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Startlingly present is the sense of the hidden, of the public
exposure of places to which access had previously been restricted to those
who possessed the highest grades of institutional secrecy. Today the secrecy
of such places is no longer considered of any value, but the physical
evidence of this former status remains in the barbed wire fences, fence
posts, sentry boxes, massive concrete enclosures and carefully calculated,
extended sequences of doors and access tunnels. The Wilson's work figures this place in our imaginations. In
their amateur dramatics they play out an essential parody of the space. With
their handbags, nail varnish and military uniforms they act out the moment of
activation of the nuclear trigger. Their play-acting places us by proxy in
the spaces and in the repeated moments of imminent annihilation. Their work
shocks us into a realisation of the provisional nature of the de-militarised
life of peacetime. Their work brings us back into a consciousness of the all consuming
cold war threat. In this sense their work can be seen in the tradition of
vanitas, memento mori, the reminder of the proximity of death, the presence
of the skull in the dutch still life. Another major former airforce base located not far from Greenham,
is that at at Upper Heyford in Oxfordshire. The site had been maintained and
controlled by the American military from 1952 up until 1992 when the site was
returned to the British Ministry of Defence. It's future is now in debate. 3 It is currently managed by a consortium that has been assembled
by the property wing of the Ministry of Defence, Defence Lands Estates. To
this consortium the most lucrative use of the site is for new housing.
Initially the consortium argued for a new settlement of ten thousand new
houses. It seems likely that local planning restrictions will limit this
number to one thousand thus leaving the vast majority of the site with no
clearly established future use. |
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Gavin Finnan - on-site earthwork at RAF Upper Heyford Spring 1997 |
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The vast
expanses of runway, taxiways, and assorted hangar and bunker structures are
currently used, amongst other things, for storing Rover cars fresh off the
production line at Cowley Oxford, for a large mobile exhibitions company, and
for the storage of fireworks. However these uses are only permitted by the
council under temporary licence, generating enough income to maintain the
security of the site during it's transition period. The expected scenario is
that the majority of the land will be given over to productive agriculture or
forestry, erasing the military organisation of the landscape, and supplanting
it with a "traditional" eighteenth century field pattern. 4 At Upper Heyford the presence of the former military structures
in the landscape is tacitly assumed to be undesirable. The will to transform
the image of this semi-derilict landscape can be understood positively, but
the current landscape proposals feel like the equivalent of the
cotswold-style pastiche of the developer housing. It is the substitution of a
false image of landscape, an image which is itself hardly neutral, these
field structures having their roots in the eighteenth century
reterritorialisation of landscape implemented by the enclosures act. |
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