If you thought climate change was an issue best addressed by an unholy marriage of scientists and politicians, then think again. Artists have been venturing to the frozen wastes of the polar regions for more than 200 years, returning — some didn’t — with visions of terrifying grandeur that fired the curiosity and awe of their public. Most of them were bit players in expeditions bent on exploiting the trading opportunities promised by the lure of the great ice worlds, but over the past 100 years the role of the artist on such dangerous missions has become increasingly prominent.
One of the most famous was Captain James Francis “Frank” Hurley (1885-1962), an Australian photographer, film-maker and adventurer. He is especially known for his role in documenting Ernest Shackleton’s extraordinary expedition in 1915-16 to cross the Antarctic on foot. Hurley was hired because Shackleton wanted to exploit the commercial sale of images relating to the expedition but, when their vessel Endurance was stuck in ice, his photographs took on an altogether more poignant and desperate quality.
Hurley “is a marvel”, wrote Frank Worsley, captain of the Endurance. “With cheerful Australian profanity he perambulates alone aloft and everywhere, in the most dangerous and slippery places he can find, content and happy at all times but cursing so if he can’t get a good or novel picture. He stands bare and hair waving in the wind, where we are all gloved and helmeted, he snaps his snaps or winds his handle turning out curses of delight and pictures of Life by the fathom.”
Back then, the concept of climate change hardly stirred in our imaginations. Now, however, there’s an increasing number of artists journeying to both the Arctic and the Antarctic, and they’re bringing back very different work. Not records of human endeavour and heroism, but rather a range of responses that challenge our understanding of mankind’s wider impact on the planet and the role of art itself in an era in which science holds all the dramatic cards.
Several of these artists’ work will be shown in an exhibition at the Natural History Museum in London called The Ship: The Art of Climate Change. The ship in question is the Nooderlicht, a 46m schooner that has taken three expeditions of artists, photographers, writers and scientists between 2003 and 2005 to the Svalbard Archipelago, located between 76·50 and 80·80 degrees North, a spot roughly equidistant from Iceland, Greenland and Norway. Part of the Cape Farewell project, an enterprise founded by the artist David Buckland and the subject of a BBC documentary shown in February, it has brought artists, scientists and educators together to raise awareness about global warming.
Back in 1988, the British artist Andy Goldsworthy, traditionally known for his interest in working with organic materials such as twigs, leaves, and stones, went to the North Pole and made a number of ice and snow sculptures that he then photographed. His trip might have seemed rather eccentric to many but, since then, the practice of artists descending on the formerly pristine surfaces of the Arctic and Antarctic has developed widely, with the Cape Farewell project perhaps the largest and most formally structured. The work to be shown at the Natural History Museum reveals both the singular skills of the expeditions’ artists and, it must be said, when faced with the immensity of the evident catastrophe unfolding in these regions, our fragmented responses.
Gary Hume’s semi-stylised painting of a hermaphrodite polar bear is tragi-comic — apparently, the rising rate of hermaphroditism in the species is due to toxic waste accumulating in the Arctic. The choreographer Siobhan Davies’s extraordinary film projection Endangered Species, produced in collaboration with the dancer Sarah Warsop and costume designer Jonathan Saunders, shows Warsop’s movements becoming increasingly obstructed by the addition of white rods to her clothes, offering a metaphor on the developing crisis of self-entrapment in which the human race appears to be engaged.
Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey have produced something that fits easily within the museum’s context of old bones. “In a place called Moffin Island we arrived on this very low- lying land mass, perfect for walruses to haul themselves in and out of the sea. We came across a beach covered in walrus bones and nothing else. We had to dig down through the snow to find them but we were just pulling up skull after skull,” recalls Ackroyd.
“I’m sure that if the snow had not been there, the whole beach would have been full of them. You suddenly realised what had gone on there.”
Their response when returning to the UK was to retrieve the skeleton of a minke whale beached at Skegness, from which they made a 6m- long sculpture of the whale’s skeleton that they then encrusted with alum glass. It lies on a bed of frosted glass, emphasising the fragility of the Arctic and life in general.
Of the other works in the show, the photographs of Antony Gormley’s three snow sculptures, Three Made Places, stand out: looking very small indeed against the vastness of the Arctic scene is a group of three rectilinear shapes — a trench-like hole burrowing into the snow-covered hill, a mini-tower block with a small square window in one side, and something that looks like a giant sarcophagus. They have been formed with seeming monumental precision and it is this simple clarity, together with the sense that the landscape around them has only recently been found, that gives the work its archaic feeling.
