Pictures of You: Day 64 Tuesday 28th February 2012 The Commission (Tutorial-Research)

Tuesday 28th February 2012 The Commission (Tutorial) 10:00 with Steffi Klenz (SK)

Last night I printed out a blog and ensured my contact sheets were in my document case and ensured my blog was u to date regarding my progress regarding this project. Four members of team one attended (one being sick) and the session lasted about an hour and a half with each of us explaining our ideas and progression.

Steffi advised that I look at the following photographers/artists: Jane & Louise Wilson (Sealander)

Jane & Louise Wilson (Sealander) http://www.culture24.org.uk/art/photography%20%26%20film/art52708


Jane & Louise Wilson (Sealander) http://www.culture24.org.uk/art/photography%20%26%20film/art52708

My own images

Interestingly I have previously photographed bunkers myself in locations Jane & Louise Wilson and especially Paul Virilio have also shot.

Also I was advised to look at: Erasmus Schroter (who I have blogged via Edvardus informative research) This work is beautiful and architectural with artificial colour/lighting used to transform the subject matter.

http://stylemetothemoon.com/scapes/bunker-fascination/

Also Tacita Deans 'Spound Mirrors' project from 1999 http://www.mariangoodman.com/exhibitions/2000-02-22_tacita-dean/ This work is interesting but Sound Mirrors only exist on the south coast and thus fall outside the remit of the brief, also I am aware that they were covered by another student on the previous environment project, so I will continue to try to meet the location requirements of this latest brief in relation to my subject matter.

I've slso found the following research information interdependently(via this website http://culturalpolitics.dukejournals.org/content/7/1/79.full):

The defensive systems of fortified bunkers built during the twentieth century have become, especially since the end of the Cold War, objects of troubled fascination for artists, architects, and archaeologists. Images of bunkers proliferate in contemporary art and photography, and the heritage business has become increasingly interested in exploiting public curiosity towards the remains of recent conflict. This article positions current work about bunkers within the context of postwar debates surrounding modernist aesthetics – minimalism in art, brutalism in architecture – and the latent connection between modernist concerns regarding shape, form, and materials and military construction. Recent interest in bunkers is linked, it is argued, to the ongoing reappraisal of postwar modernist art and architecture and its relationship not only to the violence of World War Two but to the secrecy and passive aggression of the Cold War. As such, the bunker as a site of power in much of the work discussed is approached not merely as an historical artifact but as a deeply ambivalent structure that speaks to contemporary anxieties regarding the location and accountability of the systems of authority and control the bunker represents.

The bunker is both anomalous and ubiquitous in contemporary culture, the embodiment of contradictory implications that, as Jacques Austerlitz says, “betray the degree of our insecurity.” One of the most compelling contradictions that bunkers appear to articulate and which animates much of the cultural work about them is the sense that bunkers are at the same time necessary and useless. The solidity of the reinforced bunker invokes both the power of the weapons it is intended to repel and something of the folly of the attempt to seek any sort of shelter from them. As such, the bunker is both a sign of industrialized warfare and of there being no escape from it. The continuing fascination with Hitler's bunker has its source not only in the imagined thoroughness with which Nazi space was militarized, but in the fact that it ultimately offered no protection. The satisfaction in knowing that Hitler could not secret himself from Allied assault gives the lie to the bunker's promise of security but in doing so inadvertently also calls into question the usefulness of the bunker as defensive redoubt. Hitler himself had already demonstrated this by steering his invasion of France around the Maginot Line.

The bunker's redundancy as a mode of defense is seemingly confirmed by the remains of thousands of pillboxes, blockhouses, fallout shelters, flak towers, observation posts, gun turrets, command centers, and test sites that litter cities, coastlines, and landscapes from rural East Anglia to Kinmen Island in the Taiwan Strait. These are the ruins of the twentieth century, of ideologies, conflicts, and dreams of mastery through reinforced concrete. Yet the reassuring pastness of the ruin's conventional aesthetic function is not so easily achieved by the wrecked or abandoned bunker, which continues to shape and structure affective responses to the environment within which it squats.

This series of bunker images (in link below) were created by photographer Uta Kogelsberger (http://www.utakogelsberger.com/work/bunker/index.htm)

“Like beached whales the blockhouses in Uta Kögelsberger’s photographs appear washed up on the sand. Functionless, decaying, desolate, they are reabsorbed into the landscape.” Francesca Fuchs
http://www.photofusion.org/gallery/photography/exhibitions/past/archive/kogelsberger/kogelsberger.htm