In 2012, the New Greenham Arts gallery (since then partly defunct and partly assimilated into Corn Exchange Newbury) hosted an exhibition exploring the organisation's history and its location in the de-commissioned American nuclear airbase at Greenham Common. From works by sixteen participating artists, two winning pieces were selected: Andrea Hasler’s Irreducible Complexity and Pam Hardman’s Airfield. The winning artists were offered a joint exhibition at New Greenham Arts, Embrace the Base, from 30 January to 11 April 2014. Pam Hardman, who still lives and works in Newbury, has since also been given a one-person show in the upstairs gallery of the Control Tower (You Can't Kill the Spirit, July-Sept 2019).
Pamela Hardman, 'You say this land is out of bounds', no date, http://www.pamelahardman.com/prints.html. The song is identified as one of (RaisedVoices.org.uk) or for (Danish Peace Academy) the Molesworth peace camp but in either case it would have been sung at Greenham too. There is also a version of the song for Palestine.
Pamela Hardman, Embrace the Base III, no date, http://www.pamelahardman.com/prints.html, in reference to the eponymous action, 12 December 1982.
Pamela Hardman, You Can't Kill the Spirit, no date, http://www.pamelahardman.com/prints.html. The title references the eponymous 1975 song by Naomi Littlebear Morena, used in feminist activisms across the world for over forty years and made famous at Greenham.
Hasler and Hardman took very different approaches to the history of the airbase and the peace camp, reflecting their distinct aesthetics. While Hardman, who regularly works with printmaking and is interested in archaeology, uses blind embossing to suggest, I think, the persistent if imperceptible traces of the impact of past events on the landscape and its inhabitants, Hasler is more concerned with the extremes of beauty and ugliness, aspiration and its grisly failures, gendered embodiment and luxury commodity fetishism. Hardman's white-on-white reliefs remind me of Mary Kelly's fragile typescript on compressed lint from the dryer filter, indexically documenting domestic maintenance labour and alluding to the potential for productive alliances between feminism, materiality, and new materialisms, as explored and exploited in the work of Paula Chambers. By so often evoking songs, remembered (perhaps, by some) but inevitably absent in the visual work, Hardman treads a fine line between haunting and survival that strikes me as profoundly Warburgian (something to revisit and work through later). A man and his dog faintly appear in a heathland clearing: the title reads 'Security Guard, Greenham', which situates the scene in the recent past but also projects it into the present and future, when the guard's ghost might be replaced by a dog walker on the reclaimed commons. (Note to self: research current security arrangements on the common.)
Pamela Hardman, Security Guard, Greenham, no date, http://www.pamelahardman.com/prints.html
'How to depict the emotional body is the red thread in my work', states Andrea Hasler, whose contribution to the joint exhibition Embrace the Base sought to create equivalences and awaken resonances between the bodies of the protesters and their temporary dwellings on the peace camp, specifically their tents (to 'humanise' the tents, as she writes in her statement, which I have tried to unpack here). Hasler commemorates the peace camp by showing us how she imagined the aftermath of the nuclear disaster that the Greenham women sought to avert.
Andrea Hasler photographed among her sculptures for the joint exhibition (with Pamela Hardman) Embrace the Base, January 2014. Photograph released to press by Corn Exchange Newbury and New Greenham Arts.
Andrea Hasler, The Mother Tent [also referred to as 'The Breast Tent' in the 2nd of the 'making of' videos, http://www.andreahasler.com/andrea-hasler/]. https://www.theverge.com/2014/2/18/5421716/andrea-hasler-embrace-the-base-greenham-common-nuclear-protest
Andrea Hasler, Irreducible Complexity/Dual Act (mother and child), 2014.
Hasler is interviewed by Mark Segal, curator of the Embrace the Base exhibition in a series of three videos, where she reveals that her 'meat tent', as well as speaking to the resonances between bodies and dwellings, and evoking protest sites and festivals alike, is also a deliberate reference to Tracey Emin's Everyone I Have Ever Slept With (aka The Tent), which was destroyed in a warehouse fire in 2004, i.e. then ten years earlier. Hasler's tent becomes flesh and is specifically identified as a maternal body transformed by 'the worst case scenario'. In the second of the three videos, Hasler is shown placing a nipple-capstone on top of her 'breast tent', while in the third its opening is abjectly likened to a womb spilling out. The womb is also where 'fear sits', Hasler notes. The equivalency between bodies and -- not dwellings but -- artworks is both entertained and resisted by Tracey Emin in the aftermath of the Momart fire that destroyed hers and many other iconic yBa pieces. Emin effusively expressed her hurt and anger at the shameless Schadenfreude of both tabloid media and artworld insiders alike (including in an appearance on Breakfast with Frost), while also trying to keep things in perspective:
"It's happened - the British art disaster [sic] - and it's in the papers between this war, with people being bombed at their wedding, and 500 people being washed away in flash floods in the Dominican Republic. So it's very difficult as an artist to say that I'm very upset - I'm going to cry because my art has been burned."
In Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence (Columbia UP, 2011), Adriana Cavarero teases out the horrific visuality of death as the result of bombing: 'What is at stake is not the end of a human life but the human condition itself, as incarnated in the singularity of vulnerable bodies.' (p. 8) In this sense terror and horror are interrelated but distinct: the former is etymologically linked to trembling and urgent flight, the latter to feeling frozen and paralysed, bristling with shock but unable to act. Severed limbs, minced flesh, the body undone and rendered unrecognisable and indistinguishable from the flesh of others through the violence of its killing, make up the visual and material lexicon of horrorism.
Do Hasler's materialisations of the horrors that the peace camp fought to avert exemplify 'pre-emptive mourning', the aesthetic strategy of lending form to the worst case scenario in order to inspire, motivate, and sustain the work of activism that protests and protects against it? If horrorist objects transfix the contemplating (i.e. looking/thinking) subject as Cavarero argues, I am not so sure that they can.
Acknowledgements
With thanks to Daniel Whateley, Programming and Events Co-Ordinator at Corn Exchange, Newbury, for sharing useful information on the New Greenham Arts Commissions.
Corrective Postscript
Hardman's works discussed here aren't necessarily those exhibited alongside Hasler's but possibly made at a later date, to be researched and confirmed.
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