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.
Table of Contents:
Introduction: ‘To Whom It May Concern’ 1. 30 January 1972 2. Contexts And Origins Of A Contemporary Official War Art Scheme 3. Operational Uses Of War Art 4. The First Artistic Records Committee 5. Ken Howard: ‘The Imperial War Museum’s Official Recorder In Northern Ireland’ 1973–1978 6. Linda Kitson: ‘Official Artist Of The Falklands War,’ 1982 Final Conclusion: Future Deployment Index
About the Author :
Clare Carolin is a senior lecturer in Art and Public Engagement at King’s College London, UK. She was previously Exhibitions Curator at the Hayward Gallery, Senior Curator at Modern Art Oxford, Associate Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila, and Co-Director of the Curating Contemporary Art Department at the Royal College of Art, London.
Review :
‘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 Fernández López, Professor of Contemporary Art History and Curatorial Studies at the Autonomous University of Madrid, and author of Exposiciones y Comisariado: Relatos Cruzados
‘In this meticulously researched and critical book, Clare Carolin shows how the Imperial War Museum used its commissioning of artists to serve the ends of pro-war propaganda, counterinsurgency efforts, and the dark art of PSYOPS. Covering the conflicts in Northern Ireland and the Falklands, Carolin situates official war art against a wider analysis of more radical images of warfare, the artistic and institutional setting, and the dominant social and political forces of the time.’
Julian Stallabrass, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, The Courtauld Institute of Art, and author of Killing for Show: Photography, War and the Media and Vietnam and Iraq
‘Carolin tells the almost unknown story of the Artistic Records Committee, set up in the 1970s by the Imperial War Museum at the suggestion of the General Officer in Command of British forces Northern Ireland. Given that progeny, it is almost inevitable that she concludes that the ARC had a distinct propaganda role. The artist sent to paint about the troops in Northern Ireland, Ken Howard, may have seen himself simply as faithfully recording what he saw. But that very normalisation of conflict betrays the goal of the scheme – the production of a state- and army-friendly account of what Britain was up to in Ireland. Cromwell may once have asked for his portrait to be painted ‘warts and all’, but that was not the purpose of this art endeavour. This is a riveting, fascinating and valuable insight into state propaganda in times of conflict and although things have moved on exponentially because of social media, it spells out the dangers of the co-option of professional artists (and others) for the purposes of justifying repression, torture and death.’
Bill Rolston, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Ulster University, and author of Ireland, Colonialism and the Unfinished Revolution and Politics and Painting: Murals and Conflict in Northern Ireland
‘The importance of visual records of conflict for truth and justice can never be underestimated, both now and in the recent past. Carolin’s richly illustrated investigation of British involvement in the North of Ireland and the Falkland Islands/Malvinas offers crucial new insights into just how important those visual records are through art, photography and the museums that commission and collect them.’
Anthony Gardner, Professor of Contemporary Art History, Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, and author of Politically Unbecoming: Postsocialist Art against Democracy
'Carolin has shone a light in little visited places showing how British establishment voices influenced the presentation of Northern Ireland in British museums and elsewhere for decades.'
Mark Hennessy, The Irish Times
