Fionn Byrne. A memorial to the extinction of a species

Fionn Byrne. A Monument to the Extinction of a Species.This is a new submission to On Site's digital exhibition of war memorials.  Byrne opens with this statement: 'the alarming rate of species extinction would not normally be classified as a war, but perhaps this ongoing extreme loss of life should be reconsidered in the context of an organized conflict.'

Yes, it should. 

Transformaçaõ de Armas em Enxadas

Cristovao Canhavato (Kester). Throne of Weapons, 2001Transformaçaõ de Armas em Enxadas (Transforming Arms into Tools) is a project initiated by Bishop Dinis Sengulane in Mozambique in 1992 to exchange the weapons accumulated during the 1976-1992 civil war for tools such as sewing machines, bicycles, hoes and shovels.  One village exchanged all their arms for a tractor.  The weapons are decommissioned, cut up into scrap metal which is then used by artists. 

The resulting sculptures are powerful anti-war statements, diagrammatic in their political import:  the first image on the TAE website is of a saxophone made from an AK-47 and a bazooka. The caption reads: 'It is the antithesis of the weapons used to construct it. It regroups people rather than separating them. It's an instrument of peace rather than an instrument of death.'

In 2005, in conjunction with Christian Aid which supports TAE, Bishop Sengulane gave an enormous Tree of Life to the British Museum.  It is as one would expect, a large metal baobab tree trunk made of gun barrels. 

A more subtle piece is Throne of Weapons, 2001, by Cristovao Canhavato (Kester) who studied at the Núcleo de Arte in Maputo in 1998, becoming involved in the TAE project.  This is a generation of artists, many of whom were child soldiers, who grew up knowing only civil war and the tools of civil war.  Art here is instrumental in turning those tools – chunks of metal, plastic and wood – into things that war cannot appropriate. 

The Throne of Weapons which featured recently on BBC's A History of the World in 100 Objects turns the weapons of war back into politics: thrones, chairs, seats – these are the euphemisms for power, especially during war when it is those who sit in chairs that conduct the war, not the children with the AK-47s.  

Hesco bastion

German forces filling Hesco bastions in IraqJimi Heselden died last week in a Segway scooter accident. He was, according to his obituary notices, the epitome of the entrepreneurial inventor from the gritty side of Leeds.  He developed the gabion into an international manufacturing company that provided flat-packing wire and canvas frames that, when filled with sand or gravel or building debris or whatever is at hand, forms a heavy wall against erosion, mortars, bullets, landslides.  The R-House is a fortified building: a square of bastions with a heavy canvas top strapped over for a roof: 'living space for six to eight people against the potentially devastating after-effects of any disaster'. 

Hesco is divided into humanitarian, civil and military applications with many variations of the basic frame filled with rubble.  RAID is a 400m concertina wall packed into a 20' container.  It pulls out of the containter, a meter wide and 2.2m high, providing instant cover.  On the website it shows a truck shooting down a track the RAID wall flooding out behind it. Once standing it can be filled, or used for storage, but its main use is as an instant forward operating base.  It's a terrific concept – fast, effective; thundering music in the little video demo brings home that war needs ideas, and it needs someone to put those ideas in place.  Lives depend on them.

The Hesco website is full of information and photographs of the most amazing products.  Heavily copyrighted, thus no images here.   However, when looking up the history of the gabion, I find it is an ancient war defence, once used by Leonardo da Vinci for foundation fortification.  

Heselden gave away millions  to charity, he bought Segway just last year as the future of personal transportation able to be developed in many different ways.  He was on one when it tumbled over a cliff near his home.  A freak accident cutting short a canny, clever, generous, visionary life. 

Jeremy Deller. Baghdad, 5 March 2007

Jeremy Deller. Baghdad, 5 March 2007. Imperial War Museum, London.

Originally Jeremy Deller had proposed a bombed car from Iraq (called The Spoils of War (Memorial for an Unknown Civilian)) for the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, an ongoing rotating sculpture competition. Unfortunately, it wasn't chosen.  Unfortunate, because for the countries responsible for the war in Iraq, collateral damage is very abstract.  Four thousand American troops were killed in Iraq; hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed in Iraq.  That abstraction alone is near meaningless: numbers as synecdoche.

