In the Ruins of the Cold War Bunker

by Luke Bennett

  RADIOFLASH

  Returning to this notion of careful selection and reposition, the use of scenography as a tool for pushing these realities, or hyper-realities, can be found in examples of my works: Magazine No. 7, Radioflash and Hush House. These pieces appropriate the use of Cold War military sites, animated through sound and light, combined with journey and scenographic devices to evoke a constructed memory in the imagination. They explore our perception and pre-conceptions of Cold War architecture through journey and anticipation. The buildings are given a sense of presence. Radioflash (2009) utilizes the symbol of the nuclear bunker as the ultimate protection from war. One structure above all others typifies the nation’s view of the Cold War: the so-called ‘nuclear bunker’ (Clarke 2005, 171).

  Radioflash is predominantly a sound installation that draws on this notion of the bunker as a symbol to inform the work as an experience of piecing memories (real and imagined) together, creating anamnesis7 within the spectator, or participant. By establishing key signifiers within their immediate experience of the work, the participants can fill in their own narrative of the space, sound and the experience they are witnessing. The fragmented construct of sound, spatial disorientation and carefully selected objects is an illusion in order to convey an evocative sense of ‘experiencing’ the Cold War bunker space. The subject is asked to ‘vivify memory through the memory-work combination itself – whereby events, their recollections and the role monuments play in our lives remain animate, never completed’ (Young 1993, 15).

  When experienced under normal working lighting conditions, the adapted bunker-hosting Radioflash does not overwhelm in its scale. It is a domestic scale, the Second World War shelter, consisting of three chambers. However, the work is scenographically manipulated through the use of light and sound, from the first room, to the second, to the third room, with increasingly limited light, becoming more localized, while the sound image becomes more diffuse and dense, therefore creating the illusion of a larger space. Visually, the first room can be read as an office-like area, with desk, swivel chair, anglepoise lamp, filing cabinet and military documents in files (as shown in Figure 4.2). All the objects date from between 1970 and 1980. The second room reveals a darker space with illuminated, painted numbers on the wall, under pegs indicating some sort of ordering. The third and final space is empty and almost entirely in darkness. The sound filling the final space appears to emanate from the walls but, being acousmatic, its source is unidentifiable (the sound is heard but without an obvious and visible source). The experience of the third room is deliberately disorientating and appears to represent nothing but a sonic and tactile experience of sound pressure on our bodies, unlike the previous two rooms that employed visual clues. It allows space to reflect on what perpetuates fear in our imaginations (Sandys 2012).

  Figure 4.2. Radioflash (2009, Kathrine Sandys).

  The approach to the bunker is deliberately prosaic, entering via a busy fitness centre, through a clean, corporate ‘staff only’, wooden laminate door. The incongruity of both worlds juxtaposed is not unusual in the urban landscape, with many surviving stations sitting alongside or underneath many new building projects of the past 30 years. On arrival in the bunker, however, the smell, minimal focused lighting and claustrophobic sound resonating through the space is an immediate and unexpected switch of sensory stimuli. The spectator/participant is immediately confronted and penetrated by sound and smell, with no distance between him or her and the source. There is no opportunity to recognize these sensory inputs as external to the body, before being confronted by them. With control removed it reverts the subject to what Ernest Schachtel describes as

  early infancy [where] the autocentric senses (taste, smell, proprioception, visceroception and touch) play a much more important role than the allocentric … while in the adult, the reverse is the case. The other fact is that all the senses, including sight and hearing, function in the newborn in the autocentric mode, without objectification, mostly reacting passively to impinging stimuli, and largely with pleasure-unpleasure-boundedness. (Schachtel 1966, 83)

  This literal penetration is the mode of autocentric affect and a direct switch from the mainly allocentric experienced prior to entering the space. The involuntary nature of this sensation can feel unsettling, with the suggested likeness to behaviour not experienced since infanthood. The discomfort of this sensation can potentially manifest as fear.

