nuclear chairs
November 17, 2025
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I made a zine about nuclear chairs. You can even purchase it, here: https://charliemacquarie.bigcartel.com/
During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic I spent many late nights hunched over my phone reading historical preservation indexes/reports on historical structures of the Nevada Test Site. You know the place – where they exploded the nuclear bombs. It’s hard not to feel a macabre fascination with the Nevada Test Site, but for me it’s not so much the whole nuclear thing – arresting as that is – but instead it’s because of the landscape. I grew up camping across Nevada and so the rhythm of desert valleys and high secret mountains has always been immensely comforting to me. The test site seemed so weird because it housed these things in addition to total destruction.
And so I was mostly crawling these reports for glimpses of that landscape, and there was an incredible aura in the bare utility of this exhaustive documentation of “historically significant” – yet utterly bland – structures and sites. The composure was so uncomposed, the view somehow more authentic because accidental.
Another seemingly accidental element of the thousands of photographs started to capture my attention – the chairs. They were everywhere. Like any major military/scientific institution, the Test Site has all kinds of structures. Some are exciting and dangerous – post-shot-recovery facilities for plutonium-powered rocket engines that are so radiologically contaminated as to be effectively permanently unsafe for human entry. Others are as innocuous as the disused bowling alley where some jaunty desert-fatigued army officer locked the door in 1972 and walked away forever. But there were chairs left in all of them.
Who on this holy, forsaken patch of dry earth was going to sit? Was it a malevolent invitation? A casual oversight? An ever-present ghost? A simple reminder of the vast numbers of people required to move forward the banal machinery of immense organizations of violence?
In thinking these questions through visual collecting there emerged something that I’m still chewing on, something about labor, bravado, violence, satisfaction, and physical landscape. If you read this zine I’d love critical feedback – these half-formed thinkings would benefit from ideas of others.
There’s lots of weird stuff in here – interviews, citations, insults against Burning man, and more uncanny photos of chairs than you can shake a nuclear physicist at. Get yours today! (And pick up some bumper stickers while you’re at it!)
Here's some other things people are doing that I'm excited about:
I wrote many moons ago (although, maybe that was just my last newsletter? At this point I seem to write 1 per year so a lot can change!) about Caroline Tracey’s then-notional book about salt lakes. Well it’s not notional anymore – it’s available! For pre-order! You should do that! here: https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324089025
I got to do a bit of radio sifting to help my friend Torreya Cummings on their upcoming show with Sarah Lowe at the Berkeley Art Center. Torreya is one of those incredible people who can basically do magic with any and all materials, so it’s going to be amazing, go check it out when it is up! https://www.berkeleyartcenter.org/black-point-reinterpretive
The whole family went to Providence, RI (I almost typed Road Island) and it was a nice opportunity to get to see Jeremy Ferris and catch up on some of the work he’s doing. Jeremy has the most beautiful drawings, and he showed me tons of new stuff that takes this amazing drawing style and pairs it with the beauty and mystery of deep explorations of place. If you’ve ever spent hours wandering around overgrown industrial ruins, you will appreciate his work. Also, I learned that he made a video game!
I loved this piece by Maya Livio about Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/157/6776783/conservation-is-the-work-of-art-how-the-lightning-field-made-land-art-into-land-management
My good friend Nicole Lavelle made these beautiful t-shirts to try and cover maternity leave (isn’t it messed up that this isn’t just universally paid for?!?!). Go buy some! https://nicolelavelle.com/store
//// ROCKS ROCKS ROCKS ROCKS . ROCKS ->
The url rocksrocksrocksrocks.rocks does exist, but that’s actually not the point today. (Someday it will even contain rocks, but now it doesn’t). In honor of the nuclear chairs in this issue we’ll be highlighting some anthro-militant-mineralizations (not exactly rocks) in my collection.
PROJECT SHOAL CONCRETE
First up we’ve got a piece of the concrete drill pad (or, at least, that’s what I think it is) for the Project Shoal emplacement shaft. Located in Central-Western Nevada, Project Shoal was an underground nuclear test, one of the first detonations to happen off of the designated test sites in Nevada, New Mexico, and Bikini Atoll. A part of the larger “Vela Uniform” series (the namer is a real artist of misery), this test was intended to help gather information about how nuclear tests could be monitored and detected world-wide, which was something the US maintained was necessary if it was to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. I visited in 2017 with Alison and Elisabeth and Cari, goddess bless them, and we found these little pieces of concrete strewn all over the place. I don't have a geiger counter so no word on the number of roentgens, sieverts, grays, rads, kermas, or curies this puppy is blasting out. Does anyone have one I can borrow? (To be clear, the DOE maintains that it’s none)
BRAVO 20 SHELL CASING
This next fine specimen is a very large shell casing (don’t know my calibres on sight – sorry people) that had been spending time mineral-merging with the dry lakebed of Bravo 20 bombing range north of Fallon, NV. Bravo 20 – a piece of the Fallon Range Training Complex – is an interesting and horrific place, where the US Navy’s haphazard record keeping practices (not to mention, you know, the violence) have led to the hotly contested status of this particular bombing range. Indigenous occupations, tactical malicious mining claims, proposed national parks, activist aeronautical dentistry, and Richard Misrach’s photo book of some renown – Bravo 20 has seen it all. The dirt road to get here is one of the longer ones I’ve driven, but if you’ve got the time once you’re out there you can walk right up to the fence! And it’s just a little barbed-triple-wire thing that comes up to your belly button and can be leapt over with enough of a running start – not a chain-link in sight. I do not recommend crossing the fence though, and you can find plenty of ordnance fragments outside the range boundary anyway, which seems bad…
Unrelatedly, if you live in the Bay Area would you like to join creative radio club? You should!
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Charlie Macquarie's newsletter. Sent from Oakland, California, Lisjan Ohlone Land.
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