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.

Gender on Ice Revisited

Gender on Ice was the first critical book in the U.S. on both north and south polar exploration narratives that re-engaged the legacy of the Heroic Age (1895-1914) of Arctic and Antarctic exploration. It articulated a highly critical, revisionist attitude toward explorers and their writings in its emphasis on examining which narratives, lives and sacrifices counted and which did not. It is significant that the book puts emphasis on visual culture and specifically evaluates these heroic narratives through the way they were represented in National Geographic magazine, a new publication of visual culture that linked itself to a national image of the United States in the 1890s and seized the poles as a metaphor for modernity and progress. Gender on Ice also offered a revisionist account of white explorers such as Robert Peary and Captain Robert Falcon Scott, who were deemed heroes of their national cultures in the early part of the 20th century, in spite of the evidence that they led failed expeditions. Both Scott and Peary fabricated the events of their expeditions to suit the particular imperial and masculinist ideologies that each characterized. The book also highlighted the exclusion of Matthew Henson, the black American explorer who accompanied Robert Peary in his trek to reach the North Pole, and the ways he was not given equal credit for his central place in the story as it was told by Peary and interested institutions such as National Geographic magazine. Gender on Ice discussed how the Inuit men and women helpers, companions, and guides were erased in their role as travelers and explorers because of their perceived "primitive" status. Thus, the book helped document the ways that polar exploration had not always been the exclusive preserve of "white" male explorers. By showing alternative narratives of polar exploration "told" in the words and lives of native, non-western, and female subjects, the study challenged the dominant historical discourse of travel in which white western men figured as the sole aesthetic interpreters or scientific authorities.

Figure 1 Cover of Gender on Ice: American Ideologies of Polar Expeditions
University of Minnesota Press, 1993
Cover Illustration by Narelle Jubelin, Cover Design by Brad Norr

Though the book was about gender and its connection to nationhood and the politics of imperialism and science, much of the interest generated by Gender on Ice stemmed from how the book was written, and how the writing style of the book played off the epic quality of these male heroic narratives set in regions that overwhelm the senses with their dangerous weather, extreme cold, blinding light and whiteness. The playfulness of the book was announced by its cover, which uses artwork by the Australian artist Narelle Jubelin to foreground the book's anti-heroic emphasis (see Figure 1). The image is a close-up in petit point, or needlepoint stitch, of the face of a polar explorer that is disintegrating. This disturbing image is placed within a bombastic gilt frame to explicitly underline the book's overriding thesis: how the traumatic experience of failure in both the British and American expeditions was reworked to turn the official version of events into something worthy of public reverence.[3]

Gender on Ice was a case study, rather than a highly theoretical work, that at the time tried to break new ground by bringing colonial discourses of exploration, science, and adventure not only under the consideration of gender studies, but into conversation with cultural studies of race and ethnicity. In this project, the parameters of gender studies were stretched to include its historically "other" subjects, marking a shift in then current feminist practice. Thus, Gender on Ice was not a book about women per se—though the history I tell does bear directly upon the condition of women and relations of gendered power during this period—but a feminist critique of a gendered concept of heroism associated with the new importance given to turn of the century polar exploration as a source of national virility and toughness. By asking, somewhat ironically, what types of white men the Arctic and Antarctic make, the book analyzes how reaching the North Pole and the South Pole functioned as a testing ground of masculinity, where there was shame attached to losing, and thus failure to demonstrate manhood.

The denial of failure at each pole by both the British and the Americans establishes a continuity between two national events. I focus on the tragedy of the failed British polar expeditions of Captain Robert Falcon Scott to provide important contrasts and parallels with U.S. polar exploration narratives. I explain how Peary's very American scientific enterprise, which stresses tangible results, contrasts with Scott's account, which also understood the expedition as making contributions to science, but which followed British literary and military traditions valorizing the inner qualities of tragic self-sacrifice rather than performance and achievement. Drawing on the letters and diaries of those members of Scott's expedition who were denied power by their social position, I examine how Antarctica becomes a discursive space. Here a nationalist myth was established in which writing itself becomes a means to mythologize an ideology of British white masculinity while, paradoxically, the male body is ignored. Thus, in the Scott narrative, examples of the men sleeping in tents or on a ship together, emphasizing the closeness of their gendered, physical bodies, are ignored and replaced by moral character. Scott claims that he exposed himself and his men to additional dangers and personal sacrifices, and connects his actions to a higher national mission as defined by the metaphor of tragic self-sacrifice, providing the foundation on which a kind of white heteronormative masculinity becomes heroicized.

