In the Ruins of the Cold War Bunker
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I spent many months walking and documenting the Ness while conducting this research. The time spent meeting and interviewing ex-employees, archaeologists, acousticians, musicians and site guardians, when coupled with more intensely personal and solitary moments alone, unavoidably created feelings of affection towards the site along with a more proprietorial sense of ownership and territory.
Artists are attracted to the Cold War’s spaces and sites; they beguile us with their inaccessibility and their curious affective charge. This inaccessibility can be related to the difficulty of their physical access (i.e. that trespass or special permission has to be obtained – making the artist feel like a boundary-pushing explorer) and/or it can point to their semantic illegibility: that these places are difficult to understand, for even though their architectural materials may be familiar they are otherwise utterly alien in their form, scale, brute materiality and harsh geometries. We are also often left uncertain of their purpose, and this illegibility will often be a function of official secrecy and the incompleteness of the publicly available information by which these sites and their operations might ordinarily be contextualized and rendered ‘known’. This blankness is compounded by the fact that the people who once worked at them may still be bound to silence by the Official Secrets Act. Without such knowledge to project onto these sites during the course of a visit, the artist must let the places ‘speak’ for themselves.
This concern to find a way for the awkward spaces of the Cold War to offer up their own testimony has been evident in the work of numerous contemporary artists. For instance, Jane and Louise Wilson’s (no relation) moving-image work has focused on traces left by the now-absent occupants in ideologically loaded sites such as the former Stasi prison Hohenschonhausen in East Berlin (Stasi City 1997), Greenham Common (Gamma 1999) and the Exclusion Zone at Chernobyl (The Toxic Camera 2012). Each of these works is mindful of the complexity of place and its relationship to memory, and of how places appear to have an ability to remember events.
A sense of place (and its vulnerability) can also be summoned within an artwork in order to project an emotionally powerful sense of events that were once feared, but that never actually happened (thus accessing a trauma born of anxiety rather than one of actual physical violence). For example, inspired by the fictional portrayal of a nuclear attack upon the city of Sheffield in 1984’s TV docudrama Threads, Matt Stokes’s powerful video and archive piece In Absence of the Smoky God (2014) presented the imagined post-apocalyptic vocalizations of two distinct surviving communities existing in (over- and underground) bunker spaces.
Stokes’s work reminds us that even though the apocalypse never happened, anxiety about its possibility still exerted a tangible effect and touched lives in acute ways during the Cold War. Joanna Bourke (2005) has considered the Cold War’s particular brand of insidious fearfulness and posits that it was markedly different to previous conflicts since unimaginable elements – driven by techno-scientific development – were present. Stephen Felmingham (2011) believes the Cold War produced a collective psychosis that continues to stalk our unconscious:
It informs almost everything that we do now, it is still not been dealt with. It is still hidden, because it was a hidden war, materially it was hidden underground or in networks in the world, electromagnetic waves, radio stations etc. It wasn’t overt and it kind of never happened either, but it might as well have done because of the fear it placed in the population.
Unresolved anxiety, unintelligible science and all-pervasive secrecy characterized the Cold War: these all present fertile ground for artists, and we till this soil by visiting and directly engaging with the now-abandoned sites of Cold War darkness. Some of the richer engagements are motivated by a curious need to physically inhabit these sites of fear and threat – there is a sense in which proximity and immersion enable more than simply sensory observation of the close at hand, since to quote Tim Edensor ‘the body senses history’ (voiced at the seminar Apocalypse Now: thinking about ruins and radiation at the Whitworth Art Gallery, 28 November 2012). The artist, then, may wish to imagine himself or herself as a sensitive receptor of past trauma at a site where secrecy still prevails. This is particularly true of sites of ruination that permit somatic experience where:
movement is rough, disrupted and potentially perilous, replete with sensations other than the distanced gaze; no one is there to enforce performative norms, and indeed, there are no preparations for entry into, and performance upon, such as stage. (Edensor 2005, 95)
Thus Cold War sites attract artists through a heady combination of their newfound physical accessibility, the relative illegibility of their form or purpose and their rich scope for cultural manipulation. And this creative potentiality is particularly true of abandoned bunkers – relict structures that have already been found by artists to be particularly open to material and symbolic re-appropriation, and to have a distinctive affective charge.
