Performing Ground

Space, Camouflage and the Art of Blending In

L. Levin

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137274250
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Performing Ground explores camouflage as a performance practice, arguing that the act of blending into one's environment is central to the ways we negotiate our identities through space. The book offers a critically rich investigation of how the performative practice of camouflage renders the politics of space, power, and gender (in)visible.

1

World Pictures

On 11 March 2003, just days before the United States invaded Iraq, an issue of The Times Online carried an article entitled, ‘Movie Men Add Special Effects to Media War.’ In it, David Charter reported that the Pentagon had recruited Hollywood set designer George Allison to give the military a spectacular public relations Makeover. Having just completed his work on MGM’s It Runs in the Family, starring Michael and Kirk Douglas, Allison was whisked off to the US Central Command base (CENTCOM) on the outskirts of Doha, Qatar, to oversee plans for another show: the construction of a $200,000 media environment within a converted storage hangar to be used for daily military briefings (Figure 1.1). The final set, built in Chicago and shipped to Qatar via FedEx, featured ‘two podiums at the front of a stage adorned with five 50 in plasma screens and two 70 in television projection screens.’¹ Calling to mind sets that Allison has created for TV game shows and news networks, the high-tech environment would allow commanders to show diagrams, maps, and videos of combat, and to deliver that information as super-sized spectacle. The war would be imaged through multiple screens, from multiple angles, and with careful attention to cinematography. To anchor this maze of screens, Allison added one final touch: a soft-focus, borderless map of the world extending like wallpaper across an upstage flat.

Why was Allison’s set of such tremendous value to the American government and its performance on the international stage? The extravagance of the CENTCOM media center clearly exceeded the average briefing room’s mandate to provide folding chairs pointed at a talking head. The real value of this environment lay in its ability to project a specific image of American identity at a specific historical moment, to make the United States look well-informed, professional, and morally correct in the face of escalating global criticism. And who better to prop up the illusion of self-sufficiency and military might than a scenic designer who cut his teeth working on glitzy TV shows and for magicians like David Blaine?

Figure 1.1 Commander of the Coalition Forces US General Tommy Franks addresses the media in the press center at Camp As Sayliyah outside Doha, Qatar, 22 March 2003. Franks was joined by representatives of the coalition forces. Pictured from left are: Rear Adm. Per Tidemand of Denmark, Air Marshall B. K. Burridge of the United Kingdom, Franks, Brigadier Maurie McNarn of Australia, and Lt. Col. Jan Blom of the Netherlands. Photo by Reuters/Tim Aubry, © Reuters/Corbis

Here, a particular view of national identity derives its meaning and force through the performance of official bodies in front of a hyper-managed backdrop, and in relation to several mediatized world pictures. A national ‘Us’ is set against an amorphous ‘Them’ when American bodies pose before high-tech maps, photos, and videos of the Middle East presented on state-of-the-art plasma screens. Designed to intimidate, these screens connect imaging technologies to the more immediately violent technologies of war at the United States’ disposal. As Charter notes, they are designed to send a message ‘that American technology is second to none and far outclasses anything possessed by the Iraqis, who [would] be watching the briefings on the Arab broadcaster al-Jazeera.’ In Allison’s own words: ‘This is about bringing the level of technology up from the flipchart to the modern age. It is trying to send a clear message about the technology and our use of it.’² Ironically, while this display tries to assure viewers that the US mission is based on sound intelligence about ‘weapons of mass destruction’ in Iraq, America’s hyper-performance of technological prowess continually points to its opponent’s technological deficiencies, thereby, quite accidentally, hinting at the illusory nature of its own WMD claims.³ Perhaps in an effort to draw the viewer’s attention away from this illusion, photographs of the set itself – outside the context of military briefings – were strictly banned.