In contrast to the British, the Americans try to produce a narrative of masculinity that is part of a scientific tradition worked discursively to erase the significant presence of Inuit women, men and the participation of Matthew Henson. There is a larger emphasis on exteriority, where successful performance and achievement matter most. While the tragedy of Scott's failed expedition to the South Pole is acceptable within the parameters of the literary, there is no place for failure within the ideological narrative of scientific progress that framed the discourses of the Peary expedition.[4] As a result, Peary's achievement was never scientifically disputed.[5] This inability to acknowledge outright the failure of the Peary expedition, I argue, explains why the critique of Peary remained narrowly focused on establishing or disputing the accuracy of Peary's claim to the North Pole and did not resonate more widely as in the case with Scott's expedition.[6]

These questions, in the context of my book, are meaningful in terms of the unacknowledged failure enacted not only at the North Pole at the early part of the 20th century, but also in the later part of the century during the Vietnam war and at the time of the book's writing, the first Persian Gulf War. Gender on Ice has been my attempt to explain the interconnections between the multiple narratives of national identity, scientific progress, modernity and masculinity across the national cultures of the United States and the United Kingdom. In what follows, I will return to how these discourses are invoked and re-narrativized in the work of Isaac Julien and Connie Samaras.

Renarrativizing the Arctic: Isaac Julien's True North

Figure 2 Isaac Julien
Untitled from True North Series, 2004
digital print on Epson Premium Photo Glossy paper
39.37 x 39.37 inches, 100 x 100 cm
Courtesy of the Artist and Metro Pictures

Isaac Julien's film True North is a strong example of a fascinating new departure in the artistic and scholarly discourse on polar expedition narratives.[7] Drawing in part from Gender on Ice, as well as the problematics of earlier Arctic representations such as Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North, and the 1999 documentary Nanook Revisited, made by a Canadian Collective, Julien responds to a larger visual culture of the Arctic by focusing on the relation between aesthetics and politics, as well as the Peary expedition's complex politics of exclusion. Emphasizing the significant role of Matthew Henson, Julien is attracted to the rawness and violence of the relationship between Henson and his employer, Peary, in the inhospitable male space of the Arctic, a testing-ground in which isolation and physical danger combine with overwhelming beauty. Significantly, in Julien's film, we don't see Peary or Cook, or evidence of the bitter controversy that ensued between the two men. Instead of the driving anxiety and competition in these white male narratives, in Julien's film, the sheer physical, natural attraction of the North Pole is foregrounded (see Figure 2). Matthew Henson and the Inuits who accompanied Peary to the Pole serve as witnesses in Julien's film and substitute for Peary (see Figure 3). By underscoring Henson and the Inuits as subjects, Julien's film actually draws out what Peary and Henson share through an unusually audacious strategy of over-the-top post-colonial mimicry, which challenges the viewer's relationship to these older arctic narratives and to the Arctic itself.

Figure 3 Isaac Julien
Untitled from True North Series, 2005
digital print on Epson Premium Photo Glossy paper
Courtesy of the Artist and lightbox.metroonline.co.uk

In Julien's attempt to rethink the relationship between cinema, aesthetics and racism endemic to earlier well-known representations of the Arctic, he does not only emphasize the imperial ambitions of that period but also highlights the aesthetic drive—something that was critical to early exploration narratives. However, Julien's use of the aesthetic provides a very different approach that challenges some of the foundational assumptions of the sublime as overwhelming and humbling. He does not offer us an unmediated vision of the Arctic, but one that is highly technologized and artificial, as evidenced by his use of three screens rather than one and his lush production values (see Figure 4). This technological beauty is compelling in the way it is used to draw out our fascinations with the North Pole and how the drive to possess it was not simply about ownership or nationalism. His film emphasizes the fact that the representation of polar exploration exceeds both purposeful activity as well as the instrumentality of the earlier colonial narrative of exploration, science, and discovery. However, he does not give up politics to focus on beauty. They are presented together as inextricably entangled.

