![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Antoinette LaFarge is an associate professor of digital media for the Department of Studio Art, University of California, Irvine.
Notes
1 More information about Eisbergfreistadt and other Kahn and Selesnick projects can be found at their website, <http://www.kahnselesnick.com/>. The author wishes to thank the artists for providing images of their work to accompany this article. Reproductions of Kahn and Selesnick's work, originally in color, are used by permission of the artists. A note on spelling and translation: Kahn and Selesnick appear to use “Lubeck” and “Lübeck” interchangeably in their project. I have preferred the Anglicized spelling here as it underlines the otherness of their version of the city. “Eisbergfreistadt” is more correctly translated “Eisberg Free City” or “Eisberg Freetown,” but I have chosen to go with their preferred alternate title of “Eisberg Free State.”
2 It may be that the Lubeck iceberg, detached and melting, is intended by Kahn and Selesnick as a retrojected symbol of global warming, but discussion of this possibility lies outside the scope of this article.
3 Even their press release lays emphasis on what it terms “the actual event” of the iceberg.
4 Wolfgang Iser, The fictive and the imaginary: Charting literary anthropology (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), p. 13. I am also indebted, here and later, to Nelson Goodman's 1976 book Ways of worldmaking (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing).
5 I purposely do not use the term “illustrate” because it does not fully address the degree to which the objects and photographs themselves create the narrative. Likewise, I prefer not to refer to the objects as “props” since the term as normally used does not embrace something that functions simultaneously as a fine art object and a prop.
6 Marianne Moore, “Poetry.” From Observations (New York: Dial Press, 1924).
7 Conversation with Nicholas Kahn, May 29, 2008.
8 Kahn and Selesnick have been tagged with a raft of different terms by writers uneasy in designating them as artists. For example, a review of Eisbergfreistadt by Mark Freeney in the Boston Globe (May 13, 2007) suggests that “cultural historians,” “connoisseurs,” or “curators” could all be preferable designations. Kahn has said that he is more comfortable calling the team curators than photographers (conversation with Nicholas Kahn, May 29, 2008).
9 And further suspect that all the clones are either Kahn or Selesnick, populating their own world. One is reminded here of Oscar Rejlander, who pioneered similar compositing techniques early in the history of photography.
10 It is striking, also, that at the small scale of reproduction, it becomes difficult to determine that the panoramas are photographs rather than paintings, thus constantly renewing the battle for that kind of truth value which only photography can offer. I am indebted to Lise Patt for drawing this point to my attention.
11 Hal Foster, The return of the real (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996).
12 In writing, a metafictional text has been defined as one that “systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality.” (Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The theory and practice of self-conscious fiction, Routledge, 1984). If it is true, as Iser argues, that fiction by its nature already draws such attention to itself, then the distinction between fiction and metafiction may be one more of degree than of kind.
13 Iser, p. 2.
14 Here I am extrapolating from a point Iser makes in discussing philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis's idea of the radical imaginary. Iser, p. 216.
15 This latter event took place in 1916, during the Shackleton-led Imperial Trans-Arctic Expedition.
16 Note that the masthead visible in the foreground of Church's canvas was added later, sometime between 1861 and 1863.
17 In White horizon: The Arctic in the nineteenth-century British imagination (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2007), Jen Hill (citing work by Jessica Richards) argues that there is a strong counternarrative to masculinist polar fantasy in such works as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
18 Polar fantasy becomes ever more closely linked to nationalist narratives of conquest, culminating in the neo-Romantic German Bergfilmen of the 1920s and 1930s, where it is refracted through the thematics of nascent fascism. Although the work of Kahn and Selesnick stands closer to the Bergfilmen in time than to romantic painting, it is essentially alien to the seductive fantasy of transcendence through physical duress that is the hallmark of Bergfilmen. Visually, also, the work of Kahn and Selesnick is more beholden to the romantics and to early photography (which was heavily inspired by romantic themes and forms) than to these neo-romantic films. For more on Bergfilmen, see Nina Power's excellent article, “Mountain and Fog,” in Cabinet, no. 27 (Fall 2007).
19 It should be noted that a resurgence of the polar imaginary can be discerned in the recent rush by the circumpolar nations to lay claim to extended parts of the Arctic seafloor, in advance of massive ice melts that are expected to uncover huge new resource-rich terrain.
20 A contemporary analog can be found in Philip Pullman's trilogy His Dark Materials, which features polar settings and folk archetypes such as a talking polar bear. I can't say whether Kahn and Selesnick were directly inspired by Pullman, but I feel that structurally the Eisbergfreistadt project owes more to Poe's metafictional framing than to Pullman's more straightforward tale.
21 Edgar Allen Poe, The narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Episode 12, p. From Project Gutenberg, The works of Edgar Allan Poe, Vol. 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition (release date: May 18, 2008). <http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2149/2149-h/2149-h.htm#2HCH0012>. Accessed November 17, 2008.
22 Poe, Arthur Gordon Pym, Preface.
23 In fact, the story is partly based on accounts by various real explorers. Poe's sources for Arthur Gordon Pym include the 18th century journals of Captain James Cook, Benjamin Morrell's narrative of four voyages (1832), and an 1836 report to Congress by Jeremiah Reynolds entitled “An Address on the Subject of a Surveying and Exploring Expedition to the Pacific Ocean and the South Seas.”
24 The Gutenberg Project edition of Arthur Gordon Pym does not include the glyph illustrations. Another online edition of the novel at <http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ma98/silverman/poe/frame.html> does include the glyphs on the Notes page: <http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ma98/silverman/poe/agp_note.html>.
25 Poe, Arthur Gordon Pym, Note.
26 The publishing history of this novel is somewhat tangled. The first two episodes appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger under Poe's byline in 1837; it was only when the full story was published in novel form the following year that the preface was added claiming that Pym had actually dictated it to Poe. Consequently, what had originally appeared in the Messenger as fiction was now reclassified in the preface as having appeared “under the garb of fiction” (italics in the original)—an unusual move on Poe's part, since while nonfiction is often “outed” as fiction, the reverse is extremely rare.