Drones and Night Vision: Militarised Technology in Paintings by
George Gittoes and Jon Cattapan
Kathryn Ann Fox
Bachelor of Arts (University of Queensland)
A thesis submitted for the degree of Master of Philosophy at
The University of Queensland in 2017
School of Communication and Arts
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Abstract
This thesis focusses on the representation of militarised airborne drones and night vision technologies in paintings by Australian contemporary artists, George Gittoes and Jon Cattapan. Drawing on substantial primary research, including extensive interviews with both artists, the argument is developed through a cross-disciplinary framework that incorporates discourse from art history, critical theory, cultural studies, and political theory. Particular attention is paid to debates surrounding increasingly autonomous, persistent surveillance, and rapid response targeting capabilities associated with airborne drones and night vision technology.
Gittoes and Cattapan have both lived or worked in war and conflict zones; Gittoes in numerous zones since 1986 when he went to Nicaragua during the Sandinista Revolution (1979-1990), and Cattapan in Timor Leste in 2008 as Australia’s 63rd official War Artist. Both artists have used night vision technology in conflict zones, and Gittoes has witnessed the deployment of airborne drones. Despite their conceptual and political affinities, their works have not previously been analysed together, and no detailed studies of their engagement with contemporary militarised technology have been undertaken. This thesis not only offers a significant addition to art historical understandings of the artists’ works, but also presents novel insights into the capacity of contemporary painting to critically engage with ethical and political issues associated with developments in militarised technology.
The structure of the thesis is in two parts. Chapter One, “George Gittoes: Scoping the Horror of War”, draws on Paul Virilio’s critiques of screen-based technology to examine how Gittoes’ paintings trigger questions about militarised drone vision. It contests the use of words such as seeing and vision when applied to contemporary militarised technology, offering Gittoes’ paintings as evidence that scope and scoping more aptly describe drone surveillance and targeting capabilities. In Chapter Two, “Jon Cattapan: Ghosts and Data Proxies, Disappearance and Reappearance”, Jean Baudrillard’s speculative writings on war and cyber technology are applied to Cattapan’s enigmatic paintings where dripped paint is overlaid with digital-like spectral markings. This chapter proposes that Cattapan’s paintings provide evidence of human disappearance through data proxy digital replacements, exposing the cyber-world as both battlefield and weapon. Throughout the thesis, theoretical critique is consistently paired with detailed and close visual analyses of key paintings by the artists.
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In bringing together the works of Cattapan and Gittoes through the lens of militarised technology, this thesis generates new understandings of the ways in which contemporary painting can critically engage with issues associated with developments in contemporary warfare. It argues that the paintings and artistic practices of Gittoes and Cattapan expose particular kinds of dehumanising processes propagated by the deployment of remotely piloted militarised drones and night vision technologies. The argument critiques the way developments in drone systems inform “future of war” rhetoric that emanates from military sources and manufacturers of militarised technology. It demonstrates that the artists’ paintings and practices prompt important questions that address current as well as future implications of militarised technology. In an age dominated by cyber and digital technology the artists’ paintings, created with hands-on analogue processes, provide evidence of contemporary painting’s political and radically subversive agency.
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Declaration by author
This thesis is composed of my original work, and contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference has been made in the text. I have clearly stated the contribution by others to jointly-authored works that I have included in my thesis.
I have clearly stated the contribution of others to my thesis as a whole, including statistical assistance, survey design, data analysis, significant technical procedures, professional editorial advice, and any other original research work used or reported in my thesis. The content of my thesis is the result of work I have carried out since the commencement of my research higher degree candidature and does not include a substantial part of work that has been submitted to qualify for the award of any other degree or diploma in any university or other tertiary institution. I have clearly stated which parts of my thesis, if any, have been submitted to qualify for another award.
I acknowledge that an electronic copy of my thesis must be lodged with the University Library and, subject to the policy and procedures of The University of Queensland, the thesis be made available for research and study in accordance with the Copyright Act 1968 unless a period of embargo has been approved by the Dean of the Graduate School.
I acknowledge that copyright of all material contained in my thesis resides with the copyright holder(s) of that material. Where appropriate I have obtained copyright permission from the copyright holder to reproduce material in this thesis.
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Publications during candidature
Brimblecombe-Fox, Kathryn. “Airborne Weaponised Drones and the Tree-of-Life.” Australian Women’s Book Review 27, no. 1 and 2 (2015/2016): 59-64. https://hecate.communications- arts.uq.edu.au/files/2673/AWBR%20vol27%201and2.pdf.
Brimblecombe-Fox, Kathryn. “Cover: Kathryn Brimblecombe-Fox: Red Rain.” Hecate 42.1 (2016):131-134.
Brimblecombe-Fox, Kathryn. “George Gittoes: Night Vision.” Review for Eyeline: Contemporary Visual Arts 86 (2017): 79.
Publications included in this thesis
No publications included.
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Contributions by others to the thesis
No contributions by others.
Statement of parts of the thesis submitted to qualify for the award of another degree
None.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful for the encouragement and support provided by my initial supervisors Dr. Fiona Nicoll and Dr. Amelia Barikin, and for the continued support from my finalising supervisory team, Dr. Amelia Barikin and Dr. Paolo Magagnoli.
I am thankful for the unwavering and enthusiastic support given by my daughters, Clementine, Edwina and Winsome, and from my mother, Elsie Brimblecombe.
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Keywords
George Gittoes, Jon Cattapan, contemporary painting, militarised technology, airborne drone, night vision, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, Gregoire Chamayou, Eyal Weizman
Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classifications (ANZSRC)
ANZSRC code: 190102, Art History, 50%
ANZSRC code: 190104, Visual Cultures, 25%
ANZSRC code: 200299, Cultural Studies not elsewhere classified, 25%
Fields of Research (FoR) Classification
FoR code: 1901, Art Theory and Criticism, 50%
FoR code: 2002, Cultural Studies, 50%
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Table of Contents
List of Figures 10
Introduction 12
Chapter One 36 George Gittoes: Scoping the Horror of War
Chapter Two 74 Jon Cattapan: Ghosts and Data Proxies, Disappearance and Reappearance
Conclusion 109 Painting, Human Agency and Existential Risk
Bibliography 114
Appendix 1. Figures 132
Appendix 2. Ethical Clearance Approval 153
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List of Figures
1. George Gittoes, Simurg, pencil and collage on paper, 44 x 62 cm, 2008. Collection of the artist. 2. George Gittoes, Night Vision 2015, oil on canvas, 120 x 200 cm, 2015. Courtesy of the artist and the Sydney Peace Foundation. 3. George Gittoes, The Artist, oil on canvas, 210 x 173, 1996. Collection of Mike Mitchell, Brisbane. 4. George Gittoes, Discarded, oil on canvas, 173 x 260 cm, 1995. Courtesy of the artist. 5. George Gittoes, Mojo Rising, oil on canvas, 200 x 260 cm, 2009. Courtesy of the artist and Mitchell Fine Art, Brisbane. 6. George Gittoes, Charon, oil on linen, 200 x 260 cm, 2009-2010. Courtesy of the artist and Mitchell Fine Art, Brisbane. 7. Mrs Joy Allen, holds her daughter Meredith at George Gittoes' puppet show, “Aquarius Festival of University Arts”, ANU, Canberra, 1971. Photo, courtesy of The Canberra Times. 8. Pablo Picasso, first Dove of Peace, emblem “The World Congress of Peace”, Paris, April 23, 1949. 9. George Gittoes, Night Vision, pencil on paper, 44 x 62 cm, 1993. Courtesy of the artist. 10. George Gittoes, Khats, pencil on paper, 1993. Collection of the Australian War Memorial. 11. George Gittoes, Tightrope Cowboys, Ink on paper, 59.5 x 49.5 cm, 1971. Courtesy of the artist. 12. George Gittoes, Why Am I Here?, oil on canvas, 87 x 101 cm, 1997. Courtesy of the artist, collection unknown. 13. Baidoa, Somalia, Emaciated Child Sitting in the Courtyard of the Orphanage, Located in a Former Jail and Now Operated by a Care Agency. The Child is being Sketched by Australian artist, George Gittoes. Photographer unknown. 1993. Collection of the Australian War Memorial. 14. George Gittoes, Voyeur, pencil on paper, 44 x 62 cm, 1993. Collection of the Australian War Memorial. 15. Jon Cattapan, Night patrols (Around Maliana), oil on linen, triptych 120 x 300 cm overall, 2009. Collection of the Australian War Memorial. 16. Jon Cattapan, Night Figures (Gleno), acrylic on linen, 180 x 250 cm, 2009. Collection of the artist.
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17. Jon Cattapan, Imagine a Raft (Hard Rubbish 1), oil and acrylic on linen, 194 x 165 cm, 2011. Courtesy of the artist. 18. Jon Cattapan, Raft City No 1 (Surveillance Version), oil and acrylic on linen, 198 x 165 cm, 2015. Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane. 19. Jon Cattapan, Carrying, oil on linen, 195 x 240 cm, 2002. Dr Paul Elliadis Collection of Contemporary Art, Brisbane. 20. Jon Cattapan, Fall of the Valley Kings, oil on linen, 175 x 259 cm, 2016. Courtesy of the artist and Dominik Mersch Gallery, Sydney. 21. Jon Cattapan, Vapour Line, oil on linen, 185 x 250 cm, 2016. Courtesy of the artist and Dominik Mersch Gallery, Sydney. 22. Paolo Uccello, Niccolò Mauruzi da Tolentino Unseats Bernardino Della Ciarda at the Battle of San Romano, 182 x 320 cm, egg tempera, walnut and linseed oil on poplar, c.1435–1455. Uffizi Gallery, Florence. 23. Paolo Uccello, Niccolò Mauruzi da Tolentino at the Battle of San Romano 182 x 320 cm, egg tempera, walnut and linseed oil on poplar c.1438-1440. National Gallery, London.
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Introduction
This thesis examines the painting practices of contemporary Australian artists George Gittoes (1949-) and Jon Cattapan (1956-). I investigate their representations of contemporary militarised technology, paying particular attention to “unmanned air vehicles” (UAVs), commonly called drones, and night vision capabilities.1 This investigation probes how the artists’ paintings and painting techniques are informed by contemporary militarised technology. It also examines how Gittoes’ and Cattapan’s practices and paintings generate moral, ethical and political questions about the ongoing development and use of contemporary militarised technology. By using a militarised technology investigative lens to examine the artists’ paintings and practices, this thesis draws on cross-disciplinary art history, cultural studies and technical research. This research positions Gittoes’ and Cattapan’s painting practices within current and important debates about militarised technology and its ramifications for war and humanity, now and into the future. By placing the artists’ paintings within these global debates this thesis provides a major contribution not only to scholarship on the artists’ works, but also to discourses on contemporary painting, and contemporary Australian art.
In this thesis, ‘contemporary militarised technology’ refers to new and emerging technologies designed for or conscripted by the military to enhance and maintain tactical advantage. For example, surveillance, targeting and attack capabilities of remotely piloted drones are optimised through digital technologies, reliance on space-based assets such as GPS and communications satellites, and cyber interconnectivity. These technologies differentiate contemporary militarised technology from earlier electronic, analogue, largely manned and pre-satellite reliant militarised technologies. In the twenty-first century the apparatus of warfare is designed for continuous surveillance, persistent presence, enduring offensive and defensive readiness, increasing automation, continuous interactivity, and long range capabilities. I argue that the artists’ paintings, in different ways, expose how increasingly remote and autonomous systems add another dehumanising layer to the processes and outcomes of war and conflict.
Both Gittoes and Cattapan have witnessed contemporary war or its aftermath. Gittoes has worked in war and conflict zones as a painter, photo journalist and filmmaker since 1986
1 “Unmanned air vehicle” is the accepted term for an aircraft that does not have a human pilot or passengers. It is used by the military, the aerospace industry and commentators from across academia and news media. 12 when he travelled to Nicaragua during the Sandinista Revolution (1979-1990). Subsequently he has worked on his own volition in war zones such as Somalia, Cambodia, Rwanda, Gaza, Iraq, Pakistan, the Congo, South Africa, Bosnia, Afghanistan and others.2 Cattapan accompanied Australian peacekeeping forces in Timor Leste as Australia’s 63rd official war artist in 2008.3 It is noteworthy that Gittoes has witnessed airborne drone deployment in the second Gulf War and in Afghanistan where he has largely been based since 2011.4 Both artists have used militarised technology in the form of night vision glasses, Gittoes in Somalia (1993) and Cattapan in Timor Leste (2008). However, the artists’ responses to these experiences are different.
Apart from using night vision glasses, Gittoes and Cattapan share other common experiences. Both displayed early skills with technology, Gittoes working with physicist Zoltan Hegedus at CSIRO in Sydney (1976-1977) to develop the “first multi-colour white light transmission hologram” and Cattapan completing a year of computer science before transferring to visual arts at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in 1975.5 Both artists spent time working in New York, Gittoes (1968-1969) and Cattapan (1989- 1991). As young men they also experienced the loss of a loved one in tragic circumstances. Not long after returning from New York, Gittoes’ girlfriend Marie Briebauer committed suicide.6 Her death indelibly marked Gittoes’ psyche. He writes, “All the dead bodies I have witnesses since are eclipsed by Marie’s dead eyes – her face has made the realm of death my alternative home”.7 In 1984 Cattapan’s sister was killed when a fire engine struck her car.8 Three months after the accident he created a series of drawings called Sister Drawings (1984).9 Despite conceptual affinities and similarities in private and professional life experiences, Gittoes’ and Cattapan’s work and practices have not previously been analysed together.
2 George Gittoes, “George Gittoes: Biography,” accessed September 10, 2015, http://gittoes.com/. 3 Australian War Memorial, “Australian Official War Artists: Conflicts 1945 to Today,” accessed January 11, 2017, https://www.awm.gov.au/encyclopedia/war_artists/1945totoday/. 4 George Gittoes, recorded interview with the author, Brisbane (July 28, 2016). Gittoes mentioned he had taken photographs and videos of drones during the second Gulf War, but many had been confiscated by military police. However, a few still exist in his visual diaries. 5 Gittoes, “George Gittoes: Biography”; Jon Cattapan, “Jon Cattapan: Biography,” accessed May 5, 2017, http://www.joncattapan.com.au/wp-content/uploads/jc_bio.pdf. 6 George Gittoes, Blood Mystic (Australia: Pan MacMillan, 2016), 87. 7 Ibid. 8 Chris McAuliffe, Jon Cattapan: Possible Histories (Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing, 2008), 48. 9 Ibid. 13
Thesis Structure
This thesis has a two part structure; Chapter One “George Gittoes: Scoping the Horror of War” and Chapter Two “Jon Cattapan: Ghosts and Data Proxies, Disappearance and Reappearance”. These are preceded by an Introduction and followed by a Conclusion “Painting, Human Agency and Existential Risk”. Chapter One investigates Gittoes’ paintings that reference contemporary militarised vision technology, and associated screen-based and scoping systems. I pay particular attention to Gittoes’ various portrayals of night vision glasses and references to airborne drones. I ask; how do these paintings question concepts of vision, seeing and knowledge in an era where increasing surveillance, monitoring and targeting contribute to the horror of war? Gittoes has never worked as an official war artist, but on occasion has accompanied Australian peacekeeping forces in places including Somalia (1993) and Rwanda (1995).10 This chapter focusses on Gittoes’ painting practice which includes source drawings in visual diaries he takes with him to conflict zones. Paintings that referentially use these in-situ drawings are subsequently completed in studios.11 These paintings are, in varying degrees, confronting images of the horror and atrocity Gittoes has witnessed over many decades and in numerous conflict zones. However, they go beyond simply recording events. Rather, in the process of working through his experiences of witnessing, Gittoes re-imagines events, often in hallucinatory ways. This provokes critical reflection on events, and military practices and apparatus, in ways that also prompt questions about the future of war and humanity.
Chapter Two focusses on Cattapan’s paintings completed after he returned from Timor Leste (2008). Paintings include those commissioned and acquired by the Australian War Memorial, and other subsequent works.12 Like Gittoes, Cattapan uses in-situ drawings and photographs as references for subsequent studio paintings that are literally and metaphorically layered. The literal layering occurs in the way Cattapan paints markings that mimic a kind of digitally produced virtual rendering over loosely painted backgrounds. After returning from Timor Leste Cattapan made subtle but significant changes to the way he uses paint. These include allowing background paint to drip rather than be formed by brush strokes. I argue that these changes reflect the artist’s visceral reaction to using militarised technology, namely a helmet-mounted night vision monocle, in a military zone on night
10 Gittoes, “George Gittoes: Biography.” 11 He has a studio in Sydney, another in Jalalabad in Afghanistan. He hires studios in cities such as London and Berlin, when needed. 12 The Australian War Memorial acquired a major work Night Patrols (Around Malania) (2009), a series of six smaller Night Vision Studies (2009) oil paintings and twenty works on paper. https://www.awm.gov.au/. 14 patrols with military personnel.13 He comments that a “relatively prosaic scene became instantly more visually loaded”.14 This “loaded” quality, evident in Cattapan’s saturated green backgrounds, can be extrapolated beyond night vision glasses specifically, to contemporary militarised vision technology more generally. For example, long range and long dwell military drones are equipped with wide area electro-optical surveillance systems. Their persistent reconnaissance and monitoring capabilities are often coupled with targeting and attack operations. In this chapter I ask, how does Cattapan’s method of painting markings reminiscent of computer graphics over an underlay of dripped paint, help promulgate questions about contemporary technology designed for surveillance, siege and attack in war and conflict situations?
Contemporary Weaponised Technology and Human Agency
Using strong brushstrokes and lurid colours Gittoes paints actual two pronged eye-piece night vision glasses in a number of his paintings. However, his renditions of the glasses are usually distorted and mask-like, and worn by equally exaggerated or twisted figures. Gittoes combines the distortive and emotive qualities of expressionism with social realism to not only reflect the effect of wearing the glasses on the user, but also the effect on others of seeing soldiers with them on. He describes wearing the night vision glasses: “For the wearer the night takes on the quality of an hallucinatory or nightmarish dream” where “the strange goggle masks make the soldiers look like Hollywood robots”.15 The use of distortion and exaggeration reveals a response to the particular way contemporary militarised technology dehumanises the human being through mediated or virtual ‘augmentation’. Here, Gittoes’ visual ploys raise political and moral questions about the efficacy of so-called augmented vision specifically, and militarised technology generally.
Rather than depict actual night vision glasses Cattapan saturates backgrounds in varying shades and hues of night vision green paint. The saturation of colour reflects Cattapan’s experiences seeing through night vision technology which he describes as “just plain eerie”.16 The pervasive quality of his saturated backgrounds and their connection to a military context, provoke questions about the increasing presence of persistent surveillance
13 Jon Cattapan, “Night Vision Goggles,” Artlink 31, no 3 (2011): 41. 14 Ibid. 15 George Gittoes in Mike Mitchell, Night Vision: George Gittoes (Brisbane: Mitchell Fine Art, 2016), 49. 16 Cattapan, “Night Vision Goggles,” 41. 15 by non-human technical entities, operated remotely or semi-autonomously. In doing so, Cattapan’s paintings also provoke questions about the increasingly opaque boundaries between civilian and military use of technological infrastructure, for example, GPS and communications satellites. Threats to humanity are made more insistent in the way Cattapan paints computer simulation-like spectral figures that oscillate between appearance and disappearance, reality and virtuality over the top of his saturated backgrounds. This tension is activated by the way Cattapan ameliorates his initial abstract expressionist and non- representational approach with figurative overlays. The abstract and the figurative perform a kind of dance that choreographs the oscillation between appearance and disappearance, reality and virtuality.
How do Gittoes’ and Cattapan’s paintings and painting practices reflect and critique the use of militarised technologies in ways that prompt re-evaluations of war, and its effects, now and into the future? To answer this question I examine the artists’ choices and treatment of subject matter and content. I also examine the way each artist uses paint as a medium. Here, human agency, contingent in painting practices, provides a way to reflect upon the dehumanising processes and outcomes of contemporary militarised technology. These processes include not only subjugation of the human and death, but also the removal of the human in increasingly “unmanned” and remotely operated systems. The process of a human artist painting an image using rudimentary tools such as a brush, palette knife, fingers or hands contrasts with the increasing “unmanned” nature of militarised technology reliant on unseen processes of algorithmic instruction and cyber interconnectivity.
Heidegger’s observations in The Origin of the Work of Art, first published in 1950, offer a way to understand the physical act of painting by a human being. He places significance in the creation of art as work when he writes the “workly character of the work consists in its having been created by the artist”.17 He explains that the origin of a work of art lies in the “activity of the artist” and that defining a work of art without consideration of human activity is “unfeasible”.18 In other words the creative physical activity of the artist exists in the artwork and cannot be excluded from it. The artist’s craftsmanship and mastery are important factors for the unfolding nature of an artwork’s creation.19 This occurs at the same time as the process of creation provides an ongoing education for the artist.20 Heidegger’s mid twentieth
17 Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (London: Routledge, 1978), 183. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., 184. 20 Ibid. 16 century perspectives about human agency and the creation of an artwork provide useful contrasts with twenty-first century digital and cyber technology. For example, instructional algorithms, software and increasing self-learning systems can operate without the presence of a human being. Although it can be argued that a human might precipitate an algorithmic or software driven operation, and oversee digital and cyber processes, these operations cannot be described as predominantly “workly” human work. Even oversight operations are increasingly conducted by self-learning artificial intelligence that can detect anomalies in systems, processes and documentation. For example detection of anomalies in cyber systems can pre-emptively warn of security vulnerabilities, and anomaly detection in documentation searches can assist procedures such as legal due diligence. In an age where artificial intelligence and robotics are rapidly replacing the human worker across various arenas, raising questions about human work and agency are important for a variety of social, moral, economic, cultural and political reasons.
Human work and its agency are evident in the creative processes and outcomes of a painter’s gestural actions that initiate paint’s reactions such as movement, absorption, coalescence, dripping, blending and stages of drying. These occur in embodied or analogue time with the working co-presence of the painter. The result is a painting that makes visible not only the artist’s inspiration and thoughts reflected in content or subject-matter, but also the progression of paint as it takes time to drip, coalesce and dry. This means that paint’s reaction to surface, temperature and mishap, such as an insect flying into it, are visible. The co-presence of the human painter means he or she can intervene, disrupt and manipulate according to judgements about the progression of the paint, how it looks and how it emboldens meaning. Sometimes the paint, by accident, albeit introduced by the artist’s gestural actions, achieves something the artist decides to keep. The painter may need to wait for the paint to respond, dry or drip, before making a decision to paint another brushstroke or mark, or not.
In comparison with the human painter, robots that paint rely firstly upon an energy source, such as battery or electric, and then on digital imaging technology that is programmed into subsequent painting actions.21 The randomness of dripped paint, mess and gesture, play little part in contributing to the robot’s painting process, which is essentially a type of digital copying. Also, many robot painters currently are simply stand-alone mechanical arms responding to cyber delivered instructions. Without a body, physical and gestural
21 An internet search for robots that paint will provide examples. 17 movements are limited not only in action, but also in emotional reactivity and response to the activity of painting. The human painter, however, has physical, emotional and intellectual responses to the unfolding nature of creating a painting. These remind us of human agency and work, and in this way Heidegger’s “workly” character of a painting, prompts comparisons with the dehumanising effects of twenty-first century militarised technology.
Gittoes’ and Cattapan’s analogue painting processes remind us of human agency at the same time as their subject matter represents contemporary militarised technology, and its dehumanising features and capabilities. This juxtaposition represents a primary motivation for linking the two artists in this thesis. It provides a complex ground to research how the artists respond to contemporary militarised technology in ways that stimulate questions about its use and ongoing development. Gittoes and Cattapan produce very different work but neither artist simply illustrates, records or copies. Their in-field drawings and photographs help to create paintings where the choice of content, how it is depicted and arranged, colour choices and the handling of paint itself, trigger reflective questions. These questions consider how advances in militarised technology influence the processes and outcomes of war and conflict. A century ago German artists Otto Dix, Max Beckman and George Grosz responded to their experiences as World War 1 veterans, in ways that went beyond the kind of reportage and illustration that can conceal horror with heroism.22 Their harnessing of expressionism, figurative and some abstractive techniques heightened the social realist quality of their work in ways that emotively revealed the horror of war. Whilst continuing this kind of approach Gittoes and Cattapan also depart from it, because the digital and cyber characteristics of contemporary war create additional real and virtual dimensions of horror.
These dimensions are broadened by military research into using artificial intelligence to enable increasingly autonomous weapon systems. Often called lethal autonomous weapons (LAWS), these weapons have the potential to drastically reduce human involvement in operative and decision making loops. For example, a background briefing for the United Nations (UN) states: “Potentially LAWS could identify and attack a target without human
22 Jennifer Berry, “Otto Dix: A Critical Realist Captured the Horror of War,” MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History 21, no. 1 (2008): 50- 55; Paul Fox, “Confronting Postwar Shame in Weimer Germany: Trauma, Heroism and the War Art of Otto Dix,” Oxford Art Journal 29, no. 2 (2006): 247-67; Marcel Franciscono, “The Imagery of Max Beckmann’s The Night,” Art Journal 33 no. 1 (1973): 18-22; Jeff Michael Ocwieja, “Art as Political Struggle: George Grosz and the Experience of the great War,” Grand Valley Journal of History 3 no. 2 (2014): 1-20. 18 intervention”.23 Other briefings discuss what “meaningful human control or appropriate human judgement” might mean in regards to autonomous weapons.24 Historical ‘just war’ traditions (jus bellum iustum) of ‘just force’ (jus ad bellum) and ‘just conduct’ (jus in bello) are threatened by accelerating developments in militarised technology and the resulting asymmetry of combatant capability.25 Gittoes’ and Cattapan’s practices and paintings trigger questions that reflect upon these twenty-first century dilemmas.
Literature Review: Cross-Disciplinary Research
Due to the cross-disciplinary research framework taken by this thesis, discourse from art history, critical theory, cultural studies and political theory have provided avenues to analyse how Gittoes’ and Cattapan’s paintings and painting practices critically engage with ethical and political issues associated with developments in militarised technology. Cultural theory that critiques digital and cyber technology generally, and militarised technology specifically, provides a way to analyse the artists’ subject-matter. It also offers an avenue to juxtapose contemporary technological processes with the artists’ analogue painting methods. In Chapter One Paul Virilio’s critiques of technology’s accelerating speed and the reductionist effects of screen-based vision provide avenues to investigate Gittoes’ work. These are scaffolded by Virilio’s observation that technology contributes to a collapse between the private and the public, and the civilian and the military.26 His analysis in various books such as The Great Accelerator (2012), Negative Horizon (2005) and Open Sky (1997), and articles “Cold Panic” (2005) and “Red Alert in Cyberspace” (1995) help to reveal the historical, political and cultural significance of Gittoes’ depictions, over many years, of night vision glasses and drone technology.27 Through the lens of war and conflict Gittoes’ work
23 United Nations, Background, Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems, United Nations Office at Geneva, accessed January 10, 2017, http://www.unog.ch/80256EE600585943/(httpPages)/8FA3C2562A60FF81C1257CE600393DF6?OpenDocu ment. 24 Heather M. Roff, “Meaningful Human Control or Appropriate Human Judgement? The Necessary Limits on Autonomous Weapons,” briefing paper prepared for the Review Conference of the Convention on Conventional Weapons (Geneva, December 2016), accessed January 10, 2017, https://globalsecurity.asu.edu/sites/default/files/files/Control-or-Judgment-Understanding-the-Scope.pdf; United Nations, The United Nations Office at Geneva, Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, United Nations Office at Geneva, accessed January 10, 2017, http://www.unog.ch/80256EE600585943/(httpPages)/4F0DEF093B4860B4C1257180004B1B30?OpenDocu ment. 25 Christian Enemark, Armed Drones and the Ethics of War: Military Virtue in a Post-Heroic Age (London and New York: Routledge, 2014). 26 Paul Virilio, “Cold Panic,” trans. Chris Turner, Cultural Politics 1, no. 1 (2005): 28-29. 27 Virilio, “Cold Panic,” (2005); Paul Virilio, The Great Accelerator, trans. Julie Rose (Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press, 2012); Paul Virilio, Negative Horizon: An Essay in Dromoscopy, trans. Michael Degene (London 19 tracks the acceleration of technological development and the resultant “inertia” Virilio identifies. Gittoes’ paintings, therefore, are important and critical contributors to historical accounts of war generally, and the tracking of militarised technology specifically.
Virilio’s critiques of technological speed also provide a way to reflect upon time and painting, in contrast to time and technology. Unseen algorithmic instruction enables signals to bounce between satellites, cloud storage systems and devices at near light speed. Interconnectivity and speed mean that contemporary technology increasingly operates in dimensions that are inaccessible to the human being. Gittoes’ and Cattapan’s painting practices, processes and techniques, however, occur in analogue time with the co-presence of the artist. The artists’ painting practices, representing examples of human agency, are unmediated by cyber or digital accelerants or remote infrastructure. Once applied and manipulated by the artist, paint also demonstrates visible processes that occur over a period of time. Processes such as dripping, coalescing and drying are determined by material connectivity between paint layers, the painted surface and the hand of the artist, as well as environmental factors such as humidity. The creation of a painting occurs in humanly accessible spatial and temporal dimensions.28
Sociologist Mark Featherstone critically engages with Virilio’s postulations about speed and screen-based technology in ways that address twenty-first century technology as a “technoabyss” or “negative abyss”.29 Political scientist James Der Derian also engages with Virilio’s “conceptual cosmology”.30 He suggests Virilio has revealed a “dark power” of contemporary technology, its capacity to “dissimulate in time as well as space” in ways that accelerate the disappearance of reality.31 In a sense contemporary technology’s velocity and speed create an abyss-like enclosure that neuters human agency. As Virilio remarks the “acceleration of reality is now part and parcel of the loss of all self-control”.32 Ideas of a
and New York: Continuum, 2005); Paul Virilio, Open Sky, trans. Julie Rose (London and New York: Verso, 1997); Paul Virilio, “Red Alert in Cyberspace,” trans. Malcolm Imrie, Radical Philosophy (Nov/Dec 1995): 2-4. 28 Heidegger’s lecture “The Question Concerning Technology” published in 1954, presents technology as a human activity and as a means to an end. Nearly seventy years later digital and cyber technologies contrast with analogue, electronic and mechanical technologies of the 1950s. Heidegger’s notion of technology’s “standing-reserve,” in readiness to be a means to an end is outdated by the speed and invisibility of algorithmic and cyber processes. The always-on characteristic of contemporary systems undermines notions of “standing” or “reserve.” Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977). 29 Mark Featherstone, “The Negative Abyss: Surface, Depth, and Violence in Virilio and Stiegler,” Cultural Politics 11, no. 2 (July 2015): 219. 30 James Der Derian, “The Conceptual Cosmology of Paul Virilio,” Theory, Culture and Society 16, no. 5-6 (1999): 215–27. 31 Ibid., 218, 216. 32 Virilio, The Great Accelerator, 44. 20 technological or negative abyss provide further critical tools to analyse Gittoes’ choice and manipulation of iconography. His visual cosmology of inter-related motifs depicted over time addresses the abyss in ways that present it as a truly hellish place. By juxtaposing references to a hell in his paintings, such as the River Styx, Cerberus and Charon with the technical apparatus of contemporary war, many of Gittoes’ paintings suggest that hell is on Earth.33 As art historian Bernard Smith suggests, Gittoes’ paintings “challenge us to gaze into the dark abyss of inhuman reality, and confront the abiding savagery at its heart when trapped into the extreme situations of war and civil unrest”.34
In Chapter Two, Jean Baudrillard’s three provocative 1991 essays “The Gulf War Will Not Take Place”, “The Gulf War: Is it Really Taking Place?” and “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place” offer avenues to reflect upon Cattapan’s post-Timor Leste paintings.35 Baudrillard’s essays raise questions about the relationship between contemporary screen-based technology and war’s status, meaning and future. I use these essays to connect Cattapan’s paintings, of computer graphic and simulation-like markings over backgrounds of dripped paint, with discussions about militarised technology and its effects. Christopher Norris in Uncritical Theory: Postmodernism, Intellectuals and the Gulf War (1992) criticises Baudrillard’s essays for promoting a “ludicrous” argument that the first Gulf War was a postmodern illusion promulgated via mass media.36 However, as William Merrin points out in “Uncritical Criticism? Norris, Baudrillard and the Gulf War” (1994), Norris fails to understand Baudrillard’s work as a timely trigger to re-examine the apparatus, operation and politics of war in a digital and increasingly globalised age.37 As Merrin establishes in “‘After the End’: Baudrillard’s Future” (2008), by the second Gulf War Baudrillard’s essays were often referred to by commentators as “prescient”.38 Baudrillard’s penetrating critique of war and terrorism continues with analysis of the 9/11 attacks in the United States of America (2001), in publications such as The Spirit of Terrorism (2003).39 Here he presents dialectic where ideology, symbolism and politics are effaced by a virtual world, which has enabled the “virus” of terrorism to invade the real world.40 Cattapan’s
33 George Gittoes, “Descendence Stories,” George Gittoes, April 16, 2014, http://gittoes.com/descendence- stories/. 34 Bernard Smith, “George Gittoes and the Grotesque,” Art Monthly Australia 155 (November 1, 2002): 21. 35 Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, trans. Paul Patton (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995). The three essays were first published in the French newspaper Libération, 1991. “The Gulf War Will Not Take Place,” January 4, 1991; “The Gulf War is Not Really Taking Place,” February 6, 1991; “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place,” March 29, 1991. 36 Christopher Norris, Uncritical Theory: Postmodernism, Intellectuals and the Gulf War (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 17. 37 William Merrin, “Uncritical Criticism? Norris, Baudrillard and the Gulf War,” Economy and Society 23, no. 4 (1994): 433-58. 38 William Merrin, “‘After the End’ Baudrillard’s Future,” French Cultural Studies 19, no. 3 (2008): 263. 39 Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, trans. Chris Turner (London and New York: Verso, 2003). 40 Ibid., 10. 21 layered images that represent the virtual as painted content grapple with the tensions Baudrillard observes.
