Panel Statement
Chair Persons: Judit Hersko & Lisa E. Bloom
Presenters: Jane D. Marsching, Marko Peljhan, Matthew Biederman & Leslie Sharpe
Questions of subjectivity related to gender, race, emotion, and perception usually do not factor into thinking about polar climate science. This panel explores climate change and the environment as well as the landscapes of the polar regions and geopolitics in terms of shifts in awareness that inform how we think about, act about, and set policy for dealing with these global regions. Politics, emotion and culture are significant indicators for understanding the history and present uses of the Arctic and the Antarctic, how science and data gathered in these regions is perceived today, and the resulting impact on practical policy matters related to climate change. This panel is a companion panel to Far Field 2 and takes up some of the same issues but emphasizes the connection to the colonial histories of these regions, the technological incorporations of traditional knowledge into data, as well as contemporary approaches to art about landscapes that deal with issues of politics, emotion, and culture. The papers discuss contemporary art that challenges normative assumptions about art making-what form it might take, what effects it might have, and how it might incorporate as well as be read as data-in addition to how it might change our perceptions of the landscapes of the polar regions. Much of the artwork discussed embodies a relationship to nature not as something to be conquered, transformed, or turned to our advantage, but as a relational space that makes us think differently about the environment, the fossil fuel industry, capitalism and notions of territory.
- Judit Hersko is an installation artist who works in the intersection of art and science and collaborates with scientists on visualizing climate change science through art. In 2008 she received the National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists and Writers Grant and spent six weeks in Antarctica. Her recent exhibition featured by Leonardo Electronic Almanac (March 2011) builds on her collaboration with scientists and her experience in Antarctica. Her installations have been featured internationally including in Germany, Austria, Hungary, Spain, and in many cities around the United States including Chicago, New York, Los Angeles and San Diego. In 1997 she represented her native Hungary at the Venice Biennale. She has received an Artslink Collaborative Grant, a California Arts Council Visual Arts Fellowship, and has participated in residencies including the Lucas Artists Residency Program. She has several pieces in museum collections- for example in The Museum of Contemporary Art, Ludwig Museum in Budapest. Her work has been the subject of many publications including articles in Sculpture Magazine and Art in America. Her piece Pages from the Book of the Unknown Explorer is forthcoming in Far Fields: Digital Culture, Climate Change, and the Poles, 2011, edited by Andrea Polli and Jane Marsching. Hersko is an Associate Professor in the Visual and Performing Arts Department at California State University, San Marcos, where she initiated the Art and Science project in 2004. Her activities in Antarctica have led to new and ongoing collaborations with scientists, and recently she has been invited to present her work internationally at many universities, research institutions and conferences including the Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference in Hong Kong, and the Antarctic Visions Conference in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia.
- Lisa E. Bloom‘s interdisciplinary research and pedagogical interests cut across numerous fields including critical gender studies, visual culture, art history, science studies, photography, and cultural studies. She is the author of Gender on Ice: American Ideologies of Polar Expeditions (University of Minnesota Press, 1993), which is the first critical book to date on the Arctic and Antarctic written from a feminist perspective, and an edited anthology entitled With Other Eyes: Looking at Race and Gender in Visual Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 1999) that was also translated into Japanese. Her third book, entitled Jewish Identities in U.S. Feminist Art: Ghosts of Ethnicity (Routledge, London, 2006) explores the place of Jewishness in feminist art in the United States. Her more recent articles include a review of the Istanbul Biennial 2009 for a British International Feminist Art Journal, n.?paradoxa that was co-written with Betti-Sue Hertz of the Yerba Buena Center, and Disappearing Ice and Missing Data: Visual Culture of the Polar Regions and Climate Change, that was co-written with Elena Glasberg that will be published in Far Fields: Digital Culture, Climate Change, and the Poles (edited by Andrea Polli and Jane Marsching) forthcoming 2011. Lisa E. Bloom’s essays have appeared in The Scholar and the Feminist, n.?paradoxa, and Configurations; exhibition catalogues on Isaac Julien and Eleanor Antin, and anthologies including The Visual Culture Reader, Performing the Body/Performing the Text, Jewish Identity and Art History, Jews and Sex, Writing Science, and Everyday eBay, Collecting and Desiring. She has both an M.F.A. from the Visual Studies Workshop and Rochester Institute of Technology (1985) and a Ph. D. from the History of Consciousness Board at the University of California, Santa Cruz (1990). She currently teaches in the Visual Arts Department at the University of California, San Diego (US). lisabloom.net or lisaebloom.com