In 1909, when the Victorian naturalist and painter Abbott H. Thayer published his observations about concealment in nature, it&rsquo;s fairly certain he had no idea what he was starting. Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom was the first comprehensive catalogue of the many camouflage techniques employed in the natural world, and Thayer argued that nature was acting as an artist, creating optical effects with colour and light. On this basis he suggested that his study belonged in the realm of the artist as well as the naturalist. His thesis coincided with the birth of Cubism and, interestingly, with the emergence of Gestalt perceptual psychology. &lsquo;Gestalt&rsquo; means &lsquo;shape&rsquo; or &lsquo;figure&rsquo;, and its theorists sought to explore how the brain organizes and interprets visual material through form, context, spatial proximity and patterning. Perhaps unsurprisingly the primary concepts of Gestalt gained some credence within the art world, in particular with Klee and Kandinsky a decade or so later. But it wasn&rsquo;t just in the art world that significant changes were taking place. The early twentieth century saw a seismic shift in the visual techniques employed by military forces worldwide, primarily as a result of the development of longer range and more accurate weaponry. These new technological developments negated the traditional use of the military uniform, such as the famous red coat of the nineteenth century British army. The red coat had long been a symbol of military pride and was intended to visibly intimidate the enemy on the battlefield. But the trench warfare of World War One required different strategies. Colour on the battlefield was no longer used to inspire fear, but to conceal. In an unlikely meeting of opposites &ndash; the military and the arts &ndash; many modern painters were recruited into the army and given the task of using their new techniques, developed through the study of camouflage in nature, to disguise weapons, vehicles, and ultimately, men. The French army led the way with its dedicated camouflage section under the direction of artist Lucien-Victor Guirand de Scevola and produced new innovations for concealment in the air, on land and at sea. The Cubists, many of whom fought in the Great War, and ever open to conceptual challenges, had already begun to reinterpret and mimic the camouflage techniques found in nature. It was Picasso who apparently first used the term &lsquo;dazzle&rsquo;, in reference to the need for warships to dazzle (i.e. &lsquo;mislead&rsquo;) their enemies at sea. Under the direction of British marine artist and Naval Commander Norman Wilkinson, the navy founded a &lsquo;Dazzle Section&rsquo; based at the Royal Academy of Arts. Here a group of eighteen artists including Wilkinson and the Vorticist painter Edward Wadsworth developed paint schemes for warships that used disruptive patterns to confuse enemy gunners as to the target&rsquo;s course, speed and direction. (In 2008 Jeff Koons showed a painted yacht, &lsquo;Guilty&rsquo;, that was directly inspired by the dazzle painted ships of WW1.) The essential role of the artist as camoufleur continued in the Second World War, and by the time the war had ended, camouflage was deeply entrenched in twentieth century visual culture. New printing techniques had facilitated the mass production of army uniforms, and the development of international mass media in documenting war had brought camouflage into the public eye on a scale like never before. The first post-war artist to appropriate camouflage was the French painter Alain Jacquet. Exploring an interest in the visual effects of disruptive patterns, Jacquet created camouflage interpretations of his peers&rsquo; works, including Camouflage Jasper Johns (after John&rsquo;s Flag, 1954) and Camouflage Hot Dog Lichtenstein, both in 1963. In 1964, Jacquet reinterpreted Manet&rsquo;s Le Dejeuner sur l&rsquo;herbe, which he described as breaking &ldquo;reality into dots&rdquo;, and thus having the same properties as camouflage. In 1964, Jacquet wore a camouflage suit recycled from a US Army parachute to the opening of his show at the Alexander Iolas Gallery in New York, attended by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein.Italian artist