While Virilio and Baudrillard offer theoretical avenues to examine Gittoes’ and Cattapan’s paintings and practices, architect and theorist Eyal Weizman offers two interrogative approaches to position the artists’ paintings within current debates about war and technology.41 One approach is the verticality of threat.42 The other approach is “Forensic Architecture”. His notion of the verticality of threat, delivered by an array of “unmanned” surveillance, targeting and attack systems located above a territory, provides a tool to critically and visually examine Gittoes’ paintings particularly. Weizman provides a way to identify and penetrate Featherstone’s ideas of abyss, “techno” and “negative”, by extending the abyss into skies meshed with surveillance signals that form a kind of elevated enclosure.43 In Chapter One, I tease out Weizman’s ideas of the verticality of threat in regards to Gittoes’ paintings, by also referencing art historian Martin Jay’s propositions of vision in Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (1994).44 Whilst Jay conducts an historical overview of vision focused on France, his mention of ‘scoping’ takes on different nuances when considered from perspectives, taken by Weizman and others, of twenty-first century militarised vision and surveillance technology.
If Cattapan’s paintings act as a kind of evidence of the role of the virtual in contemporary war and conflict, Weizman’s forensic architecture analysis offers another way to prosecute the claim. Forensic architecture tracks and traces physical, digital and media artifact remnants for their connections to past atrocities and war crimes. It can reveal the reversibility of an “algorithmic culture” where generated data is retrievable.45 Evidence is reconstructed via simulation in ways that can contribute to activities such as human rights and war crimes investigations.46 Patterns emerge that also enable “forensic futures” calculations that can
41 Weizman heads a research and investigative team “Forensic Architecture” at Goldsmiths, University of London. http://www.forensic-architecture.org/. 42 Eyal Weizman, “The Politics of Verticality: Control in the Air,” Open Democracy (May 2, 2002), accessed May 18, 2016, https://www.opendemocracy.net/ecology-politicsverticality/article_810.jsp. 43 Other commentators interested in droned geographies of the sky include Ian Shaw and Derek Gregory. Ian Shaw, “The Great War of Enclosure: Securing the Skies,” Antipode 00.0 (2016): 1-24; Ian Shaw, “The Urbanization of Drone Warfare: Policing Surplus Populations in the Dronepolis,” Geographica Helvetica 71 (2016): 19-28; Derek Gregory, “From a View to a Kill: Drones and Late Modern War,” Theory, Culture and Society 28, no. 7-8 (2011): 188-215. 44 Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 45 Eyal Weizman, “Forensic Temporality,” in Simulation, Exercise, Operation, ed. Robyn Mackay (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2015), 40. 46 Eyal Weizman, “Introduction: Forensis,” in Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth, ed. Forensic Architecture (London and Berlin: Sternberg Press and Forensic Architecture, 2014), 20. 22
“produce future-oriented archives capable of anticipating incoming events”.47 Forensic architecture offers a number of possible interpretations of Cattapan’s ghost-like markings made over dripped backgrounds. For example, they could be representations of evidence, of ‘virtual’ reconstructions of evidence or some kind of “future-oriented archive” of emergent patterns.48 These kinds of nuanced interpretations resonate with Baudrillard’s evocative statement made in his third Gulf War essay that, “the war, the victory and the defeat are all equally unreal, equally non-existent”.49 The complexity of this statement is magnified by subsequent conjectures which Baudrillard made in The Perfect Crime (1996) about the status of reality. He declares that the “never perfect” “perfect crime” is the “murder of reality”.50 The “murder of reality” where “the corpse of the real itself has never been found” suggests an extreme outcome of dehumanisation, and perhaps the ultimate crime against humanity.51 This offers an interesting challenge for a forensic architecture investigative approach.
By analysing a particular painter’s practice as evidentiary, this thesis offers an original and radical way to articulate this challenge. In this way, this thesis departs from the kind of analysis utilised by Ralph Rugoff in the Scene of the Crime (1997), published at the time of an exhibition of the same name.52 Rugoff concentrates mainly on artists working in photographic, video and installation mediums. The emphasis is mostly on civilian criminal acts. A small number of the artists are painters, such as Nancy Reese and Vija Celmins. However, their photo-realist paintings fall into a kind of recording category that befits Rugoff’s more traditional ideas on reconstructing and preserving a crime scene. Rugoff’s notion of a crime scene clashes with Baudrillard’s accusation of the “murder of reality” where the crime scene is everywhere but also nowhere, its event status obscured. Weizman’s suggestion that “war is no longer perceived as existing on an axis of time” penetrates Baudrillard’s accusations in ways that also help to scrutinize Cattapan’s paintings.53
Throughout this thesis, cultural critiques that focus on the military airborne drone help inform my analysis of both Gittoes’ and Cattapan’s work. These critiques intersect with media studies, legal and international relations disciplines, thus broadening the cultural studies and art history research frame. The figure of the military drone has recently been scrutinised in
47 Susan Schuppli, “Forensic Futures”, Forensic Architecture: Lexicon, accessed May 15, 2017, http://www.forensic-architecture.org/lexicon/forensic-futures/. 48 Ibid. 49 Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, 82. 50 Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, trans. Chris Turner (London and New York: Verso, 1996), preliminary page. 51 Ibid. 52 Ralph Rugoff, Scene of the Crime (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1997). 53 Weizmann, “Forensic Temporality,” 40. 23
Drone Theory (2015) by French philosopher Gregoire Chamayou.54 He examines the apparatus of the drone and its capabilities against a backdrop of philosophical questions about the effects of remote killing on the perpetrators, victims and society. International relations academic, Christian Enemark in Armed Drones and the Ethics of War: Military Virtue in a Post-Heroic Age (2014), examines the drone in reference to legal issues associated with ‘just war’ (jus bellum iustum) theories, placing the increasing asymmetry of war firmly within discussions about the morality of war.55 Media theorist Mark Andrejevic, in articles or chapters such as “The Droning of Experience” (2015) and “Theorizing Drones and Droning Theory” (2016), uses the figure and operation of the military drone as a way to theorise about the ‘droning’ effects of pervasive digital interactivity in, what he calls, our “sensor society”.56
A number of critics of the drone refer to art that engages with various aspects of the airborne surveillance and weaponised drone. However, they gravitate towards photography, video and new media art as examples of art focussed on critiquing contemporary militarised technology. In comparison, painting is largely left out of discussions regarding the figure of the drone specifically, or weaponised technology, more generally.57 Chamayou briefly refers to filmmaker Harun Farocki.58 Media theorist Daniel Greene discusses the work of new media artist, James Bridle.59 Historian and international relations academic Alex Danchev also refers to Bridle, as well as video artist Omer Fast in his provocatively titled article “Bug Splat: The Art of the Drone” (2016).60 He refers to two films, Drone (2014) directed by Tonje Hessen Schei and Good Kill (2014) directed by Andrew Niccol. He refers to Lisa Barnard’s photographic work.61 Danchev also quotes, in its entirety, writer Teju Cole’s tweet-delivered Seven Short Stories About Drones.62
Installation, performance and new media art that utilises digital and cyber technologies for production, reproduction and dissemination are repeatedly represented in exhibitions with
54 Gregoire Chamayou, Drone Theory, trans. Janet Lloyd (London: Penguin Books, 2015). 55 Enemark, Armed Drones and the Ethics of War (2014). 56 Mark Andrejevic, “The Droning of Experience,” The Fibreculture Journal: Apps and Affect Issue no. 25 (2015): 202-216. Mark Andrejevic, “Theorizing Drones and Droning Theory,” in Drones and Unmanned Aerial Systems, ed. A. Zavrsnik (Switzerland: Springer, 2016), 21-43. 57 Pakistani artist Mahwish Chishty’s colourful drone paintings attract some attention http://www.mahachishty.com/. Since starting my M. Phil research my paintings have received some international acknowledgement that contextualises them within current debates about airborne drones. 58 Chamayou, Drone Theory, 114. 59 Daniel Greene, “Drone Vision,” Surveillance and Society 13, no. 2 (2015): 233-49. 60 Alex Danchev, “Bug Splat: The Art of the Drone,” International Affairs 92, no. 3 (2016): 703 -13. 61 Ibid., 703, 710, 711. 62 Ibid., 707-08. 24 airborne drone and surveillance themes. One of the earliest exhibitions to address contemporary surveillance, “CTRL SPACE: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother”, was held in late 2001 into early 2002.63 Fifty-nine artists were included in the exhibition, curated to examine how Jeremy Bentham’s (1748-1842) ideas of a panopticon could be extrapolated upon or contested with digital and cyber surveillance technologies. The exhibition was dominated by artists working with photography, film and video mediums. Of these Jordan Crandall, Peter Fend and Laura Kurgan worked with military or security themes.64
In more recent years the figure of the drone has become more prominent in exhibitions that address surveillance. Installation, photography and new media art forms, however, continue to dominate. “Trace Recordings: Surveillance and Identity in the 21st Century” held at the University of Technology Gallery, Sydney, considered “surveillance in a networked age” and “controversial technologies” including surveillance drones.65 Of the eleven artists included in the exhibition, one was a painter, Pakistani artist Mahwish Chishty.66 Chishty was also included in “Heaven and Hell: From Magic Carpets to Drones” at the Boghossian Foundation, Brussels.67 This exhibition included forty-four artists, with Chishty as the only contemporary painter. “Decolonized Skies” held in New York, Barcelona and Tel Aviv included between six and eight artists, but no painters.68 “Once is Nothing: A Drone Art Exhibition” held at InterAccess, Toronto, Canada, included eight new media or inter- disciplinary artists.69 “Watched! Surveillance, Art and Photography” at C/O Berlin and “To See Without Being Seen: Contemporary Art and Drone Warfare” at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University, St. Louis were dominated by new media, video and photographic artists.70 Some artists are repeatedly included, for example, Trevor Paglen and James Bridle were in the Sydney, Toronto and St. Louis exhibitions.
63 Thomas Y. Levin, Ursula Frohne and Peter Weibel, eds., CTRL SPACE: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2002). The exhibition was held at ZKM, Center for Art and media, Karlsruhe, Germany, October 12, 2001 – February 24, 2002. 64 Ibid., 292, 433, 545, 416. 65 “Trace Recordings: Surveillance and Identity in the 21st Century,” UTS Gallery, Sydney, October 22 – November 29, 2013, accessed May 5, 2017, http://cargocollective.com/tracerecordings. 66 Ibid. 67 “Heaven and Hell: From Magic Carpets to Drones,” exhibition at the Boghossian Foundation, Brussels, March 6 – September 6, 2015. 68 Details about the three iterations of “Decolonized Skies” are available on the curators’ High and Low Bureau website, accessed May 15, 2017, https://www.hlbureau.org/decolonized-skies. 69 “Once is Nothing: A Drone Art Exhibition,” InterAccess, Toronto, February 17 – April 2, 2016. 70 “Watched! Surveillance, Art and Photography,” C/O Berlin, February 18 – April 23, 2017; “To See Without Being Seen: Contemporary Art and Drone Warfare,” Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, January 29 – April 14, 2016. 25
The aforementioned exhibitions demonstrate that curatorial commentary on themes associated with surveillance and drones privileges new media and digital art. Why is contemporary painting largely overlooked as a medium that can engage with critiques of contemporary technology, militarised technology and warfare? This is an important question because although there is a bourgeoning body of creative work engaging in strategic ways with militarised technology, particularly the figure of the drone, painting is not identified by commentators as a significant contributor.71 In this cyber and digital age painting presents as an ‘outsider’ in a couple of ways that affect how it is perceived as a medium with a capacity to critically engage with contemporary technology. Firstly, its historical ‘outsider’ status is due to its eons-old history as a human endeavour long before electronic, cyber or digital technology was invented, and subsequently used as a medium by artists. Secondly, painting’s operative ‘outsider’ status is linked to its historical one and is due to its operational non-reliance on electronic, cyber or digital platforms, electric or battery energy. A painting, a human painter and his or her tools, do not need to be ‘plugged in’ to external energy sources or software in order to be produced or created. By demonstrating how Gittoes’ and Cattapan’s paintings can offer critical perspectives, this thesis addresses the lack of attention given to painting as a contributor to contemporary debates about militarised technology. In doing so, this thesis also addresses the marginal presence of contemporary painting in public exhibitions, and resulting discourses about art and technology, and art and militarised technology.
Before continuing I will pre-empt the positon taken in this thesis with regards to art historical debates about the status of painting. Periodically since photography’s nineteenth century invention, painting’s ‘death’ and ‘resurrection’ have been predicted and lamented.72 This thesis acknowledges these predominantly Western art history debates but is not aimed at focussing on them. Rather, by examining Gittoes’ and Cattapan’s practices and paintings through the lens of contemporary militarised technology, this thesis contextualises their work within broader cross-disciplinary cultural and art historical research frameworks. In doing so, painting may be re-positioned and re-evaluated in ways that could re-calibrate its status in contemporary art history. However, whilst this may be an outcome, I am more interested in
71 Gittoes directly refers to drones. Mahwish Chishty and Pakistani artist Fatima Zahra Hassan also refer to drones. I have worked with the airborne drone in my paintings since early 2016. Yemeni graffiti artists have painted drones in street art campaigns organised by Murad Subay. https://muradsubay.com/campaigns/12- hours/. 72 An example is Douglas Crimp’s oft-cited article, The End of Painting where he suggests that in the 1960s painting had a “terminal condition” which by the 1980s, as evidenced by Frank Stella’s “hysterical” work, heralded its demise. Douglas Crimp, “The End of Painting,” October, 16 (1981): 75, 82. 26 how Gittoes’ and Cattapan’s practices and paintings can meaningfully contribute to broader societal issues where reminders of direct human agency provide counterpoints for critical discussions about technologies that increasingly exhibit dehumanising attributes, actions and results.
Literature review: analyses of Gittoes’ and Cattapan’s work
In this section I review the existing literature pertaining to Gittoes’ and Cattapan’s paintings and practices. In addition I also detail primary research I conducted through interviews with the artists, email correspondence with Gittoes and a visit to Cattapan’s studio. Additionally, I visited the Australian War Memorial to view works by both artists. This primary research significantly adds depth and currency to existing material on both artists.
With regard to George Gittoes, Gavin Fry’s monograph George Gittoes (1998) provides historical and contextual information.73 It also includes many photographs of the artist at work, his paintings, drawings and places he has visited up to 1998. Of importance to my research are drawings where Gittoes writes first-hand accounts in their margins. Fry has transcribed many of these notations, including those relating to Gittoes’ use of night vision glasses in Somalia in 1993. The catalogue for the George Gittoes: I Witness (2014) survey exhibition at Hazelhurst Regional Gallery, Victoria, Australia, includes articles by art historians or commentators, Bernard Smith, Rod Pattendon, David A. Ross and Mayen Beckmann.74 They contribute various responses to Gittoes’ reactions to the horror he has witnessed, but none investigate his depictions of militarised technology. More recently, gallerist Mike Mitchell has produced Night Vision (2016) to accompany Gittoes’ solo exhibition of the same name at Mitchell Fine Art Gallery, Brisbane.75 Again, this publication provides useful transcripts of Gittoes’ hand written notes that accompany drawings, plus other notes from his visual diaries. It also includes photographs of the paintings included in the exhibition. Although held in a commercial gallery the exhibition was more like a survey show covering the years 1993 – 2016. Mitchell’s publication includes an essay “More Than Human: War and Hyper-Reality” by art historian Darren Jorgensen.76 Jorgensen identifies
73 Gavin Fry, George Gittoes (Sydney: Craftsman House, 1998). 74 Hazelhurst Regional Gallery and Arts Centre, George Gittoes: I Witness (Hazelhurst: Hazelhurst Regional Gallery and Arts Centre, 2014). 75 Mitchell, Night Vision: George Gittoes (2016). 76 Darren Jorgensen, “More Than Human: War and Hyper-Reality” in Night Vision: George Gittoes, ed. Mike Mitchell (Brisbane: Mitchell Fine Art, 2016), 27-29. 27
Gittoes’ depictions of night vision glasses as a motif to convey the hyper-reality of war, which he notes has morphed into “perpetual war”.77 However, he does not extrapolate upon the role militarised technology plays in the perpetuation of war and how Gittoes’ paintings offer critical witness representations of this process occurring over a period of time.
Jorgensen, in another article “George Gittoes and the Social Turn in Afghanistan”, focusses on Gittoes’ documentary films.78 There is a plethora of media coverage focussing on Gittoes’ documentary films, but although connected by his intent to tell stories and to make peace through art, his documentary film practice is not a focus of this thesis. However, his films do provide added insight into Gittoes’ experiences in war zones and his responses to them. For example, in a scene in the full length documentary Snow Monkey (2015) a moderate Taliban leader arrives for his first visit to the Yellow House artists’ community Gittoes has set up for local Afghanis in Jalalabad. As a nervous Gittoes greets him, the camera suddenly swings up to focus on a surveillance drone hovering in the sky above. Also, gruesome footage of the aftermath of a suicide bombing, children associated with the Yellow House witnessed, is briefly shown. In his earlier film Miscreants of Taliwood (2009) Gittoes ventures into Pakistan’s dangerous North West Frontier, now largely infiltrated by ISIS, where he documents the effects of rigid conformity enforced by the Taliban. At the same time, Gittoes documents the defiant production of a Pashtun film in which he also acts as the villain. Footage such as these provides context to the environments and situations in which Gittoes works.
In his article, Jorgensen makes a statement that helps further explain my interest in Gittoes. It also contextualises my interest in Cattapan. He compares Gittoes’ experiences in war and conflict zones with those of recent official Australian war artists, video artist and photographer Shaun Gladwell (2009 war artist) and painter Ben Quilty (2011 war artist). He comments that their “experience of the country was very different, as they made work within military bases sealed-off from the rest of Afghanistan”.79 This is also largely the case with Cattapan’s occasional collaborators Lyndell Brown and Charles Green, who went to Iraq and Afghanistan as official war artists in 2007.80 Being confined to military bases for safety reasons, offers a different perspective of war and conflict compared with life beyond these
77 Ibid., 29. 78 Darren Jorgensen “George Gittoes and the Social Turn in Afghanistan,” Artlink 36, no. 1 (March 2016): 26- 31. 79 Ibid. 80 Australian War Memorial, “Australian Official War Artists: Conflicts 1945 to Today.” This thesis does not examine Cattapan’s collaborations with Lyndell Brown and Charles Green. 28 confines. Cattapan, after overtures from the Australian War Memorial to be an official war artist, actively sought to go to a military zone where he could get outside military bases.81 The Australian peacekeeping operation in Timor Leste allowed for this to happen. Both Gittoes and Cattapan have worked in conflict zones beyond military bases, albeit Gittoes over a longer period of time, in a wider variety of places and often where active battle is occurring. This thesis does not, however, primarily focus on Cattapan’s or Gittoes’ contribution to the history of Australian war art, or on Cattapan’s involvement in the history of official Australian war artists. The militarised technology research lens taken by this thesis positions their paintings within global perspectives, rather than specifically national ones.
In a 2016 interview with Jorgensen, Gittoes makes a comment that strikes at a core concern about contemporary militarised technology, and the future of war and humanity.82 He says that the “biggest fear I’ve got, and what I‘m seeing in Afghanistan, is the increase in robotics”.83 He mentions airborne drones, driverless trucks, and speaks about his knowledge of engineers actively developing military robotics.84 He goes on to describe how he and others in Jalalabad avoid using digital devices to evade being monitored and mistakenly targeted.85 Gittoes’ behaviour modification and witness-based fears regarding militarised robotics intersect with concerns expressed by Chamayou, Enemark, Andrejevic, and others, about accelerating developments in “unmanned” systems, methods of target identification, and increasingly autonomous systems. Gittoes’ fear of being remotely tracked and monitored reflects a general fear that pervades territories where drones and their persistent surveillance systems are prevalent, for example in Afghanistan, Northern Pakistan, Yemen, Gaza and Somalia.
These fears are stoked by the occurrence of ‘signature strikes’ by drones. A ‘signature strike’ is triggered when a person’s movements and device usage demonstrate patterns of behaviour that indicate possible insurgent activities or intentions. In these cases the victim’s name is not known. A ‘personality strike’ targets a named person who authorities consider a threat and therefore, actively seek, or as Chamayou observes, ‘hunt’.86 Drones are
81 Jon Cattapan and Penny McLintock, “Extended Interview: Jon Cattapan Speaks with Reporter Penny McLintock,” May 29, 2009, audio recording, 8:37, ABC News, accessed July 2017, http://www.abc.net.au/news/2009-05-29/extended-interview-jon-cattapan-speaks-with/1698466. 82 George Gittoes and Darren Jorgensen, “Interview – George Gittoes: Artist, Peacemaker,” Emajart Journal (May 9, 2016), accessed January 4, 2017, https://emajartjournal.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/jorgensen_george-gittoes-artist-peacemaker.pdf. 83 Ibid., 6. 84 Ibid. 85 Ibid., 7. 86 Chamayou, Drone Theory, 46-47. 29 mentioned by Gittoes in a number of other interviews, including one with David Levi Strauss in 2010.87 In 2016, he was quoted speaking about drones in a newspaper article by Sune Engel Rasmussen.88 Drones figure in his work as early as 2008. In Chapter One, I analyse a drawing called Simurg (2008) (Fig. 1) which Gittoes drew in-field in Afghanistan.89 It depicts a Hellfire missile-armed drone, seemingly guided by the fourth horseman of the apocalypse. Despite numerous mentions of drones over many years, Gittoes’ work has not been examined with regards to the figure of the military drone. Given the artist’s awareness of the heightened geopolitical concerns relating to militarised drone usage and development, this is a significant omission which this thesis addresses.
Considering Gittoes’ near five-decade long career as a painter, Jorgensen’s piece in the Mitchell publication is one of relatively few scholarly pieces addressing his paintings. Others include Daniel Herwitz’s chapter “The Persistent Witness: George Gittoes” (2017), essays in the George Gittoes: I Witness catalogue, and Deborah Hart’s preface in the Realism of Peace: George Gittoes catalogue (1995). Additionally, other articles include those by Gina Fairly in Arts Hub (2014), Joanna Mendelssohn in Artlink (2008) and Griffith Review (2008), Bernard Smith in Art Monthly (2002), Michele M. Gierck in Eureka Street (2002) and Janet McKenzie in Studio International (2010).90 Each responds in varying ways to the horror of war depicted in Gittoes’ paintings. These responses include aesthetic and art historical contextual analyses, reflections on the role of artist as witness, plus observations about Gittoes’ method of drawing in-situ and subsequent studio painting. Whilst some occasionally mention technology they do not focus on Gittoes’ depiction of or concerns about contemporary militarised technology. They do, however, provide information and insights that, when examined through the lens of militarised technology, take on expanded meaning.
87 George Gittoes and David Levi Strauss, “George Gittoes with David Levi Strauss,” Brooklyn Rail (July 30, 2010), accessed October 10, 2016, https://gittoes.com/george-gittoes-with-david-levi-strauss-the-brooklyn- rail/. 88 Sune Engel Rasmussen, “George Gittoes and the Art of War,” The Good Weekend: The Age, April 23, 2015, accessed November 4, 2016, http://www.theage.com.au/good-weekend/george-gittoes-and-the-art-of- war-20150409-1mhay4.html. 89 George Gittoes, hand written notation in the margin of Simurg, pencil on paper, 2008. 90 Daniel Herwitz, Aesthetics, Art, and Politics in a Global World (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017),161- 176. Deborah Hart, The Realism Of Peace: George Gittoes, (Darwin: Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, 1995); Gina Fairly, “George Gittoes: Amid the Horror, the Hope,” ArtsHub Australia (June 17, 2014): 1-6, accessed September 19, 2015, http://visual.artshub.com.au/news-article/news/visual- arts/george-gittoes-amid-the-horror-the-hope-244256; Joanna Mendelssohn, “The Story of George,” Griffith Review 22 (November 2008), accessed April 5, 2016, https://griffithreview.com/articles/the-story-of-george/; Smith, “George Gittoes and the Grotesque,” (2002); Michele. M. Gierck, “The Man Who Reads the Signs,” Eureka Street: Profile (July-August 2002): 28-31; Janet McKenzie, “George Gittoes: Descendence Stories, from Night Vision, The Diaries,” Studio International: Visual Arts, Design and Architecture (April 16, 2010), accessed 2016, http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/george-gittoes-descendence-stories-from- night-vision-the-diaries. 30
Art historian Daniel Herwitz, however, provides particularly useful insights that help to elucidate Gittoes’ paintings and painting processes.91 Whilst not primarily focussed on representations of militarised technology, Herwitz perceptively contrasts Gittoes’ drawings, paintings and hands-on time consuming working methods with the rapid response and distribution characteristics of screen-based technologies, such as television and digital photography.92 He discusses how Gittoes extends the act of witnessing the horror of war into paintings where content and painting processes imbue palpable “moral urgency” and complex political agency.93 He notes that Gittoes’ practice of drawing in-situ, and responding later in paint, acts as a performance conducted over time.94 The idea of performance helps to explain the complexity of Herwitz’s description of Gittoes as a “persistent witness”. It is not just about Gittoes literally witnessing many horrific situations over time. It is also about his role as artist-witness, performed through acts of creating subsequent drawings and paintings, also over time. The idea of persistent witnessing is conveyed via multiple iterations of witnessing occurring through the physical presence of the artist in a process that, as Gittoes notes, forces him “to re-live events as I go back into the experiences to interpret”.95 Immersive human presence and agency are evident in this idea of persistent and performative witnessing, in ways that intersect with Juval Noah Harari’s notions of “flesh-witnessing”.96 For Harari, the “flesh-witness” is someone who actually experiences something, where the source of their “knowledge is experience rather than data”.97
In addition to material published by others, I also reference Gittoes’ autobiography Blood Mystic (2016).98 This publication is an assemblage of recounts of events, transcriptions of notes made in the past, and various photographs of his work and life. My primary research includes a long interview with Gittoes at his 2016 Brisbane exhibition “Night Vision”.99 Given that this exhibition was more like a survey show the opportunity to discuss recent, as well as older paintings, through a militarised technology research lens was valuable. This is particularly because, despite his decades-long presence in the international and Australian art scenes as an exhibitor and an award recipient, no major institutional art gallery holds a
91 Herwitz, Aesthetics, Art, and Politics in a Global World. 92 Ibid., 164. 93 Ibid., 165. 94 Ibid., 166. 95 George Gittoes and Phong Bui, “In Conversation with George Gittoes,” The Brooklyn Rail, September 5, 2011, accessed June 3, 2017, http://brooklynrail.org/2011/09/art/in-conversation-with-george-gittoes. Interviewed by skype with The Brooklyn Rail publisher Phong Bui and his students. 96 Yuval Noah Harari, “Scholars, Eyewitnesses, and Flesh-Witnesses of War: A Tense Relationship,” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 7, no. 2 (June, 2009): 217. 97 Ibid., 218. 98 Gittoes, Blood Mystic (2016). 99 Gittoes, interview with the author, (2016). 31 selection of his major canvas paintings.100 Smith, in 2014 succinctly notes that despite Gittoes being one of the most internationally active Australian artists his “work is rarely seen on the walls of Australian art museums”.101 The National Gallery of Australia has the largest holding of Gittoes’ art; drawings, prints, sketchbooks and photographs. The gallery bought its first major painting, The Preacher (1995) in 2016. This painting, based on a scene Gittoes witnessed at the 1995 Kibeho massacre, Rwanda, won the 1995 Blake Prize for Religious Art.102 The Australian War Memorial holds the largest number of canvas paintings with six in its collection.103 My primary research also includes diarised notes and unpublished stories Gittoes has written and sent to me.104 Other unpublished archival material includes photographs he took of surveillance drones in Iraq during the second Gulf War.105 My primary research contributes important new scholarship on the artist, with my militarised technology research approach offering a novel way to both expand and deepen existing research. This opens new ways to contextualise Gittoes’ paintings and practice within Australian art history, as well as global cultural approaches to contemporary war and technology.
Regarding available literature on Cattapan’s practice, the primary text is the 2008 monograph Jon Cattapan: Possible Histories by art historian Chris McAuliffe.106 Published before Cattapan went to Timor Leste, the book covers developments in his work from student days until 2008. McAuliffe examines how Cattapan’s painting technique and processes changed over the years, developing into a signature style that features cyber simulation-like spectral markings over more loosely painted amorphous backgrounds. In this thesis I examine how and why this signature style has changed again since Cattapan’s return from Timor Leste. McAuliffe’s comprehensive commentary covers Cattapan’s interest in visually exploring the figure in space, his fascination with cities, and with time, how he visually articulates his concerns about the world. The chapter “Information Drift” is
100 Ascertained from accessing online collection data from the National Gallery of Australia and state galleries. 101 Bernard Smith, “George Gittoes: Morality and Art,” in George Gittoes: I Witness (Hazelhurst: Hazelhurst Regional Gallery and Arts Centre, 2014). 15. 102 Gittoes had also won the Blake Prize in 1992. 103 Australian War Memorial, “Collections,” accessed May 21, 2017, https://www.awm.gov.au/search/all/?query=george+gittoes&op=Search&format=list&rows=20§ion%5B0 %5D=collections&filter%5Btype%5D=Art. 104 George Gittoes, BM2, (Blue Dog) Control Through Fear (Unpublished diaries sent by email to the author 2015); George Gittoes, The Black Paintings and Night Vision Comics, sent by email to the author, 2017); George Gittoes, “War Dog Comic” (unpublished story sent to the author in an email, May 7, 2017). 105 Sketchbook shown to the author at the launch of Blood Mystic at QAGOMA, Brisbane, October 22, 2016. 106 McAuliffe, Jon Cattapan: Possible Histories (2008). 32 particularly useful for my research, as it highlights Cattapan’s interest in digital technology and data, and his quest to represent it with paint.107
There are some texts that directly engage with night vision technology in Cattapan’s practice. In 2011, Cattapan wrote a short article “Night Vision Goggles” in which he describes the experience of using night vision technology in Timor Leste.108 He does not elaborate on the use or development of militarised technology, but his reflections on the effects of wearing night vision glasses provide insights into his treatment of subject-matter, use of colour and paint in subsequent paintings. Since returning from Timor Leste, Cattapan has attracted attention from numerous media sources in short articles, exhibition reviews, catalogue essays, written and broadcast interviews.109 However, whilst some authors note the influence of night vison glasses, few extrapolate into broader and deeper discussions about militarised technology and its ramifications for war and humanity. Kyle Weise, in his article “Jon Cattapan: Data-Scapes” (2014) briefly draws together the idea of data-scape and “militarised modes of perception” but does not elaborate into broader discussions relating to war and militarised technology now or into the future.110 Here, it is interesting to note Alex Anderson’s review of A Century of Australian War Art (2015). This exhibition, curated by the Australian War Memorial, was shown at the National World War 1 Museum and Memorial in Kansas City, USA.111 Anderson responds to Cattapan’s series Night Vision Studies VII, XV and XVI (2009) by succinctly penetrating and then isolating how the three paintings reveal the significant role technology plays in warfare, including increasing technological mediation of “human capability”.112 Unfortunately, the article is not long and there is only one paragraph devoted to Cattapan’s work. Even though Cattapan’s paintings were included in an Australian war art exhibition the national context did not divert Anderson from identifying how his work intersects with broader and global contemporary contexts.
