Future of War conf., reviewed by Tom Vanderbilt

Pretty intriguing stuff…

marc


> hey all -
> this just in:
> ————
>
> War as Architecture
> by Tom Vanderbilt
>
> [published summer 2003 in The Knowledge Circuit, Design
> Institute, University of Minnesota]
>
> http://design.umn.edu/go/knowledgeCircuit/smr03.1.vanderbilt
>
> NEW YORK, NY. War, as the old Clausewitzian saw goes, is the extension of
> politics by other means. As we have been reminded in recent months, there
> may be cause for a new dictum: War is the extension of architecture by
> other means.
>
> Apart from the obvious architectural connotations of war the need for
> defensive shelter, the status of architecture as a target there is a
> breadth of associative meaning between the two enterprises: both are about
> the exercise of control over a territory; both involve strategic
> considerations of the most apt site-specific solutions; both involve the
> use of symbol, rhetoric, and cultural context.
>
> In the Iraq campaign, the architectural connotations were legion, from the
> New York Times Op-Ed writer who commented upon the fact that the
> Hausmannian avenues and relatively low, dispersed skyline of Baghdad boded
> well for its military penetration; to the surgical extraction of
> architectural assets, shown in remarkable overhead clarity by the
> satellite imagery of Evans and Sutherland, looking like the aerial mosaics
> employed by urban planners (in fact, aerial warfare and urban planning
> have long shared an eerie confluence of language and tactics, and even
> practioners, as in the Air Forces Curtis LeMay, who studied urban planning
> before overseeing the devastating aerial campaign on Japan); to the mere
> fact that the rebuilding of Iraq will cost far more than its invasion.
> More than a war of destruction, this is a war of construction. The terrain
> itself was filled with three-dimensional militarism; an absolutist regime
> produces absolutist architecture, after all, and nowhere was that better
> signified than in Saddam Husseins crossed swords monument, fashioned from
> the melted metal of Iraqi weaponry, festooned with myriad helmets (some
> even functioned as speed bumps) taken from some of the one million
> soldiers who died in the Iran-Iraq war. Architecture, or a gesture of war
> itself?
>
> Architecture, like war, is never entirely one thing, but a condition,
> occasioned by culture and history, mediated by time and opinion. As Wayne
> Ashley, curator of Thundergulch (the new media initiative of the Lower
> Manhattan Cultural Council) and organizer of "The Future of War," said in
> leading off the event, buildings can be seen as secure environments, but
> also as objects to be destroyed. Is that really a hospital, or a weapons
> cache? Is that an office building, or a symbol of imperialist domination?
> As participants were to reiterate in different ways, architecture can be
> the object of terrorism, or it can be terrorism: Mohammed Atta was a
> student of urban planning; and as cultural theorist Benjamin Bratton
> pointed out, a member of the "Black September" team of terrorists at the
> 1976 Munich Olympics was an architect who had worked on the complex they
> occupied. War can be erased by terrorism or in some strange way
> constructed by terrorism; who knew anything about the unremarkable Alfred
> P. Murrah building before "Oklahoma City" as the event itself has come to
> be known? The entire city has been collapsed by the metaphoric weight of
> the bombing, turning the building into a shrine, more visited than any
> architectural landmark known for its aesthetic merits.
>
> One might reduce war to violence and art to aesthetics, but it is more
> useful, albeit more unsettling, to explore what happens when one removes
> those perceived oppositions. This was one of the underlying themes of the
> "Future of War" conference, to "challenge comfortable categories" as
> moderator Helen Nissenbaum phrased it at the outset of the opening panel,
> "The Aesthetics and Politics of Technologized Warfare." While the first
> presenter, the artist Joy Garnett, spoke while behind her on the screen
> flashed images of her paintings drawn from the haunting imagery of the
> military complex, stark images of contrails streaking through a night sky
> ("Tracer Fire") or stealth bombers in patterned flight. Her paintings,
> which seek to use a more primal medium to wrest meaning out of an image
> saturated environment, evoked from one audience member a comparison to the
> recent use of "satellite phones" by embedded correspondents in Iraq. Did
> the shaky, pixellated images, with literal and figurative gaps in their
> composition, obscure the "reality" of what was happening or did their
> low-tech immediacy actually enhance the realism? We needed a McLuhan was
> the satphone a "hot" or "cool" medium?
