Polar Visual Culture: An International Conference June 2011, University of St Andrews Abstracts

Transcription

1 Polar Visual Culture: An International Conference June 2011, University of St Andrews Abstracts Session I: Histories and Archives of Polar Photography At the Ends of the Earth: Polar Images and Royal Collecting. Sophie Gordon, Curator of the Royal Photograph Collection, Windsor Castle The polar material in the Royal Collection has remained almost completely unknown until a recent exhibition (The Heart of the Great Alone: Scott, Shackleton and Antarctic Photography in 2009) highlighted the existence of two photograph albums containing the work of Herbert Ponting from Scott s Terra Nova expedition and Frank Hurley s images from Shackleton s Endurance expedition. The research for the exhibition led to the discovery of a much larger and significant collection of books, prints, photographs, paintings and other objects connected with Arctic and Antarctic expeditions dating back to the early 19th century. This paper draws on this research and focuses on three central questions. What material connected with polar exploration was acquired by the Royal Family? Why was it acquired? And what does its presence in the Royal Collection mean? In answering these questions, the paper will touch on early material acquired by King William IV; E. A. Inglefield s Arctic photographs from 1854 acquired by Queen Victoria; the British Arctic Expedition photographs from , and the Scott and Shackleton material acquired by King Edward VII and King George V. Revisiting Arctic Regions Luke Gartlan, Lecturer in the History of Photography, University of St Andrews William Bradford s deluxe volume The Arctic Regions (1873) is often cited as an exemplar of Victorian publishing on polar subjects. Illustrated with hand pasted photographs and bound in sumptuous gilt leather, the publication was the professed outcome of a self-conscious art expedition to Greenland. As a prominent photographic book of the mid-victorian period, produced by an American painter for a trans-atlantic clientele, this album merits deserved critical attention for its visual and textual representations of the Arctic.

2 This paper will examine The Arctic Regions alongside two related, unpublished albums held in the National Library of Scotland, which highlight the scientific and personal networks of knowledge exchange that informed the final publication. In particular, contra the artistic credentials emphasised in the publication, this talk highlights the contestation of meaning apparent in a personal album gifted by the artist to the Scottish polymath John Francis Campbell of Islay. Among his many accomplishments, Campbell s studies of glacial formation and Arctic geology in northern Scandinavia and Labrador were well known in Victorian Britain. Far from the rhetoric of an unchanging frozen landscape, his accounts promoted a notion of the polar environment as dynamic and volatile. Paying particular attention to the inscriptions written around the photographs margins by Bradford and Campbell, apparently added in conversation with one another, I intend to highlight the unstable meanings and evidential uncertainties which could accrue to photographs of the Arctic.

3 Session 2: Poles Apart? Provincial Experiences From Dundee with the Whalers: Early Visual Representations of the Arctic and Antarctic Matthew Jarron, Curator of Museum Services, University of Dundee The city of Dundee has played a crucial role in the history of polar exploration as the European capital of the whaling industry it led the way in its knowledge of the Arctic and in 1892 turned its attentions to the Antarctic with a landmark expedition that directly inspired the later missions of Scott, Bruce and Shackleton. This paper will explore the visual representation of Dundee s Arctic and Antarctic connections, looking at early artistic depictions of the areas visited by the whalers, the specimens brought back by them for display in the city s museums and the Arctic photography of two assistants of Professor D'Arcy Thompson, Aleck Rodger and David Dickson, who accompanied various whalers in the 1890s and photographed them at work and the landscapes they encountered. It will also discuss the work of Professor Patrick Geddes in bringing together the scientist William Spiers Bruce and the artist William Gordon Burn Murdoch, both of whom accompanied the Dundee Antarctic Expedition. Burn Murdoch s work (widely published and exhibited afterwards) made him arguably the first artist-inresidence in the Antarctic. The Rural Imagination and the Arctic Robert G. David, Visiting Research Fellow, University of Lancaster This paper foregrounds English rural society and the visual representations of the Arctic in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to which it had access. Remote rural communities, such as those in the English county of Cumbria, the case study discussed here, did not have access to the range of representations of the arctic available to those living in urban centres of population. However there were people living in or associated with the county, who were familiar with the arctic through whaling, exploration or early tourism. These activities created a variety of visual representations and their study has provided the opportunity to consider their reach and significance in shaping the rural imagination of the Arctic.