This mise-en-scène – specifically the borderless world map on the upstage wall – also illustrates that the world is united with the United States in fighting the War on Terror, a message that, it would seem, contradicts the story of national singularity that is told by the super-sized set. Of course, in this staging of alliance, it would be more accurate to say that the world stands behind the United States rather than with it: the world is presented as a muted backdrop, in muted colors, behind an American commander who speaks at center stage. The backdrop confers upon America the status of ‘leader,’ a position that is not located in the world but rather outside and in front of it, mirroring the United States’ self-placement in the logo designed to represent ‘Operation Enduring Freedom Coalition.’⁴ In the logo, the world is mapped as a patchwork of flags in the shape of a flying eagle. In familiar Cartesian fashion, the United States is presented as the head and the rest of the world as its body. Not only does America steer and think for the rest of the world, but it also controls the beak so that it can speak for its allies.

This disquieting orientation was frequently reinforced in the CENTCOM environment by the theatrical positioning of military bodies within it. One of the best examples can be found at the press conference of 22 March 2003 when army officers from four countries (Great Britain, Australia, Denmark, and the Netherlands), donning a variety of camouflage patterns, were invited to pose behind General Tommy Franks to signal the support of coalition forces (see Figure 1.1). On the one hand, the appearance of camouflage, in this context, signifies the power of those who can see without being seen, those who have the privilege of surveying and exerting their will upon their enemies without themselves being located. That failure to be located, and dissolution of individual identity, also potentially absolves the individual of responsibility for what happens on the battlefield. Taken together as a visual unit, the display of similar but nationally distinct camouflage suggests yet another picture of ‘world,’ conveying a sense of collective international military power. At the same time, the uniformity of the camouflage costumes gives the viewer the sense of nations melding into one another. The camouflaged soldiers function as a kind of undifferentiated ‘human wallpaper’⁵ for the non-military viewer, the same kind of background supplied by the borderless world map. Interestingly, the erasure of national difference – the camouflaging of difference through military camouflage – became instantly legible the moment the photo hit the press, signaling the failure of this visual strategy. Members of the Dutch public were incensed by the incongruous appearance of the Dutch officer in the photo because the Netherlands, at that time, had offered only ‘political but no military support’⁶ and had not committed soldiers to operations in Iraq. This raised questions, for many, about the clandestine actions of the Dutch military and, more broadly, about the fictions produced by American media spin, specifically the politics of staging a unified front at a time when intense national debates were raging within ‘coalition’ countries about getting involved in the war.

The idea of camouflage is at the heart of the CENTCOM stage, from the tactical use of military garb to the performance of hyper-masculinity as defensive masquerade, from the oscillation of visibility and invisibility to the disguising of hidden agendas and bogus intelligence. The fact that the military actors in the CENTCOM briefings fail to disappear in Allison’s environment, as they might in the Iraqi desert, is beside the point. They blend into their background not by becoming invisible, but precisely through manipulating the terms of their visibility in space. By strategically positioning themselves (or allowing themselves to be positioned) within Allison’s carefully designed war room, and by using their bodies to comprise a particular image of ‘world,’ these performers are the consummate camoufleurs. They do not disappear into a desert tableau, but they fit perfectly within the picture imagined and projected by their American scenographers.

The 22 March 2003 photo provides insights on camouflage, the focus of this book, as it evokes a range of camouflage strategies and points to a much broader way of understanding this term. Camouflage is often used in science to define the visual or formal adaptation of organisms to their environments. However, it can also describe the problem of self-placement that is here displayed by military actors – a problem which is also intrinsic to performance. Camouflage contains within it an understanding of the ways that identities are negotiated in and through space – how we attempt to fit in, identify with, and position ourselves in relation to an environment. Understood as an explicitly spatial form of self-representation, camouflage suggests much more than disappearing as a form of self-protection (as in military camouflage). Rather, camouflage is a visual and physical negotiation with one’s environment; it is how individuals transform their appearance – much like animals and insects – as a means of locating themselves within a larger environment or picture. As design theorist Neil Leach explains, ‘Camouflage does not entail the cloaking of the self so much as the relating of the self to the world through the medium of representation.’⁷ This need not involve the total disappearance of a body into a space or precise mirroring of surroundings. Instead, it implies a process of performative correspondence: embedding oneself, or becoming embedded, in the surrounding environment through the physical and visual stylization of the body.

