Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics Artists Reimagine the Arctic and Antarctic

Front matter

CLIMATE

CHANGE

AN D THE

Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments

Introduction From the Heroic Sublime to Environments of Global Decline

An Aesthetics of Finitude

Part I. Disappearing Landscapes: Feminist, Inuit, and Black Viewpoints

Part I draws on a range of representations within visual culture and contemporary art to rethink the visuality of the polar regions’ shift from the heroic sublime to environments of global decline. In chapter 1, “Antarctica and the Contemporary Sublime in Intersectional Feminist Art Practices,” I address Antarctica exclusively and focus on four women artists: Judit Hersko (California State University, San Marcos, United States), Anne Noble (Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand), Connie Samaras (University of California, Irvine, United States), and Joyce Campbell (University of Auckland, New Zealand). In a region that lacks a native human population and that excluded all women until the 1960s, these artists link regional climate change to gender, the relation of the human to the nonhuman, questions of territory, knowledge production, and empire. They shake viewers out of routine assumptions about the natural world and invert the tourist gaze using strategies borrowed from postmodernist art, speculative fiction, and the gothic horror genre. The intersectional framework in this chapter goes beyond naming categories to understanding the complex entanglement of nature and culture in the context of a modern visual tradition still influenced by the masculinist imagery of the Antarctic sublime wilderness from the Heroic Age of exploration (1897-1922).

The chapter provides a way to understand the Anthropocene and Capitalocene within the context of speculative fiction. For instance, in Judit Hersko’s From the Pages of the Unknown Explorer, the artist introduces fictional elements to the historically real world to rewrite themes of gender, science, exploration, and Jewishness in the time of World War II and to shift our understanding of our interconnected dependence on the nonhuman world in the present. By contrast, Anne Noble’s photography reworks contemporary images of Antarctica to examine the way gender is implicated in how tourists see modern Antarctica as narrated through the lens of white

3N119340 1VE019 OL AWITENS JIOUSH WOUS male polar exploration and photography, which represented a relatively narrow range of traumatic events from the Heroic Age of exploration. Her photographs address how this masculinist rhetoric and imagery survive as Antarctica, widely known within the tourist industry as Earth’s last great wilderness, has been repackaged into a universal commercial and aesthetic product, calling attention away from the more terrifying material ways that Antarctica reveals itself as an anthropogenic landscape.

If Noble takes on how the race to explore the far extremes of the planet from the late nineteenth century has since been commercialized in neoliberal capitalism, Connie Samaras and Joyce Campbell use science fiction and horror to examine Antarctica as an alien space created by the melting of the ice and permafrost. Campbell’s gothic daguerreotypes of icescapes in Antarctica from her series Last Light: Antarctica do not display the grandiosity and the potential destructiveness we find in the polar sublime, exemplified by Western photographs and paintings of untrammeled nature from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Instead, she reworks our perceptual apparatus to document this new terror of climate change through her anachronistic daguerreotypes and the gothic horror genre (see the cover of this book and plate 9). Samaras’s photographs of the Buckminster Fuller Dome sinking into the permafrost also shift the way we perceive and inhabit environmental time. Her work draws from science fiction but makes us think about unexpected disappearances and anxieties that permeate everyday life and the ways that the Anthropocene also resists science fiction, as it is precisely not an “imagined” other world apart from ours, now that the polar regions are no longer seen as located in another time or dimension.

Chapter 2, “Reclaiming the Arctic through Feminist and Black Aesthetic Perspectives,” focuses on the art practices in the Arctic of British artist Isaac Julien (University of California, Santa Cruz, United States) and Swedish artist Katja Aglert (Linköping University, Sweden). The failure of imperialist heroism is the subject of Julien’s epic multiscreen immersive installation project True North (2004-2008), which returns us to US heroic Arctic exploration narratives and their myths more thana hundred years after Robert Peary’s expedition. It is told from the vantage point of the African American polar explorer Matthew Henson, whose own witnessing authority and claims to the 1909 “discovery” of the North Pole were consistently written out of the script by white polar explorer Robert Peary. Julien’s True North takes poetic license, restructuring Henson’s story to dismantle the homophobic regimes of imperial masculinities. It draws from the documentary genre, historical documents, and nonfiction material and is heavily research based. Drawing in part on Henson’s later writings and a larger visual culture of the Arctic, Julien explores the relation between aesthetics and politics as well as the Peary expedition’s complex politics of exclusion.

Katja Aglert’s multimedia installation project Winter Event—Antifreeze also explores white heroic masculinity and nationalist failure in the past and its recuperation and rehabilitation in the present not as a source of admiration or esteem but as a destructive act. Inspired by feminist scholarship and the work of Fluxus, her work (which was also turned into an experimental opera) draws on the photographic and media history of Svalbard but also uses repetition, performativity, and dark humor as strategies. Both Julien’s and Aglert’s innovative installations respond to a larger visual culture of the Arctic by exploring the relations among nationalism, aesthetics, and politics to challenge a kind of human relationship to landscapes (nature). They rethink and revisualize these beautiful and extraordinary spaces in the context of accelerated warming and the reemergence of the excesses of an earlier colonialism.

Chapter 3, “At Memory’s Edge: Collaborative Perspectives on Climate Trauma in Arctic Cinema,” broadens the work on aesthetics to address questions of memory and what it means to make art and film about a warming Arctic without sentimentalizing or spectacularizing Indigenous suffering. I draw on the writings of Indigenous literary theorist Gerald Vizenor both for his questioning of the representation of Indigenous peoples through a modernist aesthetics of tragedy, victimhood, and nostalgia steeped in notions of absence rather than presence and for his term aesthetics of survivance.*® Though this term was intended to think about modes of Indigenous survival and resistance through storytelling, I argue it is also applicable to the articulation of climate trauma in contemporary Indigenous cinema. Here I discuss three innovative short films on the Arctic that call forth new representations of the climate crisis that focus on a world beset by uncertainty.