  This fear is derived from the lack of control ordinarily enabled in adulthood. The visual sense takes time to relieve this fear, as the eyes gradually adjust to the low light levels. This is unsettling and emotionally destabilizing, when there is no understanding where that sensation is being formed. This forms both bodily experience and the anamnetic experience, the act matter and act quality. Localized lighting draws our visual attention to small details of the space, allowing our visual brain to form a picture of the rest of the otherwise dark space. Our olfactory sense recognizes the damp concrete, associating the space with the mythologized site, based on nothing more than a desire for it to be ‘authentic’ (Sandys 2012).

  The actual bunker appropriated for Radioflash was actually built as a Second World War shelter. Using scenography to present the identity of a Cold War bunker, through the placing of objects, sound and a single paragraph of marketing text, this plays on the notions of myth surrounding our knowledge of the Cold War as we recognize it through popular cultural references, enabling us to accept the fiction presented to us, as easily as we accepted the filmic version of the Cold War before.

  AUTHENTICITY

  In my work I am interested in exploring how our myth-making practices engage the past and the present. Barthes’s concern with myth as an ideological image helps identify the symbol of the Cold War that has been formed through the series of scenographic devices in Radioflash:

  What must be firmly established at the start is that myth is a system of communication, that it is a message. This allows one to perceive that myth cannot possibly be an object, a concept, or an idea; it is a mode of signification, a form. (Barthes 1972, 117)

  But the notion of imagination and memory as a contributing factor to the audience experience in Radioflash cannot exist as simply a past recollection of the Cold War that is unconsciously assimilated into the current experience. As a recollection, unconscious or not, it will be a reproduced memory rather than current and new experience. As Emmanuel Levinas states: ‘If a remembering is always modified by the present wherein it returns, phenomenology will not speak of a falsified remembrance, but will make of this alteration the essential nature of remembering’ (Levinas 1998, 93).

  Thus memory is constantly being reworked, and it is not a stable ‘given’. Although imagination draws on learnt knowledge, it requires some form of stimulus to activate the temporal assimilation of current (in the present moment) and the previous upon which the consciousness is simultaneously drawing. If this is the case, we have a layered imagination of parallels – the primal stimulus and the recalled reproduction. They do not work chronologically but simultaneously and are therefore not any assumed associative processes but one that will alter by the slightest amount with the very slightest of variables. My work therefore seeks to access and explore these dynamic meaning-making processes, by acknowledging the rich and fluid associations entailed in the phenomenological experience of bunkers.

  CONCLUSION

  The Radioflash bunker was selected for its architectural qualities, reading as a hardened shell. Radioflash utilizes this association of memory, perceived memory and perceptual experience, or passive genesis, in order to create the narrative against which the experience is heightened. It is that desire that enabled film to form such vivid imagery depicting military activity during the Cold War that therefore perpetuated the imagined architectural landscapes of the Cold War. Radioflash also required a specific journey to its location, it required knowledge and effort to get there, a pilgrimage of sorts. It thus enabled John Urry’s tourist gaze:


  Potential objects of the tourist gaze must be different in some way or other. They must be out of the ordinary. People must experience particularly distinct pleasures which involve different senses or are on a different scale from those typically encountered in everyday life. (Urry 1990, 12)

  This frame of journey or ‘encounter’ can become an inherent attribute of the visit. By making this special journey, there is a sense of the authentic in the experience, not one that can easily be captured in a roadside photo opportunity. ‘The process of experiencing these ideas in situ is a kind of “feral scholarship” which enables new insights…. Bipolar places (loci which generated despair and euphoria in equal measures)’ (Dunlop 2013, 222–223). This builds on the notion of the sublime distance that cannot be easily drawn close to but is a ‘departure, of a limited break with the established routines and practices of everyday life and allowing one’s senses to engage with a set of stimuli that contrast with the everyday’ (Urry 1990, 2).

