Planetary precarity and feminist environmental art practices in Antarctica
Lisa E. Bloom
Abstract
The article addresses Antarctica exclusively and focuses on three women artists: New Zealander, Anne Noble (Massey University, Wellington), American, Judit Hersko (California State University, San Marcos), and New Zealander Joyce Campbell (University of Auckland/Los Angeles). In the absence of indigenous inhabitants and a human population that excluded all women until the 1960s, these feminist contemporary artists make linkages between the region and issues of climate change to gender, the relation of the human to the non-human, questions of territory, knowledge production, and empire. The intersectional art works of these artists jolt viewers out of routine assumptions about the natural world using the strategies of postmodernism, speculative fiction, the Gothic, and the horror genre. Their provocative aesthetic approaches enable us to understand the powerful webs where cultural and natural aspects are entangled in the context of a modern visual tradition dominated by masculinist imagery of Antarctic wilderness from the Heroic Age of Exploration (1885–1922).