Becoming picture

The study of camouflage has a long history, weaving its way through fields like zoology, biology, military history, and visual studies. In Art and Camouflage (1981), art historian Roy R. Behrens helped define the field of inquiry by offering a cultural history of this phenomenon. Camouflage, Behrens argues, ‘comes from the French verb camoufler, meaning to mask or disguise,’ and ‘camoufler came from camouflet, the noun for a manner of snubbing – blowing smoke in someone’s nose and by extension obscuring his features.’⁸ This word, however, took on a much broader range of associations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, first via its deployment by the military – camouflage as concealment in war. Soon after, the term acquired a number of ‘figurative, non-military connotations.’⁹ During this period in Europe, Behrens points out, ‘one finds reference to a “camouflaged autocracy,” to eggs “camouflaged” in a scramble, and even to a telephone as “camouflaged” by its design.’¹⁰ Behrens deftly explores historical developments that have shaped our understanding of camouflage as an ‘art’ of concealment: American artist Abbott H. Thayer’s research on optics and the protective coloration of animals; the role of artists as ‘camoufleurs’ during World War I and II – as designers of camouflage for military clothing and navy ships (a practice called ‘dazzle painting’); the influence of disruptive and geometric patterning in modernist art (cubism, in particular); and the subsequent absorption of camouflage designs into fashion and pop culture. The history of camouflage as an art form has almost exclusively been taken up by art historians, with notable exceptions such as a fascinating dissertation written by set designer Ronald Arthur Naversen (1989), which outlines the contributions of theatre scenographers to wartime camouflage, and Sara Brady’s (2012) more recent and timely discussion of the performative use of camouflage uniforms in post-9/11 military protests.¹¹

Over the past decade, there has been a surge of interest in camouflage. This fascination is evident in scholarly work (Leach’s book on camouflage as architectural philosophy), the popular press (attractive coffee table books on camouflage patterns in art and war), and the international art world (the focus of dozens of exhibitions at art, natural history, and military history museums).¹² Aside from tracking a pop culture fad that has captured the attention of music artists like Madonna and Beyoncé Knowles, and fashion designers like John Galliano, Tommy Hilfiger, and Anna Sui,¹³ the recent fascination with this topic responds more generally to growing concerns about the relationship of humans to their environments in an age where ideas of human self-sufficiency and mastery fail in the face of larger cultural, ecological, and global systems. Also contributing to this recent attention are our daily encounters with images of war facilitated by print, televised, and online media. These images repeatedly bring camouflage-clad soldiers into public view and spark debates about what it means for military and journalist bodies to ‘embed’ themselves in foreign spaces.¹⁴

Drawing together the complex strands of this developing interdisciplinary conversation, this book makes an argument for reading camouflage as a performance strategy, as a theoretical frame for analyzing contemporary performance practices and the performance of self in everyday life. Building on influential works about space and subjectivity in philosophy and visual theory, I illustrate how humans routinely establish their identities through a complex process of morphological and environmental mimicry, a process wherein the visual markers of identity are transformed in response to the forms found in their settings. The lens of performance makes camouflage a more versatile concept, enabling scholars to move beyond a purely scientific reading of camouflage as biological instinct as well as the tendency, particularly within the visual arts, to treat camouflage as a static artistic product (camouflage as a form of modernist-influenced abstract painting; the extensive cataloguing of camouflage patterns in apparel, etc.).

Beyond engaging interdisciplinary understandings of camouflage as an art form, Performing Ground is directly in conversation with the burgeoning literature on space and site-specificity in performance studies, which has emerged in response to the ‘spatial turn’ of the past few decades.¹⁵ This work takes up the challenge posed by philosophers like Michel Foucault as well as cultural geographers like Henri Lefebvre and Edward Soja, who have encourag...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Front matter
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• 1 World Pictures
• 2 Camouflage Acts
• 3 Performing Ground
• 4 The Environmental Unconscious
• 5 Embedded Performance
• 6 Epilogue: Situating the Self
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index