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Online papers / Journal Articles
Paul Gough
Dead Lines: Codefied Drawing and Scopic
Vision in a Hostile Space
A version of this paper first appeared
in POINT, Journal
of CHEAD, winter '98 ISSN 1360-3477, pp 34-41
Abstract
The military have long used drawing as a navigational
and exploratory tool. From the early 18th century, British military
academies trained gentlemen cadets and sailors to analyse and record
landscape and coastline with the aim of neutralising and controlling
enemy space. This paper explores the tenets of scopic control and
its manifestation in the first global war of this century. Between
1915 and 1918 military sketching required avant-garde British painters
to adopt the systematic coding of surveillance with varying results.
The second half of the paper examines the antithesis of the analytic
drawn line, the silhouette or shadow which has become one the of
the familiar tropes of martial iconography.
From the OP (Observation Post) I saw a completely featureless
landscape, save here and there a few broken sticks of trees. I
made a pencil drawing of this barren
piece of ground, but what use my superiors would be able to make
of this sketch I could not imagine.(1)
Thus ended the Vorticist artist William Roberts first and only foray
into reconnaissance drawing. Few of the other young 'moderns' serving
in the armed forces during the Great War could subvert their artistic
tendencies in the pursuit of technical objectivity. The poet David
Jones, for example, having already been promoted sideways from 'Maps'
to 'Observers' was soon moved on 'because of my inefficiency in
getting the right degree of gun flashes'. (2)
Reconnaissance drawing (also known as Panorama or Field sketching)
required technical control, a common graphic language and a healthy
disregard for what the manuals termed 'artistic effect':
It may be premised that, from a military point
of view, it is not necessary to be an artist to produce a useful
panorama. Indeed, it is better almost that the artistic
sense should be absent, and that instead of idealising a landscape,
it should be looked at with a cold, matter-of-fact eye. Thus the
sketcher would note rather the
capabilities of the country for military purposes than its beauties
of colouring or the artistic effects of light and shade. (3)
i Neutral outline
The Field Sketch was the graphic trace of scopic control. In the
trenches of the Western Front the trained military draughtsman shared
something of the solitary fixation of the sniper: ceaselessly scrutinising
a fixed front, homing in on a hidden enemy and picking out (or off)
the target. Like sniping, the military sketch could be taught. Within
years of the establishment of the first military academy at Woolwich
in 1741, a drawing master had been appointed and the Gentlemen Cadets
set lessons in 'Sketching Ground, the taking of Views, the drawing
of Civil Architecture and the Practice of Perspective'. 4)
During the 18th and 19th centuries the military academies at Woolwich,
Dartmouth, and later Sandhurst and Marlowe attracted such high calibre
artists as Paul Sandby, David Cox and Alexander Cozens. John Constable,
though, rejected the offer of a post in 1802 remarking that had
he accepted 'it would have been a death blow
to all my prospects of perfection in the Art I love.'
(5) For all its remunerative
attraction military sketching was regarded with some disdain, a
process of 'tame delineation', of reducing the aesthetics of nature
to something ordinary or (to borrow Gainsborough's dismissive phrase)
something 'mappy'. For others, the task of 'breaking ground' and
issuing a neutral report was, like the very term 'military intelligence',
a contradiction in terms.