The architect and fellow expedition member Peter Clegg, who helped to make the pieces, chillingly explains the peculiarly familiar dimensions of these snow structures: they reflect “the volume, approximately, taken up by ourselves and the space immediately around us, roughly the volume occupied by a coffin, which is perhaps an appropriate symbolic unit when we are talking about the destruction of the planet”.
I am shocked when David Buckland tells me that, while the Antarctic is protected by international treaty, the Arctic isn’t. It is sadly ironic that there are now 12 travel agents and tour operators offering trips to Svalbard, four hotels, and six tax-free shops. There’s even a museum there.
More artists are also making tracks to the Antarctic. The French artist Pierre Huyghe’s latest work, A journey that wasn’t 2006, receives its premiere at his forthcoming show Celebration Park at the Tate Modern. Based on his 2005 journey to Antarctica, where he searched for a unique creature said to be living on a hypothetical uncharted island (oh, the fey French), the piece is shot on location in Antarctica and in an ice-rink in Central Park, New York.
Last autumn, Layla Curtis spent three months carrying out an extensive geographical exploration with the British Antarctic Survey as part of their artists and writers residence programme. She recorded her journey using a personal GPS tracking device that created a set of continuous lines charting her passage to, from and in Antarctica, rather than distorting the known geography of the region — a decision that may reflect her respect for its scale and significance. Simon Faithfull’s voyage to Antarctica on RSS Ernest Shackleton resulted in a film shot through his cabin porthole and numerous drawings made on his palm pilot and e-mailed around the world. Combined with notes, these drawings and films have been published as a book.
“The problem with science in this day and age is that it isn’t entertainment and, while art isn’t exactly that, it can become a metaphor for an emergency,” Buckland says. “If you think about how humans operate in the world, it is rarely rationally. Our behaviour when it comes to trade, buying, politics and warfare is driven by emotive forces and so therefore art can influence us quite directly.”
The Ship: The Art of Climate Change, Natural History Museum, London SW7 (www.nhm.ac.uk 020-7942 5000), Jun 3 to Sep 3.
Pierre Huyghe, Tate Modern, London SE1 (www.tate.org.uk 020-7942 5000), Jul 5 to Sep 17.
Layla Curtis, Gimpel Fils Gallery, London W1 (www.gimpelfils.com 020-7493 2488), until Jun 10. Simon Faithfull’s book Ice Blink is published by Bookworks
Environmental artists
THE PAST. . .
Walter De Maria
The Lightning Field is a work of Land Art situated at 7,200ft on a flat plain in New Mexico. Completed in 1977, the piece comprises 400 polished stainless steel poles installed in a grid array measuring one mile by one kilometer. During storms, the poles can act as lightning conductors, animating the space between earth and sky.
James Turrell
His ongoing project to transform the entire cone of Roden Crater, a volcano in Arizona, is his most ambitious project. Since 1975 he has been gradually reshaping the top of the crater by transforming it into a hemispherical dish with a rim all at one height. Visitors will be able to view the sky above from inside a space that focuses the act of viewing.
Robert Smithson
Smithson’s iconic Spiral Jetty, completed in 1970, was conceived as a curling tongue of debris made of black basalt rocks and earth taken from the site. This was arranged to form a path 1,500ft long and 15ft wide on which one could walk into the shallow edge of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. It was fully legible as a spiral only from the air. But the lake has since risen and effectively destroyed the work.
Michael Heizer
Complex One stands in a flat valley four hours’ drive from Las Vegas. At 140ft long and more than 23ft high, the piece is a geometrical hill of earth cut off by two massive beams of concrete and partially framed by large steel elements. Resembling some mysterious silo, the work pales by comparison with City, an enormous complex in the Nevada Desert not open to the public.
THE FUTURE. . .
Arthur Woods
On May 22, 1993, his luminous green Cosmic Dancer Sculpture was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on a Soyuz rocket to the Mir space station in Earth’s orbit. When docked at the station, the cosmonaut crew aboard released the sculpture, allowing it to float freely in the zero-gravity, and, at the artist’s request, recorded the spectacle in a video and text diary.