4 Session 3: Popular Visual Narratives of Polar Exploration From Panoramas to Early Cinema: Arctic Spectacles, Professor Russell A. Potter, Professor of English, Providence, Rhode Island The nature and extent of Arctic entertainments from the last days of fixed-circle and moving Panoramas in the 1890 s to the emergence of the North in silent films in the first two decades of the twentieth century, is at present little understood. A key role was played by exhibitors, such as German zoo magnate Carl Hagenbeck and early film impresario William Selig; their trade in human and animal subjects provided the material for some of the first polar spectacles on film. Remarkably, both men worked with the same troupe of Inuit performers, that led by Esther Eneutseak and John C. Smith, who appeared both at Hagenbeck s zoo and in Selig s films. This paper traces the role of northern subjects through this remarkable period of transition, and examines some of the surviving films and ephemera that document these rich and varied shows. Shackleton's Marvellous Moving Pictures : The Ontology of the Early Travelogue Professor Robert Dixon, Professor of Australian Literature, University of Sydney Ernest Shackleton s presentation of the films and lantern slides from the Imperial Trans- Antarctic Expedition premiered at the Royal Albert Hall on 19 December Billed as Shackleton s Marvellous Moving Pictures, this illustrated lecture used similar images to Frank Hurley's own In the Grip of the Polar Pack-Ice, which had premiered at Sydney's New Lyceum Theatre on 22 November Comparing these events, I explore questions of textuality and authorship in the early travelogue, which combined a number of media, with different versions of performance events being created at different times by different personnel, and for different audiences. The paper draws on material from my forthcoming book, Photography, Early Cinema and Colonial Modernity: Frank Hurley's Synchronized Lecture Entertainments (London: Anthem Press, October 2011). The Cinematic Race to the Poles: Roald Amundsen s South Pole Expedition ( ) and Other Polar Films in the Heroic Era Professor Jan-Anders Diesen, Lillehammer University College, Norway The Heroic Era in Polar Exploration is filled with fascinating stories about interesting men,

5 and the Race for the Poles is richly described in hundreds of books. The Heroic Era in Polar Exploration coincided with the conception of film technology and the rise of commercial cinema, and many polar explorers saw potential in utilising this new technology as a research tool. As a result there exists a range of films from the Polar Explorations, but since their making and initial screenings they have received little attention. The story of these films is also an interesting one, although it has not yet been written. A few years after the production of the first film cameras, the explorer Carsten Borchgrevink brought one along on his British Antarctic Expedition in His main sponsor, a newspaper publisher, wanted to make news films, but the cinematograph, the film reel and the filming skills were not sufficiently developed to capture living images from the polar region. Our record of this first attempt at making a polar film is limited to one scene from when the expedition left London. The first explorer to succeed in filming in the Antarctica was William Bruce, leader of the Scottish Antarctic Expedition in Bruce was a scientist who wanted to use the cinematograph to document the natural history in Antarctica. Following Bruce`s breakthrough the cinematograph became standard scientific equipment on all polar expeditions. In Ernest Shackleton almost made it to the South Pole. In his book on the expedition he wrote that they took a moving camera in order that we might place on record the curious movements and habits of the seals and penguins, and give the people at home a graphic idea of what it means to haul sledges over the ice and snow. Shackleton later used these moving images as illustrations on his lecture tours, and his incorporation of film appears to have been popular: It was my privilege recently to see these living pictures from Furthest South, and they served largely to intensify my interest in Lieutenant Shackleton s story. I saw the men engages at their work and recreations amidst the ice and snow, watched the strange antics of the penguins when disturbed by the whirr of the operator, and in short, enjoyed a brief tour to the Antarctic by cinematograph. (Bioscope ) The attention these animated illustrations received influenced Roald Amundsen to bring along a camera on his famous expedition to the South Pole, and he proceeded to use a similar approach in his lectures. Other explorers understood the need of professional cameramen which ensured higher quality images and records. In my lecture I would like to screen Amundsen s film and make comparisons to films made on other polar expeditions lead by Bruce, Fiala, Wellman, Wilkins, Scott, Mawson, Shirase and Shackleton, in order to tell the story about early polar film.

6 Session 4 Artist s Presentation Connection and Purpose Camille Seaman, Artist-Photographer, Emeryville, California Camille Seaman has travelled between both the North and South Polar Regions for the last ten years documenting the fragile environment and its otherworldly beauty. Her work captures the essence of awe and beauty of environments in a sophisticated documentary/fine art tradition. People often wonder what one person can do to help save this planet we call home. Seaman will discuss this question from the perspective of being part of both an indigenous culture and a modern world. Camille was born in 1969 to a Native American (Shinnecock tribe) father and African American mother. She graduated in 1992 from the State University of New York at Purchase, where she studied photography with Jan Groover. Her work has been exhibited and published in magazines internationally including National Geographic Magazine, New York Times Sunday Magazine, Newsweek, Outside, Zeit Wissen, Men's Journal, Italian Geo, Camera Arts, Issues, PDN, and American Photo. Seaman s photographs have received many awards, including a National Geographic Award in 2006, and the Critical Mass Top Monograph Award in 2007.

