DAVID MANLEY Contents

Acknowledgement 3

Abstract 4

Introduction 5

Urban Ambivalence 8

Monuments out of Time 14

The Citadel 22

Bunker Mentalities 29

Ballardian Typologies 44

A Hidden Presence 54

List of illustrations 57

References 58 3

Acknowledgements

I would like to convey my warm appreciation to the following people for their invaluable contribution and support in the development of this project.

Lynne Roberts Goodwin

Cameron Petrie

Samantha Suyono

Loughlin Gleeson

Miren Zarate

David Manley Ambivalent Structures Abstract

The research and accompanying studio practice titled Ambivalent Structures interrogates the latent connection of the bunker with the urban terrain, channelling its psychological influence while addressing contemporary anxieties regarding power and control. Military bunker facilities have long been the subject of intense interest for artists and architects, particularly since the end of the Cold War. Their presence has been linked to discourse surrounding devel- opments in modernism, minimalism in art, and architectural brutalism. Bunker construction occurred on a massive scale during the Second World War with the building of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall, a series of fortifications that was intended to stretch along the entire west coast of Europe and Scandinavia. The Atlantic Wall’s construction employed new types of reinforced cement moulding technologies that are still in use. Imposing and monolithic, these structures retain a deeply ambivalent nature, as they can be at once places of security and danger, of refuge and warfare, and indeed of life and death. Cold War secrecy served only to heighten the bunker’s psychological power within the civilian population; their hidden presence fuelled the imagination of populist culture of the time in films such as Stanley Kubrick’sDr Strangelove (1964), while writers such as J.G. Ballard pondered their influence on urban infrastructure and the post-war utopian aspirations of city planners in works such as Concrete Island (1974) and Crash (1973). Here, manifestations of the bunker and its effect on the psychology of Ballard’s characters were conjured through the run-down tenement tower blocks, motorway exit ramps, multi-story car parks and pedestrian underpasses of the built environment. Ambivalent Struc- tures is a visual and textural exploration of the aftermath of modernity through its attendant buildings and structures that are inextricably linked to the violence of war, pondering their psychological influence on the individual. 5

Introduction

Ambivalent Structures considers the bunker as visual and psychological metaphor, situating its latent presence within a contemporary urban context. The conflicting nature of the bunker will be considered in light of Zygmunt Bauman’s critique in Modernity and Ambivalence (1995) and incorporating John Beck’s (2011) observations on the bunker’s ability to resist architectural classification. It will be argued that the bunker has become a symbol of the ambivalence of modernity, and that its contradictory nature helps to sustain its intense interest and mystique within popular culture. Historical perspectives of the bunker and the emergence of ‘bunker mentalities’ 1 in societies will be explored through its evolution in design and construction during the Second World War, its mass proliferation during the Cold War, and its contemporary influence on modernist architecture and popular culture: initially drawing from Paul Virilio’s Bunker Archeology (1994) and building on the metaphor through reference to Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove and Oliver Hirschbiegel’s filmDownfall (2004). Links will be established with contemporary urban structures and the case presented that they too retain a similar sense of ambivalence through their historical and technological connec- tions with the bunker and, as Ballard suggests, possess similar latent psychological influences, creating pockets of cognitive dissonance within the urban landscape; spaces that engender a sense of dissocia- tion and “estrangement” 2 from our everyday lives. The abject nature of the bunker as psychological prison will be examined through W.G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz (2001). This example will be used within a broader discussion of modernist interpretations of the bunker explored through the cinematic works of Luis Bunuel and Michael Haneke and linking their works to Jean-Paul Sartre’s text No Exit (1944), in addition to incorporating Luke Bennett’s (2011) theories of “hyper-organizational space” 3 and its effect on the individual and group psyche during times of perceived threat. The bunker’s strong links to modernism, minimalism in art and brutalism will be discussed with reference to the work of Jochen and Esther Shalev Gerz. Their

1 Bell, 2008: 1 2 Frost, 2013: 3 3 Bennett, 2011: 158 David Manley Ambivalent Structures sculpture, Monument Against Fascism (1986), acts to neutralize the violence of the bunker by using its brutal aesthetic in defiance of past atrocities. This example will be used to support the notion of the bunker’s strong connection to the deeper subterranean spaces of the human psyche, something that operates as a powerful metaphor, highlighting the potential in all of us for positions of isolationism and paranoia. The development of bunker mentalities within organizational structures and hierarchies will be used to broaden the scope of the metaphor and support Michel Foucault’s analysis of power and control and their relationship to the built environment, thereby strengthening the case that architecture plays a significant role in the development and expression of human behaviour. The studio practice will explore remnants of the Cold War within urban terrains, incorporating historical and contemporary issues of imaging unverifiable urban landscapes, interiors and facades within a post-brutalist environment. Rather than creating images of bunkers per se, the practice work interrogates the bunker’s contemporary incarnations as referent, conjuring their psychological influence. An overarching theme of the research is the synthesis and incorporation of J.G. Ballard’s musings on urbanism and the psychological influence of architecture on the individual, a potent theme in many of his works. An interpretation and re-iteration of the contemporary urban environment will explore the idiosyncratic nature of the bunker and its strong association with architectural Brutalism through photography, sculpture and video installation, drawing from Ballard’s observations. Here, links will be established with my own studio practice, situating the work within the current discourse of modernism and its relationship to the violence, visible traces and impact of the Second World War. Ultimately, the practice work is concerned with the aftermath or post-humanism that many of Ballard’s works allude to, something inextricably linked to the bunker metaphor; its latent presence a reminder of humanity’s equal capacity to create and destroy. The redemptive qualities of the bunker as a survival machine will be used to call into question notions of the Apocalypse, a central theme in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011) and Ballard’s The Crys- tal World (1966). Siobhan Lyons (2013) postulates two alternatives to 7

this end: redemption from a Doomsday scenario through the reliance on some form of technological machine that somehow saves humanity at the brink of disaster, and Ballard’s post-humanism, where the end of the world is seen as the natural order of things; the universe will continue to exist without humanity and we are not the central focus for its existence. The research will argue that the latter has its own redemptive quality, as it frees us from a state of perpetual crisis and a descent towards a bunker mentality during times of stress and perceived threat. This scenario is perhaps avoidable through an understanding of the historical narrative of the bunker and through its relationship with the darker aspects of the human psyche.

David Manley Ambivalent Structures Urban Ambivalence

It is important to present a detailed analysis of the term “ambivalence” and its relationship with modernity, as the structures and spaces imaged within the research project are conceptually linked to this discourse. In The Ambivalence of Modernity (1993), Zygmunt Bauman describes ambivalence as the discomfort we feel when we are unable to assign a particular order or classification to things. He argues that the need to classify in a world of chaos could be seen as the driving force of the modern world. 4 As one set of problems is solved another level of complexity is generated, something that was not anticipated by the technological advances that were designed to deal with the initial problem. Bauman argues that ambivalence is the by-product of this process, referring to it as “the great waste of modernity”; 5 something produced through our relentless drive to assign order in an otherwise chaotic world. Indeed, Bauman describes this as a “war on ambivalence”,6 as paradoxically the need to assign ever-increasing complexities of order creates more disorder and even more complexity that in turn fosters more ambivalence. But it is not just the discomfort we feel generated through a quest for order that is of concern here. When we extrapolate this thoroughly modern condition, something Bauman argues is characterized by a relentless march forward, we realize that any place of arrival is temporary. The development of modernity’s exponential complexity occurs not because it strives for more, but because it never succeeds in obtaining enough. It is the transitory nature of the technological landscape, incorporating the built environment with its inherent ambivalent characteristics, that is compelling when we begin to dissect the aftermath of modernity. Within this context it is interesting to consider the development of post-Second World War modernist architecture, a central theme of the research. Conceived as architecture for the people and characterized by ideologies of social reform, 7 modernist architecture rejected Classicism and celebrated a more utilitarian approach to functionality. The Futurists, an Italian artistic and social movement commencing in the early 20th century with parallel

4 Bauman, 1991: 1 5 Ibid, p. 15 6 Ibid, p. 3 7 Ballard 2006: 2 9

movements being established across Europe, were the vanguard of modernism, and architects such as Antonio Sant’Elia and Mario Chiattone saw the machine as humanity’s great hope and salvation. The avant-garde movement of Futurism glorified themes associated with contemporary concepts of the future’s progress through technological development and the potential transformation of all lives through the creation of mechanized order in the world. 8 The utopian aspirations of the modernists after the Second World War were more concerned with the equitable distribution of affordable housing, which in some ways functioned as a machine, structures that could improve the lives of their occupants through advances in technology by increasing social cohesion. Architects such Le Corbusier believed that buildings could act as an instrument of social reform by promoting egalitarianism through the geometric ordering of the grid. 9 Unite d’Hab- itation is an example of this style of modernist/brutalist architecture. This building was the culmination of a more ambitious but ultimately un-realised design scheme by Le Corbusier for something he called The Radiant City, which comprised a series of block structures raised on “pilotis” 10 or cement legs that bore the weight of the buildings, housing around 1600 people, set in a twelve-acre lot of parkland in Marseilles.

