by Luke Bennett
CONCLUSION
The military occupation of the Ness is not ancient history – much of it happened during living memory, albeit in conditions of strict secrecy. Since the early 1990s the site has become interrogatable – but much of that sense-making relies upon the act of visiting the site and experiencing it, and on using imagination to fill the gaps in the historical record. The desire to create narratives, to fill in gaps, is inevitable – and is a spur to an arts-based inquisitiveness. But interrogation of the Ness must always remain multi-modal and multi-disciplinary. To imagine a past for this site and to celebrate its mystery (by viewing it as the UK’s own Tarkovskian ‘Zone’) is but one necessary form of enquiry for the actual histories of this site do exist, and these lie embodied not just in the brutal, weathered concrete of its relict structures, or its fractured pebbles, but also in the memories of those who worked there. The Trust has unearthed a large amount of verbal and archival material, and increasingly veterans are making themselves known and talking about their experiences, alongside family members and volunteers to build the site’s historical identity. Surprisingly the archive has been little mined or used by artists, and this opportunity to work with the actual (rather than imagined) history of this site perhaps presents a new direction that artistic engagements with the site could now take.
This chapter has shown the way in which melancholic and apocalyptic tropes have influenced a succession of artworks inspired by Orford Ness and its bunkers. Preparing this research has required more work than might have been required in other disciplines – for even though artists may cite the same originating literary sources, they generally do not reference the other artists who either preceded them. Artists instead like to give the impression that their work is untainted by (or is breaking free from) everything that has gone before. In this regard they are different from researchers in the fields of anthropology, archaeology and so forth where knowledge generation and claims to truth and/or authenticity are based upon linkage back to a developing canonical body of prior work, and to affiliation to discrete paradigms and debates. In Patience Iain Sinclair delivers a wry but stinging critical observation (quoted in full):
I think you get a very interesting moment in these properties between the point when they’re totally off the map and the short moment later when artists are more or less forcibly deposited there to make artworks. From there being no possibility of getting in to the absolute welcome that’s thrown at certain people to make works that give a poetic to these dangerous, dirty, difficult spaces. The first ones in have a real charge & then it becomes very processional and very bleached of energy in some ways. It’s much more of a charged space if it has to be broken into or infiltrated. (Gee 2012)
In the film, Marina Warner is positioned to briefly counter Sinclair’s critical position. She reacts to the accusation of processional diluted artworks with an entreaty not to be elitist: ‘It’s all very well if we’re the first to be there then that’s fine, but I don’t think that we should simply slam the doors in the face of pilgrims who have been ignited by a piece of literature’ (Gee 2012).
Rings has clearly had a powerful influence over the ways in which Orford Ness has been framed and engaged with by writers and artists, and there is always the danger that a dominant mode will squeeze out any search for new or other ways of engaging a place or topic. But we should avoid the urge to throw the baby out with the bathwater: the Sebaldian approach has encouraged a kind of close looking, an attention to detail, to what can’t be easily pinned down, and many of the resulting artworks have brought forth a subtle reflection on a site, in a way that helps us to appreciate the point at which landscape and built structures increasingly merge. Moreover, as warner argues in Patience, rather than simply thematizing remembrance, the Sebaldian approach has activated a ‘poetics of suspension’: a poetics that ‘suspends notions of chronology, succession, comprehension, and closure’ (Gee 2012). This forms a non-linear voice for a history that is (still) mute.
In a review of Cobra Mist (Townley & Bradby 2008) that included a roll call of previous ‘Orford Ness artists’, it was noted that these works all draw on the accumulated psychic atmosphere from seven decades’ experimentation in destruction and portray the site ‘as some combination of brooding, eerie, forsaken, distressed’ (Townley & Bradby 2008). Emily Richardson’s piece adds to the growing composite portrait of a place at the end of a particular historical period, but doesn’t redirect that portrait into a new form or tone. But I wonder how far that is possible anymore. Arguably Orford Ness has become emblematic of a secret Cold War militarized landscape – one that still shocks or intrigues but, ironically, has become increasingly exposed. The representation of that landscape has become increasingly static – fossilizing a relatively short period of transition and uncertainty and semantic indeterminacy. Perhaps we should be mindful of the need to give over-exposed sites a rest from time to time and let them quietly continue to assert their own agency, and slowly change while we look more closely elsewhere at sites, and structures, that have received relatively little literary or artistic attention.
