The Raising of the Exocet: The use of heritage charm to sanitise warfare and the beginnings of postmodern war representation in the Malvinas/Falklands conflict.

[Paper given at 9th Annual International Conference on Communication and Mass Media, Athens Institute for Education and Research, 16-19 May, 2011, Athens, Greece.]

John Yeadon’s (1982) painting The Raising of the Exocet depicts a missile being raised up from the South Atlantic on chains.  The weapon is bleak, huge and malevolent, suggestive of a phallus or a turd, dripping blood or rust or excrement into the turbulent waters.  On it is painted a grinning face.  Behind and all around are the beak grey seas and wintery skies that witnessed the destruction of the Argentinean battleship The General Belgrano and the British destroyers HMS Sheffield and HMS Coventry in the war over possession of the small group of South American islands known to the British as the Falklands and to the Argentines as the Malvinas. Below these stark and chill waters must lie the bodies of young soldiers and sailors of both countries sacrificed in this bizarre, unnecessary and irrational war.  On the horizon we see smoke and the disputed territory (Captioned “Falklands Malvinas”).  The obscene object, the weapon of destruction that dominates the picture speaks of the futility and the brutality of armed confrontation. The conflict took place in the spring of 1982 and caused the deaths of 907 combatants and the serious injury and mutilation of many more. The islands had long been under British control but claimed by Argentina and were occupied by that country in April of that year. It had widely been assumed that Britain would not be prepared to undertake the recapture of the territory, which was perceived to have little economic value.  It was also doubted whether Britain had either the military capacity or the martial will to undertake such a mission.  The resulting military triumph was used politically by the conservative government of Britain under Margaret Thatcher and is widely credited as the foundation on which she built her successful ten year domination of UK politics.

One unexpected beneficiary of the war was the French company Nord Aviation who manufactured the Exocet missile.  It was this weapon, deployed with devastating effectiveness by the Argentinean air force, that caused so much damage to the British fleet and accounted for a significant proportion of the total killed.  The Exocet became a metaphor for sudden and spectacular destructiveness.  Over the next few years, knock down political arguments, decisive footballing goals, catastrophic financial deficits would all be called “Exocets”.  The weapon became an icon of draconian intervention. The painting is in some ways an acknowledgement of this new trope of demotic English.

Yeadon has explained that the picture was inspired by the raising of the Tudor battleship Mary Rose in the same year.  This ship was the pride of the fleet of Henry VIII, the king who has a fair claim to be the creator of both the modern English nation and the Royal Navy.  It sank on its maiden voyage and lay on the seabed for four and a half centuries until an expedition to raise it and put it on display as a tourist attraction was successfully carried out in the Autumn of ’82 (Mary Rose, 2011). Whereas warfare in the Malvinas was a crude and bloody affair, the ship that was raised from the Solent was portrayed as a romantic feat of renaissance design and engineering, an object of beauty.  In her own time she was straightforwardly one of the most advanced killing machines so far devised, an engine of cruelty and destruction as much as any modern warship, or indeed as an exocet missile.

The visual rhetoric of the military is dominated by the weaponry of a previous age.  Army badges depict swords, lances, cavalry, medieval armour.  It is comparatively rare, even in the most modern armed forces, for the heraldry to be as up to date as the equipment the troops actually use.

As we visit ancient castles and regimental museums we are shown displays of weaponry that take on, in our modern eyes, a sense of charm.  Suits of armour, racks of pikes and halberds, brightly coloured uniforms, old brass cannonry appear to us not as the brutal and brutalising objects they were but almost as works of art or as delightful antiques.  What was once the last word in terrifying hardware has become heritage.

Just as the visual rhetoric of heritage is used to give an ersatz charm and grace to the business of organised human killing in military history and the iconography of armed forces, so the rhetoric of warfare, concentrating on gallantry, heroism and derring-do and ignoring the cold brutality of actual combat is used to sanitise the representation of war in the media, to render it more acceptable to the audience.  The art galleries of the world bear witness to this.  While there are examples of artists, like Goya, who seek to show the horror of war, there are many more who paint heroic and chivalrous lies about human carnage.  This was equally true of media representations of conflict from the early newspaper reporting of the Napoleonic wars through to the Second World War.  For a brief moment in the 1960’s it seemed that new technology might have undermined this tendency for representation to be co-opted onto the side of power.

Direct television reporting of the horrors of the Vietnam war had undermined the ability of the US government to control depictions of the war and some people had thought that this made the fighting of a war in the age of mass media increasingly problematic.  New media technologies are often perceived at first as liberatory.  In the early days of the Worldwide Web, it was common to see wild and extravagant claims for its potential to subvert power and control of information and to create a new international direct democracy mediated through cyberspace.  In the 1960’s television was the technology that would set free the truth from the control of the Captains and the Kings.  Perhaps it would now be impossible for a state to use war as a means of policy when the reality of conflict could so easily be placed in front of the eyes of the people.

But the management of news in the Falklands war achieved a level of control that allowed government to manipulate public opinion effectively.  From this follow directly the practices of war reporting (particularly the concept of embedding) in use today in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Raising of the Exocet was exhibited in Yeadon’s controversial 1984 exhibition, Dirty Tricks (See Yeadon 2011).  In the two years between the war and this exhibition, the rightwing administration of Margaret Thatcher had become increasingly strident and confident.  The style and content of what was becoming known as Thatcherism – populist, aggressively free market, economically permissive yet socially reactionary – was built on the foundation of military victory in the South Atlantic.  Radically rightwing economic and political policies – privatisation of utilities, suppression of trade union rights – that had been pioneered in South America – in Pinochet’s Chile – were now being applied in the heartlands of world capitalism, in Britain and, under Ronald Reagan in the USA.  Dirty Tricks was in part the response of a committed artist of the left to this profoundly reactionary situation.