Figure 1: Le Corbusier’s Sketch for La Ville Radius (Radiant City, 1924)

8 Perloff, 2003 9 Hughes, 1980: 187 10 Ibid, p. 170 David Manley Ambivalent Structures Students of Le Corbusier such as Gucco Costa and Oscar Niemeyar later designed and built the city of Brasilia, with its gridded block-like state infrastructure and boulevards designed around the automobile. This city was the realization of their mentor’s grand utopian aspiration for a planned metropolis. Le Corbusier’s Unit d’Habitation and parts of Brasilia have gone through various periods of dilapidation and social degradation over the years; these were the structures and urban contexts that epitomized the early aesthetics and ideologies of the Modernists.11 It is interesting to note here that the same building technologies used by architects such as Le Corbusier were initially developed during the Second World War by the Nazis to construct Hitler’s Atlantic Wall, a series of bunker fortifications that stretched along much of the western coastline of France, Belgium, Holland and Scandinavia. The writer Paul Virilio combined his interest in WWII bunkers and architecture to co-design the Church of Saint Bernadette (1978) in Nevers, with its beton brut (rough-cast concrete) aesthetic resembling a bunker in shape and form, directly referencing their charismatic machismo and the relationship between Brutalist architecture and the bunker. 12

Figure 2: Jan Hanzlik, Unite d’ Habitation, 2006

11 Ibid, p.171 12 Armitage, 2000 11

In Concrete Ambivalence: Inside the Bunker Complex (2011), John Beck describes the aesthetic used by the Brutalists as a form of “passive aggressiveness”, something perpetuated by the post- war legacy of a pseudo-militarized urban terrain.13 Brutalism was a movement in architecture that flourished from the 1950s to the 1970s and was a direct descendant of Modernism. Beck argues that Paul Virilio’s Bunker Archeology (1994) has forced into view the “repressed utopianism” 14 of post-war modernism; something he believes has strong links to the violence of WWII. Jonathan Meades concurs in The Incredible Hulks: A–Z of Brutalism (2014), which considers the significance of the early Brutalist architects such as Werner March and Friedrick Tamms, who designed and built the many types of bunker fortifications used by the Nazis during WWII. Meads describes these architects as the “first Brutalists”, noting their tendency to build structures that harnessed the perception of strength and might; an expression of power and control through the use of an anthropomorphic aesthetic of defiance, which later became the trademark of Brutalism. 15 Meades asserts that the bunker aesthetic was appropriated in many post-war structures such as the now-demolished Tricorn Centre in Portsmouth, the Balforn Tower in East London, and the Wotruba Church in Vienna. In this context and in light of Bauman’s critique on ambivalence, the bunker becomes an interesting structure because it fundamentally resists classification. These structures embody deep contradictions as they remind us of past conflict, but they also expose our insecurities by pointing to a future where war and catastrophe are a distinct possibility. It is the seemingly redundant nature of the bunker with its referent characteristics of ideology and conflict that personifies the ruins of the twentieth century; their ubiquitous presence highlighting a contradictory nature as a structure of survival and conflict, necessity and uselessness. A bunker is not a ruin in the classic sense as its existence suggests a potential for use, its status and metaphor continually shifting. Indeed, this could be the reason why these structures create such discomfort and fascination within popular culture, their presence in the landscape perhaps acting as a repressed premonition of our own demise. The bunker is an

13 Beck, 2011: 86 14 Ibid, p. 86 15 Meades, 2014: 2 David Manley Ambivalent Structures architectural aberrance and exists outside normal classification systems, with its fundamental ambivalence summed up by Beck’s statement that it is “oscillating somewhere between the visible and invisible, architecture and engineering, ruins and rubble, violence and inertia, the spectacularly symbolic and the blankly dumb, the bunker is the waste of modernity that cannot be tidied away.” 16 In this context, the bunker can be seen as a potent representation of Modernity’s ambivalence; its characteristics and latent power borne out in post-war Modernism, a style of architecture so common in the urban landscape. The work Zoomorphic Cement Structure (2013) considers the anthropomorphism of the Brutalist aesthetic; something used in both Le Corbusier and Virilio’s architecture. The work combines analogue and digital photography to image the foreground and sky. Cement blocks were constructed through digital intervention to create the central sculptural structure, which is in fact a mash-up of a variety of concrete pieces sourced from the urban environment. The work consciously considers Le Corbusier’s anthropomorphic pilotis mentioned earlier, and the bunker’s “zoomorphy” 17 described by Virilio creating a deliberate consideration of the post-Brutalist era that we are currently situated in. The initial phase of my research project has attempted to establish links between this style of architecture, the violence of the Second World War, and the ambivalence generated through the relentless development of technology. A more detailed account of the historical background of the bunker and the development of “bunker mentalities” will now be presented, to build the case that these structures continue to retain a latent presence within the contemporary urban landscape.

16 Beck, 2011: 81 17 Virilio, 1994: 89 13

Figure 3: David Manley, 2013. Zoomorphic Cement Structure, archival pigment print, 1250 mm x 1000 mm

David Manley Ambivalent Structures Monuments out of Time

“This island was a fossil of time future, its bunkers and blockhouses illustrating the principle that the fossil record of life was one of armor and exoskeleton.” 18

Throughout history the evolution of the bunker has been one of antagonism between military technologies. The relentless development in the power and accuracy of weaponry and the anxiety this created drove bunker design to be increasingly more sophisticated. Primarily, these structures were used as a defensive fortification, their purpose to protect people and valued material from attack. By the First World War, vaulted steel shelters were designed to shield soldiers from artillery fire and atmospheric weapons such as mustard gas. Networks of trenches and underground tunnel systems were also developed and became synonymous with the Great War; they were the proto- bunkers for their further development. 19 After World War One, fortifications such as the Maginot line began to be constructed deeper underground. The new submerged bunkers offered greater protection from the continually evolving ballis- tics increasingly being deployed aerially. Distances between opposing forces were seen less as protective strategies, as projectiles could be delivered over vast distances with accuracy; “retreat was now into the very thickness of the planet and no longer along its surface.” 20 The new bunkers were constructed from reinforced cement and joined together to form vast, extensive, fortified underground complexes. During the Second World War the bunker was typified by Hitler’s Atlantic Wall, a series of bunkers above ground or semi-subterranean fortifications that stretched hundreds of kilometres along the Western coast of France, Belgium, Holland and Scandinavia. The Atlantic Wall was an attempt to protect occupied Europe against Allied invasion and was Hitler’s response to the new climate of war and advances in the development of military hardware. The system of bunkers that comprised the Atlantic Wall also operated as a form of state propaganda, a physical example

18 Ballard, 1994: 138 19 Virilio, 1994 20 Ibid, p. 39 15

of the Reich’s impenetrability. Hitler’s Atlantic Wall fortification program was thus an expression of the new totality of war. In Bunker Archeology (1994), Paul Virilio makes the case for the bunker as an undeniably modernist structure and in many ways pre-empts several contemporary sub-genres of photography, including aftermath photography, which is an approach that often consists of photographers returning to the sites of terrible events in an attempt to crystallise something of that past in photographic form. But unlike this genre, which is often about hinting at histories that remain hidden, Virilio tackles the question of histories that remain plainly visible, but are still too difficult or painful to understand or even to actually see. His investigations into the Atlantic Wall bunkers during the 1950s were partly an attempt to link these buildings to the broader context of European modernism and its architectural development. Neil Leach (2000) suggests that there was a “curious echo” 21 in Virilio’s descriptions of the bunker’s concrete form and the Modernists’ conscious use of similar cement-moulding techniques in their buildings. This technology was first developed by the Todt organization employed by Hitler to construct the Atlantic Wall. Liquid concrete was poured into wooden form-work to create one solid outer mass, a single cast rendering the structure as one complete unit, a design that helped to diminish any structural weaknesses. Virilio argued that this new style of construction gave the bunker its unique anthropomorphic appearance. These structures were foundationless and this, combined with their smooth outer casemate, gave them the capacity to deflect projectiles upon impact. They had minimal openings, and steel armour, air holes and doors made from iron were their only moving parts. The bunkers were also designed to remain partially concealed within the landscape, something unusual when we consider architectural design, which generally functions to be seen. The shapes of the structures and their demeanour signified a new form of military space that underscored the reality of modern warfare where the very atmosphere above could be rendered unlivable: “That is the accomplishment of modern war: transforming the earth into a pseudo-sun, through a momentary return to a gaseous state.” 22 Embedded in the surrounding earth, ostensibly hidden and out of immediate sight, the bunker was a truly autonomous

21 Armitage, 2000: 73 22 Virilio, 1994: 39 David Manley Ambivalent Structures structure, its absent presence adding to its mysticism as one of the rare monolithic structures.