Figure 4 Isaac Julien
Untitled from True North Series, 2005
digital print on Epson Premium Photo Glossy paper
Courtesy of the Artist and lightbox.metroonline.co.uk

The film provocatively rewrites the narrative of a subservient Henson, concocted by Peary in a visual register far different than one would expect from an account of a moment in history in which Blacks were excluded from the official historical script. In this way, Julien's film insists that North Pole heroism exists both in spite of and against Peary. Julien reformulates the narrative with a different aesthetic, one that is modern, ironic, artificial and detached that is deliberately unsettling. For example, Peary sanctioned Inuit mistresses on his expedition to protect against what was seen as the potential, but more dangerous, carnal relations between white men.[8] Julien's film subversively plays up the homosocial and racial relations between Peary and Henson, though in unexpected ways. This comes through in Julien's focus on a black female fashion model, Vanessa Myrie, dressed in couture, who impersonates Matthew Henson. His use of the commercial aesthetics of fashion photography makes the Arctic appear almost as a runway (see Figure 5). This brazen strategy queers a discourse that otherwise inscribes and validates a highly simplified and formulaic narrative of white, masculinist, heterosexual agency prevailing over a feminized space (see Figure 6). The incongruous presence of Vanessa Myrie shown washing her hands and fondling the ice turns this dangerous landscape into simply ice, not life or death. However, it is the contrast between the stunningly spectacular landscape and Myrie's banal gesture that underscores Julien's ambition to remind us of how fetishized the ice and the black female model remain. Her presence is part of an extended joke to remind us that nobody belongs there. Julien emphasizes this visually, as there is nothing more incongruous than a black fashion model on ice wearing the darkest of clothing to aesthetically mark her off from the landscape and further highlight its sublimity.

Figure 5 Isaac Julien
Untitled from True North Series, 2005
digital print on Epson Premium Photo Glossy paper
Courtesy of the Artist and lightbox.metroonline.co.uk

Figure 6 Isaac Julien
Untitled from True North Series, 2005
digital print on Epson Premium Photo Glossy paper
Courtesy of the Artist and lightbox.metroonline.co.uk

In a sense both Peary and Julien are processing the North Pole technologically, but producing very different products. Both are open to the beauty of the landscape, and Julien acknowledges common ground with Peary and other white explorers by highlighting and creating irony in the aesthetic side of exploration. This gets us away from a simple or straightforward critique. Julien reminds us that scientific exploratory projects have an aesthetic dimension that may not be apparent in official accounts. His highly artificial and more ironical relationship to beauty is also a response to Peary's older colonialist discourse of technology which minimizes the significance of Henson and the Inuit work force by representing them not as exploited workers but as "cogs" that are instrumental in the workings of what Peary termed his smooth and well-managed "traveling machine."

Julien by contrast is interested in foregrounding Henson's subjectivity and using the figure of Henson/Myrie to bring back the beauty of the Arctic. However strongly he is affirming a recovery of black subjectivity, he does it in a mockingly counter-heroic way and the heroism he maintains is deliberately exaggerated and could be understood as a form of postcolonial mimicry, to use Homi Bhabha's well-known term.[9] As in the process of mimicry more generally, Julien's film highlights the fashioned and performed nature of the original authoritative discourse of exploration narratives and spotlights what happens when the colonialist enterprise is threatened by the displacing gaze of its double—in this case Matthew Henson/Myrie. Julien not only takes us back to these original heroic polar exploration narratives but to a whole discourse of earlier colonialist artistic and cinematic representations of the Arctic to restage, and in some sense disrupt and mock, the aesthetics and politics from which those original representations draw.

