by Luke Bennett
It might be said that there is an opportunity for a certain affective, dark tourism in looking back now (from a position of apparent safety) at the apocalyptic conditions of the Cold War. To explore this aspect of Cold War bunker-hunting, we need to suspend awareness of the continued existence of nuclear weapons (something that we generally are quite proficient at doing – too proficient Masco would say) and to consider whether the Cold War bunker hunters are engaged in a pursuit of a sublime encounter with their quarry. Talk of the sublime (as with talk of ‘ruins’ considered in the previous chapter) is likely to stir purists who will point out that the sublime is an aesthetic concept devised 200 years before the advent of the Cold War, and which was only ever intended as a way of investigating human subjectivity as it confronts things beyond the realm of human creation or understanding. Thus, for them, the sublime is an account of the overwhelming sensation produced by confronting the elemental power of the natural world. But Frances Ferguson (1984) has argued that a modern, more human originated form of the sublime can be characterized: the ‘nuclear sublime’. Ferguson takes the sublime as a way of ‘thinking about the unthinkable’ (1984, 5), and then explores how the condition of facing the prospect of total extinction has the necessary quality of being overwhelming and something over which we – individually and collectively – lack control. It would appear credible then to identify bunker hunters as encountering the nuclear sublime, if their exploring leads them to confront the incomprehensible enormity of world destruction, something at the very edge of their comprehension due to the scale of destruction or because the agencies of the apocalypse have no sensate register (e.g. due to the tasteless, colourless ‘invisibility’ of radioactivity).
Furthermore, the 18th-century sublime required that the spectator approach the phenomenon of awe and seemingly overwhelming danger from what was ultimately a position of safety. Thus a precipice was sublime, provided the spectator was standing safely back from the edge. If temporal distance can be substituted for physical distance from sublime danger, then the ‘safe looking back’ entailed in visiting the former sites of nuclear preparedness would appear to fit the sublime definition. Potentially, such ‘safe looking’ could be titillating and disrespectful of those who worried and/or suffered bodily harm during the Cold War era, and we will explore this accusation further in Chapter 14, but for now it is suffice to state that the likelihood that Cold War bunker-hunting is simply prurient entertainment, or schadenfreude, is lesser if carried out by those who survived that era or who have a close ancestral connection to it. In the chapters that follow, Felmingham, Sandys and Wilson each take us further into matters of the nuclear sublime and the uncanny as part of wrestling (explicitly or implicitly) with their Cold War trauma, and it is important to note that many of the contributors to this book are ‘of a certain age’ – they are ‘Cold War kids’, who spent their formative childhood years worrying about nuclear war in the early 1980s. Like Virilio, their (and my) repeated engagement with bunkers is likely to be related to a compulsive working-out of childhood trauma. As such, for many of us, the roots of our Cold War bunker-hunting are similar to those of Vowell, for in her words ‘by the time I was old enough to start planning a future, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t have one. I’m amazed I got to grow up. Amazed!’ (Ross 2004, 12). A form of relief then – ‘Phew, I survived!’ – may lie at the root of our work. In my case it is particularly the suddenness by which that heightened nuclear anxiety came to an end that fascinates me, how something that seemed total and permanent suddenly proved not to be. Like Vowell I consequently find succour in the physical traces of Cold War provisioning for nuclear war because (as she says of Ross’s photographs of fallout shelters) ‘looking at your pictures makes me feel saner. That old familiar world is so far gone that sometimes I catch myself thinking I dreamt it’ (in Ross 2004, 16). Accordingly, I’d argue that finding material evidence to ground the accuracy of prior memories and traumatic feelings is not the same thing as wallowing in the past.
NOTES
1.The American publishers used this variant spelling of ‘archaeology’.
