Same Territories, New Strategies
The contributors to this special issue offer a range of alternatives to the imagination, whether scientific or cultural, of such a masculinist and western approach to the regions and the challenges of living and working in them. The contributors attend to the different ways that time passes in extreme environments; they listen to the environment—literally to its sounds and figuratively to its meanings; they photograph their surroundings from unusual angles, sometimes emphasizing immense expanses and sometimes emphasizing the mundane minimalism of living in rigidly enclosed spaces. While tourists are often taken to sites that enhance the Arctic and Antarctic’s “atmospheric” and “well-maintained” pristine image, an anti-colonialist artist such as Subhankar Banerjee dedicates his conservationist ethics to show, through his photographs of animal migration patterns, the urgent environmental problems that face the Alaskan Arctic and its inhabitants, Gwich’in and Inupiat Americans. Originally trained as a scientist, since 2001 Banerjee has been working as both an artist and activist for the protection of the native Inupiat and Athabaskan Gwich’in against incursion and contamination by the fossil-fuel industry, which was already dangerously close to the Arctic Wildlife Preserve in the oil and gas fields known as Prudhoe Bay.
For both the Arctic and Antarctic, photography has been a critical tool. In the case of Banerjee’s work, his images, which serve as both art and as scientific data, are inspired by Alaska’s native people and the wildlife on which they depend. Banerjee’s photographs remind us that scientific projects also have an aesthetic dimension, perhaps not apparent in scientific accounts, but which Banerjee is careful to foreground in his photographs. Unlike other art photographers who were promoting conservation, such as in the work of Elliot Porter, discussed in this issue by Elena Glasberg, Banerjee’s landscapes create a different way of seeing landscape that deviates from the norm of, for example, a Sierra Club coffee table book. Banerjee photographs the Arctic National Wildlife Preserve as a living space that is home not only to indigenous people but to thousands of animals that pass through, rather than as a blank space or wilderness. As Banerjee writes: “My engagement with the Arctic and its people and wildlife is to create a visual culture of the often mystified, obscured, unrepresented connections that make land-as-home.”
For Joyce Campbell art also supplements what the maps of official history leave out. There is a lingering fascination with sublime nature as awesome, overwhelming, and simultaneously humbling in her work on Antarctica, which, unlike Banerjee’s, records an alien icescape devoid of humans and wildlife. Campbell’s work also uses the genres of gothic and horror to reinvigorate the sublime, and thus creates tension between the traditional heroic landscape images and those of the present. If Campbell uses the sublime to create photographs epic in scale, she also deliberately documents the cracks, crevasses and pressure ridges to reveal that something terrible is also happening in this beautiful but extreme landscape.
Artists such as Jane Marsching, Connie Samaras, Andrea Polli, Paul Miller (DJ Spooky), and Marina Zurkow take another direction altogether and have little interest in reassessing the colonial era, and generally use less traditional artistic means to confront the issue of climate change in their work. We have become used to seeing global warming in polar regions represented though the iconic images of Arctic polar bears and Antarctic penguin colonies trapped by melting ice floes. Perhaps even more striking are the scientific visualizations—the images from space showing the changes in ice surface area and thickness, the seasonal hole in Earth’s ozone layer in polar regions, and the Manhattan-sized chunks of Antarctica breaking away from the main continent and drifting off. Some of our contributing artists explicitly utilize scientific imagery in their work. Jane Marsching’s video shows the effect of possible rising sea levels from melting polar ice caps on the major populated cities of planet Earth. Andrea Polli and Paul Miller use the sounds of the ice in Antarctica, combined with images of scientific data, in their multimedia productions Ground Truth and Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica. Zurkow’s animation shows us an Arctic space already so disembodied and iconic—the floating iceberg—that it creates a hyper-real arctic occupied by cherubic kids wielding automatic weapons and stranded animals. Zurkow’s work creates an apocalyptic commentary on social breakdowns in the lower 48, as well as discourses of the future sentimentally linked to children. Miller’s poster series for the “People’s Republic of Antarctica” looks instead to the past of Communist revolution. Countering imperialist flag planting, Miller is interested in the free utopian potential of Antarctica, one that looks back to historical political models, but like Zurkow and Polli, towards new media renderings of an alternate “space” of Antarctica. These new works extend the utopic potential of political and scientific endeavors, including the IPY and ATS, which have created Antarctica as an international territory devoted to scientific research and non-military interaction. Some have even articulated a vision of Antarctica as a global space for peace. 1 But these artistic adventures also question the ability of contemporary international science and geopolitics to maintain a course for Antarctica as a part of the world system, not a serviceable exception to it.
- See: Elena Glasberg. “Who goes there? Science, fiction, and belonging in Antarctica.” Journal of Historical Geography. 34.4 (2008): 639-657. [↑]
