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Issue: 7.1: Fall 2008
Guest Edited by Lisa Bloom, Elena Glasberg and Laura Kay
Gender on Ice

Elena Glasberg, "Blankness in the Antarctic Landscape of An-My Lê"
(page 6 of 6)

Shocked Blank

The post-Heroic indexes, and is represented by, the marks in the photograph, the deep palimpsest-like tracks, which accrete and cover, and are defaced and erased in the ice. This blankness is a blanking as well. The dense and overlaid tracks repeat the mark of the footstep of the Heroic Age, the first arrivals, the lone witnesses to a romantic sublime landscape. The layering of tracks comments on habitation and the passing of human time—the mechanical industrial sublime replaces the former South Pole concept by effacing it.[18] The new Pole is both marked by and replaces the idea of an unmarkable, vast, timeless land. The marks in Storage Berms at the South Pole are trashed, illegible, untraceable to a singular, heroic agent. Rather, these tracks violently blank out Ponting's and Porter's blanking. This latest form of blanking provides the central argument of Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.[19] In describing how free market economic policies, beginning after WWII, have exploited natural disasters to promote profit as well as policy change to insure future profits, Klein describes a blankness that is unlike the 19th Century imperial blankness of the map, whose white spaces were created only to be filled in.

Klein's first chapter, "Blank is Beautiful," describes the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans as an example of the way a natural disaster became an opportunity to politically remake the city to benefit capital, but not necessarily the displaced inhabitants. Klein agues that disaster capitalism not only exploits natural disaster, but produces disaster—through the techniques of shock therapy on the level of individuals, and through the kind of defense policies of "shock and awe" at the center of the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. Shock and awe was designed to radically undo Iraqi society so that occupying forces might rebuild on terms favorable to their interests. While the blankness in Storage Berms at the South Pole is not reducible to the evacuating violence that Klein analyzes, a violent process of marking and overwriting is nevertheless at play in the composition and subject of Lê's photograph. This new kind of footprint is unlike the original Heroic Age man-hauled and dog-sledded tracks that indexed singular, if nationalist effort and human-animal time frames and scales. It is, rather, a demonstration for a disembodied, many-limbed, and non-teleological global capital. The South Pole is in many ways a perfect, endless arrival point for a global capital flow, whose very maintenance of the new South Pole requires more attention than any past arrival or claim. The South Pole becomes claimable—beyond the limits of biology or the ecosystem, and beyond the restraints of any treaty limiting national or corporate profit—only within this new economy of extreme capitalism. The contemporary South Pole is a ready-made desert for "shock doctrine" economics.

Working within globalizing capital and big science in Antarctica is a small but persistent history within the U.S., the NSF: the Artists and Writers Program. Beginning as early as 1957, it has sent visual, sound, literary, and other artists-observers to the ice, including both Porter and Lê.[20] Under the aegis and even encouragement of the NSF, we now have an incredible record, both descriptive and critical, of human presence in the Antarctic that would never have been possible if not for this underfunded program. Yet paradoxes similar to those of the Sierra Club's promotion/ conservancy of Yosemite emerge: national interest in a non-national project, promotion at the cost of the pristine, obeisance to the state as a factor in its critique. The AAWP has managed beautifully to balance the requirements of the state and the need to support science with an allowance for artistic freedom. Although the populations of the southern hemispheric states like Australia and New Zealand incorporate Antarctica much more intimately into their national cultures, the size and quality of the U.S. program has produced a U.S.-authored commentary disproportionate to U.S. cultural involvement in Antarctica. We could even argue that the program keeps the U.S. in the game culturally, and in the important area of geopolitics and the media, or that the AAWP is the cultural wing of a neoimperial project in Antarctica, one that operates beyond the need to legally claim territory, and that surpasses the sundry claims of other nations no matter their histories and worthiness. The cultural imperialism of the U.S. is promoted, expressed, and yet also countermanded by the NSF AAWP. No matter what kind of art is produced—children's books or high art depicting U.S. militarism—the state cannot fail to benefit.

But where do the future of consortia enter? Can the arts create a bulwark against capital, even as the arts are a form of capital? We're back to the Sierra Club perplexity: does looking at any ideological filling-in of a blank national consciousness of Antarctica lead to freedom for development? Lê's post-Heroic, post-ecological wasteland at the South Pole suggests another role for the constructed tabula rasa: that blanking the object may help preserve it from being filled in. Knowing as we do the constructedness of every approach to the radical place of Antarctica, can we imagine a politics of unmaking Antarctica that would create a blankness not to be filled, but to be left unserviceable and de-instrumentalized? For such a vision we may have to stare into Lê's overexposed, layered track marks before they too melt into air.

