The Deployment of Art

This book explores the Artistic Records Committee (ARC) of the Imperial War Museum (IWM) as a bureaucratic mechanism that enabled the deployment of art as an instrument of war.

The ARC was established in 1972 to commission artistic records of activities involving British Armed Forces (BAF) deployed in the North of Ireland. Through a close reading of artworks, archival research, and interviews with artists, former IWM staff, and a former British Army psychological operations (PSYOPs) expert, this book shows that the ARC was implicated in the 'propaganda war' that the British Government waged to counteract negative public perceptions of Operation Banner after 'Bloody Sunday', and later during Britain's 1982 campaign to recapture the Falklands/Malvinas from Argentina. The two case studies are the painter Ken Howard's ARC commissions to record Operation Banner in 1973 and 1978, and the illustrator Linda Kitson's ARC commission to record the 'Falklands Campaign' (Operation Corporate) in 1982. At a time when emergent conceptual and non-object-based art practices were increasingly concerned with exposure, concealment, and photographic evidence, the book demonstrates the potential operational significance of creating pictorial records and utilising art as a tool of warfare.

This volume will be of interest to researchers and scholars of history of art, museum studies, art and politics, and military and intelligence studies, as well as those studying the recent history of the North of Ireland.