Lisa E. Bloom author of Gender On Ice: American Ideologies of Polar Expeditions<\/em><\/a> (1993), one of the first feminist works of visual culture\/science studies\/cultural studies, is a scholar who has long known and worked within this critical rubric. Her magisterial Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics: Artists Reimagine the Arctic and Antarctic<\/em><\/a> was published by Duke University Press at the end of 2022. She and I met on Zoom with her long-time collaborator and coauthor Elena (El) Glasberg to discuss the implications of what they call the \u201cnew polar aesthetics.\u201d The collaboration with Glasberg started in 2007 when they coedited with Laura Kay at Barnard College a special issue of the online journal The<\/em> Scholar and Feminist<\/em><\/a> on art, gender, and the polar regions in 2008. As you will learn from our conversation, the new polar aesthetics is \u201cnot meant to simply critique the reactionary masculinist culture of right-wing nationalism,\u201d but in seven chapters, explores the \u201cfeminist, queer, postcolonial, and Indigenous artists and filmmakers\u201d who \u201carticulate ways of responding to the climate crisis that differ quite markedly from those of their Western masculinist counterparts\u201d (13). <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Thyrza Nichols Goodeve<\/strong>: Welcome Lisa and El. It is a pleasure to speak with you both about your book. Lisa, you are the main author, and El, you and Lisa collaborated on two of the seven chapters, so let\u2019s begin with introductions of\u202fyour histories as scholars on climate change, contemporary art, and the polar regions. Lisa, you have been doing interdisciplinary work since the 1980s when you and I met as students in the History of Consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz.\u202f <\/p>\n\n\n\n Lisa Bloom<\/strong>: Much of my writing over the last fifteen years brings the issues of gender, race, and colonialism, and the relation of the human and nonhuman to bear on the topic of climate change and contemporary art. In certain ways I have been thinking about social art history and feminist approaches since the days when I was an art history major at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, in the late 1970s, when I was fortunate to be exposed to these issues by my art history professor Judy Rohrer. I also thought about these questions when I trained to be a photographer at the International Center for Photography in New York City and received an MFA at the Rochester Institute of Technology and then the Visual Studies Workshop (VSW) in Rochester, which was a radical collective space that was in part publicly funded at the time. While there, as well as taking photographs, I started reviewing photography books for Afterimage<\/em><\/a>.<\/em> At that time, I was very much influenced by the feminist perspective at Afterimage <\/em>when Catherine Lord and Martha Gever were editors. But the bigger shift happened when I attended a conference in 1984 at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign\u2014which was one of the first big conferences on cultural studies and visual culture\u2014through the Marxist Literary Group. It brought together some of the authors and photographers writing for Afterimage<\/em>, such as Martha Rosler, together with Douglas Crimp, Craig Owens, Frederic Jameson, and Gayatri Spivak, among others. It was there that I saw it was possible to bring together my interest in visual studies\u2014art history and photography and feminism\u2014and gave me confidence to go to the History of Consciousness program. After the Urbana-Champaign conference I was inspired to study further and it was clear to me after the Visual Studies Workshop, which was really a critical studies program, that I couldn’t go to a conventional art history or American Studies program to study photo history or modern art history since feminism and critical theory weren\u2019t being taught widely at that time in most doctoral programs.\u202f <\/p>\n\n\n\n TNG<\/strong>: Gender on Ice<\/em> was your dissertation? You worked with Donna Haraway and James Clifford. How did the book manuscript evolve through your course work in Hist Con?\u202f <\/p>\n\n\n\n LB<\/strong>: In the mid 1980s when I was taking graduate classes with James Clifford, Paul Rabinow, Frederic Jameson, Hayden White, Donna Haraway, Stephen Heath, and Teresa de Lauretis, I\u202fwas reading the writing of my professors as well as the work of Edward Said and Michel Foucault in my graduate seminars. At that time, I also participated with other graduate students at the History of Consciousness Program\u2014Deborah Gordon, Chela Sandoval, Caren Kaplan, Ruth Frankenberg, Lata Mani, Thyrza Goodeve, among others\u2014in what was then called the Group for the Critical Studies of Colonial Discourse, which also had its own journal Inscriptions<\/em> (1985\u201394). In the journal\u2019s beginnings there was a strong focus on how the history of modern imperialism bears directly upon the condition of women and relations of gendered power. The focus of my dissertation evolved quite organically out of this context since it\u202flinked polar exploration narratives to the interdisciplinary study of gender and to the key concepts of colonialism, modernity, science, and nationalism.\u202f <\/p>\n\n\n\n TNG<\/strong>: Two out of the seven chapters of The<\/em> New Polar Aesthetics<\/em> are coauthored with you, El. You come out of literature and American Studies and are the author of Antarctica as Cultural Critique: The Gendered Politics of Scientific Exploration and Climate Change<\/em> (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Lisa\u2019s book must have been quite influential.