'Crossing No-Man's-Land and Back': A doctoral journey through art, war and the topographies of emptiness

Within months of the outbreak of war in 1914, the landscape of Flanders and Picardy had been divided into two fixed zones: a zone of known ground occupied by the British troops, and beyond, the enemy-held territory. By daylight the battlefield was deserted, combatants were hidden in a labyrinth of trenches and subterranean passageways; only at night could the strip of land that acted as a buffer between the two armies be explored. This thesis examines the effects of a war where the landscape, rather than the figure, had to convey the omni-directional face of conflict. It looks at a wide range of paintings and drawings produced on the battlefield, and the development of a pictorial language capable of describing the unique conditions of trench warfare. The appraisal of the battle landscape fell Into two distinct categories: one, that prioritised command and control of a hostile terrain by a method of fragmentation and analysis; the other, that revelled in the violation of the landscape and was fascinated by the destructive capabilities that were unleashed by fixed warfare. From these two appraisals came two very different aesthetics: the first (argued In Part One of the thesis) was an aesthetic of reason and control - Imposing onto the battle landscape a number of immutable directional laws, reducing the environment to a matrix of datum points and co-ordinates, unifying the terrain under the systematic spatial framework of one-point perspective.