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11 - On the Oblique Imperative: What Revealing Conceals and Concealing may Reveal
- Edited by Owen T. Nevin, Ian Convery, Peter Davis
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- Book:
- The Bear: Culture, Nature, Heritage
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 21 March 2020
- Print publication:
- 15 November 2019, pp 131-146
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Summary
Matrix: the cultural, social, or political environment in which something develops (Oxford Dictionary)
Look at my skin – look at my skin shine… (Dylan 1963)
It was an urgency to come here, […] My fear was that we would lose the opportunity of seeing these magnificent animals –
polar bear tourist in Kaktovik, Alaska (Goode 2016)
Since the 1980s the ecotourism sector has grown and grown. It is the fastest growing sector in tourism – growing at an annual rate of between 10%–15%. Tourism is one of the few sectors of the world economy that continues to grow despite the ups and downs in the world economy (World Tourism Forum, 2012)
In this chapter, we, as collaborative artists, follow the links between spectacle, image and ecotourism and, in this context, challenge the viability of expectations upon which ecotourism is fuelled. Implicitly, we offer a critique on its ethical sustainability, particularly where its regulation is, at best, patchily implemented. The specific frame for our inquiry here is the research undertaken for an art project Matrix, commissioned by the Anchorage Museum in Alaska where, from 2015–20, we are ‘Polar Lab Artists in Residence’. In this research, and the artworks arising, we have been examining interspecific, human and bear ecologies in the Arctic region.
THEATRE OF OPERATION
Somewhere out there, caught if you will like a seed, mid-flight and quivering on an obscure thread of the worldwide web, there exists a brief, 41-second clip of black and white video footage depicting an aerial search and the discovery of a freshly-dug polar bear den out on the North Slope – effectively, at the highest latitude of the USA.
We were shown this clip by US Fish and Wildlife agent Craig Perham when we met with him in Anchorage in 2015. In many ways, it is like many other clips from an archive of similar aerial surveillance missions in which an oil industry's attention, using thermal imaging Forward Looking Infra-Red (or FLIR) technology, turns away from the work of excavation, mineral extrac tion and pipeline monitoring, instead focusing on environmental stewardship and the purposes of conservation. The principle is simple – up on this Arctic coast in late autumn and early winter, biologists join together to fly with oil industry pilots in search of occupied polar bear dens.
27 - After nanoq: fl at out and bluesome: A Cultural Life of Polar Bears: Displacement as a Colonial Trope and Strategy in Contemporary Art
- Edited by Ian Convery, Gerard Corsane, Peter Davis
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- Book:
- Displaced Heritage
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 24 February 2023
- Print publication:
- 18 December 2014, pp 293-302
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Summary
nanoq: flat out and bluesome is a project by Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson that began as a survey of displaced taxidermic polar bears in the UK conceived with a view to restoring specific and discrete histories to relics whose purpose had hitherto been generic and symbolic.
Since completion of the project nanoq: flat out and bluesome (2006), the photographic archive from the survey has gone on continuous tour of a host of zoological, maritime and polar museums in northern Europe, including those within the Arctic region itself, such as in Long-yearbyen, Svalbard and Tromsø, Norway. One of the prime ambitions of the project is to bring singularity to the remains of specimens whose individual, cultural purpose has been to act as representative for a species – and sometimes, even more generically, its environment. In addition there are those specimens in private hands which function as company mascot, conversation piece and inevitably, hunting trophy.
Beginning my discussion on the subject of animals and their presence in art from this very work [nanoq] is important, as [it] could, from multiple perspectives, be understood as a quintessential work thus far produced within the discourse of human–animal studies. […] Snæbjörnsdóttir and Wilson have developed an international reputation for the creation of conceptual works of art that simultaneously embody the core and transcend the boundaries of human–animal studies’ strictly academic discourse in order to communicate to wider audiences. (Aloi 2012, s74)
For the artists, nanoq first and foremost concerns the issue of representation and how representation itself must always be a depletion and distortion of that which is represented. Historically, by removing the bears from the arctic and populating museums with these and similar colonial plunder, the will to construct self-congratulatory narratives through the display of the ‘tamed wild’ is clear. In 2004, when ten polar bear specimens were purposely displaced again for the eponymous installation at Spike Island in Bristol, their mutual effect upon each other was to simultaneously cancel out their representational and iconic currency and render visible as counterfeit the promises they had been called upon to convey. This chapter explores these contradictions and other readings of the project, of which Hunterian Museum director Dr Sam Alberti has stated led UK zoological museum curators to reappraise their approach to the collections in their charge.