Connie Samaras,
"America Dreams"
(page 5 of 7)
III. Into the Void
Figure 9 Connie Samaras
Antennae Field South Pole
digital print
Courtesy of the artist
Although the ideas of blankness, the imaginary, and the mundane were
integral to constructing the images, I also did not want to visually
shy away from the utter beauty and power of the polar plateau, despite
the fact that beautiful landscapes are a representational trap given the
long cultural and historical use of such images in defining nation and
class. Picturing the landscape through a close-up lens, where its
grandeur is seamed with the built environment, reveals the ice as an
entity in and of itself rather than simply a void being filled. It
also exposes the empty slate beneath the shifting cultural markings of
U.S. nationalism repeatedly being dropped down onto this place.
Photographing pure landscape however was a more difficult proposition.
One approach was to reveal the fragility of the built environment in
such an extreme climate, as in the aerial picture of communication
antennae and their shadows thinly cast onto the polar plateau (see Figure 9).
Another was to frame close-up sections of
the plateau to create visual confusion and underscore the failure of
optics to read images. For example, one photograph appears first as an
image of a black sea against a sky at sunset. Taken in full twenty-four
hour sunlight, the black sea is actually a close up of where night is
falling somewhere else on the globe and the "sunset" is in fact contrail
pollution from the transport planes landing at the Pole (see Figure 10).
Figure 10 Connie Samaras
Night Divide and Contrails
digital print
Courtesy of the artist
However as most artists know, once work is put out into world it is
expected that, along with an understanding of the artist's intent, there
will also inevitably be symbolic slippage, misreadings, and/or willful
mistranslations of one's work. Still it was almost a hallucinatory
experience when, six months later, during an exhibition of the first
photographs I printed from V.A.L.I.S. (see
Figure 2, Figure 3 and
Figure 6), I watched a
crowd of men armed with cell phone and digital point-and shoot-cameras
photographically correct the spatial and narrative dislocation I had
aesthetically built into the photographs.
This particular exhibition was in a Los Angeles' municipal gallery
where a large group of contemporary photographs on architecture were
being exhibited to coincide with the re-opening of the newly refurbished
Frank Lloyd Wright house adjacent to the galleries. There was a
massive crowd in attendance, out for an entertaining Sunday afternoon at
the city's cultural park. As soon as the show opened, I saw a large
number of people gravitate to the image of the sinking Buckminster
Fuller Dome (see Figure 6).
Soon after I noticed a few men, white and
middle-aged, take out their mobile phones or pocket digital cameras.
Next, several set their devices to "video" and moved into the
photograph, starting to "walk through" the photographic terrain as
though they were actually there. Soon others began "re-photographing"
as well. Some set their cameras to wide-angle format as they moved in
closer to "correct" my close-up image into a panorama. Others
diligently photographed a series of small linear sections that I assumed
they would later tile into a panorama with (unlike my image) a more
coherent horizon line. One man was particularly industrious: clearly
armed with an empty and sizeable memory chip, he held his mobile at
arm's length and, for several minutes, slowly video taped every inch of
the picture as though he was heroically trudging across the ice. I
stood behind him the entire time watching the bright screen vacuuming
the void into a "meaningful" tourist adventure. By the time he
finished, I felt as though I'd been transported into a dream state, one
where narratives of manifest destiny and masculine heroics live
timelessly on, inured to any kind of intervention.
Lisa Bloom in her book Gender on Ice is one of the few to
discuss the differing ways in which gender, race, and sexuality are
constructed in the narratives of the early polar explorers and the
institutions, private and state, who supported them. While in Antarctica
almost a century and two more waves of feminism later, I found these
questions even more confusing. The adage, "everything changes,
everything stays the same," kept running through my head like a stuck
commercial jingle. Although men still outnumber women in terms of
personnel, there was a high percentage of women workers in all kinds of
jobs from, for example at the South Pole, heavy equipment operators all
the way up to summer station manager. When it came to scientists, women
are still, as is the case at my own university and most others in the
States, very much in a minority. Also, the ice was not the only white
expanse. Coming from Southern California, it was shocking to be in a
population, scientists and personnel, where there were hardly any people
of color and where, like the 50s in the U.S., it was somehow acceptable.
Unexpectedly I found small enclaves of my gay sisters, more so at
McMurdo than at the Pole. I also encountered a kind of queerness in the
straight culture. For one, the physical nuclear family does not exist
on the ice, thus paving the way for imagining other kinds of social
arrangements. The stories I heard about dating rituals (where women
often have the upper hand because of their fewer numbers), sexual
experimentation, and the phenomenon of "ice husbands and wives"
(relationships that take place only in Antarctica's austral summers
where the spouses left at home are substituted with their ice
equivalents) made me recall the period, post-Stonewall and pre-AIDS,
when queer culture was starting to have a visibly bending effect on
normative heterosexuality. In terms of class, because it's enormously
expensive to send and house anyone for any purpose in Antarctica,
facilities, personnel come from all walks of life, from Alaskans (mostly
white) looking for employment during their winter season to people, for
example, with degrees in medical anthropology willing to take jobs
washing dishes in order to simply be there. The off-planet feel is
particularly strong at the Pole. Because you are at an ellipse to
orbiting satellites, there's very little time in the day to call out or
go online. Unlike the few dismal channels aired in the main galley at
McMurdo (which included Fox News and a channel produced by the
military), there was no media at the Pole. It felt as wonderfully far
as one can get from the endless assaults of consumer economy, yet the
faint hum of Raytheon corporate management thousands of miles away in
Denver pervaded the atmosphere.
Page: 1 | 2 | 3 |
4 | 5 |
6 | 7
Next page
|