2.Kiefer’s 1969 work Besetzungen (‘occupations’), which shows the artist standing in the pace of a soldier, looking out to sea: see http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/in-focus/heroic-symbols-anselm-kiefer/difficult-reception-occupations
3.Beuys’s 1971 work Schautafeln für den Unterricht I + II which juxtaposed photos, raw materials and textual message on a half-submerged generic bunker – the message is the pomp-busting, intentionally ridiculous ‘The Samurai’s sword is a blood sausage’.
4.See the images here: http://insitu.revues.org/6444
5.And here it is important to remember that the Space Race at this stage was also an arms race: as it enabled the development of rocketry with the capability for the intercontinental deliver nuclear warheads.
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Part II
LOOKING AT THE BUNKER
Representation, Image and Affect
Chapter 3
Peripheral Artefacts
Drawing [Out] the Cold War
Stephen Felmingham
Cold War military installations and bunker spaces occupied a position of simultaneous disquiet and fascination for me through my early life, growing up in close proximity to the militarized landscapes of the Cold War and subsequently in my adult career as an artist. My current areas of research into drawing, place and the contemporary sublime have found their intersection in bunkers that were latterly the underground posts of the Royal Observer Corps (ROC): a network of 1,500 nearly identical installations across the United Kingdom, built during the Cold War to monitor and track radioactive fallout in the event of a nuclear attack. These were designed to house three to four volunteer members of the ROC, whose role would be to gauge bomb power and ground zero of a nuclear blast and report the scale and direction of fallout to a group headquarters. The majority of the posts were built to a standard layout, comprising a small monitoring room and latrine 15 feet below the surface and accessed by a hatch and ladder. The post contained standardized Ministry of Defence equipment, furniture and communications devices. The posts were vacated after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disbanding of the ROC in 1991–1992. These abandoned installations now provide objects and material for my drawing work and a site of possibilities from where new forms and associations can emerge. They also operate in my drawing practice as conceptual and physical laboratories from where experiments into the subtle field of perceptions that pervade this research can develop. What follows is an account of my research, its aims and methods and an exploration of how I have used the ubiquitous Cold War bunker as a way of foregrounding a post-traumatic unease, a haunting and uncanny affect hidden within the ruins, something glimpsed only fleetingly and at the edge of visual perception.
Drawing is my primary means of research, both as an object of and for research, and it sets out to detect uncanny forms in the half glimpsed peripheral halo around the edges of our vision: literally drawings made by looking out of the corner of the eye. As will be shown later, this approach has produced drawings of reversed contrast, of half-glimpsed forms and drawings derived from a technique of deep focus on Cold War period photographs and objects arrayed in front of my visual field. To effect this I have developed a series of masks and visors to eliminate or divert central foveal vision and increase my sensitivity to peripheral vision. I contend that these forms can be associated, through drawing, with an uncanny sense that continuously populates our waking vision despite being suppressed by the visual parts of the brain. I will argue that this state of uncanny perception coincides with Jean-François Lyotard’s view of the post-modern sublime in ‘The Sublime and the Avant-garde’, of small shocks of perception, of a ‘quickening’ and anxious intensity (Benjamin 1998, 198) rather than the transcendental sublime of Edmund Burke.
Drawing is an active, dynamic and responsive agent in my research and practice and a ‘primary means of symbolic communication’ (Downs et al. 2007, xi), mediating simultaneously between the physical and the metaphysical and between thought and perception. This status of drawing, I will argue, offers the possibility that these fleeting and uncanny visions, repressed by culture and the efficiencies of our perceptual apparatus, can be uncovered by drawing as a research methodology in resonant sites of Cold War memory and trauma: here the UK network of Royal Observer Corps posts. My research brings together a constellation of theoretical approaches that have implications for ideas of place, the sublime, the uncanny and visual perception. Drawing is examined as a means to communicate somatic and metaphysical thinking alongside the bunker as a contemporary cultural artefact, an expression of modernity and as a location for the uncanny. I will briefly discuss the bunker’s presence in the landscape in order to bring to bear ideas of the sublime and its relationship to the abject, before arguing for drawing’s role in detecting what I term an ‘uncanny field of affect’ in the bunkers that provide the primary research context for the drawings.
