by Luke Bennett
Figure 3.1. Transition 3 (2012, Stephen Felmingham).
Working from objects retrieved from the posts, the Peripheral Artifact series are drawings made on smooth concave forms in plaster, with their edges showing the scrim and evidence of their construction. The plaster forms sit within a larger, more rudimentary concave form made of very thin lead, moulded to approximate the same shape as the plaster. The impression is of a fragment of some larger whole, although this is undefined. It appears as the remains of perhaps an unlikely crashed satellite, or a detached portion of some architectural plasterwork. The drawing on the plaster is in a dense charcoal; Peripheral Artifact #7 (see Figure 3.2) shows a regulation MOD dustpan retrieved from a post and alongside it (Peripheral Artifact #8) a carrier receiver that would have been the first warning of a nuclear attack. The work here invites movement by the viewer: by moving towards the work the drawings appear to slide across the concavity, moving around in the space set up by the charcoal ground and eluding the eye, always on the point of leaving or slipping away. Associated with these forms are the white chalk marks that have an apparent connection to the charcoal drawings. They hover above, apparently in a different space from the charcoal drawings, apart from them but informing them.
The drawings themselves have an elusive aspect, retreating and advancing as the viewer changes their angle of vision, reminiscent of the way that perceived objects slide and distort at the edges of the visual field. The chalk lines are drawings from peripheral vision of the same objects, dustpan and carrier receiver, executed by responding to the objects just in sight at the edge of vision but made blind by not being able to see the drawing as it is made. The works hold the uncanny, in the familiarity of apparently ubiquitous objects that have been rendered with spectral blacks and shadows, becoming something unsettling and ambivalent. The drawing here is implicated in the whole fragmentary object of plaster and lead, appearing to have come together in a contingent way and seeming about to fly apart or imminently erode: this fragmentary sense is intuited at once in the moment of aesthetic confrontation by the viewer.
Figure 3.2. (Left to right) Peripheral Artefact #7 and Peripheral Artefact #8 (both 2010, Stephen Felmingham).
The drawings exist as a response to what has been described earlier as an uncanny field of affect. In themselves, as a register of a process, they do not serve as lines of empirical data that can be interrogated to reveal a meaning. Rather they are blind traces of a state of mind of the maker and require an act of doubling, that of their perception by a viewer of the drawing, to retrace the path of the lines with their eyes and to ‘see’ the drawing as a whole for the first time even as it has not been seen in the making process. This also operates in another way: the viewer regards the drawing, scanning and interpreting in a manner not available to the maker who is feeling and touching blind. Thus the experience of the maker in the uncanny field of peripheral vision is brought to bear in the central, foveal vision of the secondary viewer, doubling it as the uncanny affect occupies their rational frame of reference. The qualities of line produced in the process are of a different order. The drawing does not possess the signature graphic expressions of the sighted drawing. Rather it appears as if made by another hand. It is, arguably, a drawing by the hand itself.
The conclusion can be drawn that forms become uncanny when we are unable to grasp the boundaries of experience, representation and reality, opening a gap at the edge of our conceptual powers. This uncanny sense intersects with the sublime identified by Lyotard as that which enters into the realm of a ‘presentation of the unpresentable’ (Lyotard 1988, 91), embracing the Burkean immanence of the sublime, but proposing it as a form of intensification rather than of transcendence. This intense ‘now’ constitutes for Lyotard a Heideggerean ‘event’ or Ereignis: an event small and temporal in comparison to that associated with the shock and awe of a sublime event, rather becoming, as Michel Serres puts it, a ‘scintillation’ (Bingham & Thrift 2000, 92) of small shocks and uncanny visions that are held ever-present in our conscious visual field. The modern ruin of the bunker provides a fertile ground for this instability, for cultural anxiety and ambivalence and for a phenomenology of the uncanny as it intersects with a Lyotardian sublime. This uncanny mismatch between an actual place and the memory of that place results in a layering of different images of space that never entirely overlap. The result, it can be concluded, is a sense of fundamental strangeness, or an experience of the uncanny, that occurs constantly in our daily lives (Trigg 2013, 325). Thus the bunker posts of the Royal Observer Corps triangulate three key theoretical areas of enquiry: the uncanny, place and the sublime giving a particular access to the resonances of these through drawing.
