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CAMOUFLAGE CULTURES
Beyond the art of disappearance

Edited by
Ann Elias, Ross Harley and Nicholas Tsoutas
First published in 2015 by Sydney University Press
© Individual contributors 2015
© Sydney University Press 2015

Reproduction and Communication for other purposes

Except as permitted under the Act, no part of this edition may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
communicated in any form or by any means without prior written permission. All requests for reproduction or
communication should be made to Sydney University Press at the address below:

Sydney University Press

Fisher Library F03
University of Sydney NSW 2006
AUSTRALIA
Email: [email protected]
sydney.edu.au/sup

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Title: Camouflage cultures: beyond the art of disappearance / edited by Ann Elias, Ross Harley and
Nicholas Tsoutas
ISBN: 9781743324257 (paperback)
ISBN: 9781743324264 (ebook : epub)
ISBN: 9781743324271 (ebook : MOBI)
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Subjects: Art and camouflage.
Camouflage (Biology)
Art--Social aspects.
Other Authors/
Contributors: Elias, Ann Dirouhi, editor.
Harley, Ross, editor.
Tsoutas, Nicholas, editor.
Dewey Number: 751.4

From cover image: Jack in the Green (Lambretta-AGS 195 to Triumph-GVL2MXD), 2013 by Shaun Gladwell.
Courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery.

Back cover image: Hembras palito/Female sticks, 2010 by Maria Fernanda Cardoso. Archival pigment print on 300g
water colour paper. Courtesy of the artist.

Cover design by Miguel Yamin

Contents

Acknowledgments v
Introduction vii

1 Khaki to khaki (dust to dust): the ubiquity of camouflage in human experience 1

Roy R Behrens
2 Camouflage and mimesis – deception, evolutionary biology and imitation 17
Bernd Hüppauf
3 Zoos and camouflage 33
Ann Elias
4 Australian stick and leaf insects (Insecta, Phasmida): camouflage and natural 47
history
Paul D Brock & Jack W Hasenpusch
5 Mimicking the masters: a new age for camouflage design 65
Jonnie Morris
6 The origin of art: camouflage, anti-camouflage and de-camouflage in the 77
appropriation art of Imants Tillers
Ian McLean
7 The camouflage effect 87
Pamela Hansford
8 Light leak 101
Tanya Peterson
9 From Ghillie suit to glittering kowhaiwhai – contemporary New Zealand 115
artists deploy the camouflage aesthetic
Linda Tyler

iii
 CAMOUFLAGE CULTURES

10 Making visible, changing sides: the contradictory use of camouflage by artists 127
Xing Junqin and Ian Howard
Ian Howard and Brigitta Olubas
11 Interventions in seeing: surveillance, camouflage and the Cold War camera 147
Donna West Brett
12 Unmasking militarism: hegemony, naturalisation, camouflage 159
Ben Wadham and Amy Hamilton
13 Of mimicry and hipsters 171
Hsuan Hsu
14 Camouflage/fashion/performance: a case study of Leigh Bowery 183
Jacqueline Millner
15 Hiding in the cosmos 193
Nikos Papastergiadis

Afterword 201
Shifting ground
Ross Gibson
About the contributors 207
Index 213

iv
Acknowledgments

It is due to the generous support of Sydney College of the Arts (SCA) at the University of
Sydney, and the University of Sydney’s International Project Development office, that we
have been able to publish Camouflage cultures: beyond the art of disappearance. The editors
would like to thank all the kind people who assisted us to stage an international conference
and major exhibition of contemporary art at SCA in 2013, which led to the publication
of this book: the Dean, Professor Colin Rhodes, and Professor Brad Buckley (then Asso-
ciate Dean of Research) who provided seed funding; staff and volunteers who gave their
time and professional skills, especially Simon Baré, Liam Garstang, Professor Ross Gibson,
Priscilla Gundelach, Sophie Hague, Wendy Ju, Nerida Olson and Peggy Wallach. In addi-
tion, we thank the Vice-Chancellor of the University, Dr Michael Spence, for launching the
conference, Professor Jill Trewhella, Deputy Vice-Chancellor Research, for launching the
exhibition, and the International Project Development office for assisting with the book’s
publication. Many generous partners were involved in the project and we would like to
specially acknowledge the Australia Council for the Arts, the Ian Potter Foundation, The
Goethe-Institut, the University of Northern Iowa, and the University of Auckland.

v
Introduction

Camouflage is becoming a key topic and important critical concept in the 21st century.
Emerging out of a growing interest in the connections between areas such as ecology, evo-
lution, visual deception, and warfare, the number of publications dedicated to the subject
is steadily increasing. Historically, the study of camouflage has most commonly been as-
sociated with either military or natural history research frameworks. However, over the
past few years the number of critical perspectives emerging from this varied field have ex-
panded significantly. Following the ground-breaking work of Roy R Behrens (a contributor
to this volume), authors and academics in the United States and Britain have published re-
search that embraces film studies, design perspectives, psychology, aesthetics and popular
culture, as well as the more familiar areas of natural history and war studies. Most notable
among these are Neil Leach’s 2010 book Camouflage – a theoretical account of the psycho-
analytic and architectural components of camouflage that connect or mediate us and our
environment – and Hanna Shell’s careful tracing of the mediation of camouflage by means
of photography and cinema in her 2012 book, Hide and seek: camouflage, photography and
the media of reconnaissance.
The present publication continues this trajectory, bringing together researchers from
a variety of disciplines to shine new light on the way scholars and artists around the world
think about and work with this expanding field. It includes contributions by thinkers who
demonstrate that camouflage can usefully be considered beyond the politics of appearance,
beyond the art of disappearance, or beyond simple strategies of mimicry. The contributors
demonstrate a critical and insightful engagement with the concept of camouflage in ways
that expand the boundaries of how we think about its history, theory or artistic deploy-
ment. As practices of deception move across the visual field and into non-representational
modalities, contributors to this volume also point to an extended rubric of camouflage that
goes beyond the limits of nature and visual perception.
Camouflage cultures: beyond the art of disappearance can also be viewed as a contem-
porary sequel to the 2011 book by Ann Elias entitled Camouflage Australia: art, nature,
science and war. That work brought a broad historical perspective to our understanding of
camouflage by concentrating on the Australian artists and designers who dedicated their
service to 20th-century wartime projects of concealment and deception. By contrast, the
current volume is broader in conceptual scope and more contemporary in focus. As such,

vii
 CAMOUFLAGE CULTURES

our aim is to bring new insights, and to add another dimension to the broader fields of vi-
sual culture, contemporary art theory, and art history.
Contributors to this collection variously explore how camouflage theory was founded
in modernity and based on cultural preconceptions about the nature of perception, as
much as it was founded on historically grounded understandings of the ‘nature of nature’.
In an important sense, the authenticity of appearance and the possibility of its negation
was once considered the principal starting point for camouflage studies. Now, in a digitally
networked age of surveillance and counter-surveillance, the logic of those constructions is
being fundamentally transformed by pervasive networks and global systems of code. Un-
der these new material and cultural conditions, the centrality of figure-ground dynamics
and the primacy of perception in the visual field may not play the same ontological role
that they have in past understanding of how camouflage works in nature, culture and soci-
ety.
At the most general level, we take camouflage to mean strategic concealment and
exposure within physical, social and political contexts. Each of the contributors to the pre-
sent volume reflect upon important social and cultural aspects of this concealment and
exposure, which in turn sets the physical and social context for camouflage today – es-
pecially as it pertains to questions of surveillance, aesthetics, communities and animals.
Subsequently, the authors assembled here investigate the many perspectives and contradic-
tions that make camouflage a vital conceptual tool for analysing today’s complex sensory
world. Taken as a whole, this volume demonstrates a depth of understanding and rigor-
ous research that helps reveal camouflage as both a contemporary working process and an
arresting object of study in the 21st century. Camouflage cultures provides an invigorated
sense of why and how camouflage is important as part of a broader cultural framework.
Approaching this subject from the disciplines of art history and theory, art practice,
biology, cultural theory, literature and philosophy, this present volume greatly expands the
reach of camouflage’s cultural terrain. The result is a collection that makes a new and origi-
nal contribution to discussions about the role that physical, artistic, and social camouflage
plays in contemporary life. Indeed, the unique contribution this book makes comes from
the connections it draws between diverse disciplines whose intersections open up new ar-
eas of debate and dialogue about the study of camouflage in its many guises. This new field
is relevant not only to the specific disciplines that have a stake in creating the discourses
concerning the role and function of camouflage; it also opens up the area to more general
popular discussions that range from fashion to the military, from animals to philosophy, or
from sexuality to aesthetics. Each of the book’s contributors takes a different approach to
understanding and interpreting the significance of specific strategies of blending, assimila-
tion, invisibility and masking that can be found in contemporary society as much as they
can be found in nature or the military.
The book is conceptually framed by two different paradigms of thinking and research
regarding camouflage. The first relates to camouflage’s history and principles as they
emerged (in the context of modernity) out of cultural institutions dedicated to science,
art and war. Modern camouflage began with naturalists and zoologists, artists and design-
ers, military organisations and defence tacticians all trying (often for different reasons and
sometimes communally) to solve problems of static and dynamic disguise. The second
paradigm that frames this book raises questions about camouflage’s modernist principles
and proposes a new ontology of camouflage for the 21st century. Accordingly, this para-
digm poses a series of new questions to help frame the contemporary context: what forms

viii
 Introduction

of camouflage are required in an increasingly multi-modal, networked, electronic world?

How does the 21st-century ‘camouflagist’ mask contingent relationships in an era that
seems to be less about static objects and more about dynamic systems and codes that shift
through time and space?
Contributors to this book consciously juxtapose aesthetics, animals, war and surveil-
lance, as well as social institutions and popular communities. Their visions place hipster
mimicry in the United States alongside body mimicry in the life of the legendary perfor-
mer Leigh Bowery; a case study of animal visibility in zoos is thrown into relief by an
essay on surveillance in German war history; actant theory and contemporary critiques of
evolutionary theory butt up against gestalt and evolutionary biology; industrial design is
questioned by the current passion for biomimicry; one of Australia’s leading contemporary
artists, Imants Tillers, is spoken about for the first time alongside Abbott H. Thayer, Amer-
ica’s leading historical artist; the politics of camouflage in the context of cosmopolitanism
and globalisation is placed next to discussions concerning the politics of camouflage in bi-
cultural New Zealand; militaries in China and Korea are discussed alongside militaries in
Australia; and the reception of art as an act of camouflage and as a response to camouflage
aesthetics is considered in light of contemporary photography, sculpture and painting.
In short, Camouflage cultures provides a new perspective on the developing discourse
of camouflage. It asks what place the study of camouflage might have in art, science and
philosophy – especially if we critically interrogate the importance of the place of the ani-
mal in this shifting framework of camouflage. Through a series of particular case studies
relating to animal camouflage in zoos, in the wild, and as it is applied to human de-
sign, contributors provide detailed historical, philosophical, biological, animal-centred,
and design-based analysis that sheds new light on the world of contemporary art. Taken
together, the contributions contained in this volume chart the increasing importance of
camouflage as a way of conceptualising the social performance of camouflage through new
modes of mimicry in the 21st century.
Ann Elias, Ross Harley and Nicholas Tsoutas

ix
1
Khaki to khaki (dust to dust): the
ubiquity of camouflage in human
experience
Roy R Behrens

