M HKA Ensembles

Film, 61 x 76,2 cm.

Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp.

Romantic Landscape Painting of Three Mile Island Nuclear Reactor, Made Before 1979 Partial Meltdown, Artist Name Indecipherable [title given by Allan Sekula], oil on canvas, 1974-1975, 61 x 76,2 cm. Purchased by Allan Sekula through eBay on 10 April 2011. [Allan Sekula – The Dockers' Museum, 2010-2013, object nr. 57]

An American amateur oil painting with the Three Mile reactor, painted before the meltdown in 1989, and before the building of the third reactor at that site. It’s very much in the kind of American East coast landscape tradition that one can trace back perhaps to the Hudson River School, enacted by an amateur. It’s rather well done, not a bad painting at all, showing the Susquehanna River scene, the cooling towers of the reactor, all looking like a kind of industrial pastoral. Sekula thought that would be an interesting addition to the 'Bombing Section' as well, the so called ‘peace time’ use of the atom. Of course all of this for him was coming together in the context of the Fukushima meltdown, with ‘this violent eruption of energy from the ocean floor coming ashore and damaging a hubristically misplaced reactor facility on the coast, leading to another level of calamity’. This is one of a couple of paintings that are pended up in the museum collection. artist name indeciferable