\u202f\u202f <\/p>\n\n\n\n Elena Glasberg<\/strong>: I had read Gender on Ice<\/em> in grad school at Indiana University. I come from American Studies and even today I wouldn’t claim to be anything more than a cultural studies literature-based American Studies scholar. Early on I was interested in writing about Poe, so it was The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym<\/em> that got me into Antarctica, which got me out of American Studies, even if I’m still in American Studies. But I met Lisa at The Scholar and Feminist conference on the Polar regions at Barnard in 2008.\u202f <\/p>\n\n\n\n TNG<\/strong>: This was a watershed moment for you both?\u202f <\/p>\n\n\n\n LB<\/strong>: Yes, the invitation to be a coeditor for the special journal issue of The<\/em> Scholar and Feminist<\/em> as well as the international conference we put together at Barnard to launch the issue during the International Polar Year in the fall of 2008 were both extraordinary events for me because it really brought me back to Gender on Ice<\/em>, which by that point I had moved away from. The interdisciplinary nature of that book made it very\u202fhard for me to get a job when the book came out in 1993. I had to switch my focus to art history and photo history, which is where I have the kind of disciplinary depth that I needed in order to teach, get fellowships, and have institutional support. But at that point, my work had been so transformed I couldn’t approach either field in the traditional way. So, that was when I published With Other Eyes: Looking at Race and Gender and Visual Culture<\/em> (University of Minnesota Press, 1999) where I published people like Jennifer Gonzalez and Sean Smith who then became well-known scholars in art history and photo history. But it was thanks to El Glasberg and Laura Kay in 2008 who invited me to coedit this special issue that I discovered how my book had taken off in different parts of the world within the context of climate change and so it returned me to that work. Frankly, I was pretty surprised.\u202f <\/p>\n\n\n\n TNG<\/strong>: With Gender on Ice<\/em>, you inadvertently invented a discipline, didn\u2019t you? <\/p>\n\n\n\n LB<\/strong>: When Gender on Ice<\/em> was published there was virtually no feminist scholarship on either of these areas. Moreover, although the academic world in Canada, the Scandinavian countries, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand have given rise to a highly critical, revisionist attitude toward Arctic and Antarctic explorers and their writing since the 1970s, US scholars did not show an equally critical scholarly interest in the Arctic or the Antarctic until the late 1990s and as a result, Gender on Ice\u2019s <\/em>readership was primarily outside the US since the poles were not considered a subject of vital concern then. In certain ways the book\u2019s popularity stood closer to the more international scholarship on these regions, but it did help to create more of a focus for feminist perspectives in the growing field of polar studies and Arctic and Antarctic Studies, in fields such as art, literature, geography, and polar science. Now that there is a redefining of the globe and the polar areas are coming into daily circulation even in the US, the book has since become highly cited because of the growth of scholarship and programs abroad focusing on the Arctic and Antarctic and the wider interest in the book\u2019s early intersectional feminist approach. <\/p>\n\n\n\n TNG<\/strong>: Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics<\/em> offers a radical thesis: that art is not just supplementary to the discourse on climate, but, as the title says, is about \u201cArtists [who] Reimagine the Arctic and Antarctica.\u201d In fact, Lisa, you situate imagination as essential to the politics of this new aesthetics and you discuss the way art has become data or evidence in climate change debates as well as how much work involves blurring the line between fictional and documentary formats and science fiction. Here your book aligns with McKenzie Wark\u2019s Molecular Red<\/em>: Theory for the Anthropocene <\/em>(Verso Press, 2015) and Donna Haraway\u2019s Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene <\/em>(Duke University Press, 2016) where fiction and imagination are essential to politics. Your book covers so much territory, please discuss the structure. For instance, how you privilege intersectional feminism as well as Black and Indigenous perspectives at the outset.\u202f <\/p>\n\n\n\n LB<\/strong>: That is right, it is important to see the artwork in the book as crucial to expanding our political imagination of how we see these regions and climate change outside of mainstream media depictions that feature apocalyptic spectacles of distant melting ice and desperate polar bears. Artists in the book link regional climate change to gender, race, 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, science fiction, speculative fiction, and the gothic horror genre. Indigenous filmmakers widen our purview to think of the entangled ecological dimensions of the Arctic, drawing on traditional Indigenous knowledges and on more experimental approaches. The intersectional framework 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\u202fsublime wilderness from the heroic age of exploration (1897\u20131922) that nevertheless reemerged in more modern forms to justify the imperial expansion that is accelerating the extraction of oil, gas, coal, and rare earth materials.\u202f <\/p>\n\n\n\n TNG<\/strong>: This relates to how you chose work that challenges and offers alternatives to the aesthetics of the distanced sublime and the white male heroics you discussed at length in Gender on Ice<\/em>.