Abstract

Dreaming of Bombs and Roses: Antinuclear Aesthetics in California’s Spiritual Countercultures

This talk examines the work of two California artists, Jay DeFeo and Jess (Burgess Collins), who both became central to the mid-century countercultural energies of the Bay Area, affiliated with both the Beat movement (Ginsberg, Kerouac), and the San Francisco Renaissance. DeFeo and Jess were acutely haunted by the specter of nuclear annihilation, and some of their most important work—DeFeo’s The Rose (1958-1966), as well as Jess’s paintings and complex series of collages—are marked by a visionary apocalypticism also shaped by their deep engagement with forms of alternative spirituality. My talk explores how DeFeo and Jess’s esotericism augmented the ways they came to craft an anti-nuclear aesthetic: one not clearly correlated into a political position or form of activism, but premised on a translation of the nuclear crisis into types of personal and artistic transformation. As such, both artists present examples for the continued viability of an American antinomian tradition, a form of (aesthetic) dissent which construes private spirituality as a way of doing politics.