In the body of work My War, I aim to reveal the uncanny structure of the naturalization of war in Southern California. By photographing archives, landscapes of military ruins, and in turn poetic, activist, and radical responses to this latent militarism in the Los Angeles region, my work forms a geographic and indexical trace of imperialism rooted in the banality of the everyday. When combined together, it forms a conceptual map of specific instances of militarism and every-day civilian resistance from WWII through the early 2000’s in the Southland.
The central focus within this body is the photographic piece Datum: a series of sixteen photographs of bound periodicals located in the UC Irvine Langson public library. These photographs literally depict colorful, burlap bound journals and magazines of US defense industry data reports, counterintelligence statistical manuals, military oversight committee white papers, outsider watchdog group pamphlets, and armed forces handbooks. The simple, suggestive titles and systematic date structures of the bound periodicals form a sequence of dates that coalesce to form an example of Paul Virilio’s theory on “Pure War,” or the continuous and systematic act of war, engaging in actual violence as well as through organized efforts to control economies, architecture, cities, and most importantly the technology we use in our everyday lives. “Pure War” runs through and beyond generations, with origins based in the so-called “Greatest War,” WWII. This ontological “grandfather” of contemporary systems-warfare has set deeply in place the structure of organized militarism and contemporary systems of imperialism. Within these “Pure War” systems are most notably the American military-industrial complex, of which has a legacy of industry in Southern California.
Within the photographs of Datum are sequences of dates running through the early 70s to 2006, signifying a time line of war during eras of supposed peace as well as agreed periods of conflict. Presented in a linear sequence organized by form, color, and play on words rolling off the tongue through associate reads between images, these books render a surprising sequential narrative of war throughout my own lifetime. The photographs of books on shelves hung in the gallery in a linear or grid presentation not only emphasize the indexical structure of the library but also mark the walls of the gallery with systematic records of war.
As I investigated this public archive of war within my own lifetime, I kept having free-associative responses to certain words or images I found in these texts. The words that came up were mimetic responses from memorized song lyrics I learned as a youth. As a teen during the Reagan/Bush years (and a daughter supported by the good business of the Defense Industry in Southern California), the Cold War had a huge impact on my coming into being as an artist. Relocating in 1984 from Boulder, Colorado to Palos Verdes, California at the age of thirteen and finding myself stuck in the weirdly unsophisticated landscape of the South Bay of Los Angeles, I sought escape like many an awkward teenager through music. This music, specifically located within the hardcore punk scene of the suburban region south of Los Angeles, took me on an adventure that lead me directly to making art. Oddly enough I found it again making an impact on how I interpreted the signs of the linguistic systems rooted in these periodicals.
This personal, mimetically driven linguistic response is examined in a very dry and strategic look at my own archive of 80s punk rock. This music acted both as political resistance to the local South Bay military-industrial complex and as an aesthetic to counter the dominant conservative culture. This genre of music is the most crucial living example of anti-aesthetics working both outside and within culture, activated because of its opposition to conservative culture and aesthetic value systems. While having its own structure of aesthetics (ugly, noisy, disjointed, disharmonious, etc.), it works best when the system at large pushes against it. For example, when “grunge” became popular in the early 90s through the spread of early methods of viral marketing in youth culture, the strength of the effect of punk rock as a form of resistance to conservative culture weakened. It is noteworthy to mention that soon after the popularity of “grunge,” conservative elements of culture subsequently weakened due to the mainstreaming of punk culture and its acceptance into popular culture, thus by the mid-nineties allowing for differences within the hegemonic political cultural structure.
In my photographs of select album covers by the early 80s Los Angeles punk bands The Minutemen and Black Flag, I am giving the viewer historic disruptions in a landscape of conservative culture--a direct descendent of the military-industrial complex in Southern California. In these photographs, social criticisms are made larger than life through an inversion of scale. The Minutemen, a local activist punk band, founded their name as response to the Minutemen militia of colonial times and in part to sarcastically lampoon a right-wing reactionary group of the 1960s which has since gained traction in the George W. Bush administration. This reclamation of historical terms by the punk group The Minutemen causes disruption in the conservative hegemony by dislocating the secondary source—the Minutemen the anti-immigration group--and reclaiming it as a liberal sign, thus confusing the authentic (the colonial Minutemen) for multiple simulations.
