Nancy Buchanan

Ten unique books form a portrait of father, Louis N. Ridenour, Jr., from his birth to his death, through documents and letters. In compiling this piece, I also consulted numerous histories of the time—since 1911 to 1959 encompassed the first atomic weapons, the rise of physicists in America, the McCarthy era, space exploration, and computers. I typed fragments of my research on red paper, and cut windows to my father's papers, to demonstrate how his life was shaped by the times. Other pages, blue tissue paper, had brief quotations from interviews with people close to him. My father, though a target of J. Edgar Hoover because of his liberal opinions and flamboyant lifestyle, considered himself a patriot, and I felt a red, white, and blue portrait appropriate.

—Nancy Buchanan (2004a)

The Furnace has never shirked from political material, as evident in Martha Wilson's own long-running satirical impersonations of Barbara Bush. One of the most powerful political works shown at the Furnace in the late '70s was a series of books by Los Angeles artist Nancy Buchanan. Fallout from the Nuclear Family (13-31 May 1980) was a complex portrait of Buchanan's world-famous nuclear physicist father, Louis N. Ridenour, Jr. Ten one-of-a-kind books containing a montage assembled from a vast archive of his birth-to-death professional and personal documents, essays, letters, and photographs, revealed not only the life of the man, but of the social and political culture in which he played an essential part. Found dead at the age of 47 in a Washington, DC, hotel room, Ridenour had been a prominent member of the post-World War II military industrial complex. After editing for MIT the texts on radar resulting from his war work, he left academia to become a Pentagon advisor, and in 1950 was appointed the first Chief Scientist of the Air Force. Although he continued to be active in weapons development, after World War II he became involved in efforts to limit the arms race and keep nuclear research out of military control. At the same time his language shifted as he tried to adapt to the changing political climate. By the late 1940s Ridenour had succumbed to subtle red-baiting and "better dead than red" rhetoric. In 1950 he reviewed a book describing a new weapon of radioactive poisons, "death sands," that would kill civilians but leave cities intact—essentially a neutron bomb (Buchanan 2004a). Aided by the post-Watergate era's Freedom of Information Act, Buchanan discovered that her father paradoxically was not the government's idea of the "perfect" scientist. His FBI files revealed that J. Edgar Hoover signed a number of suspicious memos regarding Ridenour's security clearance, which he, amazingly, always received. The FBI, concerned from the Eisenhower administration forward with increasing the ever-tightening requirements for Federal employees with clearance, focused on Ridenour's liberal leanings as well as his racy lifestyle which supposedly involved "excessive drinking" and "loose [behavior] with women" (Buchanan 2004b).

Buchanan uncovered the darker side of the 1950s, not only in the deep schisms between her father's ideals as a scientist and the political realities that corrupted him, but in the underside of the idealized "nuclear family." Interweaving short quotes from her own research on various sociohistorical subjects—including the Red Scare of the '40s and '50s, scientists speaking out against atomic weapons, etc., and recollections from those who knew him—with his own writings, from youthful utopian short stories to his last disillusioned letters, she allowed us to see the many facets of the man and his time.

In his 1982 Arts Magazine article "War Games: Of Arms and Men," Jonathan Crary succinctly sums up the brilliance of Buchanan's work:

Ridenour's failure was ultimately one of critical intelligence, of a willful blindness to the powerful network of institutions in which he was immersed and which crushed him. Buchanan's archive awesomely lays bare the seamless, interlocking texture of the military, academic, and corporate entities through which Ridenour circulated, all the time voicing his belief in the autonomy and incorruptibility of the scientist. The analogy between artist and scientist...