Alighiero Boetti (1940-94) famously discovered surplus camouflage cloth (the &lsquo;telo mimmetico&rsquo; pattern, created in 1929 for the Italian army) in a flea market. He used it to create works in 1966 and 1967, stretching the cloth as though it was a blank canvas and turning it into a visual artefact, thus subverting its original intention of concealment. The same decade saw the rise of the Civil Rights movement and the Anti-War response to Vietnam in America &ndash; the counter culture, in all its many manifestations, took to using army surplus as a new symbol of resistance to the Establishment, again subverting the purpose of camouflage from one of hiding to being seen, this time for political reasons.It was newspaper coverage rather than surplus trade that led to Warhol&rsquo;s re-appropriation of the US Army Woodland camouflage pattern in 1986 for his famous Camouflage series. Unlike Boetti, Warhol reworked the pattern&rsquo;s original colourways and scale, although he left the shapes intact. Warhol used these camouflage patterns as a base for nearly 70 works including The Last Supper, Self Portrait and his portrait of Joseph Beuys. Warhol&rsquo;s fascination with camouflage as a perfect form with which to explore the possibility of pure abstraction mirrored his own personal need for disguise. Perhaps it&rsquo;s this central idea of disappearing, blending in, or inversely standing out, whether personally, socially, or politically, that makes camouflage so seductive to many artists. The lure of camo can be seen in modern works as diverse as the &lsquo;pop&rsquo; camouflage of graffiti artist Leonard McGurr (Futura 2000) throughout the 80s, the architecturally camouflaged &lsquo;Cloud Towers&rsquo; of Emile Aillaud in Paris, and the museum performances of Harvey Opgenorth in 1998, in which the artist stood in front of classic paintings by Matisse and Rothko wearing clothes that blended perfectly with the colours on the canvases. More recently the idea of appropriation, the recycling (of theft?) of images has been at the heart of much contemporary artistic work that references camouflage. Gavin Turk&rsquo;s 2007 exhibition &lsquo;Me as Him&rsquo; projects both Turk and the Warhol, the men and the images, under a layer of silk-screened camouflage, challenging the idea of the self-portrait as something authentic with &lsquo;deeper meaning&rsquo;, and looking only to the fa&ccedil;ade for answers. Damian Hirst&rsquo;s Amazing Revelations collage (2007) uses thousands of butterfly wings to make abstract patterns and inadvertently demonstrates some of the most skillful camouflage techniques used in nature. Hirst&rsquo;s interest in butterflies as a metaphor for mortality is perhaps linked to the obvious visual use of camouflage as a survival mechanism. Despite all of this, however, and despite the continued presence of camouflage in music, fashion and contemporary culture, the fact that the use of camouflage in the twentieth century developed through the synergy of nature and art is often overlooked. We could argue that its primary symbolic association is still with the military. Today, as more military special forces adopt black uniforms along with the use of new pixelated patterns in army camouflage, the traditional disruptive pattern &ndash; the khaki or sand uniforms that have become iconic cultural visual signifiers of war and combat for over a hundred years &ndash; becomes less useful. Does this mean that we will be able to culturally reclaim camouflage, divorcing its original artistic and natural function from military needs? Each time another artist uses the disruptive pattern in a non-military context, will this slowly reshape our perception on the meaning of camouflage? Perhaps eventually when we see a Warhol canvas or a rap album cover or a Japanese toy that uses a well-known camouflage pattern, it might be possible for us to respond to the colour, shape and form in its new context, without being dominated by the pattern&rsquo;s prior historical military associations. We have to remember that the desire of Thayer or Braque or Picasso to explore the visual techniques found in natural forms was really a desire to understand themselves. The need to hide or to reveal oneself is not the same as the need to declare war.