I interviewed Yeadon in January 2011 about the picture.  He pointed out the place of sea painting in British art and specifically cited Turner’s Fighting Temeraire as an influence.   Another key connection is the British royal family.  The Prince of Wales, Prince Charles was one of the patrons of the raising and restoration of the Mary Rose.  His younger brother, Prince Andrew was a helicopter pilot in the Royal Navy who saw active service in the Falklands campaign.  The supreme icon of the British establishment, the House of Windsor, made the link between the sanitisation of war through heritage imagery and the reality of war fought with terrifying firepower in the icy seas off the coast of Argentina.

For Yeadon, Dirty Tricks was also about a return to figurative painting.  His public work had begun with abstract mandala paintings, an attempt, perhaps to find a transcultural, universal human art.  He had gone on to produce more committed, radical agit-prop work such as the anti fascist banners (See Yeadon 2011). In mainstream British painting, the 1960s were the high point of pure abstraction, the time of the “hard edge” style;  modernist and optimistic.  To a younger generation of artists like Yeadon, contemporary politics and events, particularly the Vietnam war, made this concern with pure form seem out of touch and irrelevant. To become a figurative painter, to use art to talk about the real, was a political statement in itself.

Alexander Moffat (1991) summed it up: “Yeadon was one of those artists responsible for the re-introduction of figurative imagery – a new discordant and overtly expressive imagery, capable of representing the ideas of our time. The new painting embraced literature, history and story-telling as the exclusive codes of Late Modernism (which disallowed such things) were challenged by a new generation of artists.  Although the extravagant promotion and huge market success of New Painting turned it quickly into an international fashion and encouraged work which was little more than  feeble pastiche, it was now possible to conceive of painting pictures as a radical and critical activity.  John Yeadon had long since held this view and indeed differed from most of his contemporaries in that his subject matter concerned the realities of the modern world. The nostalgic and romantic themes, and the modish eclecticism which came to typify so-called Post-Modernism were anathema to Yeadon and his large paintings in the early Eighties engaged openly in a critical commentary on ‘late capitalist society’.”

Thus Dirty Tricks and in particular The Raising of the Exocet, constitute a challenge to the tendency in contemporary representation to offer stylised or idealised images instead of the truth about their subjects. Yeadon’s work is a challenge to the bland formalism of the hard edge school and exemplifies a truth-based, narrative art style that was quickly recuperated by the international gallery system into the meaning-free pastiche of postmodernity.  It stands as a “moment of truth”.

The falsification of war implicitly criticised by this painting is mirrored by that in journalism that focuses on stories of heroism and glory to the exclusion of the horror and pity of war.  I have argued elsewhere (Barton, 2010) that this is largely a function of the control now exercised by military forces over the journalists reporting their wars.

The Falklands war stands also as a pivotal moment in the mediatised representation of war.  If Vietnam was the war where the media escaped state control, the South Atlantic campaign provided laboratory conditions for its recapture.  The only way for journalists to cover the war was to be taken there by the military.  The only way to send back reports was by the military’s communication channels.  British journalists, whether of the openly patriotic tabloid press or of the supposedly objective BBC, were thus creatures of the armed forces.  Although at the time the term “embedding” was not used, the practice was completely established.  In later conflicts this would become the standard practice for war correspondents.  The inevitable damage to objectivity and independence resulting from this are catalogued in a number of recent critical studies, notably that of Keeble and Mair (2010). As Tim Luckhurst (1991) asks within that context:

“Does the pulsating glamour and dazzling martial imagery of much embedded reporting squeeze out of news coverage reporting that does not depict combat?”

In the end, there is a powerful responsibility on all who represent war to others, whether through art, journalism or popular culture, to beware of sanitising the hard truth through distancing forms or styles.  The presentation of the present as uncontextualised bravery is of a piece with the presentation of the past as charming and romantic.  In our interview, Yeadon drew a parallel to the windmills in Dutch landscapes – we see them as picturesque and antique, when to those who built and operated them they were simply machines.  Similarly with the depiction of old weapons, guns, pikes, etc, we say “How marvellous – look at the craftsmanship, the woodwork!”  There is some kind of huge lie or contradiction entailed in this.  Perhaps, in the end, that collapse into contradiction is the final critique of such discourse.  As Yeadon said, “You can’t raise an Exocet.  It’s absurd.”

Will Barton, 2011

[Then] Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication, Coventry School of Art and Design, Coventry University

 

References

Barton, Will (2010) ” ‘You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive’; Sherlock Holmes and the Wooton Bassett Jihad” in Keeble, Richard Lance & Mair, John (Eds) (2010) Afghanistan, War and Media: Deadlines and Frontlines; Abramis Academic; Leicester

Keeble, Richard Lance & Mair, John (Eds) (2010) ) Afghanistan, War and Media: Deadlines and Frontlines; Abramis Academic; Leicester

Luckhurst, Tim (1991) “Compromising the First draft” in Keeble, Richard Lance & Mair, John (Eds) (2010) Afghanistan, War and Media: Deadlines and Frontlines; Abramis Academic; Leicester

Mary Rose (Accessed 2011) Website: http://www.maryrose.org/

Moffat, Alexander (1991) “It’s a joke” in Yeadon, John (1991) The Travails of Blind Bifford Jelly; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham.  (Exhibition catalogue)

Yeadon, John (1982) The Raising of the Exocet 140cm x 191cm acrylic on Canvas; in the Collection of Will and Sheila Barton, Bath, UK.