7 Saturday 18 June 2011 Session 5: Exposed: Signs, Bodies, Visions Icarian Icescapes and Daedalean Dreamscapes: Envisioning Victorian Arctic Exploration Shane McCorristine, NUI Maynooth and Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge We dream as we live, with our eyes open, and there is a social, material history to dreams and reveries of air and water. Arctic experience today is typically described as enchanting and Arctic tourism promises that visitors will enjoy a dreamscape (Natural Focus Safaris, 2009). Indeed, one commentator has highlighted the notion of an Arctic spell as being crucial to future research on the region (Sturm, 2000). The origins of such language can be traced back to the era of Victorian Arctic exploration when the narratives of explorers were simply one aspect of a much larger cultural field of northern discovery which included artistic, poetic, technological, and spiritualist voyages to an otherworldly environment. This paper intervenes in cognitive questions about the conditions in which minds or spirits can serve as reliable technologies of travel capable of interacting with landscapes. A central area for examination is whether the structural binaries (e.g. delight and desolation) that defined aesthetic response to Arctic landscapes (c ), were unsettled by later unauthorised disembodied agencies such as magnetic fluid, armchair travelling, and dreamy contemplation. In each case Victorians experience of Arctic place co-existed with senses of home the affectual forces that weave religious-spiritual or sacred spaces together (Holloway, 2006). Two related forms of envisioning what was, on occasion, perceived to be a deeply magical realm, may be presented and discussed. Narratives from the era of the quest for the Northwest Passage are drenched in the phenomenology of dreams, particularly in relation to mobility through icescapes. Taking a fresh look at Arctic narratives, especially following the disappearance of John Franklin s expedition after 1845, reveals a Daedalean poetic a distinct language of folds, curtains, labyrinths, and awful veils. The navigation of explorers, at home as well as in the Arctic, through ice fields and snowy deserts, offers, I would suggest, an opportunity to use the phenomenology of Gaston Bachelard to re-think how the Arctic was envisioned and codified. Similarly, Charles Dickens dreadful thoughts of floating away above the snow-line in late 1854 were part of a larger cultural imaginary, which I consider reflective of the ancient myth of Icarian freedom, in which a variety of selves voyaged north as if with wings, presenting a highly stylised and omniscient view of the Arctic wilderness. Sometimes these voyages were directly intertextual, as in Jane Eyre s flight (1847) through Bewick s History of British Birds

8 ( ), which itself drew upon James Thomson s topographical representations of the north in The Seasons ( ). What were the prevalence and significance of these types of envisioning and what can they tell us about the relationship between the embodied experiences of Arctic explorers and the mental travellers who voyaged north through reverie, panorama, or poetry? The Andrée Polar Expedition With Camera towards Death Dr Tyrone Martinsson, Professor of Hypermedia Studies, University of Skövde, Sweden In 1896 a journey towards the unknown in the Arctic started at Danskoya in Svalbard. That summer a young photographer Nils Strindberg worked in northwest Svalbard. A year later in 1897 a balloon left Spitsbergen, on today s Svalbard, with three men on board. The destination was a flight across the polar basin. The journey ended on the ice after a couple of days and a march towards safety started. Thirty-three years later the remains of the expedition was found at Kvitoya, northeast of Svalbard. The photographs and text told their story. The photographer Nils Strindberg s work plays different roles today as a dialogue with history puts his work in different contexts and is both a narrative of polar dreams and documents with data talking about time and place and changes over time. Photography offers a possibility to see changes over time and to learn more about the work of the nineteenth-century photographers. This also creates interesting questions regarding time and place and viewpoints in representations of landscape and raises questions on how a landscape is portrayed. Photography can be used to study this process of making the landscape, perceptions of the Arctic as a frozen northern landscape the very concept of the Arctic wilderness as well as the changes to those perceptions. Photographs offer a direct and detailed comparison of change and raise questions about the future. What will this place look like in twenty, fifty, a hundred or even ten years? How will the concept of a frozen north change and then our perceptions of the Arctic? If the ice is gone, the seals will decrease, the polar bears will be gone, what will then be the characteristics of the Arctic and its stories?