107 Ibid., 133-163. 108 Cattapan, “Night Vision Goggles,” 41. 109 Rhonda Dredge, “Jon Cattapan: Staying Afloat,” Art Monthly Australia 262 (August 2013): 41-43; Peter Hill, “The Contemporary Art of War: Jon Cattapan, Lyndell Brown and Charles Green,” Art and Australia 47, no. 3 (March 1, 2010): 408- 09; Jon Cattapan, Lauren Webster, and Bridie MacGillicuddy, “Jon Cattapan as an Official War Artist, East Timor, 11-25 July 2008, interviewed by Australian War Memorial art curators Bridie MacGillicuddy and Laura Webster,” August 8, 2008, audio recording, 94:25, Australian War Memorial, accessed September 2016. https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/C1224197?search; Louise Turley, Artists at Work: Jon Cattapan, produced and directed by Louise Turley, ABC (2009) film; Cattapan and McLintock, “Extended Interview” (2009). 110 Kyle Weise, “Jon Cattapan, Data-Scapes,” Eyeline 78/79 (2014): 42-48. 111 Alex Andersen, “Rare Chance to View Aussie War Art,” KCMETROPOLIS. Org: Kansas City’s Online Journal of the Arts (September 1, 2015), accessed September 14, 2016. http://kcmetropolis.org/issue/september-2-2015/article/rare-chance-to-view-aussie-war-art. 112 Ibid. 33
In addition to reviewing existing literature regarding Cattapan’s paintings and practice, I have conducted primary research that significantly adds to extant scholarship. Primary research included a substantial interview with Cattapan, conducted in his Melbourne studio in 2016.113 Being with Cattapan in his work and creative environment provided valuable insights into his painting practice, as well as his intellectual and visceral reactions to his experiences in Timor Leste. The militarised technology research lens taken by this thesis provided a focus for our discussion. It also provided a novel lens through which to view finished and in-process paintings in the studio. We also discussed Cattapan’s art materials, painting processes and studio practices. My professional practice as a visual artist prompted specific questions about both. For example, I was particularly interested in Cattapan’s reactions to and manipulations of dripping paint. This thesis also draws on extensive viewings of Cattapan’s works held in public collections, dealerships, and private collections. Like Gittoes, major state galleries predominantly hold works on paper by Cattapan. The largest holding of 168 works, including a few large paintings, is held in the National Gallery of Victoria’s collection. This kind of local curatorial support, however, has not been the case with Gittoes who was born in New South Wales and whose Australian studio is also in the state. The collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales includes Gittoes’ twenty four etchings The Hotel Kennedy Suite (1971, 1990), plus two pen and ink works on paper. Currently, it has not collected any major paintings.
Methodology
This thesis employs a pluralist, cross-disciplinary art history and cultural studies methodology that draws upon theoretical, historical and technical literature. The originality of the research is enhanced by this broad cross-disciplinary frame. Each chapter pivots around close visual analyses of specific paintings, and scrutiny of the artists’ painting processes. Analyses of the artists’ paintings are supplemented by research into the technical aspects of drones and night vision technology. This correlates the artists’ iconography with technical written and visual documentation relating to the operation and appearance of drones, their payloads and other components. Research into the history and technical aspects of night vision technology is similarly rewarding. This kind of cross-disciplinary academic – technical research has meant that I have examined sources not usually
113 Jon Cattapan, recorded interview with the author, Melbourne (October 6, 2016). 34 associated with art history. However, in order to make justifiable claims about Gittoes’ and Cattapan’s paintings, it is necessary research. This is particularly so given that neither artist simply copies or illustrates things they have seen. Neither do they copy photographs they have taken.
My interviews with Gittoes and Cattapan, and the visit to Cattapan’s studio, are critical elements of my research methodology. They offered an opportunity to ask specific questions about technology, and about the artists’ responses to using and witnessing militarised technology, not captured in existing literature on the artists. Discourse on their work does not explicitly pursue how their works engage with issues such as drone technology, night vision technology’s association with militarised surveillance, and the operation of war now and in the future. Additionally, interviews with Gittoes and Cattapan, and observing Cattapan in his studio, contribute to a sense of the artists’ presence in this thesis. This human presence and voice intensifies the criticality surrounding questions relating to the dehumanising processes of contemporary and future militarised technology.
Significantly, the development of, and scientific research into, militarised technology is largely future focussed. This ensures military forces and their governments can maintain advantage over known enemies and those that may become enemies in the future. The economic imperative for manufacturers and suppliers of military technology to look to the future is a significant contributor to their business models. Perspectives provided by theorists such as Baudrillard, Virilio, Chamayou and Weizman offer ways to examine accelerating developments in technology designed to not only meet present demands, but also those perceived to be necessary in the future. These theoretical perspectives help to draw together the technical, art historical and cultural studies cross-disciplinary approach of this thesis in ways that also inform, and are informed by, aesthetic and conceptual examinations of Gittoes’ and Cattapan’s paintings and practices.
35
Chapter One
George Gittoes: Scoping the Horror of War
This chapter investigates George Gittoes’ representations of night vision technology in paintings and drawings created since 1993, when he first used night vision glasses in Somalia. I also examine his depictions of unmanned airborne drones in works completed since the second Gulf War. The aim is to examine how Gittoes’ paintings track and critique the use and development of militarised technology, particularly contemporary militarised vision technology and its implications. The historical trajectory evident in Gittoes’ paintings sparks questions about the present and future role persistent surveillance plays in the kill chain that leads to targeting and attack by airborne drones. Against a backdrop of accelerating and increasingly autonomous military capabilities, I ask: how do Gittoes’ paintings, informed by decades-long experiences in war and conflict zones, contribute to current debates about militarised technology?
To answer this question, I closely analyse a key selection of Gittoes’ paintings and drawings, including Night Vision 2015 (2015) (Fig 2), Simurg (2008) (Fig. 1), The Artist (1996) (Fig. 3), Discarded (1995) (Fig. 4) and Why Am I Here? (1997) (Fig. 12). In the last part of the chapter, I analyse Mojo Rising (2009) (Fig. 5) and Charon (2009-2010) (Fig. 6), two hallucinatory and nightmarish paintings linked to Gittoes’ fictional writings Descendence Stories (partly published online 2014).114 Theoretical scaffolding for my analyses of Gittoes’ paintings is provided by cultural theorist Paul Virilio’s critiques of technology and media theorist Mark Andrejevic’s appropriation of the airborne military drone as a figure for ubiquitous digital connectivity and surveillance. I also conscript philosopher Gregorie Chamayou’s scrutiny of the military drone and cultural critic Eyal Weizman’s concept of the verticality of threat to examine how Gittoes’ paintings, and painting practice, traverse the current and future topology of the horror of war.
114 George Gittoes, “Descendence Stories” (2014). These stories are part of a trilogy, unpublished diaries called Night Vision. The stories and paintings have been created over time since the Kibeho massacre, Rwanda, 1995.
36
Night Vision 2015
Two versions of Night Vision 2015 (2015) were painted for the Sydney Peace Prize, which Gittoes won in 2015. One image was used for banners and the other used as an image for posters. Both paintings refer to night vision glasses and drones. Whilst drawing upon Gittoes’ experiences of using night vision glasses, the Night Vision 2015 paintings also reflect visits to the tribal belt in Northern Pakistan and Gittoes’ life in Jalalabad, where surveillance and weaponised drones proliferate. In his diaries Gittoes notes that, “every 15 minutes we see an unmanned drone pass overhead, and spy drones buzz around above our garden, continuously”.115 Against a black background both Night Vision 2015 paintings depict a head sporting long wild yellow hair. In each painting the head’s face is obscured by an array of cross-hair marked rectangles painted over its eyes, mouth and one ear. The protruding prongs of blue night vision glasses further the obscuration. Positioned in front of the face, a white dove with outstretched wings looks agitated. The presence of two blue guns indicate direct danger. Gittoes has painted both paintings in a flatter, less textured manner than other works discussed in this chapter. He has used this technique, picked up from pop-artist Martin Sharp, because it affords better reproduction for promotional resources, such as banners and posters.116 Gittoes’ intent to optimise the promotion quality of the image, to help disseminate the Sydney Peace Prize’s message, adds to the political dimension already evident in his treatment of subject-matter. Whilst both paintings are similar in content there are differences in orientation, one long and rectangular for the banner, and the other smaller and portrait oriented, for the poster.
In this chapter, I focus on the long rectangular Night Vision 2015 (Fig. 2) painting. The crosshair marked black rectangles painted over the head’s mouth, eyes and one ear take on the appearance of camera or computer screens. They suggest that screens in the cyber age have metaphorically become the twenty-first century’s ‘windows’. Two horizontal red lines frame the entire composition making the painting a complex play of screens within a screen. However, the two guns and the night vision glasses signpost the malign nature of the smaller screens’ crosshair markings. It becomes apparent that Gittoes is referring to drone camera scopes or computer screens used for surveillance and targeting by remote pilots. The screens over the head’s eyes, mouth and an ear evoke Chamayou’s suggestion in his book Drone Theory (2015) that, “Drones have not only eyes, but also ears and many other organs”.117 This
115 Gittoes, BM2, (Blue Dog) Control Through Fear, 4. 116 Gittoes, interview with the author (2016). 117 Chamayou, Drone Theory, 41. 37 deceptive anthropomorphising description refers to an “unmanned” drone’s apparent capacity to ‘listen’ and ‘see’ using its cameras, other devices and networks to identify individuals or groups whose physical, online or communication behaviour flags attention. Whilst identification can be personalised for direct targeting, it may also mean that patterns of behaviour provoke a ‘signature strike’.118 In either case the drone can quickly turn from sensor mode to killing mode when Hellfire or guided missiles are launched. Gittoes’ dexterous ‘play’ with multiple screens poses the question; is Night Vision 2015 a representation of a close-up screen image of a drone’s victim, an image of a drone operator surrounded by screens, a drone’s surveillance and targeting payload, or all three, simultaneously?
The screens painted over the head’s mouth, eyes and ear are black, except for white crosshair markings. Their empty blackness may indicate that drones, in fact, cannot see or hear everything, perhaps confirming Andrejevic’s observation that the neo-pragmatic processes of contemporary technological interactivity elide “the realm of the subconscious, desire, and psychoanalytic subject”.119 Andrejevic uses the term “neo-pragmatism” to explain the difference between new “automated processes” of data collection and analysis, and traditional modes of discourse, and how each conducts interpretation.120 In terms of the drone, a target is not necessarily a subject that speaks. Rather, its generated and automatically collected data, acts as a pragmatic voiceless dehumanised proxy. Director of America’s National Security Agency (NSA) from 1999-2005, Lieutenant General Michael Hayden made a statement in 2014 that highlights the disturbing significance of the pragmatic data proxy approach. He said “We kill people based on metadata”.121
In Night Vision 2015, pragmatic data-identity and identification are visually mocked by the way Gittoes plays with ambiguous and interchangeable personas. The head’s wild long blonde hair and beard indicate that Gittoes has made himself a visual prop for the painting. However, this does not mean he opportunistically appropriates the voice or cultural identity of particular characters, perpetrators or victims. Rather, as a long-term witness to war and its multiple players, Gittoes head acts as a prop that facilitates role-playing of multiple identities. These include facades that represent non-human players, such as drones. Here, there are two important factors to consider. The first is Gittoes’ experience as a performer. The second is
118 Ibid., 47. 119 Andrejevic, “Theorizing Drones and Droning Theory,” (2016), 40. 120 Ibid. 121 Michael Hayden, The Johns Hopkins Foreign Affairs Symposium Presents: The Price of Privacy: Re- Evaluating the NSA, Johns Hopkins University debate with General Michael Hayden and Dr. David Cole, moderated by Major Garrett on April 1, 2014 (Johns Hopkins University, April 7, 2014), video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kV2HDM86XgI. 38 thinking about his role as witness, not only as an eye-witness but also a “flesh-witness” where, as Harari explains, authority is “based not on the observation of facts but on having undergone personal experience”.122 Gittoes’ decades-long physical immersion in life-threatening war and conflict environments positions him as a flesh-witness, in ways where eye-witnessing is assimilated into an affective whole body and mind experience. Gittoes’ performing and flesh- witnessing experiences combine in his complex multiple role-playing, rather than appropriative, depictions where he uses himself as a visual prop. In this capacity he is able to give expression to multiple voices and viewpoints in the one image. Here, Harari’s description of the flesh- witness as a messenger, “speaking on behalf of countless others who did not live to tell the tale” helps explain some of Gittoes’ intent.123 Arguably the role of “messenger” is also a performative one.
A review of Gittoes’ history as a performer helps to explain how and why he uses himself as a prop to visually articulate the horror he has witnessed. In the early 1970s, Gittoes performed as a clown (Fig. 7) with the Yellow House artists’ group he helped set up in Sydney with fellow- artist Martin Sharp. He also made puppets and produced puppet shows. He continues to make puppets whose heads are variously human-machine and anamorphic conglomerations. Many present as other-worldy robotic beings with features morphed by embedded weaponry. At the Jalalabad Yellow House a circus has been formed. Accompanied by a trick performing monkey called Dali, Gittoes often leads the circus. His flowing Afghani garments, and long beard and hair, grown in order to fit in with the local population, make him look like a wizard from a fairy tale.124 Additionally he performs, along with local performers, in Pashtun films the Yellow House produces with local filmmakers and editors, whom Gittoes and partner Hellen Rose have trained. These productions have helped resurrect the Pashtun film industry after the Taliban’s destruction of it.125 Pattendon incisively describes the significance of the performative aspect of Gittoes’ work, stating that Gittoes is an “unstoppable storyteller, using narrative to get himself into and out of unlikely situations. This performative gesture underlies his entire practice”.126
In Night Vision 2015, a significant story element is the elision of subject-hood by screen- based targeting technology reliant on data. Gazing into the screens, it is evident that there
122 Harari, “Scholars, Eyewitnesses, and Flesh-Witnesses of War: A Tense Relationship,” 217. 123 Ibid., 222. 124 Gittoes, Blood Mystic, 257. 125 More information about the circus and the Pashtun film industry is available in Gittoes’ autobiography Blood Mystic, his documentaries, particularly Miscreants of Taliwood (2009), and website. Also, in David A. Ross’ catalogue essay “Unanswerable Questions: The Film Practice of George Gittoes,” in George Gittoes: I Witness (Hazelhurst: Hazelhurst Regional Gallery and Arts Centre, 2014), 25-31. 126 Rod Pattendon, “George Gittoes: I Witness,” in George Gittoes: I Witness (Hazelhurst: Hazelhurst Regional Gallery and Arts Centre, 2014), 17. 39 is nothing behind them. Rather than being “eyes” and “ears” or “other organs” the screens appear more like entries to a dark abyss where distance, both literal and metaphoric, loses perspective. Gittoes’ prop-head bears witness to this. Of Night Vision 2015 Gittoes has said: “Soldiers target with laptops as remote death streams onto computer screens, detached from the real blood that splatters the streets and fields”.127 The remote manner of scoping and attack elides the victim’s subject-hood as the warfighter’s detachment from the reality of bloodletting, and the aftermath of destruction, impeaches their own. The black screens in Night Vision 2015 represent the fact that neither victim nor perpetrator can really ‘see’ each other. They also suggest that the soldier-pilot or warfighter loses sight of him or herself. Whilst the victim’s subject-hood is mortally annihilated, the remote pilot becomes a symbol of what Enemark calls a “post –heroic” age where moral and ethical issues associated with just war theories are eroded.128
Armed and “unmanned” drones create a “radical asymmetry” between combatant capabilities that challenges traditional notions of military morality.129 When drone attacks occur in places such as Yemen and Northern Pakistan, where defensive technology is comparatively unsophisticated, there is little chance to warn people let alone retaliate. Human traits of sacrifice, courage and bravery are seen to be expunged by drone operators, and their military and political masters, in a determination for “risk-free killing”.130 Radical asymmetric capabilities that disallow reciprocity rupture notions of honourable conduct in the battlefield, shearing open a moral and ethical abyss. The prop-head, in Night Vision 2015, again bears witness and in doing so, shows the viewer the inside of this dark abyss, that also doubles as a burial chamber. Both victim and perpetrator reside in the black darkness. The question is posed, is humanity drawn into the abyss too?
Virilio describes the screen in Open Sky (1997) as “the square horizon” that causes “confusion of near and far, of inside and outside, disorders of common perception that will gravely affect the way we think”.131 His warning of eroded perception is represented in Gittoes’ black and depthless screens. Social and cultural theorist Mark Featherstone’s description of Virilio’s ‘square-horizon-screen’ as a “negative abyss” provides a further way to understand the black screens and background as signs of an abyss.132 Featherstone
127 Gittoes in Mitchell, Night Vision: George Gittoes, 118. 128 Enemark, Armed Drones and the Ethics of War, 6-7. 129 Ibid., 7. 130 Ibid., 6. 131 Virilio, Open Sky, 26. 132 Featherstone, “The Negative Abyss” (2015): 211. 40 writes in The Negative Abyss: Surface, Depth, and Violence in Virilio and Stiegler (2015) that Virilio’s “squared horizon” becomes a “kind of thoughtless dystopia organized around the collapse of the endurance of distance and depth into absolute proximity and surface”.133 The flat surface of the screen protects the remote drone pilot from destruction and the literal mess of mortal death, the victim’s and his or her own. But, military slang terms like “bug splat”, used to describe how a drone attack looks on a computer screen, signal Featherstone’s “thoughtless dystopia”.134 The squashed insect analogy metaphorically transforms the computer screen into a boot, flyswat or the windscreen of a speeding vehicle covered in the smashed remains of insects annihilated upon impact. The Kafkaesque analogy also transforms human victims into insects and those that target them into exterminators.
The screen, however, does not need to be cleaned of its virtual “bug splat” in the same way as a boot or windscreen need to be cleaned. A computer’s on/off, shut down and restart mechanisms ‘clean’ in ways that spell the arrival of what Featherstone calls the “technoabyss” where the “destruction of the human” is summoned by loss or mutation of identity.135 The indeterminable and interchangeable identity of the head in Night Vision 2015 plays with this sense of loss and mutation. Again Gittoes’ prop-head bears witness. The night vision glasses and long spikey yellow hair create an insect-like “bug splat” appearance, but the glasses and guns also convey the exterminator’s apparatus. The loss or mutation of human identity is further explained by Virilio’s observation that the “life-size is no longer the yard stick of the real. The real is hidden in the reduction of images on the screen”.136 In other words, the human loses relational perspective in the “technoabyss”. Colloquially calling death and destruction “bug splat” is evidence of this. Virilio’s observation that the screen has “optical and geometric properties that suggest a window or frame of a painting” helps to explain the subterfuge that is suggested in the ambiguous way the various screens in Night Vision 2015 are portrayed.137 Whilst looking like windows or frames the screens are also prosthetic-like devices designed to calibrate human perception to a reduction of the life-size in the squared horizon of the digital and cyber world. With its military resonance Night Vision 2015 exposes the calibration as a dark and depthless abyss-like compensation for the real.
133 Ibid., 212. 134 Danchev, “Bug Splat: The Art of the Drone” (2016). 135 Ibid., 219. 136 Virilio, Open Sky, 26. 137 Ibid., 32. 41
Virilio’s 1997 statement that the “square horizon” of the screen will cause grave changes in the way we think, reverberates twenty years later with Gregoire Chamayou’s commentary. He proposes that using drones to “kill from a distance” reorients concepts of political and geographical terrains, creates a “crisis in military ethos”, dislocates self-reflective mechanisms, and promulgates necroethical issues associated with remote “risk-free” killing.138 In other words, the way we think has been “gravely” affected and an outcome is that peace remains remote, elided. It seems lost in the abyss where Virilio’s “disorders of common perception” are virtually mediated via the “neo-pragmatic” processes of technological interactivity identified by Andrejevic.
Yet, in Night Vision 2015 the painted dove plays a role as a symbol of peace. It flutters below the green screen, which could represent a twenty-first century window avatar, simulation, decoy, ambush or escape route. Maybe the dove was enticed from the green landscape into a dark kill zone, maybe its escape is nigh or maybe there is a trick to capture it? Its stance indicates imminent action of some kind, especially as one of the guns seems to target it and the green ‘window-screen’. Gittoes offers clues to the dove’s role in the following statement: “The First World War industrialised killing but in 2015 it is computerised and with night vision it can target anyone anywhere. Like the dove in my painting we need to use art and creativity to confront this blind military madness”.139
Gittoes’ observation that targeting is undertaken by the blind and mad is reflected in Night Vision 2015. It gives substance to Virilio’s warning that the “square horizon” of the screen can cause “disorders of common perception”. The crosshair scoping marks on black screens reveals blind intent. The painting also demonstrates Chamayou’s claim of a “crisis in military ethos” where traditional ideas of courage, sacrifice and heroism are altered by the transition from “industrialised” to “computerised” killing that Gittoes has observed. The painting foreshadows the future, as Gittoes says, the “painting is about the challenges to peace in a digital age that is rapidly turning robotic”.140 No wonder the dove appears ready for action, its flapping wings about to thrust downwards to propel movement. Like the artist, the dove seems agitated about a future where the machinery of war and conflict becomes increasingly robotic with autonomous systems requiring minimum or no human input.
138 Chamayou, Drone Theory, 95, 111, 119, 127. 139 Gittoes in Mitchell, Night Vision: George Gittoes, 118. 140 Ibid. 42
Picasso’s Dove of Peace (1949) (Fig. 8), chosen as the emblem for the first International Peace Conference in Paris in 1949, can be contrasted with Gittoes’ dove in Night Vision 2015 in ways that shed light on war and peace in the digital and cyber age.141 Although Picasso subsequently produced a number of more stylised peace doves, normally in flight like Gittoes’ dove, his first dove is rendered realistically, perched on the ground, wings folded.142 The peace dove’s historical narrative injects a poignant gravitas into Gittoes’ Night Vision 2015. The use of both the landscape and portrait oriented Night Vision 2015 paintings as emblems for the 2015 Sydney Peace Prize, an international award, adds to this gravitas. Sixty-six years after Picasso’s first peace dove Gittoes’ dove, depicted in high-flight, symbolises peace’s ongoing precarious situation. Picasso’s 1949 dove bore witness to the profound shift nuclear weapons brought to “industrialised” war. Gittoes’ dove acts as a witness to another shift, one where “computerised” killing foreshadows the next revolution in warfare, the use of increasingly autonomous weapons.143 Here, the dove and Gittoes’ prop-head are both witnesses, in their own ways drawing attention to “blind military madness”.144
Gittoes’ dexterity in generating multiple visual cues triggers further reflection upon peace’s current and future plight. In Night Vision 2015, the head of blind black screens seems oblivious to the dove’s presence, unable to see or detect it. This is despite allusions to aural and vision capabilities, albeit in the form of prosthetic-like apparatus. The blindness is made more disturbing because even though the dove is positioned in front of the screens it is not reflected in any of them. The image suggests that the head of screens, simultaneously role- playing a drone and a drone’s target, cannot see or identify peace. For the dead, peace is not found on Earth and for military forces, peace is possibly not only invisible, it is also not even imaginable. Night Vision 2015, therefore, presents ‘evidence’ that the human eye as well as the mind’s eye of imagination can be blinded by contemporary militarised technology. However, although the dead and the military machine cannot see or possibly imagine peace, the artist can, and he presents it symbolically to the viewer in the form of a dove. The urgency apparent in the dove’s outstretched wings, as it realises it has not been seen or imagined by the apparatus of war, warns us of a future where peace may have no presence, even in imagination. The apparatus of networked militarised vision technology is exposed as a
141 Friends of Peace Monuments, “Peace Art of Pablo Picasso,” accessed August 30, 2016, http://peace.maripo.com/m_picasso.htm. 142 Ibid. 143 Future of Life Institute, “Autonomous Weapons: Open Letter from AI and Robotics Researchers,” accessed September 8, 2015, http://futureoflife.org/open-letter-autonomous-weapons/. 144 Gittoes in Mitchell, Night Vision: George Gittoes, 118. 43 means to incrementally exclude, and possibly annihilate the human being. This represents an extreme kind of blinding which reframes war and its future in ways that proffer perpetual war as the norm.
Two blue guns at the bottom of Night Vision 2015 point up into the painting, almost cradling the head of screens. The presence of the guns poses malign possibilities. Their blood-red tipped barrels mirror the blood-red outline of the head’s mouth-screen. It appears as if the mouth has triumphantly kissed the bloodied guns. Here, Gittoes theatrically channels the actions of an old fashioned wild-west gunslinger blowing smoke from guns after successful bloody shots. In doing so he places the image within a gun-toting cultural vernacular where frontier and urban violence, terrorism, war and filmic history collide, as they slip into a contested technologically weaponised future. By alluding to a gun toting vernacular, Gittoes places contemporary war and its militarised technology into an historical narrative that links them to maverick lawlessness. Night Vision 2015 draws attention to the fetishisation of weapons, and their capabilities, evident in popular culture and the slick promotional media produced for companies that manufacture militarised technology. But, along with the red horizontal lines that frame the entire composition, the red tipped guns and the red framed screen covertly draw attention to the deadliness of a drone’s persistent scoping and targeting capabilities. Gittoes enhances this by painting the night vision glasses the same blue as the two guns. Additionally, the pointy appearance of the guns and the night vision goggles not only makes them protrusive but also intrusive in ways that indicate how screen- based night-vision surveillance and targeting technologies aid lethal weaponry that “can target anyone anywhere”.145 Fetishisation of weapons is revealed as a dangerous, albeit seductive, contrivance to militarise imaginations.
Night Vision 2015 cannily identifies a political ‘blindness’ to what Enemark has described as a new global arms race where developments in militarised technology are driven by perceived military needs in future war.146 An example of this kind of thinking is demonstrated in the opening speech of the “Land Forces: Australia, Asia, Indo-Pacific 2016” conference held in Adelaide, South Australia. In this speech, Lieutenant General Angus Campbell, Australian Chief of Army, talked about the importance of science, engineering and technology research “informed by concepts of future of war”.147 A forum held in conjunction
145 Gittoes in Mitchell, Night Vision: George Gittoes, 118. 146 Enemark, Armed Drones and the Ethics of War, 20. 147 Defence News, Land Forces Conference: Opening Address 2016, opened by Lieutenant General Angus Campbell, Australian Chief of Army, Defence News, September 5, 2014, video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_2TNIbjeRM. “Land Forces: Australia, Asia- Indo-Pacific 2016” was held 44 with the event was called “Future Land Force Conference 2016”.148 This focus on the future of war indicates an imagination that has been militarised. Whilst defence and security are bandied as motivations for military preparedness, neo-liberal market forces also exhort militarised imaginations. The “Land Forces: Australia, Asia, Indo-Pacific 2016” conference, for example, was a defence forum as well as a trade show.149 A future focus requisitions ongoing research and development for new military products and updates on existing ones. Here perpetual war promises a perpetual market, and vice versa.
Night Vision 2015, however, presents the viewer with multiple visual cues that critically disrupt militarised imagination’s advancement. It becomes apparent that the painting subversively offers various perspectives, for example those of a victim, a drone operator, the artist as witness, even the dove. However, these can be amplified to encompass military, civilian, human, machine, legal, art, science, peace and war perspectives. This broader cosmology can prod or perhaps re-awaken human imagination in ways that provoke questions about “concepts of future war”. In doing so the pervasive infiltration of militarised imagination as a driver of the neo-liberal market capitalist project is exposed for scrutiny. The painting becomes a ‘soft’ weapon, contrarily requiring no digital or cyber technology to wield its message, the message of the “flesh-witness”. The artist is revealed as a complex and seditious warrior who harnesses the past as he critiques the present and reaches into the future, covertly tracking where militarised imagination has already infiltrated.
Vision, Night Vision, Eye in the Sky and Imagination
Night Vision 2015 offers a critique of night vision technology, charging it with a broader and complicit role in militarised technologies that ‘afflict’ a blind military madness which ultimately predisposes imagination to hijacking. Given the serious nature of this charge the word ‘vision’ in the title Night Vision 2015 needs further scrutiny. Gittoes has used ‘night vision’ in the titles of other paintings including, Night Vision Baidoa (1993-2016) and Night Vision (1998). He has also named exhibitions “Night Vision”, including his 2016 Brisbane exhibition
at the Adelaide Convention Centre, September 6-8, 2016. Other examples of combined defence conference and trade show are the “Military Engineering,” conference, London, United Kingdom, February 2 – March 2, 2017, accessed June 16, 2017, https://militaryengineering.iqpc.co.uk/; “Air Warfare Symposium,” Orlando, Florida, United States, March 1-3, 2017, Air Force Association, accessed February 16, 2017, https://www.afa.org/airwarfare/home. 148 Land Defence Australia, “Land Forces 2016: Full Program,” accessed June 16, 2017, https://www.invenio.com.au/wp-content/uploads/Land-Forces-2016-Full-Program.pdf. 149 Ibid. 45 and his 2002 exhibition “Night Vision: The Artist as Witness” in Michigan, USA.150 Gittoes’ representations of night vision glasses and their effects present multiple interpretations that question how night vision technology specifically, and augmented militarised vision generally, affect notions of vision.
The term ‘night vision’ is also applied to an individual’s natural capacity to see in the dark without the aid of technological devices. Night vision testing of military recruits and ongoing testing of warfighters across defence personnel is still undertaken.151 For contemporary warfighters, natural night vision abilities are considered particularly important for those who use night vision technology. As Australian Defence Force guidelines stipulate: “Good night vision is essential for all members of the ADF, in particular those personnel required to operate in the field using tactical lighting or night vision devices. Poor or degraded night vision could be a major safety concern in ADF operations”.152 Night vision devices are “electro-optical devices that intensify existing light instead of relying on a light source of their own”.153 Infrared, ultraviolet and visible spectrum photons are converted to electrons for intensification. In this state they are then re-converted to photons by a phosphor screen.154 This screen is coloured green because the “human eye can differentiate more shades of green that other phosphor colours”.155 Hence the green glow of technologically augmented night vision.