THE LURE OF BUNKERS
While the Cold War’s material remains are clearly more than just its bunkers, for those seeking aesthetic frisson in the ruins of the Cold War, bunkers wield a distinctively eerie allure. As John Beck argues, in the wider public consciousness, these most iconic of Cold War structures both function as useful stand-ins for a host of defence-related work environments (from laboratories, manufacturing plants and launch sites to improvised shelters and so on) and (as discussed in the preceding chapter) radiate psychologically charged possibilities as imagined and metaphorical spaces.
Beck argues further that these structures ‘resist assimilation’ (Beck 2011, 81) into culture, through their being stuck in a ‘kind of attraction/repulsion ambivalence’ (Beck 2011, 82). This view, understandably, has been taken to task by others who argue that bunkers are actually assigned clear and stable meanings by a variety of communities. For instance, Luke Bennett persuasively contends that the ‘dominant discursive formations – that is, the political, the taxonomic, the nostalgic, and the experiential – frame the ways in which accounts of bunkers and bunker-hunting are presented by bunkerologists themselves, and display how representation is performed’ (Bennett 2013, 502, emphasis in original). Understanding the agency of representational framing mechanisms is therefore key in ‘making sense’ of these structures.
Undeniably in recent years, bunkers have become visible ‘objects of troubled fascination for artists, architects and archaeologists’ (Beck 2011, 79). The rationale behind why these specific structures are singled out as particularly alluring raises further questions. It is necessary to ask if it follows that the ‘most popular’ subjects are consequently the most accessible, visually the most compelling (however that might be determined) or carry the most intriguing historical and cultural association. Accordingly, an examination of the variety of ways in which artists and writers come to know of sites helps us to understand the critical and contextualizing role played by pre-existing literature (and other representational tropes and sources) in artists’ and writers’ research processes and how it is that they might tend to be drawn to particular iconic sites and structural forms.
In pursuit of this genealogical understanding, this chapter examines the role that W. G. Sebald’s elegiac travelogue The Rings of Saturn (1999) (hereafter Rings) has played in successive writings and artworks about the former military testing site at Orford Ness, and in particular the bunker ruins of the now-abandoned AWRE facility there. Upon reaching Orford Ness (towards the end of his journey and as a climax of sorts), Sebald meditates on ruination and solitude and experiences an epiphanic vision in which different times seem to be simultaneously present. I will consider how Sebald’s lyrical description of a ‘first contact’ with the ruinous AWRE structures at this place has offered an inspiring but arguably restrictive lens through which numerous artists and writers have subsequently viewed this site. My teasing out of the effects of a resulting ‘Sebaldian trope’ – with recurrent narratives and imagery – upon successive creative engagements with this place will pe
rvade this text, and I will ponder whether the repeated foregrounding of certain iconic places, like the AWRE bunkers, helps or hinders our attempts to use the arts to investigate bunkers, and the wider militarized landscapes in which they originated. In so doing, my analysis of artists’ engagement with Orford Ness will emphasize that the site’s bunkers are physically and contextually inseparable from their immediate environment, and I will assert the importance of a wider – landscape-based – perspective.