Surveillance and the seeing eye

In writings about camouflage, it is often said that an object’s visibility is primarily depen-
dent on the extent to which it stands apart from a setting or surrounding. Known as a
figure-ground relationship, it underscores the notion that we only experience a ‘thing’ in
relation to other components. In the words of Zen philosopher Alan Watts, all experience
‘is like the rainbow, for there is no phenomenon “rainbow” except where there is a certain
relationship of sun, moisture in the atmosphere, and observer’ (Watts 1969, 65).
Camouflage is no exception. Like a rainbow, it too can only be witnessed when an ap-
propriate set of relations exists between a means of observation and an entity that might
better survive from not being seen or, at least, from being confusing to see. ‘Camouflage’,
said Swiss zoologist Adolf Portmann, ‘implies a seeing eye from which to hide’ (Portmann
1959, 9). To observe, we partake in surveillance, and, to a great extent, the history of cam-
ouflage is a dance of dynamic adjustments – a perpetual pas de deux between that which
hides and that which seeks (cf. Shell 2012).
A recent familiar example of this is the initially puzzling adoption by deer hunters of
outfits that make dual use of background matching patterns and high visibility safety or-
ange. For purposes of camouflage, it would at first appear to be counterproductive to dress
in a blatantly visible hue. As it turns out, the ‘visual world’ of a deer differs substantially
from that of a human being. It is now assumed that deer are oblivious of (or colour-blind
to) safety orange, and yet (like humans) they can be fooled by patterns that simulate green-
brown foliage. As a result, two purposes can co-exist in one surface pattern: high visibility
conspicuousness (safety orange, invisible to the eyes of a deer, but conspicuous to our
own), and low visibility or blending camouflage (green-brown foliage patterns, which dupe
both the predator and the prey).
If necessity is the mother of invention, the mother of modern wartime camouflage
is technology-aided surveillance. For example, it is widely agreed that what we now call
‘camouflage’ was first promoted by artists serving in the French Army in the early years
of World War I (Kahn 1984; Behrens 2009; Coutin 2012). While there is some confusion
about which individual initiated the idea, the reasons are not in contention. Soldiers as-
signed to artillery teams were dismayed by the ease with which airborne enemy spotters

1
 CAMOUFLAGE CULTURES

could find and report the positions of their field artillery. In response, they proposed two
countermeasures: the application of disruptive (or ‘broken colour’) patterns on the surface
of their cannons, and the donning by those in artillery teams of sinister-looking hooded
robes, called gagoules (they closely resembled the outfit worn by a French crime novel
character called Fantomas (c. 1911) or darkened paint-stained versions of Ku Klux Klan
ceremonial robes).
By applying broken colour to artillery, the camoufleurs’ intention was to make their
positions harder to spot (by subverting the continuity of the cannon’s shape through high
difference disruption). At the same time, by wearing dingy hooded robes, their goal was to
prevent themselves from standing out (by merging visually with the ground through high
similarity blending, or background matching). In relation to surveillance, all this came to-
gether because of the adoption by both sides of the conflict of concurrent innovations:
the airplane (which allowed for distant observation from overhead), long-range artillery
(which enabled strikes from miles away), and wireless telegraphy (by which aerial ob-
servers could report the locations of targets).
An equally crucial contributor was aerial photography, which made it possible to sur-
vey the battlefield through the non-human visual filters of the camera and photographic
film. In addition, it allowed for exacting comparisons of a sequence of views of the same
location over an expanse of time, which all too often gave away the subterfuge of ground-
based artist-camoufleurs. Modern camouflage adapted to these and other innovations – all
of which were ‘game-changers’, in the sense of redefining what constitutes the ‘seeing eye’
from which one attempts to hide.
Long-range artillery, airplanes, wireless telegraphy and aerial photography: all these
things we now regard as ‘technological innovations.’ But throughout history, camouflage
has also had to adapt to changes that were far less sophisticated – even non-technological,
but no less fundamental. Of these, of particular significance is the point of observation of
Portmann’s ‘seeing eye’ (with or without technological aids).
In the 1890s, far in advance of Portmann’s book, the American artist and naturalist
Abbott H Thayer (who is now commonly said to have been the ‘father of camouflage’) fer-
vently insisted on the importance of the viewer’s observation point, which is the source
of surveillance (cf. Thayer 1909; Behrens 2011b; Post 2013; Stevens & Merilaita 2011).
Short of what we now regard as rigorous scientific proof, Thayer validated his theories
by providing demonstrations for groups of naturalists (see Figure 1.1). These were mostly
well-received, yet participants were at times dismayed by having to crouch down on their
stomachs to observe his models from the presumed stalking point of view of a predatory
animal. When Thayer’s audience hesitated, no doubt it was partly because of the risk of
soiling their clothing, but also (and, some think, far more tellingly) because it required that
civilised people adopt the unmanly position of an inferior ‘animal’, and not – as the Great
Chain of Being assumed – the dignified upright stature of a ‘human being.’
A similar point has been made by art historian Ann Elias in her studies of the camou-
flage research of UK-born Australian zoologist William Dakin, who was clearly influenced
by Thayer. For the dual purpose of observing while remaining unobserved themselves,
Dakin advised World War II Australian soldiers to adopt (in Elias’s words) ‘the horizon-
tal position of lower evolutionary animals using postures such as crouching and crawling
which were recommended in war but not recommended in everyday civilised life because
of their association with lower social types, including “servants and savages”’ (Elias 2008,
254).

2
 1 Khaki to khaki (dust to dust)

Figure 1.1 Various visual examples pertaining to the research of Abbott H Thayer, including:
(a) the use of shading (a ‘drop shadow’) to produce the illusion of a solid, dimensional form,
as illustrated in Solomon J Solomon, The practice of oil painting and of drawing. New York: JB
Lippincott, 1910, 27 (public domain); (b) a sequence of four circles (left to right) showing flat-
ness, shading, countershading, and the subsequent nondescript flatness (author’s diagram); (c)
countershading in the surface coloring of a mouse as shown in a 19th century engraving (pub-
lic domain); and (d) news photographs of three interactive demonstrations (devised by Thayer

3
 CAMOUFLAGE CULTURES

and his son) of coincident disruption in nature (figure disruption and blending combined),
published in Amos T. Earling, ‘Ships that pass in the daytime’ in Illustrated World, Vol. 31
(1919), 202–15 (public domain).

In the first half of the 20th century, ground-breaking vision-related research was under-
taken by Adelbert Ames II, an American artist and optical physiologist who had been a
student of William James at Harvard. It is of curious interest that two of James’s sons (Billy
and Aleck) wanted to be artists, and had studied painting with Abbott Thayer in the years
when he and his son Gerald were preparing a book on Concealing coloration in the animal
kingdom (Thayer 1909, 1918). In later years, Aleck James was also a close friend of Ames,
who spoke at Aleck’s funeral.
As for Ames himself, he was not assigned to camouflage during World War I, but the
army did assign him to aerial reconnaissance and to research pertaining to optics. At the
war’s end, he abandoned painting and devoted the rest of his life to optical physiology and
perceptual psychology. He eventually became well-known for the Ames demonstrations
in perception, a series of hands-on laboratory set-ups by which he showed persuasively
that human vision can easily be deceived, especially when a setting is viewed through a
fixed monocular point of view (Ittelson 1968; Behrens 2010). As had been anticipated by
German scientist Hermann von Helmholtz in the 19th century, Ames confirmed that any
number of oddly misshapen room interiors (he jokingly called them ‘cockeyed rooms’)
could appear to be perfectly normal – providing each resulted in the same ‘retinal image’, a
condition that could be assured by an invariant monocular peephole.
Today, when Ames’s research is cited, the set-up inevitably featured is his well-known
‘distorted room’, in which people seem to shrink or grow as they move from one corner of
the room to another (Figure 1.2a and 1.2b). In that demonstration, the right interior side
wall is one half the size of the left wall, and the rear wall – although it looks rectangular – is
in fact a trapezoid, turned toward us at an angle. In recent years, the Ames Room has been
included in a routine by magicians Penn and Teller, in a television commercial for Quaker
Oats cereal by Errol Morris, and in the opening sequence of a 2010 HBO Films docud-
rama (titled Temple Grandin) about a well-known animal scientist who had been inspired
by Ames’ research early in her student life.
Few people realise that Ames produced about 20 other demonstrations, including a
misshapen window that looks like a normal rectangular shape when angled and viewed in
perspective (Figure 1.2c). Ames called it the ‘rotating trapezoid window’, because its actual
shape is not rectangular but trapezoidal, and in fact its shape is all but identical to that of
the rear wall of his distorted room (Ittelson 1968).
Another Ames demonstration is the ‘architect’s room’ (Figure 1.2d). To experience
this, the subject is instructed to look through a peephole, to observe what initially seems
to consist of a simple, square-shaped room interior, with four windows on the rear wall,
and various other windows on each of the side walls. However, when the same interior
is viewed from any other position, it is obvious that the actual space is long and narrow
– not at all square in proportion – and, in truth, two of the windows on the facing wall
are ‘anamorphic’ or ‘skewed perspective’ shapes that have been cleverly painted on the
side walls. Only when viewed through the peephole do these two aberrant windows fit in
(Behrens 2010).

4
 1 Khaki to khaki (dust to dust)

Figure 1.2 Examples of perspective-based distortion in experiments in psychology and in

WWI-era camouflage, including: (a) an Ames distorted room, as viewed through the peephole
(from Ittelson 1968, public domain) and (b) from the side (author’s diagram); (c) the rotating
trapezoid window (author’s diagram); (d) two views of the architect’s room (Ittelson 1968,
public domain); (e) an American newspaper cartoon (c. 1918), showing a ‘forced perspective’
trick sometimes used (with little success) by camoufleurs (public domain); and (f) the same
disruptive pattern (called ‘dazzle camouflage’) applied to two different US ships (c. 1919),
from Naval History and Heritage Command (public domain).

5
 CAMOUFLAGE CULTURES

While it was Ames who devised these demonstrations, the perspective distortions on
which they depend have a rich ancestral past. At the very least, they can be traced to the
sketchbooks of Leonardo da Vinci, who made note of his realisation one day of what he
called ‘accidental perspective’, or, as it soon became commonly known, ‘anamorphosis’ (in
visual art) and ‘forced perspective’ (in theatre stage design). In recent years, it has regained
popularity in online-posted photographs of illusionistic ‘street art’, in which chalk-drawn
sidewalk paintings look like actual dimensional objects, when viewed from a specified an-
gle. There is a long tradition of this in Western painting, and by the time that World War
I began (almost 20 years before Ames constructed his own demonstrations) those artists
who were camoufleurs were well-acquainted with comparable form-distortion techniques.
Indeed, wartime drawings and photographs show that WWI camouflage artists made
panoramic painted screens (most of which seem comical now) in which phony railroad
tracks and crudely-made perspective screens were intended to trick the observer (Figure
1.2e). But they cannot have fooled very many, for the same reason that Leonardo rejected
anamorphosis as a practicable option for artists: like the Ames demonstrations, trompe
l’oeil forced perspective tricks only work optimally from the viewpoint they were designed
for.
Among Ames’ admirers was the Viennese-born British art historian Ernst H Gom-
brich, who once compared the Ames laboratory set-ups to looking at constellations at
night (Gombrich 1982, 207). If observed from a location in a remote region of the universe,
most likely we would never see the star groups that we know so well. It is because we are
Earth-bound that, throughout history, humans have predictably tended to see connections
among nearby stars, producing constellations (or gestalts) that we know as Orion, Gem-
ini, Taurus and so on. Amazingly, the seven stars of the Big Dipper are seen as ‘belonging
together’ despite the unfathomable distance between, for example, the farthest star Alkaid
(which is 210 light-years from the Earth) and Mizar, the star adjacent to it (the distance of
which is 88 light-years). To allude to Alan Watts again, constellations are akin to rainbows
in the night.
During WWI, resourceful use was made of forced perspective in frantic Allied naval
attempts to undermine the cat-and-mouse exchange between German submarines (called
U-boats) and the slow and all too vulnerable prey of British and American merchant ships
(Behrens 2011a). When within the vicinity of other vessels, for their own safety U-boats
cautiously stayed submerged and maintained a considerable distance between themselves
and their potential victims. The U-boat’s standard ‘seeing eye’ was (of course) its periscope,
a cyclopean surveillance device that could rise above the surface while the U-boat re-
mained under water. But a raised periscope was itself conspicuous (in part because it left a
wake as it cut across the water) so the time duration of its use was restricted to brief incre-
ments of 30 seconds or less.
Within such rigid time constraints – not to mention ocean storms, fog, haze, glare,
water on the periscope lens, and the ceaseless jostling up-and-down of the U-boat and the
targeted ship, all of which undermine accuracy – German U-boat gunners (restricted to
their own monocular peepholes) tried to determine three critical facts: range, course and
speed. In other words, how far away is the targeted ship? In what direction is it headed?
And how fast is it traveling? In essence, their goal was to try to predict the position of the
target ship when the torpedo eventually crossed its path.
Obviously, torpedo gunners had to aim ahead of or ‘lead’ the target, but not in the
pedestrian way of a duck hunter. Instead they had to calculate (as quickly and carefully