Drawing for military purposes has two distinct fields of vision:
information-drawings gathered during mobile reconnaissance (by peripatetic
patrol) and drawings made from static, elevated positions - customarily
the preserve of the artillery spotter. Where the patrol sketch is
often a collage of hasty impressions later re-arranged to form a
spatial narrative, the panorama is primarily concerned with scopic
control and spatial dominance. The artillery panorama works on the
same premise as military mapping; surveillance and graphic survey
will eventually neutralise a dangerous terrain and assure mastery
over it. (6)> Foucault
wrote of the system of permanent registration that operated in the
plague town in the 17th century. (7)
On the septic terrain of the First World War battlefield the panoramic
drawing was an integral part in segmenting and immobilising perceived
space. The stasis of the battle line, however, meant that the panoptic
ideal could never be attained: dead ground (space beyond or concealed
from retinal view) camouflage and concealment were constant frustrations
to retinal surveillance. Foucault's concept of a transparent space
was constantly frustrated by the fissured and volatile landscape
of the battlefield. The military sketch, though, provided the nearest
graphic proof of Bentham's paradigm: systematic observation
'in which the slightest movements are supervised, in which all events
are recorded' (8)
The battlefield was a malign industrialised space
where visibility was a 'trap'. The military sketch was the spring
in that mechanism. Jay Appleton, developing Konrad Lorenz's thesis
on the atavistic landscape, proposed a habitat theory which categorises
any landscape into hierarchies of 'prospect,
refuge and hazard'. (9)
The panoramic viewpoint is the paradigm of Appleton's system; military
drawing systematised the graphic language so that trees became datum
points and ridge lines became the immutable co-ordinates of a functional
terrain, a strategic field. Or as Henry Reed phrases it in this
poetic fragment 'Judging Distances' from Lessons of the War,
it is a domain where the temporal elides with the spatial:
Not only how far away; but the way that you
say it Is very important. Perhaps you may never get The knack
of judging a distance, but at least you know How to
report on a landscape : the central sector The right of the arc
and that, which we had last Tuesday And at least you know That
maps are of time, not place, so
far as the army Happens to be concerned - the reason being , Is
one which need not delay us. Again, you know There are three kinds
of tree, three only, the fir
and the poplar, And those which have bushy tops to ; and lastly
That things only seem to be things. (10)
Spatially, the artillery panorama has clear
areas of jurisdiction. The foreground is considered irrelevant.
To the gunner, the near is already controlled. The middle distance
and the horizon are the focal points. These, to borrow Appleton's
phrase, are the prospect-rich domains and the most coveted. Panorama
drawings are predicated on trajectories and barrage lines. The horizon
is the ultimate goal in that it holds the promise of further territory
for martial exploitation. During the First World War the horizon
took on special value when seen from the noisome mess of the front-line
trench. Secreted in their observation posts, gunners described the
green and unspoilt distance as 'The Promised Land' - perfect, but
forever locked in an unattainable future.
These concerns, as W.J.T. Mitchell has observed, are the essential
discourses of imperialism. Empires, according to him, move outward
in space 'as a way of moving outward in time, the "prospect" that
opens up is not just a spatial scene but a projected future of "development"
and exploitation.'(11)
The promise of control permeates every level of military drawing.
In contemporary drawing manuals the unmodulated pencil line is given
the authority of military language:
A line should be as sharp and precise as a
word of command. A wavering line which dies away carries no conviction
or information because it is the product of
a wavering mind. Every line should be put in to express something.
Start sharply and finish sharply. Press on the paper.(12)
Similarly, by ridding the page of ambiguity
or doubt the drawings aim to pre-ordain the future. This is also
true of the written word which uses the active and instructive tense
of military command - a language where the passive or conditional
does not function: 'Brigade will commence
at ..., Objectives shall be taken by ..., reinforcements will be
moved to ... etc'. (13)
Maps and charts drawn up before offensives bear a similar code;
barrage lines are clearly marked in minutes of advance, in June
1944 the objectives beyond the Normandy beachhead were marked out
in time - D Day plus one, plus two, etc - as well as in actual space.
Instruction manuals in military sketching equate clarity of line
with clarity of purpose. Ambiguity and doubt is (quite literally)
ruled out. The margins of failure (like the estimated casualties
rate) are clearly prescribed and then codified. Any blank, undrawn
areas of the paper is not intended to be read as negative space
but the area set aside for instructive wording. (14)
The panorama, though, could only make sense in a war where both
sides were predominantly static, where a battlescape was shared
but where the zones of control were clearly demarcated. The view
from the opposing emplacements might be radically different but
the contested ground was rationalised and systematised using to
a shared vocabulary of grid and line. In his analysis of the tourism
of war, Jean Louis Deotte, has argued that the beachline of Normandy
in 1944 constituted a common world, a shared objectivity for both
defender (cooped in a concrete pillbox) and attacker (exposed in
a tin landing craft). Both sets of adversaries experienced a 'reversibility
of the points of view' because 'enemies share in common the same
definition of space, the same geometric plane ... they belong to
the same world of techno-scientific confrontation, the substratum
of which, here, is sight'.(15)
ii Shadow and Silhouette Circa
1916, the fixed linearity of the trench war fractured into a myriad
of fragments. War in the air, under the sea, on every front, (including
the Home Front) the onset of globalised conflict, all bought about
an omnidirectional and multivalent trauma that, argues Stephen Kern,
was echoed in the canvases of the Cubists and in the relativism
of scientific theory. The 'proliferation of perspectives and the
break-up of a homogeneous three-dimensional space'(16)
also fractured the hegemony of the elevated eye and the supremacy
of scopic control that had lasted unchallenged since the extensive
panoramas of Ruisdael and de Koninck.
