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Antarctica, that icy wasteland and extreme environment at the ends of the earth, was - at the beginning of the 20th century - the last frontier of Victorian imperialism, a territory subjected to heroic and sometimes desperate exploration. Now, at the start of the 21st century, Antarctica is the vulnerable landscape behind iconic images of climate change. In this genre-crossing narrative Gould takes us on a journey to the South Pole, through art and archive.
Through the life and tragic death of Edward Wilson, polar explorer, doctor, scientist and artist, and his watercolours, and through the work of a pioneer of modern anthropology and opponent of scientific racism, Franz Boas, Gould exposes the legacies of colonialism and racial and gendered identities of the time. Antarctica, the White Continent, far from being a blank - and white - canvas, is revealed to be full of colour. Gould argues that the medium matters and that the practices of observation in art, anthropology and science determine how we see and what we know. Stories of exploration and open-air watercolour painting, of weather experiments and ethnographic collecting, of evolution and extinction, are interwoven to raise important questions for our times. Revisiting Antarctica through the archive becomes the urgent endeavour to imagine an inhabitable planetary future.
List of contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Notes on Acronyms
Introduction
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Notes on Acronyms
Introduction
Antarctica through Art and the Archive
- Atmosphere through Architecture
- Anthropos through Nomadic Subjects
- Biography through Zoegraphy
- Transposition through Refraction
- Art and Antarctica through Writing
- The Journey through the Writing
Prologue
- Notes from the Field
- Glass
- Archive
Chapter One Elsewhere
- The Crippetts
- A Chapter of Antarctic History
- Evolution
- Notes and Queries
- Hints to Travellers
- Avant-Garde
- A View from Nowhere
- Archive as Field
- Analogy
- Immediacy
- Medium
- No More Elsewhere
Chapter Two Watercolour
- In the Open Air
- Notes towards a Lecture on Sketching
- The Weather
- Climate Control
- Horizon
- Permanent Colour
- Black and White
- Colour in Nature
- The History of Art
- Of Turnerian Topography
- Everything Wanders
- Watercolours
Chapter Three Antarctica through the Archive
- Antarctica
- Curious Perspective
- The Grid and Globe
- The Antarctic Manual
- Observation Hill
- The Southern Journey
- X
- The South Pole
- The Observer and the Observed
- Interpretation
- Atmosphere
- Ekphrasis
- Through the Archive
Chapter Four The Colour of Water
- Understanding of the Colour of Water
- Typology
- The Study of Geography
- Natural History
- Pharmakon
- Silver Nitrate
- Fugitive Colour
- Diorama
- Climatron
- Twenty-First-Century Storm Cloud
- Participant Observation
- Air Conditioning
Chapter Five Where Else
- No Where Else
- Refractive Index
- Please Return Immediately
- Similarity-in-Difference
- The Hut and the Museum
- The View from Somewhere
- Rear-Guard
- Lantern Lecture
- Some Notes on Penguins
- But Things Have Turned out Otherwise
- Some Fragments of an Antarctic Archive
- Hope
Epilogue
- The Arkive
- Ice
- Field Notes
Manuscripts
Primary Bibliography
Secondary Bibliography
About the author
Polly Gould is an artist who shows with Danielle Arnaud. She a tutor at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, UK, and is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.
Summary
Antarctica, that icy wasteland and extreme environment at the ends of the earth, was - at the beginning of the 20th century - the last frontier of Victorian imperialism, a territory subjected to heroic and sometimes desperate exploration. Now, at the start of the 21st century, Antarctica is the vulnerable landscape behind iconic images of climate change. In this genre-crossing narrative Gould takes us on a journey to the South Pole, through art and archive.
Through the life and tragic death of Edward Wilson, polar explorer, doctor, scientist and artist, and his watercolours, and through the work of a pioneer of modern anthropology and opponent of scientific racism, Franz Boas, Gould exposes the legacies of colonialism and racial and gendered identities of the time. Antarctica, the White Continent, far from being a blank - and white - canvas, is revealed to be full of colour. Gould argues that the medium matters and that the practices of observation in art, anthropology and science determine how we see and what we know. Stories of exploration and open-air watercolour painting, of weather experiments and ethnographic collecting, of evolution and extinction, are interwoven to raise important questions for our times. Revisiting Antarctica through the archive becomes the urgent endeavour to imagine an inhabitable planetary future.
Foreword
An illustrated analysis of the visual, material and anthropological formation of environmental art and histories, in particular a visual history of the Antarctic.
Additional text
Gould provides a critical review of the archive of Antarctic visual artwork created by Edward Wilson (1872–1912), a celebrated English polar explorer, physician, natural historian, and artist ... Throughout, the author advocates for the value of new and post-anthropocentric materialism in transforming the epistemology of vision. She demonstrates this new approach effectively using Wilsons' archive in understanding how art and polar explorations can be integrated to present a story in which humans are decentered. This book should interest scholars of environmental history and those in polar research fields, as well as scholars of art.
