The Deployment of Art : The Imperial War Museum’s Artistic Records Committee, 1968–1982

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 the British Armed Forces (BAF) deployed in the North of Ireland as part of Operation Banner. 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 British military presence and activity in the North of Ireland after ‘Bloody Sunday,’ and later during Britain’s 1982 campaign to recapture the Falklands/Malvinas from Argentina (Operation Corporate). The two case studies are painter Ken Howard’s ARC commissions to record Operation Banner in 1973 and 1978 and illustrator Linda Kitson’s ARC commission to record the ‘Falklands Campaign’ 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 art history, museum studies, art and politics, and military and intelligence studies, as well as those studying the recent history of the North of Ireland and the Falklands/Malvinas war.