Barry Curtis, Patrick Wright
‘We walk through a panorama of pictures, which, if we have not fallen under its spell, reminds us of a large lunatic asylum’ Ernst Jünger, The Glass Bees
This course will explore the modern construction and manipulation of visual experience, covering both the technologies of imaging and reproduction, and the means by which spectators have been integrated into spaces of illusion. It will consider how contemporary preoccupations with virtuality provide a new basis for revisiting the theatrical and architectural management of events and milieux in earlier periods of history. A particular emphasis will be placed on war and the ‘war by other means’ of creating national and factional identities through scenario-building and allegorical elaboration.
One: The Baroque
We will examine the seventeenth century Baroque as a style that served as propaganda for resurgent Catholicism, fusing a new naturalism with reconfigured use of emblem and allegory. Baroque sought to uplift and emotionally engage by deploying excess and ‘spaces of provocative mobility’. It provided a repertoire of themes which were exploited in upscale scenarios of power and entertainment in subsequent centuries. We will explore ways in which the Romantic/Industrial period transformed this essentially aristocratic style into forms of popular spectacle and track the re-appropriation of the ‘post modern’ and ‘electronic’ baroque in recent times.
Reading:
Richard Wagner: The Artwork of the Future [1849] (online at http://users.belgacom.net/ wagnerlibrary/prose/wagartfut.htm)
Two: Potemkin Villages
The term ‘Potemkinism’ is nowadays more likely to be applied to the exploitation of historical façades in urban development. Yet this sort of manipulation of appearances actually derives from the late eighteenth century, when Prince Grigory Potemkin is alleged to have employed theatrical set designers to create illusory villages along routes he would travel with Catherine the Great and her powerful European visitors. These acts of scene-rigging were intended to convince Catherine and her visitors that Potemkin was improving conditions in lands recently incorporated into the Russian Empire in accordance with the Enlightenment principles she espoused. After 1917, the accusation of Potemkinism was reorganised to address Bolshevik attempts to convince western visitors that the revolution had arrived. Potemkinist exhibitionism persisted through the Stalinist era to become a feature of Mao’s China and its reception of visiting delegates after the ‘Liberation’ of 1949.
Reading:
Simon Sebag Montefiore, Prince of Princes; the Life of Potemkin (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2000), chapters 23 & 22, pp. 351-87
Nikolai Gogol, ‘The Government Inspector’ and ‘Nevsky Prospect’, in Gogol, Plays and Petersburg Tales (Oxford: World’s Classics, 1998)
A dossier of extracts will be provided for the post-1917 developments.
Three: Expos and Entertainment
The International Expositions of the nineteenth century achieved an industrialisation of spectacle and a global scope. They combined new optical and experiential technologies with structures that configured transparency, circulation and information, in what Walter Benjamin called a ‘dream of the future’ and a ‘frenzy of the visible’. This session, which will draw much of its material from early twentieth century events, considers how they constructed mobile and vicarious gazes, the relationship between ideal communities and amusement parks and the appearance of the ordinary citizen on the stage of history.
Reading:
Walter Benjamin, ‘Dream City and Dream House, Dreams of the Future, Anthropological Nihilism, Jung’ The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 338-415
Four: Camouflage
Many artists have engaged with camouflage as a conceptual and visual theme, and this session will explore the ways in which artists and theatrical scene-riggers actually helped to originate this new application of visual illusion during the First World War. Now associated with printed fabrics, camouflage was then an altogether more theatrical kind of deception, involving the manipulation of perspective in the interests of concealment and discovery. Avant-garde techniques were used in some British experiments included the ‘Dazzle’ schemes developed for ships by Edward Wadsworth, Norman Wilkinson and others. Yet it was Solomon J. Solomon, an Anglo-Jewish artist of conservative perspective, who recognised that, with the coming aerial photography, ‘the Other Side of the Hill no longer exists.’
Reading:
Extracts from DPM Disruptive Pattern Material; An Encyclopedia of Camouflage: Nature- Military-Culture (London: DPM Ltd, 2004)
Patrick Wright, ‘Cubist Slugs’, London Review of Books 27.12 (23 June 2005) (online at http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n12/wrig01_.html)
Warpaint: Artists and Camouflage (needs Realplayer). Written and presented by Patrick Wright, produced by John Goudie; first broadcast, BBC Radio 4, 5th August, 2002. Download as an mp3 file.
Five: Interactivity, Immersion, Virtuality
After 1945 technologies produced new ways of conceiving space and redefining haptic experience, methods that would go far beyond the masking and screening of earlier styles of dissimulation. A growing interaction between industry, academia, entertainment and war are evident in the genesis of computing and new kinds of spectacle. This session considers the complex material and ideological elements which have been termed ‘the electronic baroque,’ proceeding from a reading of three basic texts.
Reading:
Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (1954; London: Free Association, 1989)
Morton Heilig, ‘The Cinema of the Future’ [1955], reprinted in Randall Packer and Ken Jordan, eds., Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality (New York and London, W.W. Norton, 2001), pp. 219-31
Ivan Sutherland, ‘The Ultimate Display’, Proceedings of the International Federation of Information Processing Congress, 2 (1965): 506-8
Six: Digital Warfare & the Army after Next
Writing about the first Gulf War, Jean Baudrillard suggested that ‘War drifts slowly into technological mannerism’. Satellite mapping technologies and infra-red sighting systems have made it conceivable for American and Allied forces to fight wars without leaving virtual terrains, and to claim ‘total situational awareness’ even in lands where they have never previously been. The seminar will review this outcome, while also examining how war features in the global media spectacle of the present day, and comparing this with the earlier vision of robotic technology expressed by Ernst Jünger, a German novelist who was also a veteran of World War I.
Reading:
Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (Sydney: Power Publications, 1995)
Ernst Jünger, The Glass Bees [1957], trans. Louse Bogan and Elizabeth Mayer (New York: New York Review Books, 2000)
Retort (Iain Boal, T.J. Clark, Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts), Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (London: Verso, 2005)