Connections between drawing, perception and derealization (or disassociative states) have emerged as a distinct strand in the research. I have argued that there are implications in this respect for effects on spatial awareness via anxiety states derived from the Cold War and the 20th century: this is outside the current scope of this writing and is a future direction for my research. Drawing operates as a continuum across these areas of enquiry: as a methodology it is in itself ambivalent and paradoxical, with a consequent ability to express the subtleties in perception and the emerging forms of a Lyotardian sublime. The drawings themselves, as original drawings of peripheral vision, contribute to a new direction for drawing research. My own work follows a path that brings forth the subtlety of an uncanny field of affect through its subject matter which variously employs the interiors of the bunkers, abandoned chairs, discarded cleaning materials and banal landscapes of the ROC posts to generate the forms that populate my drawing research work. This is defined here as ‘the abject … edged with the sublime’ (Kristeva 1982, 11). I have demonstrated how these forms are uncovered through my visor system that disrupts central foveal perception to allow drawing from peripheral vision and that has been discussed in the research methodology. In its fluidity and capacity to reveal truths, I have shown how drawing can be a sensitive detector in the process of research, both means and outcome. I also conclude that it can hold, in my own drawing practice, the ambivalent and uncanny places of the bunkers and the traumatic legacy of the Cold War.
POSTSCRIPT
This communication through drawing has brought me a means of describing the fragments of a childhood remembrance, of the fear and the helplessness that still worry away, worn like an old familiar coat clutched close. Artists often describe a sublime moment in their childhood when ‘all was one, under the yellow sun’ in an epiphany of completeness. I feel keenly that the possibility of that moment was taken away from me, conflated with another more blinding light and a seeming paralysis that has been vouchsafed to the Cold War generation as their inheritance. This work is not intended as closure, a completing of some cycle of memory. Rather it bears witness, through the artwork, to the short and dangerous 20th century and its effects on the civilian populations who lived through it.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Downs, Simon,
Marshall, Russ., Sawdon, Philip, Selby, Andrew & Tormey, Jane. 2007. Drawing Now: Between the Lines of Contemporary Art. London and New York: Tauris.
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Felmingham, Stephen. 2011. Gallery talk transcript. Online resource available at: http://eaststreetarts.org.uk/artists/stephen-felmingham/ (accessed 27 April 2011).
Flintham, Matthew. 2012. The Military-Pastoral Complex: Contemporary Representations of Militarism in the Landscape. Online resource available at: http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/military-pastoral-complex-contemporary-representations-militarism (accessed 5 May 2013).
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Chapter 4
Sublime Concrete
The Fantasy Bunker, Explored
Kathrine Sandys
Many of the military defence and operational buildings built during the period of the Cold War still remain present within the UK’s rural and urban landscape. Although no longer active, they offer us a visual reminder of a long period of unrest and uncertainty in Britain following the Second World War. But what collective and individual sense do we make of these ruins or of that period of unrest and uncertainty?
During that tense era British civilians had only an indirect acquaintance with the Cold War and its defensive structures. Nuclear control centres and bunkers were more imagined in novels and depicted in films than experienced in real life. During the Cold War the public’s primary image of the bunker was of the mysterious and epic subterranean command centres designed by production designers such as Ken Adam: luxury, world-domination plan-hatching accommodation for Dr Strangelove, Dr No or Blofeld.1
In the aftermath of the Cold War, public notions of the reality and form of ‘secret bunkers’ became more prosaic, in the face of their greater accessibility: in part due to a certain degree of declassification of information about these places, and in part due to increased opportunities for physical access to them. Therefore, we in the post–Cold War era could question the truth of the exotic ideological visions inherited from cinematic interpretations. But, even so, those who chose to look closely enough could still detect some affinity between the fictional and factual bunkers of the Cold War era, for many echoed some of these fictional modernist designs in their purpose-built, vernacular, improvised style.
