Colloquy, Issue 8, Krell, Devil's Rope

Issue Eight

Allan Krell, The Devil's Rope: A Cultural History of Barbed Wire. London: Reaktion Books, 2003. ISBN: 186189144X

Sam Everingham

The Devil's Rope by Allan Krell takes the ubiquitous cultural artefact of barbed wire and illustrates how it has become woven into the cultural imagination through various thematics. As a lecturer in art history and theory, Krell's interest lies in various images and representations of barbed wire, and the book respectively traces its various incarnations from colonial demarcation of boundaries to post-modern fetishisation.

Initially, Krell examines the development of barbed wire as a means by which to co-ordinate and facilitate greater agricultural production in rural communities in America in the late nineteenth century. While Krell's study challenges that dominant view which supposes barbed wire solely to be an instrument of control, his cultural examination of barbed wire nonetheless begins with a history of the wire's use as boundary itself - one which constitutes a dichotomy of inclusion and exclusion through the demarcation that the wire draws between the rational and the natural. In beginning thus, Krell quotes from early manufacturers of barbed wire on the function and use of the wire - the underlying politics of which are clearly in the common refrain of the colonial.

From the perspective of a developmental history, the next significant historical epoch The Devil's Rope examines is, perhaps unsurprisingly, the period of the Second World War. And the examination of the use of barbed wire during this time is also, perhaps accordingly, unsurprising. Preoccupied with images of constraint, Krell's understanding of the use of barbed wire during the war focuses on the thematic of power through violence. But rather than simply reinforcing the dichotomy between inclusion and exclusion, Krell now emphasises images which utilise barbed wire as a frame by which to negotiate both sides of the dichotomy. Margaret Bourke-White's photograph of prisoners after the liberation of Buchenwald, 28 April 1945, captures prisoners of the camp through a frame of barbed wire, highlighting its two-fold significance as both the apparent and actual means of control or exclusion, and perhaps more importantly, the frame through which such control is viewed.

At this point in the book it becomes clear that what is being sought is a position from which to understand barbed wire as a signifying element in the world. To this end, Krell situates the artefact of barbed wire through the Foucaultian manoeuver of understanding the signifier itself as being procurative of its own demarcation and propagation. Understanding barbed wire as a means by which to control and regulate does not go far enough into understanding the conditions by which such control and regulation are implemented. For Krell, the significance of barbed wire as a cultural artefact is made manifest in the attitude that it begins representing itself, as an already defined mechanism of constraint, yet one which is seen through (that is, can be looked through) and in some sense merely represents a lack of definable demarcation. This is made apparent with the beginning of the next chapter, which supposes that the ubiquity of barbed wire is itself responsible for firstly, its acceptance as a banal tool, and secondly, the possibility of its subsequent fetishisation into a kind of sexuality.

And fetishisation it is. Krell documents the inception of various associations which began the process of supposing barbed wire to be more than either an industrial commodity or a means of constraint. Rather, Krell proposes that this fetishisation of barbed wire is made possible by its becoming an item of great collectability. This is supported by numerous images documenting the publications and interests of barbed wire appreciation societies ('barbarians'). Furthermore, such associations provide the basis for understanding the a potential connection between barbed wire and sexuality, evidenced by the crowning of Miss Barb Wire (1967), and the Barbed Wire Queen (1970), not to mention the feature film casting Pamela Anderson in the title role of Barb Wire (1996).

In demonstrating the various culturally epochal attitudes toward barbed wire, Krell's real aim seems to be to suggest that one of its principle values is its normative ambiguity. Thus he writes, "barbed wire's transparency of purpose - to inflict injury (sometimes deadly) if violated - and it's singular unchanging function - to control and to confine - has nonetheless invited a wide variety of imaginative engagements that … often call into question its normative function."(181)The Devil's Rope suggests that the elements of inherent violence and mechanistic control which are usually so readily associated with barbed wire may indeed be 'looked through' to form a new insight into the cultural value of an artefact which may otherwise simply be overlooked.