In Flanders Fields Museum 2003 : Encounter
On 21st May 2003, Mark Anstee started work at the In Flanders Fields Museum, Ieper, Belgium.
His task was to draw two opposing armies of equal number on either side of a 4 metre square wall in 72 days.
On 31st July the drawing was completed.
Total number of figures drawn: 19,386.
The work stood until 4th October when Anstee returned to delete it. Deletion took 2 days. On the third day, the wall was destroyed.
Soldier Statues
Catherine Moriarty
April 2003
The silhouette of the soldier statue is a familiar sight across village greens and market squares, along high streets and in parks and gardens.
Immediately identifiable as a war memorial, these figures in bronze or stone were placed on bases or pedestals of various types and materials. A single figure more often than a group, an infantryman rather than a sailor or airman, a private rather than an officer, represented those who did not return.
Few are depicted ‘in action’, while some stand easy, a few to attention, many adopt a head-bent mourning pose. The soldier still, represented the end of fighting and the moment of reflection.
The free-standing figure would be perceived from every aspect and careful studies were made from life models. Once the pose was established attention turned to the details of uniform, accoutrements and equipment. Backpacks, belts, bayonet scabbards, buckles, buttons and badges were carefully observed. Though some figures were unique others were cast to order. Thus soldiers in the same pose might be found in different locations and with a new list of names beneath, commemorating different deaths.
Anonymous from behind, often the faces of these figures are difficult to distinguish except from close up. On inspection they usually correspond with an idealized but not far-fetched presentment of the kinds of soldiers who left the surrounding community. Usually slightly larger than life size, a <heroic> 6 feet 2 inches, they were credible representations of those to be remembered. From a distance and depending on the time of day, these immobile soldiers would appear as silhouettes within a familiar scene. Individuals might recall specific loved ones whom they last saw, leaving home to return to the Front or walking along a station platform glancing back to catch a glimpse – in German ein Blick zurück – the anonymity of soldiers seen from behind disrupted by a flash of familiarity. At the time of their unveiling, soldier statues provoked remembrance of individuals through their collective <likeness>. Though over time this association has lapsed, these generalized military bodies remain iconic of conflict and its costs.
Published in ‘Mark Anstee – encounter’, catalogue, In Flanders Fields Museum, 2003
Catalogue Obit
Hold the line. For the seemingly endless ripples of uniformed men at Gallipoli, Ieper and the Somme the order was executed bravely – keeping the integrity of a futile battle line against shot and shell, walking steadily forwards into oblivion without breaking ranks.
For Mark Anstee, an artist intrigued by that Great Conflict and its never-ending aftermath, the command applies too – not least in his ambitious work Encounter, presented at the Ieper museum May-October 2003.
In that monumental piece, Anstee held the line with an extraordinary concentration. It was a marathon work requiring immense discipline and endurance in the three stages of its creation and destruction: line drawing in biro 19,348 ruckenfigures in front of a changing audience over 70 days was but the second stage, following the conception and preparation for the piece, and preceding the anticipated calculated destruction and auctioning of the work – a fitting conclusion.
At his studio in Brighton in 2002, in the months before travelling out by motorbike to create Encounter, he limbered up. He lined the walls of his creative space with sketches and prototypes of the figures, preparing himself for the endurance of rendering each figure on the 4-metre square tablet in the museum. For Anstee, with his characteristic generosity towards and inclusion of the viewer, the live drawing aspect was key. Discussing the piece prior to its creation, between training bouts at his Brighton studio, he elaborated as to why the ten-week drawing process was an integral part of the work. “I want to slow people’s looking down,” he said. “They have to come back and look again. And by line drawing they have to read visually in real time – they have to to see a single man, and when they see one they have to look at others.” For him, it made sense that, like the Great War and all wars, the piece was a bodycount that was being constantly recounted. Drawing each person before witnesses made sure that each man was accounted for, that each one had an identity and that had been sufficiently personally and uniquely articulated.
But in a wider sense, and with inimitable irreverence, Anstee has broken, crossed and sometimes blurred the line. His commitment to creative expression and how he has chosed to give shape to an idea or emotion, has never been impeded by conventional ideas of discipline. Yet all his work has been executed with skill and honed craft.