It is this point of cross-over between the mythic and familiar properties of bunkers, between the idea and the reality, and the resulting half-knowing and half-remembering, that my arts practice has sought to explore, primarily through the media of sound and lighting as scenography or installations. In post–Cold War, early 21st-century Britain, myself and other artists (whom I discuss later) are (relatively) free to explore the actual relics of modern military architecture, reframing them at a point in history where the fantasy of these modernist visions has not yet been fully dismantled.
Appropriating abandoned bunkers and their half-told stories as artworks enables, through artistic augmentation, an enquiry into their seductive mystery. We use the enigmatic filmic version of the Cold War, as a way of creatively exploring the deserted military installations we are now able to access, and exploring how – in folk memory – we only half-remember them and the affective states for which they were a concrete embodiment. What we seek to achieve by our interventions is a form of reanimation, activating now-abandoned spaces through both cultural memory and individual embodied, sensorial engagement.
This chapter therefore shows how both the fantasy and the materiality of the Cold War bunker can be explored phenomenologically, through artists’ interventions with the enigmatic architectural properties of these now-abandoned structures. I will show how these interventions activate and question the aesthetic properties of the sublime, the uncanny and ‘ruin value’.2 Through this I will show the appeal of these places for me, and others, as artists. Structurally, this chapter will mobilize in turn a number of aesthetic concepts and consider how each might be applied to Cold War bunkers, illustrating along the way bunker-interrogating artworks that have sought to activate these blank-seeming spaces, and the cultural memories attached to them.
RUIN VALUE
The late 18th- and early 19th-century notion of the picturesque often co-opted ruined castles into the scene, imbuing those broken fortifications as redolent of decline, classical wisdom and solitude. Bunkers have not yet taken the place of castles in a 21st-century redefinition of the picturesque, but neither have they completely been rejected as having potential for inclusion within an emergent aesthetics of contemporary ruin. Taking his cue from the conventional framing of notions of the picturesque, Albert Speer attempted to imbue Nazi architectural projects with classical ruin potential. Equating his regime with the majesty and durability of classical empires such as the Romans, Speer was keen to design Nazi civic buildings in a way that would cause them to fall into ruin in a picturesque way. However, he did not ascribe ‘ruin value’ to the functional concrete bunkers of the Atlantic Wall. For Speer, neither Nazi bunkers nor their Cold War descendants would have ruin value, because they would not degrade in the picturesque or refined degree to which stone buildings of the past inspired (Speer 1970, 56). They would not sit among landscaped gardens or within carefully maintained boundaries. Instead – as their actual fate now shows – they linger in bleak landscapes, both literally and metaphorically, without the picturesque framing of a Romantic recent history. They appear as abandoned buildings, often isolated in rural locations, hidden from view, not strategically positioned on prominent hilltops or coastal points displaying the heritage of the pre-20th-century picturesque military landscape of castles and forts. And their concrete forms have not decayed; they were built to withstand the potential onslaught of nuclear attack. The only value we can associate with these structures is the lingering myth of the Cold War still existent in the relatively unexplored aura of their presence. Here I use the term ‘myth’ in the sense developed by Roland Barthes (1972) – that of powerful cultural set of representations, rather than necessarily an untruth.
SUBLIME TERROR
Many bunkers and hardened shell military buildings display their purpose through their unusual shape and form. However, without an understanding of the function that determined the strange form, the civilian eye is left to speculate upon these structures’ mythical qualities, presence and aura. These mythi
cal qualities are based on the stories we have been told of the Cold War, rather than first-hand experience in active service. These stories are the fictions of Fleming, Le Carre, Frankenheimer or Tarkovsky.3 This chapter aims to unpick the sense of this aura as a phenomenological experience when the architecture and visiting experience is mediated as artwork, removed from the representation we experience with of the picturesque. The experience of encountering these structures, removing any curated interpretation, places the visitor in the state of Hauntology, a ghostly liminality of neither presence nor absence, proposed by Jacques Derrida (Derrida 2006). This state is one that relies on the visitors or spectators to introduce their own self-curated histories where personal memory and fact become assimilated as a new version of history, unique to the individual experience.