\u202f I\u2019m thinking of Anne Noble\u2019s restaging of the archetypal photographs of Herbert Ponting\u2019s Barne Glacier<\/em><\/a> from 1911, or Judit Hersko\u2019s Pages from the book of the Unknown Explorer <\/em>or Connie Samaras\u2019s feminist approach that focuses on the ordinary and every day in Underneath Amundsen-Scott Station<\/em> and Domes<\/em><\/a> (2005) and South Pole Antennae Field<\/em> (2005), and most significantly,\u202fthe use of the female voice in Ursula Biemann<\/a>‘s Deep Weather<\/em> (2013). <\/p>\n\n\n\n LB<\/strong>: Yes, as you point out, feminist art works by Anne Noble, Connie Samaras, and Judit Hersko on Antarctica, challenge an aesthetics of the distanced sublime from Romantic aesthetics and its roots in European Universalism: the idea of a white and male oriented domestication of nature. For them, representing climate change by sublime aesthetics often comes wrapped in a colonial nostalgia for an earlier image of Antarctica as a polar sublime landscape from the heroic age of exploration (1897\u20131922) in the years bracketed by the deaths of its defining\u202fBritish celebrities, Robert Falcon Scott, and Ernest Shackleton. Some of these well-known photographic images of Antarctica from that period by photographers like Herbert Ponting and Frank Hurley mythologized the idea of Scott and Shackleton\u2019s expedition as a heroic life and death struggle\u2014one of the more common narrative tropes of Arctic and Antarctic exploration narratives and art.\u202f In Ponting\u2019s Barne Glacier<\/em>, the glacier dominates to such an extent that the figure in the landscape is tiny by comparison, easily engulfed by the vast icy landscape. For example, in Frank Hurley\u2019s Blizzard at Cape Denison<\/em><\/a> from 1912 in which silhouetted figures struggling against the wind and cold are superimposed on a windy Antarctic landscape to illustrate the terror associated with the powerful, forbidding climate. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Anne Noble\u2019s Barne Glacier, Antarctic Centre, Christchurch, 2003<\/em> (2003) references and comments on these iconic images of sublime wilderness from the heroic era that show the inhospitable space of the Antarctic as a male testing ground in which isolation and physical danger combine with overwhelming beauty. Substitution and humor are central to Noble\u2019s postmodern strategy, representing Antarctica and contemporary tourism in immersive environments such as in IMAX theaters and theme park\u2013type exhibitions both outside and within Antarctica. In Barne Glacier<\/em>, Noble presents two dummies dressed in National Science Foundation standard-issue extreme-weather gear standing before a panoramic photograph of the Barne Glacier in an Antarctic-themed indoor entertainment center in New Zealand. Noble\u2019s photographs use beauty and space in less conventional ways by reversing Ponting\u2019s use of composition. Her image, in contrast, is tightly framed and almost claustrophobic, robbing the setting of its epic character. While the photographic beauty of her images is central to their meaning, she is also asking us to rethink the way the sublime can be experienced in an artificially simulated landscape environment, creating an uncanny commentary about the contradictions between the Antarctica visualized in Hurley\u2019s and Ponting\u2019s photographs and the kitsch aesthetic of sublime wilderness now produced in indoor settings such as the Antarctic Center in New Zealand, where she took this photo. The point for Noble is that what is sold in these contemporary tourist images is not global warming or the threat of pollution but the promise of Antarctica\u2019s mythical past, in which icebergs, glaciers, penguins, whales, and white male heroes dominate and define the horizon and white man\u2019s endurance.\u202f <\/p>\n\n\n\n On the other hand, Judit Hersko, like Noble, searches for new ways to tell stories about the invisibility of women\u2019s historical place in polar exploration narratives\u202fbut in her case, she connects this to the invisibility of the significant labor and herculean role of tiny lifeforms like the sea butterfly and the sea angel in the Antarctic oceans. In this way, her work brings together the feminist question of the scale of the personal to the nonhuman to acknowledge the connectedness and relationality of the human and the more than human. That such small planktonic organisms are considered the canaries in the coal mine when it comes to the state of the oceans in the era of climate change is at odds with a world where large mammals such as polar bears are preferred as the icons of anthropogenic climate change.\u202f <\/p>\n\n\n\n For Samaras and Hersko, their more intimate encounters with the landscape mean bringing in the physical relationships of the human and nonhuman and the interconnection of natural systems to highlight the sense of dislocation involved in living in such an extreme environment that is already in a state of slow collapse. In her photographs of Antarctica\u2019s built environment, she uses science fiction and horror narratives to\u202f focus on the ordinary and every day but injects something more unsettling and unearthly into otherwise neutral and objective images of mostly anonymous industrial structures, as in her photograph Underneath Amundsen-Scott Station<\/em> or in her South Pole Antennae Field<\/em> (2005), an image of an empty Antarctic landscape that dwarfs tiny radio antennae standing as the only sign of human habitation. Samaras\u2019s work is also not about heroic masculinity but about something much more displaced, related to both her positionality as a woman and the placelessness of the sites 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 romanticism and fantasies.\u202f <\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"Anton](\"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/Fig.-1.1_H-Ponting-1000x714.jpeg\")
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