Artist Story: Michael Mulvihill

Please give a brief introduction to yourself and your artistic practice

I have always drawn. My earliest memories are making pictures with paper and pens that my auntie would bring from work. I also have memories of the children’s television show Take Hart, where artist Tony Hart would draw or make things out of found objects. It was watching this programme that opened the possibility of being an artist.

I was probably around eight years old at the time. The drawings I made were in green biro on large reams of fanfold paper, which were printouts from old mainframe computers. I’d spend hours copying pictures from comics, books from the library, or reimagining things I’d seen on the television.

The news had the biggest impact upon my work. It was the early eighties and a lot of the news coverage at that time was about the possibility of nuclear war between the United States and Soviet Union. The threat of war seemed very present at the time.

A central theme of your work in recent years has been the ‘shadowy’ activities of the military-industrial complex, particularly with reference to the later 20th century Cold War between the West and the former Soviet Union. What draws you to this subject?

The Cold War as I experienced it seemed so omnipresent. My mum supported the protesters at Greenham Common, and always pointed out military landmarks on daytrips into the countryside, such as the spinning radar booms at RAF Boulmer or army convoys on the motorway. It has been something I have always noticed.

However, it was the experience of the Four Minute Warning (a pervasive notion in the 1980s, which denoted the minimum warning for a nuclear missile attack against the United Kingdom) that drew me into the politics of warfare. The existence of the warning made implicit that the end of the world was always only four minutes away. Looking back as an adult, living after the end of the Cold War, I wanted to understand who and what constructed this ‘politics of fear’, which everyone on the globe lived with.

Do you see yourself as a very politicised person?

I don’t see myself as politicised in terms of an activist, or campaigner. Rather, I am interested in how politics shapes lives to produce the world we live in.

The RAND Corporation were/are an interdisciplinary think tank, established in 1946, to consider how to use nuclear weapons. They quickly realised actual nuclear weapon use was unthinkable, but they could be used to deter, or coerce an opponent. Many of the analysts at RAND were economists, so certain techniques used in assessing the impact of nuclear war were transferred into organising other aspects of everyday life, such as health care and education. I am fascinated by these points of intersection that challenge commonly held ideas of how the world is organised.

For example, the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), known to many as the company that released the records of Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, ABBA and many other well-known artists. But they were also a key contractor for building and operating the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System, which includes RAF Fylingdales (1). The implication being, that behind our affective and emotional selves, which has been shaped by music, is another mechanism connected to the demands of national security and systems of nuclear warfare.

Much of your work, such as the drawings of nuclear explosions and fighter planes and the looming images of iconic modernist buildings, have a brooding sense of menace but also an austere beauty. Can you expand on this?

I don’t set out to convey a meaning or personal emotion in the work. I do think of the drawings as artefacts. Like they are objects that have been dug up or are remnants of a catastrophic event. The drawings are made over a long period of time. They are made by applying graphite through a process of drawing and erasing, which destroys the surface of the paper they are made on and gives an effect of fossilisation, or erosion. I think this gives the impression of looking backwards from a post-human future, and probably contributes to the sense of disquiet and menace.

Have your residencies linked to iconic Cold War structures such as RAF Fylingdales on the North York Moors and the York Cold War Bunker influenced the way you think about your studio practice?

RAF Fylingdales is an incredible and uncanny place to work. It is one of three Ballistic Missile Early Warning Stations, situated around the North Pole at Alaska, Greenland and on the North York Moors. Fylingdales’ primary mission is to provide a minimum Four-Minute warning of nuclear attack from space. Therefore, it is very significant to my work.