  It is this break from the everyday that applies the same mythical interpretations of fiction in the Cold War bunker, similarly acknowledging the potency of the romance and imagining for a site, even if that imagining is not based on an original first-hand experience but sits in the ‘biography/culture intersection occupied by heritage suggest[ing] a particular category of the tourist gaze – one which seeks the meaning of encountering or fantasizing the self as other’ (Dicks 2003, 127), offering us an augmented version of what we believe we have already experienced in the past. The reframed site lends us the opportunity to explore, test and present the fragments of mediated history, through the context of our own imaginations. Although the structures themselves do not maintain the convention of the picturesque, they are inherently imbued with the past ‘the fact that life … once dwelled here constitutes an immediately perceived presence. The ruin creates the present form of the past life’ (Georg Simmel, quoted in Dillon 2011, 23), a stoic past we wish to capture and maintain, but with enough distance to perpetuate the sublime fantasy of the bunker.

  NOTES

  1.The arch-villains featured respectively in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 dark-comedy Dr Strangelove, or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb, and in the James Bond films, 1962’s Dr No and 1965’s Thunderball (both directed by Terence Young).

  2.Albert Speer’s Ruinenwerttheorie of natural building materials, free from any metal reinforcements that would decay in an aesthetically pleasing state, over time, with no upkeep required. This notion was drawn from Classical architecture, standing long after its collapse as a symbol of power.

  3.The fictional settings of the Cold War were summoned in a variety of styles. Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels and the resulting films portrayed an exotic, high-modernist Cold War, something echoed but with a more sinister edge in the tense drama of John Frankenheimer’s films, like The Manchurian Candidate (1962). Meanwhile John Le Carré’s series of British spy fiction novels detailed equivalent suspense, but in a more prosaic, work-a-day situational styling. And Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker portrayed the alienation of the late Cold War period through its use of industrial dereliction in its scenography.

  4.The Ipcress File was a 1965 British spy movie directed by Sidney J. Furie based upon a Len Deignton novel of the same name.

  5.Goldfinger was the third film in the increasingly popular James Bond movie franchise. It was directed by Guy Hamilton.

  6.Significant examples could be seen in the BMEWS (Ballistic Missile Early Warning System) ‘golf ball’ radar domes at RAF Fylingdales, North Yorkshire, or the supersonic wind tunnel at the former RAE (Royal Aircraft Establishment) Bedford, both now demolished. The iconic ruins of the AWRE (Atomic Weapons Research Establishment) bomb testing pagodas still remain at Orford Ness, Suffolk.

  7.An effect of reminiscence in which the past situation or atmosphere is brought back to the listener’s consciousness, provoked by a particular signal or sonic context. Anamnesis, a semiotic effect, is the often involuntary revival of memory caused by listening and the evocative power of sounds.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Barthes, Roland. 1972. Mythologies. New York: Farrar, Straus & Girou.

  Burke, Edmund. 1990. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Clarke, Bob. 2005. Four Minute Warning: Britain’s Cold War. Stroud: Temous Publishing Ltd.

  Derrida, Jacques. 2006. Specters of Marx. Abingdon: Routledge Classics.

  Dicks, Bella. 2003. Culture on Display: The Production of Contemporary Visibility. Maidenhead: Open University Press.

  Dillon, Brian (ed.). 2011. Ruins: Documents of Contemporary Art. London: Whitechapel Gallery.

  Dunlop, Gair. 2013. ‘Relics of acceleration: A field guide’, in John Armitage & Ryan Bishop (eds.) Virilio and Visual Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 207–226.

  Franklin, A. (2003) Tourism: a guide. London: Sage Publications.

  Frayling, Christopher. 2005. Ken Adam: The Art of Production Design. London: Faber and Faber.

  Leader, Darian. 2007. Jane and Louise Wilson. London: Haunch of Venison.

  Levinas, Emmanuel. 1998. Discovering Existence with Husserl. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

  Lippard, Lucy. 1999. On the Beaten Track: Tourism, Art and Place. New York: The New Press.