NOTE
1.The AWRE was restyled as the AWE in 1987.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Battle, Laura. 2014. ‘Anya Gallaccio at Aldeburgh’. Financial Times, 6 June at http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/d912a68e-e7e4-11e3-b923-00144feabdc0.html (accessed 18 October 2015).
Beck, John. 2011. ‘Concrete ambivalence: Inside the bunker complex’. Cultural Politics 7(1): 79–102.
Bennett, Luke. 2013. ‘Concrete multivalence: Practising representation in bunkerology’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 31: 502–521.
Bourke, Joanna. 2005. Fear: A Cultural History. London: Virago Press.
Daniels, Stephen, Cowell, Ben & Veale, Lucy. 2015. Landscapes of the National Trust. London: National Trust.
Davis, Sophia. 2008. ‘Military landscapes and secret science: The case of Orford Ness’. Cultural Geographies 15(1): 143–149.
Dean, Tacita & Miller, Jeremy. 2005. Place. London: Thames & Hudson.
Dyer, Geoff. 2012. Zona: A Book about a Film about a Journey to a Room. Edinburgh: Canongate Books.
Edensor, Tim. 2005. Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality. Oxford: Berg.
Felmingham, Stephen. 2011. ‘Tocsin Bang’ exhibition at Union 105, Leeds (from the unpublished transcript of the In Conversation between Stephen Felmingham and Louise K. Wilson, 27 April 2011).
Fisher, Mark. 2014. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Winchester: Zero Books.
Flintham, Matthew. 2012. ‘The military-pastoral complex: Contemporary representations of militarism in the landscape’. Tate Papers 17(spring), http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/17/military-pastoral-complex-contemporary-representations-of-militarism-in-the-landscape (accessed 16 May 2014).
Gee, Grant. (Dir) 2012. Patience (after Sebald) (Film). Soda Pictures, UK.
Halstead, Robin, Hazeley, Jason, Morris, Alex & Morris, Joel. 2005. Bollocks to Alton Towers: Uncommonly British Days Out. London: Penguin Books.
Heazell, Paddy. 2010. Most Secret: The Hidden History of Orford Ness. Stroud: The History Press.
Kinsey, Gordon. 1981. Orfordness: Secret Site. Lavenham, Suffolk: Terence Dalton Limited.
Kotting, Andrew. 2008. Cobra Mist. Online resource available at: http://www.animateprojects.org/writing/essay_archive/a_kotting (accessed 30June 2014).
Kraenzel, Christina. 2006. ‘Picturing place: Travel, photography, and imaginative geography in W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn’, in Lisa Patt & Christel Dillbohner (eds.) Searching for Sebald: Photography after W.G. Sebald. Los Angeles, USA: The Institute of Cultural Inquiry and ICI Press, pp 126–145.
Macfarlane, Robert. 2008. The Wild Places. London: Granta.
Macfarlane, Robert. 2012. ‘Robert Macfarlane’s Untrue Island: The voices of Orford Ness’. The Guardian, 8 July at https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2012/jul/08/untrue-island-orford-ness-macfa
rlane (accessed 18 October 2015).
Macfarlane, Robert. 2016. ‘Walking in Unquiet Landscapes’, part of ‘Landscape beyond the Benign’. TATE ETC 36(spring) at http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/walking-unquiet-landscapes (accessed 17 July 2016).
McLaren, Duncan. 2006. ‘I love the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union loves me’, in Louise K. Wilson (ed.) A Record of Fear. Cambridge: Commissions East and National Trust, pp. 13–42.
