In the Ruins of the Cold War Bunker

by Luke Bennett

  One of the qualities I propose within this hauntological experience is the potential for the sublime in the uncanny and fear of the unknown. Discourse around the sublime had more often been associated with natural phenomena until the mid-20th century, with terror being one of the key manifestations of the sublime. Destructive forces are a common theme in sublime discourse, predominantly as they ignite the ultimate sensation of terror. As Edmund Burke stated in his 1757 treatise on the sublime and the beautiful: ‘Terror is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latently the ruling principle of the sublime’ (Burke 1990, 54). War is the ultimate state of terror and is therefore potentially filled with sublime properties in both its anticipation and its fallout. In 2005 war entered the discourse of the cultural context of the sublime in Gene Ray’s Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory (Ray 2005), a series of essays reading traumatic events as sublime experience when the actual fear, violation, disruption of destructive events in wars are experienced from a distance, as a second-party viewer.

  This notion of distance is important in our understanding of where the sublime is present. The sublime can emerge only when our experience rapidly switches from an overwhelming sense of one’s mortality to a position of safety. It is also why memories of the Cold War are imbued with the sublime in the latent but ever-present threat of a hot war. Furthermore, during the Cold War the sense of the sublime was embodied in the uncertainty of how present the danger actually was. As Tom Vanderbilt describes, of his own experience as a US citizen during the Cold War, it was ‘a war of light and shadow, illusion and reality, truth and counter-truth. War was not declared, nor was peace resumed…. Battlefields were everywhere and nowhere, an abstract space on wall-sized screens in situation rooms’ (Vanderbilt 2010, 15). Here the imagined war rooms are similar to those depicted in Dr Strangelove, Dr No’s4 nuclear reactor plant or the Brainbox in The Ipcress File.

  However, while those battlefields may have remained a more abstract space on American screens, in the UK they were the very real launch pads for imminent attack. The logistical positioning of the US Air Force in east coast England created an actual front line prepared for defence and attack, present to residents in East Anglia, Lincolnshire and North Yorkshire but still concealed and secret enough that the sheer number of these sites was never fully evident in the landscape until the end of the Cold War. This end of the Cold War revealed the true scale of potential threat which these UK sites had anticipated and prepared for, bringing with it a sublime sense of the Cold War, an aesthetic sensibility that was ever possible only retrospectively. After it had ended its danger appeared to retreat to the safety of the ‘past’. As Burke stated: ‘Indeed the ideas of pain, and above all death, are so very affecting, that whilst we remain in the presence of whatever is supposed to have the power of inflicting either, it is impossible to be free from terror’ (Burke 1990, 59). With terror, alongside astonishment being the ‘affect of the sublime in its highest degree’ (Burke 1990, 53), it could be argued the sublime is therefore present in the sheer volume of these relics of the Cold War as they have now been revealed to us, as we now may safely gaze upon them as ruins of a time or former terror: a terror of conflict and its related anticipation of mutually assured destruction. It is the position of distance, in the past and the ‘delight’ (Burke 1990, 122) within that knowledge of safe distance, that offers the thrill of the sublime.

  In his writing, Ray describes the resonance in the traces and relics of the war. He suggests: ‘Ghosts are more easily honoured than those who are now being condemned to spectrality’ (Ray 2005, 4), with a ghost here being something clearly assigned to the past, but a spectre having an unstable, wandering nature that is not safely contained within its historicity; instead the spectre deploys its agency within and upon the present. With many of the Cold War structures built to outlast nuclear threat, one of the most destructive forces man had yet created, a vast majority of them are not yet in a ruinous state but remain in a good state of repair, leaving us – spectrally – even more unsettled by their refusal to decay at the same rate of the memory of the Cold War. No charming patina is developing, giving the buildings age value or ruin value. Therefore they still stand as a strident representation of power for their nation and leaders. They remain brutal symbols of the age of modern conflict. As Paul Virilio commented, they are ‘anachronistic in normal periods, in peacetime the bunker appears as survival machine’ (Virilio 1994, 39).