6
 1 Khaki to khaki (dust to dust)

as possible) the probable future location of the targeted vessel. Despite ongoing improve-
ments in periscope design, even the German Navy agreed (as confirmed by captured
documents) that range, course and speed could be calculated ‘with difficulty only or not at
all.’ However ardent their efforts, it was essentially guesswork – a process far less certain,
as others have noted, than Hollywood movies would have us believe (Figure 1.2f).
Looking back, it may help to suggest a comparative link between a U-boat commander
(peering one-eyed through a periscope) and a subject who is looking through the peephole
of an Ames demonstration. The two situations are reasonably parallel, since both are in-
structive examples of how easily vision can be fooled. At the same time, it is important not
to forget that while naval ‘skewed perspective’ schemes were adopted by the British as early
as 1917, the first of the Ames demonstrations were not proposed and constructed until the
mid-1930s.
As that sequence of events suggests, other artists and scientists, years in advance of
Ames’ research, were exploring ideas related to his for the purpose of camouflage. One
of the leading contributors to this was Everett Longley Warner, an American Impres-
sionist painter. Coming from different social classes, Warner and Ames were most likely
unacquainted although both were stationed in Washington DC (in the navy and army re-
spectively) in optics-related assignments.
What is certain is that Warner was in contact with Abbott Thayer (they even collabo-
rated briefly on a botched attempt at ship camouflage), and that Ames (through the library
of his sister and brother-in-law) was acquainted with Thayer’s writings about animal cam-
ouflage. In 1917, when the US Navy chose the best, most effective camouflage schemes for
protecting merchant ships, a proposal by Everett Warner was among the top six submis-
sions and was sanctioned for official use. Soon after, he was given a second-tier leadership
role in the US Navy’s new Camouflage Section, in the course of which he supervised a unit
of artist-camoufleurs assigned to its Design Subsection in Washington DC.
As World War I subsided, restrictions were gradually lifted and Warner was able to
publish a handful of popular articles on his wartime activities as a ship camoufleur. In a
1919 essay on ‘The science of marine camouflage design’, he compared his unit’s most fruit-
ful approach to ship camouflage (known then as ‘dazzle camouflage’) to the procedure of
making a physically distorted room appear to be perfectly normal, or a standard rectangu-
lar room appear to be distorted. All this can be achieved, wrote Warner, short of actually
building a room, simply by applying ‘op art wallpaper’ (my term), using forced perspective.
According to Warner, this was the most effective means of designing ship camouflage, so
much so that, he noted, when ‘you have thoroughly grasped this idea, marine camouflage
holds no secrets for you’ (Warner 1919).
In brief (keeping in mind that the truth is more complex than this), it enabled Warner’s
designers to make an angled ship appear to be perpendicular, or, conversely, a perpendicu-
lar ship appear to be headed at any angle. It was claimed by experts at the time that an error
in course estimation of as little as ten to eleven degrees could potentially undermine the
calculations of a torpedo gunner, while, according to empirical tests undertaken at MIT
in 1919, the most effective dazzle ship designs could result in far more significant errors –
sometimes as great as 58 degrees (cf. Blodgett 1919) (Figure 1.3).

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 CAMOUFLAGE CULTURES

Figure 1.3 It is commonly asserted that the effectiveness of WWI dazzle camouflage cannot be verified,
because it was never empirically tested. On the contrary, quantitative laboratory tests were done on
painted ship models at MIT in 1919, by Leo S Blodgett (Blodgett 1919). In the most successful,
perspective-based distortion schemes, he found course estimation errors as great as 58 degrees. Shown
here are restored diagrams of three of the models. © Roy R Behrens, 2013.

Community and privacy

The German equivalent of ‘figure and ground’ is ding und stoff, while the phrase for the
traits that contribute to that is dingcharakter und stoffcharakter. How is it that we experi-
ence ‘things’ in contrast to surrounding ‘stuff ’? When physicist Paul Weiss addressed that
question, he replied that it ‘stems partly from a biological heritage, which makes focusing
on ‘things’, such as prey, enemies, or obstacles, a vital necessity; partly from cultural tra-

8
 1 Khaki to khaki (dust to dust)

dition; and partly from sheer curiosity, which draws our attention and interest to limited
‘objects’’ (Weiss 1969, 5).
Like you, I even see my ‘self ’ this way. ‘I am I’ and, to follow, I am not ‘not-I.’ Or, I am
‘self ’ as distinguished from ‘others.’ We typically regard our ‘selves’ as permeable identities
in a bouillabaisse of ubiquitous ‘stuff ’, a surrounding that seems to a newborn, in the fa-
mous words of William James, like ‘a blooming, buzzing confusion.’ One wonders if this
might also explain, as Ernst Schachtel suggested, why we are all afflicted by ‘childhood am-
nesia’, leaving us with little or no memory of the first years of our lives, because we lacked
the ‘handles’ then – the linguistic categories – that enable us to ‘grasp’ events (Schachtel
1959). In recent years, increased attention has been paid to the various forms of ‘amnesia’
at the opposite end of life, including gradual memory loss, senility, dementia, and the hor-
rifying ordeal of Alzheimer’s. If the boundaries of our figural ‘self ’ are blurred when we are
newborns, perhaps we should not be surprised that the limits of our ‘self ’ grow thin – once
again – as we march to the end of existence.
As adults, we use hackneyed phrases like ‘dust to dust’ to imply that at birth we some-
how spring from naught; that we metamorphically evolve through infancy and childhood;
live out our ritualistic lives as corporeal upright adults; then slowly – or, just as often, cat-
astrophically – ’deconstruct’; and (at last) are literally ‘disembodied’ in the process that we
dread as death. Instead of saying ‘dust to dust’, it may be more in tune to say ‘khaki to khaki’,
since it seems as if our lives consist of time-based re-enactments of a spectrum of nuanced
relations between figure and ground, some or all of which pertain to varieties of camou-
flage.
In 1960, when Alexander Liberman reported on his interview with French painter Fer-
nand Leger (whose WWI companions had served as camoufleurs), he recalled that the
artist was wearing ‘a checkered shirt, and the violent pattern of his clothes against the vi-
olent pattern of his paintings made him seem like a chameleon’ (Liberman 1960, 189).
According to R. Tripp Evans, whenever American Regionalist painter Grant Wood dressed
in typical street clothes, instead of farmer’s overalls, he could easily vanish in public. ‘Such
an uncanny talent for blending into the woodwork … ‘, continues Tripp, ‘was matched by
a lifelong habit of self-deprecation’ (Evans 2010, 3–4). Wood even had a pet chameleon in
his studio, and, during World War I, served briefly in the army as a camoufleur, in a unit
whose insignia was an embroidered yellow chameleon.
Architectural theorist Neil Leach, in his influential book called Camouflage, proposed
that we ‘are governed by a chameleon-like urge to blend in with our surroundings – to
“camouflage” ourselves within our environment’ (Leach 2006, ix; cf. Hsu 2006). This is true
enough, but there may be an opposite side of the coin. Think back to the earlier writings
of another architect, Christopher Alexander, who spoke of our tandem proclivities toward
‘community’ and ‘privacy’, by which he hypothesised that not only do we need to blend
with our surroundings (to belong to a community), we also need to distinguish ourselves
as gated entities (our penchant for privacy), as a way to affirm our uniqueness (cf. Alexan-
der 1964; Chermayeff and Alexander 1965).
‘Sometimes I dress to fit in’, writes art historian James Elkins, ‘so that I can blend with
the crowd and not attract attention’, while at other times, ‘I need to stand out; I want to be
noticed’ (Elkins 1997, 82). Alluding to Alexander again, we are in some ways a subset of a
larger unit (a family, a city, a nation, the world) while, in another sense, we are a self-reliant
‘whole.’ To use a term coined by Arthur Koestler, we flourish best as a ‘holon’, in which we
are both part and whole, both integrative and self-assertive (cf. Koestler 1967). This is true

9
 CAMOUFLAGE CULTURES

Figure 1.4 Two demonstrations of reversible figure-ground, based on comparable diagrams by psycholo-
gist Julian E. Hochberg (cf. Hochberg 1964) (author’s diagram).

of all organisms, Koestler argued, a belief that was foreshadowed by Frank Lloyd Wright’s
insistence on ‘organic form’ in architecture, on the holonic interrelation between a man-
made structure and its site, a building and its (literal) ground. To paraphrase Wright, a
house should not be on a hill – it should instead be of a hill. To follow, a man should not
live on the earth, he should instead live of the earth (Behrens 2002).
In thinking about figure-ground relationships, an image that may spring to mind is a
pair of diagrams that accompanied his various writings about human vision by American
psychologist Julian E Hochberg (Hochberg 1964). These were published about fifty years
ago (maybe earlier), so by now they are hardly surprising. But back then they were a novel,
less doctrinaire way to portray gestalt psychologist Edgar Rubin’s ‘vase or faces’ diagram,
his all-too-familiar example of ‘reversible figure-ground.’ In textbooks prior to Hochberg’s,
this had been illustrated by a flat graphic of a black vase against a white background, or of
two white profiles set against a black background. It was Hochberg’s innovation to recon-
figure these as three-dimensional silhouette cut-outs, as if they had been made today using
the layers option in Adobe Photoshop.
It is especially instructive to look at the second stage of this, in which the ‘figure’ is a
cut-out hole through which we observe the ‘ground’ (in this case, a literal background). In
the second half of the 20th century, this was a familiar surrealist technique among artists
because of its frequent use by the Belgian painter René Magritte. But that too has its prece-
dents. In the late 19th century, it was common for newspapers and magazines to feature
‘puzzle pictures’ in which a shape that initially looks like an area of little consequence be-
came, by a switch of attention, a significant, meaningful figure. In one widely-published

10
 1 Khaki to khaki (dust to dust)

example, at first we see what seems to be an image of trees on the Island of Elba – and then
by a switch of attention, the space between the trees becomes the profile of Napoleon in
exile. In another, Abraham Lincoln, on horseback, rides through a benign grove of trees –
and then, suddenly, the space between the trees becomes the ghostly figure of his assassin,
John Wilkes Booth.
In the mid-1890s, as Abbott Thayer struggled to understand protective colouration in
nature, and later, to adapt his findings to military camouflage, the New Hampshire painter-
naturalist was all but completely oblivious to signs of the onslaught of modernism. He had
no interest in cubism, vorticism or surrealism, but he was an avid follower of the daily
newspapers, their cartoons, jokes and puzzles. Surely these influenced him (years in ad-
vance of the work of Magritte) as he and his son Gerald laboured to complete their book
Concealing coloration in the animal kingdom, first published in 1909 (Thayer 1909, 1918).
Among its indelible contents is a two-page demonstration of the concealment of a cop-
perhead snake in the context of a floor of leaves. In the book, the page on which the snake
appears is preceded by a blank page that has a cut-out stencil silhouette which, when su-
perimposed on the painting, reveals the shape and placement of the snake – in essence, the
stencil extracts or ‘un-embeds’ the figure from the noise of the background it hides in.
Abbott and Gerald Thayer repeatedly used this approach as they devised demonstra-
tions of animal camouflage for exhibits at European and US museums (Figure 1.1d). The
elder Thayer had used it in earlier essays in which he insisted that the most effective cam-
ouflage was that in which the animal’s surface pattern was (to quote one of his biographers)
‘a generalization or distillation of the features of those physical settings in which the an-
imal was commonly found’ (Anderson, 1982, 116). Unfortunately, for this Thayer coined
the phrase ‘background picturing’, which resulted in undue confusion because he surely
did not mean a literal picture of the animal’s habitat, but instead, as his son later clarified,
something far more fleeting – a generic, abstract ‘picture-pattern.’
To demonstrate this, Abbott Thayer made cut-out stencil silhouettes of birds, skunks,
antelopes, zebras and even indigenous Native American warriors, whose ‘war paint’ he
believed to be irrefutable proof of his theory.
In adapting natural camouflage for wartime purposes, Thayer took an additional, log-
ical step. In a 1918 essay, he proposed a simple, reliable way for soldiers (or anyone) to
come up with impromptu camouflage schemes. To determine the optimal camouflage for
any creature – a ruffed grouse, for example – Thayer recommended that one ‘has only to
cut out a stencil of the soldier, ship, cannon or whatever figure he wishes to conceal, and
look through the stencil from the viewpoint under consideration, to learn just what cos-
tume from that viewpoint could most tend to conceal this figure.’ By the time this essay
was published, World War I was ending, and camouflage was no longer a funding priority.
However, when the same concerns resurfaced during World War II, Australian artist-cam-
oufleurs, including the Sydney Camouflage Group, returned to conducting experiments
with the use of cut-out stencils (Elias, 2011, 51–2).

