Chris Burden
The Atomic Alphabet
1980
Not on view
Date
1980
Classification
Prints
Medium
Photoetching
Dimensions
Sheet: 57 1/2 × 39in. (146.1 × 99.1 cm) Image: 54 × 36in. (137.2 × 91.4 cm)
Accession number
2003.110
Edition
AP | Ed. 20
Publication
Printed and published by Crown Point Press
Credit line
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Print Committee
Rights and reproductions
© Chris Burden / Licensed by the Chris Burden Estate and Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
In 1979, Chris Burden began a number of works that took as their subject the political circumstances and psychic resonances of the Cold War—focusing particularly on the neutron bomb, nuclear missiles and warheads, and the submarines that ferry them. The Atomic Alphabet, a print made using the techniques of hand-colored etching and photo-etching, alludes to these broader phenomena as well as to the specific atrocities of the recently-ended Vietnam War by incorporating Chinese characters and references to the jungle. Like a children’s chart that associates letters with words and corresponding pictures, The Atomic Alphabet runs down the page, lending each letter an assigned correlate: A for ATOMIC, B for BOMB, and so on. By using this childlike, didactic format, the print mocks the culture of information dissemination and the normalization of such fearsome terminology at the height of American Cold War paranoia and interventionism.