Examples of night vision technology include night vision glasses or monocles worn by individual soldiers, gun scopes and airborne military drone surveillance equipment. Mechanisms to see in the dark were developed by various military forces during World War 1, World War 11 and the Korean War.156 However, it was not until the Viet Nam War that night vision systems and devices, akin to current ones, were developed and used.157 Until
150 George Gittoes, “Night Vision,” Mitchell Fine Art Gallery, Brisbane, Queensland, July 27 – August 20, 2016. “Night Vision: The Artist as Witness” was held at the Institute of Humanities, University of Michigan, Michigan, United States, November 18 – 22, 2002. 151 Two examples of night vision testing - one from 1942 and one from the present. B.W. Rycroft, “Night Vision in the Army”, The British Medical Journal 2, no. 4271 (November 14, 1942): 576-77; Australian Defence Force, “Guidelines for the Examination by an Ophthalmologist or Optometrist” accessed February 10, 2017, http://www.oaansw.com.au/visionstds/ADF_Guidelines_General.pdf. 152 Australian Defence Force, “Guidelines for the Examination by an Ophthalmologist or Optometrist.” 153 “Night Vision Goggles (NVG),” Global Security.org, accessed August 26, 2016. http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/ground/nvg.htm. 154 More information is available at Stanford Computer Optics, Image Intensifier: Phosphor Screen, accessed August 30, 2016, http://www.stanfordcomputeroptics.com/technology/image-intensifier/phosphor-screen.html. 155 Defense Industry Daily, Through a Glass, Darkly: Night Vision Gives US Troops Edge, accessed August, 26, 2016, http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/through-a-glass-darkly-night-vision-gives-us-troops-edge-06047/. 156 Asia Pacific Defence Reporter (APDR), Night Vision/Land 53BR, accessed February 2, 2017, http://www.asiapacificdefencereporter.com/articles/77/Night-vision-LAND-53BR. 157 Lynn Jane Ho, “Night Vision Goggles: Moving from Military to Modern Day Applications,” Illumin: A Review of Engineering in Everyday Life XV11, no. 11 (August 4, 2016): 1. 46 recently the technology used in night vision scopes and glasses has remained analogue. However, recent developments in digital night vision devices introduce capabilities such as sharing of images and video across a network in real time.158 Another innovation is that wireless connection between a warfighter’s night vision glasses or monocle and his or her gun allows the warfighter to see without raising the gun to their eyes.159 This means the gun can be pointed around a corner, over the top of a wall or mounted on a robotic device, allowing the soldier to see the environmental situation and potential targets without being exposed. Advances in combining night vison and thermal imaging capabilities also augment a soldier’s ability to target and aim.
Cameras of various kinds can be equipped with night vision enabling technology. This includes drone visual sensors. Drones are equipped with wide area surveillance systems which consist of a multitude of sensors that can scan and scope in unison or independently. For example, the MQ-9 Reaper drone which provides “a unique capability to perform strike, coordination, and reconnaissance against high value, fleeting, and time-sensitive targets” is baseline-equipped with the, “Multi-Spectral Targeting System, which has a robust suite of visual sensors for targeting”.160 This suite includes an “infrared sensor, colour/monochromatic daylight TV camera, image-intensified TV camera, laser designator, and laser illuminator. The full-motion video from each of the imaging sensors can be viewed as separate video streams or fused”.161 The recently upgraded Gorgon Stare wide area surveillance system incorporates 368 small cameras, each “capable of capturing 5 million pixels” that can cover 100 square kilometres 24 hours a day.162
The colloquial term ‘eye in the sky’ seems like an apt description of an airborne drone. However, as Chamayou remarks, this electro-optical ‘eye’ converts vision to an act of “sighting” which “serves not to represent objects but to act upon them, to target them”.163 The cross-hair marked screen painted across the head’s eyes in Night Vision 2015
158 Valerie Insinna, “Special Operators to Test Digital Night Vision Goggles,” National Defense: Business and Industry News (December 2013), accessed February 2, 2017, http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/archive/2013/december/pages/specialoperatorstotestdigitalnightvisi ongoggles.aspx. 159 Kevin McCaney, “With Night Vision Goggles Soldiers Don’t Need a Scope to Aim,” Battlespace: Defense Systems (2015), accessed February 6, 2016. https://defensesystems.com/articles/2015/07/27/army-envg-iii- night-vision-goggles-wireless.aspx. 160 United States of America Airforce, “M-Q Reaper 9,” accessed May 7, 2016, http://www.af.mil/AboutUs/FactSheets/Display/tabid/224/Article/104470/mq-9-reaper.aspx. 161 Ibid. 162 Stephen Trimble, “Sierra Nevada Fields ARGUS-IS Upgrade to Gorgon Stare Pod,” Flight Global, accessed June 30, 2016. https://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/sierra-nevada-fields-argus-is-upgrade- to-gorgon-star-400978/. 163 Chamayou, Drone Theory, 114. 47 represents the head as a drone, an ‘eye in the sky’ equipped with targeting sights. This is from the point of view of the remote pilot surrounded by screens as well as the victim who is targeted. The head’s cross-hair marked screens painted across eyes, ear and mouth demonstrate a mediated sightlessness that mutes or literally kills other capacities of hearing and speech. Virilio’s notion of an electro-optical doping caused by an excess of stimulatory virtual effects provides a way to view the head of screens as doped, rendered disabled in a way that reveals the dehumanising pretext of technological augmentation.164 Additionally, Virilio notes that an excess of stimulation from the “virtual world of the screen” collapses attention to time, the hours of the day and months of the year.165
The collapse of human time and its rhythms is both caused and perpetuated by the affliction of a doped stupor brought about by excess of screen-delivered virtual stimuli. Night Vision 2015 reveals a contemporary dilemma, one where a state of doped stupor is presented as the only way to keep pace with the long range, long dwell and persistent surveillance capacities of airborne drones. Currently drones require around the clock ground system control operation where remote pilots and their sensor operators work back-to-back long shifts surrounded by screens in windowless bunkers. The ebb and flow of day and night fuse with the persistent surveillance of drones hovering above foreign lands in different time zones. Received images are what Virilio describes as synthetic images or statistical images, “that can only emerge thanks to rapid calculation of the pixels a computer graphics system can display on a screen”.166 The fusing of day and night across trans-national timeframes to keep pace with the ‘eye in the sky’s’ persistent transmission of “synthetic” imagery, received on screens in windowless bunkers, places human vision in a distressed position. The head of black screens and the disclosure of an awaiting abyss in Night Vision 2015 suggests the replacement of the human being is perhaps nigh.
The word ‘vision’, however, connotes not only seeing with an eye aided by technology or not, but also a mind’s eye where imagination can conjure a range of ‘visions’ from the utopic to the dystopic. Gittoes’ paintings prompt questions about how militarised augmented vision technology might mediate seeing in a way that influences the mind’s eye or imagination. Actually using augmented vision devices is not necessary for this to happen because experiences are gained vicariously via the infiltration of screen-based media into our daily lives. Night vision scenes can be viewed in popular and documentary films, televised news,
164 Virilio, The Great Accelerator, 33. 165 Ibid. 166 Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine (London and Bloomington: British Film Institute, 1994), 75. 48 online imagery, photographs and military promotional material. Mind’s eye vision, or imagination, facilitates abstract ideas such as political vision, economic vision and cultural vision. Arguably this also includes military vision where people project, through policy directives, future aims. This process could be described as a bureaucratic way to justify militarised imagination.
An example of policy focussed on future military needs is the November 2012 United States Department of Defense: Directive on “Autonomy in Weapon Systems” which sets guidelines for the future of autonomous weapon use and development.167 The United States Deputy Secretary of the Department of Defense, Bob Work, provides a further example of military vision and militarised imagination in a speech about the militarisation of space. At the 32nd Space Symposium, Colorado (2016), the “premier, global, commercial, civil, military and emergent space conference”, Deputy Secretary Work opens his speech with; “I don’t think I have to convince this crowd that our space capabilities are central to our ability to project power anywhere on the globe. They contribute to every aspect of the Joint (sic) multi- dimensional battle networks we assemble to fight and prevail over any opponent”.168 Military vision, expressed in policy directives or via grand statements, is designed and imagined by people to cast a wide net to garner financial and political support. Capturing the broader public imagination could be classified as an act of war itself.
Not Vision, but Scoping
An expanded idea of vision, that includes imaginative and biological processes of seeing, is not within ‘vision’ capabilities of night vision glasses or drones. The loose use of the word ‘vision’, in connection with technology, needs re-orienting to arrest the normalising and anthropomorphising effects of attributing non-human entities and processes with faculties of seeing. Even attributing blindness to technology comes under scrutiny when ideas of vision are examined this way. I propose the word ‘scope’ as an alternative to ‘vision’. For example ‘night scopes’ or ‘drone scoping’ are more apt descriptors of night vision technology and
167 United States of America Department of Defense, “Department of Defense Directive,” USD(P) Number, 3000.09 (Nov 21, 2012): 1, accessed 2016, http://www.dtic.mil/whs/directives/corres/pdf/300009p.pdf. 168 “32nd Space Symposium”, accessed September 1, 2016, http://www.spacesymposium.org/; Bob Work, “Deputy Secretary of Defense Speech: Remarks at the Space Symposium: As prepared for delivery by Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work, Colorado Springs, Colorado, April 12, 2016,” 32nd Space Symposium, accessed September 1, 2016, http://www.defense.gov/News/Speeches/Speech- View/Article/723498/remarks-at-the-space-symposium. 49 drone capabilities. As the black screens in Night Vision 2015 demonstrate, a drone’s array of visual sensors do not enable the drone to see or imagine. Rather, their crosshair markings expose their scoping intent. The ‘eye in the sky’ becomes a ‘scope in the sky’ and in doing so allusions to a kind of godly omnipotence evaporate.
Currently drones also require space asset support, such as GPS and communication satellite connectivity, to scope and target successfully. Given Deputy Secretary Work’s ‘visionary’ remarks that, “space capabilities are central to our ability to project power anywhere on the globe”, I propose that scope and scoping, rather than vision, provide a more objective lens to examine militarised technologies associated with increasingly persistent surveillance and targeting.169 The idea of projecting power “anywhere on the globe” conjures an infiltration via technology that disallows reciprocity.170 Here, Virilio’s contention that screen-based technology produces “sightless vision” helps to explicate this kind of infiltration.171 He proposes that, “sightless vision” is the “reproduction of intense blindness that will become the latest and last form of industrialisation: the industrialisation of the non-gaze”.172 Night Vision 2015 goes further by implying that the intensely blind “non- gaze” is not only industrialised, it is computerised and militarised.
Chamayou challenges the idea, endorsed by the military and developers of militarised technology, that a drone’s persistent surveillance capabilities represent a revolutionary process of sighting.173 His description of a drone as a “projectile-carrying machine” equipped with an “unblinking eye” that enables a “24 hour constant gaze” to undertake its “militarised manhunt” draws attention to anthropomorphic descriptors such as “eye” and “gaze”.174 He observes that the notion of an “unblinking eye” is a reduction, rather than an augmentation, of sight to a mechanised function of persistent and total surveillance that scopes in the present, while it also records and archives.175 He notes that archived material is not only re- traceable, but can be fused with other data for future use.176 These processes generate what Chamayou describes as a “schematization of forms of life” that could trigger pre-emptive actions of targeting and killing by a drone.177 Chamayou’s observations dispel notions of a
169 Ibid. 170 Ibid. 171 Virilio, The Vision Machine, 73. 172 Ibid. 173 Chamayou, Drone Theory, 38. 174 Ibid., 27, 32, 38. 175 Ibid., 38-39. 176 Ibid., 39-42. 177 Ibid., 42-44 50 revolution occurring in sighting in ways that reveal the mis-nomenclature of ‘sighting’ and ‘vision’ when applied to the airborne drone.
The head of black cross-haired screens in Night Vision 2015 offers insight into machine sightlessness, at the same time exposing the elision of human capacities as well as mortal death. The painting suggests that rather than a ‘sighting revolution’ perhaps it is more helpful to think about a revolution in scoping? A revolution where scoping mechanisms have infiltrated multiple operative levels of surveillance. These include not only watching, listening, monitoring and recording, but also data collection, storage, re-tracing, fusing and correlative anomaly detection processes facilitated by software and artificial intelligence. Andrejevic’s “neo-pragmatic” processes are at work in a cyber world where digitally scoped data generates proxy identities that can lead to pre-emptive targeting and potential killing. Andrejevic has also appropriated the figure of the drone, and its data collection, monitoring and targeting characteristics, to describe increasing surveillance and cyber networked interactivity within society more generally.178 He reveals the insidious nature of surveillance by suggesting that customers, subscribers, buyers and voters are ‘targeted’ by policy makers, businesses, advertisers and journalists. Although not in the same league as targeting with the purpose of tracking to kill, Andrejevic exposes how ubiquitous and persistent surveillance is normalised in ways that predispose society to militarised scoping.
Martin Jay, in his tome Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (1994) surveys the history of Western visuality through the lens of French philosophy and art. An examination of his book, over twenty years after it was published, reveals that Jay, in a way, forecasts the role of militarised scoping in twenty-first century visuality. Although he uses multiple words, or derivations of them, to examine vision and its historical narrative—eye, visual, optical, ocular, vision, see, looking and gaze—he uses “scopic regime” a number of times to describe vision’s cultural significance at various historical stages.179 He first used the term in an earlier piece, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity” (1988).180 He appropriates it from French film theorist Christian Metz’s examination of the cinematic experience in, The Imaginary Signifier (1982).181 Metz argues that the distance
178 Andrejevic, “Theorizing Drones and Droning Theory” (2016); Andrejevic, “The Droning of Experience” (2015). 179 Jay, Downcast Eyes, 70, 105, 154, 299. 180 Martin Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988), 3-23. 181 Ibid., 3; Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster and Alfred Guzzetti (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1982). 51 between the cinema viewer and the representation, via reproduction, of people and objects on a screen, constitutes a “cinematic scopic regime” that is voyeuristic.182 He differentiates a live-theatre audience from the cinema “spectator”.183 The former is co-present with the actors and object-actants on stage, whereas the latter is distanced, watching in a kind of solitude that signifies an almost prohibited voyeuristic gaze or desire.184 Metz calls this “cinematic scopophilia”, claiming that all voyeurism is sadistic, to greater or lesser degrees.185
Despite appropriating the term “scopic regime”, Jay does not address the idea of a voyeuristic scopic distance in twentieth century vision. Rather, in “Scopic Regimes of Modernity” he focusses on perspective and its history, nominating Cartesian perspectivalism as a “scopic regime”. In Downcast Eyes, he presents a more discursive account of vision yoked to the history of science, and philosophy. However, there is a link between perspective, voyeuristic vison, and scoping. This link is presented by the development of linear, single point perspective, where, as Jay points out, the eye becomes singular, “conceived in the manner of a lone eye looking through a peephole at a scene”.186 Although, Jay uses the word “peephole” in “Scopic Regimes of Modernity” and Downcast Eyes he does not extrapolate on its voyeuristic scoping implications.187 That the militarised drone is colloquially called an ‘eye in the sky’, rather than ‘eyes in the sky’, indicates monocular and peephole-like scoping qualities. Its wide area surveillance system, equipped with multiple cameras, is a gorgon of one-eyed apertures, scopes and peepholes persistently transmitting images and data to its remote crew. This represents terminal “scopophilia”, and the co- morbid always-present sadistic voyeurism Metz identified. Jay’s title Downcast Eyes refers to a balloon flight over “the landscape of recent French thought on vision and visuality”.188 Although binocular human vision is denoted in the use of the plural eyes, with Jay’s repeated references to scoping, the balloon also foreshadows the figure of the airborne drone. In Night Vision 2015 the cross-hair marked screens present the drone as a terminal symptom, turned mechanism, of militarised “scopophilia”.
Further questions and interpretations of Night Vision 2015 surface when the head is examined more closely. There is no neck, nor other indication that it is attached to a body. Again, Gittoes’
182 Metz, The Imaginary Signifier, 61. 183 Ibid., 64. 184 Ibid., 65. 185 Ibid. 186 Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” 7; Jay, Downcast Eyes, 127. 187 Ibid. 188 Jay, Downcast Eyes, 587. 52 ambiguity forces multiple possible interpretations. The head could be a mask or a decoy. It could also be a decapitated head recalling acts of brutality Gittoes has witnessed in the various war and conflict zones he has visited or lived in.189 The head of screens could represent the media’s scramble to saturate outlets with gruesome imagery. The head’s detached state could also represent the extreme effects of Virilio’s virtual doping ultimately rendering a body inert, useless. Or, the head of screens could be a drone’s close-up image confirming a kill with the drone’s scoping devices reflected in the target’s face. If so, perhaps it is an example of scopophilic necro-intimacy, a kind of mutant and sadistic voyeurism. An examination of an earlier painting Discarded (1995) (Fig. 4) helps to unravel Gittoes’ complex visual critiquing of screen-based intrusion evident in Night Vision 2015. In Discarded a young dead girl is carried on a stretcher past her distraught father. The image is based on a scene Gittoes witnessed during the Kibeho massacre which occurred in April 1995 at a camp for internally displaced people near Kibeho, Rwanda. Gittoes was there with a team from the Australian Medical Corp, part of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR2), when the massacre happened.190
To gain insight into a painting like Discarded it is necessary to understand some of Gittoes’ experience at the Kibeho massacre. Gittoes has written, “I have been where heads rolled like corn cobs in a harvest. At Kibeho, thousands of people were decapitated by machete, many of them women and children”.191 In an interview (2013) with Christiana Spens he explains that during the massacre, his “first priority was to try to save as many lives as possible”, helping the Australian medical team where he could.192 When he was able, he also made drawings, wrote in his visual diaries and performed duties as a photo-journalist.193 However, in an ABC radio interview (July 2016) he distinguishes the role of photography from drawing.194 When asked about the Kibeho massacre he comments that a photograph is not about feeling; a photographer clicks and moves on.195 In other words, its scopic one-eyed aperture trolls for likely news-media ‘disaster click bait’. Gittoes goes on to explain that drawing people in-situ over a period of time helps to forge human connections, even as death awaits in dirty and
189 In Gittoes’ autobiography Blood Mystic he has a chapter titled “Decapitation”. 190 Australian War Memorial, “Rwanda (UNAMIR), 1993-1996,” accessed September 5, 2016, https://www.awm.gov.au/unit/U60680/. 191 Gittoes, Blood Mystic, 367. 192 Christiana Spens, “Community, War and the Role of Art: An Interview with George Gittoes,” Studio International: Visual Arts, Design and Architecture (September, 2013) accessed October 30, 2015. http://studiointernational.com/index.php/george-gittoes. 193 His photographs appeared in publications such as Newsweek. They were used by the UN in investigations of the massacre. The Australian War Memorial holds a cache. 194 George Gittoes and Steve Austin, Mornings with Steve Austin ABC 612, July 28, 2016. 195 Ibid. 53 dangerous improvised medical stations. He also talks about the effect of witnessing death over three to four days, commenting that “fear cannot be sustained” and that you can “almost hear the dead speak to you”.196 He describes this aspect of war as being “supernatural and strange”, something that he says painting can capture in ways that the camera lens cannot.197 Gittoes’ immersive physical, emotional and spiritual experiences at Kibeho are clearly those of a flesh- witness. Drawing and painting are extensions of this human experience, re-immersing the flesh in processes where death is maintained as a human experience, rather than as data production.
Discarded demonstrates Gittoes’ claims that painting and drawing evoke what a camera cannot. He critiques the intrusion of screen-media by painting a television hovering in the air above the dead girl’s contorted and mortally wounded body. Screened on the television is a close-up shot of the dead girl’s head. It is visually decapitated from her body and the situational context. By painting the television screen amongst the site of horror Discarded draws attention to the subterfuge of media de-contextualisation. In this way the painting foreshadows Andrejevic’s notion of “neo-pragmatic” elision by the media, and its devices and sensors. I propose that the word elision is a sanitised alternative for the word discarded. It is as if the girl has died twice, the second time via media consumption and its scopophilic morbidity. In the painting her father stands alone as his daughter’s body passes by. He stands bereft with closed eyes. He is not present in the televised image. He, and the familial tragedy he represents, have been elided, discarded. Gittoes has achieved a palpable sense of loss and horror at many levels.
In 1995, when he painted Discarded, Gittoes cautioned the viewer about the screen’s veracity as an informational source. Twenty years later Night Vision 2015 exposes the complicity of contemporary media technology and militarised technology. The neckless head literally showcases an array of reception, transmission, sensing, and targeting screens or perhaps the head represents a drone’s Gorgon Stare wide area persistent surveillance system? It is noteworthy that the mythical Gorgon, sporting a head of snakes instead of hair, blinds those who might meet its gaze. Maybe the neckless head is the gorgon, but then again maybe it is the gorgon’s blinded victim? The painting’s warnings intersect with those of Virilio who describes “contemporary man” surrounded by screens, controlled by algorithms and duped into an inertia by technology’s speed as, “a consenting victim of a progress that amputates his
196 Ibid. 197 Ibid.; Gittoes also commented on this in the interview with the author (2016). 54 private life with electro-optical addiction to information” and therefore “his sense of self”.198 The decapitated head in Night Vision 2015 represents an amputation, literally, but also metaphorically, as a loss of self, or more broadly, even a loss of humanity’s identity.
Gittoes’ provocative play with his neckless head of screens foreshadows the use of lethal autonomous weapons. The head has already discarded its body and human senses of sight, hearing and taste in preference for pragmatic scoping apparatus. The erosion of the human and human control is evident. The two guns could be the weaponised arms of a roboticised combatant. Here a complex play between warrior, weapon and victim poses Enemark’s proposition of the “disembodied warrior” as the weapon, possibly an autonomous one.199 Virilio’s ideas of doping, addiction and amputation, where a sense of self is eradicated by screen-based virtual technologies, also figure as processes of disembodiment. Gittoes’ concerns for the future are clear in a statement made in reference to Night Vision 2015 and drones. When talking about going into villages where drone attacks have occurred he says, “We can smell the death and the tears of the grieving families, but the people who released the bombs are insulated from the pain they are causing. My fear is that the robotising of the military is happening without the general public being aware of it and unmanned enforcers will be upon us”.200
It is salient to note that the previously mentioned November 2012, United States Department of Defence Directive outlining research into “Autonomy in Weapon Systems” includes applications for the “design, development, acquisition, testing, fielding, and employment of autonomous and semi-autonomous weapons systems, including guided munitions that can independently select and discriminate targets”.201 Gittoes’ concerns are echoed by many scientists and AI developers who worry that the exponential growth of artificial intelligence development, coupled with lethal autonomous weapon research, poses major risks. For example, at the 2015 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Autonomous Weapons: Open Letter From AI and Robotics Researchers called for a ban on offensive autonomous weapons beyond meaningful human control.202
198 Virilio, The Great Accelerator, 45. 199 Enemark, Armed Drones and the Ethics of War, 85-97. 200 George Gittoes, “Artists Without Borders,” Creative City Sydney, February 18, 2016, accessed May 29, 2016. http://www.creativecitysydney.com.au/blog/artists-without-borders/. 201 U.S.A. Department of Defense, “Department of Defense Directive,” 1. 202 “Autonomous Weapons: Open Letter from AI and Robotics Researchers.” Over 22,000 AI researchers and developers, scientists, philosophers and others have signed the letter. 55
The Artist (1996)
To historically trace Gittoes’ critiques of militarised technology, and how they have engendered fears about autonomous or robotic weapons, an examination of his earlier painting The Artist (1996) (Fig. 3) is a productive launching point. The painting depicts a figure of an artist wearing a diamond patterned blue and yellow harlequin jumpsuit and a pair of night vision glasses. Text written down the side of a preliminary drawing also called The Artist (1996) identifies that Gittoes is the artist in the painting.203 He holds a paint brush which he uses to paint yellow cloud-like stepping stones over a dark blue abyss which is flanked by a ‘city’ of upright yellow bullet shells. The Artist provides further evidence of Gittoes’ long-term dexterity with role-playing and applying multiple guises through which he negotiates and demonstrates the complex role of artist-flesh-witness to war. The privileges and responsibilities contingent in the freedoms of speech and expression, that were afforded to the medieval court or travelling jester, provide The Artist with a visual and performative camouflage.204 This camouflaging effect is heightened by the overall mise-en-scene of blue and yellow. It is also indicative of the immersive nature of Gittoes’ experiences.
The suggestion that Gittoes appropriates a harlequin persona compounds with his identification as a mystic. A life-long interest in mysticism stems from a teenage fascination with Sufi poetry.205 In a televised interview in July 2016 he commented, “I am someone who has a knowledge of the other side of reality”.206 Gittoes’ practice of transforming himself to physically blend in with his environment, especially in foreign war zones, is a lived experience of taking on guises in order to participate, and stay physically safe. This lived experience also scaffolds his compassionate and activist intent to reveal the horror of war. Harari’s suggestion that flesh-witnesses, “resemble religious visionaries and prophets who are possessed by some transcendent power” that compels them to “change the world rather than merely transmit information” helps us to understand the forces that drive Gittoes.207
Gittoes’ intent to reveal the horror of war became more pronounced after witnessing the Kibeho massacre. He writes in his diaries that, “Nothing has been the same for me since
203 George Gittoes, hand written note in the bottom margin of The Artist, pencil on paper, 62 x 44 cm, 1996. 204 Again Picasso’s influence is evident. He also dressed up as a clown and painted harlequins, famously suggesting that World War 1 soldiers could be camouflaged from the air by wearing harlequin outfits. Roy R. Behrens, “Art Culture and Camouflage,” Tate Etc 4 (2005), accessed June 5, 2017, http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/art-culture-and-camouflage. 205 Mendelssohn, “The Story of George,” (2008). 206 George Gittoes and Jane Hutcheon, “One Plus One – George Gittoes.” ABC, July 7, 2016, http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-07-08/george-gittoes-on-compassion-and-filmmaking-in/7579008. 207 Harari, “Scholars, Eyewitnesses, and Flesh-Witnesses of War: A Tense Relationship,” 222. 56 witnessing the Kibeho massacre. No one’s life can ever be normal after that”.208 He goes on to write that survivors need “to keep out on the edge as a way to prevent falling into the abyss”.209 The Artist, painted not long after the Kibeho massacre, reveals how Gittoes copes with the horror he and others witnessed. The guise of a harlequin dispels his own personal identity to enable others to identify with his painted character. The harlequin-artist, demonstrating almost magical freedom of movement, steps off the edge of an abyss. In the role of an artist the harlequin paints stepping stones affording safe passage across the abyss. As an activist the harlequin-artist critiques the horror of war by revealing the abyss. As a mystic, imagination is used to create an image that, upon close examination over twenty years after its completion, almost prophetically warns of Featherstone’s “negative abyss” and “technoabyss”. The way Gittoes generates multiple personas triggers multiple interpretations that present ambiguity as a way “to keep out on the edge”. Ambiguity expedites the sensorial experiences of the flesh-witness, thus avoiding the mere transmission of information.
In The Artist, Gittoes’ use of ambiguity plays an integral part in problematising the efficacy of night vison glasses and ideas of technologically augmented sight. In doing so, the painting poses questions about militarised technology that are as relevant today as they might have been in 1996. Even though night vision glasses were an analogue device in 1996, Gittoes’ dexterous play with ambiguity enables an extrapolation into the present at the same time as providing an historical tracking of night vision device usage. Gittoes problematises night vision technology by making it unclear whether the artist-harlequin’s night vision glasses are operational or not. Their mask-like appearance deceptively suggests they are simply part of the harlequin costume. However, the militarised setting, as indicated by the night vision glasses and upright bullet shells, implies the costume is a covert disguise. If this is the case maybe the night vision glasses are operational? But, perhaps their function is something different to technical operation? The presence of the abyss, which might only be revealed by wearing the night vision glasses, suggests the glasses may have a function that transcends technical operation. Gittoes’ description of the killing at Kibeho—“Much of the killing happened during the night. The nights at Kibeho were like a horror movie”—gives a clue to why the artist-harlequin wears night vision glasses.210 In Gittoes’ hands their promise
208 Gittoes, BM2 (Blue Dog) Control Through Fear, 75. 209 Ibid. 210 Gittoes, Blood Mystic, 22. 57 of augmented sight is not orthodox or technical. Rather he seditiously appropriates them as a radical, even darkly magical, visual tool to expose the horror of war as an abyss.
Handwritten text in the margin of an earlier drawing, Night Vision (1993) (Fig. 9), offers further clues to help understand the relationship between the night vision glasses and the abyss in The Artist. The drawing was completed when Gittoes accompanied Australian UN Peace Keeping forces in Somalia. He describes the effects of wearing night vision glasses as: “The world is made artificial like an advanced virtual reality computer game”.211 He continues by suggesting that for the “wearer the night takes on the quality of an hallucination or nightmarish dream.”212 He also describes soldiers’ fears that due to the disorientation caused by the glasses they may mistake a child with a toy gun as an adult with a real one, and shoot. Another drawing, Khats (1993) (Fig. 10), completed on the same day as Night Vision, depicts Gittoes wearing night vision glasses, and a Somalian man chewing the narcotic Khat plant. In the margin of this drawing Gittoes writes: “People through the goggles lose their humanity - becoming like synthetic computer constructs”.213 Significantly, Gittoes’ compares the effects of wearing night vision glasses with computer generated imagery and virtual reality. This helps to shed light on the purpose of The Artist’s night vision glasses. They are gateways that provide access to an abyss where hallucination and nightmare are the handmaidens of the horror of war. Featherstone’s description of the “technoabyss” is presaged here in Gittoes’ painting.
To trace and connect Gittoes’ depictions of the clown or harlequin, night vision glasses and abyss iconography, a much earlier drawing provides critical antecedent motifs. Tightrope Cowboys (1971) (Fig. 11) depicts a clown attempting to walk across a tightrope. The drawing is a comment on President Nixon’s policy oscillations during the Vietnam War, which as a young man Gittoes deplored.214 Twenty-two years later, in Somalia, Gittoes responds to the experience of wearing night vision glasses by making drawings where his depictions of them are reminiscent of the mask worn by the tightrope cowboy. The cowboy’s mask is therefore a precursor to the way Gittoes subsequently paints night vision glasses as a kind of mask- prosthesis that represents the dehumanisation of both wearer and those he or she scopes
211 George Gittoes, text written in margins of drawing Night Vision, pencil on paper, 44 x 62 cm, 1993. Collection, not known. Reproduced in George Gittoes, Blood Mystic, 52-53 and Gavin Fry, George Gittoes, 50. 212 George Gittoes, text written in margins of drawing Khats, Pencil on paper, 44 x 62 cm, 1993. Australian War Memorial Collection, accessed online 2016. Also, reproduced in Gavin Fry, George Gittoes, 121. 213 Ibid. 214 Commentary about Nixon is written below the image on “George Gittoes Artworks 1969 to ’72: Yellow House Sydney,” Ian Rose Blog, https://iannrose.wordpress.com/. Australia’s involvement Vietnam: 1962 – 1975. USA: 1955 – 1975. 58 through them. This mask-prosthesis transforms Gittoes’ figures into monsters, yet the viewer is somehow aware that the same figures are also fearful of seeing monsters. This kind of visual double entendre demonstrates Gittoes’ dexterity playing with ambiguity, something which ultimately helps him stay out on the edge.
The Tightrope Cowboy’s mask sports a protruding carrot-like nose that suggests Nixon is afflicted with Pinocchio’s habit of lying. Toy-like glasses are flung from his face, their lenses cracked. These and the cowboy’s bulbous eyes imply a blind hubris. A mouth that ejects vomit indicates that Nixon’s statements are ‘sick’. The tightrope cowboy’s rigid carrot-nose is contrasted with his slack and pendulously exposed dripping penis, and testicles. This more than insinuates that Nixon ‘got his rocks off’ over prolonging the Vietnam War, despite promising to end it in his 1968 pre-election campaigning. As the cowboy precariously balances on one foot on the tight rope, he tosses grenades. He also tosses a globe of the world. The cowboy figure is actually a monster, representing monstrous political deception and weakness that perpetuates and exacerbates the horror of war. The viewer is unsure what is below the cowboy, but the dangerous flippancy of his actions is evident. Here, The Artist provides ways to retrospectively interpret Tightrope Cowboys as an image of an abyss where the world is discarded. Given that the viewer cannot see what is below the cowboy the image could be a nightmare image from inside an abyss or an image of an imminent plummet into it.
Before returning to The Artist another painting, Why Am I Here? (1997) (Fig. 12), helps illustrate how Gittoes’ different representations of night vision glasses pose multiple questions. In this painting Gittoes wears a peacekeeping uniform patterned in a manner reminiscent of a harlequin’s costume. He lies in the dirt, pencil in hand, with night vision glasses pulled up onto his forehead. He is drawing an emaciated child who sits on a flattened cardboard box on the ground of a Somalian orphanage. He has also painted the words “Why am I here [sic]”. Photographs taken in 1993 of Gittoes drawing the child show him lying in the dirt at the same level as the little girl (Fig. 13). He does not wear night vision glasses. In a preliminary drawing called Voyeur (1993) (Fig. 14) he also does not wear them. Voyeur was drawn the day after he drew Khats and Night Vision with their commentaries about the effects of wearing night vision glasses. His choice, subsequently four years later and after witnessing the Kibeho massacre, to paint himself with night vision glasses deliberately pulled up onto his forehead illustrates a reflective response to his experiences. He re-enforces his critique of the device by drawing attention to the horror of being with children who have suffered the brutality of conflict. As he reports of Kibeho: “At one point we found a row of dead children – graded by
59 size and stacked like sandbags”.215 By removing the glasses from his eyes in his painting Why Am I Here? the potential to mistake the child as a target is eliminated. The child’s humanity is restored because the conduit to hallucinatory and dehumanising scoping, symbolic of war and conflict, is removed from his eyes. The child is not to be scoped or targeted, but rather, she is to be seen.
