Planetary precarity and feminist environmental art practices in Antarctica

ABSTRACT

The article addresses Antarctica exclusively and focuses on three women artists: New Zealander, Anne Noble (Massey University, Wellington), American, Judit Hersko (California State University, San Marcos), and New Zealander Joyce Campbell (University of Auckland/Los Angeles). In the absence of indigenous inhabitants and a human population that excluded all women until the 1960s, these feminist contemporary artists make linkages between the region and issues of climate change to gender, the relation of the human to the non-human, questions of territory, knowledge production, and empire. The intersectional art works of these artists jolt viewers out of routine assumptions about the natural world using the strategies of postmodernism, speculative fiction, the Gothic, and the horror genre. Their provocative aesthetic approaches enable us to understand the powerful webs where cultural and natural aspects are entangled in the context of a modern visual tradition dominated by masculinist imagery of Antarctic wilderness from the Heroic Age of Exploration (1885–1922).

KEYWORDS:

• Antarctica
• feminist art
• feminist ecological art
• postcolonial art
• polar art
• Antarctic art

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to Anne Noble, Judit Hersko and Joyce Campbell for their cooperation during the preparation of this article and permission to reprint the images of their works.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This article draws upon an earlier version (Bloom 2017).

2. The special issue of the online journal The Scholar and the Feminist (Bloom, Glasberg, and Kay 2008) at Barnard College was the starting point for some of my current research.

3. See the first two volumes of a trilogy devoted to her photographic investigations of Antarctica (Noble 2011; Noble, Panek, and Jones 2014), as well as Glasberg on Noble’s Antarctic photography (Bloom, Glasberg, and Kay 2008).

4. Thanks to Michelle Erai for this insight. She is based in New Zealand, was formerly professor of gender and women’s studies at the University of California, Los Angeles and is of Maori descent.

5. On how the rise of tourism in Antarctica is disrupting its fragile environment, see McClanahan (2020).

6. See Judit Hersko’s website http://www.judithersko.com/ for images and a full description of her Antarctic art project, From the Pages of the Unknown Explorer. Hersko’s art work on climate change and planktonic snails is an outgrowth of her collaboration with the biological oceanographer Victoria Fabry.

7. For a book-length study that addresses the veiled role of Jewishness in the understanding of feminist art in the US, see Bloom (2006).

8. Quote from https://rcwg.scrippscollege.edu/blog/2008/04/04/joyce-campbell/. Last Light was exhibited in 2007 at Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery, in the Last Light exhibition, Scripps College, Claremont, California.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lisa E. Bloom

Lisa E. Bloom is the author of books and articles on visual culture, cultural studies, and feminist art history including Gender on Ice: American Ideologies of Polar Expeditions (1993), With Other Eyes: Looking at Race and Gender in Visual Culture (1999), and Jewish Identities in American Feminist Art: Ghosts of Ethnicity (2006). She is currently in residence at the Beatrice Bain Center in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley completing her forthcoming book, Critical Polar Aesthetics: Art, Feminism and the Climate Crisis in the Arctic and Antarctic (Duke University Press, 2022).