In the Fields of Flanders - Martin Lucas Media

In the Fields of Flanders is an installation/performance work based on panoramic transparencies of pastoral Flanders, the arena of some of the most horrible slaughter of the First World War. These images and the story that goes with them ask viewers to contemplate the geography of war — where wars are, and where they aren’t. They look at what constitutes a battle zone, and what remains 75 years after a war is over.

WWI introduced some of the most important aspects of modern war, notably its incredible destructiveness, and its total mobilization of human effort in the battlefield and on the “Home Front”, where a vast industrial production effort and the first mass media propaganda campaigns created the beginnings of a militarized society and culture that we live with to this day.

Using my own fascination with, and experience of, a “war mentality” during my Cold War childhood, and my experience covering war with still and video cameras as an adult, I suggest that the eighty years since 1914 have been a period of continuous wartime. By going back to the origins of modern war and re-examining – “re-viewing” – that landscape we can begin to feel the dramatic militarization of modern consciousness.

The 80 panoramic photographs in this piece were taken in Belgium in January 1996 with the much appreciated help of Joke van Kampen and Arjen van der Meerwe. The piece was first presented at the Villa Alkmaar, Rotterdam, January 1996, as part of the “State of Mind” exhibition created by Jeanne v. Heeswijk, and presented again in June, 1996 at The Knitting Factory, New York. A selection from the show appeared in the book Beyond Ethics & Aesthetics, eds. I. Gevers & J.v .Heeswijk, Nijmegen, 1997.

A photo of two bunkers from WWI in a field in Belgium — ONE OF THE MOST VISIBLE EVIDENCES that several million men fought in this small area are the bunkers. The ones in Flanders are built in the style of no style. They are enduring monuments of the fighting, and fitting ones, cement, reinforcing rods, linked to the earth through sheer weight.

A photo of an artillery shell in a post from WWI in the Belgian countryside. — The majority of deaths in the First World War were from artillery fire In Ypres for one attack, the one that became know as Passchendaele, some four million shells were fired by the British in a week. The shells still come oozing up out of the earth with regularity. They are often still ‘live’ and a regular source of fatalities. The Belgian military comes and collects them every so often for disposal. This shell is stuck through a hole in a telephone pole.