Urban Camouflage
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A soldier stands guard on a canal crossing in St Petersburg, clad in a Russian Military Fleck Tarn, curiously at one with the iron railings. (Jacky Bowring, June 2007)
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HMS Belfast stands guard in the Thames, clad in Admiralty Disruptive Camouflage, curiously at one with the pale blue ironwork of Tower Bridge beyond. (Jacky Bowring, June 2007)
As a shift from the often brightly colored uniforms worn by the military, naturalistic camouflage patterns were developed early in the twentieth century, and became widely used in both World Wars. Artists such as Franz Marc, Arshile Gorky, László Moholy-Nagy and Ellsworth Kelly were enlisted amongst the ‘camoufleurs', artists, designers and architects, who developed the various "disruptive pattern" schemes used in battledress and for military equipment.
British artist Norman Wilkinson developed the unlikely "dazzle" camouflage to be used at sea, creating a series of patterns based on Cubist principles. Rather than attempting to disguise the ship by means of blending in, the dazzle approach breaks up the surface through the use of line and colour, accepting that within the constantly changing conditions of sea and sky, to attempt a perfect colour match was not possible. Instead, patches of bright or contrasting colours and lines were used to counter the actual shape and size of the craft, for example taking a dark colour around the bow, from port to starboard, to create a sense of ambiguity about the length of the ship. While the ships were made to appear quite visible in an absolute sense, they were deceptive in terms of their form and scale, and speed and direction, and thus the dazzle scheme underscores the paradoxical relationships between self and other that underlie any philosophy of camouflage.
Bernard Lassus echoes these observations on the apparent incongruity of camouflage. Recalling a 1969 stroll along a quay in Stockholm, the French landscape architect tells how he was, "suddenly pulled up short. Emerging from the vegetable mass of building sections I thought I saw in the distance, on the port's horizon, there materialized before me the shape of a long and powerful warship. It had remained hidden thanks to its camouflage. Until then I had thought that camouflage was reserved for the land army. But here the pattern of a paratrooper's battledress, mainly green but also strewn with maroon and streaked with some black, represented a design that had grown to envelop the whole of the boat."[1]
Roger Caillois destabilized the benign reading of mimicry, presenting a psychoanalytical examination where the dialogue between self and environment is called into question. Caillois drew attention to the lack of a rational connection between camouflage and survival, and as Dawn Ades explained, both Caillois and fellow camouflage essayist, Jacques Delamain, “challenge any neat division between scientific classification of natural phenomena and poetic metaphors found in nature.”[2] Caillois pointed out that the adaptation hypothesis of camouflage is flawed in numerous ways. For example, insects which are unpalatable anyway are still camouflaged, as are insects which are hunted by smell, which makes any efforts at visual disguise redundant. Some insects are so well-camouflaged that they are pruned by gardeners, or the “even sadder” case of the Phyllia, who “browse among themselves, taking each other for real leaves…”[3] or, cannot find each other when it comes time to mate. The enigma of disguise as display is evident in the Oxyrrhyncha, or spider crabs, who “haphazardly gather and collect on their shells the seaweed and polyps of the milieu in which they live … deck[ing] themselves in whatever is offered to them, including some of the most conspicuous elements…”
Both photographs above exhibit a type of surrealistic unease, connecting to a potent legacy of art, psychoanalysis and formalism that connect the self and camouflage in much more profound and unsettling ways. Caillois had a contentious relationship with surrealism, and was largely marginalised from the mainstream movement of art and literature, yet his influence and connections permeate thinking on the uncanny in many ways. Rosalind Krauss retrospectively applies his approach to Man Ray’s photographs which predate Caillois’s writings by a decade, and in her analysis of Return to Reason (1923) she describes how the “nude torso of a woman is shown as if submitting to possession by space.”[4] Man Ray’s explorations of the dissolution of the body into space were subsequently echoed in René Magritte’s paintings, such as Discovery (1927), where the shadows cast on the nude form are transfigured into patches of wood grain veneer. These images from Man Ray and Magritte evoke ideas of camouflage through the surface patterning of the female form, the sense of what happens when an “object fuses with an another object.”
[1] Bernard Lassus, The Landscape Approach. (Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press,1998), 24
[2] Dawn Ades, “Photography and the Surrealist Text.” In Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingstone, L’Amour fou: Photography and Surrealism. (London: The Arts Council of Great Britain, 1985), 187
[3] Roger Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia.” Trans. John Shepley. In Annette Michelson, Rosalind Krauss, Douglas Crimp and Joan Copjec, October: The First Decade. ( Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press,1987. Original essay published 1935, this translation in October 31, 1984, 16-32), 67.
[4] Rosalind Krauss, Corpus Delicti. In Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingstone, L’Amour fou: Photography and Surrealism. (London: The Arts Council of Great Britain, 1985), 74.
[5] René Magritte cited in Jacques Meuris, René Magritte: 1898-1967. (Köln: Taschen, 2004), 51.
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