Here Gittoes also declares something about his role as artist-witness, but it is not without some disquiet. In handwritten text in the margin of the drawing Voyeur (1993) he writes that he felt “selfish” drawing the Somalian orphans for “reasons I felt hard to define”.216 He continues, “their dignity was the most beautiful sight I have ever witnessed. So to capture this I persisted with the drawings”.217 His disquiet is also evident in the title-question of his painting Why Am I Here?. However, in including the night vision glasses but removing them from his eyes, Gittoes offers possible answers. He not only removes the likelihood of mistaken identity as he declares to the girl I now really see you!, he also emphasises that the orphan could look him in the eye, rather than through a mediated device. His persistence at drawing indicates he took time, thus honouring the orphan’s dignity. The alchemical and time consuming processes of drawing and painting demonstrate how his beguiling, critical and perhaps prophetic-like vision contrasts with technological devices that promise instant upgradeable augmented production and scoping. Gittoes’ prophetic-like paintings render the technological concept of a simple upgrade as obsolete. Art historian Daniel Herwitz’s observation that Gittoes’ paintings “retain a kind of roughness, refusing to relinquish the messiness of the actual event pictured” illustrates a lived and sentient witnessing, a flesh- witnessing that extends into paintings created subsequently to events.218 As Herwitz notes, Gittoes’ moral driver is respect for those he encounters, draws and paints.219 The retained immediacy in Gittoes’ paintings, as Herwitz points out means that the viewer becomes a witness too, encountering the victims of war with respect, just as Gittoes does.220
Gittoes drew the emaciated little girl in the Somalian orphanage about the same time photojournalist Keven Carter took a photograph of a vulture stalking an emaciated Sudanese child. The child was attempting to reach a UN feeding station. Carter “waited twenty minutes
215 Gittoes, Blood Mystic, 366. 216 George Gittoes, text written in the margin of drawing Voyeur, 35.2 x 43.2, 1993. Australian War Memorial collection, accessed on visit in December, 2016. 217 Ibid. 218 Herwitz, Aesthetics, Art, and Politics in a Global World, 172. 219 Ibid., 166. 220 Ibid., 164. 60 until the vulture was close enough, positioning himself for the best possible image and only then chased the vulture away”.221 Carter’s photograph, originally titled Struggling Girl and subsequently called The Vulture and the Little Girl, was first published in The New York Times, on March 26, 1993. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1994.222 The publication of the photograph triggered questions about Carter’s subsequent actions. Whilst he chased the bird away he did not help the child. Carter committed suicide in 1994. I asked Gittoes if he had seen Carter’s photograph at the time. He replied, “I think everyone saw that”.223 He went on to say, “You can never put the film ahead of a human life. I have never done it.” Further in the interview he said, “I’ve never never ever - in every situation I have been, whenever I could save someone’s life I’ve tried, like really hard. I‘ve had several people die in my arms, but only as I was trying. Even though I had not succeeded in saving their lives I’ve comforted them”.224 Gittoes attributes this guiding principle for the reason he can sleep well at night.225 Whilst he has also worked as a photojournalist in war and conflict zones, drawing, writing in the margins of his drawings, and painting offer him opportunities to process what he has witnessed in ways that are not just about recording an event. He explained in a 2011 interview for The Brooklyn Rail that the thing the “artist-witness most wants to talk to the world about begins where the camera fails. The artist can go where mechanical devices can’t: your emotions. And people need artists who use traditional methods that go directly from your spirit onto the page”.226 Here, is another answer to his question posed in Why Am I Here?
Gittoes’ statements describe a kind of witnessing that is demonstrably that of a flesh- witness. It is not just about what is seen, but what is also felt and experienced. By employing traditional methods of drawing and painting, the emotional element is transferred by direct human touch and action, neither mediated by digital and algorithmic technology. The literal experience of the flesh, through touch and action, extends the flesh-witnessing experience in ways that contrast with the dehumanising role played by contemporary militarised technology. Herwitz articulates how Gittoes achieves this when he observes that Gittoes’ paintings, “do not merely recapitulate the drawings, but remake them through the resources of painting. It is here that Gittoes parts way with television. Circulation is not propagation
221 Rare Historical Photos, “The Vulture and the Little Girl,” accessed 24 July, 2016, http://rarehistoricalphotos.com/vulture-littel-girl/. 222 Ibid. 223 Gittoes, interview with the author (2016). 224 Ibid. 225 Ibid. 226 Gittoes and Bui “In Conversation with George Gittoes,” (2011). 61 through airwaves, it is recreation, variation, re-incarnation”.227 In other words, Gittoes offers the viewer multiple ways to witness by bringing to life or re-incarnating sites of horror via what Herwitz calls drawing and painting’s, “special virtue of molten reactivity brought right into the tracing of lines, the boldness of shadows, the exaggerations of physiognomy, the raw application of paint, the riotous calamities of colour, the “fine line” traced between realism, and the grotesque”.228 Gittoes’ 1995 painting Discarded, with its hovering television set, is an uncanny illustration of Herwitz’s 2011 observation that Gittoes “parts way with television”.229 Tightrope Cowboys and The Artist demonstrate how Gittoes traverses the metaphoric tightrope, abyss or “fine line” “between realism and the grotesque”.230 Why Am I Here? self-reflectively draws attention to the complex role Gittoes plays as artist-witness. As Herwitz observes he re-incarnates the horror of war providing viewers with ways of seeing, rather than scoping, that makes them witnesses too.231
Emotional, spiritual and intellectual responses to Gittoes’ paintings of horror offer a contrast to what Herwitz describes as, the “rapid fire circulation of images produced by automatic machine gun cameras and disseminated globally in seconds”.232 By describing the media, and its modes of production and dissemination in terms of weaponry and its actions, Herwitz highlights a pervasive reduction of vision that brings the covert scoping strategies of war into the domestic and civilian domain. It is in this environment, in a sense furtively militarised, that screens deliver promises of information and opportunities to ‘witness’ or be involved in global events. However, image saturation ultimately is a weapon that deadens responses, or as Herwitz suggests, creates “homogenized deadness”.233 Here, Herwitz provides a succinct way to describe Virilio’s proposition that accelerating speeds of digital interactivity cause “electro-optical” doping and paralysis, an inertia of the human body as well as the societal one, a kind of deadening.234 Contemplation of Gittoes’ practice reveals how his multi-layered processes, taking his time as they occur over periods of time, rebuke accelerating speeds of technology, and the “rapid fire” production and circulation of screen delivered imagery. Gittoes’ practice involves a sentient but robust grappling with the horror of war. It jolts inertia and paralysis, re-incarnating the body and mind through the application of paint that can sometimes appear almost chaotic and unfinished. His paintings are not
227 Herwitz, Aesthetics, Art, and Politics in a Global World, 166. 228 Ibid., 169. 229 Ibid., 166. 230 Ibid., 169. 231 Ibid., 164. 232 Ibid. 233 Ibid., 169. 234 Virilio, The Great Accelerator, 18, 33. 62 clean and neat renditions for they reveal the mess of paint, the abruptness of human gesture and the rawness of materials. Gittoes’ paintings, and his painting processes, can be viewed as radically disruptive in a world dominated by screen-based technology.
Vertical Threat: Scoping from Above
In the twenty-first century, digital and cyber technologies pervade society through an array of devices from mobile phones to satellites orbiting Earth. Extensive interconnectivity enables sophisticated levels of global surveillance. The reliance of many devices on GPS and communications satellites extends the operation of pervasive surveillance into space. The airborne drone acts as a surveillance node between Earth and space. Currently drones rely on GPS and communications satellites for operations such as orientation, and for sending and receiving data. Space assets are also used for civilian purposes. The increasingly blurred lines between civilian and military use of such assets is of concern. Here, Weizman’s ideas about the “politics of verticality” help to negotiate these concerns.235 His 2002 description of Israeli control of all aspects of Palestinian territories’ airspace provides an example of increasing saturation of air surveillance capabilities. “Every floor in every house, every car, every telephone call or radio transmission, even the smallest event that occurs on the terrain, can thus be monitored, policed and destroyed from the air”.236 In 2015, Chamayou, in reference to weaponised drones, expands the concept of a colonised airspace that harbours threat from “flying watchtowers” by describing the whole world not as a battlefield but as a “hunting ground”, a manhunting ground.237 Here, Deputy Secretary Work’s comment that US “space capabilities are central to our ability to project power anywhere on the globe” reverberates with serious possibilities.238
In The Artist the dark abyss exposes a negative or inverse verticality that helps to visually extrapolate Weizman’s assertion that the verticality of threat is penetrative and intrusive. The abyss could represent a negative verticality by revealing the continued trajectory of missiles delivered from above. It is easy to imagine these missiles as a drone’s Hellfire missiles, possibly seeking hellish places. The Artist —painted just after Gittoes witnessed the Kibeho massacre—discloses the horror of war in ways that draw attention to the dark
235 Weizman, “The Politics of Verticality: Control in the Air,” (2002). 236 Ibid. 237 Chamayou, Drone Theory, 45, 52. 238 Work, “Deputy Secretary of Defense Speech” (2016). 63 underbelly of modern warfare and conflict. At Kibeho deep trenches that had been dug to use as toilets, became shitty refuges for people seeking safety during the three day massacre.239 After the massacre mass graves were dug for the thousands who had been slaughtered. The trench and the grave are significant motifs that signify an inverse verticality, made more poignant by how Gittoes described Kibeho at the time of the massacre, “after three days of slaughter the refugee camp had been flattened. This place is hell”.240 The abyss also acts as a reminder of the trenches dug by soldiers in World War 1, thus further situating the painting within an historical war narrative that informs its prophetic-like capacity.
As Jay points out in Downcast Eyes, trench warfare limited a soldier’s line of sight to either downwards to the dirt or upwards to the sky.241 Venturing beyond the trench for battle meant adjusting to horizontal perspectives, often obscured by dust and gassy hazes. The handmaidens of disorientation and death, wrought by limited perspective, underpin how seeing is supplanted by scoping features of twenty-first century “flying watchtowers”.242 The Artist also foreshadows the verticality of threat with its ‘city’ of bullet shells that foreclose the horizon, limiting horizontal perspective. The idea of limited perspective can be literal, as well as metaphoric. The latter, in terms of diminished moral, ethical and political resolve to address the circumstances of war and conflict. Like soldiers in World War 1 trenches, the viewer senses a walled-in feeling that is both physical and psychological. The Artist prompts the viewer to ask, is there an open sky anymore or is it replaced by endless abyss-like tunnels, creating the ultimate gorgon of peepholes, reaching from inside the Earth upwards to militarised outer space?
Keeping Gittoes’ dexterity with visual ambiguity in mind, the upright bullet shells that create a fence-like barrier around the abyss offer a few interpretations. The shells, aimed at the sky, could be a layer of camouflage that attempts to dupe an aerial attacker with a defensive stance. Their spent nature indicates battle has already been fought and the viewer wonders if the camouflage attempt is a desperate measure. Taking Weizman’s idea of the verticality of threat, the bullet shells seem to symbolise the futility of defence from the ground when aerial surveillance and attack capabilities are pervasive and asymmetrically sophisticated. The sense of enclosure created by the bullet shells, coupled with Gittoes’ comments equating the effect of wearing night vision glasses to “an advanced virtual reality computer
239 Gittoes, Blood Mystic, 22. Gittoes describes women and children huddled together in these makeshift toilets. 240 Ibid., 366. 241 Jay, Downcast Eyes, 212-213. 242 Chamayou, Drone Theory, 45. 64 game”, ominously presage the automated “kill box”. This is a multidimensional screen-based cube graphic created by remote operators to delineate a 3D kill zone around a target. The aim is to provide a zone where recourse to authority for attack is unnecessary or as Chamayou states, a “kill box is a temporary autonomous zone of slaughter”.243 Looking at The Artist the viewer wonders if the artist-harlequin is caught in a 3D kill zone graphic, the ‘city’ of bullet shells providing schematic limits. The corollary is that the abyss could be a ‘grave box’, the multidimensional, but permanent inverse, of the “kill box.” Here, the artist- harlequin’s night vision glasses, whether a mask or operational, act as a revelatory device in many ways. The abyss becomes a signpost for Virilio’s warning, made in the same year the painting was created, that “no technology has ever been developed that has not had to struggle against its own specific negativity”.244 The Artist warns that the coupling of war and advanced technology in the twenty-first century shears open the dark abyss, a gateway to a hellish place.
Questions concerning the sky continue with the harlequin-artist painting cloud-like stepping stones over the abyss. The viewer assumes that the clouds afford escape from the kill zone. The painting, however, poses multiple interpretations that present notions of escape as multi-layered. The harlequin-artist could be demonstrating that the abyss is virtual. Here, Virilio’s observation that accelerating speeds of technology create a catastrophic inertia compound the idea of the abyss, as Featherstone has suggested, into a “technoabyss”.245 The artist-harlequin’s demonstration that painting clouds affords escape over the dark blue abyss is telling because the paint brush is revealed as more powerful than a weapon and advanced technology. Upon close inspection, the artist-harlequin’s yellow clouds are exemplars of camouflage. The clouds are actually flat but when viewed from above their shapes would make them appear fluffy and impossible to walk upon. That they dot the blue landscape with patches of yellow, like the upright bullet shells, would add to an aerial view confusion. Additionally, the artist-harlequin’s blue and yellow costume, set against the blue and yellow landscape, would disguise movement across the hovering stepping stone clouds. The flatness of the clouds and the harlequin’s movement across them restores a horizontal perspective that cuts across the vertically delineated kill zone. Given Gittoes’ statements about witnessing and surviving the Kibeho massacre the painted clouds prevent the artist- harlequin-survivor from falling into the abyss, but at the same time there is a sense of staying
243 Ibid., 55. 244 Virilio, “Red Alert in Cyberspace,” 2. 245 Featherstone, “The Negative Abyss,” 219. 65 on the edge. With his knowing grin, bearing sharp teeth, the artist-harlequin encouragingly indicates that he has a plan.
In Open Sky, Virilio responds to developments in space exploration and the speeds required for “liberation from gravity”.246 He coins the term “reverse vertigo”, or a sense of falling upwards, claiming that it could “force us to change the way we think about the landscape and about the human environment”.247 A city is an environment, like any other landscape and environment. The city of bullet shells in The Artist not only offers a way to interpret Virilio’s concerns about landscape and environment, but also democracy, “because democracy is tied to cities, to places”.248 Militarisation of the air, screen based virtual operations and accelerating speeds of interactivity, collapse ideas of “public space and public power normally centred in cities”.249 These spaces are transformed into virtual ones. In The Artist the city is a ruined environment, spent and exhausted, perhaps representing the ruins of democracy, even civilisation. Its appearance relies on the subterfuge of a shaky camouflage designed to trick surveillance from above. The implication is that the institutions of democracy are exposed and vulnerable, or perhaps neutered. In an uncanny way the tunnelling effect, created by the abyss and the walled bullet-shell city prefigures Virilio’s concerns about speed-induced inertia, a lockdown within a fortified “virtual wall” where freedom of movement is lost.250 Featherstone describes Virilio’s observations as, “the empire of speed has started to collapse into a society of immobility and stasis characterised by walls, borders, camps, and prisons”.251
Yet, the harlequin-artist in The Artist is freely moving across the abyss, his painted clouds defying the presence of walls and the threat the abyss conveys. Unlike the Nixon-cowboy tottering on a tightrope in Tightrope Cowboys, the harlequin-artist sees the abyss but chooses to ignore it, trusting in his own capacities to traverse it or stay out on the edge. Gittoes provides clues to the harlequin-artist’s freedom of movement in the face of lockdown, stasis and inertia in words written on the reverse of the painting The Artist, and in the margin of his preliminary drawing, The Artist. “We step into the dark trusting we can paint over the void and not plummet into the chasms below”.252 In Tightrope Cowboys the Nixon-cowboy’s
246 Virilio, Open Sky, 2. 247 Ibid. 248 Virilio, “Red Alert in Cyberspace," 2. 249 Virilio, “Cold Panic,” 29. 250 Virilio, The Great Accelerator, 22. 251 Featherstone, “Virilio’s Apocalypticism,” CTHEORY, eds., Arthur Kroker and Marilouise Kroker, (September 2010): 7, accessed June 5, 2016, http://ctheory.net/ctheory_wp/virilios-apocalypticism/. 252 George Gittoes, text written in the margin of drawing The Artist, pencil on paper, 62 x 44 cm, 1996. 66 precarious balancing on a tightrope over something the viewer cannot see appears doomed. There is no edge in sight, to tether trust. His random juggling of items indicates that he has no plan and his gaze upwards appears desperate. This figure clearly has no vision beyond self-satisfaction, as indicated by the exaggerated phallic references. The viewer has no clue about his purpose and suspects he has none either. Gittoes’ youthful political critique through parody is clear. In the painting The Artist, however, he displays a mature critique which offers the role of the artist as a provocative agent of change. Joanna Mendelssohn’s suggestion that Gittoes works in the “ancient tradition of the Holy Fool, the apparent idiot innocent who by his acts exposes the evils of the world” illuminates Gittoes’ and The Artist’s subversive messages.253 Indeed, The Fool in a pack of Tarot cards is normally depicted as a figure balancing on the edge of a ravine or abyss.
Drones, Hell and Hallucination
In November 2008, while travelling between Kabul and Tarin Kowt in Afghanistan, Gittoes drew a picture of a drone (Fig. 1).254 He has inscribed the word “SIMURG” on the drone’s fuselage. A simurg or simurgh is a benevolent bird-creature from Persian mythology.255 Gittoes’ drone takes on bird-like characteristics, its beaked head protected by what looks like a pilot’s helmet. It appears as if the bird has been hijacked and forced to mutate into a Hellfire missile-armed drone. The number four is significant. We know the four missiles attached to the drone are Hellfire missiles because each one emits flames. Gittoes has also written “Hellfire” above a figure riding a galloping horse. This figure represents the fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse, the purveyor of death, famine and war. Here, the horseman leads the “unmanned” drone. This suggests that the weaponised remotely piloted drone is cast on a hellish trajectory. The drone most likely to have inspired Gittoes is the Reaper drone, equipped to carry four Hellfire and two guided missiles, and bearing a name that conjures the Reaper of Death.256 Night Vision 2015, painted seven years after Simurg,
253 Mendelssohn, “The Story of George” (2008). 254 Gittoes has written in pencil on the bottom of the drawing “Drawn on the (illegible) to Kabul from Tarin Kowt.” However, a photograph, at the Australian War Memorial, of him with the drawing says Kuwait. 255 “Persia: The Simurgh,” Echoes.Devin.com, accessed September 5, 2016, http://echoes.devin.com/watchers/simurgh.html. 256 I proposed to Gittoes that Simurg would have to be one of the first drawings of a drone, particularly by a westerner. He replied “Yes, that would be right”. Since my interview with him, he has shown me one of his diaries where there is another drawing depicting drones plus photographs of crashed drones dated around 2004, Iraq. He also said he was one of the first people to film drones in the Middle East, but at the time “it was seen as a crime to expose to the world that they were using drones, that they were a secret weapon.” Gittoes, interview with the author (2016). 67 demonstrates how militarised drone technology has embedded itself into the ‘character’ of contemporary war and conflict. This begs the question, is Simurg closer to a hell or has it arrived?
Gittoes is no stranger to the specter of hell. Paintings linked to a set of fictional texts Gittoes has written, in the years after witnessing the Kibeho massacre in 1995, called Descendence Stories are testimony to this.257 The stories are part of a larger work, a series of three graphic novels called Night Vision which is as yet unpublished. Gittoes’ stories draw upon his experiences witnessing war and conflict in numerous places. However, these experiences also include those of “other worlds” where spirits reside and where he retreats to work through the horrors he has witnessed.258 The Descendence Stories trace the afterlife of a character called Corporal Night and his Virus Patrol. “For the sake of my sanity” Gittoes explains “I invented a character, ‘Corporal Night’, whom I animate in stories like an avatar puppet of myself”.259 Here is another example of Gittoes’ ability to use role-play as a way to ‘perform’ through his experiences and to take the viewer with him. Significantly, the stories and the paintings are a twist on the idea of ‘night vision’. Corporal Night’s visions, expressed in paintings and stories, penetrate beyond the realms of reality to trawl ‘life’ beyond death. Night’s vision is shown to be more revelatory than night vision military devices. Rather, the technological apparatus and operation of war are revealed as conduits to hell and the afterlife.
In the stories, soldiers haunt an afterlife that taunts them with repeated possibilities of resurrection that are thwarted by ambushes, attacks and death. At the end, the ‘truth’ is revealed. The soldiers were killed when their ‘chopper’ was attacked. Their bodies were mutilated, but their heads had been protected by helmets. In a military experiment, their brains were removed, encased and connected to computers that operate the crash dummies on which soldiers practise administering medical aid. Crash dummies are, in fact, connected via tubes and cords to computers that can trigger things like bleed outs and convulsing if medic- soldiers have not administered aid within certain periods of time. A crash dummy mimics a mutilated body in a number of way; limbs missing or mangled, torsos ripped apart and faces disfigured. In Descendence Stories each time a crash dummy is worked on, Corporal Night and his Virus Patrol ‘sense’ life returning, only to have it crushed by another nightmarish death. They experience hallucinatory struggles, ‘re-living’ horrendous situations as they variously morph into new arrivals to hell, metamorphosing mutant insects, and zombies.
257 Gittoes, “Descendence Stories” (2014). 258 Ibid. 259 Gittoes, Blood Mystic, 52. 68
Two paintings associated with Descendence Stories are Mojo Rising (2009) (Fig. 5) and Charon (2009-10) (Fig. 6). Imagery and content are based on mutilations, decapitations, suicide bombings and crash dummy simulations Gittoes has witnessed. By combining myth and reality to portray hellish descents, real-life horrors are visually transported to the afterlife. Janet McKenzie, who viewed the paintings in the Berlin studio Gittoes worked in during 2009, initially compares Gittoes’ intentions to reveal the futility of war with German artists Anselm Kiefer (1945-) and Georg Baselitz (1938-).260 Both artists visually grapple with Germany’s World War Two history, and ensuing national guilt, in urgent and exploratory ways. However, McKenzie subsequently notes that even though the desire to expose the futility of war connects Gittoes with post-World War Two German artistic tradition, he is not driven by “personal guilt or that of his nation”.261 Rather, he avoids both the personal and national to embrace a “global phenomena, based in non-Western war zones”.262 Mackenzie argues that Gittoes stylistically departs from Keifer and Baselitz with a use of cartoon and graffiti-like imagery painted in panoramic or fisheye lens perspectives.263 However, panoramic views are evident in Keifer’s images of devastated landscapes, and cartoonish or graffiti-like elements are apparent in Baselitz’s figurative paintings. Gittoes’ stylistic departure is more apparent in his use of distortive and theatrical elements where multiple possible narratives transport viewers into other worlds. This differs from the monumentality in Keifer’s paintings where the viewer is grounded in history. It also differs from Baselitz’s practice of turning figures upside down or sideways. Baselitz’s visual ploys are more gymnastic than theatrical, and whilst distortive they do not suggest grotesque pathways to other worlds. Gittoes, however, uses distortion and theatricality in ways that introduce a visual dialectic between surrealist, expressionist and social realist representations that partially replicate the horrific hyper-reality that he senses in conflict zones.264
Positioned amongst the blatant horror depicted in his Descendence paintings are subtle references to contemporary militarised technology. In both Charon and Mojo Rising, bodies have tubes connected to them. These mimic the tubes that connect crash dummies to computers. In Mojo Rising Corporal Night flies over a hilly landscape, his mutilated wing-like arms attempt to push him upwards. His legs are missing from the knee down, the stumps bloody and raw. On his chest, wounds gape. Despite attempts to rise upwards two red coloured
260 McKenzie, “George Gittoes: Descendence Stories, from Night Vision, The Diaries” (2010). 261 Ibid. 262 Ibid. 263 Ibid. 264 George Gittoes, George Gittoes: The Hyper Real, published by Rojer Levy (January 19, 2010), video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vY_5xr3I2S0. 69 tubes tether him to something beyond and below the painting. Rather than an ascension to heaven Corporal Night is tethered to hell. In Charon Corporal Night meets red-eyed Charon, hell’s ferryman. Charon has delivered Virus Patrol across the River Styx to hell. A “chopper” hovers in the distance. It alludes to Virus Patrol’s ‘real’ deaths. Cerberus, hell’s guard dog, snarls. Virus Patrol’s ghostly red-eyed heads gasp for air above the sticky ooze of the River Styx. Each head is connected via tubes to the monstrous Charon. In Descendence Stories, upon delivering Virus Patrol to hell, Charon disconnects the tubes and hands them to Corporal Night. In both Mojo Rising and Charon shades of red, from cadmium to crimson, create an overwhelming sense of bloodiness and visceral ooze. Is this caused by the pretend blood in tubes connected to crash dummies ‘bleeding’ out, or is it caused by severed arteries gushing real blood?
In Descendence Stories, Corporal Night expresses a disdain for “techno nerds” who collect intelligence from “drones and surveillance satellites that feed them. The nerds watch horror 24 seven”.265 But, despite watching horror, in “their safe cyber world the nerds had no idea of the real horror outside”. When Corporal Night turns on the nerds exclaiming; ““We are the living Dead!”” he rails against the way contemporary militarised technology makes remote death and killing like a computer game.266 The critique of militarised technology is reiterated when Corporal Night says, “They are improving our bodies all the time. There will be a day when they put us back into service as active soldiers. We have to live through this hell. The moment for our revenge will come”.267 Here, “our bodies” are crash dummies, and attempts to make them “active soldiers” alludes to robotic soldiers with a ‘consciousness’ borrowed from the downloaded minds of real dead soldiers. Warrior robot revenge conjures another scale of future horror.
The travails of Corporal Night and Virus Patrol, depicted in Mojo Rising and Charon, intersect with Virilio’s concerns expressed in Open Sky that in the cyber and digital age the human body has become a “body terminal” equipped with devices that in many instances act like interactive prostheses.268 He observes that this makes the “super-equipped able-bodied person almost the exact equivalent of the motorized and wired disabled person”.269 Does this infer that both are disabled or that both are cyborgs? Another inference is that if removal of ‘prosthetic’ augmentation devices occurs, the human being is then rendered almost obsolete. Corporal
265 Ibid. 266 Ibid. 267 Ibid. 268 Virilio, Open Sky, 11. 269 Ibid. 70
Night and Virus Patrol demonstrate that death is a human weakness, a disability justifying replacement with advanced technology, including robotics and artificial intelligence. Remembering that Night and Virus Patrol, and the events they are involved in, are based on real ones, the implication is that in the cyber and digital age of contemporary militarised technology the human body is not an efficient machine. Here the use of the word “unmanned”, for example “unmanned air vehicle”, becomes more than just meaning there is no human operator. Rather, it denotes a process of extreme dehumanisation that might be better described as a process of “un-humanning”.270 With Virilio’s ideas of amputation in mind, ‘unmanning’ could be described as the ultimate amputation of the human from the body politic.
The slick digital images of a computer game or a remote drone pilot’s surveillance screen, contrast with hand painted images like Mojo Rising and Charon. Gittoes’ brushstrokes, laden with paint, seem to have been quickly but confidently placed. In Mojo Rising the predominantly pale crimson landscape and sky are painted with almost feathery strokes that imply a compassionate regret that heaven cannot be reached. These feathery brushstrokes act like a palliative measure, almost caressing Corporal Night’s gaping wounds with care. Charon offers a more brutal appearance with the paint almost sculpting each character’s form. The River Styx seems to be painted, however, with congealed blood that oozes through the eye sockets of Charon and each member of Virus Patrol. Again, it seems as if Gittoes has painted quickly and confidently, keen to escape hell, but also willing to reveal its horror. Herwitz’s comment that Gittoes’ paintings “retain a kind of roughness, refusing to relinquish the messiness of the actual event pictured” describe the painterly qualities in Mojo Rising and Charon.271 Gittoes does not simply record the mess of death and the horror of the afterworld, as a flesh-witness he uses paint to re-live disembodiment by channeling a kind of viscerality through the paint’s application and performance.
Descendence Stories and the paintings associated with them, including Mojo Rising and Charon, offer an opportunity to engage Virilio’s concept of reverse vertigo and Weizman’s theory of the verticality of threat. Gittoes’ references to drone surveillance and attack in Descendence Stories generate visions of a vertical threat trajectory from the sky to land. However, Corporal Night’s and Virus Patrol’s descent into hell continues the trajectory to the bottom of the abyss, perhaps the one the harlequin-artist revealed in The Artist. The proposition
270 Kathryn Brimblecombe-Fox, “Airborne Weaponised Drones and the Tree-of-Life,” Australian Women’s Book Review 27, no, 1 and 2 (2015/2016): 62, https://hecate.communications- arts.uq.edu.au/files/2673/AWBR%20vol27%201and2.pdf. 271 Herwitz, Aesthetics, Art, and Politics in a Global World, 172. 71 that Corporal Night and Virus Patrol have descended into hell indicates that there is only one way out, and that is up. However, Corporal Night’s attempt to ascend in Mojo Rising demonstrates that rising is not easy and that a reverse vertigo or falling upwards cannot break the tethers that tie him to hell and the afterlife. Painted between nine and seven years after the Descendence series Night Vision 2015, with its black screens and background, indicates that while war and conflict exist, the abyss is ever present, ready to consume both the living and the dead, the victim and perpetrator. Bernard Smith’s 2002 observation that Gittoes’ paintings challenge us to, “gaze into the dark abyss of inhuman reality, and confront the abiding savagery at its heart when trapped into the extreme situations of war and civil unrest”, remains urgent.272 However, fifteen years later, with accelerating developments in contemporary militarised technology infiltrating the future via militarised imagination, paintings like Night Vision 2015 suggest that Smith’s “abyss of inhuman reality” is the future; the word ‘inhuman’ conjuring not only a lack of human qualities such as compassion, kindness and mercy, but also the replacement of the human with non-human forces.
Gittoes’ paintings demonstrably provoke questions about the continuing use and development of contemporary militarised technology within a broader expression of the horror of war, now and into the future. This chapter demonstrates that as a body of work created over decades, his paintings track the use of contemporary militarised technology and its outcomes. This historical tracking paves a way into an imperilled future. In his diaries Gittoes has expressed concerns about lethal autonomous weapons, writing that there “is a race going on similar to the nuclear arms race of the 60s which seems unstoppable and the ultimate aim is to have robots replace human soldiers and police”.273 He calls it a “race to extinction”.274 Significantly his concerns are echoed in the emergence of multi-disciplinary research that examines existential risk posed by emerging technologies.275 Furthermore, in his role as harlequin-artist-witness Gittoes flaunts the hands-on eons-old, time consuming and messy activities of drawing and painting as provocative ways to critique contemporary technology without actually using it. In doing so Gittoes disrupts what Andrejevic has identified as the “post-representational”, “post-narrative”, “post-explanatory, post- discursive”, “post-ideological” and “post-human” contexts of ubiquitous and passive digital and cyber interactivity.276 Indeed, Gittoes’ paintings of war and conflict annihilate the notion
272 Smith, “George Gittoes and the Grotesque,” 21. 273 Gittoes, BM2 (Blue Dog) Control Through Fear, 4. 274 Ibid., 7. 275 Future of Humanity Institute (FHI), Oxford University; Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER), University of Cambridge; Future of Life Institute (FLI), situated in Boston. 276 Andrejevic, “Theorizing Drones and Droning Theory,” 36, 40. 72 of interactivity with reminders that mortal death literally means that the ‘post’ in post-human could mean the extinction of the human species.