Figure 4: Paul Virilio, Command Post in South Brittany, 1994, Bunker Archeology, p. 158

Figure 6, Substructure (2013), is an example of one of the initial bunker visualizations within the development of the research project. The work interrogates the physicality of the bunker, its ability to eschew time and its effect on the surrounding landscape. In Concrete Ambivalence Inside the Bunker Complex (2011) John Beck argues that the bunker’s presence in visual culture is compelling because of its capacity to dominate any medium in the same way the bunker dominates its environment. Here, the bunker’s tendency to militarize its surroundings becomes complicit within the image. Beck (2011) notes that this is a function of the bunker’s ambivalent nature that also con- tributes to its cultural power. Ambivalence here relates to the bunker’s unique ability to remain both absent and present in the landscape, resisting “assimilation” 23 with more normative notions of architecture. He also notes that these structures appear foreign; they have an almost alien presence as if they were deposited here from some other time and place. In the development of the practice work, a conscious attempt was made to restage the ambivalent iconography of the bunker as a psychological metaphor amplifying its cultural power. Beck argues

23 Beck, 2011:81 17

Figure 5: David Manley, 2013. Substructure, archival pigment print 500 mm x 500 mm that shifts in natural colour within bunker representations in popular culture change its authenticity, resulting in an image that is consciously theatrical and alien to the spectator. Artists such as Erasmus Schröter use the bunker to create its own spectacle through the use of projected light. This is in contrast to more documentary styles of representation that retain naturalized traditional/perceptual colours, where the bunker exists as a passive structure. The use of a blue colour cast in Substructure (2013) is a conscious and deliberate attempt to increase the charismatic nature of the bunker; the cool blue light is used to explore the bunker’s foreignness.

David Manley Ambivalent Structures Bunkers have been utilized in a range of artistic practice. In Hiding in Plain Sight (2004) Schröter projected vivid colours on to the remains of the Atlantic Wall bunkers to highlight the folly of Nazism and its political ideologies. Allora and Calzadila’s work Clamor (2006) explores relationships between the cacophony of war and its typological architecture. This installation was manifested as both bunker and sound booth, where live performances were staged as a form of “sonic expression” 24 interrogating contemporary contexts of global war. Holland-based artist Gabur Osz’s images from The Liquid Horizon (1999–2002) use a camera obscura technique within the bunker complex itself to image the surrounding environment and interrogate the bunker’s capacity for targeting and surveillance. Through varying de- grees and processes of re-representation, all of these artists resist the bunker’s mandate to remain hidden, avoiding the documentary style; a trope also used in the development of Substructure. As Beck notes this may help to enhance their aesthetic as spectacle, something that contradicts the bunker’s intended function. 25

Figure 6: Allora and Calzadilla, Clamor, 2006, plaster foam, live performance, 945 cm x 762 cm x 305 cm

24 Feireiss and Klanten, 2014: 203 25 Beck, 2011: 91 19

It is worth emphasizing that the bunker’s primary aim, as a place of safety, is to remain concealed, maintaining some level of secrecy within its surroundings. “To fulfill its defensive function the bunker must be hidden and naturalized.” 26 Once exposed, these structures tend to militarize their environment. Brutalism borrowed from the bunker’s symbolism of violence by adopting a look of open defiance. Dan Lockton (2008) argues that the use of a Brutalist aesthetic in state infrastructure after the Second World War was concerned with maintaining the mystique of security arrangements within the psyche of the populace. He postulates that the force and power of the bunker aesthetic in architectural structures may have assisted in maintaining state control. 27 Examples of this could be drawn from the FBI headquarters in Washington DC and the AT&T Long Lines Building in lower Manhattan. These buildings use the aesthetics of Brutalism to assert an important arm of state and commercial power. Beck concedes that this may have been a reaction to the secret nature of Cold War bunkers, which tended to be hidden. He argues that state buildings may have served to deflect the spectator’s attention away from the actual seats of military power, which remained concealed. 28 Virilio’s bunker investigations and subsequent body of photographic work highlighted the sculptural qualities of the bunker and their relationship to architectural Minimalism. The work coincided with Bernd and Hilla Becher’s photographic typologies of water towers and gas tanks, which were a taxonomic inquiry into their sculptural forms. It is interesting to note that their work was titled Anonymous Structures, A Typology of Technical Construction (1970), and links can be drawn to Donald Judd’s Primary Structures (1966), which according to Tim- othy D. Martin (2008) retain an “ontological absence.” 29 The Bechers’ interest in water towers and gas tanks resided partly in their architectural peculiarities in relation to their lack of aesthetic design and latent effects on their surroundings, 30 which paradoxically draws attention to them. Beck highlights similarities with Virilio’s bunkers, something worth noting here; they were also designed for functionality yet they remain inconspicuous, unnoticed in their surroundings. This “unseen” imperative may help to amplify their anonymous status, similar to the Bechers’ water towers and gas tanks. 31 The concept of 26 Beck, 2011: 86 27 Lockton, 2008 28 Beck, 2011: 86 29 Martin, 2008:15 30 Beck, 2011: 86 31 Bernd and Hilla Becher, 1989 David Manley Ambivalent Structures inconspicuous structures unnoticed yet purposefully designed acted perhaps as a form of camouflage in terms of both visibility and perceptual invisibility. In A Handful of Dust (2003), J.G. Ballard suggested that it was this apparent lack of design that enabled similar construction to escape recognition and scrutiny from architects, as its shapes were utilized in the construction of state buildings, social housing and transport infrastructure during the reconstruction of Europe after the Second World War. He argues that these buildings became the surrogate bunkers of post-war institutional Brutalism so popular with architects and urban planners of the time. 32

Figure 7: Bernd and Hilla Becher, 1984. Water Tower, Carmux, France, gelatin silver print, 610 mm x 508 mm, Ruth Blume Gallery, Santa Monica

32 Ballard, 2006 21

Figure 8: David Manley, 2013. AT & T Long Lines Building, 33 Thomas Street, Manhattan

David Manley Ambivalent Structures The Citadel

“The bunker is the proto history of an age in which the power of a single weapon is so great that no distance can protect you from it any longer.” 33

The end of the Second World War saw the appearance of the definitive weapon of absolute atmospheric devastation. In the nuclear paradigm, the bunker becomes the end game, the final stage and full stop of military history if all-out war is waged. In light of this, the mythology surrounding the Cold War bunker became even more potent within contemporary culture. Anxiety surrounding nuclear Armageddon increased during the initial phases of the Cold War with the realization that civilians and their cities were the primary targets of intercontinental ballistic missiles. Thermonuclear war became a reality, generating the need for immediate and improved forms of military, civilian and political shelter. Attack from above and a fear of the sky sparked a bunker mania in America, Europe and the Soviet Union, and bunker construction commenced on a massive scale with the subterranean migration of civilian, military and political infrastructure as a way of dealing with nuclear anxiety. Initially, bunkers were constructed under cities that were likely targets; it was thought that these facilities could withstand atomic weapons similar to those used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The purpose of these deep shelters was to protect the arbiters and the machinery of military operations, with space reserved for military commanders, politicians and civil servants. These facilities were continually improved and developed as the Cold War progressed, in line with the evolution of nuclear weapons from the atom to hydrogen bomb. 34 If you know what to look for, visible signs of underground bunkers can be seen in many cities even today. In fact Seoul’s underground railway operates as both a transport system and shelter for its population in the event of war with North Korea. The Crystal Palace bunker in London was constructed in the mid-sixties in the crater of a V2 rocket, a weapon that was the prelude to the more

