Polar Fantasies and Aesthetics in the Work of Isaac Julien and Connie Samaras
Global warming has brought renewed attention to both the Arctic and
Antarctic, as scientists and the media report almost daily on shrinking
ice masses. Recently, there has been a shift from a representation of
the polar regions as physically terrifying and sublime, to the ground
zero of catastrophic climate change worldwide. They have also become
sites for the new international rush for territory and scarce natural
resources, especially in the Arctic. The Arctic and Antarctic are no
longer seen as forbidden places, and the spectacle of the effects of
global warming is drawing people to these spaces more than ever before.
Tourists carrying digital cameras on cruise boats have descended on
these regions, photographing Antarctica during the summer months.
With the exception of the last international geophysical year in
1957-58, the last time these regions have received this kind of popular
attention was during the heyday of colonialism in the late 19th and
early 20th centuries. The race to the Poles during that era was seen as
an important vehicle for nation building and the advance of scientific
knowledge. In what follows, I reconsider my book Gender on Ice
(1993) in relation to the work of Isaac Julien's True North
(2004) and Connie Samaras' V.A.L.I.S. (2005) to examine how 20th
century discourses are reworked one hundred years later in the context
of 21st century artistic practices. As I wrote in Gender on Ice,
polar exploration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was integral
to the social construction of a distinctive nexus of white manhood and
nationalism and was crucial to reifying a particular form of white
masculinity.[1]
In the early 20th century. both the North and South Poles
represented one of the few remaining masculine testing grounds where
"adventure and hardship could still be faced."[2]
The role of women and people of color, in this vehicle for nation- and culture-building and
the advance of scientific knowledge, was significantly elided at this
historical moment.
Almost one hundred years later, the Arctic and Antarctic are no
longer the site of a privileged white masculinity and these regions are
no longer understood as just remote areas, but rather as spaces closely,
if complexly, connected to globalized and political forces. By focusing
on the work of two artists—Isaac Julien and Connie Samaras—this
article asks: What new stories and images are being produced through
recent attempts to re-visualize the Arctic and Antarctic? What impact
have the genres of science fiction and horror, as well as the older
aesthetic traditions of the sublime, had on their work? In what follows
I will examine how both Julien and Samaras' work are playing off or in
dialogue with issues raised in my book about the Heroic Age of
exploration as well as the ways that both these projects take the
critical scholarship of the book's gender and race politics in new
artistic directions beyond the bounds of my original enquiry.
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