Dazzling

Since the day back in 2008 when et al. sent us Hardy Blechman’s remarkable book Disruptive Pattern Material: An Encyclopedia of Camouflage, OTN has had a lively interest in camouflage and its artistic offspring (you can see OTN's Collected Camo below). And now Tony de Lautour has taken up the hide-me craft and applied it to the odd bunker shape that sits outside the Christchurch Art Gallery. Just what the architects were up to when one of them said, ‘let’s make a square concrete box as an entrance to the car park and stick it right in front of the Gallery’ and the others said, ‘yeah, let’s do that’ we might never know. But now de Lautour’s sly commentary has lifted it into something worth looking at; ain’t art grand? 

LATER: A GREAT COMMENT FROM RALPH PAINE: Gertrude Stein: “I well remember at the beginning of the war being with Picasso on the Boulevard Raspail when the first camouflaged truck passed. It was at night, we had heard of camouflage but we had not seen it and Picasso, amazed, looked at it and then cried out -- Yes it is we who made it, that is Cubism!” Doubtless an epoch-making change in the composition of the world was taking place and Picasso is the first artist to register this fact. Stein goes on even to suggest (perversely?) that the entire First World War had been an exercise in Cubism. And today?

Images: left, dazzle design for a World War I war ship designed to ‘dazzle more to mislead the enemy about a ship's course and so to take up a poor firing position’ and right, Tony de Lautour takes a shot at the car park entrance
 
OTN: the Collected Camo
Ship shape 
Camo site 
War paint
Hidden in plain sight
Camo artists 
A merging artist 
Koons Camo