Big dams function as national performance art on a televised stage

Evidence

If, as I am suggesting, big dams themselves are (beyond any possible utility) a kind of national performance art, it was the genius of Abbey and his gonzo anarchists to recognize the dam wall as a blank staging ground for outsize guerilla theatre that could be projected into the homes of the first television nation. Abbey viscerally understood the high-stakes politics of spectacle and counterspectacle. The massive dam face represented the monumentalism of national modernity, but it could also represent—especially amidst 1960s cold-war paranoia—the monumentalism of the apocalypse. Onto the blank canvas of the televised dam wall could be projected a nation’s outsize hopes, but also its outsize fears. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 439

Categorization

• SEED: The dam-as-national-performance-art frame could anchor an essay on how public works double as spectacle declaring national modernity — connecting megadams, bombs, and space programs.