Iodine-131 and the winds of change

Iodine-131: winds of change, oil on paper, 76x56 cm

Iodine is a mysterious element. At room temperature it appears to have no liquid state. It's dark crystals sublimate directly into violet fumes (watch it do that here). That is why this latest 'portrait' is not only a representation of a hazmat-suited Fukushima worker but also a personification of airborne iodine vapour. Hence the purple curling fumes and haze in the painting. This is a companion piece in a trilogy along with Cesium-137: bitter harvest and Strontium-90: poisoned earth. This series can be seen as a form of Neo Arte Nucleare (a French art movement of 1950's Art Informel).

We need trace amounts of iodine in our diet to keep thyroid growth normal. Maybe that's because we once came from the ocean (our blood serum is basically seawater) and ocean is the greatest source of iodine compounds. Countries far from the ocean experience the most iodine deficiencies for it seems iodine compounds are wind born in ocean spray and deposit on our crops, get ingested by cows, get concentrated in milk.

All good for us - until you substitute good old home-brand iodine for radio-active Iodine -131 that gets taken up by the thyroid in the usual way. But it leaves unusual results in its train - cancer.

As the American Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER) explains, "The primary risk of concern with iodine-131 is thyroid cancer, with children more at risk than adults. A high enough intake of iodine-131 by children can also cause developmental problems and other thyroid diseases. Young girls are at greater risk than boys. Female infants have a risk of thyroid cancer 70 times greater than adult males for the same radiation exposure. Some iodine-131 deposits on land, including pastures. When contaminated grass is eaten by cows and goats, iodine-131 concentrates in milk. It has a half-life of about eight days, meaning that appreciable amounts will remain in the environment for a few months after large releases." One blogger has declared himself radiolactoseintollerant.

So in Fukushima prefecture during May there were restrictions on the distribution and consumption of fish, milk, turnips, bamboo shoots, spinach, cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli and shiitake mushrooms. But it's contamination has spread well outside of Japan.

Too late for Nagasaki staffers exposed to Fukushima radiation while on a mission there to assist. Blogger Gabi Greve in Japan reports that Nagasaki University Hospital says that at least 40% of the Nagasaki helpers sent to Fukushima Prefecture returned suffering internal radiation exposure from iodine-131 and cesium-137.

The Fukushima-meltdown dispersion cloud has deposited Iodine-131 onto Michigan and California. In Hawaii boron is being feed to cows and sprayed on crops to absorb radioactive iodine. Berkley has radioactive strawberries. It was reported that on 9 April iodine-131 had been found, albeit in levels well below the EPA's maximum contaminant level, in the milk of Oak Ridge, Chatanooga, Helena,  Columbia, Cincinatti, Pittsburgh, Painesville, Denver, Detroit, Trenton, Waretown NJ and Muscle Shoals, AL.

Meanwhile,  Réseau "Sortir du nucléaire" has asked permission to publish a painting or two in their tri-monthly magazine from my Fukushima series. I have agreed and have forwarded Fukushima Future, Fukushima Samurai I, Fukushima Samurai II, and Fukushima Samurai in the nuclear fires for them to choose from. My work is expected to appear in the July edition of the magazine.

Sortir du nucléaire is an anti-nuclear alliance of 874 organisations based in France. Their charter is to rid the world of nuclear weapons and power plants. With a membership of 50,251 individuals, Sortir du nucléaire publishes a monthly newsletter with a circulation of 20,000. You can visit their website here and see clips of some of their anti-nuclear activities here, here, here and here. Or follow them on Faceook here. One can subscribe to their monthly digital newsletter by emailing this web address.

But the last word today i will give i to French rappeur Duval Mc, his rap rage made chic by the seductive sibilants, exquisite edgy vowels, and cultured charm of French language on the attack. The spirit of Rousseau lives: "Man is born free but everywhere he is in chains."

Fukushima Samurai in the nuclear fires

Fukushima Samurai in the nuclear fires, oil and bitumen on board, 90x120 cm

UPDATE 8-8-11: 
Fukushima samurai in the nuclear fires has been published in the tri-annual journal Sortir du nucléaire, by the French anti-nuclear network Réseau "Sortir du nucléaire", a federation of over 900 anti-nuclear groups from around the world with a membership of over 53,000. It is out in the Summer edition, No. 50, which you can read HERE. Xavier Rabilloud, the editor, found my Fukushima work on line and asked if i would allow him to publish a reproduction.

