‘Why is the Second World War taken as a break? The fact is, in Europe, the post-war period has greatly increased the situations that we longer know how to react to, in spaces which we no longer know how to describe. These were “any spaces whatsoever”, deserted but inhabited, disused warehouses, waste ground, cities in the course of demolition and reconstruction. And in these any-spaces-whatever a new race of characters was stirring, a kind of mutant: they saw rather than acted. They were seers.’ Gilles Deleuze, Cinema II: The Time-Image
During the supervision of a trip for art students to Berlin in 2001, Ian Cale remembers what he calls a ‘lightbulb moment’. This moment would frame decades of work across a variety of mediums that aimed to open up lost traces of people and the objects they left, marked by conflict and occupation, not solely during the Second World War, but throughout the Twentieth Century and now on Europe’s eastern border with Russia full scale invasion of Ukraine on the 24th February 2022. To grasp the significance of this moment Cale, by way of offering some contrast to this illuminating shift in perspective, remembers how the history of conflict, in mid-Twentieth Century in particular, was narrativised in his childhood in North Yorkshire. In his boyhood years, Ian recalls children’s games shared with his brother. They played ‘War’ and ‘Cowboys and Indians’ (another reductive retelling, though problematic for reasons too different to draw this parallel any further) Mud-Grenades. Playfighting. Culture: films heroising American military intervention (think, for instance the movie ‘Kelly’s Heroes (1970). Something which stands out in his retelling of this period is an Action Man, dated 1969 which, as he noticed only years later, was adorned with, along with a machine gun and military garb, a belt-buckle bearing the mark of a Swastika. The Germans as a whole remained the ‘bad guys’, and their stories were limited to this.
Add to this the spector of conflict overhanging the 1970s British landscape – especially in this area. The RAF bombers (the roars of which passed audibly within the family kitchen every 4pm with the exception of Fridays) that were plotted through the reservoirs that marked the landscape itself. The threat of Nuclear disaster. Duck ‘n’ Cover drills. Conflict was close to home. However pre-emptive.
Now we return to the Berlin trip of 2001 – the Lightbulb Moment. A provocation that would spur his commitment to uncovering the objects, landscapes and, increasingly, civilians, that remain lost to historical narrative.
A scene that Cale mention is particularly evocative. He recognises the layout of a street from a photograph taken several decades before. In the older photograph, a dead animal lies in clear view on the street, unattended to. Derelict buildings bear signs and scars of conflict. Barricades and advancing Russian tanks dominate the image. In 2001, these scars are erased. Standing in their place are signs of consumerism, gentrification and sanitisation – forgetfulness. An ordinary urban street. A Dunkin’ Donuts. Nothing to see here. The theme of sifting through the debris of conflict to speak of what remains of these collective traumas, the lives shaken by war, quite literally haunts Ian Cale’s work. The marks left by the deceased, the unknown, and the partial and fragmented stories left behind. It has expanded it’s territories from Britian to Germany and now Ukraine. Cale himself recognises inspirations for this in more formal presentations and remembrance sites within Germany and Ukraine. A historical mass-grave in Halbe, Brandenberg, East Germany, represents the burial spot of an indeterminate number of tens of thousands of German soldiers. A contentious site, indeed, since it has also become something of a place of pilgrimage for Neo-Nazis who view it as a site for fallen heroes. This, it should go without saying, is not Cale’s interest, but it is not difficult to imagine how haunting such a space would be to tread upon. He was also touched by a photography exhibition, Topography of Terror, held on the same sight as what was, from 1933 to 1945, the SS Reich Main Security Office, the Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, and also a site bearing the history of the division of East and West Berlin during the cold war. What struck Ian about this was the power of maintaining an awareness of one’s own place in history. In this case, a site recognising it’s past complicity in historic horrors, and a commitment to a moral injunction to not tidy them away but compel reflection.
Returning to Cale’s work, which begins in the margins rather than ‘monumental’ sites. The questions that you, the purveyor and critic, are asked to consider since his earliest published collections and in his present collection ‘Chorozem: Black Earth’ have become increasingly complex and even uncomfortable. All the more so, I would argue, because of the barbarity of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. And exploring how the people of Ukraine are coping with, and making sense of, the collective and personal traumas of the war, of occupation, of shared and personal grief. Responding to the horror and shock of the Manson Family Tate murders (The White Album, 1979), Joan Dideon begins her reflection: ‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live’. Of course these stories are heavily-laden with real truth, suffering and grief. There will always, however, be something lost in the blunt instrument of language. What is at stake in our narratives surrounding Ukraine and incomprehensible terror?