33 Virilio, 1994: 46 34 Bennett, 2011:163 23

sophisticated intercontinental ballistic missiles that spawned Cold War bunker building. The apartments above the bunker complex are residential, but had the four-minute warning sounded, indicating that a nuclear strike was imminent, the occupants would not have been allowed to access the facility below. 35 A now-defunct RAAF “operations facility”, which was constructed in 1942, still remains today in Bankstown, Sydney. It is quite easy to find and appears as a grassy mound near a housing estate on the corner of Edgar and Marion Streets. The bunker was constructed as a central command bomb shelter and was also used as a planning centre for military personal. 36 Switzerland has an abundance of underground civilian bunkers with a coverage ratio of 114 per cent for a population of eight million, and government regulations during the Cold War stipulated that all members of the population were to have ready access to a bunker facility if war broke out. Ironically, Switzerland was a neutral country, but its proximity to the Soviet Union and NATO states assured the country’s exposure to deadly radiation in the advent of nuclear war. 37 During the 1950s a bunker was constructed at Kelvedon Hatch in Essex that could house up to 600 people. Its purpose was to co-ordinate the surviving population after a nuclear strike by the Soviet Union. The structure was made from forty thousand tonnes of concrete and encased in a ten-foot-thick cement wall. There was a modest entrance to the site through a bungalow in the countryside. A two-inch-thick armoured door weighing over a tonne was used to close off the main bunker. Faraday cages protected infrastructure vulnerable to the electromagnetic pulses of nuclear detonation. The Kelvedon Hatch bunker had a twenty-four-thousand-gallon water preservation unit and was stocked with enough food to feed its inhabitants for three months. Cooling systems helped to dissipate heat generated by the occupants, and outside air was drawn through two extensive filtration systems. Armed security personnel maintained law and order, and escapees would have been shot to preserve security. The bunker was also equipped with an operating theatre as well as stackable cardboard coffins and a temporary morgue. Its main purpose was to ensure the survival of leadership and the machinery of government, with some space reserved for a small number of civilians. 38

35 View from the Mirror, 2011 36 Berry, 2013 37 Mariani, 2009 38 View from the Mirror, 2011 David Manley Ambivalent Structures The secrecy surrounding these structures during the Cold War helped to fuel the imagination of Hollywood film directors and the public, and bunkers were soon portrayed as the high-tech play- rooms of world power brokers. Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove is a good example of the narrative of total control and power executed from within a Cold War bunker, highlighting the tensions of the time through a parody of world events mediated from a nuclear command centre. The set designer of the film, Ken Adams, constructed the War Room with a cavernous interior measuring thirty by forty metres (with a ten-metre-high ceiling). Adams envisaged the room as a nuclear bunker buried deep below the Pentagon; it was a room that people expected or wanted to see: “everyone who thought about such things, in the early 1960s, must have imagined such a place.” 39 Other examples can be drawn from Ian Fleming’s Dr No (1958) and the John Sturges film, Ice Station Zebra (1968). The British science-fiction television series Thunderbirds (filmed between 1964 and 1966), created by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, incorporated stylized versions of the bunker with command centres and launch pads built into active volcanoes. Indeed, the notion of the subterranean bunker as a citadel of power was a very powerful narrative used in popular culture during this period. In The Bunker: Metaphor, materiality and management (2011) Luke Bennett argues that it was the American Modernist movement that encouraged the image of the bunker as a place where power and control could be maintained from deep beneath the surface of the Earth during a nuclear war. An example of this is Cheyenne Mountain Complex (founded May 12, 1958 due to the Cold War, commencing full operational capa- bility in 1966), a vast underground shelter that came to personify Amer- ica’s preparedness for nuclear war with the Soviet Union. It remains today as an example of bunker construction on a truly epic scale and has been used as a location for broadcast media, films and fiction-based literature. The movie War Games (1983) is set partly at the command centre; in The Terminator film series, the complex was used as the installation site for Skynet, and in Independence Day (1996), aliens destroy the installation during an invasion of Earth. In the video game, Fall- out Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel (2001), the complex is used for cryogenic stasis after a nuclear war.

39 Bromwich, 2014: 33 25

Figure 9: United States Air Force, 2010, NORAD blast doors, Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado

In reality, however, most of the bunkers that were built during the Cold War were far less lavish than the ones portrayed on screen, something at odds with the cultural narrative of the time. The real bunkers were often constructed hastily and suffered many architectural defects such as damp, leakage, and poor air quality. They were reflections of the bureaucracies that constructed them, a micro-representation of the state that operated as a dispersed centre of governmental power where issues became amplified in the context of the bunker’s extreme physicality and operational necessities. The bunker operated as a society in miniature, and vulnerabilities in relation to provisioning, preparedness and an actual ability to control the outside world became the primary focus of the occupants. 40 Modernist Structure (2014) and Art Bunker (2014) are an exploration of some of the imagery associated with Cold War nuclear command centres. The works are also an attempt to crystallize some

40 Bennett, 2011 David Manley Ambivalent Structures of the ideas drawn from a review of the literature in relation to this research project. Brutalist and Modernist buildings are sourced through topographical exploration. The buildings are imaged using a variety of cameras or reconstructed as models from images in the studio setting. This is the case with Art Bunker. A mobile phone was used to photograph a corner space in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum (1959) during a field trip to New York in 2013. The image was then used to reconstruct a half-scale replica of the space in the practice studio. The model was constructed from wood, foam plastics and cement filler painted white and photographed with similar lighting arrangements to the museum space. Modernist Structure combines the rearrangement of sourced structures through a process of digital intervention and compositing. The research incorporates many hours walking within the urban terrain with consideration paid to particular structures linked to the Modernist/ Brutalist aesthetic. Generally, the buildings imaged convey a strong architectural presence. Part of the research process incorporates the sketching of these buildings and the distillation of thought over many months where particular structures emerge as viable options for the production of artworks. High-resolution samples are then recorded of the buildings through digital and analogue mediums and the process of detailed compositing commences. 27

Figure 10: David Manley, Modernist Structure, 2014, archival pigment print, 1250 mm x 1000 mm

David Manley Ambivalent Structures

Figure 11: David Manley, Art Bunker, 2014, archival pigment print, 1250 mm x 1000 mm 29

Bunker Mentalities

“His eyes turned to the multi-storey car park beside the apartment blocks above the beach. Its inclined floors contained an operating formula for their passage through consciousness.” 41

The bunker as a form of defensive architecture brought with it a new set of psychological parameters for its occupants. These structures were a technology for defence and attack. One marked time within the bunker’s confines with the possibility of action or reaction at any moment. Survival and the possibility of death were the overriding preoccupations. Slits cut into the reinforced cement allowed only a limited view of the outside world. Submerged bunkers were equipped with periscopes as the need for absolute protection was proportion- al with the need to see. This narrow line of sight tended to create an idiosyncratic view of the world outside. A retreat into the bunker signified an impending crisis for those who sought shelter within its confines, its form and structure acting as a survival machine, a place where the illusion of control could be sustained. 42 Why do these structures harbour such dark undertones? Are there historical narratives that underscore the bunker’s abject influence on the human psyche? In W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001), the unknown narrator discusses architecture during a chance meeting in Antwerp with the character Austerlitz. An architectural researcher, Austerlitz reflects on European fortifications and in particular those at Fort Breendonk, which were occupied by the Nazis during WWII. Austerlitz notes that the time taken to construct and man such buildings made them obsolete before they could carry out their intended function. “The construction of fortifications clearly showed how we keep surrounding ourselves with defenses, built in successive phases as a precaution against any incursion by enemy powers.” 43 Austerlitz describes these buildings as monuments to futility, alluding to their symbolic psychological power as something that reminds us of our