Thus, his aesthetics of the Pole cannot be simply folded back into a discussion of the sublime, science, whiteness, fashion, or politics. Instead he's attending to it in a way that critically engages and impacts an entire tradition of photographic, cinematic, and art representations of non-white people, not only by inserting Henson and the Inuits into a central role, but by creating an entirely new parodic counter-discourse enabled by a different deployment of new technologies that underscores the nature of the human relations he represents. Julien is not only retrieving the North Pole as an arena of black male, queer and Inuit experience, but he also reminds us forcefully of the complex political, colonial, scientific, sexual and aesthetic dimensions of polar exploration.

Connie Samaras' Minimalist Aesthetics in V.A.L.I.S.

Though the context of Antarctica is different (it is the only place in the world without an indigenous population), both Isaac Julien and Connie Samaras are challenging our perceptions of these regions as well as our devotion to the older heroic narratives. In the case of Samaras, who traveled to Antarctica and the South Pole with a National Science Foundation grant in 2004-5, her work also responds to a number of other issues specific to Antarctica now, such as: the enormous, continuously accelerating increase in tourism to Antarctica in the past decade; the impact of global warming; the soaring prices of raw materials, which strain agreements governing the status of the polar region;, and the consequences of the 1959 treaty, which protects the continent for big science and allows countries like the U.S. to build outposts there. She is engaging a history of visual representation of Antarctica and the way this region is still imagined as an empty frozen wasteland of snow and ice reminiscent of earlier imperial narratives of Arctic and Antarctic exploration long after the Heroic Age of exploration has passed.[10]

Samaras' V.A.L.I.S. (vast active living intelligence system) consists of photographs and two videos she took while on an artist's residency. She approaches Antarctica from a feminist perspective, deliberately anti-heroic in its focus on what it means to live in such an inhospitable, and thus anxiety-provoking, built environment. As Samaras puts it, "because the Antarctica imaginary is strong (perhaps because so few have traveled there), I attempted to show the ice as a place, like any place, where the exotic can be disclosed in the everyday."[11]

Figure 7 Connie Samaras
Buried Fifties Station
digital print
Courtesy of the artist

Her aesthetics of the everyday plays out very differently than does Isaac Julien's work, which is more about returning us to an earlier heroic era and the epic. If Julien creates a new aesthetic by out-subliming the sublime, Samaras goes in the opposite direction and creates a minimalist aesthetic that matches the minimalism of a hostile and uncaring environment (see Figure 7). Significantly, her aesthetic is located in the context of a post-heroic age. Moreover, paralleling these aesthetic differences is Samaras' emphasis on the contemporary everyday, while Julien seeks to return to the heroic registers of the early 20th century to ironically re-invent them. Thus, Samaras' visual project is framed explicitly as post-heroic and intervenes in the discourse that confidently explores, maps and visualizes a space, thus turning it into a place we now claim to consume. In questioning these discourses, Samaras' post-heroic aesthetic is deliberately at odds with hegemonic tourism narratives and photographs.

Figure 8 Connie Samaras
Amundsen-Scott Station Phase III (triptych)
digital print
Courtesy of the artist

Her project is founded in another genre altogether—science fiction and horror, which interest her in part for their critique of technology and also the way both genres create anxiety to make us question what we see and know. Her aesthetic approach to Antarctica makes us interrogate the gap between what we expect to see—touristic views of nowhere that represent the landscape as pristine and empty—versus her image of Antarctica as a somewhat flat corporate environment, not quite a rooted place but more of an eerie transit zone in an extreme environment (see Figure 8).[12] This makes her work more in dialogue with the present discursive context of Antarctica and how these sites are no longer understood simply as remote spaces that demand to be mapped, but rather as spaces closely connected to globalized economic and geo-political forces. Her work on Antarctica attempts to symbolically position Antarctica in the neo-liberal order, which is fitting as one of the buildings she photographs is owned by Raytheon, a leading company in the weapons industry. One of the consequences of neo-liberalism is to render a certain degree of uniformity to all cities. Obviously that isn't quite possible in Antarctica because of its extreme climate, but the built environment suggests a kind of neo-liberal logic emerging as evidenced by her photograph of the submerged Buckminster Fuller dome that make it appear as if it has been abandoned or left to deteriorate, not because it cannot be used meaningfully, but perhaps because it cannot be used profitably (see Figure 9). Samaras herself has written on neo-liberalism and why these images of Antarctica belong in a larger series that includes photographs of the built environments in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas, amongst other sites.[13]