Mark Espiner 2003.
In 2003 Mark Anstee was Artist in Residence at the In Flanders Fields Museum. Piet Chielens of the IFFM interviewed Mark on camera for Gabi Cowburn’s film ‘encounter’. This is a transcript of that interview.
PC
I see you counting every day and leaving the little marks to make the counting possible. I know it’s technically not intentional but it is like a big body count.
MA
If I don’t mark them I can’t remember which ones I’ve drawn that day, because even though they’re all very different I don’t recognize them until I recount them from the last mark. So I have to go through it every day to know exactly how many I’ve done.
PC
Then you start again the next morning. Is there a different script? Do they get a different character because it’s a different day?
MA
Sometimes, yes. Because the drawing is in my physical memory and I can make the shape of the drawing with very little change. Now it’s very much a rhythm I get into. But there is a slightly different character when I start each day. There is a kind of anticipation before I start the first one every day.
PC
You don’t draw them as being regimental but to be individual.
MA
Some days I’ll do two hundred in a group, or maybe just five. But each little group has its own kind of identity. What is funny is they have different terrain. Its an accident of the wall not being absolutely perfect. Sometimes I’ll come across a more textured bit of the wall and so they’re drawn in a different way. They have a different quality because they’re going over rougher ground. You have to respond to the material of the wall, so they have to be different.
PC
When I look at you while your doing it, you’re so concentrated. I might be standing there for ten minutes before you notice me.
MA
I have to. It’s part of the rhythm thing. I have to be on the line. I have to be in the moment.
PC
Yet doing it in the museum with the public being there is very much part of the piece itself. So how do you marry that? You have to shut off the audience but they have to be there. They have to witness you.
MA
They have to witness me but I’m not presenting anything to them. It’s not a presentation. I’m inviting them to look through me to the line that I’m making. I’m inviting them to watch me draw something in real time. And they tend to watch at least one. Sometimes they’ll watch me do fifty. Kids, even the most impatient looking ones will watch me do one in real time. But it’s not me. They’re interested in me as a kind of by-product. They’re interested in me making something appear out of nothing. That’s what they get interested in. So the live audience thing is about them looking over my shoulder.
PC
Yes, but the fact that you can do it, that this is so clever, is what makes them stop.
MA
They like the kind of magician aspect of it, the illusion and the skill. People love skill.
PC
We hope that a piece of art or in this case a piece of art being made makes people reflect on the environment they are in. On the subject we’re dealing with. You cannot just take a visitor by the hand and tell them that war is a very bad thing and that it shouldn’t happen. You just can’t do that, but you can hope that when they see an artist or the result of his or her work that will stop them in their thinking and make them reflect.
MA
For me, what I’ve loved about the kids coming through especially is they ask obvious questions first, then they start thinking and then they ask what I call the right questions. Hopefully when they go away they’ll think about these things.
PC
Your work is so well thought through, is it important for you that people walk away having done the work or can they walk away thinking completely different things?
MA
I don’t believe that art is x+y=z. It just cannot be. I set up some questions for myself and then I give people some clues. There is no answer to it but if you follow these instructions like putting an IKEA kitchen together you could possibly see what I’m getting at. But if you come to your own conclusion then that’s fine because I think that’s also what it’s about. It’s kind of my job to guide people in a certain way if I want them to look at something in particular. You have to give them some clues.
PC
I’m a great believer in this. We have a very wide audience and most of them are not prepared to handle contemporary art. So they need guidance and in this case they need more because otherwise they come poking you and asking what it’s all about and then you can’t get your work done. But the text you give to them, the introduction to the piece gives away some things, and I think that’s very kind of you because some artists don’t want to do that at all. But, when it comes to the very personal and possibly the deepest layer of it all, the fact that the two armies are facing each other at a certain distance so they have to make individual and very lonely decisions about life and death, war or peace, about fighting or not fighting…
MA
Or who they want to die with…
PC
…that is not so prominent in your text. Is that intentional?
MA
I wasn’t sure that people needed to know the biographical specifics of that because it can seem like therapy…
(In 1990 Anstee witnessed an horrific murder in a swimming pool in London. A man died in his arms. The assailant was convicted at The Old Bailey in 1991.)