What Deller did do was to take a car from Iraq that had been completely crushed by the bomb in in the Mutanabbi Street book market in 2007 which killed 38 people. He installed it at the New Museum in NY (called It Is What It Is) and then towed it through the red states of the US showing what a bombed Iraqi car looks like.  It is now installed at the Imperial War Museum in London (called Baghdad, 5 March 2007) in a hall full of the official hardware of war. 

It isn't art, but Deller said on the Strand last night, I am an artist, so I can propose things.  And in this case, the Imperial War Museum took it – a statement they clearly felt they had to make.

Jeremy Deller. It Is What It Is, 2008. On view in the United States.

Paul Nash: the surrealist eye

Paul Nash. Boat on the Shore, South of France, 1933/4

Last week the Guardian had this photo on their website from an exhibition of Paul Nash's photographs currently on view in Sheffield.  Coincidentally, I just finished reading Pat Barker's novel about the Slade, WWI, war artists and the purpose of war art, Life Class, published in 2007. This appears to have been loosely based on the WWI experience of both Paul Nash (1889-1946) and his brother,  John Nash (1893-1977) who also enlisted in the Artists Rifles. Both might be called meticulous and passionate landscape draughtsmen, rendering complex landscapes into simpler sheets and planes that record an ancient topology usually scarred by some form of modernity.

Between 1931 and 1946 when he died, Paul Nash had a No. 1A pocket Kodak camera with which he photographed landscapes, objects, rocks and rubbish with a slightly crooked surrealist eye.   The exhibition mounted by Abbott and Holder shows a few of these photographs, from the White Horse at Uffington to an Avebury standing stone.  Tree trunks and fence posts become sculptural, ploughed fields become pattern, a topiary garden with a large looming house on the other side of a hedge becomes comically Gothic. 

The Guardian blurb mentions a pathetic fallacy at play in these photographs.  I must say I'd forgotten what the pathetic fallacy was for a moment, but I don't think this is what it is.  One might project all sorts of social preoccupations on the subject matter, but if one was a visual artist, a surrealist and insisted on using your pathetic little pocket Kodak for everything, I would take the cue from surrealism instead.  These are photographs of curious, inexplicable things. 

Paul Nash. The Box Garden, Beckley Park, Oxfordshire. 1943

Anselm Kiefer

Anselm Kiefer. Zim Zum, 1990. oil, crayon, shellac, ashes, sand, dust and canvas on lead 3.8 x 5.6 m. National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Yesterday after thinking about the large Gursky photographs and standing around in galleries looking at very large things I thought about Kiefer.  So I wrote the post below, and now find it has sucked all the light out of the day.  Too much Sturm und Drang for me.  I'd rather be looking at Ocean III.  However.

The first major Anselm Kiefer exhibition I saw was at the Saatchi Gallery in conjunction with several Richard Serra pieces – great slabs of steel balanced on their corners against the wall.  Someone had been injured in the installation.  Seeing the Kiefers was something like when an earlier generation first saw Mark Rothko's enormous, ambiguous colour fields at the Tate.  Kiefer's paintings cover whole gallery walls; one cannot get enough distance from them, one is completely humbled by them.

Much is written about the symbols and myths of German history and the Holocaust in Kiefer: Zim Zum, above, is from the Kabbalah and refers, roughly, to destruction and creative rearrangement.  And there appear to be many debates about whether a German can do anything with German myths and not be a closet Nazi.  Kiefer's work is both textual in that it insists on working with both Teutonic and Jewish history, and in its messy application of straw and mud, paint and dust, often to make great ploughed fields that appear to be totally barren, devoid of life, incapable of resurrection, work shouts out about the destruction of Germany.  It helps to know that Kiefer studied with Joseph Beuys. There is a sensuality that is not romantic in this work – perhaps it is the sensuality of melancholy and despair. 