  Ray, Gene. 2005. Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory: From Auschwitz to Hiroshima to September 11. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

  Sandys, Kathrine. 2012. I Thought I Grew an Ear in My Stomach: The Phenomenological Experience of the Art Event as Sublime Encounter. Goldsmiths, University of London. (unpublished PhD Thesis).

  Schachtel, Ernest. 1966. Experiential Foundations of Rorschach’s Test. New York: Analytic Press.

  Speer, Albert. 1970. Inside the Third Reich. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

  Urry, John. 1990. The Tourist Gaze. London: Sage Publications.

  Vanderbilt, Tom. 2010. Survival City: Adventures among the Ruins of Atomic America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

  Virilio, Paul. 1994. Bunker Archeology. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.

  Wilson, Jane & Wilson, Louise. 2006. Urville. New York: 303 Gallery.

  Wilson, Jane & Wilson, Louise. 2013. Blind Landing, H-bomb Test Facility, Orford Ness, Suffolk, UK. London: Paradise Row Gallery. Young, James. 1993. The Texture of Memory. New Haven: Yale University Press.

  Zahavi, Dan. 2006. ‘Does (Husserlian) phenomenology have a future?’ Husserl Archives. New School for Social Research. http://www.newschool.edu/husserl/future/part%20two/zahavi.html (accessed 26 October 2008).

  Chapter 5

  Processual Engagements

  Sebaldian Pilgrimages to Orford Ness

  Louise K. Wilson

  The preceding chapters have explored the ways through which artists have sought to animate our sense of the Cold War through creative engagements with its abandoned bunkers. They have also specifically considered the strange interplay of fact and fiction that frames our attempts to ‘know’ the bunker. In this chapter I will build on this analysis by considering how one UK site and its iconic bunkers (the ruins of the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment complex at Orford Ness, in Suffolk, UK) have become emblematic of a secret Cold War militarized landscape. My chapter therefore extends the consideration of the role of the artist in attempts to make a sense of the Cold War by placing its bunkers within a wider affective and material landscape, and then laying bare and questioning the recursive patterns of meaning making that can be witnessed applied to the Orford Ness site and its iconic remnant structures. Before introducing that site, however, I will introduce general themes that I will then specifically apply within my case study: first by exploring the motivations of artists in engaging with Cold War sites and second by considering the particular lure of Cold War bunkers.

  WHY ARTISTS ARE DRAWN TO COLD WAR SITES

  First to provide personal context, in 2005 I was invited to apply
for a commission on Orford Ness as part of Contemporary Art in Historic Places, a partnership between the National Trust, English Heritage and Commissions East in which three artists would be funded to create new work inspired by historic properties. The invite felt propitious – I had been curious about the Ness for some time (having listening to a Radio 4 documentary which conjured up an evocative image of a watery, mysterious and distant ex-defence site). This opportunity would also continue a body of work I was making looking at the cultural and physical legacy of the Cold War – using sound in particular to ask how such sites might be known through their sonic traces, by practicing a kind of ‘acoustic archaeology’. In the resulting series of audio works, video works, a self-guided walk and book (collectively entitled A Record of Fear) I sought to give tangible form to the sense of strangeness and renewed affirmative ‘occupation’ that struck me most in this most bleak and oddly beautiful of landscapes. Record included an audio work sited in the ‘Black Beacon’ building, in which an array of contact microphones, hydrophones, ultrasonic recorders and other devices had been used to capture the subtle ‘background’ sounds of the site. I also filmed the Exmoor Choir performing madrigals (and a specially commissioned work by Yannis Kyriakides) in some of the site’s former Atomic Weapons Research Establishment (AWRE) lab buildings – male and female voices ‘exciting’ the resonant acoustics amid the ruination – their words lamenting the passing of time. Finally, for one day only, visitors were allowed to enter the normally inaccessible test laboratories to hear the suite of audio works including the captured sound of a working centrifuge I recorded at AWE Aldermaston,1 returning the centrifuge’s sound back to its original site.