Aesthetics and animals

In the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, there is a small watercolour painting by
Gerald Thayer, about 20 inches square, titled Male ruffed grouse in the forest (Figure 1.5).
At the time of its acquisition, an art critic in the New York Tribune described it as a ‘con-

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 CAMOUFLAGE CULTURES

Figure 1.5 Gerald H Thayer, Male ruffed grouse in the forest (1907–08). Watercolour on paper. 19.75
inches high × 20 inches wide. Thayer produced this image as an illustration for his book, Concealing col-
oration in the animal kingdom (1909), Plate II, 38 (public domain). The original artwork is in the
Metropolitan Museum of Art.

summate work … one of the most brilliant things of this kind since Dürer drew his famous
hare’ (Cortissoz, 1917, 3). No one could have known it then, but this exhaustively detailed
painting was the high point in the art career of Gerald Thayer, whose woefully tragic life
would end in 1939. That extraordinary painting, which took him six months to complete,
is surely the finest pictorial work in his and his father’s magnificent book.
As the painting’s title indicates, portrayed is the elaborate feathered attire of a ruffed
grouse, encountered in a woodland setting. The grouse is completely motionless (which
is a common means of defence among many animals) for the same reason that the Ames
distorted room works best from a rigid, ‘frozen’ one-eyed view. Motion is a great spoiler of
camouflage, and if the grouse moves even a muscle, it will be quickly given away. Gerald

12
 1 Khaki to khaki (dust to dust)

Thayer’s painting looks as if it were painted from life, but in fact (accordingly to the artist)
it ‘was painted from woodland photographs, etc., and from a stuffed grouse in a house with
lighting artificially arranged to suit the bird’s countershading’.
By countershading (also known as ‘Thayer’s law’), Gerald is referring to his father’s
initial contention (in the mid-1890s) that it is a survival advantage for animals to have
light-coloured undersides, with darker colouring toward the top (Figs. 1a, b and c). As
all artists know, by using the technique of shading (which makes shapes lighter at the
top, and gradually darker toward the base), flat shapes drawn or painted can appear solid
and three-dimensional, to protrude from the surface on which they are drawn (Behrens,
2011b). Today, when we work on computers, we typically make this happen by using ‘drop
shadows.’ We are susceptible to this trick, according to neuroscientists, because the human
brain ‘comes in the box’ with a default setting by which we instinctively always assume that
the source of light is overhead. Shading takes advantage of that; as does countershading (or
inverse shading) because it counteracts or cancels out the effects of shading, and by that
makes a form appear less dimensional, less ‘thing-like’, and less solid.
Gerald Thayer’s grouse painting is extraordinary, so much so that it ought to be
adopted by camouflage scholars as an occupational mascot, much like the army camou-
fleurs in WWI adopted the chameleon. Beyond its artistic achievement, his painting is an
‘object lesson’ in the most fundamental principles of camouflage (natural and military), ax-
ioms that his father described as the ‘laws of disguise.’
Inadvertently, it is also a masterful lesson about other primal aspects of human vision,
aspects that were first spelled out by the gestalt psychologists in the decade after Thayer’s
death. Those Berlin-based psychologists referred to such tendencies as ‘perceptual organiz-
ing principles’ and conducted extensive experiments with similarity grouping, proximity
grouping, continuity, closure and so on. In 1954, one of their prominent students, Harvard
psychologist and art theorist Rudolf Arnheim, published a pivotal ground-breaking book
that brought all this together, titled Art and visual perception: a psychology of the creative
eye (Arnheim 1954).
This essay began with a passage from Swiss zoologist Adolf Portmann, and it ends now
with a second quote from the same author. In his book on animal camouflage, Portmann
sums up the relations between camouflage and vision, which he regards as approximate
parallels to disguise and display. While ‘disguise and display are opposites’, he writes, they
are not incompatible, but simply ‘two ends of the same field – here the field of vision’ (Port-
mann 1959, 9).
In much the same way, vision is not incompatible with concealment or confusion; they
are simply two opposing poles of the same continuum. Display is the figure; disguise is the
ground. Vision reveals, but, in doing so, it also necessarily hides. Camouflage conceals, but
it also displays what it isn’t.
In fact, Thayer’s laws of disguise are all but synonymous with the gestalt psychologists’
perceptual organising principles (cf. Behrens 1998). They are reliable tricks of the trade
that have been exploited for centuries by artists, poets, pickpockets, magicians, comedians,
theatre set designers, golf course architects, fashion designers, duplicitous office-seekers –
and, of course, by camoufleurs.

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References

Alexander C (1964). Notes on the synthesis of form. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Anderson R (1982). Abbott Handerson Thayer. Exhibition catalogue. Syracuse, NY: Everson Museum.
Arnheim R (1954). Art and visual perception: a psychology of the creative eye. Berkeley: University of Cal-
ifornia Press.
Behrens RR (1998). Art, design and gestalt theory. Leonardo, 31(4): 299–303.
Behrens RR (2002). False colors: art, design and modern camouflage. Dysart, IA: Bobolink Books.
Behrens RR (2009). Camoupedia: a compendium of research on art, architecture and camouflage. Dysart,
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tion (pp41–44). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Behrens RR (Ed.) (2011a). Ship shape: a dazzle camouflage sourcebook. Dysart, IA: Bobolink Books.
Behrens RR (2011b). Nature’s artistry: Abbott H. Thayer’s assertions about camouflage in art, war and
nature. In M Stevens & S Merilaita (Eds). Animal camouflage: mechanisms and function (pp87–100).
Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press.
Blodgett LS (1919). Ship camouflage. Thesis. Cambridge, MA: MIT.
Chermayeff S and C Alexander (1965). Community and privacy: notes toward an architecture of human-
ism. New York: Anchor Books.
Cortissoz R (1917) The personal accent in American art today. In New York Tribune, (April 13), 3.
Coutin C (2012). Tromper l’ennemi: l’invention du camouflage moderne en 1914–1918. Paris: Éditions
Pierre de Taillac et Ministère de la Défense.
Elias A (2008). William Dakin on camouflage in nature and war. Journal of Australian Studies. 22(2):
251–63.
Elias A (2011). Camouflage Australia: art, nature, science and war. Sydney: Sydney University Press.
Elkins J (1997). The object stares back: on the nature of seeing. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Evans RT (2010). Grant Wood: a life. New York: Random House.
Gombrich EH (1982) The image and the eye: further studies in the psychology of pictorial representation.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Hochberg JE (1964). Perception. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
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Ittelson WH (1968). The Ames demonstrations in perception. New York: Hafner.
Kahn EL (1984). The neglected majority: ‘les camoufleurs’, art history, and World War I. Lanham, NY:
University Press of America.
Koestler A (1967). The ghost in the machine. New York: Macmillan.
Leach N (2006). Camouflage. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Liberman A (1960). The artist in his studio. London: Thames and Hudson.
Portmann A (1959). Animal camouflage. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Post A (Ed) (2013). Abbott Handerson Thayer: a beautiful law of nature. Exhibition catalogue. Washing-
ton, DC: Gold Leaf Studios.
Schachtel EG (1959). Metamorphosis: on the development of affect, perception, attention and memory.
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Shell HR (2012). Hide and seek: camouflage, photography and the media of reconnaissance. New York:
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Cambridge University Press.
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Thayer GH (1909, 1918). Concealing coloration in the animal kingdom. New York: Macmillan.
Warner EL (1919). The science of marine camouflage design. In Transactions of the Illuminating Engi-
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Watts A (1969). The two hands of god: the myths of polarity. New York: Collier Books.
Weiss PA (1969). The living system: determinism stratified. In A Koestler and JR Smythies (Eds). Beyond
reductionism (pp 3–55). Boston: Beacon Press.

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2
Camouflage and mimesis – deception,
evolutionary biology and imitation
Bernd Hüppauf

Mimesis and camouflage

Camouflage needs to be linked to mimesis. Mimesis and camouflage are abstract theoret-
ical concepts, tacitly related to each other. They refer to opposing relationships to reality.
Camouflage is deception yet cannot be understood without a concept of mimetic realism.
They place emphasis on confidence and distrust, respectively. While designating opposi-
tions, they also refer to identical techniques of relating to the world, resulting in repetition
and creativity.
While the term camouflage was not used before the 19th century, mimesis can be
traced back to the origin of European literature and philosophy. From Plato on, mimesis
has been a concept for a disciplined relationship to reality (Auerbach 1953; Gebauer &
Wulf 1992; Halliwell 2002). It has been defined in opposition to the anarchy of magic and
in close proximity to realism and naturalism. The philosophical theory of mimesis created
the framework for reality as realisation of the three ideals of truth, beauty, and the good. It
encompasses terms such as imitation and imitatio, representation, replication and assimi-
lation, and approximation. In Homer and the Bible, it has been argued, mimesis has been
constitutive for creating order and, as Girard maintains, it is an order of the self in relation
to others (Girard 1999).
Mimesis is an ambiguous term. It is at the same time cognition and evaluation. Its cog-
nitive result is imitation. There is no imitation without difference. To describe an object in
terms of mimesis is to acknowledge that there is no identity. It is not the thing itself. We
call toy animals realistic, but not a zoo. If mimetic imitation were to be wholly at one with
what it represents, it would cease to be a representation. A text that would succeed in mak-
ing its words ‘become’ the animal they describe would be an animal breeder. Language is
real, as real as a living animal, and this genuine reality is precisely the reason why it cannot
be an animal. In this sense, all products of culture, including the most realist art, cannot be
thought of without a gap of untruth.
The fact of deception is most obvious when an artist includes details that are redun-
dant such as a precise fold in a frog’s skin in order to signal an intention: ‘This is a realist
image.’ Realistic mimesis aims at an ‘effet de réel’ (Roland Barthes). Contrary to common

17
 CAMOUFLAGE CULTURES

understanding and propagated objectives, it can be called calculated deception. The differ-
ence creates the gap for the emergence of two distinct implications.
(1) Mimesis means more than realistic representation and more than sensuous effect.
It not only shows by imitation but makes visible. It is invented for the unappeasable desire
of representing an object as closely as possible but, like nature and culture, it undecidedly
hovers between the real and the imaginative, evidence and value, empirical fact and cul-
tural (constructed) fact, description and value judgment. Mimesis has the ability to create
a convincing deception of perceiving an object such as an animal as it really is. To this ef-
fect it includes knowledge of the underlying techniques of nature. It is supposed to create
an approach to life capable of grasping its dynamics which, in the age of modern science,
are determined by the process of evolution.
(2) The other effect of the gap in calculated deception is the emergence of images and
cultural practices of camouflage.
Camouflage is linked to and at the same time transcends the means of mimesis and
can be interpreted as a fundamental characteristic of an anti-mimetic effect (Ott 2010, 9). It
means the end of imitation and, in pretending to be something which it is not, it subverts
the ideal of identification of represented distinct objects. It needs realist imitation and nec-
essarily also includes falsification and lying.
Philosophy in the Platonic and Christian tradition was solely concerned with the con-
cept of truth. Camouflage as a technique for deception and a form of lying goes back to
the origin of representation but was not elevated to the level of serious theory building. In
contrast to theories of mimesis, camouflage was a latecomer. As far as theories of the social
construction of reality are concerned, camouflage has not given rise to substantial attempts
at conceptualisation.
In nature, camouflage is the product of an anonymous force of deflection and de-
parture from existing reality. Whereas mimesis is conditional upon the separation of self
and other, camouflage is a term for transformation and shifting boundaries, built upon a
rupture within an underdetermined self. While mimesis is built upon an operation that
separates what is alike and what differs, what belongs together and what falls apart, cam-
ouflage is built upon the blurring of these differences and creates obscurity by making
distinct and separate parts appear like others. Instead of imitation, camouflage refers to de-
viation and construction in both nature and culture. Its cultural origin is the power of the
imagination and it is a product of the magical mind (Stevens 1996). Camouflage is a term
that emphatically covers freedom and creativity. It is ‘disorder (as are trance and ecstasy)’
(Behrens 1981, 71; Bergson 1907).
Its pretence exploits a weakness of perception on the part of the viewer, both animal
and human being. If we wish to comprehend camouflage as a combination of imitation and
(deceiving) creation, a conception of mimesis that includes a theory of image building by
perception cum deception is required.
Camouflage in nature and as cultural practice remained theoretically unaccounted for
until in the late 19th century the modern scientific mind postulated that deception is a
function of evolution. Observations of camouflage in nature as well as cultural practices go
back to hunting, magic and rituals. Observers narrated stories and invented or recreated
myths built around camouflage. Judged by the standards of modern zoological knowledge,
authors prior to Darwinian theory had no understanding of their own observations as the
myths collected by Ovidius demonstrate.