I was invited to Fylingdales following my exhibition, ‘Standby for the New Stone Age’, at English Heritage’s York Cold War Bunker in 2015. They were trying to build their own Cold War archive and wondered if I would have a look. I was not prepared for the number of artefacts that range from large control consoles for the radar systems, thousands of photographs and operations manuals. At the time all this stuff was unsorted but became the basis for my doctoral research as RAF Fylingdales’s first artist in residence, and then the Fylingdales Archive (2). RAF Fylingdales is a very secure environment, and an unusual place for an art practice. I think it is my use of artmaking in the field of critical military geography, which has changed my relationship to the art object.

I don’t see the art as an object, but as an investigative tool. The sculpture, Reggie, Jenny, Tony, and Cleo (MM-W76-LALD-2017) (2017), was used to investigate how nuclear weapons relate to the rest of society. It started with a photograph of technicians in blue overalls working on a W76 nuclear warhead at the Pantex Plant in Texas. The image was striking because the space where the warhead was being handled, to me at least, looked very like a fine art metal workshop.

As the work was made, relationships between manufacturing processes such as digital sculpture and CNC-manufacturing (Computerised Numerical Control) became apparent. These challenge the ideas that nuclear weapons are remote objects, by demonstrating the weapon making enterprise share material and practices from wider social and economic networks.

The work was first exhibited from within the Solid-State Phased Array radar building at Fylingdales, and I’ve shown this piece to think tanks and policy communities. Therefore, this piece is significant to me because it has opened the seemingly closed policy worlds that I first depicted with the RAND corporation drawings.

You work across many media, but drawing has always remained core to your practice. Why is this?

Through drawing and arts practice I have developed very specific expertise in critical security and defence studies. I am equally known as a political geographer as much as an artist. But my social research and ideas are still firmly rooted in drawing. It is a direct medium, and for me, the way materials interact on a drawing surface can be adapted to investigate how matter coalesces into social and technical formations. This is an original approach, that focuses upon the ‘matter and making’ of nuclear weapons, rather than their strategic or political significance, which hide how these objects organise our lived experience.

Beyond Cold War politics, what other socio-political situations influence your ideas for work?

I find myself in a strange position now. I am regularly called upon by the media to give expert analysis on the risk of nuclear escalation arising from the war in Ukraine (3). I think for decades many people, including mainstream media, had assumed nuclear weapons were relicts of the past. What we are seeing in the Ukraine are those ‘Cold War politics’ playing out. And the geopolitics of the Cold War is a politics of nuclear weapons. What was disturbing in the weeks leading up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, was that the situation looked very like the beginnings of old Cold War NATO wargames. In these games, tactical nuclear weapons are used almost immediately to aid or blunt a tank invasion of West Germany.

This situation is the backdrop to a drawing I made several years ago called The Fulda Gap (2015). The drawing is made from lots of photographs I had taken of Kassel Hauptbahnhof during Documenta 13. The Fulda Gap is a plain that lies just north of Kassel and was thought to be the path of a possible Soviet tank invasion of Western Europe. Had war broken out between NATO and the Soviet Union, Kassel would have been one of the first places destroyed by nuclear weapons. The Fulda Gap was a way of repositioning the Documenta exhibition into a possible and lived geopolitics.

Presently, nuclear weapon use in Ukraine looks unlikely. No nuclear weapons have been deployed., However, Russia is still conducting strategic warfare against Ukrainian civilian infrastructure by other, non-the-less brutal, means.

Can you discuss how your studio practice has expanded in recent years to include other media such as sound installation?

When Fylingdales was built in the early 1960s, there were concerns that the station’s radar could be electronically blinded by powerful radio transmitters on Soviet Trawlers operating in the North Sea. Engaging these vessels using the Navy or Air Force could have triggered a nuclear conflict off the coast at Whitby. So an electronic counter-counter measures (ECCM) system was designed that enabled attacking frequencies to be detected, and the radars retuned.