>
> Imagery is another condition shared by war and architecture: just as most
> of us do not experience war, we often do not experience architecture;
> rather, we "know" a building (through its repeated transmission) via
> photography. But images do not just happen, they are created, and for a
> reason. Many of Garnett's paintings were drawn from weapons effects
> testing in the Nevada desert in the 1950s. The hundreds of thousands of
> images (still and moving) generated by this activity were, largely,
> classified for many decades. These were "images as dangerous as the
> isotopes that produced them," she noted. Images as toxic waste, to be
> buried beneath the sand. Inherent in her work is a questioning of the
> "effects" of classifying these "effects tests." What happens when imagery
> is removed, left in the dark for decades? What happens when it is returned
> to the light? Scratchy footage of atomic tests from the Nevada deserts, as
> men in goggles look on, functions nowadays more as historical kitsch than
> pure horror. It has been sanitized by time, rendered as a strictly
> historical document. "Declassification" speaks to their political and
> aesthetic impotence. Of course, the weapons tests were hardly secret
> people gathered on predawn Las Vegas rooftops to view them. They saw in
> the blasts (they never saw the "effects") something else: perhaps a
> sublime beauty, felt perhaps an awed speechless and frightened reverence
> towards man's ability for self-destruction.
>
> Tom Keenan, director of the Human Rights project at Bard College,
> presented a countervailing narrative of sorts: He wanted to explore what
> he calls "the paradoxes of openness." In other words, contrary to the idea
> that war is a secret activity whose violence occurs off camera, away from
> the public eye, and contrary to the notion that it could thus be fought
> against if people only knew what was going on "mobilizing shame" in the
> words of human rights groups Keenan argued that there is "nothing in art
> that resists violence." Images and exposure do not necessarily stop war
> in fact they may even "lead the charge," according to Keenan. He screened
> footage from the Kosovo campaign that showed Serbian troops looting
> villages near Pristina. They did not seem to be taking much, the BBC
> correspondent noted, they merely seemed to be putting on a symbolic
> display. The fatal moment came when one militia member, Kalishnakov rifle
> in hand, waved to the cameras. The casualness of the gesture was
> disturbing: They were not afraid of their violence being exposed, indeed
> they seemed to welcome it. Keenan followed with another example, this time
> the humanitarian intervention of U.S. troops in Somalia. He used the
> example of the first Marine landing, a supposedly secret, "tactical"
> approach that came ashore to a cavalcade of some 600 journalists, in full
> klieg light, drawn like moths to the flame. As one Marine commander
> worried about the presence of the press, a journalist chided back: "Like
> you didn't know we were going to be here." The military, the media, both
> were joint players in a performance, each feeling a bit awkward in the
> role. Later, when an audience member decried the corporate ownership of
> the U.S. media and the shortage of available imagery and information from
> Iraq, Keenan begged to differ, noting the abundance of information sources
> made possible by the internet and other outlets. The question was not, as
> he put it, what the media was doing about the war, it was what we were
> doing about it.
>
> Art has been intricately intertwined with war at least since the days of
> Leonardo da Vinci, whose drawings of siege engines and other commissions
> for the Borgias rival anything in his corpus in terms of technique and
> mastery. Those drawings, which in some cases presented fantastic new
> visions of what war could be, are echoed in the simulation programs the
> military now uses, created by partnerships involving the film and computer
> programming industries. Art can even be used in the conduct of war e.g.,
> it was recently revealed by a Spanish historian that a group of anarchists
> in Spain during the Civil War had employed specially designed cells,
> outfitted with surrealist decor inspired by Dali and Bunuel, for what they
> called "psychotechnic" torture; as El Pais described, "The avant garde
> forms of the moment surrealism and geometric abstraction were thus used
> for the aim of committing psychological torture."
>
> So too can architecture become a weapon, as revealed in a fascinating
> presentation (part of a panel entitled "Architecture, Violence, and Social
> (In)Security") by Eyal Weizman, a Tel Aviv-based architect. Weizman,
> detailing the spread of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, noted their
> "panopticon" like arrangement over neighboring Palestinian villages
> (usually at a lower elevation) as well as their linkage, in certain cases,
> by infrastructural devices (roads, tunnels) that bypass intervening zones
> of Palestinian autonomy. Thus the Israeli superhighway soars over
> Palestinian farmland, creating, as Weizman put it, "sovereignty in three
> dimensions." The landscape as a whole, as he put it, is "in effect an
> artificial arrangement of a totally synthetic environment, as designed as
> any built environment, within which all 'natural' elements like streams
> and mountains, forest orchards, rocks and ruins function not as the things
> being fought for but as the very weapons of the conflict."