THE NESS
The 16 km shingle spit of Orford Ness in Suffolk – known locally as ‘the island’ – is now owned and run by the National Trust, an organization charged with the difficult task of managing tourism while stewarding the fragile habitat on this latter-day nature reserve. In addition the Trust maintains the fraught guardianship of this hugely significant territory of 20th-century history – espousing a policy of ‘continued ruination’ for the extant structures that represent a 70-odd-year history of military testing, including the early invention of radar, integrity testing for atomic bomb assemblies (but no nuclear detonations) and Cold War surveillance. Others (e.g. Kinsey 1981; Heazell 2010) have written at length about the importance of this place and, in doing so, have emphasized the atmosphere of secrecy that pervaded it. But while the island’s perimeter may once have been bordered by high-security fencing and patrolled by military police in support of this secrecy, the island is now accessible for visitors who can take a short boat ride over from the mainland. The site has been – and continues to be – a uniquely precarious heritage for the National Trust to ‘curate’. As Sophia Davis notes, ‘Reacting to the mysterious visual power of the place, those in the Trust responsible for the site’s current presentation tried to identify and preserve this special character, to endeavor to understand Orford Ness on its own terms, to appreciate the order in disorder and the beauty in ugliness’ (Davis 2008, 144). This policy has evidently been valuable in fashioning an affective nature/heritage site with an aura that has weathered such management. This aura of ‘forbiddeness’ remains an important part of its claim to a Cold War authenticity. It is something that a certain type of visitor craves: evident in Orford Ness’s entry in the ‘alternative’ travel guide Bollocks to Alton Towers: Uncommonly British Days Out contains the warning that while waiting for the ferry over ‘you get the sense that you’re not really meant to go there’ (Halstead et al. 2005, 116) and frames the site as one of ‘the lonely places our technocrats choose for their obscene experiments…. Again and again you’ll find these sick laboratories built on or beneath such haunted sites’ (Halstead et al. 2005, 116).
And yet the site is equally attractive to birdwatchers, country ramblers, artists and radar and telecommunications history buffs – each identifying in it certain ‘special qualities’ that chime with their particular aesthetic or wider meaning-making frameworks and believing that a visit to the site will permit them to directly experience those ‘special qualities’ for themselves. Accordingly, the site is repeatedly ‘mined’ by visitors, each for their own needs, and the National Trust must respect and somehow find a point of balance around these various ways of valorizing this place.
While normally seeing itself as concerned with the protection of areas of natural beauty and conventionally picturesque heritage, at Orford Ness, the National Trust has seen a role for art (and artistic augmentation) to enrich the character of this place, and the Trust’s wardens are approached by and actively seek out artists to be resident and respond to its uniqueness. Subsequently these works are displayed on and off the Ness on a fairly regular basis. It would seem artists have played a crucial role in the shaping of the Ness by the Trust from its early days. Christopher Woodward describes how a painter (Denis Creffield) was involved at the conceptual stage of philosophical debate around what to do with this uniquely scarred landscape (along with an archaeologist and writer). After the National Trust acquired it in 1993, the immediate thought had been to demolish the AWRE bunkers since the Ness’s importance was seen solely in terms of its character as a nature reserve. But the architectural historian Jeremy Musson argued for these structures’ value as ruins, proposing that Orford Ness’s role was as a palimpsest of 20th-century history. As Woodward explained, the Trust bravely agreed to embrace an approach ‘emulating that of the 18th century Picturesque: … a perspective which “framed” the experience of visiting but also involved a moral narrative, and a meditation on time, transience and humanity’ (Woodward 2002, 223). This was directly influenced by the presence, activity and work of Creffield, who camped on the island, rising at dawn ‘to depict an island in which distance and scale were impossible to estimate, the air unnaturally thin and luminous, and on days of sunshine the shingle shimmering and rippling as if the Ness were a transient mirage’ (Woodward 2002, 223). These pictures were highly influential (indeed his intense charcoal drawings are still displayed on the Trust’s East of England’s office walls – or were displayed when I visited in 2005). The management team acknowledged the painter’s ability to capture ‘mood, moment and the unexpected music of the island which hangs between the calling gulls and the endless wind’ (Woodward 2002, 223). Within this emergent curatorial policy, emphasis was consciously to be placed on the notion of ‘atmosphere’ and association between available elements – particularly as there was little factual information known at that point (although archival research, scholarship and oral history work have yielded substantially more information about the 20th-century history of the site in the years since).
But before proceeding to examine some of the artistic projects arising from this policy of ‘palliative curation’, we need to take a step back and to detail the earlier visitation of W. G. Sebald and the ripples set in train by his account of that visit in Rings.