41 Ballard, 1969: 93 42 Gane, 1990: 90 43 Sebald, 2001: 17 David Manley Ambivalent Structures own demise: At the most we gaze at them in wonder, a kind of wonder which in itself is a form of dawning horror, for somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins. 44 The book’s narrator then visits the Breendonk bunkers near Antwerp, reacting in horror to the cement monoliths. He is unable to relate their presence to anything remotely connected to a civilized society. “I could not, despite its now rational structure, recognize anything designed by the human mind but saw it, rather, as the anatomical blue-print of some alien and crab-like creature.” 45 Descending into one of the casemates, the narrator describes the psychological impact of its corridors and sunken spaces where his repressed memories are triggered by the rooms’ dampness and smell. Here Sebald places a sourced image of a dark arched corridor descending towards the foreground into the text. No one can explain exactly what happens within us when the doors behind which our childhood terrors lurk are flung open. But I do remember that there in the casemate at Breendonk a nauseating smell of soft soap rose to my nostrils, and that this smell, in some strange place in my head, was linked to the bizarre German word for scrubbing-brush, Wurzelburste. 46 During the occupation, the complex degenerated into a vast Nazi torture house; its purpose as fortification shifted from a place of defence and safety to one of perversity and death. Interestingly, Sebald’s use of sourced photographs in the novel, many of which appear to be randomly chosen, act to neutralize the spectators’ preconceptions of the image as though we are experiencing them for the first time. It is as if Sebald wants the reader to approach the world through images we don’t recognize. Perhaps this process enables the reader to be more sensitive to the things we would not normally be responsive to because of their unfamiliar nature? 47 Ambivalent Structures draws from this process, deliberately presenting the photographic image in a way that is not fixed to any specific cultural or temporal context. As noted above, the bunker was an expression of its creator’s anxiety. This anxiety and fear of attack has implications when we

44 Ibid, p. 23 45 Sebald 2001: 28 46 ibid, p.19 47 SOURCE Photographic Review, 2013 31

Figure 12: Jo Jan, Bunkers surrounding the Fort van Breendonk, Belgium, 2007. 280 mm x 210 mm

consider the bunker’s cultural power as a psychological metaphor, something linked to the deeply rooted archetypal spaces of our collective unconscious that relate to the underworld such as the cave, the dungeon and the crypt. Sebald’s descriptions of the Breendonk fortifications allude to this. In The Bunker Metaphor, Materiality and Management (2010), Luke Bennett describes the psychological implications associated with “bunker mentalities” 48 that can develop when organizational management hierarchies feel threatened by outside circumstances. Bennett argues that the bunker’s mystique has been sustained within popular culture through its secrecy and deeply ambivalent nature, fed by the imagination of writers and filmmakers who have used its unique status and archetypal symbolism to explore the darker spaces of the human psyche. 49 He argues that during times of threat a disconnect may emerge between that which is controlled and those people who seek to deliver control. 50 This

48 Bennett, 2010:156 49 Ibid, p. 160 50 Ibid, p. 156 David Manley Ambivalent Structures disconnect is characterized by a heightened sense of “paranoia and defensiveness” 51 and may lead to a retreat into a predetermined place of safety within the physical confines of the organization. This physical and psychological separation creates a feedback loop and a heightened level of defensiveness and paranoia, with the focus centered on and around events taking place outside, and Bennett argues that this experience is filtered through the unique nature of the particular organization and its physicality. 52 The last days of Adolf Hitler have come to personify the bunker’s contemporary symbolism as the psychological endgame. Hitler’s demise and the psychopathologies that were manifest within the confines of the Berlin bunker are explored in Oliver Hirchbiegel’s filmDownfall (2004). The film depicts Hitler’s loss of control over the war and a descent into nihilism. The Berlin bunker was initially constructed as a citadel of power, but by the end of the war it came to represent Hitler’s inability to sustain any control over the European conflict. Here the bunker metaphor acts as the physical site of the organization during the final act, a place where the illusion of control could be maintained contrary to events taking place outside. Bennett describes the bunker as an extreme form of “organizational existentialism” which functions, or is meant to function, as a “hyper-organizational space,” for its occupants. 53 This was certainly the case in the Berlin bunker. A scene in the movie depicts Hitler shuffling model armies across a map of Germany, exalting past victories to an adoring inner circle while demanding that his armies hold off the Russian invasion of the city. Hitler has, however, already lost radio communication with his generals on the battlefield and was unaware that the Red Army had actually captured Berlin. Downfall depicts Hitler’s demise as a degeneration of rational behavior that was characterized by intense paranoia, delusions of grandeur and an ultimate trajectory toward suicide. This narrative continues to reverberate within contemporary culture and is used here to highlight some of the psychological implications associated with bunker mentalities that can develop when people choose to isolate themselves from the outside world during times of crisis and threat.

51 Ibid, p. 156 52 Ibid, p.156 53 Ibid, p. 158 33

Why do bunker mentalities develop? In Images of Organiza- tion (2006) Gareth Morgan argues that members of an organization may become imprisoned by the systems, images and ideas that are unique to that group of people. In other words, people can construct the truth about the world from the viewpoint of their own particular organizational hierarchy. Morgan’s theory of the “psychic prison” 54 was derived from Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Prisoners in the cave were chained to the wall and could only make sense of the world from the shadows that were cast in front of them. Bennett situates the psychological impact of the bunker in this context, 55 through the notion that an organization can only have limited control over events that occur outside its physical and psychological confines. Kubrick’sDr Strangelove could be used as an example here. During a Cold War nuclear crisis, the US President, played by Peter Sellers, phones the Kremlin from an American command centre to notify the Russian Prime Minister Dimitri of an imminent nuclear attack by a squadron of errant American B52s. The conversation is complicated by the fact that the Soviet Prime Minister is drunk and the phone line breaks up intermittently. A difficult discussion ensues which is characterized by miscommunication and technical problems. Both parties have only a limited understanding of real events that are unfolding over Eastern Europe, a bit like the shadow play in Plato’s cave. The US President is acutely aware of this difficult situation and his lack of control over a rapidly escalating event that could potentially destroy the world. In the film’s final scene, generals and bureaucrats jostle for position in the nuclear shelter, encouraged by Dr Strangelove’s plan to provide ten sexually stimulating females for every one male in an attempt to preserve the human race. The bunker metaphor is used here to highlight the folly of isolationism when the need for careful diplomacy becomes paramount. 56 The bunker metaphor as psychological prison resonates strongly within modes of modernist cinema and literature, where groups of people are held within a room or building by some seemingly unknown force. This was explored in the Luis Bunuel film, The Exterminating Angel (1962) and Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No

54 Morgan, 2006: 396 55 Bennett, 2010:156 56 Kubrick, 1964 David Manley Ambivalent Structures Exit (1944). These works are examples of an existential crisis that can be linked to Bennett’s contemporary interpretation of Morgan’s psychic prison and the bunker narrative. This theory can be used to interrogate the psychopathologies created within the context of organizational culture under stress. Both Bunuel’s and Sartre’s works resemble each other in that a group of people find themselves trapped together in a room, unable to leave. In The Exterminating Angel, a wealthy noble holds an elaborate dinner party for a group of aristocrats. After dinner the guests congregate in the sitting room for a piano recital and nightcap. At the end of the recital the guests discover they are unable to leave the room. For some inexplicable reason an invisible barrier prevents them from exiting. The guests’ plight continues throughout the night and into the next day. Food and water become scarce as one day leads into the next. People lose track of time and civility degenerates into some of the more base aspects of human behavior. The group splits to form factions while petty arguments and infighting emerges over the allocation of resources. The dinner guests’ privileged lives begin to degrade as the things they have taken for granted slowly disappear and their primal needs take over. 57 Bunuel’s film gives us no reason as to why the guests are unable to leave the sitting room, whereas in Sartre’s No Exit, the characters are aware that they have died and understand the cause of their predicament. As the play evolves and the characters get to know one another, they begin to realize that their destiny is to remain together within the room, torturing each other with their personalities and idiosyncrasies for eternity. In both works the room and its physicality act as a space of control and containment. In No Exit the room’s fixtures and fittings, many of which don’t work, become an irritant for the occupants; it is as if the room itself is goading the occupants into an argument about petty issues to do with personal taste and their past, incomplete lives. The illusion of a physical and psychological disconnect from the outside world creates a form of “crusoeism” 58 for the protagonists, and this experience of isolation degrades their ability to effectively manage the circumstances they find themselves in. As previously mentioned, bunker mentality is characterized by an inward focus on the needs of the individual with

57 Bunuel, 1962 58 Sellars, 2012: 5 35

increasing levels of paranoia, the illusion of control, and a heightened level of defensiveness. These feelings coalesce, amplifying the experience. The architectonics of a room assist in shaping events and ensuing behaviours, leading to a slide into the abject; a seemingly benign space becomes a dark and dysfunctional place. Bunuel and Sartre share a similar sentiment in their works, linked to the bunker metaphor. In the final act ofNo Exit, Garcin announces, “There’s no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is – other people.” 59

Figure 13: Luis Bunuel, still from the Exterminating Angel, 1962, The Criterion Collection

