Blankness in the Antarctic Landscape of An-My Lê

Lê records a built environment that is brutally industrial, menacing, and strangely familiar. While her large format images monumentalize the effort to support scientists in Antarctica, it also points to the growing tension between human-powered modes of field work and remote, simulated, or robotic modes of information gathering and data production. The human body may not be as necessary to science as an attachment to heroic history might have it. The glorification of labor and the working class aspect of the South Pole site gestures complicatedly to the impossibility of nostalgia for the human body as the primary site for meaning on the ice—even as that body is now a worker in an organization within an infrastructure far removed from the dangers faced by the original heroes. Lê’s South Pole is a combination (post)industrial office park and (de)militarized base. The support of science requires an infrastructure whose implications secure Antarctica within a map of globalization and capital flows at odds with depictions of the ice as pure, empty, or even as heroic and sublime.

Military operations are captured by Lê in Offload, a similarly structured scene of sky meeting water taken from an elevated position. Though the location is a shore, not a frozen polar plateau, and the characters are a military amphibious vehicle, a tank, and an aircraft carrier headed towards the horizon, these elements are in analogous position to those in Storage Berms at the Pole. The Marines on the beach are anonymous, and dwarfed by the scene and machinery from which they emerged and which they drive. Relative movement comes through in the spume clouding the landing vehicle, which is caught between being in the water and sitting on shore. A vaguely malevolent, thick sky hangs over the affair. The shared composition of Offload and Storage Berms at Pole demonstrates Lê’s anti-exceptionalist positioning of Antarctica as removed from its own narrow history of extremophile representation. Rather, Lê places Antarctica in a visually and politically homologous position to globalization of the U.S. military. As Chalmers Johnson has observed, the “U.S. has bases in every continent but Antarctica”—though Lê would suggest a minor correction: the Antarctic is not fully or cleanly demilitarized, even though the ATS remains in effect. ¹ As Simon Jenkins recently argued in The Guardian, the U.S. and other nations adhere nominally to the ATS restrictions against drilling, assaying, and other development plans, to the extent that science programs can do whatever they want. ² That includes, within science programs—which no one suggests are anything but serious and valuable—activities and implications that are also nationally strategic. These activities help to aggrandize development and may be refunctioned at a time when the empty frozen laboratory becomes a different kind of blank, when ice core drilling and blasting might be put to other less scientifically benign purposes.

The tiny human figures against a grand background echo Ponting’s classic perspective. But in this take the human figures are diminished toy soldiers rather than anchors of the human. Lê amplifies the potential of Heroic Age sublime to an extreme distortion comments back on the limits of the very notion of the sublime to give any real proportion to nature or to humanity. This imbalance was immanent in Ponting. Lê, the contemporary Ponting, has forced us to look at the absurdity, the menace, the doom both in the material facts of humanity’s trace in Antarctica, and also in the mode of looking at Antarctica.

Porter’s anxious warning about drilling in the ice has returned in the form of concern over global warming and renewed resource pressure worldwide. And yet artists are less interested in the propaganda techniques of the earlier generations of eco-art. ³ A new style of the eco-visual is emerging in which artists directly survey the damage in the landscape, risking its aestheticization and their own complicity in ruin—yet avoiding the equally problematic evacuation of the human from the concept of wilderness. ⁴ Lê’s complex “deadpan” exposure, or muted outrage, characterizes the post-Heroic in Antarctic photography as both desiring the Heroic and critiquing its trace, lamenting its tabula rasa clarities while refusing everything imperial that its blankness stands for.

1. Chalmers Johnson, “America’s Empire of Bases.” Tomdispatch.com, January 2008.[↑]
2. Simon Jenkins, “Scientists and Soldiers Can No Longer Keep These Paradises to Themselves.” The Guardian. 14 March 2008.[↑]
3. “After Nature” exhibit at The New Museum, New York City, July-October 2008, curated by Massimiliano Gioni.[↑]
4. 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.[↑]