Black Flag, however, embraced the alienation imposed upon the punk movement by Reagan-economics and Moral Majority conservatism by responding through hostility and musical anti-aesthetics. Literally taking their name from the household insecticide spray, Black Flag took on the physical, bodily response to a hostile political climate as their aesthetic in musical form and lyrical content. The specific records pictured in this series also reference locations within the South Bay of Los Angeles that were home to both defense industry businesses and micro counter-culture movements in the 60s, 70s and 80s.
Continuing with this investigation into site specificity in regards to ideologic forms of resistance to militarism in the South Land, there are two deep black stains on the achievement records for my alma mater, Palos Verdes High School. Palos Verdes is an upper-middle class to upper class suburban community situated on the coast between Redondo Beach and San Pedro. Known as “The Hill” for both topological and economic reasons, Palos Verdes (or “PV”) is at its core strictly conservative. In the mid to late 1970s, Palos Verdans Christopher John Boyce and Andrew Daulton Lee, a.k.a. “the Falcon and the Snowman,” severely damaged the CIA and the local defense industry through repeated acts of espionage. Boyce, the “good son” of a McDonnell-Douglas security officer, was a young drifter who landed a desk job at the defense subcontractor TRW in Redondo Beach. Lee was a wealthy, drug dealing drop out, selling pot, cocaine, and heroin to local youth in Palos Verdes and Redondo Beach. Together they conspired to sell secrets from the Black Vault, an archive of encryption and communications within TRW, to the KGB. Their actions were founded on the schizophrenic differences between political, ideological, and capitalist means to finance an illegal drug business. This account was told by NY Times author Robert Lindsey in his 1977 book, “The Falcon and the Snowman: a true story of friendship and espionage.” Lindsey documented the capture of Boyce and Daulton in the winter of 1977 and the subsequent trials against them, later compiled into a non-fiction book so juicy in pulp presentation that it was, in turn, written into a screenplay. In 1985, the same year that Mikhail Gorbachev was appointed the General Secretary of the USSR, this screenplay was made into a popular motion picture featuring 80’s teen heartthrobs Timothy Hutton and Sean Penn.
My serial photographic piece is a documentation of the pictorial narrative within a worn paperback copy of the book. The serial format of the work follows the linear narration of the story to unfold in photographs. In these photographs, my hands are seen holding the book open to the viewer, revealing the indirectness of the Cold War and a single mutinous act against it. This was a “war without bodies,” a systems war for weapons technology supremacy. My hands are visible with the pictorial spreads open to the viewer, evidence of what would otherwise have been a Tom Clancy novel of thrilling fiction. The six sequential images depict the most minimal amount of narrative information through photographs and captions, allowing the viewer/reader to compose a timeline of espionage without reason. What is missing in this “archive” is the schism between patriotic American values and political ideology that Christopher Boyce developed during his short tenure at TRW and Daulton Lee’s capitalistic drive for wealth and fame.
Photographic captions limit the history of their actions to one-liners of espionage. They do not give evidence of Boyce’s employment at TRW as having literally been limited to being locked in a communications vault where he was left to his own devices. The vault was an archive of encryption cards and communications data between the CIA, TRW, and other outposts. Out of what was most likely sheer boredom, Boyce began reading the encoded teletype messages from the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia to various outposts throughout the world, discovering covert acts of espionage and manipulation of public trust on behalf of the United States. After discovering that the CIA was misleading the Australian government, a friendly ally to the United States, and in turn spying upon the political advances of the Australian Labour party who was critical of the United States outposts in the rural outback, Christopher Boyce became ideologically torn. This evidence combined with working for a company that was building photoreconnaissance and artillery satellites for the United States put Boyce at odds with his patriotic beliefs in the democratic processes of his country. He was angry over the deception of Watergate and the atrocities in Vietnam. With an IQ of over 170, Boyce set about to manipulate his profit driven friend Daulton Lee into a capitalistic frenzy of selling state secrets to the Soviet Union to radically strike back at a system he believed was inauthentic to the concept of a true democracy. The judge who oversaw Christopher Boyce’s trial was quoted as stating the following:
“Even if the Court accepted as true the expressed motivation by this defendant that he was setting out to correct evil security practices by the government, the word needs to go forward that you just don’t do that. In the role he played, the position he occupied, it was none of his business to attempt unilaterally and through criminal acts to revamp a system he didn’t like, or which he disapproved, or of which he was critical.”
