Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics: Artists Reimagine the Arctic and Antarctic

by Lisa E. Bloom

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478018643
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	08/08/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	66 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Lisa E. Bloom is Scholar-in-Residence at the Beatrice Bain Research Group in the Department of Gender and Women’s studies, University of California, Berkeley, and author of Gender On Ice: American Ideologies of Polar Expeditions. Two of the book’s chapters were written with Elena Glasberg, who is the author of Antarctica as Cultural Critique: The Gendered Politics of Scientific Exploration and Climate Change.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations  ix
Acknowledgments  xv
Introduction. From the Heroic Sublime to Environments of Global Decline  1
I. Disappearing Landscapes: Feminist, Inuit, and Black Viewpoints
1. Antarctica and the Contemporary Sublime in Intersectional Feminist Art Practices  25
2. Reclaiming the Arctic through Feminist and Black Aesthetic Perspectives  54
3. At Memory's Edge: Collaborative Perspectives on Climate Trauma in Arctic Cinema  85
II. Archives of Knowledge and Loss
4. What is Unseen and Missing in the Circumpolar North: Contemporary Art and Indigenous Collaborative Approaches / Lisa E. Bloom and Elena Glasberg  105
5. Viewers as Citizen Scientists: Archiving Detritus / Lisa E. Bloom and Elena Glasberg 130
III. Climate Art and the Future of Art and Dissent
6. The Logic of Oil and Ice: Reimagining Documentary Cinema in the Capitalocene  153
7. Critical Polar Art Leads to Social Activism: Beyond the Disengaged Gaze  176
Epilogue. Seeing From the Future  195
Notes  201
Filmography  229
Bibliography  235
Index  253

What People are Saying About This

Amelia Jones

“The world looks and feels precariously different for anyone alive and paying attention, and artists and filmmakers have been among the most incisive in elaborating what is happening and what might come to be. Building on these insights, Lisa E. Bloom’s Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics brings the author’s incisive scholarship to the hinge between art and environment, addressing the uncanniness of the global climate crisis through aesthetic and historical analyses of how we got here.”

Editorial Reviews

“Ever since the publication of Gender on Ice, Lisa E. Bloom has been one of the most innovative scholars in the field of polar aesthetics and the cultural history of the polar regions. Working with an array of creative art practices, Bloom demonstrates how new ways of feeling, seeing, and thinking are integral to the current and future social, environmental, and geopolitical predicament. This is a book for dark times, but it is hopeful, resilient, and socially just.”

-- Klaus Dodds, Professor of Geopolitics, Royal Holloway, University of London

"An impressive and fascinating study which prompts further critical discussions in the field of polar art. The book is a must-read for any scholar interested in the aesthetics of climate change and will have a lasting impact within the field of Environmental Humanities."

-- Anne Hemkendreis ArtHist.net

“Lisa Bloom’s Climate Change and the New Aesthetics integrates text with imagery to highlight problems, not isolated to one location or a particular ethnicity. . . . Close scrutiny of artworks which contextualize Climate Change brings problems and hopefully solutions to the forefront without verbally scolding.”

-- Jean Bundy AICA E-MAG

“This is a book capable of expanding a reader’s understanding whether they are drawn to it from the worlds of art, activism, critical scholarship, or some combination thereof. Connecting what is often separated, Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics is a vital read for artists, activists, and academics alike.”

-- Alice Oates H-Environment, H-Net Reviews

"[T]hrough well-chosen examples, understandable text, an extensive bibliography, and detailed footnotes, Bloom’s scholarship makes an important contribution to the literature for institutions with graduate programs and/or libraries which aim to include diverse views of the global environmental crisis."

-- Barbara Ann Opar ARLIS-NA

"Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics marks an important intervention in aesthetic and environmental criticism. The book contributes to a growing body of scholarship that engages with climate change not merely as an ethical injunction but as an unavoidable facet of contemporary life."

-- Elizabeth Berman Journal of Postcolonial Writing

". . . Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics figures as the most comprehensive accounting yet of contemporary polar art and the point of departure for any further thinking on the subject. It is the most thorough attempt to think through aesthetic questions to which the poles and art about them give rise."
-- Robert Bailey and Pete Froslie CAA Reviews

From the Publisher