Albuquerque Journal from Albuquerque, New Mexico • Page 49

BEST AVAILABLE COPY THE ARTS Sunday, August 4, 1985 Albuquerque Journal Page 1, Section Sculptor Makes Nuclear Garb 'Vibrate 1 i in By Kim Anderson JOURNAL CORRESPONDENT If 1 ft vr a 1r tfr. a ft I fat- i I 4'J SANTA FE "Just what the hell are you doing?" "People have been asking me that for 20 years," Tony Price said with a laugh. "I've tried to explain it and articles have come out but there's a strange gap in communication and the strangest stuff comes out of it." But that's not so surprising, really. Price is a sculptor, but a sculptor who 20 years ago chose a most peculiar medium to work in: the detritus of nuclear weapons development the garbage, if you will, of the nuclear era. His ranch home in the arid hills south of Santa Fe is packed to the rafters with art created from Los Alamos National Laboratory cast-offs: conglomerations of nuts and bolts and copper and aluminum the 48-year-old artist has salvaged over the years.

"Nuclear Nouveau Kachina" a glistening stainless-steel mask hangs on the living room wall next to "Hopi Nuclear Mudhead II." "She's a Small-town Planet Cracker" illuminates the entry to Price's dining room, a massive steel lamp with an enormous chain hanging from it. pull the string and The grounds of Price's home illustrate another characteristic of his art it's almost indestructible. They are covered with and brass monoliths that simply ignore the ram and glitter in the sunlight "The Last SALT Talks," for example, is a collection of works Price spent five years assembling. Several pieces resemble steel Rorschach blots. They've been standing in the yard since a show at 'V.

I 1 AW JOURNAL PHOTOS NEIL JACOBS Price's head is seen upside down in one of his sculptures. themselves. It's their spiritual, not physical, genesis that counts in the fulfillment of their real function something Price describes with muted but powerful intensity. "What this concept was, what I was trying to do with these nuclear parts it rests on a vibrational level, a little bit like voodoo or something," he said. "With these particular pieces, I take these weapons-energy object and it's all connected to this dark force of the weapons' energy system and I try to shape it into a religious object," he said.

Price's rationale is as mystical as the language he uses to describe it. There's a Zen flavor to the man a strength of presence, a feeling of intense concentration when he talks about it. "I'd realized that there were great, vast banks of super-good energy all over the planet you could name them by the religions that were on the planet. People put energy into these religions and take it out when they need it," Price said. "By shaping the nuclear materials into religious objects, I would cause a runnel to form between the weapons-energy system, which I considered very dark, and the religious centers, full of light," he explained.

"Putting these two bubbles together each piece would plug into the two systems and balance the energies off. These sculptures act as valves bringing the dark and light energies together to balance and thus hold the peace." Price is serious about living his philosophy: he's been building his "valves" for the last 20 years on a shoestring budget, working odd jobs to pay for the materials all of which come from a Los Alamos salvage yard. "I lived in San Cristobal, Espanola, Pojoaque, Truchas, Pietown, Leyba, Bluff in Utah, back to Espanola and all the time I was working this dump," Price said. "I did any king of work I could find. I'd turn a penny into a nickel, that kind of thing." Still not wealthy, but his art work is at least supporting him.

He could probably turn a real profit if he chose to, but he refused to use the agents and pay the commissions that would generate more public attention. "I can't afford it anyway, but why should I pay someone 50 or 60 percent of something they had absolutely nothing to do with?" he asked rhetorically. That kind of independence costs. Price, his wife Donna (a karate instructor) and daughter Zara live in a home her father provided on Old Santa Fe Trail. He's still in debt from a show in New York City's Battery Park several years ago, and he chafes at the restrictions imposed by lack MORE: See SCULPTOR on PAGE E2 "Hopi Kachina Mudhead II" AWVWV -'f hrvprl Tesuque's Shidoni Gallery in 1982 and still look fresh out of the box.

Other works punctuate the landscape around the home masses of steel scattered throughout the trees. One is "Nuclear Last Supper." It is a Price re-creation of Christian history' that uses steel balls resembling, as he puts it, the "urchins" ued in the' first nuclear weapons to represent Christ and his apostles. Price has more than 40 of his steel totems in and around the house. Some, according to Price, incorporate actual weapons components. He keeps a geiger counter around to check his purchases for radioactivity.