Like the rest of Fylingdales, the ECCM systems are built by RCA, and they have features that resemble recording studio equipment. In fact, the main console uses the same controls and headphone outputs as the RCA Victor II Music Synthesiser, the world's first music synthesiser. Electronic music seemed like a good way of making aural these electron-magnetic military encounters. To do this I collaborated with Chris Tate of the band Score, and founder of electronic ambient group, D_rradio, who I have known for years. We formed the band, One Key Magic (4), and throughout the first lockdown I would send Chris soundscapes based on the frequencies used by the Fylingdales radars. These were often raw electro-acoustic pieces, over which Chris improvised melodic phrases using Ebow guitars and synthesisers.

The result of our collaboration is the album, Worldly Noise and Electronic Atmospheres, released by Cruel Nature Records last year. I think the album speaks beyond its Cold War sources and is incredibly evocative of the North York Moors and the North Sea coast of this area.

Part of your expanded practice involves working more collaboratively. Can you expand on this?

For me collaboration is important because it enables a work to become more than the sum of its parts. A British Guide to the End of the World (2019) (5) is a film I made with director Dan Vernon for BBC Four Arena. It is based on my doctoral thesis and was originally a semi-autobiographical piece about growing up with the Four Minute Warning, and how I ended up at RAF Fylingdales. But over time the film evolved to talk about the people tasked with preparing the United Kingdom for nuclear attack. In some ways this decision was driven by budget, and we concentrated on film archives and oral histories to save on filming costs. However, this decision produced a far more immersive film, which is better than I could have imagined.

Among the most powerful contributions to A British Guide to the End of the World, are accounts from British nuclear test veterans, who experienced at close range the power of nuclear weapons. They gave visceral descriptions of the effects of nuclear testing upon themselves and their families. This produced a film with a really moving ending, which none of us could have anticipated. The film was critically acclaimed and universally well received. I am enormously proud of the fact that Barry Hines, director of Threads (1982), holds the film in high regard.

In many of your collaborative projects you’re working with academics from a wide range of disciplines: historians, sociologists, etc. How do you see your role as an artist in this research?

Using creative practice to investigate military and nuclear phenomenon is unique and innovative. I am working with colleagues in the Geography Department at Newcastle University to formalise creative practice approaches into tools for critical military research (6). I also teach creative practices across topics on geopolitics, geoeconomic and international securities. So, you can see that my practice has greatly evolved over the years, and I am very much embedded in the social science research communities as an artist practitioner.

I am increasingly involved in security policy networks and using my creative practice to shape opinion or raise awareness. For example, I recently submitted findings to Parliament on UK space strategy, and I currently sit within the N-Square Horizon Scanning Network, a partnership body of the leading funders in peace and nuclear non-proliferation. This is a strange place to be. Especially since I began this journey by making drawings of individuals from the RAND corporation. It is like standing on the other side of that work.

Do you have any particular memories of your experience of working with Vane?

A key exhibition for me was ‘The Pursuit of Happiness’, a solo show I had at Vane in 2013. This exhibition galvanised many of my ideas and use of artmaking for social enquiry. But ‘The Pursuit of Happiness’ was only one part of how Vane was supporting my work at that time. Vane has been instrumental in enabling my work to be acquired by private collectors and national institutions, or shown internationally at art fairs in Basel, Mexico and in New York.

Vane has been a crucial part of the Newcastle, Gateshead and the North East art scene. Some of my greatest memories of the scene were the early iterations of Vane, which were huge celebrations of the region’s art and artists. So I feel very privileged to be part of Vane’s history.

Links

(1) ‘Purple Haze: The Psychedelic Sound Of Nuclear Deterrence’, Michael Mulvihill, Inkstick

(2) Fylingdales Archive

(3) ‘Ukraine war: Russian tests and Putin’s threats recall the nuclear fears of the cold war’, Michael Mulvihill, The Conversation

(4) Worldly Noise And Electronic Atmospheres, One Key Magic, Cruel Nature Records

(5) ‘A British Guide to the End of the World’, BBC Arena, YouTube

(6) Military War and Security Research Group, Newcastle University