Last of the Dreadnoughts
Thomas Bangsted Danish
Not on view
For Last of the Dreadnoughts, Bangsted traveled to Texas to photograph the last remaining American warship that once had "dazzle camouflage" covering its skin. Invented by a British Vorticist painter during World War I, dazzle camouflage was not meant to conceal the ship per se but to confuse the German enemy’s primitive optical range-finding devices about the Allied ships’ speed and direction. In this tour de force of digital manipulation, Bangsted "painted on" a made-up pattern of dazzle stripes based on photographs while also relocating the ship from its Texas port to a mysterious new setting (which required the artist to create the reflections in the water from scratch). Bangsted incisively wed two forms of technological legerdemain—the avant-garde (itself a military term) strategy of modernist abstraction-cum-obfuscation and contemporary digital sleight of hand.