In 1909, when the Victorian naturalist and painter Abbott H. Thayer published his observations about concealment in nature, it’s fairly certain he had no idea what he was starting. Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom was the first comprehensive catalogue of the many camouflage techniques employed in the natural world, and Thayer argued that nature was acting as an artist, creating optical effects with colour and light. On this basis he suggested that his study belonged in the realm of the artist as well as the naturalist.

This Is Not A Story About The Military

Like the carefully staged crime scene, trompe l&rsquo;&oelig;il tricks the viewer through the arrangement of misleading appearances and false clues. Literally meaning &lsquo;cheat the eye&rsquo;, the art technique involves the realistic depiction of phenomena to create optical illusions, often turning flat surfaces into seemingly three-dimensional objects. Trompe l&rsquo;&oelig;il art does not belong to a particular ism or medium but slips in and out of focus through the ages, depending on dominant regimes of representation. Although the term was not coined until the early 1800s, the genre can be traced back to Greek and Roman times. The Roman writer Pliny the Elder writes of a rivalry in ancient Greece between the painters Zeuxis and Parrhasius, both accomplished in this particular art. Largely forgotten during the Middle Ages, the technique was given a new lease of life by the Italian Renaissance and the era&rsquo;s advanced understanding of perspective, while painters of the Baroque era applied it to the then increasingly popular genre of still life. Artists of the Modern period, however, made limited use of trompe l&rsquo;&oelig;il, as works no longer strived towards illusion or imitation but were made to investigate the grounds for art&rsquo;s own existence. Nonetheless, a few painters, such as Ren&eacute; Magritte and Jasper Johns, did appropriate the style and transform it into their own. The simulacral qualities of the technique, on the other hand, offered a desirable method for postmodern artists eager to challenge notions of authenticity, originality, and authorship. Trompe l&rsquo;&oelig;il is all theatre, which is another reason the genre did not catch on in the Modern period. In the late 1960s, the art critic Michael Fried objected to a turn towards &lsquo;theatricality&rsquo; in sculpture and painting, a concept that, according to the author, betrayed the autonomy of the advanced, Modern artwork by turning the exhibition space into a stage of sorts. While Fried&rsquo;s attack was primarily directed against Minimal art, art forms that use trompe l&rsquo;&oelig;il may equally be added to his list of &lsquo;criminals&rsquo;, as they also trouble the borders between work, ornamentation, setting, and audience, and, like performance, depend on the actual, physical presence of a viewer to be complete. In other words, the &lsquo;power&rsquo; of trompe l&rsquo;&oelig;il is not inherent to the work but exists somewhere between image and spectator and between image and place. At first glance, trompe l&rsquo;&oelig;il art appears to have no author or origin; it aims to erase the traces of its own production. In the attempt to conceal the identity of the &lsquo;perpetrator&rsquo;, the signature of the artist may be hidden on an object within the image or, in the eighteenth century tradition, on a cartellino, a calling card or a note seemingly attached to the main work. Much like Edgar Allan Poe&rsquo;s short story &lsquo;The Purloined Letter&rsquo;, the desired object is in full view but if we fail to recognise it as the thing it is, it inevitably falls outside our scopic register. Trompe l&rsquo;&oelig;il momentarily blends with its own surroundings and transforms the entire environment into a set of representations, causing us to question the validity of other appearances and confuse these with the main work. This is, for example, the case in chantourn&eacute;, a particularly unsettling form of trompe l&rsquo;&oelig;il where a painting is cut into the shape of the thing it portrays and displayed alongside actual objects. While this specific deviation was fashionable in the seventeenth century, more recent examples exist. Duane Hanson&rsquo;s late twentieth century life-size human sculptures are, though not paintings, created in the same vein. These figures are so true to life that they have been known to trick gallery visitors who have believed them to be real and, on occasions, even attempted to talk to them. However, like the detective story, trompe l&rsquo;&oelig;il hovers between suspense and surprise, and, eventually, incorporates its own slippage. This is what constitutes the paradox of the style: to be successful, it must involve its own failure and sooner or later give the plot away, which is why Hanson&rsquo;s sculptures are crucially not human. Still, some people are experts at turning themselves into trompe l&rsquo;&oelig;il. This can make them seem untrustworthy, but such masquerading may also involve a critical element. La perruque is the French philosopher Michel de Certeau&rsquo;s name for a specific performative practice through which the worker camouflages his or her own activities as work for the employer. La perruque can be as simple as a secretary writing a love letter at her office desk, a method through which, without being absent from her job or stealing anything of material value, she diverts company time. Such trickery is associated with the power of those who appear to have no power; it is a critique from below. There is more than a phonetic resemblance between the word perruque, &lsquo;wig&rsquo;, and perroquet, the French term for &lsquo;parrot&rsquo;. While trompe l&rsquo;&oelig;il appears to be all artifice, it strangely borrows a mode of appearance that we have come to associate with animality: mimicry, parroting, or aping. Closely related to trompe l&rsquo;&oelig;il is trompe l&rsquo;oreille, a &lsquo;trick of the ear&rsquo;. Here, a living being mimics the voice of another as decoy. Birds are masters at this art, and only the most experienced birder might be able to tell the difference between the call of the Pied Wagtail and that of a Blyth&rsquo;s Reed Warbler impersonating a Pied Wagtail. Just as trompe l&rsquo;&oelig;il erases the trace of its own author, so does trompe l&rsquo;oreille, although in a different way. The successful avian impersonator throws its voice as if its call was heard from a distance, confusing predators both with regard to its kind and its whereabouts.