  These now-abandoned spectral structures still possess the power to conjure up the sense of sublime terror while we remain uncertain of their former purpose. Those above ground remain incongruous within their immediate landscape, whether in the city centre or rural, open fields. Rich with history, security, fear and secrecy, they are rendered strategically useless and yet are part of a sculptural landscape that animates the story of the Cold War, through their semi-concealed existence. They exist as silent reminders of a recent past we are still trying to deconstruct, without all the evidence clearly identified yet, and we are seduced by their secrecy and power.

  NOSTALGIA, DESIRE AND THE FANTASY BUNKER

  Some structures have been re-appropriated for other purposes today, with many sold to commercial enterprises as business parks or office units. Nuclear warhead storage bunkers have become the perfect secure storage facility for sensitive documents; meanwhile hardened shell hangars have become assimilated back into the rural landscape in which they sit, with many now used as drying storage for arable farming or poultry rearing. However, some cannot conceal the peculiar architecture and unexplained functionality that was ever designed for only one purpose. Some bunkers are built of such unique forms that serve no useful purpose as anything other than a monument to military power and command. Such obsolete spaces can still hold a power and fascination, associated with the disconnected memories we have as civilian spectators. The control centre, test facility and high command bunker are the fantasy memory banks of our Cold War, as visualized through cultural representations.

  Not all sites have yet been decommissioned or opened to public access. Many offer limited access, combined with a feeling of privileged access; therefore an element of mystique maintains an illusion that is still to be revealed. Those that have open access offer only a sketch of their past usage due to the limited opening times and funds required to maintain them. Many other newly instated heritage sites are maintained by voluntary organizations with no public subsidy and few resources to reinstate the entire operational infrastructure original to the site, or to even operate a ticket office full time. Objects are donated or collected according to what acquisitions become available in order to restage and dress the spaces, often portraying only a corner of a room here and there in an attempt to project a facsimile of the original space. Some of the objects are unfamiliar, while other, more familiar domestic juxtaposed objects jolt us into remembering how recent this wartime environment was. The nostalgia introduced by the lack of curation in these sites is what Lucy Lippard refers to as the ‘dreamlike process of memory’ (Lippard 1999, 153) with the conflated fragments of memory and a desire for an idealized truth. History is somehow re-created by the imagination brought by the visitor and summarized by Lippard’s suggestion that ‘history, created and recreated, is the motherlode of tourism…. Historical tourism thrives on anachronism which jolts perceptive participants into consciousness and synchronism, which perpetuates their enjoyment of historical myth’ (Lippard 1999, 154). Meanwhile Bella Dicks suggests that public heritage sites provide a public platform in which to expose the past-self and that this desire to display this self-identity seems to be fundamental to the heritage boom experienced since the 1980s (Dicks 2003, 121). But do we wish to only experience these sites through the voyeurism of cultural tourism, or do we want an experience that allows us to draw on our own experiences of our past selves, our memories not formed through nostalgia but rather through an active re-imagining achievable through artistically augmented encounters with these enigmatic place
s?

  As Lucy Lippard (1999, 4) points out, artists have always ‘provided a lens through which the rest of us look around. Court artists, scientific artists, itinerant portraitists and later expeditionary and documentary photographers have “objectively” documented’. But artists can – and do – go beyond objective representation; the artist also can also do valuable work by augmenting reality. Through appropriation of the Cold War’s now-revealed sites and their architecture in my own work I have explored the threshold of myth and reality in the perception of Cold War bunkers and their former uses. While the imagined visions of mid-20th-century writers, designers and filmmakers created the idealized military base, we can now place our past selves in the Cold War’s actual sites, and augment them by activating there the mythic, ‘fantasy’ bunker.

  My site-specific art installations (Magazine No. 7 [2004], Radioflash [2009] and Hush House [2010]) have used light and/or sound as tools for re-animating decommissioned military sites, doing so in a way that accesses my audience’s pre-existing cinematic assumptions and orientations towards bunkers. My works have therefore co-opted the audience and their desires, making them participants in a phenomenological encounter with bunker sites, for example, in Hush House (2010), using low frequency and infrasound to imbue a feeling of life within the walls of a building (Figure 4.1). This sound penetrates our physical being, drawing us into the building as a living partnership. In short, my installations have re-created the stories we want to believe of the bunker as a working machine.

  Figure 4.1. Hush House (2010, Kathrine Sandys).

