In Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics, Lisa E. Bloom considers the ways artists, filmmakers, and activists engaged with the Arctic and Antarctic to represent our current environmental crises and reconstruct public understandings of them. Bloom engages feminist, Black, Indigenous, and non-Western perspectives to address the exigencies of the experience of the Anthropocene and its attendant ecosystem failures, rising sea levels, and climate-led migrations. As opposed to mainstream media depictions of climate change that feature apocalyptic spectacles of distant melting ice and desperate polar bears, artists such as Katja Aglert, Subhankar Banerjee, Joyce Campbell, Judit Hersko, Roni Horn, Isaac Julien, Zacharias Kunuk, Connie Samaras, and activist art collectives take a more complex poetic and political approach. In their films and visual and conceptual art, these artists link climate change to its social roots in colonialism and capitalism while challenging the suppression of information about environmental destruction and critiquing Western art institutions for their complicity. Bloom’s examination and contextualization of new polar aesthetics makes environmental degradation more legible while demonstrating that our own political agency is central to imagining and constructing a better world.
- Cover
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction. From the Heroic Sublime to Environments of Global Decline
- An Aesthetics of Finitude
- Gender on Ice: Revisited and Extended
- The Polar Regions as Critical Geographies
- Politics of the Anthropocene
- Organization and Critical Trajectory of the Book
- I. Disappearing Landscapes: Feminist, Inuit, And Black Viewpoints
- 1. Antarctica and the Contemporary Sublime in Intersectional Feminist Art Practices
- Anthropogenic Landscape Practices and the Sublimein Anne Noble’s Photographs
- Attachments in the Anthropocene: The Microscopic Pteropodsin Judit Hersko’s From the Pages of the Unknown Explorer
- Connie Samaras’s Futures in Extreme Environments: Towarda New Aesthetics of Daily Life and Survival
- The New Polar Gothic in Joyce Campbell’s Last Light
- Rethinking Gender, Aesthetics, and Politics in the Anthropocene
- 2. Reclaiming the Arctic through Feminist and Black Aesthetic Perspectives
- When Ice Is Just Ice: Gender and the Everyday in the Arctic Work of Katja Aglert
- Renarrativizing the Arctic: Isaac Julien’s True North
- Changing Physical and Psychic Realities of the Arctic
- Color Plates
- 3. At Memory’s Edge: Collaborative Perspectives on Climate Trauma in Arctic Cinema
- Between Aesthetics and Politics: Zacharias Kunuk and Ian Mauro’s Qapirangajuq: Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change
- Traumatic Landscapes, Transformed Selves: Ashlee Cunsolo Willox’s Attutauniujuk Nunami/Lament for the Land
- Dystopian Futures and the Reconstruction of Memory: Kimi Takesue’s That Which Once Was
- Creating an Alternative Cinematic Language for Documenting Precarity
- II. Archives of Knowledge and Loss
- 4. What Is Unseen and Missing in the Circumpolar North: Contemporary Art and Indigenous and Collaborative Approaches / Lisa E. Bloom and Elena Glasberg
- Countervisualizations: Subhankar Banerjee’s Photographs
- Lillian Ball: New Media, Missing Ice
- Andrea Bowers: Reactivating Data
- Missing Annie Pootoogook
- The Power of Alternative Data
- 5. Viewers as Citizen Scientists: Archiving Detritus / Lisa E. Bloom and Elena Glasberg
- Disappearance in Amy Balkin’s A People’s Archive of Sinking and Melting
- Roni Horn: Archiving Disappearance
- Haunted by the Future
- III. Climate Art and the Future of Art and Dissent
- 6. The Logic of Oil and Ice: Reimagining Documentary Cinema in the Capitalocene
- Aesthetics and Politics: Ursula Biemann’s Deep Weather and Subatlantic
- Ursula Biemann’s Subatlantic: Water Chemistry and Submerged Landscapes
- The Melodrama of Hyperreality: Brenda Longfellow’s Dead Ducks
- Brenda Longfellow’s Offshore Interactive: Extreme Oil Culture in the Global Offshore Industry
- Brenda Longfellow’s Global Offshore: Indigenous Practices of Whaling in Barrow, Alaska
- Documentary Film and Critical Polar Aesthetics
- 7. Critical Polar Art Leads to Social Activism: Beyond the Disengaged Gaze
- Edward Burtynsky: The Industrial Sublime in Late Modernity
- Idle No More and sHell No!: Protests against Arctic Drilling
- Absurd Impersonations: The Yes Men’s But It’s Not That Polar Bear Thing
- Site-Specific Activism in Art and Natural History Museums: Liberate Tate, Platform London, and Not an Alternative
- The Future of Art and Dissent
- Epilogue. Seeing from the Future
- Renewing Art and Politics: Molly Crabapple and collaborators
- Notes
- Filmography
- Bibliography
- Index
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