In Living in the End Times (2011), Slavoj Zizek notes the “fantasy” of buildings, and their outward projections of the utopian aspirations of their designers and architects to articulate justice and equality. He calls this the “mute language of buildings.” 60 Zizek further states that this physical language may also articulate a longing for inequality that demands clear distinctions between class and social hierarchy. 61 This is certainly the case in The Exterminating Angel, as the building the dinner guests are trapped in is palatial and

59 Sartre, 1989: 45 60 Zizek, 2010: 225 61 Ibid David Manley Ambivalent Structures exclusive, an outward expression of another form of utopia that relates to social class and hierarchical order. Brunel breaks down the social order within this space to show that social degradation will occur under the right set of circumstances. Here the bunker metaphor is explored, interrogating issues of isolationism and its attendant psychopathologies. The privileged lives of the characters heighten the experience of alienation from the rest of the world. Social antagonism created in the room determines the actions and behaviours of its occupants, where the building operates as a metaphor for the inherent frailty of class distinction and social hierarchy. This form of social antagonism defines the actions and behaviours of the building’s occupants. At a broader level, is it any wonder that people behave in a particular way when they are excluded or marginalized from society? Parallels of the bunker metaphor and its attendant psychopathologies also exist within more contemporary works of literature such as J.G. Ballard’s short story The Enormous Space (1989) and Michael Haneke’s film The Seventh Continent (1989). In both works the idea of micro-nationalism is considered and taken to its extreme conclusion within the confines of the suburban home. InThe Enormous Space, the main character Ballantyne becomes demoralized by a series of life-changing events that include a serious car crash, a messy divorce and difficulties managing work-related stress. He feels a profound loss of control over his life and decides to shut himself away from his problems and the rest of the world by locking himself inside his house. This rejection of society and a past lifestyle creates a dangerous introspection for Ballantyne, and his self-imposed isolation slowly feeds an ever-growing delusion of immortality. He feels no obligation to anyone, living a grandiose existence outside of moral conviction; his perception of his physical surroundings begins to alter and his house becomes the entire cosmos; its spatial dimensions expand away from him. Ballantyne’s world distorts to a point where he murders a concerned visitor as a result of his paranoid delusions towards her, then makes preparations for his own suicide. A similar motive is explored in Haneke’s film The Seventh Continent (1989). The film is based on a true story of a family who decide to destroy all of their possessions including money, furniture and photographs. The family spends weeks 37

inside their home with no contact with the outside world, bingeing on expensive food and champagne. They systematically destroy all of their possessions while making plans for a final act of suicide, an ultimate rejection of modernity. This motive is at play in both Haneke’s and Ballard’s work where the protagonists feel powerless and marginalized from society.

Figure 14: Michael Haneke, still from The Seventh Continent, 1989, Directors Suite

What are some of the forces at play that influence the development of bunker mentalities? In Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (1962) Michel Foucault described subjugation and the systems of social control that have led to the development of human cultures. It is the relationship and interaction between forces oppositional to each other that determine the outcome of a particular set of circumstances. One might describe this as social antagonism. This struggle and engagement within the space between opposing forces, the space where combatants attack and defend, is where the relationships are inherently changed and modified. This

David Manley Ambivalent Structures modification process helps to shape our systems of governance and its institutions. Within this conflict and its inherent transformation of human interactions lay concomitant values and interpretations of the events by those with the greater power and control over others. Foucault argued that humanity has developed through an interpretive process through those who maintain control and those who don’t, and architecture becomes the signifier of this control. 62 It is the lack of control that the protagonists feel with their lives in both Ballard’s and Heneke’s work that leads to the characters’ introspection and isolationism, with the architecture or building acting as the conduit. The home in both works becomes the bastion or micro-nation, where the illusion of control is re-captured. However, as both works illustrate, this form of physical isolation can have dire psychological implications. What happens when entire societies isolate themselves? On a field trip to South Korea, the research project Ambivalent Structures considered the northernmost observatory within the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) that separates North and South Korea. Here there is a unique tourist attraction that highlights the dual organizational theory of social antagonism proposed by Foucault, something the bunker personifies. Indeed, North Korea could easily be described as a societal bunker given its hermit-like governance and perceived pariah status within the west. The observatory post at the DMZ includes a building with a large theatre screen-like window cut out of the cement wall with seating for an audience. Spectators look out over the rather bleak landscape beyond the border to the North Korean frontier, where the majority of trees have been felled for firewood. The observatory is elevated and the cinema-like seating arrangement and velvet curtains on either side of the screen create a sublime viewing experience, as if the spectators are looking out onto another world. In response to the observation theatre, the North Koreans have constructed a fake town named Kijong-dong, with well-maintained houses and lawns though no inhabitants. On occasion, people are employed to move around on the streets to create the illusion of activity. Until recently the North Korean military broadcast propaganda through loud speakers pointed towards the observatory from the town. The

62 Foucault, 1982: 203 39

observatory thus acts as a theatre of ideology, with a spectacle that is highly organized and controlled through a propaganda war waged on both sides of the border.

Figure 15: David Manley, Observation Room from DMZ into the North Korean frontier, 2014

How have artists responded to periods in history marked by extreme power differentials? Monument Against Fascism (1986) is a sculptural and performance work by Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev Gerz. Today, the work exists only as a plaque with text and nine small images documenting its realization in the suburb of Harberg in Hamburg, Germany. Below the plaque, hidden underground, lies a column of cement twelve metres high and one metre square, faced with a sheeting of lead. Originally the work stood above the ground and was progressively lowered into a shaft built to accommodate its entire length underneath the footpath. Two metal styluses accompanied the structure and members of the public were encouraged to inscribe into the lead sheeting their own thoughts and comments on fascism. From 1986 to 1992 the column was slowly lowered into the ground with the public’s inscriptions following its descent until the work was complete-

David Manley Ambivalent Structures ly submerged. Finally, a commemorative plaque was placed over the sculpture. Malcolm Miles (2009) argues that the Gerzs’ work functions to neutralize the violence of the bunker by using its brutal symbolism in defiance of past atrocities. Perhaps the burying of the sculpture acts as a metaphor, its absent presence a reminder of the potential in all of us to assume positions of isolationism and paranoia? 63

Figure 16: Jochen Gerz, Monument Against Fascism, Harburg, 1986

63 Miles, 2009 41

Figures 19 Pile and Block (2013) forms a diptych work that considers the psychological implications of the bunker mentality that has been described above. The work on the left is a diorama built from foam and plasticine. It is a visual representation that explores the breakdown or fragmentation of the human psyche within a space that is isolated from the rest of the world. The series was a response to earlier research that considered the psychological effects of seclusion rooms on patients in psychiatric hospitals. The image on the right is an attempt to distill the visual aesthetic and potential psychological imperative of brutalism and its relationship to state infrastructure with its aesthetics of dominance into a cement monolith devoid of windows. The works are didactic in that they interpret the physicality of architecture from both the inside and outside. It is the ultimate fate of the bunkers and the effects of dwelling in them through times of threat that reverberates within contemporary organizational structures and hierarchies under extreme circumstances. The bunker as an extreme form of hyper-organizational space and its depiction within popular culture has implications when we consider its symbolic impact on psychology and behaviour mediated through its organizational metaphor and latent presence in the urban environment; something borne out as an expression of anxiety into architectural reality. There is no duality here between the physical and psychological. The bunker space and its influence on the psyche are enmeshed as lived or imagined, its representation in popular culture feeding back on its symbolism and metaphor through its physical evocation and archetypal narrative. Perhaps what is being played out here is a form of architectural determinism?