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 2 Camouflage and mimesis

Evolutionary theory is, from a philosophical point of view, realism. However, it is not
clear how one can represent reality which is constantly changing without striking it dead
in the process of imitating it at a specific point in time. There is no reason to assume a log-
ical link between the process of evolution and mimesis. Yet a strong connection cannot be
doubted.
If Darwin’s theory of natural selection is credited with creating a conceptual frame-
work for comprehending diversity in nature, camouflage needs to be included. Once the
animal was emancipated from metaphysics and granted a status of its own within a con-
ception of life determined by evolutionary theory, theories of camouflage emerged. It is the
function in the evolutionary process which allocates camouflage a position in life. As a re-
sult of theorising, camouflage was subjugated to a system of concepts and tamed. Trance
and ecstasy were overruled and it was finally put to military service. World War I turned
camouflage into a formidable industry. Yet until the present, camouflage retained an an-
archic dimension of disorder and unpredictability that creates a problem for evolutionary
theory.
This essay turns the modern zoological approach to camouflage into a problem and
argues that, while evolutionary theory is the only conceptual framework for understanding
camouflage, it is incapable of providing a full explanation. Camouflage is much more than
purposeful mimicry and imitation. Within a Darwinian theoretical framework, a camou-
flaging animal can be treated as a thing outside of human activity. However, even in the era
of the sciences animals such as the frog are not completely emancipated from magic and
arbitrariness in human culture. Frogs are animals of camouflage but frog images are ex-
amples of natural selection’s incapacity for full explanation. This essay argues further that
camouflage has two origins: nature and social civilisation (Haraway 2007, Huppauf 2011).
Their relationship is complex. They have interacted but must not be conflated. It is obvi-
ous that camouflage in nature has an impact on theories of camouflage in culture, but the
one cannot be explained as the extension of the other. Man-made camouflage is often in-
terpreted as an imitation of camouflage in nature. This is false causality. Both origin and
function differ. Also, man-made camouflage has repercussions for theories of camouflage
in nature. Several thousand years of imagining and imaging animals like the frog as ani-
mals of magic have not disappeared without a trace. Furthermore, it has been argued that
some genetically coded behaviour has an origin in culturally determined behaviour. Yet,
given these interrelationships, there is a need to distinguish between the two and to ask
whether the same categories can be applied to both (Eibl 2009, Garrels 2011, Graber 1995).

Distinctions

Camouflage is not a harmless cultural technique. In his opening address of a Sydney con-
ference in 2013 Roy Behrens refers to George Steiner’s sentence that camouflage in all its
forms is a means to maintain the equilibrium of the mind. I disagree. It does not belong to
the theories of balance and harmony of the mind. It is irreconcilable with a Rousseauian
construction of nature as a harmonious equilibrium and is set in motion by continuous
competition, opposition, antagonism, and fights to gain an advantage. Camouflage needs
to be extended to including conflict and the changes associated with force or violence
(Boas 1911). Camouflage has never been concerned with harmony, but with power and
domination and conflict on an invisible battlefield. It is part of a struggle that has not ended

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with the onset of the age of reason and rationality. Camouflage can be thought of as virtual
visual (and sometimes acoustic) warfare. Its early philosopher is Heraclites who speaks of
polemos as the origin of development and social innovation.
We can distinguish between four areas and conceptions of camouflage. They emerged
in different epochs of civilisation, remain to a certain extent discrete, and cannot be joined
together in a linear sequence. We associate, for instance, a magical concept of camouflage
with phases of early human history, but aspects of it can be detected in contemporary cul-
ture; or forms of an experimental attitude can be found in the mental order of mythology.
In a magical conception of nature, camouflage is perceived as an implicit feature of
a system of sentences revealed from a position of metaphysical authority. In this system,
camouflage is the product of imagination on a high level of abstraction and requires belief
in the power of magicians to be capable of suspending the laws of nature. An animal mask,
for example, is neither mere pretence nor plain imitation, but has the power to transform
the bearer into a different being with qualities that require and support attributes of reality.
Customarily we call this attitude sorcery. It is more closely related to our own image of the
animal and concept of camouflage (for example in fashion and the arts) than is suggested
by the self-image of the era of the sciences.
In mythology, camouflage moves away from abstraction. It is primarily metamorphosis
rather than mimicry and consists of (literary) narratives. Its means are false appearance,
dissimulation, masking, semblance, disguise, concealment, and masquerade. In his His-
toria animalium, Aristotle speaks of animals changing shape and colour. There is an
abundance of stories about the calculated aim of deception; for example, of Zeus camou-
flaging with the intent of deceiving a woman in order to have sex. Ancient Roman authors
wrote about techniques of concealing and camouflaging by changing body shapes, the key
opus being Publius Ovidius Naso’s Metamorphoses (8 AD). Ovid wrote about humans,
animals and plants, even minerals, changing their bodily appearance, and spoke with peas-
ants about frogs – without, however, drawing theoretical conclusions about their changing
appearance. Narration rather than explanation remained the final objective. This social
practice of camouflage extends to the present during exceptional situations such as rituals
or feasts.
In the scientific epoch, the concept of camouflage is not the result of faith or make-be-
lieve. On the contrary, scepticism liberates camouflage from systems of belief. Following
the invention of reality based upon the concepts of fact and evidence in the early modern
period, camouflage from the 19th century on was primarily observed as mimicry and im-
itation. It was the product of sense perception, supported by experimentation, and was
made an object of scientific research. It was subjected to scientific theory-building in zo-
ology. Results were considered a revelation of truth. Evolutionary theory conceives of
camouflage as a concept that is useful to decipher mechanisms of adaptation. Scientists hy-
pothesised that the aim of camouflage is adaptation in order to create an advantage over
competitors. Its means are deceptive body shaping, marking and colouring. In addition to
protection, an aggressive variant of mimicry was described (Poulton 1909).
In response to the era of empiricism and evidence, post-industrial culture expresses
doubt concerning scientific truth and the senses. They can mislead and deceive. What is
fake is not necessarily a sham or fraudulent. We simulate the world we live in. Postmod-
ernist theory demonstrates that simulation is an element of reality. Camouflage can be
interpreted as a strategy for creating reality (Schwartz 2000)1 while authenticity is a con-
struction and hence subject to manipulation and delusion. What we call reality may be

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facade and nothing else. With no value judgment passed, camouflage can then be charac-
terised as a significant feature of reality in times of war and peace. Robert Musil spoke of
modern man and a world ohne Eigenschaften, without qualities. In the absence of qualities,
no masquerading is possible and no camouflaging necessary as there is nothing to hide.
Yet, in the epoch of modern science, reality is not fixed but is made up of possibilities that
call for a Möglichkeitssinn (Musil 1987, 16), a sense for the possible. These possible worlds
appear as variants created through techniques of camouflaging with no original behind the
deception.

Three basic questions

Any theory of camouflage will pursue three basic issues.

What? ‘What’ is the subject of camouflaging, its substratum that requires and supports
attributes of nature or social culture. The ‘what’ has been made the object of evolutionary
theory in terms of Thayer’s revelation (Thayer & Thayer 1918). Not all animals in the
animal kingdom use techniques of camouflage. Most animals do not. The technique is
independent of the level of complexity of the organism. Primitive animals (of the sea), in-
sects, caterpillars, reptiles and frogs, birds, and some mammals use camouflage. Can they
be categorised in terms of an ontology? Cubism broke up the what into fragments with
non-realistic relationships to each other. ‘Under cubist attack the object first disintegrated
into uncertain plains, then disappeared into an illusion of the object. The technique of
camouflage assumed there was an object to camouflage, that there was a self to take on a
protective colouration’ (Sypher 1962, 86). This self disintegrated in the early 20th century.
The what can be defined in a different way. What do we perceive as the subject of cam-
ouflage? Cott distinguishes four aspects (Cott 1940, quoted in Newark 2007, 31; see also
Behrens 1981, 2009; Forbes 2009). Recognition by sight, as Gestalt theory has consistently
elaborated, is the perception of a contrast between a continuous field of colour and a back-
ground. The object is thrown into relief by the effect of light and shade that enables the
eye to detect surface curvature. In observation, the surface of visible bodies is framed by a
contour with a characteristic shape, and, finally, under most conditions, a shadow will be
thrown by the object. These aspects of vision determine a phenomenology of the what.
The possible impact of cultural evolution on heredity is an open question. Until the
late 20th century, not much was known about the impact of calculated camouflage on
reproduction. Based on new knowledge, scientists at the end of the last century began ask-
ing questions about the function of genes and chromosomes for the origin of individual
adaptations and adaptation as an evolutionary process (Boyd 1988; Barkow et al.. 1995;
Odling-Smee et al.. 2003; Lange 2012; see also Newark 2007, 34). We have become aware of
an interdependent interplay of cells, genomes, natural and cultural environments and their
changes. Examples of cultural evolution have been investigated in generations of birds and
monkeys. But, Dawkins summarises, ‘it is our own species that really shows what cultural
evolution can do’ (Dawkins 1976, 190).

1 Authenticity and by implication camouflage is a central issue of current debate on art and fiction.
There is a host of literature on authenticity and illusion from Ernst Gombrich’s pioneering book Art and
illusion (1960) and Richard Gregor & Ernst Gombrich’s Illusions in nature and art (1973) to postmodern
reflections on authenticity as fiction.

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 CAMOUFLAGE CULTURES

In contrast to camouflage in nature, the subject of camouflage in human societies was

never fixed and needed identification. Apart from mythological animals, it has always been
the privilege of gods and occasionally goddesses to change appearance and identity. Hu-
man camouflage is restricted to exceptional situations. Public celebrations, the Saturnalia
and Bacchanalia, ritual dancing in Africa and Asia, Christian carnival, and the circus are
based on the distinction between inside and outside. Outside of these restricted phases
camouflaging is not permitted and sanctioned; inside of them special rules apply so that a
different subject is constituted.
A special situation for camouflage is warfare when the what is determined according
to the rules of organised violent conflict.
How? ‘How’ asks for the means and techniques of camouflaging. The magic mind has
been characterised by a simultaneity of two different forms of existence. In the scientific
approach to the how of camouflage, reductionism and causal determination dominate.
How? is a question which leads to description and includes no evaluation and no in-
vestigation of reasons and grounds. How is it possible to be hidden in plain sight? How
do the various techniques work with which camouflage fools perception and exploits the
physiology of the senses and the neural system? The probability of detection is lowered
by matching background colours and textures and imitating patterns of the immediate
environment. Calculated colour patterns interfere with detection. Following Thayer, Roy
Behrens argues (2012) that camouflage causes confusion between an object and its back-
ground (blending) or makes a single thing divide into meaningless fragments or, and this
makes mimesis a major technique, reduces differences between one kind of object and
another. These are the foremost reasons for the importance of artificial camouflage in war-
fare.
Animal camouflage is highly successful and suggests that diverse visual systems from
different phases of evolution share principles of visual organisation and basics of per-
ception. Does the success of animal camouflage reveal universal principles that apply
regardless of retinal complexity and neural systems? We customarily work on the assump-
tion that a brilliant red on an animal’s body will be interpreted as a sign of warning both by
a human observer and an animal; for example, a snake looking at a frog. Is this justified?
Are the means of camouflage shared by animals and humans and do techniques of percep-
tion remain identical over time?
What for? Camouflage was shrouded in mystery and fantasy. In the era of the sciences
the explanation of camouflage as a means in the struggle for survival is common and con-
vincing. It is doubtful, however, that this explanation can fully answer to the question
‘What for?’
Evolution cannot be observed because it is a theoretical construction in reference to
extremely long periods of time. How do we account for the dynamics of the construction?
Teleological systems offer a pseudo-explanation for change and the riddle of camouflage.
Camouflage is ill-understood as long as it is considered an element of teleology. A theory
of camouflage must do without macro-history and the idea of finalisation. As soon as it
concerns itself with concrete issues, theory requires the observer to narrow down the scope
of questions. What are the intrinsic ends of camouflage?
As far as natural selection is concerned, protection and increasing diversity are some
of these ends. Is bio-diversity an end in itself? This is irrelevant in the humanities and so-
cial sciences. Can the ‘What for?’ question be answered without referring to competition
and struggle as the driving force? Can aesthetics, beauty, and ugliness, or negative drives

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such as destructive aggression provide an answer? To what extent can camouflage be an

enjoyable game with no purpose and no evolutionary function? If camouflage has a di-
mension of play, this has seldom been considered.
Social historians customarily argue that societies create discourse in order to mask
their true character; for example, an altruism discourse behind which colonial societies
can hide exploitation and greed. Colonial studies engages in the project of de-camouflag-
ing these societies and in exposing deceiving techniques during a specific period. As far
as individual camouflage is concerned, the motives, dynamics and ends are less difficult to
determine. Yet the problems are as difficult. Individual camouflage needs others, a group
at which it is directed. Motives of this intention are often ambivalent and sometimes hid-
den from consciousness and consequently invite abstract theory and speculation in the
approach to the ‘What for?’ question. What are the advantages of camouflage outside of its
military applications?