Plinius/Andrew Ray. 2012. ‘Untrue Island’ at http://some-landscapes.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/untrue-island.html (accessed 3 March 2014)
Richardson, Emily. 2008a. Cobra Mist (film) Animate TV. Online resource available at: UK.www.animateprojects.org/films/by_date/films_2008/cob_mist (accessed 5 December 2012).
Richardson, Emily. 2008b. Emily Richardson interview. Online resource available at: http://www.animateprojects.org/films/by_date/films_2008/atv_e_richardson.
Schofield, John. 2006. ‘In the other-world’, in Louise K. Wilson (ed.) A Record of Fear. Cambridge: Commissions East and National Trust, pp. 75–94.
Sebald, W. G. 1999. Rings of Saturn. London: The Harvill Press.
Smith, Phil. 2014. On Walking … and Stalking Sebald. Axminster, Devon: Triarchy Press.
SNAP. 2014. Online resource available at: http://www.snapaldeburgh.co.uk/2014/exhibition2014.html (accessed 3 February 2015).
Stokes, Matt. 2014. In Absence of the Smoky God. Sheffield: Site Gallery.
Townley, Anna & Bradby, Lawrence. 2008. Cobra Mist. Online resource available at: https://www.a-n.co.uk/reviews/cobra-mist (accessed 30 March 2015).
Tufnell, Ben. 2014. ‘The Secret Landscape Anya Gallaccio and Orford Ness’ at http://www.snapaldeburgh.co.uk/2014/exhibition2014.html (accessed 17 July 2016).
Watson, Chris. 2009. The Island of Secrets at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00j7528 (accessed 17 July 2016).
Woodward, Christopher. 2002. In Ruins. London: Vintage.
Part III
EMBRACING THE BUNKER
Identity, Materiality and Memory
Chapter 6
Torås Fort
A Speculative Study of War Architecture in the Landscape
Matthew Flintham
This chapter – presented in the style of an investigative academic paper – is a fictional reading of a real landscape and is derived from the narration to my forthcoming short film, Torås Kommandoplasse. Both this text and the film (from which the chapter’s accompanying images are derived: Figures 6.1 and 6.2) explore speculative ways to engage with historical sites of conflict and the architectures of warfare, and attempt to fuse current developments in the geohumanities with historical analyses and fictional representation. As a stylistic hybrid of academic and fictional analyses (or even as a work of ‘theory-fiction’), some of the works referenced in this text are invented, while others are not. The purpose of this conceit is simply to invite the reader into a zone of uncertainty and disquiet, and to magnify the ambiguous materials of life and non-life, war and death that articulate around an abandoned coastal bunker complex.
INTRODUCTION
The following text draws on the research of geologist Maria Lehmann, whose renowned, career-long investigation into the morphology of the Oslo Fjord became in later years an altogether fragmentary, uncategorizable body of work. It will draw principally on the handwritten journals and video footage deposited by Lehmann in the library of the University of Tønsberg, Norway, before her retreat from public life in 2012. In fact, this chapter will suggest that the body of work, or the unusual nature of its subject, was the catalyst for her career hiatus.
While this text begins where Lehmann’s own research began two decades ago, with the distribution of rhomb porphyry igneous rock deposits along the inner east coast of the Oslo Fjord, it will inevitably and necessarily extend into the recent tragic circumstances of her own private life. In this respect, it will detail an emerging preoccupation with an area of land on the island of Tjøme in the Vestfold municipality. Here, a Second World War military fortress hides in the gorges and granite hills, constructed against the threat of Nazi invasion but dramatically refortified by the invaders, and later serving as a Norwegian observation outpost and training facility during the Cold War.
Figure 6.1. Torås Kommandoplasse (2010, Matthew Flintham) (frame capture from Lehmann’s footage of Torås).
This text will interpret Lehmann’s unpublished notes and videographic research at the fort which, unusually, attempts to fuse the study of geology and militarization. In doing so, this chapter also recognizes and bears witness to a significant and relatively recent change in Lehmann’s theoretical positioning and working methodology. It would be improper to speculate on Lehmann’s reasoning and criticality during this period, suffice to say that the research under analysis here was conducted immediately before her decision to step away from her academic career. This chapter will not, therefore, speculate on any personal factors that might account for the emergent strain of pessimism that animates Lehmann’s recent theoretical observations and arguments, such as they are.