I've never seen much renewal in Kiefer's work, although the symbols of such are supposedly all there in it.  This is one of the issues with text-based work and criticism: the work becomes the vehicle for another kind of project whereby the physical painting is cast as a cipher to a larger, off-canvas discourse which can change with political rapidity.  Meanwhile, one is left standing in front of a 3 x 5 m work which is unbearably, unrelentingly dark.  I think this has to be taken seriously as an end point: war destroys, and whatever replaces whatever is destroyed is never enough.  

the Eames chair

Charles Eames. Patent Drawing, 1951. Library of CongressWe have an article about the Eames chair in the next issue of On Site: small things.  Melissa Jacques writes about its iconicity and its marketing, sixty years after its invention.  While looking for an image for the article, I came across one of the patent drawings submitted by Charles Eames in 1942.  It shows that originally the moulded bucket had material taken out of its stress points.  It somehow seems more plastic this way: one can see the original sheet material and how it is bent, a quality completely lost in the fibreglas shells that quickly followed, although I remember fibreglas chairs with an oval hole cut out at the lower back.  I thought they were for ventilation maybe, not thinking much about it at all.  It is interesting that something can be made stronger with the removal of material, rather than building it up to a state of rigidity.

Much of this moulded plywood technology was developed for wartime applications: airplanes, which are still very flexible, and famously in the Eames' case, for limb splints — both applications lightweight and shapely.  The plywood Eames Chair really is the hallmark of 1950s furniture whether it be Danish or American Modern.  Soon supplanted by fibreglas and wire mesh, and most masking of all, upholstery, all this thin, lightweight industrially processed furniture lost its wartime connections very quickly.  Jacques says that it still has its original über-cool quality however, and I wonder if this is something inherent in the way the form was made that we still  intuitively understand, rather than any amount of marketing. 
Charles and Ray Eames. Moulded Plywood Chair. Library of Congress

Rage Against the Machine. 1991The first Rage Against the Machine album cover has a famous 1960s photograph of a burning monk in Vietnam.  This album included Killing in the Name, an anthem against racism, US police force members who were also in the Klan, and the military-industrial complex, that curious phrase introduced after WWII by Eisenhower to represent the alliance of the military and corporations that raised its ugly head again during the Bush administration's 2003 invasion of Iraq. RATM played together from 1991 to 2000 and then reformed in 2007 performing at various anti-Bush and workers rallies.  It used to be the winsome Pete Seeger and Joan Baez who sang social activism, now it is RATM's metal rap funk.  It is all very much angrier now.

RATM's Zack De la Rocha and Tom Morello are articulate critics of the war in Iraq, presidents and their methods, an equally articulate supporter of the Zapatistas in Chiapis – the current version of US interference in Central America that had a parallel roster of protest singers during the 1970s.  Michael Moore directed an RATM video, they protest against the use of music in torture, the ongoing presence of Guantanamo, sweatshops, neo-nazis.  They come from Los Angeles, their success is international. 

smsteele is a poet who spent 6 months on and off at CFB Wainwrightistan in Alberta and then Kandahar as an official war poet.  She says the morning alarm clock is Rage Against the Machine's Wake Up —part of the lyrics:

Movements come and movements go
Leaders speak, movements cease
When their heads are flown
'Cause all these punks
Got bullets in their heads
Departments of police, the judges, the feds
Networks at work, keepin' people calm
You know they went after King
When he spoke out on Vietnam
He turned the power to the have-nots
And then came the shot
...
Wake up! Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!
Wake up! Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!

How long? Not long, cause what you reap is what you sow

Is it the beat that gets everyone pumped for patrols where they could lose their lives?  or does the beat simply deliver an enraged poem about being in a system that is a conflicting mixture of idealism and exploitation.  Rage is latent, it is like an unexploded IED.

war poets

A later use of Richard Jobson's Into the Valley.  Young men go to war, young men listen to punk, rap and metal.  Jobson has claimed an affinity with the British war poets, however, war poetry is not only Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, but continues to this day.  There is work coming out of Iraq and Afghanistan by our poets and probably a huge amount written by Iraqis and Afghanis to which we have little access.
 
Now that everyone can write and be read, bypassing print publishers, record companies, editors and agents, I wonder if there will be a return to the inherent rigours of poetry, the honing of phrases and words, the close expression.  Poetry is the most powerful of all the writing arts, whether attached to music or not.  Perhaps desperate times ask for this kind of precision.  