Camouflage in a world of magic

Prior to a brief presentation of the modern conception of camouflage, I will introduce

a concept of nature that is fundamentally different from that of modern science. In dif-
ferent definitions of nature, the ‘what’ for instance, the image of an animal, differs. The
relationship between zoological and cultural images of camouflage can be made significant
in terms of understanding the mental structure of a period and its relationship to nature. I
will not deal with camouflage in mythology. Rather, I will focus on magic and then turn to
the era of the sciences.
Magic thinking is distinct from modern scientific theory by basic differences. As far
as camouflage is concerned, five major differences can be discerned. There is no com-
pelling relationship between cause and effect and contingency replaces causality. Reality
is not separated from the human will and can be influenced by thoughts, verbal formu-
las and rituals (using masks). Gods, spirits and heroes have the power to change natural
shapes (metamorphosis) and identities and connect normally unconnected beings and
events (telepathy). Things in nature (stones, plants, animals) are animated and have char-
acteristics that can affect humans and be transferred to them. The future can be known by
humans with a special relationship to transcendence; this special relationship can be estab-
lished through metamorphosis.
Unlike modern scientific thought, the mental system of animism and the magic mind
have no conception of evolutionary forces. Animals are not considered the product of a na-
ture independent of human beings. They are a product of god’s intentions combined with
spiritual and theological discourse. In magical thought and practices, animals conform to
a principle of emotionality and empathy (Frazer calls it sympathy) that establishes a con-
nection of strong emotions such as love and hate, sympathy or antipathy between things
and living beings that resemble each other or between beings that have been in physical
or spiritual contact with each other. Stories about the instability of bodies combine human
beings and animals in a common fate.
In magical and mythical approaches to nature, there can be no conception and no
treatment of an animal as a product of nature. An animal’s camouflage is not a technique for
protection against predators but expression of an élan vital. Their image is never arbitrary
but carries a meaning assigned to it by the wider and theologically defined community. It

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can be transferred between different contexts and from one ritual to another and has the
power to motivate natural forces or can serve as a defence against malignant spirits. The
animal’s body is a masquerade, employed with the intention of hiding a secret. Some sym-
bolic animals such as the eagle or lion can be understood by everyone in every culture as
their strength and nobility are cultural universals. They are unambiguously recognised as
royal.
Among the first ethnologists who thought about magic as a serious way of thinking
were Franz Boas and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl. Boas subscribed to Darwinian theory without,
however, assuming that it could be applied to culture and history without qualification. He
distinguished between biological heredity and cultural constructions and focused on cul-
tural processes. Lévy-Bruhl’s study of shamanism and his concept of participation mystique
(Lévy-Bruhl 1922) demonstrated opposition to the concept of evolutionary anthropology
and evolutionary ethics. The rejection of theories of social and cultural evolution – theo-
ries which I refer to in the context of the scientific era – is often labelled cultural relativism.
It was a great accomplishment and opened an avenue to comprehending camouflage.
The theory of simultaneity of two beings in one body can be supported by the observa-
tion of camouflage. The earliest humans designing camouflage, it has been speculated, were
hunters in their attempt to deceive their prey. Their transformation of body appearance
played on the floating line between pragmatism and belief, nature and culture. The hunter
believed that changing his appearance through camouflage (a buffalo hide and buffalo
horns, etc.) would have an effect on the animal (Newark 2007, 38f.). It will be fooled. At
the same time, another transformation will be set in motion. By putting on attire that im-
itates the hunted animal, hunters not only fool the animal but also themselves. The hunter
becomes the animal. The buffalo hunter believes in his self-deception. His camouflaging
will bestow on him the strength, speed or prowess of the animal he pretends to be. This is
the point where mimesis turns into metamorphosis and a pragmatic technique of deceiv-
ing the animal is transformed to metaphysical power. Using the terminology of modern
psychology, we could say that self-deception circumvents consciousness. It is beyond the
hunter’s control. In this framework of thought, camouflage is much more powerful than in
a world of Darwinian evolution. This is an origin of natural religion as belief in the co-ex-
istence of reality and the supernatural.
1200 years after Ovid narrated metamorphoses in myths as playful – if violent – and
artistic games between gods, humans and animals, the animal–human relationship was
turned into a serious theological problem (Resl 2007). The early Catholic church built its
image of animals upon the perception of nature as magic. It invented a family of evil an-
imals which included the snake, the scorpion, the frog, and other ill-willed animals all
characterised by deception. For over 700 years, the frog in Europe was not the product of
natural selection — Catholic theology made this animal part of a nature variegated and
animated by evil spirits.

Camouflage in the age of the sciences – reductionism and evolutionary theory

In the modern period, the methodology of research on camouflage was based upon re-
ductionism, upholding the assumption that complex systems are the sum of their elements
and therefore can be reduced to smaller elements with no rest remaining. This is the
precondition for causality as the principle that enables the observer to fully explain real-

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ity. Within this epistemological framework, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was the
most fruitful approach to and explanation of the riddle of diversity and increasing com-
plexity. Evolutionary theory is the only theoretical framework that generates a language
and a systematic approach to explaining camouflage in nature. With Darwin’s theory, cam-
ouflage could for the first time be theoretically accounted for within an epistemological
framework that excludes metaphysics and subjective agency.
In his theory of evolution, Darwin links animals changing colour and body shapes to
adaptation, arguing that camouflage evolved in the process of natural selection by provid-
ing certain animals with an advantage in terms of both survival and reproduction. As soon
as it is made the object of reductionist evolutionary theory, camouflage is perceived as a
natural strategy for survival. Mimicry is a technique of nature for avoiding being eaten by
predators. These gains make camouflage a fundamental feature of evolutionary theory of
nature (Darwin 1859/1985).
The first systematic and substantial work on the subject was Poulton’s Colours of ani-
mals, followed soon thereafter by Abbott Handerson Thayer’s influential studies (Poulton
1890; Thayer & Thayer 1918). Both books accepted Darwin’s categories of selection as the
key mechanism behind variations of animal colouration. Thayer was convinced that he
had articulated ‘not theories but revelations’ (Loreck 2011, 163). Expressed in less apo-
dictic phrases, the religious overtone of this statement was (and may still be) shared by
many scientists who believe that evolutionary theory reveals the truth. Thayer, an artist
with a life-long fascination with camouflage, introduced basic concepts such as counter-
shading. He argued that camouflage is crypsis and ‘all patterns and colours whatsoever of
all animals that ever preyed or are preyed on are under certain normal circumstances oblit-
erative’. He goes on about mimicry and imitation arguing that ‘not one “mimicry” mark
[...] exists anywhere in the world where there is not every reason to believe it the very best
conceivable device for the concealment of its wearer’ (Behrens 1981). A few decades later,
camouflage emerged as a practice of industrialised modernity and became a cultural tech-
nique, socially accepted and controlled. It gained military importance in the First World
War.
The more an analytical approach to camouflage succeeds in laying bare its hidden
forces, its origin and consequences, the more it will be in accordance with the modern
ideal of cognition. In fact, there is a sense in which knowledge derived from evolutionary
theory is more real than reality itself, since by bringing out intrinsic mechanisms it reveals
what is essential in nature and animals. Reality, being an imperfect and messy affair, fails to
live up to our expectations unless its intrinsic principles of construction are revealed or, to
use Kant’s imperious verb, dictated to nature by theory. The history of the animal–human
relationship is full of dictates and misreading, some unintentional and others deliberate. It
is the aim of evolutionary theory to replace this arbitrariness by a relationship of causality.
Nietzsche initiated a new reflection on deceiving and lying, suggesting a redefinition
and re-evaluation (Nietzsche 1980b). Camouflage is an opposition to the ideal of truth
that contradicts the value system and European discourse on ethics. From Plato on and
supported by Christianity, untruth was stigmatised and all but excluded from theory. This
changed towards the end of the 19th century. Nietzsche shared Darwin’s basic view of a
value-free theory of evolution and made delusion and deception philosophically debatable.
Nietzsche and later Sigmund Freud, Heidegger, and Foucault (Eribon 1991, 328) contrib-
uted to an unwritten theory of camouflage in human history.

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In Nietzsche’s view, deception and untruth are part of the fabric of human civilisation.
Camouflage as concealment, deception, misleading and the untruth have always been a
part of the fabric of human civilisation. There is, according to this view, no human life
without camouflage. Nietzsche’s non-moral definition of truth and lie as extramoralisch are
important in this context (Nietzsche 1980a).
Mankind could not exist without telling stories that cannot pass a truth test. The false-
ness of camouflage is a universal cultural technique and necessary for survival. Visual
examples have been observed in cultures that use masks, veils, costumes and body painting
as means to change the appearance of human bodies. As far as deception in camouflage is
concerned, Nietzsche’s view and that of Darwinists such as Poulton, Thayer and their fol-
lowers are compatible.
This theory of life is based on an intrinsic contradiction. Nietzsche asks for an uncom-
promising tearing apart of all masks (‘abreissen’). What becomes visible, however, is not
the identical self, but a subject that is itself and at the same time something else, unmasked
but not authentic, camouflaged and the product of deceit and self-deception. The subject is
a multitude of subjects, and our thought and generally our consciousness are based upon
their interplay and struggle, (Nietzsche 1980c, 382; 1980d, 140).
Although Nietzsche and Darwin are in agreement regarding the value problem, there
are elementary differences. From a Darwinian perspective, camouflage is a dependent vari-
able in a continuous line of evolution, whereas Nietzsche perceives camouflage as a human
invention in a history of discontinuity and aesthetic play.
If camouflage adds complexity to nature in terms of deception, misleading, telling un-
true stories and enforcing false images, the question needs to be asked: what is its function
in the overall context of evolution? Is it functional for survival? Survival of what?
Fundamental is the assumption of a phylogenetic structure. From the point of view
of evolutionary biology, misleading through camouflage is not an individual act commit-
ted by recognisable actors. The purpose for all living organisms is to gain an evolutionary
advantage over rivals and enemies. There is no subject that can be held responsible for
camouflage in the process of evolution. As a strategy of nature, camouflage is the product
of selection with no intention and no aim. Its genealogy is observed within the framework
of a theory of progressive differentiation.
Camouflage, seen as a means for achieving evolutionary advantage, could appear nat-
ural. It is not. An observer is required. It is the observer’s theory that gives structure to the
silent closed circuit set in motion by camouflage. This communication is a theoretical con-
struction based on informed guesses.
Regarding the how, evolutionary biology describes strategies as mimesis (imitation or
mimicry) and crypsis, that is, practices of a system of communication based on simulated
signals. A signal is a gesture, sound or body movement that triggers a specific response in
the animal receiving the signal, based on a genetically coded stimulus-response effect de-
signed by evolution (Lunau 2002, 7–16). These signals produce the effect of indices that are
causally linked to the programmed response. Mimesis can be interpreted by an observer as
the appropriation of foreign signals. Mimicry is also based on appropriation, but requires
three players: the animal that sends a specific signal, the imitator who sends an imitation
of this signal, and the receiver of the cryptograph who is unable to distinguish between the
original and the cryptic signal. Misunderstanding is the aim of the cryptograph.
An observer cannot know what happens inside the imitating animal’s mind during
this communication. The observer’s position creates the danger of misreading signals. It is

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most likely that it is a value-free process of a mechanical nature pursued with no intention.
Nature has no concept of truth and no agent responsible for change and therefore can have
no intention to deceive. Evolution knows no lie and has no freedom to deceive as it is dis-
tinct from human history and morality. In the language of evolutionary biology, deception
is an inappropriate characterisation of camouflage. Camouflage as mimicry is performed
with neither good nor bad intentions. Theory consequently removes all value judgments
associated with camouflage and has, at least in principle, abandoned the categories of good
and evil. Terms such as sham, make-believe, fraud, falsification or trick are justified in a
metaphysical context, but they have no justification in an evolutionary description of cam-
ouflage. Does an animal have the intent to feign? No. Its camouflage is not an intentional
act of misleading or cheating. Does this insight govern general perceptions of camouflage?

