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Lisa Bloom,
"Polar Fantasies and Aesthetics in the Work of Isaac Julien and Connie Samaras"
(page 6 of 6)
Reflecting back on my book's reception in relation to the recent art
works of Isaac Julien and Connie Samaras has revealed encouraging new
perspectives from artists who are restaging the politics of race,
gender, sexuality and science in both polar regions from feminist and
queer perspectives. If Julien brings us back to the earlier days of
polar explorers and the epic in his fantasized re-enactment of the Peary
and Henson trek, where he playfully and provocatively transforms the
Arctic into a fashion runway event, Samaras pulls us away, bringing us
into another fantasy space where we can begin to imagine how climate
change and neo-liberalism have transformed these spaces in ways we
otherwise would not have imagined. By refusing the aesthetics of the
sublime from the heroic age, Samaras highlights the unreality, as well
as the drab ordinariness, of this landscape and built environment. By
virtue of her photographs that situate banal architecture in a sublime
landscape, she draws our attention to the surreal contrast between the
everyday and the heroic. This is in contrast to Julien, who camps up
the extraordinary spectacle of the North Pole and creates in his film a
black diasporic aesthetic in which he is able to bring back the beauty
of the Arctic and the heroism of Matthew Henson. In the process, he
queers this aesthetic by juxtaposing the culturally constructed beauty
of a fashion model with the natural beauty of the landscape. Samaras
instead downplays the spectacle by reducing it to the most ordinary
surfaces and functions with her minimalism. By challenging documentary
conventions in critical ways, such as her unsettling blurring of the
boundaries between the artificial and the natural, she draws on the
genres of science fiction and horror to give artistic expression to her
experience of Antarctica, both in its routine everyday aspects and in
its surreal extremes.
Both Samaras and Julien are telling stories about an absent
subjectivity, but while Julien uses this as an occasion to make a
political statement on beauty and aesthetics, Samaras's interest is more
in creating a new aesthetics about daily life and survival in these
unearthly neo-liberal institutional settings. Thus, her aesthetics,
compared to Julien's exuberance and lavishness, is extremely spare and
pared down, though she does employ an emotionality in her work that
differentiates it from more reserved dead-pan photographic practices.
What their works have in common is that neither can be simply folded
back into a conventional discussion of the sublime, blankness or
politics. Both are engaging these regions in new ways that implicitly
question the heroic and what it means to resurrect it at this historical
moment, when global warming and the return of colonialism have brought
renewed attention to both these regions. Julien's and Samaras'
viewpoints suggest some important new directions in contemporary art,
and in the process, their work makes us think differently about how
postcolonial, black queer, and feminist perspectives have contributed to
changing the discussion of art history and of Arctic and Antarctic
discourses. One can only imagine what could happen if they, or other
artists in their wake, bring this transformed aesthetic sensibility to
other contemporary sites where history and current politics
intersect and collide.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Norman Bryson, Elena Glasberg, Janet Jakobsen
and Roddey Reid for reading this article and providing intellectual and
editorial guidance. Thanks to Elissa Weintraub for providing useful
suggestions and editorial support, and to Laura Kay for inviting me to
participate in this special issue.
Endnotes
1. On the crisis of manhood at the turn of the
century in the U.S. context see Donna Haraway, "Teddy Bear Patriarchy:
Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908-1936." Primate
Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science. New
York: Routledge, 1989: 26-58; Cynthia Enloe, Making Feminist Sense of
International Politics: Bananas, Beaches and Bases. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1989; Gail Bederman, "Theodore
Roosevelt: Manhood, Nation, and 'Civilization." Manliness and
Civlization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States,
1880-1917. University of Chicago Press, 1996: 170-216. [Return to text]
2. Lisa Bloom, Gender on Ice. University of
Minnesota Press, 1993: 32. [Return to text]
3. The British lost the race to the South Pole to
Roald Amundsen of Norway who reached the pole in 1911, one month ahead
of Captain Robert Falcon Scott. Scott and his team of four men died of
hunger and cold on their way back. After completing nearly seven-eighths
of the distance they encountered a blizzard and, unable to reach their
food depot just 11 miles away, died in their tent from a combination of
frostbite, sickness, and starvation. Whereas Scott's narrative of
failure was straightforward, Robert Edwin Peary's claim to have been the
first person, on April 6, 1909, to reach the geographic North Pole—a
claim that subsequently attracted much criticism and controversy—is
today widely doubted for a number of reasons and remains the focus of
controversy. [Return to text]