I find it very satisfying that my art is seen as a relevant contemporary voice in the world and is sought out for publication.

 I guess that makes the whole of my Fukushima series a sort of Neo-Arte Nucleare. (Arte Nucleare was a French art movement of 1950's Art Informel).

Now there were three children from the land of Israel

    Shadrack, Meshach, Abednego!
Ah they took a little trip to the land of Babylon

    Shadrack, Meshach, Abednego!

And ol’ Nebudchanezzer was the king of Babylon

    Shadrack, Meshach, Abednego!

So they took a lot of gold, and made ‘em an idol

    Shadrack, Meshach, Abednego!

“Oh, you gotta bow down and worship the idol!”

    Shadrack, Meshach, Abednego!

Ah, but the children of Israel would not bow down!

    Shadrack, Meshach, Abednego!

So the king cast the children in the fiery furnace

    Shadrack, Meshach, Abednego!
He heaped on coal and red-hot brimstone

    Shadrack, Meshach, Abednego!

Even made it seven times hotter than it oughtta be!

    Shadrack, Meshach, Abednego!

Now they burned up the soldiers that the king had put there
    Shadrack, Meshach, Abednego!
Oh, Shadrack! Meshach, Abednego!

Shadrack, song written by Robert MacGimsey In 1930.

Hear the inimitable Louis Armstrong perform this song on Youtube here.

Which leads us to story-time.

Nebuchadnezzar ran a prosperous economy. Soon everyone in Babylon worshipped the golden idol of high dividend yields and strong capital gains. Shadrack, Meshach, Abednego, three foreign workers, would not bend the knee to Babylonian glory. So Big N had them cast into the fiery furnace.

Both the energy company's plant operating procedures and government regulations specified the permissible upper ranges for thermal production. But there is no rage like that of an emperor who has been revealed to have no clothes, so Nebuchadnezzar ordered the furnace stoked seven times hotter than it ought to be.

The plant CEO, seeing an opportunity for greater shareholder returns, was only too willing to bend the rules. Security personnel patrolling the facility, believed to be a safe distance from the thermal source, were consumed by the radiant heat in direct violation of the occupational health and safety standards for all non-engineering human resource units. Dutiful workers became collateral damage to a boom economy.

It was into this furnace that the Babylonian State executive, with the connivance of the courts, condemned Shadrack, Meshach, Abednego, while Nebuchadnezzar, from the safety of his ziggarat penthouse God-King suite overlooking the Tiber, watched them on TV as they pushed on through the flames .

His spin doctors were already working on the press release: something about "volunteer plant workers suffering regrettable collateral damage while struggling to contain Unit One" but that "the government assures the populace that there is absolutely no risk to nearby residents" because "a meltdown of the furnace core is an impossibility" given the advanced state of Babylonian technology.

And, gentle reader, you may make your own connections, if any, between this story, that song and this my latest painting, Fukushima Samurai in the nuclear fires.

This is not a large format painting. In terms of my art practice, this one is about consolidating an artistic concept.  The concept in question is the motif of the hazmat suit as metaphor for the events at Fukushima Daiichi. 

And so a fragmanted figure, all identity swallowed in the shell of the suit and by the ambiguity of smokey fallout, struggles through the consuming elemental fluxus all around.

These events in turn, to my mind, are representative of the limitations of human endeavour, that is, the feet of clay in all human enterprise - human imperfection.

But my Masters Degree research project is about expressive mark-making, and therefore I also wanted to refine my monoprinting mark-making technique. Through creating this particular work i now have far greater understanding of the degree of randomness of the mark. Tis a function of: the wetness of the paint, the amount of pressure during printing, and how various tools maybe used for applying that pressure.

However, i never want complete control or anything near it because that would rob the paint of its unique material agency and so remove happen-chance from the work. Serendipity is not only essential to the technique but, subliminally, to the expressive force and meaning of the work.

The chaos of the flow of paint is eloquent about the chaos of events, the chaos at the edges of civilisation, the chaos in the heart of human social organisation ... and the unpredictable fluxus in our own lives.