In other words, a person of the everyday world (the civilian world) should not ever take it upon themselves to engage the system of “Pure War.”
My photographs appear as “photographs of photographs” and are a sequential frame-within-a-frame account of a significant failure of the proper adhesion to systems of class, power, and patriotic ideology. Regardless of the intent for committing espionage and ultimately treason, the photographic narrative within the non-fiction account relays to the viewer the paradox of the photograph. Within this pictorial narrative are images of the Black Vault (and the chair that Boyce sat in) as well as the apparatus used to bring the Central Intelligence to its knees: a tiny Minox-B camera.
This Minox-B camera--or one just like it--was used by Boyce and Daulton to photograph classified documents, including “Pyramider” photoreconnaissance satellite specification documents, and relating photo surveillance communication encryption cards. Satellites and other modes of surveillance are typically highly classified, and the leaking of this knowledge by American citizens to members of the KGB dramatically altered the Space Defense Initiative (SDI or “Star Wars”) development and indirectly altered the United States surveillance of the Soviet Union from base stations in Iran. Once the student uprising in Iran removed the Shah and any American support, the United States lost a Middle East location to spy on the Soviet Union and Eastern Block.
Moving forward from 1977 to 2008, let’s consider the current war in Iraq. Photo surveillance satellites, or “spy satellites,” are earth orbiting cameras which photograph the surface of the earth, typically for clues of nuclear proliferation and other weapons of mass destruction. These satellites record an indexical matrix of photographic evidence, which is beamed down to remote outpost stations throughout the world through encrypted television broadcasting frequencies or other wireless means. What I find so uncanny in this traitorous event is the paradox of the photographic archive. Daulton Lee and Chris Boyce used a tiny, James Bond-like Minox-B “spy camera” purchased from a local jewelry shop on “The Hill” to make photographic copies of classified documents about undisclosed government photoreconnaissance abroad. The paradox in this example occurs through the compromise of the photograph in its dual usage as both a copy and an authentic record, suggesting that the realism within photography is neither true nor false.
The second component of this paradox is through the reproduction of photographs displayed as evidence in the “non-fiction” book about this espionage event. Snapshots of Boyce and Lee are placed within proximity of photographs taken by TRW of the Black Vault, as well as photographs of Boyce and Lee as tourists in Mexico where they met with KGB agents for the trafficking of state secrets. I find it interesting to note that photographs of the ultra secret Pyramider spy satellite project found in Lee’s possession when he was arrested in Mexico at the Soviet embassy were used against him as evidence for treason, yet the CIA refused to acknowledge any covert photoreconnaissance operations and receiving outposts abroad until well after Christopher Boyce’s trial, whereupon he revealed to a crowded courtroom filled with reporters that he engaged in mutinous rebellion against the United States because of the CIA’s conspiring against the Australian Labor Party. It was only after the fall of the Shah of Iran that Jimmy Carter came forward and acknowledged that the United States was using photoreconnaissance satellites with receiving outpost stations abroad.
