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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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