Like the carefully staged crime scene, trompe l’œil tricks the viewer through the arrangement of misleading appearances and false clues. Literally meaning ‘cheat the eye’, the art technique involves the realistic depiction of phenomena to create optical illusions, often turning flat surfaces into seemingly three-dimensional objects. Trompe l’œil art does not belong to a particular ism or medium but slips in and out of focus through the ages, depending on dominant regimes of representation.

Trompe L'oeil

&ldquo;He owned nothing. No object, no family furniture, no souvenir. All he had was contained in an old trunk where he kept a few photos and notes relating to his past work.&rdquo; Lydie Sarazin, Marcel Duchamp&rsquo;s first wife, from a privately printed memoir, published 1927. This starkness of Duchamp is liberating. There is a similar resonance in descriptions of his New York apartment; one room, one chair, a basic bed, packing crate and two nails banged into the wall. A piece of string hung from one of the nails. If it has nothing to look at, the mind has a better opportunity of being quiet. I don&rsquo;t know if this was Duchamp&rsquo;s intention, and pictures of his last home in Neuilly that he shared with his second wife show a much more &lsquo;normal&rsquo; looking room. There are shelves and books, art and objects.But a souvenir will trouble and disturb the mind. The word is French (it is a verb) and means &lsquo;to remember&rsquo;. The English noun &lsquo;souvenir&rsquo; is the infinitive mood of &lsquo;souvenir&rsquo; used substantively. The usage is modern. The word does not appear in The Bible, Shakespeare, Blake, Dickens, &lsquo;Moby Dick&rsquo; or &lsquo;Alice in Wonderland&rsquo;. There is a souvenir in Joyce&rsquo;s &lsquo;Ulysses&rsquo; (once) and Scott Fitzgerald where usage is plummy and sentimental. Gatsby refers to a photograph. &ldquo;A souvenir of Oxford days. It was taken in Trinity quad. The man on my left is now the Earl of Doncaster.&rdquo;The etymology of souvenir is Latin from &lsquo;sub&rsquo; meaning under or near and &lsquo;venire&rsquo; to come. The meaning is of something, in this case a memory that comes from the deep of the mind. &lsquo;Souvenir&rsquo; then describes an object that will dredge memory (like policemen looking for a corpse in the river).It is not common to think of souvenirs as objects that recall lost memory. In regular usage the word hitches itself to snow-domes and &lsquo;tasteless&rsquo; (insists Wikipedia) objects linked to tourists sites and capital cities. It is possible these objects ridicule the colossal state monuments they miniaturise and recast in plastic. Or suggest that any place or object that requires a souvenir to remain memorable is therefore, by itself, forgettable.But the souvenirs that recall lost memory externalise memory as three-dimensional objects. It is hard to see a memory. What does a memory look like? Pablo Picasso was fond of Alfred Jarry&rsquo;s gun. Picasso acquired this weapon after Jarry&rsquo;s death as a souvenir of his friend notes Duchamp&rsquo;s biographer. (Although Picasso&rsquo;s biographer Roland Penrose claims Jarry gave him the gun). Regardless of how he acquired the gun, Picasso took it on night-time jaunts and sometimes discharged the weapon in the Parisian air. The gun reminded Picasso of his dead friend, say the biographers. It might be accurate to exhibit the gun and with the label &lsquo;souvenir of Alfred Jarry, author of Pere Ubu&rsquo;. It might be tempting to say the gun was a &lsquo;relic&rsquo; of either Jarry or Picasso although the word &lsquo;relic&rsquo; has a specific theological meaning. &ldquo;Orthodox Christians,&rdquo; explains Bishop Kallistos Ware, &ldquo;believe that the grace of God present in the saints bodies during life remains active in their relics when they have died and that God uses these relics as a channel of divine power, as an instrument of healing.