Into The Valley

So here's some unreconstructed 1979 Scottish punk for you.  It all looks terribly neat today.  This song is now the anthem for Dunfermline FC – valleys are valleys, and Dumferline's stadium is called The Valley.  However, Into the Valley, written by Richard Jobson, the lead singer of the Skids, wrote it about young Scots recruited into the British Army, who were then sent to Northern Island.

Into the valley
Betrothed and divine
Realisations no virtue
But who can define
Why soldiers go marching
Those masses a line
This disease is catching
From victory to stone
Ahoy! Ahoy! Land, sea and sky
Ahoy! Ahoy! Boy, man and soldier
Ahoy! Ahoy! Deceived and then punctured
Ahoy! Ahoy! Long may they die

Armies are very attractive to regions mired in poverty, as Scotland continues to be.  Newfoundlanders and Maritimers have long been over-represented in the Canadian Forces.  The situation in Northern Ireland was as if they had been pitted against each other. 
We know, because we read a bit of Tennyson yesterday, for the first time in about 40 years, that Into the Valley is also from The Charge of the Light Bridgade.  The futility of the war in Ulster was just one of a long series of military futilities.
 
When last year we did On Site 22: WAR, I received some feedback that other than historical forts and things, war was irrelevant to architecture and design.  We live in peace, etc, etc.  Well, we might, personally, but we do not globally.  If a punk band can get it together to write a song about war that has become so anthemic it is still played thirty years later, so can we all, here in the luxury of safe everyday lives, write about war using the tools of our trade.  So many Paralympic athletes now are war amps – ex-soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.  They bring the war home.


the Charge of the Light Brigade

William Simpson. The Charge of the Light Brigade. 1855

Tennyson wrote The Charge of the Light Brigade in 1854:

Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
'Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns!' he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

and onward for a great number of verses.  It is about the Battle of Balaclava during the Crimean War where the Light Brigade, a British cavalry unit met Russian forces during the siege of Sebastapol, a Russian naval base on the Black Sea. 
Against the Russian Empire were the British, French and Ottoman Empires: the Ottoman Empire was in decline and the war was over who would get its territories.  It is said that it paved the way for WWI, it was the first modern war, it introduced new military technology and, because it was Empires fighting Empires, rather than mere nations fighting nations, it was a war fought on many fronts and at many scales.

The war was triggered over control of the Middle East, driven by the difference between the Roman and Greek Orthodox Catholic Churches and the Russian Orthodox Church, each claiming authority over the holy sites of Christianity.  In the end all of Europe was involved, ending with the Treaty of Paris of 1856, which disarmed the Black Sea.  Territories were re-drawn, countries joined together and others split, seeds sown in the Balkans, Turkey and the newly formed Austro-Hungarian Empire for WWI, WWII, the break up of the former Yugoslavia, the autocratic division of the Middle East in the 1920s which has led to the current Palestine/Israel impasse, Russia's ongoing problems with its satellite republics.  We will never be free of it.

The Charge of the Light Brigade was a disaster, as was the ambush at Fish Creek during the Riel Rebellion.  There are so many sieges and battles that were horrific massacres for both sides, little territory gained or lost.  One really does wonder if war is the natural state of man.  

James Peters

Captain James Peters. Two cannons fire on Batoche during the shelling that began the battle. 1885

This photograph appeared in the Globe & Mail a couple of weekends back – a notice about Michael Barnholden's newly published Circumstances Alter Photographs: Captain James Peters'  Reports from the War of 1885.

Peters was in the Royal Canadian Artillery in Quebec City and was sent to what is now known as the North-West Rebellion, where traditional British army practice met the guerilla war strategies of the Métis in now southwest Manitoba.  When Louis Riel formed a provisional Métis government to manage their lands which were being stripped of buffalo by the Hudson's Bay Company, John A Macdonald sent 5,500 troops to deal with him.  This might be compared to the 2,500 Canadian troops currently in Afghanistan.

It was a slaughter on both sides, Louis Riel was captured and hung for treason. Meanwhile, Captain Peters had brought with him a Marion Academy twin-lens reflex camera with a fast shutter speed and from his horse shot pictures of the ambush he led his troops into at Fish Creek.  One might think he ought to have been otherwise occupied, but hey, he was a keen photographer and so we have these images.  

