constructing beyond use

CONSTRUCTING BEYOND USE - Memory and Threat in Post-military space

(published in AA files 42 spring 2001)

Author: PETER BEARD

The concept of military space as something which has specific boundaries and territories is one that shifts drastically according to cycles of international and regional politics. Yet there is a level at which, under certain conditions all space (all place) becomes militarized. Take for example the transformation of a city at a time when the inhabitation and daily life of that city changes materially as a result of perceived threat or actual acts of violence. Alternatively one might examine the case of Britain in the late 1970s, when a collective sense of the proximity of nuclear annihilation charged a psychological space and permeated an entire generation's sense of situation in the world. A work by the artist Cornelia Parker entitled 'Embryo Firearms' (1995) consists of two Colt 45 blanks. Guns in their earliest stage of production, 'proto-guns' which are recognisably gun shaped but have none of the articulation or mechanisms which would allow them to operate as viable weapons. Her work speaks of a kind of muzzled violence, the capacity for base material to become an instrument of violence, and yet to retain a distance from actual violence. Violence is the potential, yet the material is passive. This is precisely the sense of the abandoned military artifact, be it bunker, runway, or empty operations room, spaces that are passive at an immediate level, yet filled with a remote threat of violence.

Jane and Louise Wilson's 'Gamma', a video installation piece dating from 1999 took the former airforce base at Greenham Common as it's subject. 1 Greenham, the location of the largest anti-nuclear peace demonstrations of the 1970s and 1980s, has a history marked by fence cutting and creative vandalism perpetrated by the women campaigners camped on the borders of the base. 2

Jane and Louise Wilson - Still from 'Gamma', video installation shown at the Serpentine Gallery London 1999

A large part of the Wilson sisters work is set in the underground control rooms of the base. The technology of construction and servicing of these spaces represents a huge investment. With no natural light, these spaces are an empty darkness, wired up for a war which is represented by coloured lights and wax crayon markings on perspex sheets. This is the nerve centre, the place of command and control. The ultimate war would be fought anonymously from the perceived impregnability of these underground chambers. Which buttons would be pressed when? And by whom? This is technological war, where technology controls strike and counterstrike whilst reinforcing the protective dimension of the bunker where the controllers are remote from the scene of violence. These spaces represent an extreme condition of isolation and reveal a heavy reliance on technology in the perception and mediation of events in the outside world. It is impossible to comprehend properly the extent or scale of these underground spaces either from within or without, but this darkness is the physical manifestation and now the memory of the cold war.