Rehabilitation of deception as a strategy of nature: Nietzsche and Darwin

According to Nietzsche, concepts are not solid and not what they pretend to be but are
based on shaky metaphors. Deception is built into the metaphorical nature of language
(Nietzsche 1980a). One could call concepts metaphors camouflaged as solid foundations.
The origin of civilisation’s most basic concepts, Nietzsche suggests, are false perceptions.
Misunderstandings and errors made in the distant past have turned out to be helpful in
the struggle for survival. They were cultivated because they worked to humanity’s advan-
tage. For this reason they have been maintained. Cognition and knowledge are therefore
based on deception. The basis of knowledge of the world, language, Nietzsche argues, is
untrue from its origin on. This origin has conveniently been forgotten. Consequently the
very term truth is untenable and nothing but a convention that says little about true reality.
Directing the focus away from mimesis and toward camouflage leads to shifting the
intention to the creative power of the mind. This creative power is inseparably linked to
deception.
Deception has two distinct meanings. The first pertains to untrue narratives and lying
purposefully. An example is camouflage for military purposes, like colouring cannons or
countershading battleships. We can call this its subjective dimension. Its other meaning
refers to evolution. Deception is unavoidable falseness ingrained in language and practised
by the symbolising species. No individual and no group are able to overcome this funda-
mental deception. We have no choice but to accommodate ourselves to the insight that the
concept of truth is inauthentic.
Contemporary evolutionary theory has adopted Nietzsche’s first and more restricted
idea on lying, but linked it to evolution. The difference between, on the one hand, the long
durée of evolution, with no responsible actor who makes decisions, and, on the other, the
short-term conditions, with strategists who are able to plan and deliberately deceive, is
blurred.
Robert Trivers elaborates on the idea that deceit is an integral part of the process of
natural selection in virtue of its evolutionary benefits (Trivers 2011). He asks why we tend
to deceive and mislead ourselves rather than tell the truth. He believes that we fool our-
selves not in order to overcome inhibition and fear (singing in a dark forest), but in order
to deceive others more successfully. We continuously and unknowingly fool ourselves to
better fool others, because a firm belief in our own strength is more successful in making
others believe in our strength and makes them behave accordingly, that is, to our advan-

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tage. The more convinced we are of our camouflage as the true indication of strength, the
more successful we will be in making others believe. Selection, he argues, favours genes
with a disposition for lying. In the pool of genes, those which have a disposition to self-
deception are especially successful, as they create, according to Trivers, an evolutionary
advantage. This is a perfect answer within the framework of evolutionary theory to the ir-
ritating observation of self-deception since it demonstrates that untruth as self-deception
produces an evolutionary advantage.
Question and the answer can be turned around, though. Camouflage will then corre-
spond with structuralist conceptions of civilisation based on power, force and anonymous
authority: what is the impact of using the power of misrepresentation? What happens
when we deceive by misrepresenting others? We fool ourselves by believing in our own
false images or narratives about the other. This is not an evolutionary sociologist’s answer,
as the outcome is to our disadvantage. Strong examples are provided by wars for example,
the self-deception of European nations in August 1914.
This scepticism in relation to the ideal of knowledge is rejected by the sciences. They
form mighty international institutions that cannot but insist on the correspondence of sci-
entific truth and the real.

Doubting evolutionary theory – survival of the beautiful

Can camouflage as cultural practice and habit be accounted for in terms of evolution? At-
tempts to maintain evolutionary theory as a model capable of producing comprehensive
explanation have been criticised and, a number of philosophers argue, refuted. While evo-
lutionary theory is not false, it fails to account for a range of characteristics of nature and
animals. Evolutionary biologists insist that every single colour and mark on a living being
developed because they have an evolutionary function. These biologists are blinded by the
theory of natural selection. What about the beautiful and the ugly? (Menninghaus 2011).
Beauty is more than a means of sexual selection in the struggle for survival. We perceive
as beautiful patterns of regularities from the strictly geometrical (made famous as art in
nature by Ernst Haeckel (1904) and Karl Blossfeldt (1929) commenting on his stunning
photographs2) to the ragged in the fractal beauty of corals or trees. And what about the
ugly in nature and a drive for destructive aggression that leads to camouflaging?
In a recent publication, Thomas Nagel points out that, in the Darwinian, reductionist
approach to explaining the world, fundamental questions of origin and complexity remain
unanswered. This approach, he writes, is ‘almost certainly false’ (Nagel 2012, 211). The
physical sciences, Nagel argues, in spite of their extraordinary success in their own domain,
necessarily leave an important aspect of nature unexplained. He focuses on mental activity
and argues that, if the mind is a distinct realm of life, then physical theories about the ori-
gins of life cannot be entirely correct. Complex life cannot emerge solely, as Darwinian
theory suggests, from chemical and physical processes.
The development of animal organisms cannot be fully understood through the physi-
cal sciences alone. The nature of those organisms is too complex.

2 See Breidbach (2006); Karl Blossfeldt wrote that ‘the plant must be valued as a totally artistic and
architectural structure’.

28
 2 Camouflage and mimesis

Finally ... it follows that biological evolution must be more than just a physical process,
and the theory of evolution ... must become more than just a physical theory. This means
that the scientific outlook, if it aspires to a more complete understanding of nature, must
expand to include theories capable of explaining the appearance in the universe of mental
phenomena and the subjective points of view in which they occur – theories of a differ-
ent type from any we have seen so far. (Nagel 2013)

Nagel is concerned with mental phenomena. They include the problem of aesthetics. Can a
theory of beauty and ugliness be developed within the traditional framework of evolution?
No convincing attempt has been made. The playful and fantastic aspects of camouflage, I
contend, are covered by his sceptical argument. The creation of mind-driven activities (e.g.
camouflage) cannot solely be accounted for by the process of natural selection. Diversity
and aesthetics can be an end in itself.
The power of function in the evolutionary approach to reality fails to account for the
fact that camouflage can support evolution but natural selection cannot fully explain cam-
ouflage, since it signifies aspects of nature without discernible function; for example, a bird
like the peacock to be beautiful and others like the crow to be ugly, or frogs to produce
disharmonic sounds or beautiful songs as is the case with some South American frogs.
Evolutionary theory will either explain camouflage by reducing it to an advantage in
the struggle for life or ignore it as an optional extra, like painting a functional building in
bright colours. Both approaches make it impossible to understand camouflage. The drive
to pretend to be another person by imitating a beautiful body or gestures of a hero is dys-
functional in the evolutionary process, as the death of a frog in Aesop’s fable of the frog
that tries to inflate itself to the size of an ox drastically demonstrates.
It is apparent that the description of the functional process of mutations and selections
is unable to explain diversity as a principle of nature. The rules of scientific inquiry of evo-
lution are not sufficient to explain diversity and complexity. Why should complex organic
systems with characteristics that are dysfunctional for adaptation be a product of evolu-
tion? Natural selection cannot provide an appropriate explanation for camouflage. Also,
camouflage in nature and camouflage as a cultural practice do not coincide and neither
can be fully grasped through a theory of evolution.
A theory which is unable to account for the playfulness, enjoyment and effects of
amazement, awe and dazzle is ill-equipped to help us understand camouflage. A theory in-
capable of accounting for basic mind-driven activities, which go back to the beginning of
human history, such as camouflage, must be reconstituted or possibly abandoned.

Natural selection as the model for cultural change?

Camouflage cannot be read in categories of reductionist science only. Even if the evolution
of organisms capable of camouflaging (i.e. the what) could be explained in terms of phys-
ical causality, the performance of camouflage, the How? and What for?, is not reducible to
physical-chemical laws.
Since neither physics nor the Darwinian concept of evolution can fully account for di-
versity and aesthetics, it follows that explanation by purely functional theory is inadequate
and therefore they must be accounted for in different terms. Another approach is needed.

29
 CAMOUFLAGE CULTURES

Evolutionary theory needs to be reconstituted in order to be able to include the emergence

and development of camouflage.
Darwin himself has shown the way. It took him more than a decade to complete his
thoughts and introduce the concept of sexual selection in The descent of man, and selec-
tion in relation to sex (1871). In this second theory of evolution, Darwin argues that some
traits in nature are selected not by nature but by females. These traits are not the fittest,
but the most beautiful. A colourful combination of feathers, an elaborate but useless song,
frills, dewlaps and other characteristics of the body that females appreciate will be included
in the process of selection when enough generations of males have been exposed to this
preference. The peacock has its tail and the deer its antlers because females have preferred
them over many generations. They are a liability in terms of strict natural selection. Yet
as long as the laws of physics and chemistry make it possible, beauty, it seems, will evolve
and evolves in unexpected ways (Prum & Brush 2002, 2003; Bostwick & Prum 2005; Prum
2006).
Sexual selection is a closed system. Research demonstrates that the genes for specific
colours and patterns are linked to genes for a preference for that pattern in mating choice.
Certainly, these patterns do have to submit to the rigor of survival by natural selection.
But they also have a range of freedom. The evolutionary ornithologist Richard Prum ar-
gues that Darwin’s ideas about sexual selection should be taken at face value, and not as
a variation of natural selection. Dysfunctional characteristics need to be included in the
basic concepts of explanation. The peacock’s plumage, bowerbirds, and colourful frogs are
examples of aesthetics in nature until their aesthetics are proven functional. He stresses
that the female’s sexually preferred trait is arbitrary, an aesthetic choice un-coupled from
natural selection. The beak of the finch can crack open seeds. As the seeds change and
evolve in size and hardness, the beak also evolves in order to face the challenge. The sexual
display of a bird like the manakin functions in an entirely different way, affecting not the
outside world but the mind of female birds. ‘To understand how these aspects of biodiver-
sity evolve’, Prum (2012) argues, ‘we must understand that the challenge is one of seducing
a mind that has the capacity to evolve nearly infinite preferences. We see in sexually se-
lected traits a much greater diversity than we see in those traits that are under strict natural
selection.’
Rothenberg supports this argument. His Survival of the beautiful pursues the question
whether colours and patterns on animals and plants can be fully defined by physics and
chemistry – or are they accidental and useless beauty? The bowerbird’s power is devoid of
utility, he demonstrates. The bird has but one purpose: to be beautiful and to be seen by a
female audience. The optical game cannot be understood without the idea of aesthetics as
a dysfunctional quality.

It’s so confusing
But so amusing
The ruses
One uses
Are nature’s own scheme ...
Though we’re like mirages
We’re all camouflages –
Things are not what they seem ... (R. Gilder 1944, quoted in Behrens 1981, 64)

30
 2 Camouflage and mimesis

The mirages are an evolutionary irresponsibility and associated by Behrens with trance
and ecstasy (1981, 71). Nature practised this freedom of l’art pour l’art long before it was
introduced to art history. Camouflage can only be accounted for when its dimension of
purposeless l’art pour l’art is acknowledged as rupture.

