Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics: Artists Reimagine the Arctic and Antarctic by Lisa E. Bloom (review)

Lisa Bloom has been a major contributor to Arctic Studies since the publication of Gender on Ice: American Ideologies of Polar Expeditions (University of Minnesota Press, 1993), a postcolonial, feminist examination of the discursive strategies by which white, Western, male possession of the Arctic was legitimized in popular media. Although Bloom has since turned to other subjects, she has continued to publish on the topic of polar discourse. In the intervening years, the contemporary relevance of polar studies has only grown, as human activity in these regions has increased, and the rapidly warming poles have broad environmental and geopolitical implications.

As memorable titles go, it is difficult to surpass Gender on Ice; nevertheless, one might wish Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics had a more striking title, especially since "new" is a less significant characteristic of the aesthetics Bloom describes than "critical." Rather than critiquing colonial discourse herself, Bloom turns her attention to representations of the Arctic today from "feminist, Black, Indigenous, and non-Western perspectives" (p. 2), demonstrating how these works critique and challenge outmoded and harmful understandings of the polar regions. Unlike the old sublime aesthetic, this "new polar aesthetics" insists on the intimacy and singularity of the polar regions, especially for the Indigenous inhabitants of the Arctic for whom environment and culture are fully enmeshed, while also insisting that these regions are unexceptional—just as vulnerable to human misuse and subject to change as any other environment. Although Bloom introduces us to a wide range of works from installations to documentary films to protest art, the works convincingly cohere as examples of visual media that challenge the old, yet resilient colonial aesthetic of the sublime and conquerable poles. The analyses are accompanied by many high-quality images: Every treatment of an artist includes at least one black-and-white illustration, and there are thirty-one color plates. These usually allow the reader to follow Bloom's analyses, as well as form their own impressions.

Bloom includes several works by artists and filmmakers of Scandinavian origin, as well as works inspired by or situated in the Scandinavian Arctic, which I highlight below. (As a Scandinavianist, the fact that examples from the Arctic significantly outnumber those from the Antarctic did not particularly bother me, although some readers may feel misled.) The book comprises three parts: Part I, "Disappearing Landscapes: Feminist, Inuit, and Black Viewpoints," is the longest section. These chapters feature artists who most directly challenge the aesthetics of polar exploration and research, and include some artists who have been directly inspired by Bloom's scholarship. In chapter 1, artist Judit Hersko is among the women recipients of an artists' grant to Antarctica who are featured. Hersko re-imagines polar exploration narratives by inventing a fictitious Jewish female explorer whom she includes in a photograph of Robert Falcon Scott next to Roald Amundsen's tent, highlighting the absence of women in polar discourse (p. 38). In chapter 2, Swedish artist Katja Aglert's work Winter Event—Antifreeze (2014) is the subject of a lengthy analysis (pp. 56–69). Bloom argues that Aglert depicts "short-lived and abandoned" infrastructure on Svalbard as more recent examples of Arctic "failure" (p. 58), not unlike the heroicized failures of the Heroic Age of Polar Exploration. In one work, Aglert incorporates images of the gravestone of Roald Amundsen and Salomon August Andrée's balloon, thereby "creating new memories" of the Arctic to counter distorted ones (p. 68). Chapter 3 focuses on the problem of ethically bearing witness to the impact of climate change without "sentimentalizing or spectacularizing suffering" (p. 84). Bloom highlights women and Indigenous filmmakers who employ decolonizing filmmaking practices, focusing on the lived experiences and knowledge of Inuit subjects to create "an alternative visual archive and cinematic language" that bear witness to the cultural disruption that Inuit communities are facing (p. 100). Bloom's observations here may be of interest...