Figure 9 Connie Samaras
Dome and Tunnels
digital print
Courtesy of the artist

Still, there is a uniqueness to her images that make them particular to the minimalist aesthetics of the Antarctic landscape. The otherworldly and corporate aspect of her images has to do in part with the emptiness of the space and the way she makes many of her structures look like buildings in the middle of nowhere, unable to make a dent in the earth. Like the landscape, her interiors are empty and deserted.[14] Her focus on these alien-looking buildings, combined with her emphasis on the un-domestic interiors and exteriors, such as her triptych of the new Amundsen-Scott Station under construction (see Figure 10), have a strangeness that is intermixed with their ordinariness, creating a dissonance with, on the one hand, the discourse of Antarctica as an untouched landscape and, on the other, a scientific utopia of the future. The ordinariness also has to do with the way buildings such as the new Amundsen-Scott station, built by a Hawaiian architect and construction company for Raytheon, looks like the buildings of other neo-liberal environments with which we are all familiar, and constructed by similar companies elsewhere in the world.

Figure 10 Connie Samaras
Detail (Panel 2), Amundsen-Scott Station Phase III (triptych)
digital print
Courtesy of the artist

Figure 11 Connie Samaras
Dome Interior
digital print
Courtesy of the artist

Most of these images are achieved through straightforward photography, though some of them appear as if completely invented. The best example of this tendency is her only photograph of a strange empty domestic interior inside the Buckmister Fuller dome at the South Pole, showing two rows of red sleeping quarters facing each other that she altered slightly by flipping the negative, making the sleeping quarters mirror each other. Though the photograph is only slightly changed, the interior looks, in the mind of the viewer, alternatively like meat lockers, future cells for monks, or worse, those of a morgue (see Figure 11). The bright red sealed bunk spaces and the dome ceiling together are more easily imagined as occupied by a strange organized cult in a science fiction film than a real place where actual scientists live and work. Her slight digital manipulation of this space is done deliberately to make us wonder about "normative" gender relations in such a strange unearthly interior. Compare this work, for example, to Laura Kay's image of the interior of the Fuller Dome in 1985 (see Figure 12). Here the dome interior is a funky non-corporate space, nonetheless made habitable, and inhabiting a specific identity and an appealing counter-culture aesthetic that makes it inviting.

Figure 12 Photograph by Laura Kay

Given the way that Samaras' photographic work goes out of its way to deliberately play with our ideas of what we imagine Antarctica to be, it is significant that she titles her work after Phillip K. Dick's semi-autobiographical VALIS trilogy based on his own claim to have had paranormal experiences. Dick's VALIS trilogy is a study of the invasion of futuristic technology from the future into the present, established by supernatural intelligence, into the life of an ordinary, present-day man who is having a nervous breakdown. As Samaras indicates in her article in this special issue, her photographic work, like Dick's novel, highlights some of the ways that scientific and technological rationality combats but fails to contain the forces of superstition and irrationality. This anxiety that creeps into her work and Dick's rejects not the technological determinism of science but the confident ideology of scientific and technological universality and the neutrality of its representation. This also entails challenging masculinist modes of rationality, which was the subject of a fairly ironical photo and text project she made in the mid-1990s where she "corrected" the representations of earth culture sent out in 1977 by NASA and Carl Sagan to extraterrestrials on two U.S. Voyager Spacecrafts.[15]

Figure 13 Connie Samaras
Underneath Amundsen-Scott Station
digital print
Courtesy of the artist

