America Dreams

III. Into the Void

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).

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.