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Chapter Two
Jon Cattapan: Ghosts and Data Proxies, Disappearance and Reappearance
In 2008 Jon Cattapan accompanied Australian peacekeeping soldiers on night patrols in Timor Leste. Like the soldiers he wore a night vision monocle. The experience of using night vision technology, over a number of nights, subsequently infiltrated his painterly vision. However, unlike Gittoes, Cattapan does not paint the actual night vision glasses or soldiers wearing them. Rather, he paints the effect of seeing through their phosphor screen green glow. This led him to saturate subsequent paintings with backgrounds of predominantly green paint. This immediately places the image and the viewer within a contemporary military terrain where militarised technology designed to enhance and augment a soldier’s vision capabilities is used. Militarised technology of this kind can be extrapolated beyond augmentation of the individual soldier’s abilities to see in the dark, to include other militarised vision sensor capabilities. These include an airborne drone’s electro-optical payload used for persistent surveillance, targeting and attack. Cattapan’s colour-saturated backgrounds visually signal the pervasiveness of militarised technology in the twenty-first century. This is enhanced by painted overlays of computer-graphic like markings of ghostly figures and strange landscapes.
This chapter examines how Cattapan appropriates or mimics cyber simulations and digital connectivity in ways that expose the digital-cyber-military domain as a twenty-first century ‘battlefield’. A battlefield where humanity is threatened by disappearance and replacement, as well as mortal death. To demonstrate the significance of Cattapan’s painting technique as a conduit to critique militarised technology, this chapter firstly pivots on two paintings completed in the year after he returned from Timor Leste, Night Patrols (Around Maliana) (2009) (Fig. 15) and Night Figures (Gleno) (2009) (Fig. 16). I then analyse subsequent paintings Imagine a Raft (Hard Rubbish 1) (2011) (Fig. 17) and Raft City No 1 (Surveillance Version) (2015) (Fig. 18). Here I also draw upon an earlier painting Carrying (2002) (Fig. 19) as a reference. In the last part of the chapter I examine paintings completed and exhibited in 2016. These are Fall of the Valley Kings (2016) (Fig. 20) and Vapour Line (2016) (Fig. 21). I conscript Jean Baudrillard’s theories of disappearance, reappearance, virtuality and reality in the realms of violence and war as theoretical avenues to interrogate Cattapan’s post-Timor Leste paintings. Eyal Weizman’s ideas involving forensic architecture help to prosecute an argument that Cattapan’s paintings expose the digital-cyber-military domain as a site of conflict where particular twenty-
74 first century processes of dehumanisation occur. Gregoire Chamayou’s philosophical examination of the airborne drone provides a focus upon militarised technology that retrospectively reveals Baudrillard’s theories as prescient.
Cattapan’s practice and paintings have not been closely examined through the lens of contemporary militarised technology and its ramifications for war, the future of war and humanity. In particular, his post-Timor Leste work has not been examined. This chapter addresses these gaps and in doing so demonstrates that painting can usefully and insightfully critique contemporary conflict and its technological apparatus. A visual duality is presented in the way Cattapan layers computer graphic-like iconography over backgrounds of saturated colour. This results in a visual tension causing the viewer’s eyes to move back and forth between the layers, before reconciling them into an image. This active process can happen each time a viewer sees one of Cattapan’s paintings, possibly revealing something new each time. More specifically, with regard to Cattapan’s post-Timor Leste paintings, the tension is intensified by subtle changes in his painting technique. These changes offer an opportunity to examine how Cattapan’s responses to being in a conflict zone influenced new approaches to subject matter, as well as the act of painting.
One of Cattapan’s changes in technique was a move from painting swathes of background colour across a canvas, to allowing initial brushstrokes of heavily laden paint to drip and coalesce. Although this change can be linked to an abstract expressionist gestural approach made famous by Jackson Pollock in the 1950s, it reflects an extension of Cattapan’s existing processes. It is an experiential and practice led change embedded in his responses to the military situation in Timor Leste. The resulting increased visual tension is amplified by a change in the way he also painted his figural and landscape overlays. These became even more spectral-like, not as filled in or modelled. Cattapan’s backgrounds of dripped paint act as gestural reminders of human agency in an age where accelerating technological developments mediate human gestural agency. His painted overlays of digitally inflected graphic-like markings, representationally reinforce how mediations of human gestural agency can occur. These mediations can occur with physical removal or death, but also via virtual (re)appearance, (re)assembly, or presentation as digital and cyber proxies.
Cattapan’s figures and landscapes may capture the pivotal moment between disappearance and reappearance. They may also demonstrate that disappearance is under way, or conversely, that proxy reappearance is occurring. This sense of oscillating movement between appearance and disappearance is amplified by the gestural and visceral agency evident in
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Cattapan’s dripped painted backgrounds. Additionally, the dialectical relationship between the dripped backgrounds and spectral computer graphic-like overlays creates a critical space that helps inform how Cattapan’s paintings can critique contemporary militarised technology. In a comment written prior to Cattapan going to Timor Leste, Chris McAuliffe makes an observation that helps us understand the role multiplicity plays in Cattapan’s paintings. McAuliffe notes; “Cattapan’s paintings are possible histories, not simply responses or interpretations of an event but also reflections on what kind of humanity and community might be recovered in the process”.277 Through the lens of Cattapan’s post-Timor Leste paintings “possible histories” are glimpsed in the oscillations of disappearance, appearance and reappearance. These oscillations present multiple “possible histories” that recursively reference the past as they draw forth the future. They draw forth possible future histories in ways that stimulate questions about the use and development of contemporary militarised technology, the future of war and importantly, the future of humanity. This chapter expands upon McAuliffe’s observation by contextualising it within Cattapan’s post-Timor Leste paintings. The contemporary military context underscores McAuliffe’s use of the word “recovered” when referring to humanity and community. Here, the word “recovered” offers a few possibilities, from recoverable data to revival of life.
Cattapan had first been asked by the Australian War Memorial to be an official Australian War Artist in 2006, a couple of years before the opportunity to go to Timor Leste was proposed.278 Timor Leste’s struggles had registered in Cattapan’s youth when, like many Australians, he had been “deeply affected” by the 1975 Indonesian invasion of East Timor and the brutal killings of the Balibo Five Australian journalists.279 Timor Leste had been a Portuguese colony until the Portuguese exited in 1975 and the country was invaded by Indonesia. In 1999, in the bloody aftermath of Timor Leste’s attempts to establish independence the UN intervened with peacekeeping initiatives lead by Australia. Although Australian peacekeeping forces officially withdrew in 2013, Australia’s involvement continues, mainly through Australian Federal Police (AFP) presence and training.280
Initially Cattapan had resisted the War Memorial’s overtures because he felt he would not be the right kind of artist: “it seemed to me that most of the artists, or indeed all of them that have
277 McAuliffe, Jon Cattapan: Possible Histories, 13. 278 Turley, Artists at Work: Jon Cattapan, 3:39. 279 Diana Warnes and Laura Webster, “Wartime Issue 53 Feature Article: Nightscapes and Jungle Vision,” Australian War Memorial, accessed 24 October, 2016, https://www.awm.gov.au/wartime/53/webster_warnes_nightscapes/. 280 Australian Federal Police, “AFP Across the World,” accessed September 25, 2016, https://www.afp.gov.au/what-we-do/our-work-overseas/international-deployment-group. 76 been sent, have quite a strong representational bias in their work, whereas for me there are moments in my work that are representational, but largely it is an imagined kind of work that I do”.281 He was, thus, wary of any expectations to record or illustrate.282 Additionally, he was cautious about having his freedom of movement or expression curtailed.283 He also had two requests. One was to be able to “get out of military bases or forward operating camps” to experience being with troops particularly on night patrols.284 In an interview with the author Cattapan commented that, “I knew if I had gone to Afghanistan or Iraq, like my friends Charles [Green] and Lyndell [Brown] did, I would spend a lot of time on those big bases and that didn’t hold so much fascination for me”.285 The second request was to have access to night vision gear.286 Both of Cattapan’s requests could be met in Timor Leste because the peacekeeping nature of the Australian military presence meant that, while not without danger, it was not as dangerous as going to active battlefields such as Afghanistan or Iraq. For Cattapan it was important that the experience contributed to his painting practice in ways that extended and informed his methodology.287 The use of night vision technology on night patrols with soldiers, provided a catalyst that helped him link his practice as a professional artist to his experience as an official war artist in mutually enriching ways.
Cattapan’s desire to experience night vision was driven by an interest “in how human beings occupy territory”, a kind of surveillance.288 This perspective had been a long-term interest since the 1980s when he painted street scenes, often at night, such as Fire in Burnett Street (1987) and The Street (1987). What is not yet evident in these earlier works is the layered painting technique Cattapan developed in the early 1990s during an Australia Council residency and extended stay in New York (1989–1991). From this period his images of urban or city environments, usually at night, were configured with markings reminiscent of digital graphics painted over amorphous and colorful backgrounds.289 These backgrounds were painted with fanned brushstrokes that blended paint. The computer generated appearance of the overlays gave rise to descriptions of his work that Cattapan also used, such as “data-scape”.290 From
281 Cattapan and McLintock, “Extended Interview,” 4:05. 282 Turley, Artists at Work: Jon Cattapan, 4:54. 283 Ibid. 284 Cattapan and McLintock, “Extended Interview,” 0:54. 285 Cattapan, interview with the author (2016). 286 Cattapan and McLintock, “Extended Interview,” 0:54. 287 Ibid. 288 Jon Cattapan and Justine Frazier, “War Artist Reflects Real Life,” ABC 702, Mornings With Justine Frazier (October 4, 2011), accessed January 2017, http://blogs.abc.net.au/nsw/2011/10/war-artist-reflects-real- life.html?site=sydney&program=north_coast_mornings. 289 McAuliffe, Jon Cattapan: Possible Histories, 146. 290 Jon Cattapan in Christine Dauber, “An Interview with Jon Cattapan,” M/C Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 3 (July, 2004), accessed November 23, 2015, http://journal.media- culture.org.au/0207/cattapaninterview.php. 77 the late 1980s and early 1990s Cattapan had also developed a technique of generating source ‘drawings’ through Photoshop manipulations of his own photographs, and found imagery.291 These source ‘drawings’ are introduced, by freehand painted markings, onto canvases already saturated with colour.
McAuliffe claims that Cattapan reinvests the “manual into the digital” in ways that speak of “digital culture as process and economy, rather than simulation or illusion”.292 But, Cattapan does more than reinvest the “manual into the digital”. Rather, he animates the manual into the digital in ways that both reflect and contest digital culture’s processes, economies, simulations and illusions. By animating the manual, Cattapan’s paintings reveal digital culture as a site where notions of what it means to be human are threatened, contested and reviewed. In the military context where digital and cyber technologies are actively researched and developed by and for defence departments to gain and maintain advantage, the digital world becomes both a site of war and a weapon of war.
Night Patrols (Around Maliana) (2009)
In the year following his return from Timor Leste Cattapan completed the works commissioned by the Australian War Memorial. These include a major piece Night Patrols (Around Maliana) (Fig. 15) and six smaller Night Vision Studies (2009) oil paintings. The Australian War Memorial also acquired sixteen works on paper, some completed in Timor Leste and others subsequently completed in Cattapan’s studio.293 Night Patrols (Around Maliana) is a triptych, each part depicting soldiers on night patrol. In this first major work after returning from Timor Leste Cattapan continues with his technique of painting amorphous backgrounds. The dripped painted background first appears in Night Figures (Gleno) (2009) (Fig. 16) painted after fulfilling the Australian War Memorial commissions. However, the figures in Night Patrols (Around Maliana) do display some of the less formed characteristics evident in later paintings. Rather than painting the figures as part of the background, Cattapan uses a drawing and stencil mono- printing process he developed in an earlier series of drawings called The Carbon Group (2003).294 In Night Patrols (Around Maliana) these hand painted, but drawing-like figures, are
291 Ibid. 292 McAuliffe, Jon Cattapan: Possible Histories, 136. 293 The Australian War Memorial’s collection of Cattapan’s Timor Leste works can be viewed at this link https://www.awm.gov.au/search/all/?query=jon+cattapan&op=Search&format=list&rows=20§ion%5B0% 5D=collections&filter%5Btype%5D=Art. 294 Turley, Artists at Work: Jon Cattapan, 6:55. 78 laid over the top of the prepared amorphous background. The result is that the figures seem to float.
Cattapan has harnessed the phosphor screen green glow of night vision glasses by saturating high foregrounds with shades of green that dissolve into Prussian blue night skies. Dashes of cadmium and crimson red, signal potential hotspots similar to those identified by the thermal imaging capabilities in augmented night vision technology.295 These red hotspots and areas of yellow interrupt the dark amorphous background, causing the viewer’s eye to travel across each part of the triptych, as if compelled to surveil the terrain. Over the top of these dark but vibrant backgrounds Cattapan has painted various markings. These include figures of soldiers looming like ghosts in the foreground of each panel. Topographical lines, painted across the top sections of each panel, recall maps that were shown or used during peacekeeping briefings he attended.296 These lines immediately distort perspective by introducing an aerial view over the ambiguous frontal viewpoint. This distortion helps Cattapan channel, in his own words, the “incredibly dreamlike” and “other worldly” experience of using night vision glasses.297 As mentioned in the previous chapter, Gittoes also commented on the other worldly experience of wearing night vision glasses, describing it as “nightmarish” and hallucinatory.298 Unlike Cattapan though, Gittoes paints distorted soldier figures wearing exaggerated night vision glasses, or figures of children or non-combatants as they appear when seen through these glasses.
In Night Patrols (Around Maliana) Cattapan, who studied computer science for a year before going to art school, has painted pale green dots in strategic positions. These stand for bytes of data, possibly gathered by the night vision glasses. The combination of dots and lines, in conjunction with spectral computer-graphic like figures, gives the appearance of digital surveillance graphics laid over images of strategic terrain. In this way, the three panels take on the appearance of multiple screens, such as those used by remote drone pilots to monitor and surveil potential targets, or screens in a military operations room. Viewers may not be surveilling figures in a landscape through the night vision glasses worn by the artist. Rather, they may be accessing relayed images displayed on screens. The sense of removal or displacement displayed in Night Patrols (Around Maliana) reveals the remote capabilities of contemporary war. In doing so the painting pries open the military occupation of the space
295 Cattapan, “Night Vision Goggles,” 41. 296 Turley, Artists at Work: Jon Cattapan, 23:35. 297 Ibid., 15:10. 298 George Gittoes, text written in margins of drawing Khats, pencil on paper, 35.9 x 43.2 cm, 1993. Australian War Memorial Collection, accessed, 2016. 79 between the real and virtual. This double entendre is revealed in a triptych of painted terrain that carries a history of Portuguese colonisation, Indonesian invasion, violent battles for independence (1999) and ongoing UN supported peacekeeping efforts.
Cattapan’s work speaks to a broader global context beyond Timor Leste in two main ways. Firstly, as he explained in a televised interview in 2009, Night Patrols (Around Maliana) is not a depiction of an exact location in Timor Leste.299 Rather, it is an amalgamation of various drawings he made in-situ and photographs he took, which he used later in his Melbourne studio to create the painting.300 By amalgamating and reworking imagery of various kinds Cattapan draws together Timor Leste’s history as an exemplar of more generalised notions of contemporary war and conflict around the globe. The saturation of night vision green transmits the physical experience of using night vision technology as well as the relayed virtual reality. The painting demonstrates a global situational awareness of ubiquitous surveillance technology in a militarised context.
Baudrillard’s ideas about a “violence of the global” that destroys natural references to the world with its pervasive “technostructure” help us to understand the complexity of Cattapan’s paintings.301 For Baudrillard the “technostructure” exists in the space between the screen and the network where natural references to the world via the body and memory are technologically mediated in ways that regiment the global system.302 In this global system the hounding “out of any form of negativity or singularity” creates an inert homogeneity that is itself a morphed kind of violence operating as a contagion.303 Whilst noting that immunities are destroyed and the power to resist is neutered by the increasingly pervasive “technostructure”, Baudrillard observes that “in the face of this homogenizing, dissolving power, we see heterogeneous forces rising up everywhere”.304 These antagonistic forces “seem violent, anomalous, irrational – ethnic, religious and linguistic collective forms, but also emotionally disturbed or neurotic individual forms”.305 Baudrillard follows with a provocative statement that it “would be a mistake to condemn these upsurges as populist, archaic, or even terrorist”. Now, over a decade after his 2003 statement, the “mistake” Baudrillard identified has helped define the continuous and unfolding characteristics of conflict, of the “war on terror”, in the twenty-first century.306 Military
299 Turley, Artists at Work: Jon Cattapan, 20:00. 300 Ibid. 301 Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, 92. 302 Ibid. 303 Ibid., 94. 304 Ibid. 305 Ibid., 95. 306 Ibid. 80 responses are now accompanied by military style global policing and security, each enabled by remotely operated, long range, long dwell and persistent surveillance systems.
The dual-use civilian – military nature of technical apparatus within the “technostructure” enables, but also blurs the lines between military operation, covert para-military activity, and military style policing. Each plays a part in perpetuating the “violence of the global”.307 Examples of military and military style security measures are US defence force drone operations in declared battlefields such as Syria, and CIA counter-insurgency drone operations in places like Yemen and Northern Pakistan.308 Contemporary studies of the post 9/11 rise of military style policing and security to aid the ‘war on terror’ highlight the role played by ubiquitous surveillance. Commentators such as Chamayou, discussed earlier in this thesis, and Ian Shaw, draw attention to the role played by contemporary surveillance technology in state security policies where military responses and military style policing or security are deployed. The twenty-first century “manhunt” has a global reach through airborne drone surveillance enabled by space assets and remote operation.309 However, as Shaw observes, vertical scoping from above is convoyed with surveillance technology that can also intrude into the intimate physical spaces of human life.310 This is achieved with developments in smaller drone technology and swarming capabilities that can facilitate intrusion inside urban and domestic spaces.311 However, as Chamayou notes, contemporary surveillance technology is not just a way to tail individuals who are known, it can also preempt military or security force actions based on patterns of behavior that may indicate alleged aberrant intent.312 In 2003 Baudrillard’s warning not to condemn “upsurges as populist, archaic, or even terrorist” takes on another dimension when preemptive condemnation occurs.313
Militarised technology now occupies Baudrillard’s “technostructure” in ways that extend its infiltration and influence beyond Earth’s atmosphere into space. In light of this, Baudrillard’s concerns about the “violence of the global” needs to be updated to the ‘violence of and beyond the biosphere’. Notions of the post 9/11 “everywhere war” put forward by Derek Gregory and
307 An example of dual-use technical apparatus is the current necessity for airborne drone communication and spatial orientation to access GPS and communications satellites also used for civilian purposes. 308 Derek Gregory, Gregorie Chamayou, Christian Enemark and Christopher Fuller are, amongst others, commentators who draw attention to official US Defense Force operations and those conducted by other agencies such as the CIA. 309 Gregorie Chamayou uses the term “manhunt” in reference to drones throughout his book Drone Theory. 310 Shaw, “The Urbanization of Drone Warfare,” 19-28. 311 Ibid. 312 Chamayou, Drone Theory, 42. 313 Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, 92. 81 discussed by Shaw and others, can now be extrapolated to literally cosmic proportions.314 It is with this in mind that I focus on an unexpected reaction Cattapan had to his experiences in Timor Leste. In an interview with the author he said, “suddenly and almost for evermore I began to understand that conflict is all around us and that the notion of a war fought in an old fashioned way, that’s gone. We’re in a state of perpetual motion where conflict is always there – hovering”.315 The sense of hovering is insightful, given the surveillance role airborne drones and space assets play in contemporary war’s kill chain. Drones literally hover, loitering over sites of interest, and satellites are suspended in space; communication satellites in geostationary orbit (GEO) and GPS satellites orbiting in medium Earth orbit (MEO). It is also interesting to think about cyberspace as a realm that hovers in perpetual motion, perpetually connected by near light-speed invisible processes that envelop the globe with signals relayed to and from space.
Night Patrols (Around Maliana) visually discloses Cattapan’s personal realisation that “conflict is all around us” in a number of ways. The painting’s saturated green background illuminates the significant role pervasive militarised technology plays in conflict’s global-cosmic reach. The ghostly soldier figures and the disorienting cartographic markings float across the green background in ways that clearly suggest a sense of “hovering”. The tension between an aerial and frontal perspective heightens spatial orientation and disorientation in ways that enhance a sense of motion and hovering. Even though the map-like markings connect across the three panels the landscapes do not. This generates questions not only about spatial orientation but temporal orientation as well. Each panel could be different locations or the same location but at different times of the night, or perhaps different nights. The confusion of time as well as place suggests that war and conflict are everywhere all the time. Additionally, the computer graphic inflected aesthetic of the figures and map-like contours introduces a sense of ‘hovering’ cyberspace. The viewer wonders whether Night Patrols (Around Maliana) is an eye-witness account, or a digitally relayed or simulated one displayed on three screens situated in a military bunker.
In a 1993 interview with Anne Kirker, Cattapan makes a statement that helps us understand his sensibility to “hovering” environments. He comments that, “When you are travelling, mentally at least, you have that feeling of being in free fall, waiting for someone or something
314 Derek Gregory, “The Everywhere War,” The Geographical Journal 177, no. 3 (2011): 238-50; Shaw, “The Urbanization of Drone Warfare” (2016). 315 Cattapan, interview with the author (2016). 82 to grab hold of you and ground you for a little while”.316 Here the feeling of free fall resonates with his observation that we are in a “state of perpetual motion” that causes a sense of “hovering”. Significantly, in his own article Night Vision Goggles (2011) Cattapan states; “Displacement can be a useful thing”.317 What he really means, I suggest, is that it is useful for him as an artist. It is something he harnesses as a source of multiple perspectives, inspiration and insight that can be reworked or remixed in paintings that hyperbolically reflect displacement sources. Hence the disorientating spatial and temporal perspectives evident in Night Patrols (Around Maliana).
The effect of displacement and disorientation can also be explained by an observation Cattapan made in an ABC TV documentary Artists at Work: Jon Cattapan (2009).318 This documentary was made soon after his return from Timor Leste and screens footage of Cattapan painting Night Patrols (Around Maliana). He describes the effect of wearing night vision glasses as “eerie” noting that you wait “for something to come in off the side that you had not accounted for”.319 The disorienting effects caused by the green glow of night vision glasses are exacerbated by a reduced peripheral vision that would account for the sense that something could “come in off the side”. The triptych format in Night Patrols (Around Maliana) facilitates the landscape misalignment in ways that create a sense that each panel represents a view where peripheral vision is obscured by the boundaries of night vision glasses. Yet, at the same time, the three panels play off each other in ways that reveal what might be happening “off the side”. That the work can also take on the appearance of computer screens used by military personnel, remote to the location, illustrates another kind of displacement where the virtual plays with time and place. Additionally, the computer screen and its frame, like the edges of a night vision scope, elide the peripheral. Here, the peripheral acts as a metaphor for reality, elided by virtualised imagery that is constructed via digitally formed pixel representation, each pixel representing another bordered entity. The painted re-presentation of imagery seen through night vision glasses in Night Vision (Around Maliana) exposes multiple ways in which peripheries or realities are obscured and elided. In doing so it opens itself to peripheries, to the “something” that might “come in off the side”, to reality. In the military context this kind of porosity means the painting rips open the dichotomy between virtuality and reality in ways that provoke questions about the blurred lines between civilian and military use of technological assets.
316 Jon Cattapan and Anne Kirker, “Jon Cattapan: Interview,” Eyeline 22/23 (1993): 35. 317 Cattapan “Night Vision Goggles,” 41. 318 Turley, Artists at Work: Jon Cattapan. 319 Ibid., 15:10. 83
War Did Not Take Place: A Baudrillardian Perspective
The triptych format of Night Patrols (Around Maliana) provides a visual lucidity for Baudrillard’s three-part essay provocation that the first Gulf War (1990–1991) was a virtualised one.320 Whilst Baudrillard’s essays refer to Iraq, and Cattapan’s painting is ostensibly located in Timor Leste, in an age where technology blurs boundaries of space and time, neither the essays, nor the painting’s imagery can be pinned to a location and time. Rather, they act as radical examples of subversive paradigms with interpretative agency that penetrate both virtuality and reality, the space between them, and the blurred lines between time and space. Baudrillard’s 1991 essays “The Gulf War Will Not Take Place”, “The Gulf War: Is it Really Taking Place?” and “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place” are relevant provocations to think about twenty-first century war and conflict, for as he states in The Spirit of Terrorism (2003), globalised violence “is viral: it operates by contagion”.321 His 1991 essays prefigure the apparatus of “contagion”. He suggests that in the first Gulf War the virtual, transmitted through the screen, pronounced via the subterfuge of decoy, broadcast by the media and embalmed in a kind of self-referencing simulation, hijacked war by eliding duration for the sake of information delivered instantaneously.322 As Baudrillard noted, “it is as though there was a virus infecting this war from the beginning which emptied it of all credibility”.323
Simon Chesterman argues that Baudrillard’s three essays focus on the “informational hegemony” of virtual representation.324 Chesterman observes that Baudrillard exposes how contemporary violence “derives meaning only from representation” in a way that positions virtual representation as the “ordering principle of a world rendered pure through the disavowal of reality beyond the borders of the image”.325 Here, Chesterman identifies that the virtual image obscures the peripheral view of reality. The disavowal of reality beyond the peripheral can be viewed as a violent act of cleansing to ensure the informational “purity” of the virtual world where decoy, simulation, image saturation and ongoing media transmission operate. This violent disavowal is part of the viral pathology Baudrillard subsequently identified as a contagion where hegemonic forces metastasise into pandemic.326 It erodes the peripheral’s ability to penetrate the virtual. A victim of this contagion is the duration of war’s declaration,
320 Refer to note 35. 321 Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, 94. 322 Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, 35. 323 Ibid., 62. 324 Simon Chesterman, “Ordering the New World: Violence and its Re/Presentation in the Gulf War and Beyond,” Post Modern Culture (1998): 38, accessed October 2016. http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text- only/issue.598/8.3chesterman.txt. 325 Ibid., 47. 326 Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, 94. 84 action and end, devoured by technological processes that pre-emptively hyper-anticipate in a way that acts as “a substitution for and diversion from the transition to war”.327
Night Patrols (Around Maliana) plays with the loss of war’s durational trajectory because any of the panels could represent, in any combination, a beginning, middle or an end, thus collapsing linear time. They could also represent isolated incidents that self-contain a trajectory from beginning to end. Equally, it is easy to imagine additional panels in an endless image with no beginning where virtual mapping simulates connection as a substitute ‘landscape’, but where real landscape falls away from underfoot, precipitating free fall. The hovering ghostly figures, either on the verge of disappearance or appearance, place humanity in a precarious position hovering on the edge of, or between, reality and virtuality. This slippage is mirrored in the two layers of paint where the sense of displaced linear time is kindled by the saturation of various shades of night vison green, clearly signifying militarised technology. Duration is also disrupted by the nebulous positioning of reality and virtuality in the three panels which could variously be eye-witness accounts, military training simulations, simulations of planned patrols, depictions of live-feeds of patrols in action, or play-backs of patrols that have already taken place.
In “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place” Baudrillard calls for a resistance to the “probability of any image or information whatever”.328 Here, he questions the veracity and motivation of the virtual ‘informational’ image. He proposes that resistance should be “more virtual than events themselves”, “not seek to re-establish the truth” and that it should “re-immerse the war and all information in the virtuality from whence they came”.329 In a few ways Night Patrols (Around Maliana) demonstrates the kind of resistance Baudrillard calls for. Without relying upon electronic, cyber or digital processes to create and disseminate the image, the painting poses multiple interpretations that play with reality, virtuality and the space between them. The painting is not a captured film image of a war situation bound to programmable instructions for its colour, resolution, production or dissemination. Its existence is not embedded in instructional algorithmic information that purports to deliver image information. The painting resists offering informational probability at multiple levels. Rather, it offers an epistemic stimulus that expands possibility. In other words, it offers the opportunity of knowledge rather than the deliverance of information.
327 Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, 36. 328 Ibid., 66. 329 Ibid., 66-67. 85
The amorphous background and hovering spectral figures in Night Patrols (Around Maliana) create a sense of permeability, visually expressing a kind of porosity, literally and metaphorically. These elements act as a resistance to the image being considered as a site or repository of re-established truth from whence information can be disseminated. Rather, the painting offers avenues, via the expression of paint and image, for viewers to question the relationship between war and media, war and technology. This is achieved in ways where discoveries of any kind of truth lie within the viewer’s epistemological reaction to the painting. Multiple viewers means multiple possible truths, over time. By animating the “manual into the digital” Cattapan introduces a human physicality that contrasts with electronic or digitally produced images.330 He uses paint, applied by hand in a time-consuming durational process, to resist in a way that addresses Baudrillard’s call to be “more virtual than events themselves” and to “re-immerse the war and all information in the virtuality from whence they come”.331
In Night Patrols (Around Maliana) Cattapan uses paint and the triptych format to play with screen delivered virtuality in ways that re-immerse it into more open-ended notions of the virtual that are not associated with cyber technology. This means that in the painting the virtual becomes something that is; “Almost or nearly as described, but not completely or according to strict definition”, rather than; “Not physically existing as such but made by software to appear to do so. ‘virtual images’”.332 In other words, the virtual is virtually there but not quite. Furthermore, this complex visual play is revealed in a painting, an object that does not need to be turned on, digitally connected, played or re-played. Baudrillard, in his second essay, “The Gulf War: Is it Really Taking Place?” claims that the “real victory of the simulators of war is to have drawn everyone into this rotten simulation”.333 Cattapan’s complex painted visual play exposes complicit relationships between war and the media, war and technology in ways that withdraw from the simulation.
With Baudrillard’s notions of temporal duration’s implosion in mind, Cattapan’s triptych format for Night Patrols (Around Maliana) further solicits Baudrillard’s three essay titles; “The Gulf War Will Not Take Place”, “The Gulf War: Is it Really Taking Place?” and “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place”.334 Each panel could be given any one of Baudrillard’s essay titles or rather, perhaps generic versions of them. For example, The War Will Not Take Place, The War: Is it
330 McAuliffe, Jon Cattapan: Possible Histories, 136. 331 Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, 67. 332 Oxford Living Dictionary, “Virtual,” accessed 8 April, 2017, https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/virtual. 333 Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, 59. 334 See note 35. 86
Really Taking Place? and The War Did Not Take Place encapsulate ideas of globalised violence by not identifying a location. In this way Cattapan’s observation that we are “in a state of perpetual motion where conflict is always there – hovering” can be subversively encrypted.335 The potential interchangeability of the three titles and the three painted panels insinuates indiscernible beginnings, middles or ends. In doing so Baudrillard’s crisis in temporal duration is parodied in ways that draw attention to globalised violence and “everywhere war”, and their implications for humanity.336 In his second essay “The Gulf War: Is it Really Taking Place?”, Baudrillard includes an allegory that reveals seemingly absurd correlations between events that belie the normal associations of beginnings and endings.
A UN bedtime story: the UN awoke (or was awakened) from its glass coffin (the building in New York). As the coffin fell and was shattered (at the same time as the Eastern Bloc), she spat out the apple and revived, as fresh as a rose, only to find at once the waiting Prince Charming: the Gulf War, also fresh from the arms of the cold war after a long period of mourning. No doubt together they will give birth to a New World Order, or else end up like two ghosts locked in a vampiric embrace. 337
I propose that the “New World Order” uses the “vampiric embrace” as a way to perpetuate suspense and war. Over a decade later in 2002, Baudrillard makes a statement that ‘speaks’ to the idea of “vampiric embrace”. In the aftermath of 9/11 he writes that there is “no remedy for this extreme situation, and war is certainly not a solution, since it merely offers a rehash of the past”.338 He goes on to list elements that in their ‘rehashed’ state are, I argue, signs of a “vampiric embrace”. The list includes the “same deluge of military forces, bogus information, senseless bombardment, emotive and deceitful language, technological deployment and brainwashing”.339 These maintain the conditions for war, to make it appear to be a solution. This appearance is promulgated by the virtual digitally produced image and media broadcasting, which Baudrillard noted in 1991 results in a “suffocating atmosphere of deception and stupidity”.340 Like vampires sucking mortal blood for sustenance, militarised imagination seeks succour from conditions, new and rehashed, that provide it with justifications to maintain its hegemonic influence. The maintenance of these conditions, and the representation of them
335 Cattapan, interview with the author (2016). 336 Derek Gregory, “The Everywhere War,” The Geographical Journal 177, no. 3 (2011): 238-50. 337 Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, 46. 338 Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, 34. 339 Ibid. 340 Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, 68. 87 through screen-based media, implodes durational trajectories of beginning, middle and end in ways that scaffold the impression of the “everywhere war”.