Poetic thought (as exemplified by Owen, Hulme, Read and other young
'Moderns') contended that the schism wrought by the war had to be
expressed in the language of apocalypse. One of the more familiar
tropes in this understanding was the sense of front-line as an edge,
a chasm beyond which lay madness and the void. The desolated landscape
was no more a vacant or negative space inhabited by solid, positive
forms, it was rather an 'emptiness crowded ... more full of emptiness,
an emptiness that is not really empty at all'.(17)
In a letters from the front, T.E. Hulme wrote how 'certain roads
lead as it were, up to an abyss.' (18)
and Wilfred Owen described in 'Spring Offensive'
the sensation of topping a crest until suddenly exposed 'chasmed
and steepened sheer to infinite space' (19)
Faced with the negative sublime, the dispassionate and neutral outline
was largely redundant. The tenets of panoramic drawing could not
encode the absurd ruination of the battleground. Front-line drawings
by Paul Nash and David Jones are dense with overlapping and confused
marks; in Jones' drawings the pictorial space is saturated with
a web of intermingling strokes, as if some graphic mist is engulfing
everything. In the war etchings of Otto Dix the very surface becomes
scabrous and infected, the ink bleeds uncontrolled from the drawn
and engraved line.
By contrast, the systematised and hygienic line of the military
sketch imposed a rural idyll onto the strategic field, in what is
essentially a re- presentation of the home landscape, or as Mitchell
describes it 'the "nature" of the imperial centre'. (20)
Thus, Foucault's transparent space becomes semi-opaque. The graphic
line cannot completely eradicate the irrational, mythical domain
of No-Man's-Land. What we find in its place is the shadow, a solid
facade of tone that became one of the leitmotifs in the iconography
of the First World War. It found a key part in the popular visual
culture becoming a staple element in the visual diction of poster
designers, front-line artists, official photographers and film-
makers.
As an art-form it owes its name to one Etienne de Silhouette, financier
to the profligate regime of Louis XIV, who had an unusual talent
for cutting small back profile portraits. His skill with scissors,
however, has outlasted his prowess with the public purse: he was
removed from office after advocating a punitive regime aimed at
saving France from bankruptcy. For some time after, the term a la
silhouette was used as a byword for meanness. The art form, though,
thrived in the 18th century providing a mass portraiture that was
cheap and elegant, which did not require hours of sittings and hid
unflattering features. During the Romantic period the silhouette
became a familiar pictorial device suggesting drama, heroism and
visual charge.
These characteristics were to influence its diverse use in the militarised
visual language of the Great War. It was first used in the great
recruitment campaign of 1914 and 1915. Posters of soldiers in unmodulated
black printed against a white background were bold, direct images
which did not have to specify badges of rank or regiment. The silhouette
was the Everyman. It also edited out demoralising or detracting
detail - a criticism that was often levelled at official war art
by such artists as Nevinson who refused to paint ordinary soldiers
as though they were 'castrated Lancelots'(21).
Furthermore, it needed no expensive colour printing or expensive
artwork, and the silhouette reproduced easily on the poorer quality
newsprint that was used for the mass poster campaigns and became
the norm for the newspapers of the later war years.
Although the silhouetted image was rooted in actualities - in that
it reproduced the 'worm's eye view' of the trench world - its widespread
use had a carefully contrived political message. The choice of the
drawing of a vigilant sentry, for example, was not accidental. The
image occurs regularly in the iconography of the Western Front for
obvious reasons : a soldier would only reveal himself over the crest
of a slope or above the parapet of a trench when he was convinced
that he had absolute control of the surrounding territory. To reveal
oneself in silhouette at any other time was to invite enemy fire.
The poster image is thus a carefully contrived declaration of the
authority of that soldier: he stands unchallenged and omnipotent,
in full control of the surrounding terrain, owning, as Foucault
would argue, the 'imperial gaze'.
Although graphically different, the silhouette drawing and the 'unwavering
line' of the military panorama are two manifestations of scopic
control. They both eschew ambiguity, they promise control and authority,
mastery is vested in the boldness of the graphic (out)line and the
tonal mass. As drawings, they were also readily achieved by the
amateur hand or semi-skilled hand, an important aspect of their
widespread dissemination in this period.