My own response to Cale’s work, and my sincere fascination with it, calls immediately to mind Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase ‘the Banality of Evil’, which stems from her 1961 account of Eichmann on trial for war crimes in Jerusalem (and, as an aside, was borrowed from Theodor Adorno; another great Jewish intellectual committed to questioning how such barbarity could have arisen as it did in the Twentieth Century). When writing of Eichmann’s style of speech recounting the suffering and horror he inflicted, she observes that he speaks of the camps with an almost bureaucratic distanciation. When asked what allowed him to do such unimaginable things, he responded ‘our language made it possible’.
In my view, here is what we are ethically compelled to question when compelled and provoked by Cale’s work. Confronting this ‘enemy’, we are unsettled when we, in fact, see something ordinary and even familiar. Childrens toys, footprints in the dust left in previously warm apartments, letters for friends that didn’t make it, photographs of posing young soldiers, shoes and photo albums. We are invited to consider that these lives are in the midst of eruption at a moment of crisis and radical cognitive dissonance. The horrors return close to home. In order to stop history repeating itself, we must bravely proceed in imagining the complex multiplicities of the lives spent under ideology and occupation. How are these subjects caught up in the ongoing war in Ukraine’? The lost voices, in their very absence, cannot let us know. Cale’s process is thorough and multifaceted. The found objects, photographs of war damaged architecture and portraiture are especially present in his new project Chorozem; Black Earth. These are not found by accident. His preparatory method reflects his fascination and commitment to Archaeology. He will carefully choose spaces, both urban and rural, domestic and militarised, through research, mapping fieldwork grids of areas to investigate. The items found are remarkable, intensely personal, and often haunting. His attitude of respect for the documentation of these spaces and commitment to seeing himself as a kind of ‘seer’ or objective witness are everywhere in his practice. These objects and sites are often recorded through photography. In the case of found objects taken home that will inform paintings and drawings upon his return, he is careful to restore to their place of discovery, untampered. The precise site is recorded with tags accompanied with exact geographical coordinates.
His work has remained faithful to thematic concerns discussed above, but their evolution, development, and expansion are marked. Early work (OST 1, for instance), focused more on domestic and public spaces in what was East Germany. OST 2 which dares do expand into portraiture more than its predecessor, but not to the same extent as Chornozem: Black Earth. He has moved increasingly to documenting urban spaces in Ukraine, torn apart by the Russian aggressors. The search for these sites carry both personal risk and emotional and ethical weight. Abandoned and burnt out apartments are entered and explored for field photography and the seeking-after of objects of interest. An example: the recovery of family photo albums – hand written notes on their reverse revealing when, where and who was captured that day. In the same building, extraordinary murals painted around serving hatches. Cale’s work is fascinated with the theme of hatches and holes (another puncture that makes a frequent appearance - bullet-holes). For reasons both literal and figurative, the notion of gaps, space defined by absence, and markings providing a guide through a space and a relationship with his work therein should be clear, but no less rich. What signification of separation and connection do they represent? Between what and between whom? These concerns are reflected in the form of the work – though the dereliction is everywhere present in the grain of the pieces, there is nonetheless a geometrical composure (especially in his resent work) that invites comparisons with Johannes Vermeer and Edward Hopper. They can be almost doll-house like. Not only this, but Cale is keen to draw our attention to the ways in which the sights, smells, and the odd air of abandoned, forgotten and neglected spaces filling his lungs. He claims that this multi-sensory experience informs the tones, textures, of his work in a somewhat symbiotic way, though his output remains visual. This accounts for a mood that pervades much of his artwork and, upon viewing, affects us in our very nerve endings.
As mentioned, Chornozem: Black Earth moves more confidently into portraiture. Past doubts about drawings and photography of human faces and his own right as an artist to consider his work authentic and un-invasive have his unwillingness to confront this because of having been met with a broader sense of perspective from Cale. Much like, he observes, Duchamp can create art with found objects, inviting us to observe them anew, Cale sees himself now as having a ‘right’ to appropriate these images into his work. Giving himself this license broadens the reach of his documentation.
