Into Eternity and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant - Moisey, Andrew

Moisey: Desire to Mark Our Buried Nuclear Waste 115
Fig. 8. Rubble landscape. Concept by Michael Brill, 1991. Courtesy of
the Estate of Michael Brill.
future closer to the past. By this I mean that both teams’ plans
seem almost designed to backfi re with respect to their task of deterrence,
containing ambiguities that their authors understood yet
never resolved. For Team A these begin with the contradictory vision
of one of the world’s “major architectural and artistic marvels”
connoting a “place we do not value.” Indeed, only the former
is plainly illustrated in Team A’s “installation views,” which show
fi gures not running away but rather transfi xed before each marker
with the awe and contemplation that every artist wishes his or her
work would receive for all of eternity. The people in fi gures 3, 4,
5, and 6 seem to think they have found the sculpture garden at the
contemporary art museum.
Moreover, both Team A and Team B envisioned multiple-level
markers in which these above-ground markers would merely be
the fi rst point of contact. Once the visitor decided to investigate
what lies beneath them, that person, or team of people, would discover
rooms fi lled with what might then be cryptic information—