Samaras' Antarctica project pursues this ironical approach by injecting something more unsettling and unearthly into what otherwise appear to be fairly neutral and objective images of Antarctica's built environment, with its mostly anonymous industrial structures.[16] This comes through in her triptych of the "Amundsen-Scott Station Phase III" and the way the building, under construction, looks like a flimsy Hollywood set on ice rather than a place of habitation, and also in her photograph "Underneath Amundsen-Scott Station," (see Figure 13) in which the building resembles an installation in space with its ultra-modern and sleek, seamless surfaces, while simultaneously the base of a fairly banal corporate structure. Like all her work, the deliberate play with the variable space between documentary and fiction sets her images apart from the public narratives and images of the Heroic Age of exploration and represents a shift from an image of the polar regions as representative of the sublime, to the present where the Antarctic is visualized as a place of fascinating terror, but this time as a result of man-made climate change and neo-liberal economics. In Samaras' images, the Antarctic is no longer seen as simply an unearthly place, but also as a strangely fragile site, one where the ice itself becomes an important entity. The built environment seems vulnerable and unstable, as in her work, "Domes and Tunnel," where the shifting pack ice will cover the Buckminster Fuller dome already slowly sinking in the permafrost, or in "Antennae Field South Pole," (see Figure 14) an image of an empty Antarctic landscape that dwarfs a tiny radio antenna standing as the only sign of human habitation.

Figure 14 Connie Samaras
Antennae Field South Pole
digital print
Courtesy of the artist

Amelia Jones, the feminist art critic, in her 2006 book Self/Image: Technology, Representation and the Contemporary Subject, argues that the most important legacy of feminism is its politics of positionality across the visual. By that she means the importance of emphasizing the situatedness of positionality, of visuality, and of spectatorship. Samaras, who is interested in the social space of taking photographs and her performance behind the camera, is committed to recording her embodied relationship to Antarctica. For Samaras, that means highlighting the sense of dislocation and anxiety involved in living in such an extreme environment. In Gender on Ice, I pointed out how in the Scott narrative, the gendered, physical body is replaced by moral character, which provided the foundation on which masculinity becomes heroicized and the exterior world loses its concreteness. Samaras' work is not about heroic masculinity but something much more displaced, related to both her positionality as well as the placelessness of the site that she photographs. Her detailed focus on the everyday brings us back to our senses, and in its focus on Antarctic architecture (both new and old) counters the romanticism and fantasies of transcendence through moral character that characterizes so much of the British discourse in Antarctica. At the same time, fantasy is not entirely absent as her work also evokes how alien the landscape is in Antarctica, when she, for example, foregrounds how uncontrollable the ice is as it swallows up buildings and signs of life in "Night Divide and Contrails" (see Figure 15) and in "Buried Fifties Station."

Figure 15 Connie Samaras
Night Divide and Contrails
digital print
Courtesy of the artist

The two videos that Samaras made in Antarctica also move us away from narratives that erase or ignore the real life suffering, anxiety and sense of vulnerability and entrapment that is part of negotiating this extreme environment. The first is a single unedited static video, capturing a Weddell seal (average adult weight 400 pounds) noisily coming up for air through a hole in the ice. The other shows a male station hand asleep in the cargo bay area of a transport plane to Antarctica (see Figure 16). The seal jumps out at us in intervals and startles the viewer as she breaks through the icy surface just to breathe, reminding us of the effort it takes for all mammals, including humans, to breathe, and the kinship between human and non-human animals in this extreme climate. The man on the transport plane is quiet; the only noise is the sound of the airplane's engine. However, as he sleeps and breathes quietly, he seems quite vulnerable. This image in particular is meant to remind us of how dependent the people, who are mostly absent from Samaras' other photographs, are on machines and the built environment just to simply live in this extreme environment (see Figure 17). While the videos evoke the dependence of human beings on their machines and buildings, her clinical images of this anonymous built environment make us wonder what kinds of human beings could inhabit this secluded, somewhat alien, non-domestic world. You might say that her video, with the mummy-like man sleeping in suspended animation, captures the ghosts moving through these spaces, even though this peaceful image seems to be the antithesis of the picture of hardship and suffering that provided a heroic dimension to polar exploration from an earlier age. Samaras reminds us that in the post-heroic age, while the region is increasingly more accessible, the same anxieties of managing the forbidden climate remain today.