An online documentary by Zacharias Kunuk and Ian Munro, titled Qapirangajuq: Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change (2010), takes the perspective of an Igloolik community highly affected by climate change. It puts front and center communities from Canada’s Circumpolar North, who craft a decolonial method of knowledge production through filmmaking. The second film, Attutauniujuk Nunami/Lament for the Land (2013), made in collaboration with the local Inuit communities of Nunatsiavut by Ashlee Cunsolo Willox, a community-engaged social science and health researcher and professor at Memorial University in Newfoundland,

3N119340 1VE019 OL AWITENS JIOXJH WOUS provides a striking example of how recognizing suffering can serve as a necessary first step toward the amelioration of that suffering; community video networks can break the isolation imposed on both individuals and communities in local and regional contexts. The third film is by Japanese American filmmaker Kimi Takesue, a professor in the video program at Rutgers University. Her film That Which Once Was is an experimental science-fictional film set in 2032 in which millions of people are driven from their homes by the effects of climate change. All three films include and are made by Indigenous and marginalized peoples, who have begun to take up arange of media to create a sense of possibilities for themselves amid the ongoing destruction of their environment by anthropogenic climate change.

Part II. Archives of Knowledge and Loss

In part II (chapters 4 and 5), cowritten with Elena Glasberg, we suggest that the category of art continues to change as artists create new aesthetic arrangements of visibility capable of comprehending the material and representational aspects of climate breakdown. In so doing, the artists in this section focus on some of these new aesthetic practices and the way they sensitize us to the unfolding process of climate breakdown These new practices redefine art against nonart: how it is pursued (methods, artists, institutions) and how it makes meaning (culture, politics). This section points to these new shifts not just in art but also in politics and the earth as a material ecosystem that contributes to an essentially reimagined art.

This section also considers the temporal politics of the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene in order to focus on how environmental art creates alternative data about the world connected to the sense of dread about the climate emergency. It is a data-supported doom (as opposed to biblical eschatologies of apocalypse) that has put pressure on the traditional relation of art and life. We touch on this in the section of chapter 4 on Annie Pootoogook: art preserving ephemeral life was once a comforting frame, but now that large-scale earthly disaster impends and environmental degradation escalates, we need to rethink art’s role. Its extension into the future beyond the limited human scale of a life or even a generation no longer suits the emergency of planetary disaster, which is also then an end to a future into which art may be imagined to extend ephemeral life. This shift in reality contributes to the ontological reordering of art we refer to in this section.

Chapter 4, “What Is Unseen and Missing in the Circumpolar North:

Contemporary Art and Indigenous and Collaborative Approaches,” cowritten with Elena Glasberg, is not only about how new polar art practices have begun to change our perceptions of the slowly unfolding catastrophes of melting ice and thawing permafrost but also about how artists work with Indigenous communities to make collective interventions that shift the very boundaries of art and visual representation. That makes us focus more on what forms they might take, what effect they might have, and how they unexpectedly might be read as meaningful “alternative” environmental data. Subhankar Banerjee’s landscape photography centers Indigenous presence and philosophies of the land in his images of animal and bird migration patterns in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, challenging assumptions about the Arctic. The late Annie Pootoogook also created a visual archive of Indigenous land but one largely focused on inanimate objects and small groups or lone human subjects within built environments. Yet her depictions underscore how colonial dispossession can reveal itself through the way climate-led social disruption enters the sphere of subjective life of Indigenous peoples. Andrea Bowers’s 2009 work Mercy Mercy Me rememorializes the struggle over the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989 and its incomplete cleanup, not from a scientific perspective, but from the point of view of both local Indigenous and white community members who have had to live with the damage over generations. Her work is a dark commentary on how ephemeral demonstrations and protests are and how work for social change is often forgotten and erased by the inevitable next catastrophe. She is interested in representing what Banerjee calls “long environmentalism,” in the case of an environmental engagement that has lasted a quarter century and the way it has created a culture and history of its own.*’ Lillian Ball marks that longer historical frame by compiling and analyzing data on the dwindling Arctic ice cap from 1990 to 2040, drawing on already available data and extensive research that includes collaboration with scientists and conversations with local Indigenous Sami peoples.

Chapter 5, also cowritten with Elena Glasberg, is titled “Viewers as Citizen Scientists: Archiving Detritus.” We discuss how the work of artists Amy Balkin and Roni Horn creates meaningful environmental data by engaging the political agency of audiences. Horn’s installation Vatnasafn/ Library of Water leads visitors to understand themselves as enmeshed in new and altered landscapes and to see ice as imbued with agency. Balkin, in her conceptual archive A People’s Archive of Sinking and Melting, which focuses on how to represent environmental damage yet to come, emphasizes the agency of citizen scientists who document, analyze, and archive everyday occurrences that are often dismissed from memory and that do

3N119340 1VE019 OL AWITENS DIOUSH WOUS not figure as significant in official policy planning. In recuperating material excess or reconstituted material that might be overlooked or abandoned (including water and ice) or considered unworthy as documentation and making it the centerpiece, Balkin’s and Horn’s archives transform everyday unseen or unwanted materials into illuminating, active climate data that also reposition the viewer as a citizen scientist with powerful potential.