BUNKER AND PLACE
The Royal Observer Corps posts remain, as structures, largely undisturbed in their subterranean locations across the UK and thus stand as evidence in the landscape of the state of perpetual anxiety and fear that characterized the Cold War, a ‘past to which the bunker stands as evidence (being) not over but remain(ing) the condition of possibility within which the present must be apprehended’ (Beck 2011, 82). Once hidden, they are now evident, their secrecy undone and their military function now overwritten by an uncanny defined by Freidrich Schelling as ‘the name for everything that ought to have remained … secret and hidden but has come to light’ (Freud 1919, 345). In Schelling’s terms the bunkers, once secret, are now revealed, although their secrecy was only partial as they occupied a known position in their locale and were staffed by local corps members. From anecdotal evidence derived from ex-corps members, it is probable that they were overlooked or ignored by the community, as their function was bound up with unthinkable possibilities of war. Their disappearance from plain sight follows the principles of Cold War defence systems: that which could be perceived was in fact a way of deflecting the gaze away from the sites of real power which were anonymously installed elsewhere. By the time of the Cold War those installations pertaining to warfare were largely out of sight, hidden in ‘their partial sub-surface visibility and cult-like detachment … [a] parallel to civil society’ (Flintham 2012, 2). This resonates with Paul Virilio’s conception of modern warfare and his logistics of perception ‘where the world disappears in war, and war as a phenomenon disappears from the eyes of the world’ (1989, 66) as the military retreated to subterranean bunkers to evade the threat from the air. The technological advances in warfare meant it was no longer effective to build bunkers that could deflect shells or provide visual vantage points over the theatre of war for the purposes of defence. The military and governmental bunkers of the Cold War were, in general, airtight and built to withstand the effect of weapons deployed some distance away. A direct hit o
r even a near miss was not survivable. Thus they did not provide a means of direct vision; rather they operated a series of mediated sensors and detectors relating to radiation levels, blast pressure, elevation of blast, electromagnetic pulse and others and, in the case of the ROC posts, were widely dispersed across the territory to ensure some remained functional in the event of a large-scale attack.
The act of entering the posts (as part of my field research) entailed descending a steel ladder into darkness, accessed from a hatch often buried in brambles or hidden in long grass. Referring to my field notes, climbing down into the posts occurs as a transgressive act: entering the still atmosphere of long abandonment, intruding in a space seemingly still populated with the ephemera of its occupants. My drawings of interiors of the posts, some completed in situ and some made from photographs, seem to hold this aspect of absent presence. To cross the threshold is to enter an ambivalent space, both refuge and potential tomb, recalling Virilio’s description of the bunker as an ‘object of disgust’ (1994, 46), a state of simultaneous repulsion and attraction. These underground rooms are now characterized by their ruinous air of abandonment and decay, but yet this is often the place where the siren for the four-minute warning would sound in each district, dragged to the surface and cranked by hand.
Across the UK the ROC posts now contain common objects resulting from the military issue of equipment to the Observer Corps – among these being abandoned air raid warning crates, standard issue bunk beds, intercom units, soap, brushes and dustpans. During my field visits I have removed objects from their positions in order to take an impression of them – through drawing and casting in the studio – before revisiting and returning them to their original places. This action extends the place of the post into the studio, drawing a connection from the object that has been abandoned in the post to its drawing in the studio. Again, referring to field notes, I reflect on finding identical items in posts many hundreds of miles apart. The commonality of these objects also connects them to other, unseen and unvisited posts, lending them an aspect of uncanny doubling as these objects appear and reappear in each post. Often they are the poignant materials of cleaning or washing of the body, for example Ministry of Defence soap or Glitto scouring powder, underlining the sense of futility in these actions in the circumstances of mutually assured destruction which now operate in my research and drawings as resonant symbols of memory, temporality and place.
