The tank changed the face of modern warfare, able to rampage over – or through – difficult terrain and shoot fucking great holes in buildings and people. Your average army general would like as many as possible, but the fly in the ointment is that they are really quite expensive. On-the-road prices for a nice German-built Leopard 2A6 start from about $6 million, fully-loaded models with the latest weaponry, heavy armour and air-con costing several million more. All very inconvenient when your country is a massive warmongering bastard but lots of its citizens can’t afford to eat. What to do?
Confuse your enemies with dummy tanks. Being built from wood, camouflaged fabric and a few nails, they cost a fraction of the price as the real thing, and are still useful for misdirecting the enemy’s bombs and causing the local army to think twice about heading in your direction. Italian artist Rä di Martino has long been interested in these mock-up machines, and was inspired to make her new video work Authentic News of Invisible Things after coming across archive footage of Lille’s citizens examining a tank left behind by the German army as they retreated in 1918. This led di Martino to look further at the history of dummy tanks, investigating their use in filmmaking and exploring the notion of fiction and reality. Her video recreates the scene, switching from black-and-white to colour film to reveal the artifice of the prop and the film’s creative techniques, and the work is accompanied by a series of archive images which are re-presented with the addition of materials used in the models’ construction. The show is currently running at London’s Copperfield Gallery and will continue until 13 February next year.
Rä di Martino
Authentic #12 (2014)
Carbon pigment print on cotton paper,
mahogany inserts and mahogany frame. 70 x 50cm
Courtesy Copperfield Gallery
Rä di Martino
Authentic #18 (2014)
Carbon pigment print on cotton paper,
watercolour . 28 x 20 cm
Courtesy Copperfield Gallery
Rä di Martino
Authentic News of Invisible Things
[Study for Dummy Tank #1], (2014)
Wood, screws
Courtesy Copperfield Gallery
Rä di Martino
Authentic News of Invisible Things (2014)
HD Video, 7′ (Still from video)
Courtesy Copperfield Gallery
Rä di Martino
Authentic #24 (2014)
Carbon pigment print on cotton paper,
watercolour. 32 x 25cm
Courtesy Copperfield Gallery
Rä di Martino
Authentic #14 (2014)
Carbon pigment print on cotton paper,
watercolour. 29 x 21 cm
Courtesy Copperfield Gallery
Rä di Martino
Authentic #13 (2014)
Carbon pigment print on cotton paper,
walnut inserts and walnut frame. 70 x 50cm
Courtesy Copperfield Gallery
