The Deployment of Art by Carolin, Clare;

Rövid leírás:

This book explores the Artistic Records Committee (ARC) of the Imperial War Museum (IWM) as a bureaucratic mechanism that enabled the deployment of art as an instrument of war.

Hosszú leírás:

This book explores the Artistic Records Committee (ARC) of the Imperial War Museum (IWM) as a bureaucratic mechanism that enabled the deployment of art as an instrument of war.

The ARC was established in 1972 to commission artistic records of activities involving the British Armed Forces (BAF) deployed in the North of Ireland as part of Operation Banner. Through a close reading of artworks, archival research, and interviews with artists, former IWM staff, and a former British Army psychological operations (PSYOPs) expert, this book shows that the ARC was implicated in the ?propaganda war? that the British Government waged to counteract negative public perceptions of British military presence and activity in the North of Ireland after ?Bloody Sunday,? and later during Britain?s 1982 campaign to recapture the Falklands/Malvinas from Argentina (Operation Corporate). The two case studies are painter Ken Howard?s ARC commissions to record Operation Banner in 1973 and 1978 and illustrator Linda Kitson?s ARC commission to record the ?Falklands Campaign? in 1982. At a time when emergent conceptual and non-object-based art practices were increasingly concerned with exposure, concealment, and photographic evidence, the book demonstrates the potential operational significance of creating pictorial records and utilising art as a tool of warfare.

This volume will be of interest to researchers and scholars of art history, museum studies, art and politics, and military and intelligence studies, as well as those studying the recent history of the North of Ireland and the Falklands/Malvinas war.

?An authoritative and unsettling account of the deployment of art as an instrument of war.?

Ian Cobain, journalist and author of Anatomy of a Killing: Life and Death on a Divided Island and The History Thieves: Secrets, Lies and the Making of a Modern Nation

?An inventive interdisciplinary investigation that offers a rich, distinctive contribution to British art history and the study of culture and conflict in Northern Ireland. Innovative in its approach and argumentation, Clare Carolin offers a highly readable alternative history of British contemporary art, revealing multiple links between art and military institutions.?   

Declan Long, Head of Doctoral Studies, National College of Art and Design, Dublin, and author of Ghost Haunted Land: Contemporary Art and Post-Troubles Northern Ireland

?Hundreds of books have been written about The Troubles but Clare Carolin has produced something that is actually fresh and intriguing. Art and propaganda is a new research approach to The Troubles which delivers a truly fascinating and highly readable book.?

Stephen Dorril, author of MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations

?This book poses uncomfortable questions about the role that certain practices and official narratives developed by British museums and art education institutions played in shaping the militarized regime of visuality during the Cold War era when the entire planet was transformed into a space of potential insurgency to be surveilled and controlled. Through an in-depth analysis of the artistic, political, and military context in Britain between 1968 and 1982, this extensively researched book succeeds in presenting the UK as a representative case study that will allow the readers to understand the paradoxes, complicities and blind spots that supposedly neutral artistic institutions produced in relation to Britain?s wars in contested spaces of coloniality in Ireland and the Islas Malvinas. This study is highly recommended for historians interested in unveiling past power structures and an opportune read in times of growing political uncertainty and rising authoritarian control.?

Olga Fern