Endnotes

1. See the Introduction to this special issue for details of the 2008 claims in the Arctic and Antarctic. Though Porter's Antarctic landscapes preceded the 1993 anti-mining agreement under the ATS, pressure to extract value from increasingly scarce territorial resource has only increased since 1978. Eliot Porter, Antarctica. New York: Dutton, 1978. [Return to text]

2. For a description of the Sierra Club aesthetic, see: Deborah Bright, "The Machine in the Garden Revisited: American Environmentalism and Photographic Aesthetics." Art Journal 5.2 (1992): 60-71. For a fuller background on Porter's nature ideology, see: Finis Dunaway, "On the Subtle Spectacle of Fallen Leaves." Environmental History. 9.4 (2004). Refer to page 730 of that text for how,"Porter chose to frame the environment as untouched and unspoiled, as a space that lies outside the fell clutch of humanity." Also see the the special issue of Aperture, "Beyond Wilderness," Volume 120 (1990), for a "critique of representational practices of major conservation organizations such as The Sierra Club . . . and their . . . 'pinup' photography . . .." [Return to text]

3. For example, Robert Powell, "Antarctic Tourists: Ambassadors or Consumers?" Polar Record. 44 (2008): 233-41. [Return to text]

4. The widely reproduced Scott photos and the much less well known Amundsen photos depict haggard men in thick gear amid a scene of almost total whiteout. Their usefulness as evidence has been obviated by their ancillary nature. See: Christy Collis, "Australia's Antarctic Turf." Journal of Media Culture. 7.4 (2004). Here Collis discusses Mawson's use of photography as part of a claiming repertoire. Cameras came to Antarctic waters in 1895. Scott had cameras along on the 1905 expedition, as did Shackleton on his 1907 attempt to reach the pole. But no official photographer predates Ponting. [Return to text]

5. Antarctica's challenge to human perception is discussed in William Fox, Terra Antarctica: Looking Into the Emptiest Continent. San Antonio: Trinity Press, 2006. For a valuable art historical and theoretical discussion of blankness see the chapter on "Blankness as a Signifier" in: Jeremy Gilbert Rolfe, Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime. London: Allworth Press, 2000. [Return to text]

6. Whiteout, or the loss of orienting or identifying features in the atmosphere is a common polar occurrence as well as a mode of blanking I do not discuss in this essay. For a brief discussion of whiteout in Antarctic photography see: E. Glasberg, "Camera Artists in Antarctica." New Zealand Journal of Photography. 65 (2007): 21-3. [Return to text]

7. See Amy Kaplan, "The Tenacious Grasp of American Exceptionalism." Comparative American Studies: An International Journal. 2.2 (2004): 153Ð9. [Return to text]

8. See the Introduction to this special issue for the way rising oil prices have increased pressure to exploit the polar regions as possible solutions. [Return to text]

9. Photographs of U.S. explorer Richard E. Byrd's "Little America" bases from 1928-1938 document a built environment prominently featuring jumbled boxes and fuel cans on a field of ice. For a range of photographs depicting U.S. bases throughout the 1930s and 1940s see "All-out Assault on Antarctica," National Geographic Magazine. CX.2 (1956): 141-180. Explicitly modeled after the Little America base, the opening shots of the Antarctic base in John Carpenter's 1982 The Thing pans across empty fuel drums against the ice. [Return to text]

10. See Sue Hubbard's review of Tacita Dean at the Tate. A filmic/cultural icon of a "defunct social system" is the scene in Planet of the Apes (1968) depicting the Statue of Liberty as a beached ruin. [Return to text]

11. Stephen Pyne, The Ice: A Journey to Antarctica. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986, p. 205. Pyne offers a portfolio of Antarctic representation including Ponting, Porter, and Schulthess. [Return to text]

12. The term refers to love of extremes as well as to a class of creatures that has evolved to thrive in desert conditions such as those prevailing in Antarctica. [Return to text]

13. In a scene from her 1981 short story "Sur," Ursula Le Guin describes her characters encountering the area around Scott's abandoned hut. Looking much different than the famous Ponting shots, the hut area is a mass of dog turds and open spilt containers, sealskins and bloody guts. The narrator remarks: "The backside of Heroism is often sad; women and servants know that." [Return to text]

14. Chalmers Johnson, "America's Empire of Bases." Tomdispatch.com, January 2008. [Return to text]

15. Simon Jenkins, "Scientists and Soldiers Can No Longer Keep These Paradises to Themselves." The Guardian. 14 March 2008. [Return to text]

16. "After Nature" exhibit at The New Museum, New York City, July-October 2008, curated by Massimiliano Gioni. [Return to text]

17. William Cronin, "The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature." Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995: 69-90. [Return to text]

18. Alix Ohlin, "Andreas Gursky and the Contemporary Sublime." Art Journal. 61.4 (2002): 22-35. [Return to text]

19. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Picador, 2007. [Return to text]

20. I too was a guest of the program in 2004-5. Other contributors to the special issue supported by the AAWP include: Connie Samaras, Ann Aghion, Andrea Polli, and Anne Noble [Return to text]

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