And with this, Cale’s relationships with his subjects is viscerally emotional. Picture him in his studio space, drawing images carefully to the point of acknowledging the wear of the records of these lives. This is complicated. The young people in the paintings are often students, now living in the United Kingdom, displaced from their homes and lives back in Ukraine. There is a sense, he claims, that the source photos watch over him in his studio, sometimes returning the gaze of a camera lens which is not Cale’s own, but still appearing to watch over him as he works. There is a relationship that becomes intensely personal. He is forced to return to their story, what were these young people doing the morning that Russia started its full scale war upon Ukraine? What does this returned gaze ask of him? There is deep sadness here. There is also a resilience and dignity. The relationship between the artist and the subject is both intensely close and impossibly remote.
In the principal focus of human subjects, we find the change that marks the Chornozem: Black Earth phase of Cale’s endeavour to this growing body of work as so distinct from previous efforts and, I would say, makes it all the more compelling. The drawings created with these quasi-photographic portraits are carefully layered; faithfully recording the photograph to the point of carefully mirroring the source-image’s degradation over time. The drawings based on these are often set alongside found inanimate objects and an almost oppressive texture of the rusted and worn metallic surfaces we associate with the image of war. His use of metallic paint against lost objects and human figures we can only guess at the stories and contexts of reflects an inherent awareness of Cale’s as an artist. This pairing, collage-like and broken, is a symptom of our own relationship with history if we are willing to reflect in this depth, but it is also a reflection of the contemporary context and scenery of his subjects. The detritus and partial remnants merge together in our engagement with news reports coming from the war in Ukraine. What is the personal history of these lives for whom conflict, artillery, occupation and damage are always close by, defining the landscape, both literally and internally?
Cale’s relationship with history evokes the Walter Benjamin essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940), and his and its insights are helpful in our understanding of time in his work. Benjamin argues in favour of Historical Materialism, as opposed to ‘Homogenous Empty Time’. The latter depending on a linear notion of History in which time marches ceaselessly forward in the name of progress; the past having no bearing on it beyond pure abstraction. He also famously observes that history, the shared narrative lifted from our experience, is ‘paraded in the hands of the victors’. To live, argues Benjamin, is ‘to leave traces’, and these traces, very much materially, define the present as such. The documents of the past return to us. Historical Materialism does not rely on this abstracted notion of the past. Instead, we may view history as the way in which these traces shape and haunt our experience of ‘now time’. History, as it were, always folding in upon itself.
Cale’s work is aware of our experience of time as fractured, incomplete, and impossible to fully consolidate, though as something that must nonetheless be confronted and considered. There is a modesty to his engagement with his subject matter and inquisition which is, conversely, precisely what marks its inherent provocations and ambition. It asks us to reflect on our own relationship with conflict and defining our engagement with the present.
What makes all this all the more relevant and evocative at the time of writing is that Cale’s art is not solely informed by history. Cale mentions that he has been deeply affected by the images of the Russian invasion of Ukraine that it has itself bled into his depiction of conflicts preceding it by over half a century. The devastating impact of this conflict in Europe – air-raids, burnt-out tanks and artillery, shelled and levelled public, military and hospital buildings, bomb-shelters, mass displacement … so much of this so strongly mirrors the aesthetic of the damage everywhere evident in Ian’s documents and experience in his research in previous work. It has consciously and inevitably and spontaneously informed his most recent work in its texture and tone, in his own relationship with his project: ‘I thought what I was doing was recording history. I saw historical items. Now it’s happening again in Ukraine. These Great-Grandchildren of the witnesses of the Second World War. It’s history repeating itself’ (Cale, 2022). This raises the question – what will our narratives be decades from now we relate, through media, art, literature, criticism, to the voices caught up in contemporary conflict. Voices too multifarious, traumatised and partially documented to claim we can ever fully know. What will become of our lost voices? What will be paraded in the hands of the victors? Who will be the victors? What will be hidden in our future narratives, and how will we respond?
Jo Rose Biography Jo Rose (1987 - 2024) was a Manchester-based writer and musician. An English Literature MA graduate who produced texts for a multitude of publications, musicians, filmmakers, and artists, he also wrote for the Alexandra Arts’ Pankhurst in the Park festival and it’s accompanying international events and workshops. He also edited multiple works on critical theory, including the Jeremy Tambling’s The Poetry of Dante’s Paradiso: Lives Almost Divine, Spirits that Matter, and co-edited two large collections: The Palgrave Encyclopaedia of Urban Literary Criticism and the Bloomsbury Handbook to Literature and Psychoanalysis.