Beautiful objects, dutiful things: waste, ruins and the stuff of war

AbstractThis article takes as its starting point the tension between objects and things in the early Second World War writing and painting of Paul Nash. By exploring a broad range of cultural artifacts—including film, fashion magazines, photographs, paintings—it demonstrates how Nash’s concerns with the materiality of airplanes, his favored mechanical object, reflect a broader wartime immersion in the imperatives of material culture. Nash transforms airplanes in two opposing ways: glorified objects become national subjects, patriotic agents; and desecrated objects are reduced to things. Moreover, it is argued that by attending to the reduction of airplanes to mechanical ruins—the transformation of military objects into things of waste—Nash, Cecil Beaton, and other image-makers ironically invoked John Bunyan’s muck-raker. While Bunyan derided the muck-raker for his obsession with material, not spiritual, things, in wartime the muck-raker’s materialist salvaging practices were embraced and encouraged, and, ...