In an analysis of Baudrillard’s writings about war, terrorism and 9/11, Leonard Wilcox makes a comment about the second Gulf War that illustrates Baudrillard’s “vampiric embrace”. Wilcox says, “Like the first Gulf War, the attack on Iraq functioned to rescue the idea of war, the status of war, its meaning, its future”.341 Here, the idea of “rescue”, rather than being heroic, is a vampiric act that feeds off the conditions of war to sustain war. This hyperbolic ‘feeding frenzy’ is aided by accelerating technological developments that augment Baudrillard’s list of rehashed elements. For example, Pioneer drones were used during the first Gulf War. A US government report notes that drones provided “substantial imagery support” and were used in “targeting…and surveillance missions”.342 The document also reports that, “Iraqi troops actually attempted to surrender to a UAV loitering over their positions”.343 Thinking about a human being surrendering to an “unmanned” vehicle loitering in the sky offers clues to the future of humanity and war, especially if increasingly autonomous and asymmetrical systems are deployed. In the second Gulf War drones were deployed in larger numbers and were weaponised for the first time by the USA, thus coupling surveillance and targeting with killing operations.344 Since the second Gulf War the use of weaponised drones has escalated in declared and undeclared battlefields.
In Passwords (2003), written over a decade after his three essays about the first Gulf War, Baudrillard describes a digitally coded destiny where it will be “possible to measure everything by the same extremely reductive yardstick: the binary, the alternation between 0 and 1”.345 In Night Patrols (Around Maliana) Cattapan’s coupling of the saturated green glow of night vision glasses with computer graphic-like markings draws attention to militarized technology and its increasingly pervasive influences in contemporary conflict operations. In doing this the painting also hints at seemingly unimaginable futures where instructional digital code is an operative of
341 Leonard Wilcox, “Baudrillard, September 11, and the Haunting Abyss of the Reversal,” Postmodern Culture 14, no. 1 (2003): 28, accessed February, 2017, http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/issue.903/14.1wilcox.html. 342 Committee on Armed Services Washington DC, “Intelligence Successes and Failures In Operations Desert Shield/Storm: Report of the Oversight and Investigations Sub Committee of the Committee on Armed Services House of Representatives,” One Hundred Third Congress, First Session (August 16, 1993): 9, accessed February, 2017, http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a338886.pdf. 343 Ibid. 344 The first lethal drone attack, under the auspices of the CIA’s Counter Terrorism Center (CTC), happened in Yemen on November 3, 2002. Christopher J. Fuller, “The Eagle Comes Home to Roost: The Historical Origins of the CIA’s Lethal Drone Program,” Intelligence and National Security 30, no. 6 (2014): 787, accessed June 10, 2017, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02684527.2014.895569. 345 Jean Baudrillard, Passwords, trans. Chris Turner (London and New York: Verso, 2003), 76. 88 war. What if we read the ghost-like figures as not human? What if we see them as avatars on a screen, robotised soldiers, or humans lost in the space between reality and virtuality? Night Patrols (Around Maliana) can be ‘read’ as a painting of a ‘simulation’ playing on three screens. However, as a painting it is the result of human analogue expression. Thus, it acts as a disruption or a resistance, wielded through human agency, forcing questions about a future controlled by the “extremely reductive yardstick: the binary, the alternation between 0 and 1”.346 Baudrillard uses binary code to illustrate the near light-speed algorithmic exchanges ‘instructing’ the virtual digital world. These algorithmic exchanges cannot be seen or touched in the human dimensions of time and space, for they operate outside of them. Referring to binary code he writes, “here lies the ultimate form of exchange, its most abstract from, its limit form, close to impossible exchange”.347
James Der Derian iterates Baudrillard’s reduction of exchange, writing that; “New technologies of imitation and simulation as well as surveillance and speed have collapsed the geographical distance, chronological duration, the gap itself between the reality and virtuality of war.”348 However, Der Derian taunts with a challenge: “Inside and outside the military, the future of war is up for grabs”. Baudrillard’s consideration on ‘thought’ at the end of Passwords proffers a way to meet Der Derian’s challenge. Baudrillard says thought “must play a catastrophic role” in re- apprehending or grabbing exchange; it must “remain humanist, concerned for the human, and to that end, recapture the reversibility of good and evil, of human and the inhuman”.349 Cattapan achieves this in Night Patrols (Around Maliana), and other post-Timor Leste paintings such as Night Figures (Gleno) 2009. The register of human physical and cognitive agency in the production of paintings that disrupt and peel away various layers of digitally produced militarised virtual simulation and augmentation pose provocations, interventions and resistances that play the kind of catastrophic roles Baudrillard proposed.
Cattapan meets Der Derian’s challenge from both inside and outside the military machine, visually grabbing the apparatus of war in ways that draw attention to humanity’s precarious oscillation between appearance and disappearance, reality and virtuality. In interview, Cattapan confessed that: “I’m interested in the human condition, it’s a bit old fashioned, but there you have it”.350 His interest in the human condition is not a nostalgic desire to return to
346 Ibid. 347 Ibid. 348 James Der Derian, “Virtuous War/Virtual Theory,” International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1944-) 76, no. 4 (October 2000): 788, accessed October 13, 2016. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2626459. 349 Baudrillard, Passwords, 92. 350 Cattapan, interview with the author (2016). 89 the past. Rather it acts as a referential gauge to hinge his visual investigations of contemporary times and his contemplations about the future of humanity. Referential processes imply links that loop in a recursive manner to the history of humanism and the birth of humanity. Here, McAuliffe’s use of the word “recovered” in his statement that Cattapan investigates “what kind of humanity and community might be recovered”, can be honed to mean a recovery of the links that inform us of our humanity and our human history.351
Night Figures (Gleno) (2009)
Night Figures (Gleno) is an important painting in Cattapan’s oeuvre as it marks the point where he allows background paint to drip. It is a departure from his long-term technique of painting amorphous backgrounds with fanned brushstrokes that blend colour. Rather, initial strokes made with brushes laden with paint are allowed to drip down the canvas, cutting into other strokes to continue dripping or coalescing. Cattapan has admitted that he felt an “urgency to create work” in Timor Leste, but due to lack of space and materials he could not paint large scape paintings.352 He goes on to say that the sense of urgency stayed with him when he returned to Australia and his studio. It acted as a driver for changes that reflect a human response to an immersive military experience, using night vision surveillance apparatus in a country with a history of war and conflict.
A sense of urgency is easy to understand when Cattapan’s statement about the ubiquity of conflict is taken in to account.353 This sense gives clues to how he approached creating Night Figures (Gleno), allowing paint to drip and coalesce. When asked about this painting, and how he worked through his Timor Leste experience, Cattapan responded that he decided to “try and do something completely different to see if I could rupture what had gone before” and that he would use acrylic rather than oil paint and let the paint “do its own thing”.354 He decided that if the experiment did not work he could “tidy it up with oil paint”. He spoke about “falling into the work and letting it go”.355 He left it overnight, and it dried.356 Upon returning to his studio the next day he thought the prepared canvas looked “pretty interesting”, but he would leave it alone for a while: “I left it alone for quite a while, thinking now what? And, then I hit upon this idea of
351 McAuliffe, Jon Cattapan: Possible Histories, 13. 352 Cattapan, interview with the author (2016). 353 Ibid. 354 Ibid. 355 Ibid. 356 Ibid. 90 these figures that were not filled in”.357 The figures in Night Figures (Gleno) differ from earlier works where figures are more modeled. It was “important” to him to “have the figures as a kind of spectral sort of outline”.358 They are a departure even from the figures in Night Patrols (Around Maliana) where, whilst ghost-like, they are still partially formed rather than outlined.
In Night Figures (Gleno) the dripped background, and spectrally outlined figures painted over the top, heighten the sense of hovering seen in Night Patrols (Around Maliana). Looking at Night Figures (Gleno) we see what appears to be a four-wheel drive vehicle on the left and a group of indefinable figures standing in an equally indefinable landscape. The figures are witnessing or waiting for something. The viewer feels drawn in, but are we waiting or witnessing? The night vision green places the scene within a military environment but, whilst somewhat menacing, the exact situation is not clear. The title Night Patrols (Around Maliana) gave a clue to the purpose and identity of the figures portrayed in it, but the title Night Figures (Gleno) leaves the identity and purpose of its figures unclear. Cattapan’s painting technique intensifies the confusion at the same time as stirring a desire to pry open possibilities.
Unlike Night Patrols (Around Maliana) Cattapan has saturated the entire Night Figures (Gleno) background with the green glow of night vision glasses. There is no Prussian blue sky or dashes of red. The spectral-like figures, the vehicle and landscape are painted in pale tones with small and narrow drawing-like brush strokes and dots. These markings vary in density according to the amount of paint on the brush, as it is stroked along the canvas. This is also affected by the pressure applied to the brush.359 The resultant inconsistent outlining amplifies the spectral appearance of figures, vehicle and landscape. The figures stand on a skeletal-like ‘ground’ of lines and markings that attempt to delineate a pictorial perspective, but the downward drip marks of the green background paint create a vertical slippage that plays havoc with this attempt. The viewer feels they are there with the figures but also not there, perhaps having ‘dripped’ out of the bottom of the painting along with residual paint.
The dripped paint in Night Figures (Gleno) represents the sense of urgency Cattapan felt after his time in Timor Leste. Just as the abstract expressionists asserted human agency through gestural application of paint, Cattapan asserts the same agency. However, given the military context and the night vision green, Cattapan’s assertion is both an urgent and a visceral reaction to the potential disappearance of the human via the various mechanisms of
357 Ibid. 358 Ibid. 359 These details about paint are due to my own experience as a visual artist. 91 contemporary war. The dripped paint acts like a tracking process of loss and disappearance. However, there is a redemption in the way the hand of the artist asserts human agency and injects further opportunities. For example, the possibility of escape presents itself as an alternative interpretation. Is the dripped paint tracking escape routes rather than pathways to disappearance, loss and death? Or perhaps, the paint dripping off the bottom of the painting offers a way to be outside the militarised environment in order to gain an alternative perspective? The presence of a human witness, or perhaps collaborator, is implied. Cattapan is both. As he says, “Certainly there were ghosts to be had scoping out the local terrain like this, and in these moments I was there but not there”.360 Here, his experience as an artist using night vision technology informs notions of witnessing at many levels, where he was “there but not there”. In other words he was present as well as removed. This experience, offering multiple perspectives, is perhaps more aligned to Harari’s idea of “flesh-witnessing”.361 In Cattapan’s case it is an immersive account of the uncanny effects of scoping.
By pulling his abstract background in Night Figures (Gleno) into a relationship with a hovering overlay of painted digitally-inflected spectral figures, Cattapan draws attention to the cyber and digital mediation of the human being. The layers of paint create a space between them. This space allows the human to slip out of the painting to witness, not simply the scene portrayed, but also the loss of reality it divulges. This slippage takes on more sinister tones when we peer into the distance beyond the figures and where a horizon might be. Cattapan has painted rough lines that could simultaneously be mountains or topographical maps, but they dissolve into fragments that seem to be scattered across the right foreground. Reality, via landscape, is dissolved and fragmented into bits or bytes of information, drawn into the “reductive yardstick: the binary, the alternation between 0 and 1”.362 Cattapan has painted signs of digital management along the top of the painting, making visible through a kind of caricature of signs, the physical, but hidden, infrastructure that digital technologies rely upon to operate. Markings reminiscent of digital chipboard components are placed in a way that give the impression the image is plugged into a controlling motherboard or server situated outside the painting. Perhaps, by providing a way to slip or drip out of the painting Cattapan creates an opportunity to ‘unplug’ mediation by cyber and digital forces? Kyle Weise makes a comment that helps explain how Cattapan’s complex processes draw attention to not only to the invisibility of digital and cyber operations, but also outcomes such as the insidious disappearance and possible digital proxy reappearance of the human being. Weise notes that
360 Cattapan, “Night Vision Goggles,” 41. 361 Harari, “Scholars, Eyewitnesses, and Flesh-Witnesses of War: A Tense Relationship” (2009). 362 Baudrillard, Passwords, 76. 92 the, “paintings do not illuminate the processes of digitisation that they connote. Rather they accentuate their invisibility and untranslatability into visual realms”.363 This is an act of resistance, one that ‘calls out’ the “reductive yardstick” identified by Baudrillard, at the same time as prying it open.
The dripped paint, with its messiness and randomness, acts as a contrasting counterpoint for Paul Virilio’s concerns about inertia caused by instantaneous technological interactivity.364 Virilio proposes that twenty-first century interactivity causes a “standardization of behaviours” and an “emotional SYNCHRONIZATION” that results in a “risk of paralysis or, rather, the sudden tetraplegia of the societal body”.365 Virilio’s observation echoes Baudrillard’s conjecture that it will be “possible to measure everything by the same extremely reductive yardstick: the binary alternation between 0 and 1”.366 Standardization and synchronization can be seen as the results of this restricted binary exchange, ultimately causing paralysis and tetraplegia within the “societal body”. In Night Figures (Gleno) Cattapan’s dripped paint defies standardization and synchronisation. This resistance is accentuated by the computer graphic-like markings painted over the top of the dripped paint, one layer exhibiting dripped randomness and the other playing with hovering mimicry. The downward trajectory of the background paint is in tension with perspectival lines Cattapan has painted at various diagonals across the canvas. This tension pulls the two layers apart in ways that not only create a space where resistance to reductive process can occur, but where resuscitating breath can be inhaled and importantly, also exhaled. Here, the human body and the “societal body” can revive.
Fifteen years before he went to Timor Leste Cattapan remarked that, “Everything is in a state of slipperiness between what we say is something and what it actually is”.367 Here, he instinctually identifies a space where movement can occur and where standardisation has difficulty gaining traction. Cattapan’s experience using night vision technology in Timor Leste provoked a significant shift in the way he was able to extend the visual articulation of this sentiment. In Night Figures (Gleno) the play between spectral figures and dripped background conveys a slippage of appearance, simultaneously suggesting a presentation of what something is and what it also might be. Here, the slippage of appearance speaks to a sense of simultaneous embodiment and disembodiment. This sense is encapsulated in Cattapan’s observation that figures and the landscape in Timor Leste appeared “eerie”, as if “something
363 Weise, “Jon Cattapan, Data-Scapes,” 48. 364 Virilio, The Great Accelerator (2012). 365 Ibid., 18. 366 Baudrillard, Passwords, 76. 367 Cattapan and Kirker, “Jon Cattapan: Interview,” 35. 93 or someone is on the verge of materialising or perhaps de-materialising”.368 Cattapan’s Timor Leste paintings are not just about Timor Leste, as they conjure the ghosts of all wars, even future ones. Caroline Turner, in her essay “Limiting Tolerance: Art and Human Rights” (2007) anticipates Cattapan’s discharge of time and place, when she notes that his series of drawings, The Carbon Group (2003), “are allusive and mysterious, but immediately bring to mind long histories of oppression, even torture; and their most frightening aspect is that they are set in our times but have no clear reference points”.369 The slippage of time and reality, clearly evident in Cattapan’s post-Timor Leste paintings, registers a similar provocation to Baudrillard’s conjecture that the first Gulf War was a phantom war, prosecuted via the screen where things and events are not as they seem.370
Raft and City: Creating Distance and Going Somewhere Else
Night Figures (Gleno) shows a shift in Cattapan’s painting technique that accentuates feelings and appearances of floating, hovering and displacement. Even though these are effects, they connect to Cattapan’s themes of the raft and the city, both evident in his work, pre and post Timor Leste. However, through the lens of Timor Leste these themes can be more directly linked to discussions about contemporary war and militarised technology. For example, the raft takes on somber tones in an era where war and conflict continue to force masses of people to flee their homes. Cattapan’s earlier painting Carrying (2002) (Fig. 19) engages with Australian political responses, at the time, to refugees and asylum-seekers arriving by boat.371 In August 2001 Australian SAS troops boarded the Norwegian ship MV Tampa, forcing denial of entry to refugees the Norwegians had rescued at sea.372 The so called “Tampa Affair” precipitated legislative responses to restrict access to Australian territory by refugees and asylum-seekers attempting to arrive by boat. Known as the “Pacific Solution” it was argued that it helped preserve border security and control immigration, and that it deterred people from seeking to travel to Australia in unseaworthy vessels, thus saving lives. However, in October 2001 a vessel carrying 223 passengers and crew was intercepted by the HMAS Adelaide. Attempts to turn the vessel back to Indonesia met with resistance from those on board. In the ensuing
368 Cattapan, “Night Vision Goggles,” 41. 369 Caroline Turner, “Limiting Tolerance: Art and Human Rights” In Thresholds of Tolerance, eds., Caroline Turner and David William, 12. (Canberra: Humanities research Centre and School of Art Gallery, Research School of Humanities, The Australian National University, 2007). 370 Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1995). 371 McAuliffe, Jon Cattapan: Possible Histories, 166. 372 National Museum of Australia, “Defining Moments in Australian History: Tampa Affair,” accessed October 27, 2016, http://www.nma.gov.au/online_features/defining_moments/featured/tampa_affair. 94 mayhem it was erroneously reported through government channels that refugees had threatened to throw children overboard.373 This claim was later proven to be incorrect and the political fallout for the Howard government was considerable. In between the “Tampa Affair” and the “Children Overboard” scandal, another series of events occurred that triggered, and subsequently defined, twenty-first century fear and threat, and ongoing political and military responses to them. On September 11, 2001, Middle Eastern terrorists with suicide mission intentions hijacked four airplanes; two planes were subsequently flown into the World Trade Centre twin towers in New York and a third was flown into the Pentagon, Washington. The fourth plane crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. These events are collectively called “9/11”.
Carrying was painted in 2002, one year after these globally defining events. The painting depicts three vessels; a half-submerged refugee boat, a border patrol vessel and a raft. They are painted against an amorphous background of luxuriant blue, with dashes of red. This pre- Timor Leste painting exhibits Cattapan’s earlier technique of painting backgrounds with fanned brushstrokes that meld colour. Dashes of red appear like slicks of blood, perhaps representing lives lost at sea. Computer graphic-like markings of a sprawling city hover, like an ambient surveillance system, over most of the painting. However, a group of four figures, “boat people”, huddling on a raft in the centre close-foreground are not covered by the surveillance-like overlay. This gives the impression that they are lost or perhaps not included in statistical data analyses. Their positioning at the very bottom of the painting and between two ‘slicks of blood’, one seeming to seep beyond the painting’s boundary, suggests that they too may drift off beyond the image. The city’s surveillance-like mode becomes simulative as it channels impressions of lost homes, in countries of origin as well as in destinations perhaps not reached, due to death at sea, or interning in refugee camps or detention centres. Civilisation, as bricks and mortar and as a concept, floats like an apparition that seems difficult to pin down. In this way it too becomes a raft, a virtual one.
Cattapan responded to the ‘children overboard’ affair of 2001 through a personal lens, confessing that “as a son of migrants it had a really particular resonance for me”.374 Whilst he responded empathetically to the situation at a biographical level, it is how he responded as an artist that reveals the significance of painting as an epistemological source with relevance to contemporary events and insight into the future. The expression of painting is not just about
373 Parliament of Australia, “Chapter 2: The ‘Children Overboard’ Incident,” Parliamentary Business, accessed April 12, 2017, http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Former_ Committees/scrafton/report/c02. 374 Jon Cattapan, The Drowned World: Jon Cattapan Works and Collaborations, exhibition catalogue, edited by Chris McAuliffe (Melbourne: Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne, 2006), 16. 95 depicting an event, but also about how the medium provides an avenue to work through it in ways that make the event a catalyst for something more. In Cattapan’s case this also included working through how the “Children Overboard” affair was represented in the media. As Cattapan explains he “went to the Internet and typed in the words ‘children overboard’ and got literally thousands of references, thousands of picture images came up”.375 The erroneous claims made by the government, including Prime Minister John Howard, had stirred a media frenzy. This was intensified by divided opinions about the legal and moral status of the “Pacific Solution”. Cattapan makes a statement that illustrates how the medium of painting provided an avenue to pursue a more measured, timely and contemplative response to the “Children Overboard” scandal. He said, “I think it’s a very particular thing to try and record something like that through painting; to actually make a painting very slowly and absorb the event through the actual act, the physical act of making the work takes it somewhere else”.376
In 2016 Cattapan makes similar remarks to the author when describing how, once back in his studio, he worked through his Timor Leste experiences. Referring to his process of making preliminary source drawings from manipulated photographs, he describes how he has “no interest in trying to copy but I have a real interest in trying to decipher”.377 He often grids his canvases, already saturated in colour, with chalk as a kind of mapping aide that helps him manually “decode” his manipulated source drawings.378 This offers a way to “absorb the event through the actual act” of making a painting.379 After his Timor Leste experience surveilling with night vision glasses, he realised that his decoding-like painting process acted as another kind of “surveilled opportunity” that could take the image beyond the initial stimulus, in other words, “somewhere else”.380 The dripped paint in Night Figures (Gleno) physically and literally goes “somewhere else” beyond the painting. The viewer can visually see evidence of this. In a sense the medium becomes a kind of raft too. It provides Cattapan with a way to hover, to keep open the space between him and his subject matter. Perhaps it is more like a magic carpet.
In the Australian television documentary “Artists at Work: Jon Cattapan” (2009) we see Cattapan painting, making broad brushstrokes allowing paint to drip, touching the surface of his painting, stepping back to view it from a distance before moving closer to make more marks.381 These physical actions, each accompanied by thoughtful decision making
375 Ibid. 376 Ibid. 377 Cattapan, interview with the author (2016). 378 Ibid. 379 Ibid. 380 Ibid. 381 Turley, Artists at Work: Jon Cattapan (2009). 96 processes, are intrinsic to his ‘decoding’ processes. They reinvest or re-encode distance in a way that might appease Baudrillard’s lament that “everything” is drastically reduced in the interchange of binary code.382 Helen Johnson’s writings on the criticality of painting help to explain how Cattapan re-encodes distance in his work. She writes about the physical act of working on a painting, “stepping back to contemplate its aesthetics, readability, coding distance into the painting’s materiality”.383 This takes place at various times during the creation of a painting. When asked by the author about walking away from a painting in-progress, and placing it where it will be seen upon re-entry to the studio in order to gain a first impression with ‘new eyes’, Cattapan responded: “I think that’s really important, really important”.384 Here we have an example of how both temporal and spatial distance are embedded within Cattapan’s working practice, allowing aesthetic, conceptual and technical elements to germinate and flourish. This is significant when considering his statement that the physical act of painting takes it “somewhere else”, for without distance the possibility of going “somewhere else” is difficult. The human dimension of distance is re-invested in ways that allow movement. With room to move, there is an opportunity to reanimate the paralysed tetraplegic societal body that Virilio diagnoses.385 In this expanded space, distance allows Cattapan to manually animate the digital, drawing attention to multiple possible human consequences of the digital and cyber world generally, and militarised technology specifically.
Cattapan’s painting processes of decoding source imagery, and creating a visual tension between layers of paint and iconography, distance his paintings from initial stimuli. In this way he achieves what Johnson describes when she writes that, “painting does not require a politics, only the ability to assume a distance from one and from thence to reflect openly upon it.”386 Here, to assume distance is a political act, one that is not necessarily contained by “a politics”. Rather, distance allows and reveals multiple possible perspectives from which to “reflect openly” on numerous issues. In this way distancing demonstrates political agency, rather than “a politics”. Multiple perspectives present a complexity that withstands the processes of synchronisation and standardisation that Virilio identifies as strangling the societal body. Here, Johnson’s short phrase “a politics” could be considered a sign of this kind of synchronization and standardization. In Cattapan’s case, hovering and going “somewhere else” reanimate human distance in ways that enable multiple perspectives. This multiplicity is evidenced in the way his paintings present multiple interpretations. It is as if the paintings unweave a situation,
382 Baudrillard, Passwords, 76. 383 Helen Johnson, Painting is a Critical Form (Castlemaine: 3-Ply, 2015), 36. 384 Cattapan, interview with the author (2016). 385 Virilio, The Great Accelerator, 18. 386 Johnson, Painting is a Critical Form, 37. 97 allowing freed threads room to relate differently to each other and to connect with new perspectival threads. Unweaving connotes a process that deconstructs prescribed patterns, standardization and synchronization.
The dripped backgrounds in Cattapan’s post-Timor Leste paintings metaphorically represent a kind of unweaving process, with the overlay of spectral computer graphic-like markings hinting at new associations. The oscillating appearance and reappearance of the figurative and landscape markings divulge a distance that exists between the virtual and real, the embodied and disembodied. By creating paintings that are not illustrative or descriptive, Cattapan avoids embedding them in a specific time and place. This helps him to create a distance from his Timor Leste’s experiences in ways that allow reflection back upon them. This also facilitates a distance from Timor Leste’s politically charged historical and contemporary association with war and conflict in ways inclusive of global perspectives. Tactics of distancing help to spawn multiple perspectives, allowing the kind of open reflection Johnson proposes. This openness means that Cattapan’s work offers multiple interpretations that not only address Timor Leste’s situation, but also global issues associated with war and conflict generally, and militarised technology specifically. The complex relationship between various kinds of distancing, multiple perspectives and therefore multiple interpretations, and openness is reflected not only in Cattapan’s iconography, but also his painting processes. Here, human agency wields political agency.
Rubbish and Data: Dual-Usage
Night Figures (Gleno) featured new painting processes that Cattapan has continued to develop in subsequent paintings that connect his experiences in Timor Leste with themes of the raft and the city. Imagine a Raft (Hard Rubbish 1) (2011) (Fig. 17) depicts a raft-like object hovering above a background of saturated and dripped night vision green paint. The raft appears to be stacked rubbish. In Raft City No 1 (Surveillance Version) (2015) (Fig. 18) Cattapan has painted a dense digital-like simulative city over another saturated and dripped night vision green background. These two post-Timor Leste paintings play with concepts of the raft, albeit in different ways that link to previous work, at the same time proffering avenues into the future. A physical raft can literally take you somewhere else. Not only does Cattapan represent raft-like objects and apparitions, he also uses paint and the act of painting to go “somewhere else”. In this way painting as a medium is also a raft, a vehicle to go “somewhere else”. The night vision
98 green backgrounds in Imagine a Raft (Hard Rubbish 1) and Raft City No 1 (Surveillance Version) channel militarised vision in a way that firmly places the raft and the city within contested environments.
In Imagine a Raft (Hard Rubbish 1), the human figure is absent but detritus in the form of hard rubbish indicates current or past human activity. Digitally inflected painted markings and dots create an overlay perspective that mimics a mapped virtual landscape. As in Night Figures (Gleno) Cattapan has painted markings at the top and bottom of Imagine a Raft (Hard Rubbish 1) that appear like external computer connections. The rubbish is painted in a more formed representational way, giving the suggestion of solidity. An old office chair, bags of rubbish, bins and boxes are clumped together as a body of detritus. The rubbish does not lie upon a raft, it collectively is the raft. It is positioned on top of one of the diagonal lines and partially over a section of filigreed map-like markings. However, a strange perspectival effect is generated by other diagonal lines extending into multiple horizon points, inside and outside the painting. Painted over the vertically dripped paint, this creates a distorted 3D effect that seems to contain the raft of rubbish. A white apparition in the upper centre of the painting appears like a string of row boats, with multiple oars protruding from their sides. It is not clear if there are oarsmen/women. This apparition suggests a number of interpretations including a possibility that it is collecting or delivering souls, whose mortal lives are represented by their left-over detritus. With the saturated night vision green background placing the image within a militarised context, this possibility stirs heightened urgency.
In Raft City No 1 (Surveillance Version) the ghostly presence of human figures is replaced with a ghost-city that floats like a data-raft, perhaps carrying civilisation’s remains. The dense depiction of the city is replete with a filigree of computer graphic-like markings that give the impression of complex circuitry or maps of digital interconnectivity. These markings seem to extend beyond the painting’s borders, enhancing the impression of interconnectivity, perhaps to ‘the cloud’. However, the night vision green background embeds Cattapan’s data-city within a contested environment where the dual-use nature of technological infrastructure blurs lines between civilian and military uses and access, thus posing threats to urban environments, and humanity. The city could be a data-raft, hovering over the night vision green, with its surveillance apparatus always switched on, to enable near light speed digital connectivity. However, there is a double surveillance operating because Cattapan’s aerial perspective places the viewer above the city, as if they are also on a hovering raft surveilling the city, as well as the painting. Has the viewer followed the dripped paint out of the painting to fly free, to distance him or herself in ways that wield the kind of human agency the painter demonstrates?
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“It is arguably necessary”, Johnson notes, “for the painter to work outside rational knowledge in order to retain a condition of becoming, and resist a point of conclusion”.387 Here, the notion of “becoming” intersects with Cattapan’s statement that the act of painting takes it “somewhere else”.
Virilio’s concept of the “‘world-city’, totally dependent on telecommunications” offers another way to analyse Cattapan’s treatment of the city in Raft City No 1 (Surveillance Version) and other earlier, and subsequent city images.388 In 1997 when Virilio wrote Open Sky he predicted that the twenty-first century would experience a “hyperconcentration of the world-city, the city to end all cities, a virtual city”.389 Cattapan’s depiction of the city in Raft City No 1 (Surveillance Version) is a densely networked city, a “hyperconcentration” of small pale coloured computer graphic-like markings that amalgamate surveillance-like perspectives of all the cities he has visited, including the online virtual world ‘city’. Weise further illuminates Cattapan’s “datascape- style” when he observes that Cattapan “uses the visual, symbolic and metonymic force of the city-lights-at-night to evoke global networks of communication, energy and power of which the city is a part”.390 In a way Virilio’s comment that, “every real city will ultimately be merely a suburb, a sort of omnipolitan periphery whose centre will be nowhere and circumference everywhere” is revealed in Cattapan’s painting.391 The ‘bleeding’ of the filigree markings beyond the image means neither a centre nor a circumference is identifiable. The twenty-first century virtual city is sustained by the ubiquitous mechanisms of digital interconnectivity hyperbolically exposing it to ongoing surveillance. Cattapan’s night vision green background ‘speaks’ to this kind of surveillance, with a military twist that intersects with Chamayou’s proposal that a “cartography of lives has today become one of the main epistemic bases of armed surveillance”.392 Cattapan’s painting reveals Chamayou’s claim that ubiquitous surveillance tramples on state sovereignties, making the whole (real) world a potential manhunting ground.393
387 Ibid., 76. 388 Virilio, Open Sky, 59. 389 Ibid., 74. 390 Weise, “Jon Cattapan, Data-Scapes,” 46. 391 Virilio, Open Sky, 74. In the chapter notes for “Continental Drift,” Virilio explains that “‘omnipolitan’ is Marco Bertozzi’s,” 147. Emphasis in original text. 392 Chamayou, Drone Theory, 42. 393 Ibid., 53. 100
Perspective, Paolo Uccello and the Forensic Imagination
Cattapan’s 2016 Sydney exhibition displayed a small number of recent large paintings.394 The exhibition included Fall of the Valley Kings (2016) (Fig. 20) and Vapour Line (2016) (Fig. 21). Like the others in the exhibition these two paintings display paint dripped backgrounds of somber colours interspersed with vibrant jewel-like tones. The effect of darker colours dripping into vibrant ones and vice versa draws attention to the initial painted gestures of the artist. Broad brushstrokes are diffused by the invading drips from other broad gestural strokes. They are also diffused by their own drips seeking a vertical but downward trajectory. Over the top of these abstract expressionist backgrounds, groups of spectral human figures dominate picture planes in dramatic ways. These figures seem to be involved either as participants or witnesses in battles or confrontations of some kind. Raised arms, postural stances, allusions to weaponry and suggestions of armour or protective gear reinforce the viewer’s impression. These recent paintings resonate with the military aspect of Cattapan’s Timor Leste experience. They also reflect how his subsequent immersion into his painting practice, as a way to work through his experiences, informs ongoing work. It is evident that Cattapan places significant emphasis on grouping human subjects, even if they are ghosts or data-proxies, as if trying to work out how they might relate to each other and why.