THE SEBALDIAN LENS
In 1992 the German-born writer W. G. Sebald made his first visit to Orford Ness. His auspicious visit offers a unique description of a place on the cusp of change (in the period after the retreating Ministry of Defence left it to be vandalized and before it was purchased by the National Trust and partially ‘tidied up’). He procured access by boat from Orford and surveyed the Ness’s scarred landscape. This encounter takes up just a few pages in Rings (first translated into English in 1998) but is frequently cited by artists, archaeologists and writers.
Rings is an account of a walk in Suffolk – subtitled An English Pilgrimage in the original German – which blends autobiography, travel memoir, historical fact, fiction, salvaged and (manipulated) image and text. It is a book saturated with the awareness of destructive histories and processes – both human-made and natural. Christine Kraenzel picks up on the title itself ‘The most knowing objects in The Rings of Saturn seem to be places and landscapes that speak of catastrophe and annihilation. Like the planetary rings, presumably formed by the destruction of a former moon, traces of calamity extend outwards in ever-decreasing circles from the East Anglian coast, much further than the eye can see’ (Kraenzel 2006, 143). The tone is sombre and violent: Sebald writes as ‘if irradiated by melancholy’, observes psychoanalyst Adam Phillips (Gee 2012) and this tenor insistently disturbs the reader.
In one of the book’s most-quoted passages, Sebald reflects on first sight of the blatantly visible defence architectures – including the temple ‘pagodas’ (the distinctively shaped AWRE bunkers, as seen from the quay at Orford):
From a distance, the concrete shells, shored up with stones, in which for most of my lifetime hundreds of boffins had been at work devising new weapon systems, looked (probably because of their odd conical shape) like the tumuli in which the mighty and powerful were buried in prehistoric times with all their tools and utensils, silver and gold. My sense of being on ground intended for purposes transcending the profane was heightened by a number of buildings that resembled temples or pagodas, which seemed quite out of place in these military installations. (Sebald 1999, 235–236)
In the absence of any (textual) captioning, he remains mystified: ‘Where and in wh
at time I truly was that day at Orford Ness I cannot say, even now as I write these words’ (237). This leitmotif of a jarring temporal dislocation in the mind of the observer has been widely referenced (and appropriated). For John Beck, Sebald’s allusive ‘first contact’ with these monstrous presences ‘does not ground historical understanding but is … radically destabilising. The buildings either seem to have been thrown to earth from some other place or else the visitor himself has been transported through time to glimpse the ruins of the future’ (Beck 2011, 81). In short, ‘the past is both confirmed and denied by [the ruins] obstinate presence’ (ibid.). The paradoxical aspect of the Cold War–era structures – dating from such recent history yet resisting ‘assimilation’ (as previously mentioned) – is subsequently repeated by other visiting writers: Duncan McLaren observes that the buildings look like ‘ancient tumuli, Stone Age burial places … timeless and exotic’ (McLaren 2006, 34). Although archaeologist John Schofield reminds us that although the Ness’s ‘material remains are mysterious and enigmatic’, it ‘is part of the world we have ourselves created’ (Schofield 2006, 75 – emphasis added). As one blogger commented – in regard to the artwork Untrue Island (the cross-art project by artists Jane and Louise Wilson, writer Robert Macfarlane and composer/musician Arnie Somogyi): ‘Ever since reading The Rings of Saturn I’ve wanted to visit Orford Ness, drawn by the idea of those enigmatic ruins, which are fast becoming a kind of Tintern Abbey for the postindustrial Romantic’ (Plinius/Andrew Ray, 2012). Although not directly cited, Sebald’s prose is conjured up in the commentary for the Radio 4 documentary Island of Secrets (2009) using sound recordist Chris Watson’s subtle field recordings of the Ness as ground for a wandering commentator’s musings. This 30-minute work is described as a ‘haunting sound portrait’ (Watson 2009). A loud reverberant clanging door sound is recurrently used – a punctuation mark to evoke menace and the morose voiceover (by Paul Evans) maintains a theme of residual haunting: ‘The silence holds a vibration – a ghostly aural image of some terrible cataclysmic noise … it’s as if I’ve entered the temple of an unknown civilization and the only thing that makes sense to me is its dereliction … the only trouble is this is my civilisation’ (ibid.) – the noise clangs again to remind us we are somewhere deeply uncanny.