Hanna Rose Shell examines the logic of camouflage since the end of the XIXe century to the present day. Man or animal, chameleon or soldier, it is about seeing without being seen, hiding your body in a changing environment – learning to become invisible.
When the philosopher Pierre Zaoui wrote about the art of disappearing, he praised discretion as a fulfilling existential experience, a ceasing to appear allowing one to abdicate “ any desire for power and to oppose our society characterized by a “ frantic struggle for recognition and visibility » », anonymity and invisibility.
By turns philosophical, poetic and political, his essay reflected on a furtive and modest self-effacement admitting the advent of the other ; a positive, necessary and committed disappearance, the antipodes of what Hanna Rose Shell analyzes in her unusual Neither seen nor known. Camouflage in view of the lens. Teacher at MITthis deals with an invisibility entirely dedicated to the survival (of the animal or the soldier) and the annihilation of the other (the predator or the enemy) ; an invisibility otherwise conditioned and subject to techniques of photo-cinematic observation and surveillance.
Where Zaoui evoked a disposition to be, an availability implying withdrawal, porosity and attention to others ; where he advocated receptivity, dialogue, a generous exchange with his environment, Shell examines the “ logic » and the “ awareness of camouflage “, this “ form of cultivated subjectivity » (p. 17) which involves a strategy of disappearance that is both defensive and offensive: a camouflage which requires increased scrutiny and vigilance, and which aspires to maximum invisibility.
Retracing the history of camouflage based on the material and image forms that it has left us, Shell explores the art of disappearing to highlight the metamorphosis of fields of perception since the end of the XIXe century to the present day. Centering her reflection on the ever more assertive affirmation of an ingenious chameleonic self, she explores three varieties of camouflage at the crossroads of art, science and military strategy.
Becoming a chameleon
A paragon of strategic invisibility, gifted with instantaneous visual evanescence, the chameleon vanishes into nature. Through its protean faculties, it is the animal-type of becoming, the model of a fascinating immediate metamorphosis in movement towards which the static, serial and dynamic camouflages exposed by Neither seen nor known.
Support point of the static camouflage, the splendid “ still life paintings ” (p. 51) by Abbott Thayer (1849-1921) capture the crucial moments of protective coloring or “ homochromy » animal – ability of certain animals to temporarily or permanently harmonize their color with that of the surrounding environment. Through taxidermy and photographic capture, this pioneer in the search for human mimicry of natural forms through visual resemblance develops naturalized scenes in order to learn how to become an invisible animal.
With the development and institutionalization in 1914 of this “ ultimate way to see » that is aerial photography, camouflage tactics become dynamic to become serial. We produce repeated images inheriting research in chronophotography, camouflage nets, “ magic sails » (p. 77) thrown onto the landscape to fool interpreters of aerial photography, as well as observatory trees which allow one to see without being seen. The art of simulated concealment then integrates the operation of photographic recognition to cast doubt on appearances and disrupt, or even prevent, the reading of the visual field.
Finally, it is through cinema that camouflage becomes dynamic. Through the film work of Len Lye (1901-1980), Hanna Shell shows how combat camouflage and photo-cinematic surveillance technologies mix to develop an art of immersion that relies on the manipulation of media environment serving self-effacement. This cinema epidermal » (p. 144), which abolishes the distinction between the filmed world and the natural world, no longer aims to camouflage the environment but the human being, who aspires to ever more invisibility.
Thus, from 1894, when Thayer set up his workshop-laboratory, to the most contemporary experiments, including the creation of the American Camouflage Society (1916), the standardization of military camouflage (1918) and didactic or training films. propaganda at the turn of the Second World War, Shell reveals this tenacious and never denied fantasy of an invisible man making his skin a screen onto which his environment is projected – a human aspiration to acquire a chameleonic envelope.
Artist-inventors
How to disappear in the picture ? This is the question for those who wish to survive in a hostile environment. Questioning the ontological foundations of photo-cinematography, Shell demonstrates that research into strategic concealment has its roots in artistic practices that combine artisanal DIY, scientific ingenuity and practical inventiveness.
A painter by training, Thayer created photomontages, feather paintings, stencils and photographic patchworks, but he also invented textile patterns and developed sketches for camouflage clothing inspired by his works which, in 1915, found no buyers, nor with the War Office British, nor with the American government. Lieutenant-Colonel Solomon J. Solomon (1860-1927), an academic painter who pioneered war camouflage techniques, invented the observatory tree in 1916, an organic construction which merged military strategy and plastic elaboration.
Between 1917 and 1919, the Special Works School (“ Special Works » is the code name given to camouflage by the English during the Great War) from London brought together a motley team of engineers, photographers, painters, sculptors, decorators and seamstresses to develop camouflage techniques. And Len Lye, an atypical documentarian, an avant-garde animation filmmaker who was trained at the London Film Society at the turn of the 1930s, signs Kill or Be Killed in 1943, propaganda film used in military training programs.
Through her fluid and skillfully translated argument, Hanna Rose Shell weaves together influences and disciplines. Its sensitive chapters which reject jargon immerse us in the mechanisms of strategic dissimulation which require adaptation and creativity. Throughout its historical progression, it highlights the ever more sophisticated development of a spectatorial logic specific to camouflage which questions our way of looking at the world and teaches us how to see.
The touch of the gaze
Shell first shows that the representation of camouflage is each time linked to a certain pedagogy. Thayer used his photos, stencils and paintings for didactic purposes, whether in participatory exhibitions, museum installations or in Concealing Coloring in the Animal Kingdom (1909), an innovative work that includes interactive illustrations. The image therefore becomes the instrument of visual camouflage training which extends beyond the two world conflicts. Photo-cinematography is used for military training: it involves learning to see without being seen, to hide one’s moving body in a changing environment.
Shell highlights a whole visual logic and aesthetic of camouflage that we see widespread today in certain action films (Predator by J. McTiernan), video games including first-person shooters (FPS), such Call of Duty Or Battlefield which sometimes serve as combat simulators for training troops of theUS Army, and Japanese experiments with photo-reflective optical-electronic camouflage systems. Underlining the crucial influence of technical innovations on these developments, it highlights “ mental persistence of images » which conditions our ways of seeing.
It seems important to emphasize that, if Hanna Shell finely analyzes camouflage images like “ watch machine » (War and cinemap. iv.) conditioning our hypermedia surveillance societies, it nevertheless emerges that photo-cinematography determines another type of gaze, a sensitive and epidermal gaze. To contemplate Peacock in the Wood (1909) by Thayer, the fascinating patterns of camouflage nets woven by little hands in 14-18, and Color Box (1935) or Rainbow Dance (1936) by Lye, another vision experience is offered to us. A visual experience which sees the advent of a haptic gaze, whose impressionistic touch blends into the visible until it embraces it.