  This desire on my part to access pre-existing imaginaries in my audience echoes the inspiration of the bunker-visioning cinematography of designers like Ken Adam during the Cold War. In an interview with Christopher Frayling in 2005, Adam described his design research for the Fort Knox bullion rooms in Goldfinger (1964)5. He was unable to secure permission to enter Fort Knox to gain a sense of the reality of the building. He went to visit the Bank of England’s gold vault instead. He described it as one of the most unremarkable spaces he had ever seen and therefore created a fantasy gold vault for Fort Knox, with gold piled high – completely unrealistic in terms of weight-loading but stylized for effect. Following the release of the film he was asked how he had been granted permission to enter Fort Knox! Adam’s design anticipated and in turn reflected the audience’s mythic assumptions about such sites and their secret forms. His version of the bullion vault thus offered an idealized image of how he and his audience imagined the store should look. As he continued: ‘Fort Knox is interesting because it is like the War Room: nobody has been there so we can only imagine what it looks like’ (Frayling 2005, 139). This satisfied a curiosity and, more importantly, fulfilled a desire to know what was behind all the secrets and covert military activity of the Cold War. This fantasy version of the gold vault chimed with the vision of mid-1960s modernist architecture and reinforced the fantasy and myth of these inaccessible top security spaces. As he described: ‘I think I can create a reality that people accept, and people have accepted it’ (Frayling 2005, 101). Desire and acceptance are also key factors in my works.

  This acceptance is our wish to want to believe the unknown and experience the uncanny. The contemporary shapes and materials of the early 1960s fiction were juxtaposed with the heavy, subterranean, elemental landscape of the location, creating a distinct aesthetic of spacious, clean and luxurious surroundings to shield the inhabitants from the destructive havoc that would ensue about ground. Now, we are invited to experience this first-hand, not mediated by the fictional screen or page.

  It is the phenomenon itself, allowing all the senses to form new imaginings for ourselves, to structure interventions that draw on the uncanny and allow audiences to assimilate their own fantasies and memories with the actual physical space, not the fictional space. Gair Dunlop suggests:

  Artists, if they can use their wit and critical awareness in the face of seduction by the ruinous charms of such sites, can deploy a wide range of techniques to probe and transmit atmospheres, residues and consequences…. Experiencing them as workplaces – albeit unusual ones – enables contact with the motivations and rationalisations of those on site. (Dunlop 2013, 208)

  Artists in the UK and Europe including Louise K. Wilson, Annelise Coste, Aleksandra Mir, Sabine Lang, Matthew Flintham, Gair Dunlop, Ryan Gander, Jane and Louise Wilson, Luke Fowler and Christophe Buchel have, in the past 16 years, started to appropriate these abandoned sites and Cold War contexts into their practice and across a range of media, interrogating perceptions of these sites. Artists are now choosing to reframe these semi-abandoned Cold War relics as allegories of ideology or substitutes of a childhood fantasy. The move is away from the representational and towards the affect of the phenomenological, a transmission of atmospheres of the past rather than nostalgia.

  ATMOSPHERE

  The bunkers featured in the work of Jane and Louise Wilson, in particular Sealander (Wilson & Wilson 2006) and Blind Landing (Wilson & Wilson 2013), use the mediated image as a form of measurement of what is left behind. The landscape of the Wilsons’ work deals with themes of the uncanny we find in abandoned sites, particularly those of the Cold War period. Their large-scale images and installations invoke a sense of overwhelming loss for these quiet and desolate places that are in the transition from decay but not yet ruined and picturesque. Although the Atlantic Wall bunkers depicted in Sealander are relics of the Second World War, they are of the same materials and built with the same resilience in mind as the Cold War’s bunkers. Equally, the solid reinforced concrete is not the material of any ruin value so, in Speer’s theory, it will never achieve the picturesque. The images are captured in a post–Cold War period where they still remain strong silhouettes on the skyline, in a very slow state of decay. The Wilsons have stated that the sites they have adopted do not invite nostalgia. If anything, they avoid it as the depiction of the remains in their work is not of romantic but of symbolic and cultural value (Leader 2007). The works evoke the same atmospheres as the unexplored Cold War relics themselves. The ruins leave us with a reminder of what these buildings stood for as monuments to power or secrecy. Thus memory is an important factor in what is evoked.