Figure 16 Connie Samaras
Video still from Untitled (Ross Ice Shelf, Antarctica)
digital print
Courtesy of the artist

Figure 17 Connie Samaras
Video still from installation Sleeping Man on Transport Plane
digital print
Courtesy of the artist

Reflecting back on my book's reception in relation to the recent art works of Isaac Julien and Connie Samaras has revealed encouraging new perspectives from artists who are restaging the politics of race, gender, sexuality and science in both polar regions from feminist and queer perspectives. If Julien brings us back to the earlier days of polar explorers and the epic in his fantasized re-enactment of the Peary and Henson trek, where he playfully and provocatively transforms the Arctic into a fashion runway event, Samaras pulls us away, bringing us into another fantasy space where we can begin to imagine how climate change and neo-liberalism have transformed these spaces in ways we otherwise would not have imagined. By refusing the aesthetics of the sublime from the heroic age, Samaras highlights the unreality, as well as the drab ordinariness, of this landscape and built environment. By virtue of her photographs that situate banal architecture in a sublime landscape, she draws our attention to the surreal contrast between the everyday and the heroic. This is in contrast to Julien, who camps up the extraordinary spectacle of the North Pole and creates in his film a black diasporic aesthetic in which he is able to bring back the beauty of the Arctic and the heroism of Matthew Henson. In the process, he queers this aesthetic by juxtaposing the culturally constructed beauty of a fashion model with the natural beauty of the landscape. Samaras instead downplays the spectacle by reducing it to the most ordinary surfaces and functions with her minimalism. By challenging documentary conventions in critical ways, such as her unsettling blurring of the boundaries between the artificial and the natural, she draws on the genres of science fiction and horror to give artistic expression to her experience of Antarctica, both in its routine everyday aspects and in its surreal extremes.

Both Samaras and Julien are telling stories about an absent subjectivity, but while Julien uses this as an occasion to make a political statement on beauty and aesthetics, Samaras's interest is more in creating a new aesthetics about daily life and survival in these unearthly neo-liberal institutional settings. Thus, her aesthetics, compared to Julien's exuberance and lavishness, is extremely spare and pared down, though she does employ an emotionality in her work that differentiates it from more reserved dead-pan photographic practices. What their works have in common is that neither can be simply folded back into a conventional discussion of the sublime, blankness or politics. Both are engaging these regions in new ways that implicitly question the heroic and what it means to resurrect it at this historical moment, when global warming and the return of colonialism have brought renewed attention to both these regions. Julien's and Samaras' viewpoints suggest some important new directions in contemporary art, and in the process, their work makes us think differently about how postcolonial, black queer, and feminist perspectives have contributed to changing the discussion of art history and of Arctic and Antarctic discourses. One can only imagine what could happen if they, or other artists in their wake, bring this transformed aesthetic sensibility to other contemporary sites where history and current politics intersect and collide.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Norman Bryson, Elena Glasberg, Janet Jakobsen and Roddey Reid for reading this article and providing intellectual and editorial guidance. Thanks to Elissa Weintraub for providing useful suggestions and editorial support, and to Laura Kay for inviting me to participate in this special issue.

Endnotes

1. On the crisis of manhood at the turn of the century in the U.S. context see Donna Haraway, "Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908-1936." Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science. New York: Routledge, 1989: 26-58; Cynthia Enloe, Making Feminist Sense of International Politics: Bananas, Beaches and Bases. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989; Gail Bederman, "Theodore Roosevelt: Manhood, Nation, and 'Civilization." Manliness and Civlization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917. University of Chicago Press, 1996: 170-216. [Return to text]