But Los Alamos officials dispute his claim and downplay his concern. "No weapons components, tools or other materical that may have been directly in the resarch and development of nuclear weapons have ever been released to the public," said James Breen, the lab's public information officer. "All radioactive materials are disposed of strictly in accordance with Department of Energy and laboratory regulations," Breen added. Not that it matters. Price's assemblages are appealing in 55 A ft Another Price sculpture built out of parts obtained at a Los Alamos garbage dump.

Tony Price behind his sculpture "The Last Nuclear Supper." Atomic Museum's Ten Seconds' Still Shake the World DECISION TO DROP THE BOMBS, a special exhibit in the lobby of the National Atomic Museum at Kirtland AFB, will open Tuesday, the 40th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, and continue through Oct. 12. Panel discussion 10 a.m. Tuesday with University of New Mexico provost and Manhattan Project veteran McAllister Hull Jr. discussing "Feelings of Lower Echelon Los Alamos Personnel on Using the Bomb:" and UNM professor and author Michael Welsh examines "Political and Foreign Policy Aspects of the Bomb." Special films will aUo be shown throughout the month.

By Bob Groves JOURNAL ARTS WRITER ll-n'T png .1 XaJPiNAL PHOTO dH.AN WALKI minutes of the film were reenacted after the fact when historic footage was not available. Nevertheless, it is a gripping, comprehensive albeit somewhat biased movie. (Shots of a devastated Hiroshima, for instance, are conspicuously without victims and carnage.) It does show how global politics and science dovetailed to push man into the atomic age. The script and Basehart's narration are just melodramatic enough, beginning with the portentous introduction that the atomic bomb is among "the handful of climactic events in man's 5,000 years of recorded history." The opening scene shows 29-year-old Col. Paul Tibbets, commander of the B-29 bomber Enola Gay which dropped the "Little Boy" bomb on Hiroshima, offering his flyers a chance to drop out of the impending mission which contains "mystery and possible danger." A capsule history then traces the Atomic Age from the work of Einstein, Madame Curie, Ernest Rutherford and stood together on the sidewalk in downtown Naples, Italy, and watched the German bombs drop.

About 150,000 people are expected to come through the museum this year, according to museum director Joanie Hezlp. "The people who come through here feel as I do, that it's an honest film. The Japanese like it for its honesty. I'd guess that we get Japanese a year here," said Ditrick. "Ten Seconds That Shook the World" a 1963 film written, directed and produced by Alan Landsburg and narrated in stentorian tones by the late actor Richard Basehart.

The executive producer was David Wolper who produced the TV mini-series "Roots" and the extravaganzas which opened and closed the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. Hollywood's nuclear holocaust movies from "On the Beach" to TV's "The Day After" pale next to "Ten Seconds." It's hard to top a film showing real people and the actual events, especially in stark, grainy black and white. According to a disclaimer, a few Eugene Ditrick Albuquerque's longest running film has never played a first-run moyie theater. But it has had approximately 16,380 screenings three to four times a day, seven days a week, 361 days a year since it opened in October, 1969. The film is not "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" or any other midnight cult classic.

There is plenty of horror it, though; as well as a cast of thousands and lots of True Life Adventure. And death. Its temperamental "star" cost the here," said Eugene B. Ditrick, the museum's first curator and now a once-a-week docent, tour guide and projectionist. Ditrick, 67, is a retired Army career man who grew up on a farm near Columbus, Ohio.

His grandfather changed the family name from Dietrich to Ditrick to make it "more American." He is not related to the German actress Marlene Dietrich; but he was her escort once. One night in 1943, they United States $2 billion. The movie is "Ten Seconds That Shook the World," the 50-minute documentary film about the first atomic bomb, which is shown daily at 10:30 a.m., and 2 and 3:30 p.m. at the National Atomic Museum at Kirtland Air Force Base. (The museum is open 9 a.m.

to 5 p.m. daily except Christmas, New Year's Day, Easter and Thanksgiving.) "It's the best movie on this subject that was ever produced. We lucky to get it. It's tailor-made for the exhibit i MORE: See MUSEUM on PAGE E2.