…But what I’m trying to do using that murder situation, that situation where I was six metres from somebody with an eight inch knife who had just killed somebody and he looked at me…it is a moment I’m interested in using. That feeling, that kind of animal moment, and saying ‘can you imagine what this is like in conflict?’
It always comes to this, to two individuals who have to do this and I’m not sure if that biographical detail will just confuse people and take away the responsibility for trying to imagine that moment. Because then it becomes a story about someone else and their feelings and their shock maybe. It has come out a few times when people have talked to me, especially when I spoke to the Dutch paratroopers. None of who had ever been in a life or death situation and I was in this peculiar position of being the closest to a situation like that amongst professional paratroopers. But I think it’s almost too much of a story and maybe too much of a distraction. I’m interested in thinking about standing that distance and asking how do you choose somebody? Is it an instinct? Do you choose somebody you recognize, someone who has a shared humanity, who is the same kind of animal as you or do you choose somebody you’re in competition with or someone you instantly dislike? Those kind of things are really interesting. Or, is it completely automatic in the fever of battle?
I don’t know but I want to ask that question because it runs against the lie that you cleanly shoot someone dead from a hundred yards. It’s that close you smell each other.
PC
They are at a distance where they have to eyeball each other.
MA
A lot of people understand the eyeball thing. It happens with teenagers, and when you flirt. There is a distance where you can not only see people’s eyes but you can see what is in the eyes.
PC
But that is one layer of the piece. It’s also about a massed army and a body count and when you’re going to finish drawing on the 31st July, that is the anniversary of the biggest battle that was ever started on Belgian soil. There are so many things around it you probably don’t need that very personal thing.
MA
Absolutely. And I had some kids ask me what’s the point of making this and destroying it? And it occurred to me, what’s the point of educating thousands of men, women and developing thousands of people as a parent to certain age then sending them off to battle to get killed in one day?
The pointlessness of what people see as me doing this could be seen as an illustration of the pointlessness in that. I don’t want to illustrate but certain things are speaking back to me as I create the drawing.
PC
Yes, well, you’ve created it in a particular space. It’s a war museum.
MA
People come to the piece of work with the context of Flanders, then Ieper, then the museum. That is going to affect people’s perception of the work but then you have to un-pick it from there. Which is an individual thing again. Articulating people individually re-establishes your individuality within the mass. You can’t get away from that solitude, that particular-ness.
PC
Which is why the residency is fulfilling my needs in this. I want people to think about this and go away with it. It’s when they’re back home on their own again it has to work. Not when they’re here but when they go out. And they send us emails asking about the artist who is drawing in the museum.
MA
Did you have the thing at school where you had to write out lines as punishment?
PC
Yes.
MA
We had to write out prayers as well, and psalms until we knew them. And I’ve had a few kids say this, they come to it like Bart Simpson in the opening credits of ‘The Simpsons’. They do see that it’s a kind of punishment. Why would you do that to yourself because it’s physically and mentally very hard to do this? But they recognize something, that you write something out that many times then you have to learn something. That’s really quite sophisticated. They work outwards. I’m interested in all these signals.
PC
Do they pick up on the scale of the men and of the models?
MA
They notice once they’ve been to the wall and they’ll come back and realise the scale is 1:32 and then they unravel it.
PC
One of the things I hate about the heritage of WW1 is that it has become for many people toys for boys. So that element there where you use this but make it much more hard hitting, this is another element I like very much in this work. The playful thing you start off with.
MA
That’s always interested me. You have to be honest, as a boy child, of the motives and icons we receive. The toy we played with, the grenadier guard, is an icon that becomes familiar to you as a child. And the scale you know without knowing it. I drew my first one in my studio to this scale without having any direct comparison. Then I got a toy soldier and it was the same size, give or take a couple of millimetres. It’s extraordinary that you hang on to a memory of a scale of something you played with. That is in our culture. I want to bring people in by using that language.
PC
You need something that takes all of that and shakes it in such a different way that’ll make people reflect on their own relationship with history.
MA
This is what I like about the Artist in Residence status. That artists can reflect upon something using the facts or even ignoring the facts but trying to work with it all in some other way, this little feeling, this idea, this irritation, to stop you just reading it off as history.
PC
You being here doing this is stopping a lot of people so far…