The impact of the silhouette has been reduced by its endless reproduction
in the popular imagery of militaria and its unthinking use by film
and art directors. (22)
It most truly belongs to the static conditions of the Western Front
because it is essentially a one- dimensional form. In so being,
it belongs (almost exclusively) to that fixed world of the coveted
horizon. As so many artists and writers observed, the sclerotic
conditions of the trench world led to the belief that beyond the
close horizon of the enemy trench lay nothing. At that edge all
three-dimensional forms - soldiers, trees, buildings, guns - were
abruptly flattened not into two-dimensions but to form stripped
of all texture and feature, that might only be expressed in a single
dimension. The silhouette becomes the icon of that edge, and today
some of the most imposing and powerful silhouette-facades are formed
by the giant archways, obelisks and towers that litter the commemorative
landscape in Flanders.
As a drawn, circumscribed form, the silhouette might be better regarded
as negative space, a shadow rather than solid. This is the dark
space, explored by Anthony Vidler in his consideration of the architecture
of death and burial: 'Th(e])prone figure
was then raised up, so to speak, in order to mark the facade of
[the] temple, now become an image of a specter: a monument to death
that represented an ambiguous moment, somewhere between life and
death, or, rather, a shadow of the living dead.'
(23) Notes
1
William Roberts (1974) 4.5 Howitzer Gunner RFA:The War to end all
wars, Canada Press, pp. 27 -28.
2 David Jones, in Rene Hague (ed)
1980, Dai Greatcoat, London, Faber.
3 General Staff, War Office (1914)
Manual of Map Reading and Field, H.M.S.O., London.
4 Lt.Col. H.D.Buchanan RA (1892)
'Rules and Orders 1792' cited in Records of the Royal Military Academy
1741-1892, Cattermole, Woolwich, p.33.
5 John Constable to John Dunthorne,
29th May 1802. For a full account of Paul Sandby's tenure at Woolwich
see Martin Hardie, (1966) Watercolour Painting in Britain, Vol.1,
The Eighteenth Century, Batsford, London, pp 216 - 222. For an analysis
of marine cartography and coastline drawing see Lucian de Lima Martins
(1999) 'Navigating in Tropical Waters' in Dennis Cosgrove (1999)
Mappings, London, Reaktion.
6 See Mapping the Landscape:Essays
on Art and Cartography (1990) eds. Nicholas Alfrey and Stephen
Daniels, Nottingham, Nottingham Castle Museum.
7 Michel Foucault (1975) Discipline
and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, Paris, Editions Gallimard,
English translation, Allen Lane 1977
8 ibid, p. 197.
9 Jay Appleton (1975) The Experience
of Landscape, Wiley, London.
10 Henry Reed, Part II.' Judging
Distances' from 'Lessons of the War'.
11 W.J.T.Mitchell (1994) 'Imperial
Landscape' in Landscape and Power, University of Chicago Press,
p16-17.
12 William G Newton (1916) Military
Landscape and Target Indication, London, Hugh Rees, p. 27.
13
John Keegan (1976) The Face of Battle, London, Penguin, p.266.
14
For a full account of the history and current uses of field sketching
see P. Gough (1995) 'Tales from the Bushy-topped Tree: a brief survey
of military sketching' in Imperial War Museum Review, No.10, pp
62-74.
15 Diller and Scofidio (1994)
Tourism of War, FRAC Basse Normandie/Univ.of Princeton Press, pp.116-177.
16 Stephern Kern (1983) On the
Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918, London, Weidenfeld & Nicholson,
p.147.
17 Reginald Farrer (1918) Void
of War, London, Constable, p.55.
18 T.E.Hulme in Sam Hynes (1955)
Further Speculations University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis,
p.164
19 Wilfred Owen, Spring Offensive.
20 Mitchell (1994) op.cit., p.17.
21 C.W.R. Nevinson to C.F. Masterman,
25 Nov. 1917, Imperial War Museum, Dept of Art, Nevinson file.
22 For a fuller account see Paul
Gough (1995) "The Silhouette as Icon of the Western Front", Journal
of the Western Front Association No.43, April 1995, pp 28 - 31.
23 Anthony Vidler (1991) The Architectural
Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely, MIT Press.
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