David Manley Ambivalent Structures Figures 17: David Manley, Pile, 2013, archival pigment print, 240 mm x 240 mm 43

Figures 18: David Manley, Block, 2013, archival pigment print, 240 mm x 240 mm

David Manley Ambivalent Structures Ballardian Typologies

“The spectacular view always made Laing aware of his ambivalent feelings for this concrete landscape. Part of its appeal lay all too clearly in the fact that this was an environment built, not for man, but for man’s absence.” 64

In J.G. Ballard & Architectures of Control (2008), Dan Lock- ton describes the way in which architecture and technology help to regulate and mould their users’ behaviours through codes that are embedded into their design. The term ‘architecture’ in Ballard’s work can be defined in its broadest sense, and relates to the entire built environment, which also includes the social and technological surroundings of its inhabitants. Lockton uses the example of council-park benches with central armrests designed into the seats to discourage the homeless from sleeping on them. 65 He argues that Ballard’s work recognizes these subliminal forces, documenting their psychological influences on the characters he creates in minute detail. High Rise (1975) is a potent example of this. The building that the novel is set in was designed to be self-contained with its own gym, school and supermarket, with no need for its residents to venture into the outside world, just like Le Corbusier’s Unite d’Habitation. The nature of this design isolates its occupants, creating a closed environment where class structures begin to emerge. After a series of petty grievances between neighbours, life in the newly opened apartment block quickly degenerates into an orgy of violence and debauchery. “Secure within the shell of the high-rise like passengers on an automatically piloted airliner, they were free to behave in any way they wished.” 66 The main premise of the work suggests that it is the psychodynamic nature of the building’s design that feeds into and influences the behaviour of the occupants. What are these influences and how do they manifest in the behaviour of the individual? Andrew Frost conjures Jean Baudril- lard’s notion of “initiatory power” in the Aesthetics of Disappearance

64 J.G. Ballard, 1975: 34 65 Lockton, 2008 66 Ballard, 1973: 47 45

(2013), a term that can be used to describe the latent effects of architectural structures at a psychological level. Frost notes that particular buildings and spaces can “provoke a sense of estrangement from our sense of everyday reality.” 67 Indeed, it was Ballard who coined the phrase “Ballardian” to describe particular imagery associated with the urban terrain that signifies the “violence and ambiguity”68 of contemporary life. Similar spaces have been described by Marc Auge (1995) as transitory zones devoid of history and culture: “A world thus surrendered to solitary individuality, to the fleeting, the temporary.” 69 In Ballard’s work, the cement geometry of the city and its subtle dominance on the skyline acts like a cipher for the relational possibilities and obsessive thought processes of his characters. This is evident in Concrete Island (1973), where the main character, Maitland, marooned on a cement median strip and living off the contents of his crashed Jaguar, ultimately declares after a series of demoralizing attempts to escape its confines, “I am the Island.” 70 Maitland succumbs to the true transitory nature of his modern life; the median strip and his proclamation act as metaphor for the solitary condition of the individual within the contemporary urban setting. A similar motive is explored in The Terminal Beach (1964), where the ruined bunkers and blockhouses of a Pacific atoll correspond to Traven’s mental decline: The system of megaliths now provided a complete substitute for those functions of his mind which gave to it its sense of the sustained rational order of time and space. Without them, his awareness of reality shrank to little more than the few square inches of sand beneath his feet. 71 Both works explore the initiatory power and psychological interaction of architecture on the individual, documenting its profound influence on the human psyche.

67 Frost, 2013: 4 68 Simonis, 2005: 2 69 Auge, 1995: 78 70 Ballard, 1973: 71 71 Ballard,1993: 145 David Manley Ambivalent Structures Figure 19: David Manley, Spiral Cement Structure, 2014, archival photographic print, 1250 x 1000 mm 47

Many buildings in the contemporary urban environment retain this presence. In Crash (1971), Ballard muses on the psychological effects of the multi-storey car parks that are so common in the city landscape, referring to them as the most “mysterious buildings ever built” and asks, “What effect does using these buildings have on us?” 72 When considering the urban environment within a Ballard- ian framework, Jonathan Crary in Simon Sadler’s Architecture Without Architecture (2005) argues that its terrains and fields of reference become “decentered”. 73 Ballard questions notions of the city as a complex comprising fixed and static elements that can be discerned objectively; rather his work provides an alternative and “discontinuous” 74 view of the city devoid of central focal points. This fragmentation of the landscape creates new possibilities for seeing how technology, architecture and human behaviour coalesce and merge together. The smart phone is a good example of this convergence. The body and the technological prosthetics of the outside world amalgamate to form and shape the way we think and react. Images and artifacts of our recent history, formed through war and conflict, reinforce particular sites of apprehension of power, control and indeed our own sexuality, as explored in Crash. Here psychopathologies are played out at a macro level, where urban terrains become the neurological pathways, its infrastructure, and transit zones blind synapses. Ballard’s urban paradigm of complexity and its subconscious influence continues to evolve in line with the growth of capitalism and the rationalization of the urban infrastructure that supports it through the encouragement of speed and the maximization of productivity as the cultural imperative. Put simply, and as Virilio argues, 75 the movement of capital has transformed urbanism. The effect of this is that the participants become ever more subordinate to this expanding system. In The DNA of the Present (2005) Pippa Tandy argues that Ballard’s work alludes to a type of parasitical relationship whereby the technological aspects of our society take on an exploitative role of the collective conscious in order to move forward and evolve, and we become the byproduct of this evolution. It is the infrastructure of this system that Ballard concentrates on in many of his works.

72 Lockton, 2008: 3 73 Sadler, 2005: 159 74 Ibid, p.159 75 Virilio, 1977 David Manley Ambivalent Structures Figures 20: David Manley, 2013, Ballardian 1 and 2, archival pigment prints, 900 mm x 1100 mm each

Shopping malls, airport terminals, and highway overpasses all operate as staging grounds for this fusion of human physicality and technology. 76 “I realized that the entire zone which defined the landscape of my life was now bounded by a continuous artificial horizon, formed by the raised parapets and embankments of the motorways and their access roads and interchanges.” 77 Ballardian 1 and 2 (2014) is a diptych series that explores the urban terrain within this context. The work consciously uses the cement wall and buildings in the foreground to intervene with the natural horizon. The buildings have been rendered through a digital process that removes all of the windows from the structures. There is also a trace of movement through the car park that is deliberately ambiguous, the aftermath of an event that may or may not have taken place. Works such as Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition (1969) explore the way in which freeways, billboards, car interiors and footage of

76 Tandy, 2005 77 Ballard, 1973: 53 49

Figures 21: David Manley, 2013, Ballardian 1 and 2, archival pigment prints, 900 mm x 1100 mm each

war on television all coalesce to shape and build the neural pathways of the individual. This fusion of the built environment with the psychology of the individual has an inherent and pending violence. Indeed, Virilio noted the bunker’s use as a form of clothing, a technological shield that has a profound effect on the wearer’s psyche. 78 The urban terrain of Ballard’s work presupposes a conjoining of the individual and the built environment, creating component parts in a vast neural network seemingly without purpose, except to extend desire in line with the market imperatives of capitalism. Ballard’s descriptions of human orifices willingly accepting technological insertion and the conjoining of the physical self with the machine are a comment on this imperative. The body becomes the ultimate terrain of capitalist utility, the final proclamation of desire and the gratifica- tion of self. What are some of the psychological implications here? Ballard describes the culmination of this convergence as the “death of affect,” suggesting a new reality in which we experience “our moral

78 Virilio, 1994: 42 David Manley Ambivalent Structures freedom to pursue our own psychopathologies as a game, and in our ever-greater powers of abstraction.” 79

Figure 22: Salvador Dali, Young Virgin Auto Sodomised by Her Own Chastity, 1954, oil on canvas, 405 mm x 305 mm, private collection

In works such as Crash, the motorways, overpasses and airport carriageways are the transitory spaces that are detached from history and a sense of moral obligation, and thus become the impact sites of the psychopathologies of Ballard’s characters. Existing within the urban network, these “suspended zones” create a sense of neutrality that exists outside of the normal legal and ethical parameters of the state. Roger Luckhurst (1997) cites Ballard’s “duty-free malls, transport systems and hospitals” 80 where the experience of the individual is “weirdly detached from an embedded history of culture and morality.” 81 Acting in a similar way to the psychodynamics of the