The proximity between Palos Verdes and San Pedro is close, and the historic relations between these two cities is important. Palos Verdes and San Pedro were ranchos in the middle of the 19th century, their grassy coastal areas perfect for farming and cattle ranching. As the port of Los Angeles in San Pedro was being developed by General Otis, the land of Palos Verdes was being developed into upperclass estates for the wealthy anglos drawn to the sunshine and golden life of LA. Split over time into three micro-cities, Palos Verdes was divided into Rancho Palos Verdes to the southwest (neighboring San Pedro), Rolling Hills in the center (facing north towards the city), and Palos Verdes Estates facing northwest (towards the Santa Monica bay). As is the case with most port towns, San Pedro became the pawn for control over the western coastal defenses and commercial flow into and out of Los Angeles. Over time, the region evolved, and as multiple wars raged on overseas, San Pedro folded into the defense structure of the Army, Navy, and Coast Guard, while most of Palos Verdes remained in the upper-middle class to wealthy private sector.
San Pedro and parts of Palos Verdes have hosted the Army since the Civil War. With the development of WWI, coastal defense became a priority for the port of Los Angeles and its surrounding environment. Air-defense batteries and bunkers were built into hillsides of the southwest-facing cliffs and beaches of the area with intent to defend Los Angeles from air or sea attack. During the early 1930s, the US Army experimented with the notion of using surplus sixteen-inch naval guns for coastal defense. Many prototype batteries were made to house these large artilleries in both the United States and Panama. A standardized design was made after these prototypes to ensure the Army the capability of building batteries in any location regardless of terrain. After the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese, two monolithic battery structures and respective earthworks were permanently built into the Southern California coastal region. Sadly, the Army’s coastal defense domain was taken from Japanese-American farmers and beach front hoteliers, all of whom were sent to Manzanar and other American concentration camps.
Almost seventy years later, this large-gun battery structure still occupies the hillsides of San Pedro. Part of the Fort MacArthur complex, the largest WWI and WWII fortress in Los Angeles, these batteries are presently maintained by the museum staff at “Fort Mac” and are under the oversight of the City of Los Angeles. The immense site occupies the upper area of the White Point Nature Preserve, an open space public park. These batteries exist as forgotten traces of a total war, and serve as visual signifiers for the system of “Pure War.” At the base of the site, one can also see the remains of Nike Ajax/Hercules launch site number 43, part of the “ring of supersonic steel”—sixteen air defense Nike missile sites which fortified Los Angeles during the Cold War. At the White Point Nature Preserve, one can walk their dog, play ball, or just take in the fresh sea air, while strolling on grounds of defense.
The photograph Battery is an analog construction of the Paul D. Bunker battery 127. The view was taken from within the battery itself, looking out to the sea – to foreign territories, the world at large. The ambient lighting and color within the photograph are the result of a long exposure taken after sunset, exposing the void of war through the implication of destruction.
Lastly, in this body of work I have included a short super-8 film which at this time has no definitive title. Set on a loop, the two-minute black-and-white film runs still and panned footage of the seemingly deserted housing on the former George Air Force Base in Victorville, California. Images of late mid-century houses and neighborhoods in ruin visualize the tropic “failure of modernism,” but what becomes critically visible in the wreckage of these otherwise tidy designs are the remnants of rifle shells scattered on a dusty linoleum floor. The repeated play of images suggests that this site is not dead, but rather in transition. The former base only looks abandoned, but is actively used by the Army, Government Security organizations, and DARPA for testing simulated urban warfare.
The presence of these ruins from varied but continuing eras of warfare, are clearly visible to the residents of Victorville and sit exposed in plain sight. Architectural elements such as bunkers, fire roads, asphalt pads, officer housing developments, and earthen berms that look like they have long ago been abandoned by the Army and Air Force, have been folded into the space of civilian and military life, appearing as signifiers for past wars, thus becoming part of the “natural” landscape. These ruins, like those at Whites Point in San Pedro, come to signify the enforcement of military occupation in public space through their presence, prompting locals and tourists alike to accept their geometries as part of social space. My belief is that this naturalization of “Pure War” through seemingly abandoned architecture, earthworks and technology is a purposeful act of visually communicating the language of American imperialism, thus working as agitprop signs which signify the concept of “this land is our land” at any given time in our history.
Gabie Strong, May 2008
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