RETREAT
Lehmann’s career-long relationship with the Oslofjord (henceforth referred to here by the geological term ‘rift’ or ‘graben’) became, it transpired, one of extreme ambivalence. Her intense fascination with the region’s geology was such that she and her Norwegian partner acquired a modest summerhouse on Tjøme, a large island of verdant forests and rolling svaberg rock formations sculpted by great inland ice sheets over 12,000 years ago. After dark months spent living and working in London, the couple and their two children would spend long summers living and working on the island. Tragically, Lehmann’s partner died after a short illness during the summer of 2008. Her loss did not, however, deter her from returning to the island in subsequent years, which provided stability and continuity for her grieving children, and a connection to her late partner’s aged parents who lived on the mainland nearby.
Rhomb porphyry
It is well known that while the igneous porphyry rock is commonly found around the world, particularly in Mediterranean regions and North Africa, the distinctly red rhomb porphyry originates in only three rift fault regions: Mount Erebus in Antarctica, the East African Rift (including Mount Kilimanjaro) and the Oslo rift in Norway. The geographical particularity of rhomb porphyry is apparent in a number of Lehmann’s text such as Zonation and Morphology of the Oslo Rift (Lehmann 1996) and A Selective Analysis of Igneous Transit across the Oslo Rift (Lehmann 1998), both of which highlight the relative rarity of this earthy-red granite with its visibly distinctively feldspar crystals. However, there is also the matter of its impossibility. A number of studies, including Lehmann’s own, ask how it is possible for rhomb porphyry, with its heavy composition of silica and phenocryst, to travel in lava flows across such great distances: the viscosity of early-stage lava eruptions is such that heavy elements quickly sink or curtail its flow across the land or sea beds (Larsen et al. 2008, 288). Despite rhomb porphyry being central to Lehmann’s research, it is difficult to believe that she could have foreseen its place in the mystery of her recent difficulties.
Torås fort
In the summer of 2010, the island suddenly got bigger. Lehmann records in her journal for the 9th of July that while out walking with her children around the edge of a military camp some miles from their summer house, they noticed that a set of gates which were normally chained and padlocked were thrown open to the world (Lehmann 2010, 14). They gingerly entered the camp, at once realizing that it had been entirely abandoned by the army, and made their way around what turned out to be a facility of considerable size. She estimated it to be three or four hundred acres, with two sizable parade grounds, barrack buildings, at least four large circular naval cannon emplacements with one large Bofors gun still in space, a complex network of tunnels in the granite hills and an imposing hilltop command centre, the Kommandoplasse, which was made almost entirely of poured concrete. With its square, flat top, this dark edifice was almost certainly
over a hundred metres above sea level, and Lehmann was now suddenly aware that it was this that she had seen almost every single summer day over the years, barely concealed above the tree canopy in the distance. It troubled her that this building had hardly registered in her otherwise-exhaustive reading of the local landscape.
LARVIKITE
The Vestfold region, like much of the coastal regions of southern Norway, is physically dominated by extensive rock formations of larvikite, which is sometimes known in Britain by the commercial name, Blue Pearl granite. These rounded, dramatically undulating rock formations disrupt a comprehensive reading of the landscape, as if the visible topography is subtly reconfiguring itself at every turn in the road or bend in the path. Always the same but always different. In Lehmann’s work, we often encounter such metaphors that express mutability in the landscape, suggesting that the hills are, indeed, alive or at least imperceptibly and constantly moving. Lehmann’s later essays also refer to larvikite as both alien and anthropomorphic in nature: unlike much of mid- and northern Norway, the larvikite landscape is almost human in scale, with sympathetic hollows that inspire thoughts of rest, shelter or even habitation, and traversable peaks that are easily managed in short leaps. And yet, larvikite’s giant, amoebic surfaces glisten in the sun like vast silicate organisms trapped in temporal stasis, forever plunging into the black, cold, ocean.