79 Ballard, 2006: 116 80 Luckhurst, 1997: 129 81 Ibid, p. 129 51

bunker, these temporally skewed zones of super-modernity incite a strange form of limbo that Simon Sellars in Zones of Transition (2012) argues relate closely to the phenomenon of micro-nationalism, whereby people dissatisfied with society live their lives outside of the system, much like the family in Haneke’s The Seventh Continent and the character Ballantyne in The Enormous Room. What conditions of cognitive action and desire are created under these circumstances? 82 Given that Ballard was exploring the interaction of the built environment and the human psyche almost forty years ago, where are we now? In Seinfeld’s Parking Garage is Weirdly Existential (2014) Claire L. Evans argues that we are now living in a post-Ballardian era. She relates and parallels an episode of Seinfeld named The Parking Garage (1991) to Ballard’s report on an Unidentified Space Station (1982) to explore this idea. In Ballard’s short story, the crew of an interstellar expedition seek haven on an abandoned space station. The ship consists of a variety of passenger concourses and waiting areas that appear to be a transit port for interstellar travellers. On inspection, the crew becomes hopelessly lost within the ship’s labyrinthine space, unable to make it back to their ship. Over time they accept the enormity of the spacecraft and become accustomed to their transitory state, their movement between concourses their only purpose in life. Seinfeld’s satirical mash-up of Ballard’s own take on the pornographic infinity is played out in a New Jersey shopping mall multi-storey car park. Jerry and the crew become lost searching for their car for what seems like hours. Evans asserts that Jerry’s existential crisis is a satirical metaphor of unconscious acceptance of the influences of technology that Ballard drew our attention to in his work. 83 China Mieville concurs in Disobedient Rooms (2010), “ we are all post-Ballard now: it’s not that we have gotten beyond him but rather that we remain ineluctably defined by him.”84 Evans proposes that these experiences have become emblematic of Ballard’s notion of the death of affect. Bauman’s notions can be used to illustrate this where “modernity is what it is, an obsessive march forward. The march goes on because any place of arrival is but a temporary arrival.” 85 Perhaps this is the passive acceptance that Ballard warned us about? A type of post-humanism defined by a never-ending movement forward, something that happens

82 Sellars, 2012 83 Evans, 2014 84 Mieville, 2010 85 Bauman, 1991: 10 David Manley Ambivalent Structures not because of any ambitious struggle on our behalf, but because our ambition is thwarted at every turn by disappointment. So what can be drawn from Ballard’s post-humanism? Siobhan Lyons cites Mathew Gandy’s notion that potential catastrophic occurrences offer an opportunity to develop a deeper insight and understanding of modernity and the existential nature of the lived experience. 86 Given the orthodoxy of the depiction of the Apocalypse through salvation and redemption in film and literature, are we able to perceive a finite end? An end where the world and everything in it is destroyed after a planetary cataclysm, as in the case of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011)? Ballard’s narratives often have ambiguous and inconclusive endings where there is no redemption or salvation for the characters or indeed the world. 87 Concrete Island, The Drowned World and The Terminal Beach are all good examples of this. Ballard frustrates our paradigmatic ideas of the Apocalypse where this outcome prevails, in that life continues without humanity. Lyons argues that Ballard is offering us an alternative to the way we understand our own demise, which is something that is intellectually rare, by shifting the orthodoxy of survival and redemption and moving us towards a more realistic understanding and consideration of crisis as the natural order of things. Here, the bunker metaphor comes into play. If redemption is truly beyond us should we retreat below ground, or do we take our chances above in the light in the same way the young Virilio did during the fire bombing of Nantes in 1945? Here lies the true paradox of the bunker metaphor. Perhaps the bunker becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, its creation an acceptance that it must be used, therefore putting its creators on a trajectory towards crisis. The bunker anticipates the end game and directs its incarnation. If we anticipate survival through some form of redemptive process or indeed salvation from a higher power then we are more likely to build and retreat into these abject spaces during times of crisis, but we are also more likely to create the very thing that will ensure this end.

86 Lyons, 2013 87 Ibid 53

Figure 23: David Manley, Ambivalent Structures, installation view at Black Eye Contemporary Photographic Space, September 2014

David Manley Ambivalent Structures A Hidden Presence

Ambivalent Structures has addressed current issues surrounding the bunker’s links to architectural Brutalism, situating its latent presence within a contemporary urban context. The research has explored the bunker’s deeply conflicting nature, linking its strong cultural symbolism with Bauman’s theory on the ambivalence of modernity as a by-product of technology’s relentless movement forward. Historical perspectives of the bunker have also been explored through its evolution in design and construction during the Second World War and the Cold War, highlighting its influence on post-war Modernism. Furthermore, the research has considered the psychological implications of the bunker’s unique architectural status and its potent narrative within popular culture, which has been used by writers and filmmakers to investigate the potential in all of us for positions of isolationism and paranoia. The bunker’s strong links to modernism, minimalism in art and brutalism have been discussed with attention paid to the work of Jochen and Esther Shalev Gerz, whose work acts to neutralize the violence of the bunker by using its brutal aesthetic in defiance of past atrocities. This interpretation of the bunker aesthetic illustrates how symbols of fascism combined with cultural anxiety can operate to remind us of humanity’s equal capacity to create and destroy. The studio work has developed in response to this investigation, incorporating the construction, staging, and imaging of the bunker’s referent within a post-Brutalist terrain. Here, the research practice has considered the bunker metaphor and some of the psychological implications associated with urban structures that retain a Brutalist aesthetic, which has been shown to be linked to the violence of The Second World War. This work has been undertaken in light of Ballard’s observations on the dynamic interaction between the psyche and the surrounding built environment. Ballard’s urban terrains serve as staging grounds for the deeply rooted experiences of modern-day alienation and dislocation of his characters. The research has argued that Ballard’s psycho-geographical accounts of the urban 55

experience point towards much broader socio-historical concerns that relate to technology’s encroachment into the development and expression of our fundamental psychology. Given this and in light of Bauman’s concerns, it encourages us to ask whether we are currently experiencing an era of human evolution that is characterized by a passive acceptance of technology’s ambivalent nature? If this is the case, then perhaps this is the scenario J.G. Ballard warned us about almost forty years ago, a type of post-humanism where the focus has shifted towards favouring technology’s development over our own. Ultimately the research considers this aftermath in light of Ballard’s concerns. Here, paradoxically, the bunker metaphor comes into play, as it can possess its own redemptive qualities. The historical context of the bunker, its hidden presence and powerful narrative could act as a potent reminder of our own negative capabilities, freeing us from a state of perpetual crisis and a descent towards a bunker mentality during the final analysis.

David Manley Ambivalent Structures Figure 24: David Manley, Blockbuster, 2015, archival pigment print, 1250 mm x 1000 mm 57

List of Illustrations

1. Le Corbusier’s sketch for 14. Michael Heneke, still from La Ville Radius, 1924 The Seventh Continent, 2. Jan Hanzlik, Unite d’ Habitation, Directors Suite, 1989 2006 15. David Manley, Observation 3. David Manley, Zoomorphic Cement room from the DMZ into the Structure, 2013, archival pigment North Korean Frontier, 2014 print, 1250 mm x 1000 mm 16. Jochen Gerz, Monument Against 4. Paul Virilio, Command Post Fascism, Harburg, 1986. in South Brittany, Bunker 17. David Manley, Pile, 2014, Archaeology, 1994 archival pigment print, 220 mm 5. David Manley, Substructure, 2013, x 220 mm each archival pigment print, 500 mm 18. David Manley, Block, 2014, x 500 mm archival pigment print, 220 mm 6. Allora and Calzadilla, Clamor, 2006. x 220 mm each Plaster foam, live performance, 19. David Manley, Spiral Cement 9450 mm x 7620 mm x 3050 mm Structure, 2014, archival pigment 7. Bern and Hilla Becher, Water Tower, print, 1250mm x 1000mm Carmaux, France, 1984. Gelatin 20. David Manley, Ballardian 1, silver print, 600 mm x 598 mm 2014, archival pigment print, 8. David Manley, AT & T Long Lines 900 x 1100 mm and 900 mm Building, 33 Thomas Street, x 1100 mm each Manhattan, 2013 21. David Manley, Ballardian 2, 9. United States Air Force, 2010. 2014, archival pigment print, NORAD Blast Doors, Cheyenne 900 x 1100 mm and 900 mm Mountain, Colorado x 1100 mm each 10. David Manley, Modernist 23. Salvador Dali, Young Virgin Auto Structure, 2014, archival pigment Sodomised by Her Own Chastity, print, 1250 mm x 1000 mm 1954, oil on canvas, 405 x 305 mm, private collection 11. David Manley, Art Bunker, 2014, archival pigment print, 1250 mm 22. David Manley, Ambivalent x 1000 mm Structures. Installation view at Black Eye Contemporary 12. Jo Jan, Bunkers surrounding Photographic Space, September the Fort van Breendonk, 2014 Belgium, 2007. 210 mm x 280 mm 24. David Manley, Blockbuster, 2014, archival pigment print, 1250 mm 13. Luis Bunuel, still from x 1000 mm The Exterminating Angel, The Criterion Collection, 1962

David Manley Ambivalent Structures References

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SOURCE Photographic Review, Austerlitz. (A Source Film in Association with the Irish Times, August 16, 2013) Seinfeld, Season 3, (1991), “The Parking Garage”, Castel Rock Entertainment and SONY Pictures Television

DAVID MANLEY  Contents

DAVID MANLEY Contents