There is a dog in the middle of the battlefield, of course.  Dogs see all, tell nothing.  

hardware and robotics

A hardened aircraft shelter at RAF Upper Heyford, near Bicester, in Oxfordshire. Photograph: English Heritage
The Guardian reports that this bunker is 'one of the best preserved Cold War landscapes in Britain' and it is now on the schedule of monuments to be protected from development.  It is a hardened aircraft shelter at RAF Upper Heyford, built in 1967 after the unprotected Egyptian Air Force was destroyed on the ground by Israel.  Decommissioned in 1994, it was a piece of little America with hamburgers and a supermarket.  

As I was considering this, and the rather crouching appearance of a hardened aircraft shelter, part one of Robo Wars by Stephen Sackur came on the radio.  He described a British lieutenant sitting in Nevada controlling drones in Afghanistan, doing his shift then driving home to his wife and kids.  Clearly this beats flying out of Kandahar and living in a dusty FOB. 

Sackur's investigation is about the nature of combat when it is conducted by robots dependent on satellite systems.  The country with the best hackers will win I suppose, however, all these things still deliver bombs which will still land on civilians who aren't hackers, and who will be the statistics that indicate success or failure.   The ultimate direction of all the handheld electronic toys that keep being launched on our wallets is not literacy with Kindle, or connectivity with the iPad, it is probably their weaponisation.

small things: lipstick

The Liberation of Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp, April 1945. The Imperial War Museum, London

Last Remembrance week The Relief of Belsen (2007) was on TVO.  It was both drama and documentary, intercut with Richard Dimbleby's BBC footage taken in 1945.  The ambulance crew which had been sent to the prison, and subsequent Red Cross and military reinforcements were played by actors, no one played the survivors of the camp, they were all shown in the intercut documentary portions.  The ambulance crew did not know it was a concentration camp; the horror of their discovery was manifest and enormous, the task of humanitarian rescue nearly impossible as thousands died even as they were trying to give them proper nourishment, medicine, clothes and bedding.

This is an excerpt from the diary of Lieutenant-Colonel Gonin DSO who, in the film, was shown as the head of the medical team:

It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don't know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the post mortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tattooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.

Such a small thing, a lipstick.

138+2

What an end to 2009: a project that has lost its direction and more and more killed. 

We did On Site 22: WAR to see what effects war has on architecture, urbanism and design.  The articles submitted to us filled an issue; it is clear that we are able to work because of wars, in the aftermath of wars, in response to wars, but at the sharp end, in our name, people are dying. 

taking pictures

Norman Foster. Swiss Re Tower under construction, London. 2003

Think you can photograph Foster's Swiss Re building at 30 St Mary Axe?  Think again.  The building features prominently in Martin Vallée's 9-minute video (Comment is Free.  guardian.co.uk, 11 December 2009) where he pushes his right to wander around in public streets photographing things.  Okay, it is England, they have a Terrorism Act, however the police seem to me to be really, really polite.  Here I would be worried that they would rush up and shoot me with a taser.
 
A few years ago I was photographing the public plaza at the base of the Trans-Canada Pipeline building as part of a photomontage for Andrew King's book, building/art, showing where the plaza hit the sidewalk – not bad, cool benches, etc – a security guard hustled out and told me I couldn't photograph there.  Shocked, I said, 'but it is a public sidewalk'.  No go.  I would have to get approval in writing from the owners of the building if I wanted to photograph their plaza, and otherwise he would call the police.  This was Calgary, 2002.  Unlike Martin Vallée, I didn't push it.  It just seemed typical of the new Calgary – bullying and completely intransigent.   It's more though.  Paranoia and punitive public safety legislation have removed our right to act as artists and photographers, observers and lingerers in the public domain.

Do we still have a public domain?  Chris Roach wrote about this in On Site 19: streets. His article Urban Guerillas looks at the work of ReBar, a San Francisco group that practices a kind of urban disobedience.  Disobedience, guerilla tactics, protests -- these seem to be the only actions that point out just how many urban freedoms we have lost. 


camo gear

Balenciaga, Spring 2004Balenciaga's cargo pants came out the year after the Iraq invasion when the western world finally realised it was on a war footing.  There is some debate about army uniforms becoming civilian fashion items: 'Did you earn it, or did you buy it?'  'Camouflage – if you haven't served, you don't deserve it'.  Camouflage gear is ubiquitous amongst hunters, which is another form of asymmetrical war.  This time the targets don't have weapons. 