4. See Lisa Bloom, Gender on Ice, 127-129.
[Return to text]
5. In the end, there was enough of a doubt about
his claims that he was recognized by a congressional committee as
"attainer" of the pole not "discoverer" and given a Rear Admiral's
pension by a special act of Congress in 1911. [Return to text]
6. See Lisa Bloom, Gender on Ice, 130-131. [Return to text]
7. See an earlier article by Lisa Bloom on Isaac
Julien's work: "True North: Isaac Julien's Aesthetic Wager," Isaac
Julien, True North, published in the catalogue for the Mak Center
for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles and Museum of Contemporary Art,
North Miami (2005); republished in German and English in: Isaac
Julien: True North: Fantôme Afrique. Eds. Veit Görner and Eveline
Bernasconi. New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2006. [Return to text]
8. See Gísli Pálsson's article in this special
issue on this topic. [Return to text]
9. See Homi Bhabha, "Of Mimicry and Man." The
Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994: 86. [Return to text]
10. For a more sustained discussion on the
history of Antarctic photography see: Elena Glasberg's "Blankness
in the Antarctic Landscape of An-My Lê" in
this special issue, as well as "Camera Artists: Gender in
Antarctic Visual Culture." New Zealand Journal of Photography.
Special Feature on Antarctic Representation (2007). [Return to text]
11. Cited in Samaras' article in this special
issue titled, "America Dreams." [Return to text]
12. For other reviews of Samaras' Antarctic
photographs, see the following: Kristina Newhouse, "Connie Samaras:
V.A.L.I.S.." X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly. 10:4
(2008); Matais Viegener, "Connie Samaras, De Soto Gallery, Los Angeles
CA." Artus (Fall 2007). [Return to text]
13. See Samaras' article in this special issue
titled, "America Dreams." The production of her series
of photographs and videos on Dubai currently titled "After the American
Century," begun in late 2008, will deal with speculative landscapes,
architecture and geopolitical narratives, political geographies in the
everyday and differing science fictional tropes of imagining the future. [Return to text]
14. The solo premiere of Samaras' body of work on
Antarctica in the U.S. took place at the De Soto gallery in Los Angeles
in October of 2007. It also appeared in a group
show on Antarctica at the Pitzer Campus Gallery in Clairmont, CA in
November 2007-January 2008, curated by Ciara Ennis. [Return to text]
15. "A Partial Correction to the Representations
of Earth Culture Sent Out to Extraterrestsrials on the US 177 Voyager
Interstellar Space Probes" was first exhibited at New Langton Arts in
San Francisco in 1994.The exhibit was curated by Nancy Gonchar and there
was a catalogue to accompany the exhibit. Also see, Connie Samaras,
"Abduction Experience: Impression of Abduction Narratives read by the
Corrector, Recorded 17-19 May 1994, L.A, CA, USA," Processed Lives:
Gender and Technology in Everyday Life. Ed. Jennifer Terry. New York:
Routledge, 1997: 200-213. [Return to text]
16. Samaras draws on a tradition of aesthetics
associated with a tradition of a male-coded photography by deploying a
dead pan photographic style associated with the work of contemporary
German photographers Andreas Gursky and Candida Höfer, former students
of Bernd and Hilla Becher who were active from the late 1950s to the
late 1990s. Whereas Gursky is drawn to large, anonymous, urban
spaces—high-rise facades at night, office lobbies, and stock exchanges—Höfer
makes large-format photographs of empty interiors and social
spaces that capture what she calls the "psychology of social
architecture." For an extended discussion of Samaras' work in relation
to the Bechers as well as Gursky and Höfer see: Kristina Newhouse,
"Connie Samaras: V.A.L.I.S.." X-TRA Contemporary Art
Quarterly 10:4 (Summer 2008). [Return to text]
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