>
> Weizman surveyed the architectural history of West Bank settlement, from
> the frontier like "tower and stockade" outposts of the 1930s, in which
> walled compounds were connected visually by tower reconnaissance and Morse
> Code; to the energetic campaign to colonize the mountaintops (so often
> containing the historical sites where Zionists hoped to return) in 1967.
> As Weizman noted, as there was little experience of building in the
> mountains, the "battle for the hilltops" began with an intensive aerial
> photography project; the West Bank became "the most photographed terrain
> in the world," to the topographic groundwork for occupation and
> cultivation. His photos of settlements were haunting, capturing such
> bizarre imagery as the trompe l'oeil paintings of an idealized rural scene
> on a looming wall dividing Israelis from Palestinians. His images of
> stucco-and-tiled houses surrounded by walls and deserts eerily replicated
> Las Vegas suburbia (the American gated community represents a similar, if
> less overtly political, securitization of space). For Weizman, the
> land-use patterns characterized by vast walls, barricades, even the
> planting of pine trees to forestall the planting of olive groves (by
> Palestinians) amount to a military action, and he says architects should
> be prosecuted for war crimes. Weizman did not disagree when an audience
> member compared the settlements (a "postmodern diaspora," he called it, ad
> hoc nation-building) to some new version of the shtetl, the Jewish ghetto
> so ruthlessly and architecturally demarcated by the Nazis. The "two-state
> solution," Weizman conclude, "is a design solution that doesn't work."
>
> During the weeks of war coverage, it became typical to see a military
> analyst or general standing before an aerial photograph of Baghdad,
> pointer in hand, cataloging the damage done to a ministry building while
> its neighbors, in most cases, appeared remarkably intact (Michael Sorkin
> recently referred to this as a "good building/bad building" dichotomy)no
> indication of casualties, no "on the ground" perspective. And yet how
> often have we seen this same presentation by architects and planners, this
> Olympian perspective of spatial rearrangement in which humans are absent
> or simply a statistical "user mix"? Listening to a number of
> presentations, it soon occurred to me, as I grew lost in the fog of
> architectural discourse, that much of what passes for the language of
> architecture icy, jargon-laden, bolstered by a reliance on dehumanized,
> abstract "spatial production" and other clinical terms bears a certain
> resemblance to the language of modern military planning, with its
> "battlespace," "kill boxes," "network-centric warfighting operations," and
> the deck of cards depicting high ranking Iraquis as characters.
>
> What both of these languages, and both of these practices which both
> involve the physical manipulation of human relations neglect is the human
> equation, the people who live and die in these theorized constructs. When
> Bratton discussed the suicide bomber as the proponent of a
> "counter-habitation" of space, the act of bombing a "suspension of the
> premise of habitation itself," or when he described the World Trade Center
> attack as a form of architectural criticism, he was, beyond offering an
> implicit condonement, resorting to the spatial, strategic primacy of
> military thinking itself (suicide bombing victims would thus be
> "collateral damage" to act of counter-habitation), wherein there are no
> crimes, no victims. Bratton's formulation was of a symbolic piece with
> that influential Naval War College thesis, which bore the infamous title
> "Shock and Awe," with the lesser known subtitle, "Achieving Rapid
> Dominance." That document, which seeks the immediate control of the
> "operational environment," articulates its mantra thus: "The goal of Rapid
> Dominance will be to destroy or so confound the will to resist that an
> adversary will have no alternative except to accept our strategic aims and
> military objectives."
>
> Neither war nor architecture are immune from the violence of language.
>
> +++
>
> "The Future of War: Aesthetics, Politics, Technologies" took place at The
> New School, New York, NY, USA, May 2-3, 2003 and was organized by the
> Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's new media initiative, Thundergulch.
>
> Tom Vanderbilt is a Brooklyn-based writer and the author of Survival City:
> Adventures Among the Ruins of Atomic America (Princeton Architectural
> Press, 2002.) http://www.papress.com/bookpage.tpl?isbn68983050
>
>
>
>
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>
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