&rdquo;And relics have a future. In the last days they will be reclaimed and refleshed by the resurrected saints. &ldquo;The relics were the saint,&rdquo; notes Patrick J Geary in &lsquo;Furta Sacra&rsquo;. But you could say &lsquo;they are the saint&rsquo;. They are not souvenirs. Or representations. Jarry&rsquo;s gun is inert. It does not belong to eternity. Jarry&rsquo;s gun is not Jarry. It is a path to the memory of a dead writer (who will remain dead) and to Picasso&rsquo;s memory of his friend (Jarry died in 1907, Picasso in 1973). If Jarry&rsquo;s gun still exists and if you could hold it in your hand it would be proof that Jarry (and also Picasso) did exist. It is an artefact or piece of evidence, like the dinosaur skeletons. And it can be difficult for those of us living in the present to believe the Past really happened. We need physical evidence; museums, galleries and archaeologies.Jarry&rsquo;s gun is like Coleridge&rsquo;s Flower; an object that connects us to another world, in this instance Montmartre circa 1906-1910. Coleridge&rsquo;s Flower is a meditation (unpublished in his lifetime) that reaches out to Heaven, Narnia and wonder. &ldquo;If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke &ndash; Ay! &ndash; and what then?&rdquo;.But most souvenirs, even if they function as evidence that you have been somewhere are &lsquo;tasteless&rsquo; (says Wikipedia) and also kitsch. The word comes form the German &lsquo;verkitschen&rsquo; meaning to make cheap and &lsquo;kitschen&rsquo; to collect junk from the streets. Kitsch is the &lsquo;commodification of the souvenir,&rdquo; says Celeste Olalquiaga and &lsquo;the souvenir the commodification of remembrance&rsquo;.There might be some who resist having their memories cast in &lsquo;cheap&rsquo; plastic (and there is a reflex prejudice against plastic &ndash; Umberto Eco has written about the wonder and beauty of plastic). St Mark&rsquo;s in Venice is to be avoided, I was told on Boxing Day by a young postgraduate student of architecture, because it is tacky, a theme park. But if you walked away from the centre, my student friend advised, you will find strange, watery fields, real farmers, authentic experience. This longing for the &lsquo;authentic&rsquo; might traumatise an otherwise restful holiday. And there is an appalling egotism in the tourists&rsquo; refusal to accept his or her role. But this is a consoling delusion because (for some of us) commodified leisure and memory are harder to stomach than commodified transport or education. There is an image Gavin Turk has exhibited of a discarded paper cup bearing the image of Stonehenge. And Stonehenge (says Wikipedia) is &lsquo;one of the most famous prehistoric sites in the world&rsquo;. I suppose you could say its the country&rsquo;s oldest and most &lsquo;magnificent&rsquo; art work. Gavin may be having a go at English Heritage, who produced the cup because there might be some leakage, some diminution of value heading back from the cup to the &lsquo;magnificent&rsquo; original. But then again both the cup and Gavin&rsquo;s image are perfectly adequate pictures of Stonehenge. And they are calm images. There is no anxiety about authenticity or form. When I started this story I wanted to rail against spoons from Ramsgate and a Tower of London snow-dome; now I find myself warming to these objects; they are without angst and they are useless.Celeste Olalquiaga, The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury Of The Kitsch Experience (Bloomsbury, 1999) Patrick J Geray, Furta Sacra, Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 1991) Roland Penrose, Picasso (Granada, 1981) Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp: a biotgraphy (H.Holt. 1996)

“He owned nothing. No object, no family furniture, no souvenir. All he had was contained in an old trunk where he kept a few photos and notes relating to his past work.”Lydie Sarazin, Marcel Duchamp’s first wife, from a privately printed memoir, published 1927. This starkness of Duchamp is liberating. There is a similar resonance in descriptions of his New York apartment; one room, one chair, a basic bed, packing crate and two nails banged into the wall. A piece of string hung from one of the nails.

This Is Not A Story About The MilitaryHardy Blechman1 Jun 03

Trompe L'oeilRikke Hansen1 Jun 03

SouvenirTony Marcus1 Jun 03