9 Session 6: Endangered Environments: Contemporary Visualities Living Ice : Contact, Material, Frames Professor Elena Glasberg, Writing Program at Princeton University 'Living Ice' insists on the vivacity of ice so often called frozen, dead. It references living (on) ice and (in) ice, in time with life arriving to ice. Taking as its center Robert Smithson s 1966 Proposal for a Monument in Antarctica, this presentation considers the ontology of ice, its immanent forms and possibilities. More than an attempt to decipher a landscape, this presentation considers Smithson s scene of a boat on an icy shore as an involution of the forces of industry, labor, and material production colliding and crossing within the frames of optics and narrative and the ice itself. Performing Antarctica Dr Alexandra Neel, Assistant Professor of the Humanities Program, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles This paper addresses how Antarctica becomes a site of performance. If, as Eric Hobsbawm argues, the polar regions were the last staging ground of imperialist territorialization and, as Caroline Alexander contends, Antarctica was the first and last continent to be discovered by camera, then the work of the three contemporary artists I examine attempts to undo that mapping through various forms of visual practice and performance. Resisting the politics of appropriation and capture, each artist invites the spectator to live antarctically for the duration of his or her performance piece. I begin with Nina Katchadourian s video series Endurance (2002) based on a ten-minute film clip of Ernest Shackleton s Imperial Trans- Antarctic Expedition of 1914, which offers a feminist re-writing of that legendary journey. While Katchadourian quite literally endures and incorporates Shackleton s trek through bodily performance, Pierre Huyghe s video and sound installation A Journey that Wasn t (2005) affects multisensory re-stagings of his real voyage to Antarctica reproducing equivalent experiences in NYC s Wollman ice rink and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In brief, Huyghe challenges the documentary weight of the official record with the phantasmagoric space of the stage. I conclude with an analysis of Simon Faithfull s Antarctica Dispatches, a work that creates a virtual community through a series of live drawings that the artist ed from Antarctica to 3,000 people across the globe (November 2004 and January 2005). From Faithfull s use of ephemera to Huyghe s conversion of an ice

10 rink into an unnamed ice island, viewer-participants are challenged to inhabit the unique environment of Antarctica in radically new ways, if only for an instant. Ice, Meltwater and Mutability in Contemporary Art Dr Alistair Rider, School of Art History, University of St Andrews This paper explores the topic of flux and transformation in relation to the perception of glaciers in current culture and contemporary art. As glaciers adapt in size to warming global temperatures, glacial change has become a topic laden with feelings of irreparable loss. A phenomenon that used to present an image of the sublime, slow-moving potency of nature is increasingly viewed in terms of an irrevocable and tragic retreat. Frequently, we see photographs of glaciers in their current state being compared to earlier images in ways that depict them as aged, shriveled manifestations of their former selves. Against this backdrop, I shall be examining how a range of contemporary artists, including Olafur Eliasson, Roni Horn and Katie Patterson, have attended to the mutability of glaciers, as their invite viewers to engage with water in its various states.

11 Session 7: Artist s Presentation TRUE and other Polar Stories: Two Years on the Ice Thomas Joshua Cooper, Professor and Senior Researcher in Fine Art, Glasgow School of Art I am a native of the New World and a long-term itinerant resident of the Old World, residing on the fringes of Europe here in Scotland. I am a picture-maker and a story-teller. I work as a project-based, solo expeditionary visual artist. I make black and white landscape photographs as art works. I work with a large nineteenth-century view camera to make my pictures. I only ever make one picture in one site or one place at one time, ever. I have been doing this continuously for 42 years now. During the International Polar Years of I had the unique privilege to work privately in both Polar Regions, from The North Pole to The South Pole. The body of artworks that I produced in those two years I assembled into the polar project and bookwork called TRUE. TRUE is the latest of three completed, geographically sectional and visually thematic project works, of four, that comprise the central structure of the larger, overall and collective project that I have been working on for 23 years: The World s Edge the Atlantic Basin Project an Atlas of Emptiness and Extremity. There are three major aims for The Atlas Project: 1. To circumnavigate and make visual artwork from all the major terrestrial cardinal extremes of all the continental and major island-based land-masses surrounding the entire Atlantic Ocean. 2. In doing this, to produce a large group of thematic and reflective sea pictures that visually describe and review the exploration processes and experience with a recognisable, but not necessarily identifiable, collective physical sea space that might then be formally considered as a contemporary space of terra incognita. 3. During this visual archiving process, a further aim is to challenge and review the very nature and substance of the sea picture itself, as a contemporary form for artists practice. By encircling and reviewing the extreme edges of the entire Atlantic Basin, a physical acknowledgement of sources, extent and condition of Western cultural heritage occurs. The Old and Classical Worlds of Europe and Africa collide and clash with the New Worlds of

12 South and North America. And, the Polar Regions pressure all these outwards to push physical and psychological boundaries into further unexpected tensions, one with the other. I will show some of the pictures that I made for TRUE and talk about TRUE in relation to my overall Atlas Project. I will discuss some of the problems arising whilst working as an artist in the Polar Regions, which are some of the most difficult places in the world to work in. I will also talk about some of the joys of doing this.