Atomic Sublime

Using found footage, this essay focusses on the intersections between Cold War politics and the rise of New York school abstract expressionism. Whereas the Soviet Union only tolerated figurative painting, in opposition the USA started to promote abstraction as an emblem of capitalist democracy. The debate rarely addressed the artworks themselves: it provided a new arena to cultivate ideological differences. The film thus also resonates in contemporary debates between the state and the arts. The use of found footage as a strategy not only reveals a treasure of forgotten propaganda imagery, it also recognises that other, very different American avant-garde from the West Coast. Teacher-writer-filmmaker Jesse Lerner (see his 2006 book F is for Phony) thus acknowledges a tradition he prefers to continue: the legacy of Bruce Conner and other Californian artists and filmmakers.