In the Fall of the Valley Kings and Vapour Line, the human figures are larger than those in Night Figures (Gleno) and Night Patrols (Around Maliana). It is as if Cattapan has brought his focus closer in order to search his figures for clues about the mode and status of their disappearance or reappearance. The figural and landscape elements in his 2016 paintings are suggested by variously sized painted dots. These dots augment the ghostliness of the figures at the same time as taking on a pixelated appearance, however, one that is not complete. This gives the impression of pixel disintegration, dispersion, or conversely a process of arrangement. Here, ongoing concerns about disappearance and reappearance, the real and the virtual are apparent. The domination of the picture plane by the groups of figures conveys an urgency to capture remaining human elements before they disappear. Or, is it an urgency to capture processes of reappearance via reassembled data, as evidence of both disappearance and the need for some kind of reappearance?
Along with figural domination of the paintings, Cattapan also generates strange perspectives that echo those of earlier paintings. In Fall of the Valley Kings, dotted diagonal lines that cross
394 “Jon Cattapan,” Art exhibition, Dominik Mersch Gallery, Sydney, New South Wales, November 3-25, 2016. 101 the entire painting suggest a confused linear plane. It is unclear whether a densely dotted landscape at the top part of the painting is the horizon or not. In Vapour Line Cattapan’s play with perspective is sparser and more ambiguous. The strongest suggestions of perspective are a white dotted diagonal line in the low right foreground and a more densely dotted diagonal line mirroring it in the upper right. The latter, however, whilst suggesting perspective, could be a weapon or a stick being waved in the air. If we take the idea of close-focus, as if Cattapan has brought night vision glasses into minimum focus, everything is brought near. But, in this nearness, Cattapan reveals that cosmology calibrates to all distances. This is evident in both Fall of the Kings and Vapour Line, where the dripped backgrounds of combined somber and vibrant colours create a sense of cosmic space. Viewed this way, the overlay of dots become constellations, stars and galaxies. By playing with oscillating macro and micro perspectives, these paintings blow open the reduced yardstick in the alternation between 0 and 1. By drawing upon cosmic perspectives Cattapan, in a sense, offers an opportunity to re-immerse everything back into the source from which everything was once virtually possible. In this way Cattapan’s paintings continue to contribute to Baudrillard’s proposition that resistance should “re-immerse the war and all information in the virtuality from whence they came”.395
The strange play with perspective, and the combination of somber and vibrant colours in Cattapan’s 2016 paintings, including Fall of the Kings and Vapour Line, echo the works of early Renaissance painter Paolo Uccello (1397-1475) in surprising ways. The resonances are particularly clear in Uccello’s Niccolò Mauruzi da Tolentino Unseats Bernardino Della Ciarda at the Battle of San Romano (c.1435–1455) (Fig. 22) and Niccolò Mauruzi da Tolentino at the Battle of San Romano (c.1438-1440) (Fig. 23), both from his “Battle of Romano” series. The battle of San Romano was fought between the Florentines and Sienese on June 1, 1432.396 The Florentines won under the command of Niccolò Mauruzi da Tolentino who was held in great esteem by Cosimo de Medici. Uccello was commissioned by Cosimo de Medici to commemorate the battle and to honour Tolentino who was killed as a result of another contestation in 1434.397
There is an aesthetic relationship between Cattapan’s and Uccello’s paintings of military history. This art historical connection across nearly six hundred years is another demonstration of how Cattapan’s post-Timor Leste paintings reflect upon war and conflict
395 Baudrillard, Passwords, 66-67. 396 Gordon Griffiths, “The Political Significance of Uccello’s Battle of San Romano,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 41 (1978): 313. 397 Ibid. 102 across the globe, as well as time. In the Battle of San Romano paintings held at the Uffizi Gallery and the National Gallery, Uccello has painted broken jousts lying on the ground. Some jousts lie horizontally along the paintings’ foregrounds. They are crossed with other jousts that diagonally point into the paintings to create a foreground perspectival orientation. Cattapan also achieves a foregrounded perspective, albeit not a single point one. He achieves this by using variously directed diagonal lines in his 2016 paintings, as well as earlier paintings such as Night Figures (Gleno). Like Cattapan’s figures, Uccello’s figures, human and horse, are grouped and dominate the picture plane. In the upper sections of his paintings Uccello has used landscape elements, such as small walls and hedges, to delineate perspective. Cattapan similarly uses landscape-like elements to suggest perspective, albeit strange ones that take the eye into multiple possible distances. Uccello sets a vanishing point perspectival orientation, but then disrupts it by painting long jousts, held high by knights astride their horses. Although a disruption to linear point perspective, these upwardly pointing jousts also draw attention to it. Uccello, as one of the early artists attempting to depict scenes in a perspectival environment, may have used the jousts for this purpose. Cattapan disrupts perspective with lines that diverge, in ways that echo the random jousting actions of Uccello’s knights.
In Cattapan’s Vapour Line, the echo is pronounced by the joust-like appearance of the densely dotted diagonal line in the upper right of the painting. With Uccello’s paintings in mind, more joust-like angles and lines are evident. For example, the upright arms of the figure in the closest foreground, a cricket bat-like shape in the upper-mid left and loose lines of dots in the upper section of the painting. These all ricochet off the foreground perspective which is simply conveyed by the diagonal line of dots that points into the image from the bottom right. However, a major disruption to these perspectival elements comes from Cattapan’s vertically dripped background. This achieves a disruption that is similar to the way Uccello’s long jousts disrupt the picture plane. Uccello uses light cadmium red and yellow ochre to paint his jousts. The resulting luminosity against more soberly toned landscapes adds a dramatic disruption that pulls attention to the knights and their horses. This luminosity is also echoed in the lighter tones used to paint the horses on which important knights are astride. In Cattapan’s 2016 paintings, dripped backgrounds that combine sombre and vibrant tones create similar luminous effects. Brighter colours introduce snippets of jewel-like light. Additionally, the white dotted computer graphic-like figural overlays provide another layer of luminosity that draws attention to the figures’ ghostly, spectral or pixelated status.
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The aesthetic parallels between Uccello’s and Cattapan’s paintings demonstrate how Cattapan’s paintings cross time: the past can inform the present and draw forth the future. Nearly six hundred years separate the two artists’ paintings, and conflict remains an issue. In Fall of the Valley Kings, Cattapan’s background includes a section of vibrant green dripped paint. It glows with a night vision quality against darker colours. Across the mid- section, a strip of red and magenta, cut by the vertical drips of other colours, suggests a fiery battle occurring against dark night skies. The overlay of white dotted ghostly digitally- inflected figures draws the battle, either real or virtual, closer. The figures in both Fall of the Valley Kings and Vapour Line seem to wear helmets reminiscent of the head armour worn by the knights in Uccello’s paintings. However, Cattapan’s head gear may be helmets equipped with night vision technology or perhaps they are virtual reality headsets entertaining people with a simulated battle. Cattapan’s ghostly figures are not carried by horses, but they may be carried by virtual reality, assisted by algorithmic instruction. As Ana Carden-Coyne, in her essay for “The Sensory War: 1914-2014” (2015) exhibition perceptively notes, “Artists have made dynamic conversations between the past and the present, looking back as much as looking forward, communicating the sensory imagination and acting as cultural barometers of the impact of war on people and society”.398
If Cattapan’s figures are ghosts, then they could be the ghosts he felt present on night patrols in Timor Leste, still haunting him and his work in 2016. Maybe using night vision glasses opened a kind of vortex through which ghosts could travel. Given the way Cattapan’s paintings open up to multiple possibilities, maybe these ghosts of battles past include a congregation of all casualties of all wars, including those from the battle of San Romano.399 The notion of ghostly presence is a defining difference between Uccello’s and Cattapan’s paintings. Uccello portrays and projects heroism and victory, whereas Cattapan projects loss and removal of the human being. Cattapan does this in ways that dispel heroism and notions of victory in an “everywhere war” conducted with militarised technology that replaces the human being in multiple ways.400 The aesthetic connection between Cattapan’s and Uccello’s paintings acts as a visual conduit through which ghosts of past battles can appear as apparition-like presences in Cattapan’s work. They inhabit his computer graphic-like overlays with permeable dexterity, ingratiating themselves into the visually implied reductive binary yardstick between zeros and ones. As they morph into data proxy spectres they seem
398 Ana Carden-Coyne, “The Sensory War 1914-2014: Bodies, Minds, and Environments,” in The Sensory War 1914-2014, exhibition catalogue, eds., Anna Carden-Coyne and Tim Wilcox (Manchester: Manchester Art Gallery, 2014), 11. 399 Cattapan, “Night Vision Goggles,” 41. 400 Gregory, “The Everywhere War” (2011). 104 to warn us about the trajectory of war into a future where we might all be ghostly presences, spectral apparitions conjured by advanced digital manipulations.
Forensic Architecture
In this final section I appropriate the notion of “forensic architecture” to examine Cattapan’s post-Timor Leste paintings.401 “Forensic architecture”, developed by Eyal Weizman and a team at Goldsmiths, London University, is an emerging investigative process that examines how the “built environment is both the means of violations and a source of evidence that can bear witness to the events that traversed it”.402 It takes a spatial approach that incorporates witness accounts, and physical and media remnants of sites where past atrocities and war crimes have occurred, to build evidence that can be virtualised and ‘re-lived’.403 This is done in ways that are admissible in various legal and advocacy arenas.404 Cattapan’s post-Timor Leste paintings are like repositories that provide evidence of the dehumanising effects of militarised technology in contemporary war. The evidence flags the removal of the human being, a “un-humanning” process, as a potential crime against humanity.405 Cattapan’s exposure of the data-proxy as a replacement for the human being insinuates possible anticipatory offenses, such as virtual fakery, fraud and identity theft to aid and abet un-humanning processes. Cattapan’s paintings could be read as visual revelations of a virtual argot designed to conceal intentions. In a militarised environment where notions of “future of war” drive planning, development and production of militarised technology, Cattapan’s paintings deserve urgent forensic architecture scrutiny. Rather than necessarily providing material evidence admissible in a legal arena, Cattapan’s paintings are catalysts for questions that elicit further enquiry and inquest.
Cattapan’s paintings play with erasure and virtualization, appearance and disappearance in ways that provoke many questions. Is Cattapan recording the processes of dehumanisation or is he virtualizing forensic architecture-like evidence to prosecute a major crime against humanity – its insidious disappearance? Here, the everywhere nature of contemporary war means that the notion of a crime scene goes beyond the kind of individual ones Ralph Rugoff
401 “Forensic Architecture,” Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths, University of London, accessed 2016, http://www.forensic-architecture.org/. 402 Eyal Weizman, Paulo Tavares, Susan Schuppli and Situ Studio, “Forensic Architecture,” Architectural Design 80, no. 5 (September 28, 2010): 59. 403 Ibid., 60. 404 Ibid., 59. 405 Brimblecombe-Fox, “Airborne Weaponised Drones and the Tree-of-Life,” 62. 105 discusses in his book and curated exhibition, both titled Scene of the Crime (1997).406 Rugoff’s idea of a forensic aesthetic is pinned to civilian criminal acts occurring in actual places. As evidenced by Rugoff’s exhibition, art forms such as photography, installation and video tend to dominate the forensic aesthetic conversation.407 That forensic crime analysts also use photography, video and physical re-enactment to record details of a crime tightens the forensic aesthetic loop through shared mediums. Cattapan’s paintings sit outside this loop in a few ways. The most obvious is that the medium of painting is not generally considered an informational tool for forensic analysis of contemporary crimes. Cattapan’s paintings also cannot necessarily be pinned to a particular time or place. The disappearance of the human being is an ongoing alleged crime perpetrated via the products of militarised imaginations. These imaginations are pulled into a militarised future where neo-liberal forces project their ongoing militarised market.
Baudrillard’s conjectures about the “murder of reality” theoretically underpin the eeriness evident in Cattapan’s paintings.408 They can be read as evidence of disappearance by and into what Baudrillard describes as the “disenchanted illusion of the proliferation of screens and images”.409 However, rather than just recording disappearance per se, Cattapan’s paintings capture a crime against what Baudrillard describes as a “living disappearance”, one where the trace of the crime needs to be “a living trace”.410 This means a disappearance that is noticed and not concealed by a simulated proxy replacement that camouflages the crime by appearing to fill the absence. As Baudrillard suggests, “On the horizon of simulation, not only has the world disappeared but the very question of its existence can no longer be posed”.411 Reality requires an absence of something to be noticeable, for a disappearance to be a “living disappearance”, as if the absence resonates with the “living trace” of what was previously present.412 Simulation and virtuality, however, do not resonate with a living presence, thus rendering living trace and therefore notions of absence impossible. That is the ultimate “horizon of simulation” a kind a flat-lining where antonymic distances, such as between absence and presence, register Baudrillard’s conjecture that even the very question of the world’s existence can no longer be posed.413
406 Rugoff, Scene of the Crime (1997). 407 Another example is Rebecca Scott Bray, “Rotten Prettiness? The Forensic Aesthetic and Crime as Art,” Australian Feminist Law Journal 40, no. 1 (2014): 69-95. 408 Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, (1996). 409 Ibid., 4. 410 Ibid. 411 Ibid., 5. 412 Ibid., 4. 413 Ibid. 106
Cattapan’s painterly evidence seizes living human imagination, dreaming and agency from Baudrillard’s “clutches of total simulation”, by subverting the virtual into deconstructed painted dots and strokes that mimic, rather than mirror, computer graphics.414 In this way, his paintings not only divulge the disappearance of the human being, they also ensure that this disappearance leaves “a living trace” of a noticeable absence. In doing so, evidence of existence, and therefore human history, can still be posed. Due to its non-reliance on digital and cyber platforms the medium of painting cannot mirror the virtual, or be cannibalistically consumed by it, in the way digital photography and video can. Cattapan’s paintings offer a kind of independent evidence of crimes allegedly perpetrated by militarised digital and cyber technologies. This is at the same time as antonymic distance is maintained as a living space for human agency, gesture and witnessing to occur. This is achieved, for example, with his dripped painted backgrounds and overlays of digitally inflected painted markings.
The small dots Cattapan uses to depict his ghostly figures, to delineate perspective, and suggest cartographic and cyber elements, act as bytes of information and indicators of cyber connectivity. These dots drift with the rubbish in his raft paintings and they hover in his spectral city and figural compositions. They elicit evidentiary readings by visually entangling ideas of information, data and rubbish for the viewer to sift through. Cattapan’s paintings can be read as metaphoric evidence of data, generated by personal digital devices and other surveillance mechanisms, that is not deliberately relinquished. This excess of data or data-rubbish, however, is retrievable and could be appropriated by unknown agents tasked with identifying patterns of behavior that might indicate individual or group mal-intent, aberrant behaviour or an as yet unknown concern. Flagged correlations and anomalies may then be used to target and kill at any time. In other words, in an era of the “everywhere war”, data and its excess can provide enabling conditions for the provocation of violence.415
Forensic architecture investigates the “enabling conditions of violence” in order to “produce future-oriented archives capable of anticipating incoming events”.416 It becomes a “projective practice that designates modes of conceiving, assembling and constructing forums for the future”.417 I argue that Cattapan’s paintings ‘construct’ one of these “forums for the future” by illuminating the disappearance of the human in evidentiary ways that also anticipate potential future outcomes. His reaction, after experiencing a militarised zone, to allow paint to drip, marks
414 Ibid. 415 Gregory, “The Everywhere War” (2011). 416 Schuppli, “Forensic Futures.” 417 Weizman, “Introduction: Forensis,” 20. 107 the construction of a “forum” that allows the future to resonate. As the paint leaks out beyond his paintings, evidence of residual corporeality remains at the same time as an escape route for humanity is revealed. If this is the case, then his data-proxy figures are possible decoys or ruses designed to dupe simulators and agents tasked with identifying anomalies. Here, Cattapan, by animating the “manual into the digital”, subverts simulation with deliberate mimicry.418 He disrupts the virtual argot and its covert acts of concealment. His “forum” is both inside and outside his paintings. It is in the gestural application of paint, a reminder of human agency. It is also in the way visceral leakage transports the viewer beyond a painting’s borders. Human distance is restored in ways that proffer vantage points to critically examine the past and present to expose “enabling conditions of violence” that may infect the future.
By actively disclosing and representing various aspects of the dehumanising processes perpetrated by the deployment of contemporary militarised technology, Cattapan’s paintings are evidentially not passive, they are clearly alive. They act as living traces, in a Baudrillardian sense. They are alive because movement is embedded in the dripped paint and the visual oscillation between the layers of paint. Movement is also evident in the play between disappearance and reappearance, reality and virtuality, and close and far spatial and temporal distances. The aesthetic link, spanning over six hundred years back to Uccello’s Battle of San Romano paintings, provides the “forensic imagination” with the kind of evidence only time can disclose.419 “Forensic imagination” examines how “non-scientific materials such as artworks” can offer “counter-testimonial to the historical narratives into which they had been previously written”.420 It seeks an “expansion of the object’s or artifact’s expressive potential”. When viewed together, the expressive potential of Cattapan’s 2016 paintings and Uccello’s The Battle of San Romano paintings, expand and recalibrate historical narratives. Aesthetic links between the artists’ work disclose the insidious infiltration of weaponised technology; from jousts to weaponised digital and cyber capabilities, from heroic battles to asymmetric advantage, from mortal death to multiple ways of human disappearance. A shift is made from specific battles to non-specific “everywhere war”.421 But the link between Uccello and Cattapan is not only aesthetic. It also lies in the human act of painting, taking time to respond to stimuli, applying paint to a surface with hand and brush, feeling the paint, and experimenting with perspective and colour. Due to its long history as a human activity, the history of painting can be mined for evidence in ways that new media art forms cannot.
418 McAuliffe, Jon Cattapan: Possible Histories, 136. 419 Susan Schuppli, “Forensic Imagination.” 420 Ibid. 421 Gregory, “The Everywhere War” (2011). 108
Conclusion
Painting, Human Agency and Existential Risk
Gittoes’ and Cattapan’s paintings and practices engage with fundamental questions about what it means to be human in an age increasingly dominated by advancing technologies. With notions of the “everywhere war”, one that inhabits physical dimensions, virtual spaces, cyber worlds and digital codes, where can the human being exhibit real agency as a counterpoint?422 What happens if we can no longer recognise human agency? Is survival of the human species at risk? This thesis has positioned Gittoes’ and Cattapan’s practices as exemplars that remind us of an array of human physical, intellectual, emotional, creative and spiritual activity that express and preserve human agency.
Gittoes’ and Cattapan’s paintings and practices have not previously been analysed together. Neither have they been examined through a contemporary militarised technology research lens. The focus on militarised technology, and the dangers it presents to the future of humanity, have until now not been recognised as important aspects of the artists’ work. This original research approach, augmented by lengthy interviews and studio visits, introduces substantial new perspectives that extend scholarship on both artists. Although each artist produces different work, the militarised technology research lens reveals some shared conceptual and aesthetic affinities. These are embedded in drawing and painting processes that develop over temporal and spatial distances, from field to studio, combat zone to canvas.
Whilst both artists are concerned about humanity and the future, neither portrays images that are illustratively didactic. Rather, Gittoes’ and Cattapan’s paintings stimulate a variety of interpretations that contribute an aliveness that is evidence of catalytic human agency. These interpretations are not only fuelled by how the artists manipulate iconography and subject-matter, they are also fuelled by the way paint, in their hands, promotes and intensifies a sense of human presence. Their paintings demonstrably stir the inertia, standardisation and synchronisation that Virilio decries as an outcome of accelerating technological processes.
422 Gregory, “The Everywhere War” (2011). 109
In Chapter One, “George Gittoes: Scoping the Horror of War”, I argued that Gittoes’ paintings of distorted night vision glasses, and screen-based drone surveillance systems, critique ideas of militarised ‘vision’. A significant finding was the identification of ‘scoping’, rather than militarised ‘vision’, as a more critically appropriate description for the politics at work in Gittoes’ images. With this shift from vision to scoping comes the suggestion, made in this thesis, that ‘scopophilic necro-intimacy’ represents a morbidity of contemporary surveillance. This ‘diagnosis’ exposes the threat posed by the infiltration of militarised surveillance into civilian arenas, such as policing and security. Additionally, my argument that even imaginations are militarised, reveals globalised violence as a dangerous contagion. Baudrillard’s prescient claim, made in 2003, that globalised violence “operates by contagion”, clearly contributes to current debates about war and the future.423 Gittoes’ 1995 painting The Artist even more presciently divulges the burial-abyss as a product of the contagion’s ability to conscript the capabilities of “unmanned” and increasingly autonomous forces.
Gittoes’ paintings disclose a brutal aspect of the development and infiltration of militarised digital and cyber systems. His experiences in war and conflict zones ingrain his work with a certain type of authority. Harari’s idea of “flesh-witnessing” explains that this authority comes from the immersive and sensory experiences of active presence in war or conflict zones. This thesis presents Harari’s idea of “flesh-witnessing” as a way to expand Daniel Herwitz’s observation that Gittoes’ painting practice is a performative process that extends from conflict zone to artist’s studio. By proposing that, in Gittoes’ hands, painting is a continuation of “flesh-witnessing” experiences, this thesis contributes new perspectives that also extend Harari’s concepts of the “flesh-witness”. This thesis, therefore, presents a re- contextualisation of Gittoes’ practice that expands, but also deepens, notions of the artist as witness, and more particularly, the painter as witness.
In Chapter Two, “Jon Cattapan: Ghosts and Data Proxies, Disappearance and Reappearance”, I argued that Cattapan’s method of painting digitally inflected spectral-like markings over dripped backgrounds exposes the insidious global infiltration of militarised style surveillance into everyday life. The threat this poses to humanity is suggested by Cattapan’s use of saturated night vision green backgrounds where he allows paint to drip and coalesce. The dripped paint acts as a visceral-like reminder of human existence, in the face of digital and cyber systems that choreograph human disappearance, and its reappearance as data-proxy. Cattapan’s work expresses various concerns about the future
423 Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, 94. 110 of war and humanity in ways that visually elucidate Gregory’s notion of the “everywhere war” and its ramifications.424
The idea of forensic architecture helps explain how Cattapan’s paintings are evidentiary of emerging patterns of human disappearance. This novel approach, includes applying a forensic eye to interrogate the conditions and patterns that enable crimes and violence to occur. Using this approach, my research has opened up new perspectives on how to analyse the epistemological contributions Cattapan conveys via visual manipulations of iconographic information. For example, Cattapan’s paintings visually disclose Baudrillard’s observation that contemporary war’s temporal trajectories are sublimated into the virtual.425 Cattapan’s paintings demonstrate that this disappearance is camouflaged by the same processes that precipitate it. His paintings expose how data-proxy replacements increasingly stand in for human beings in passive and inert ways, through devices and screens. The induced passivity, described by Virilio as a “paralysis or, rather, the sudden tetraplegia of the societal body”, is perhaps the enabling component of a silent violence, the erasure of the human subject.426
Both Gittoes’ and Cattapan’s paintings expose the insidious removal of the human being by militarised “unmanned” and increasingly autonomous digital and cyber systems. Each artist reveals particular kinds of dehumanising processes that could be considered crimes against humanity. This thesis demonstrates this in two main ways. Firstly, it establishes that each artist pictorially represents evidence of human removal and disappearance in militarised environments. That these environments seep beyond declared battlefields into civilian security, policing and surveillance activities, heightens the urgency of the messages contained in the artists’ works. Secondly, this thesis determines that the direct gestural activity of painting is a reminder of human agency in an age where algorithms, software and artificial intelligence increasingly replace human work. The gestural activity of painting operates in human dimensions of space and time, where distance is not collapsed into near light speed algorithmic processes. Whilst mortal death remains a literal dehumanising outcome of war, the diminishing role of the human being in operative and decision making loops represents an un-humanning factor that has potential to impact human mortality and suffering. The idea of un-humanning as an additional process of dehumanisation is an original contribution made by this thesis. Un-humanning clearly presents ramifications for the future of war and humanity.
424 Gregory, “The Everywhere War” (2011). 425 Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, 26. 426 Virilio, The Great Accelerator, 18. 111
By presenting two different examples of artists whose paintings critically engage with debates surrounding contemporary militarised technology, this thesis demonstrates how painting can contribute important insights into global discussions about war, technology and the future. Painting can clearly contribute to curatorial, art historical and cultural commentary relating to art—science/technology nexus themes. This thesis illustrates that painting’s non- digital and non-cyber qualities are significant critical strengths that position painting as an important counterpoint for human attributes in an age where digital and cyber technologies pervade.
This raises new research questions about art forms that are reliant on the same digital and cyber technologies used by militarised systems, that also infiltrate civilian policing and security arenas. For example, new media art that utilises instructional and operative software, digital imaging and sound technology, and cyber interconnectivity for creation, documentation, exhibition and dissemination purposes. As noted in the introduction of this thesis, exhibitions engaged with themes of contemporary surveillance, including drone technologies, are dominated by new media art. Could these exhibitions, and the curators and artists involved in them, be accused of a complicity that requires critical shifts in decisions about how contemporary technology is used as an art medium? Are there ethical issues associated with artists using digital and cyber technologies? Could these artworks present new vulnerabilities to the human condition? Are artworks using contemporary digital and cyber technologies representative of an excess that consumes the human? Is this excess related to a “scopophilic” contagion where even art is vulnerable to insidious militarisation? Will the human artist survive this?
In an era of the “everywhere war” there are risks to humanity that have not been previously experienced. These risks are wrought by new and emerging technologies, capable of exponentially blurring the lines between military and civilian use. Accident, unintended consequences and deliberate mal-intent pose additional risks.427 Current research into these risks suggests that, unlike at any other time in human history, threats to the existence of the human species are worth taking seriously.428 Cross-disciplinary research into existential risk posed by emerging technologies is conducted at various centres including, the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, and the Future
427 Martin Rees, Our Final Century (London: Arrow Books, 2003), 8. 428 Centre for the Study of Existential Risk: University of Cambridge (CSER), “Research,” accessed June 29, 2017, http://cser.org/research/. 112 of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford.429 Even though a risk may be extremely small, if the outcome of an emerging technology is considered an irredeemably cataclysmic existential risk, researchers consider it worthy of examination.430 These research centres acknowledge that different disciplines can pose different questions about impacts of emerging technologies. However, art and art history are currently not included in research approaches. This thesis takes crucial initial steps towards addressing this, by positioning Gittoes’ and Cattapan’s practices as exemplars of how painting specifically, and art generally, can epistemologically contribute. The speculative and future-oriented focus of existential risk research requisitions the type of questions that are elicited by studying Gittoes’ and Cattapan’s praxes through a contemporary militarised technology research lens.
By employing a novel cross-disciplinary research approach, this thesis has generated substantial new scholarship on Gittoes’ and Cattapan’s praxes. It has also foregrounded the capacity of contemporary painting to critically engage with globally significant debates addressing issues surrounding militarised technology, war and the future of humanity. This has significant relevance for further research, not only into Gittoes’ and Cattapan’s work, but also other contemporary painters who reference militarised technology, including references to airborne drones.431 Thus, this study of two Australian contemporary painters significantly promotes contemporary painting’s interpolation into globally significant discussions about technology generally, and militarised technology, specifically. Consequently, this demonstrates that painting and art can meaningfully contribute to cross-disciplinary research devoted to identifying and mitigating risks posed by new and emerging technologies that potentially threaten the survival of the human species. Herein lies another avenue for new research.
429 Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, Cambridge University, http://cser.org/; Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University, https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/. 430 Ibid. 431 Examples are, Pakistani born artists Fatima Zahra Hassan (late 1960s-) and Mahwish Chishty (1980-), and Lebanese artist Nadim Karam (1957-). 113
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Appendix 1. Figures
Fig. 1. George Gittoes, Simurg, pencil and collage on paper, 44 x 62 cm, 2008. Collection of the artist.
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Fig. 2. George Gittoes, Night Vision 2015, oil on canvas, 120 x 200 cm, 2015. Courtesy of the artist and the Sydney Peace Foundation.
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Fig. 3. George Gittoes, The Artist, oil on canvas, 210 x 173, 1996. Collection of Mike Mitchell, Brisbane.
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Fig. 4. George Gittoes, Discarded, oil on canvas, 173 x 260 cm, 1995. Courtesy of the artist.
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Fig. 5. George Gittoes, Mojo Rising, oil on canvas, 200 x 260 cm, 2009. Courtesy of the artist and Mitchell Fine Art, Brisbane.
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Fig. 6. George Gittoes, Charon, oil on linen, 200 x 260 cm, 2009-2010. Courtesy of the artist and Mitchell Fine Art, Brisbane.
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Fig. 7. Mrs Joy Allen, holds her daughter Meredith at George Gittoes' puppet show, “Aquarius Festival of University Arts”, ANU, Canberra, 1971. Photo, courtesy of The Canberra Times.
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Fig. 8. Pablo Picasso, first Dove of Peace, emblem “The World Congress of Peace”, Paris, April 23, 1949. Lithograph, approximately 23 x 32 cm. More details are available at, “Peace Art of Pablo Picasso,” Friends of Peace Monuments, accessed August 30, 2016 http://www.yaneff.com/html/plates/mp_60.html.
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Fig. 9. George Gittoes, Night Vision, pencil on paper, 44 x 62 cm, 1993. Courtesy of the artist.
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Fig. 10. George Gittoes, Khats, pencil on paper, 1993. Collection of the Australian War Memorial.
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Fig. 11. George Gittoes, Tightrope Cowboys, Ink on paper, 59.5 x 49.5 cm, 1971. Courtesy of the artist.
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Fig. 12. George Gittoes, Why Am I Here?, oil on canvas, 87 x 101 cm, 1997. Courtesy of the artist, collection unknown.
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Fig. 13. Baidoa, Somalia, Emaciated Child Sitting in the Courtyard of the Orphanage, Located in a Former Jail and Now Operated by a Care Agency. The Child is being Sketched by Australian artist, George Gittoes. Photographer unknown. March 29, 1993. Collection of the Australian War Memorial.
Fig. 14. George Gittoes, Voyeur, pencil on paper, 44 x 62 cm, 1993. Collection of the Australian War Memorial. 144
Fig. 15. Jon Cattapan, Night patrols (Around Maliana), oil on linen, triptych 120 x 300 cm overall, 2009. Collection of the Australian War Memorial.
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Fig. 16. Jon Cattapan, Night Figures (Gleno), acrylic on linen, 180 x 250 cm, 2009. Collection of the artist.
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Fig. 17. Jon Cattapan, Imagine a Raft (Hard Rubbish 1), oil and acrylic on linen, 194 x 165 cm, 2011. Courtesy of the artist.
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Fig. 18. Jon Cattapan, Raft City No 1 (Surveillance Version), oil and acrylic on linen, 198 x 165 cm, 2015. Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane.
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Fig. 19. Jon Cattapan, Carrying, oil on linen, 195 x 240 cm, 2002. Dr Paul Elliadis Collection of Contemporary Art, Brisbane.
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Fig. 20. Jon Cattapan, Fall of the Valley Kings, oil on linen, 175 x 259 cm, 2016. Courtesy of the artist and Dominik Mersch Gallery, Sydney.
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Fig. 21. Jon Cattapan, Vapour Line, oil on linen, 185 x 250 cm, 2016. Courtesy of the artist and Dominik Mersch Gallery, Sydney.
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Fig. 22. Paolo Uccello, Niccolò Mauruzi da Tolentino Unseats Bernardino Della Ciarda at the Battle of San Romano, 182 x 320 cm, egg tempera, walnut and linseed oil on poplar, c.1435–1455. Uffizi Gallery, Florence.
Fig. 23. Paolo Uccello, Niccolò Mauruzi da Tolentino at the Battle of San Romano 182 x 320 cm, egg tempera, walnut and linseed oil on poplar c.1438-1440. National Gallery, London.
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Appendix 2. Ethical Clearance Approval
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