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3
Zoos and camouflage
Ann Elias

Animals – their behaviours, their patterns and colours – have been vital to knowledge
about camouflage in the human world of science, art and war. But one thing that stands
out in the standard literature on camouflage is the emphasis placed on observing animals
in the wild and lack of interest in animals in zoos.1 Why the wild animal is held up as
exemplar of camouflage compared with zoo animals is of interest to the trajectory of this
chapter. The answers illuminate the troubled relations of humans and animals and draw
attention to hypocrisies and double standards underpinning those relations. With zoos
comes the admission that these animals are not in full possession of animality since most
are born in captivity, are alienated from an ecological context, and have lost the need to
hunt for prey and the fear of being hunted. Once placed in concrete enclosures and cages
for maximum public visibility, there is an acceptance that zoo animals have little chance
(and little reason) to hide or deploy stealth. Their worth as camouflage subjects is dimin-
ished, and they become a lesser version of the wild animal who by contrast is seen as whole,
complete and the source of authentic camouflage knowledge.
The rendering of animal camouflage as relatively useless in zoos and of animals in
captivity as relatively useless to camouflage knowledge is one of many angles that I in-
tend to take on the subject of zoos and camouflage. But by considering the key elements
of camouflage – concealment and deception, mimicry, crypsis, and the dynamic interplay
of hiding and revealing – I also discuss matters social, aesthetic, biological, and military.
For instance, as pleasure-parks zoos are skilled at playful deceptions, trompe l’oeil land-
scapes, simulated environments and imitation nature. Therefore the very design of zoos
engages with the subject of camouflage. I show how a farcical situation has arisen in the
design of naturalistic zoos where the greater the success of biological camouflage the more
disappointing the zoo animal is to a public craving animal visibility. And this is where the
matter of cultural camouflage becomes relevant. John Berger was one of the earliest writ-
ers to claim that what is concealed in zoos is the reality that humans have made animals
‘disappear’ by turning them into commodities (Berger 1980). These and other camouflage
matters are discussed in the following pages. My case study is Taronga Zoo in Sydney,

1 For example, Darwin CR (1859). On the origin of species. London: John Murray; Thayer GH (1909).
Concealing-coloration in the animal kingdom. New York: Macmillan; Cott HB (1940). Adaptive coloration
in animals. London: Methuen.

33
 CAMOUFLAGE CULTURES

Australia, and for the period 1914 to 1950; this slice of history usefully demonstrates the
complex interrelationships of zoologists, animals, war tacticians and artists in the subject
of zoos and camouflage.

Taronga Zoo

Figure 3.1 ‘Black bears from Canada, Taronga Park Zoo’, 1946, National Archives of Australia: A1200,
L6708

Taronga Zoo was originally built in 1884 at Moore Park in Sydney but moved to Mosman
during the First World War and opened in its present location in 1916 (Strahan 1991). The
move coincided with the zoo becoming a scientific centre. During the 1920s zoo enclo-
sures were often simulations of caves and sandstone grottoes; bears and lions were kept in
deep pits built with ‘concrete walls moulded to look like rock’ (Figure 3.1) (Boylan 2011,
151). In fact, despite sweeping views of Sydney harbour, Taronga Zoo in the 1960s was
an austere place compared to what it has become through landscaping and planting and
a contemporary approach to enclosures more attuned to animals. But earlier in its his-
tory, concrete animal enclosures offered little respite from summer heat. There were few
opportunities for animals to utilise vegetation for hiding. Sir Edward Hallstrom who was
honorary director of the zoo from 1959 to 1967 argued that concrete was easier to keep
clean (Boylan 2011, 21).

34
 3 Zoos and camouflage

However, the 1960s was an awakening to the question of ‘the animal’. It was the first
decade of sustained introspection about zoos and what they reveal about human–animal
relations. Terry Boylan, veteran zookeeper of Taronga, recollected how in that decade the
idea of collecting exotic animals from around the globe was seen as ‘an unacceptable im-
perialist intrusion’ (Boylan 2011, 9). Zoos were built for people to watch animals. But
watching people watching animals at zoos became important in the 1960s to under-
standing people and societies. For example, in the United States, artist Garry Winogrand
conducted an influential study at the Bronx Zoo. Writer and curator John Szarkowski said
he quite liked zoos until he saw Winogrand’s photographic series ‘The Animals’ (1969).
Black and white images show bored, frustrated and dysfunctional animals but also peo-
ple. It was a time of mounting dissatisfaction with zoos as places of entertainment at the
expense of animal dignity. At Taronga Zoo, Ron Strahan, who was Director from 1967 to
1974, intentionally focused away from entertainment and instead on science, education,
research and conservation. As a zoologist his philosophy included the view that at Taronga
‘there was no place for circuses, miniature trains or roundabouts’ (Strahan 2003, 477–9).

Zoologists, zoos, artists and warfare

Zoology was ‘the driving intellectual discipline’ within zoos and museums in the modern
period (Everest 2011, 84). Zoology was also critical for the development of modern cam-
ouflage warfare, especially in the Second World War (WWII), for the simple reason that
methods of military camouflage were based on zoological knowledge of animal camou-
flage. Therefore from 1900 to 1945 zoologists had a considerable part to play in civic affairs
including military research and zoo research. Take the case of Australian zoologist William
John Dakin (1883–1950). In 1931 he was a trustee of Taronga Zoo and in the same decade
was President of the scientific organisation that governed Taronga Zoo, the Royal Zoologi-
cal Society of New South Wales.2 And by 1941 he was also in charge of civilian and military
operations for camouflage defence in WWII, having been appointed Technical Director of
Camouflage for the Australia and Southwest Pacific region.
Dakin seconded many of Australia’s leading modern artists to work with him in
camouflage including Frank Hinder (1906–1992) and Max Dupain (1911–1992). As Roy
Behrens has made abundantly clear, modern developments in military camouflage acceler-
ated at the same time as the rise of modernism in Western countries (Behrens, 2002, 2009).
But in addition Hinder and Dupain had attained knowledge about animals and animal
camouflage via cubism (for Hinder) and surrealism (for Dupain). By WWII the animal
was an important subject in modern art – particularly surrealism – and among famous ex-
amples are The Tiger (1912) by Franz Marc, Robing of the bride (1940) by Max Ernst, and
Self Portrait (1937–38) by Leonora Carrington. What the subject of the animal brought to
modern art was a chance to explore and combine interests in totemism, mythology and
biology. Particularly influential was Charles Darwin’s theory that man is an animal. For
example, while Max Dupain’s most famous work, Sunbaker (1937), is usually discussed in
terms of humanism, it can also be seen as belonging to the borderland between human and
non-human. A male human figure lying on a beach is defamiliarised through foreshorten-

2 For biographical information on William Dakin, see: Elias; Bygott & Cable; Colefax.

35
 CAMOUFLAGE CULTURES

ing and as a result comes to resemble as much a spider or crab as a human – the kind of
animal able to move along the ground using strong front limbs (Dupain 1937).

Animals and war

Animals were the primary focus of William Dakin’s career. But, although involved with
Taronga Zoo, his theories on camouflage for WWII always focused on the ‘wild’ animal.
This was true for most war literature. It was informed by an assumption that animals in
ecological context are driven by the kinds of survival instincts also needed by soldiers in
the field. The type of animal Dakin wanted Australian troops to emulate was one in a Dar-
winian state of nature, driven to:

choose dark corners as hiding places, during the day. Above all, they have learned
through thousands of years of the struggle for existence that being seen is not merely a
matter of colour but far more often a matter of injudicious movement and bad choice of
resting place. The correctly coloured animals of the jungle have an instinct which auto-
matically causes them to resort to the correct background and to remain immobile whilst
they wish to be hidden. The soldier has to learn both these things. (Dakin 1947, Appen-
dix O, 7)

War justified rediscovering methods of survival practised by animals, and ‘animal cunning’
was held up as an important model of correct behaviour. What was admired most was the
way creatures with sharp instincts utilise space, colour and light to make themselves invisi-
ble and it was Dakin’s aim to equip soldiers with a similar intuition for making their bodies
‘disappear’.
It was intriguing during WWII for the Australian public to learn that war tacticians
were applying the study of animals, and their fitness with the environment, to warfare.
They read with interest how the Australian military had, for the first time in history, begun
imitating the way kangaroos, emus and insects make effective use of patterns, shadows,
stillness, and silence to evade predators and ambush their prey (The Sun 1941, 5). A cam-
ouflage manual printed for Australian soldiers in the New Guinea jungle explained about
‘The ten big sins of the hunter and the hunted’: one deadly sin was ‘being a conspicuous
colour or shape (or both)’; another was ‘being a misfit in the background pattern’ (Dakin
1947, Part 3, 3).
In preparation for jungle warfare, the team of camouflage artists working for Dakin in
Sydney, including Hinder and Dupain, experimented wearing different outer-skins to find
ones that helped soldiers become invisible (Figure 3.2). They countershaded their bod-
ies the way they had observed in birds and mammals: dark on top, light underneath so
that gradations of light and shade create the illusion of the animal’s effacement as a solid
object. Like animals they utilised disruptive patterning to help their forms blend into back-
grounds.

36
 3 Zoos and camouflage

Figure 3.2 Gervaise Purcell, Frank Hinder in camouflage, c. 1943, National Archives of Australia, c.1905
T1

Because Dakin thought of war as a logical but temporary return to the animal origins
of civilised man, he encouraged in soldiers the discovery of a primitive masculinity, and
‘the beast within’ (Mitman 1997, 262). Camouflage posters directed soldiers to behave like
tigers in the wild, lying hidden in long grass before springing towards their kill. Far from

37
 CAMOUFLAGE CULTURES

serving the weak and the unmanly, camouflage as practised by predatory animals was a
model of virility; which is why Frank Hinder liked to remind the troops that ‘the tiger con-
ceals to attack!’ (Hinder, c. 1943). One poster demonstrated how to retreat into shadows
like panthers and blacken the skin to look like ‘natives’ (Elias 2011, 136). Collapsing of
‘the animal’ and ‘the native’ into one was a legacy of 19th century racist assumptions about
natives occupying an evolutionary level comparable to animals.3 From this developed the
theory that the native and the animal were both driven by basic survival instincts from
which they perfected methods of concealment and deception. Dakin hoped that Australian
soldiers in New Guinea would rediscover similar instincts. And by mimicking animals and
natives he believed that Allied militaries would gain superiority in the fight for survival
(Dakin 1947, Part 4, 11). He instructed soldiers in New Guinea to blend with their back-
ground, change the axis of the body to horizontal, and ‘learn to crawl properly’ especially
to crawl like snakes ‘flat on the ground!’ (Dakin 1947, Part 3, 32).

Meanwhile at the zoo

It was as if war was a time of empowerment for the animal’s place in the Western mind.
But this was not the case. During the war the very same societies that admired the ability
of animals to camouflage themselves inflicted on captive animals in zoos the debilitating
states of high visibility and overexposure. At the time of WWII when animals in the wild
were models for military camouflage, animals in zoos were denied the ability and choice to
utilise camouflage methods. In this reversal of attitude to the animal and animality – one
for war, the other for civilian life – zoos diffused and in some cases eradicated the animal’s
capacity for camouflage. Instead they transformed the animal body into pure visible form
for exhibition.
Modern zoos, compared with contemporary zoos, were like militarised landscapes;
they too were photographically mediated environments and depended on and deployed
inventive processes and techniques for surveillance and exposure. Yet surveillance and
exposure were the very strategies that animals (and humans at war) tried to avoid and
counteract. Before naturalistic enclosures became the dominant paradigm of zoo aesthet-
ics, the modern zoo demanded that animals be seen from the ‘front, side and back’ (Willis
1999, 675). This situation was once described by Ralph Acampora as degrading for making
the dignity of animals disappear precisely by overexposing their bodies (Acampora 1998,
1). As a result, animals became misfits – to use the camouflage term current in WWII for
bodies that don’t blend with their backgrounds – but misfits socially and ecologically. In
this regard it could be said that during WWII a different war was waged on animals in
zoos.

3 For example, it was the opinion of US anatomist Jeffries Wyman that ‘Negro and Orang do afford the
points where man and the brute … most nearly approach each other’. See Wyman quoted in R. Conniff
(2011). The species seekers: heroes, fools, and the mad pursuit of life on earth. New York and London: WW
Norton & Company, 237.

38
 3 Zoos and camouflage

Figure 3.3 An artificial hill made of a thin layer of concrete mixture on wire netting reinforced with steel
supports, from William Dakin, The art of camouflage, 1941, p. 50

Militarised spaces and zoo design

In Sydney it was no coincidence that the civilian space of the zoo shared affinities with
military space: the same society that built Taronga Zoo also built the modern Australian
Defence Force. The zoo, the army, the navy and the air force all came into existence be-
tween the time of Federation in 1901 and the establishment of the Royal Australian Air
Force in 1921 (Dennis, Grey, Morris & Prior 1995). With the zoo at Mosman, and mili-
tary defence forts sited nearby on the same peninsula at George’s Heights, the geography
was symbolically dedicated to the science and culture of observation. On this peninsula,

39
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