  Urville (Wilson & Wilson 2006) in particular is the epitome of desolation: the bunker’s brutalist architecture, alien in form and purpose on the beach that it now subsides into. Darian Leader describes these large-scale photographic images of the Atlantic Wall bunkers:

  The bunkers lie fractured and awry, at odds with the vast empty beaches around them. They no longer have a purpose and have become repositories for litter, graffiti and the detritus of illicit activities. The bulky, gigantic, concrete blocks seem like debris from another world, space craft that have crashed into our planet millennia ago and now lie unattended and useless. (Leader 2007)

  Leader is describing the depiction with the Wilsons’ images but also captures a sense of the installations themselves: ‘As their defensive function was lost, the ambiguity of these bunkers became an out-of-placeness. Their massive presence marks the beaches with no obvious use’ (Leader 2007).

  What we see left in the bunkers is the combination of fascination at the scale (also enhanced in the scale of the photograph at 1800 mm × 1800 mm) and the brutalist architectural detail, but also the useless hulks they have now become. Their partially hidden outlook apertures offer a glimpse of former usefulness but now serve as only a space for sand to swirl into or birds to nest. They form a fractured image of former activity, with the gaps filled by an imagined narrative. This encourages a desire to fabricate an active world from these relics, a resonance or a lost sense. As a viewer, what we are able to do through our desire to understand is to interpret what we are unable to see or hear. This in turn gives us a complete picture of what we are experiencing based on the ability for memory and imagination to fill in the gaps and form a complete experience. This sensation is the phenomenological experience of Urbewußtsein. As defined by Dan Zahavi:
‘Urbewußtsein is not meant to denote a particular intentional experience. Rather, the term designates the pervasive dimension of pre-reflective and non-objectifying self-consciousness that is part and parcel of any occurring experience’ (Zahavi 2006). This sensation is purely visceral and evokes an affective feeling of the location and site within the viewer, a sense of the uncanny in both the familiar and unfamiliar. No reliance on personal experience or memory is required to appreciate this sensation introduced by the images. This gives rise to a self-constructed narrative not created by the artist, but one created by the spectator, a story that remains true in the mind of the spectator.

  MEMORY

  Buildings, objects, sites and activities that are both surprising and often unique in their design and operation offer us slight clues about their purpose as explored by the work of the Wilsons. With minimal clues, we are compelled to create the story of their full purpose, based on our splinters of civilian knowledge. Its technology, in particular, is at once familiar through its development into our domestic technological landscape yet seems also distant and antiquated. Paul Virilio likens military architecture to clothing appropriate to the event:

  The fortification is a special construction; one does not live there, one executes particular actions there, at a particular moment, during conflict or in a troubled period. Just as you put on your raincoat in the rain, you go to the fort when peacetime conditions yield to wartime weather conditions. (Virilio 1994, 42)

  On first-hand encounter, the design of the architecture is familiar in its need to withstand destruction, but more austere than could be imagined, dominated by large concrete surfaces with no obvious entrances, possessing shapes that do not resemble those of houses or domestic buildings.6 These buildings communicate a far greater sense of latent fear, terror of the unknown and the sublime than any public information programme ever could. The austerity of their structures still reminds us of that fear today and the fragility of our corporeal being, in comparison to their materiality and defensive purpose. They do transport us back to a childhood fear or a survival fear. They are the fictional adventures of childhood, exposed within the post–Cold War remains. As Bella Dicks suggests: ‘It is the “childhood self” and the “ancestor self” that finds the greatest satisfaction in living history museums…. This sets up easy resonances with the already formed imaginations of the childhood/ancestor self visitor, who also frames the history in terms of personal reminiscences’ (Dicks 2003, 129) as they evoke an essence of the memory but without the catalyst to ignite the visceral extension of feeling and memory combined. James E. Young proposes: ‘The shape of memory cannot be divorced from the actions taken in its behalf, a memory without the consequences contains the seeds of its own destruction … that public memory is constructed, that understanding of events depends on memory’s construction’ (Young 1993, 15–18). Therefore, the combination of this constructed memory and the experiencing of the site itself, heavy with lingering traces of the actual past, is a potent enough trigger in what Ken Adam suggested was ‘not offending the audience’s sense of reality, but pushing it further and further’ (Frayling 2005, 137) as he described how he was able to enhance the sense of reality within the design of his spaces, by careful selection and reposition.