If high fashion is an art form, and art reflects society, then the proliferation of cargo pants in Army drab as couture sinks to the level of the mall indicates that being at war has become naturalised in our society.  During the Vietnam war, in the 1960s and early 70s, people wore a lot of army surplus – WWII and Korean war usually, very inexpensive, quite smelly, but at least it was real, and generally worn in the spirit of protest against war.  It wasn't manufactured in China and bought at the Bay. 

The commodification of the uniform could be related to the distinct lack of interest that western countries appear to show in the carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan.  It is no longer shocking to be at war because, among other things, the violence of war has become denatured not just by the censoring of images, but also by the everyday proliferation of the uniforms associated with that violence.  War camouflaged as streetwear.

I must say, having searched high and low for evidence of cargo pants from Joe to Holts, the best on offer are from Abercrombie & Fitch: $90 on their website.  That's the price of participation in geopolitical disaster these days.

camouflage

Eric Ravilious. Spitfires on a Camouflaged Runway, 1942. watercolour on paper 45 x 62 cm. Royal Air Force Museum, Hendon

Ravilious, above, shows a camouflaged air field, with an added stream, road and shading to indicate topographic variation: complex patterns for a complex landscape.  If the RCAF training field in Vulcan had been under threat from the Luftwaffe it would have been painted to look like a wheatfield with rectangular plowing lines. 

Aisling O'Carroll wrote about military camouflage in On Site 22: WAR.  In her section on deception she outlines the array of dummy trucks, tanks and airstrips elaborately laid out to divert attention from real trucks, tanks and airstrips all cunningly camouflaged with paint, netting and big boxes.  She tracked down some great pictures from the National Photographic Archives at Kew – one showing a tank lurking under a very crude truck form as part of the grand counter-installations for el Alamein.  The scale of the deception is staggering: an entire army was recreated in a part of the desert far away from the real army. 

Camouflage does not seem to be as much about veracity as pattern recognition.  The scale worked at is the texture of the landscape with objects, including shadows.  It is an activity at once huge and intimate.

WWII surplus

link to original Google map

Not quite sure how I got this Google aerial here, but shall continue anyway.  The marker points out Vulcan, Alberta, sitting clearly in its 6-mile by 6-mile township.  If you go to the bottom of the township, where there is a clear east-west road, just below this road in the second quarter-section along is a tiny triangular airfield, roughly 45 degrees south west of the marker.

This one was built as part of the Commonwealth Air Training Program in 1943. There is a website for these  small disused airfields all over southern Alberta and Saskatchewan: learning to navigate here would have been like flying over graph paper.  My father who learned to fly in the CATP base in Medicine Hat said you'd fly around and if you were lost, you'd find the highway to Med Hat and follow it in – a nice straight run.

The Vulcan air strip had a number of hangars, the seventh of which was recently removed.  What a great project it would have been to have made all of this into a series of studios for writers, musicians, sculptors, painters.  Must artists colonies always be located in the clichés of either nineteenth century landscape painters (mountains and lakes) or the industrial areas of cities greater than 5 million people?  The depopulation of the rural prairies has left a lot of building stock, a lot of which stands until it falls down.  We could use these places.

C R W Nevinson: the scale of the road

CRW Nevinson. The Road from Arras to Bapaume, 1917. c. Imperial War Museum

This road, from Arras in the Pas-de-Calais to Bapaume, is very like the section roads that grid off the prairies.  Landscape painters in southern Alberta and Saskatchewan tend to paint from the road, looking into the section, rather than at the roads themselves.  When roads do appear, they are tangential, inadvertant, rather than the rigid registration of the land that they are. 

The Nevinson painting is both from the road and of the road.  By the third year of the Great War, fought to end all wars, tangents, the picturesque, beauty as the subject of art and landscape as something life-sustaining were gone.  Land had become, as in this painting, mechanical and antagonistic.  Thus does war poison perception.  The road, like the war, seems endless.