The ultimate antipode, where all longitudes lead: Where south cannot be
found on a compass – its needle unsteady like a sailor in the wind. The
frozen end of the world and the outermost reach of geographical thought.
The very end of it all.
The last continent is not somewhere one associates with contemporary
art. Doesn’t the latter term ring sweaty when mentioned in the same
breath as the Ross Ice Shelf? Something other than miles separates our
art world from the polar one. We who walk the baking flagstones of San
Marco, who press flesh at the prosecco intermezzo – where chatter flits
from the surface of the artwork to the decoration of the palazzo and the
cut of dresses – we are very far removed. Perhaps this is a good thing.
Antarctica is a place that does not forgive hubris easily; a place
where people sometimes eat their boots to avoid starving. How was your
canapé?
A Polar region. But a polar opposite? There is a city whose name recalls
Murder and Chicken Nuggets. McMurdo: Where a soft-serve ice cream
machine dispenses every day from ten oclock – the vanilla-swirl stain on
a continent frozen to its very core.
Antarctica – no ring for it on the Olympic flag and no pavilion in the
Giardini. The only continent without a biennale. Has its art history
been written? It is only a matter of time. Literary anthologies and
post-colonial criticism of explorers’ tales already exist, and sketches
of icebergs have been made down
below since 1895. Since then the depictions have kept coming, heroic
dilettantes replaced by debentured creators funded by government
committees.
We have a better hypothesis: ‘a biennale upside-down’. The idea is more
ambitious than the strategy of ‘embedded’ artistic practice that
dominates the short history of Antarctic enterprise. It is also
independent, so artists will be able to explore creative terrain further
afield than the hegemonic issues of imperial conquest and ecology.
Despite geopolitical overdeterminations – just in terms of sense – the
southern realm provides an unparalleled counterpoint to the rest of the
world inhabited by humans. What will artists find there? The sublime,
perhaps. But there is more to discover. What will a hundred artists who
travel there on two icebreakers have to say? What will they teach the
scientists based there who, presently, set the interpretive agenda?
But every two years? Who will go? Do we really have the resources? And
even if we do, isn’t our plan just another assault on the last great
wilderness? Fear not. Ours is a topsy-turvy biennale – so perhaps we
will only go once. That said, Antarctica’s ice caps are melting, and as
they become liquid venice will most certainly sink. In this case, people
will find time in their diaries.
Antarctopia