Picturing Missiles and Mushroom Clouds: Confronting Militarized Western Shoshone Lands in Jack Malotte’s "The End"

Abstract

Contemporary artist Jack Malotte (Western Shoshone/ Washoe, b. 1953) has created numerous multimedia works on paper that confront resource extraction, nuclear weapons testing, and the storage of toxic wastes on Western Shoshone lands. He has also designed several protest posters related to environmental and land rights in Nevada for groups like Citizen Alert and the Western Shoshone Defense Project, advertising anti-nuclear demonstrations in which he participated.

His visual and political engagements at least partially stem from the lengthy history of nuclear weapons testing at the Nevada Test Site (now the Nevada National Security Site), a 1,400-square-mile proving ground occupying ancestral Western Shoshone lands. From 1951 to 1992, the U.S. Department of Defense and Department of Energy detonated some 928 atomic devices in these lands, many of which were atmospheric tests resulting in nuclear fallout.

Utilizing an art historical, analytical, and environmental justice-attuned approach, I illuminate how Malotte’s "The End" (1983) juxtaposes colorful plants, animals, and landforms with fighter jets, mushroom clouds, fences, and signage to visually disrupt ideologies that envision the desert as desolate and barren. I contend that the artist pictures the iconic mushroom cloud form, the nuclear referent, to reckon with, make legible, and confront the extraordinary extent of atomic devastation on these lands, as, indeed, Newe Sogobia (Western Shoshone territories) is often referred to as the most nuclear-bombed nation on Earth.