2. Lisa Bloom, Gender on Ice. University of Minnesota Press, 1993: 32. [Return to text]

3. The British lost the race to the South Pole to Roald Amundsen of Norway who reached the pole in 1911, one month ahead of Captain Robert Falcon Scott. Scott and his team of four men died of hunger and cold on their way back. After completing nearly seven-eighths of the distance they encountered a blizzard and, unable to reach their food depot just 11 miles away, died in their tent from a combination of frostbite, sickness, and starvation. Whereas Scott's narrative of failure was straightforward, Robert Edwin Peary's claim to have been the first person, on April 6, 1909, to reach the geographic North Pole—a claim that subsequently attracted much criticism and controversy—is today widely doubted for a number of reasons and remains the focus of controversy. [Return to text]

4. See Lisa Bloom, Gender on Ice, 127-129. [Return to text]

5. In the end, there was enough of a doubt about his claims that he was recognized by a congressional committee as "attainer" of the pole not "discoverer" and given a Rear Admiral's pension by a special act of Congress in 1911. [Return to text]

6. See Lisa Bloom, Gender on Ice, 130-131. [Return to text]

7. See an earlier article by Lisa Bloom on Isaac Julien's work: "True North: Isaac Julien's Aesthetic Wager," Isaac Julien, True North, published in the catalogue for the Mak Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles and Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami (2005); republished in German and English in: Isaac Julien: True North: Fantôme Afrique. Eds. Veit Görner and Eveline Bernasconi. New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2006. [Return to text]

8. See Gísli Pálsson's article in this special issue on this topic. [Return to text]

9. See Homi Bhabha, "Of Mimicry and Man." The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994: 86. [Return to text]

10. For a more sustained discussion on the history of Antarctic photography see: Elena Glasberg's "Blankness in the Antarctic Landscape of An-My Lê" in this special issue, as well as "Camera Artists: Gender in Antarctic Visual Culture." New Zealand Journal of Photography. Special Feature on Antarctic Representation (2007). [Return to text]

11. Cited in Samaras' article in this special issue titled, "America Dreams." [Return to text]

12. For other reviews of Samaras' Antarctic photographs, see the following: Kristina Newhouse, "Connie Samaras: V.A.L.I.S.." X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly. 10:4 (2008); Matais Viegener, "Connie Samaras, De Soto Gallery, Los Angeles CA." Artus (Fall 2007). [Return to text]

13. See Samaras' article in this special issue titled, "America Dreams." The production of her series of photographs and videos on Dubai currently titled "After the American Century," begun in late 2008, will deal with speculative landscapes, architecture and geopolitical narratives, political geographies in the everyday and differing science fictional tropes of imagining the future. [Return to text]

14. The solo premiere of Samaras' body of work on Antarctica in the U.S. took place at the De Soto gallery in Los Angeles in October of 2007. It also appeared in a group show on Antarctica at the Pitzer Campus Gallery in Clairmont, CA in November 2007-January 2008, curated by Ciara Ennis. [Return to text]

15. "A Partial Correction to the Representations of Earth Culture Sent Out to Extraterrestsrials on the US 177 Voyager Interstellar Space Probes" was first exhibited at New Langton Arts in San Francisco in 1994.The exhibit was curated by Nancy Gonchar and there was a catalogue to accompany the exhibit. Also see, Connie Samaras, "Abduction Experience: Impression of Abduction Narratives read by the Corrector, Recorded 17-19 May 1994, L.A, CA, USA," Processed Lives: Gender and Technology in Everyday Life. Ed. Jennifer Terry. New York: Routledge, 1997: 200-213. [Return to text]

16. Samaras draws on a tradition of aesthetics associated with a tradition of a male-coded photography by deploying a dead pan photographic style associated with the work of contemporary German photographers Andreas Gursky and Candida Höfer, former students of Bernd and Hilla Becher who were active from the late 1950s to the late 1990s. Whereas Gursky is drawn to large, anonymous, urban spaces—high-rise facades at night, office lobbies, and stock exchanges—Höfer makes large-format photographs of empty interiors and social spaces that capture what she calls the "psychology of social architecture." For an extended discussion of Samaras' work in relation to the Bechers as well as Gursky and Höfer see: Kristina Newhouse, "Connie Samaras: V.A.L.I.S.." X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly 10:4 (Summer 2008). [Return to text]