Artists in the Arctic

Original article published in The New York Times: Dot Earth, by David Rothenberg

We are 14 artists, 2 scientists, and a crew of 4 sailing as close to the North Pole pack ice as we can get away with. Aboard the M/S Noorderlicht, a hundred-year old Dutch schooner, we left Longyearbyen one week ago in the Norwegian territory of Svalbard, the most northerly point in the world with regular air service, for several weeks traveling the Arctic through open sea and sheltered bays, stopping along the way to respond to the landscape in uniquely artistic ways.

Our leader is Aaron O’Connor, a man with years of experience bringing artists together in unusual places to see what they might create, together and apart. He came up with the idea of a ship full of artists called The Arctic Circle, and after years of planning, the journey has begun.

Artists, tourists, anyone would be stunned into silence in the midst of so great and fabulous a landscape—unclimbed peaks, tongues of glaciers, nary a sign of human presence as the cold winter begins to descend. Of course that is a lie. The archipelago of Spitsbergen was the favored destination of whalers already in the seventeenth century. When they first arrived the ships had to part rafts of bowhead whales just to move through the fjords, but by 1700, they were nearly all gone. Today it is easy to mark how fast the glaciers are retreating, so even in so empty a wilderness the oceans and Earth reflect back the hand of human ignorance and greed.

But this is not just a trip to lament the sadness of a nature used up and wearing out. We all know it cost enormous resources, financial and energywise, to get here. We are not here only to witness this beauty, of course not, we must express, we need to create. And don’t imagine one of those mountain trips where John Muir would guide a pack of painters with easels up into the Sierra, constantly looking for a spot worthy of the title “scenic view.” This group of artists works mostly in media in between the lines: installations, video art, staged photography, performance, conceptual works in between the immaterial and the concrete. The works created on board and ashore are meant to surprise.

Australian installation artist Ian Burns is making the most northern pieces of toast ever toasted on the flat surface of Moffen Island, just past the 80th parallel. In the summer, no one is allowed to set foot on the shore because of the many breeding walruses, but in October only a few walrus are left, and they don’t seem to mind when Ian plugs his toaster into a generator and proceeds to get the bread to the exactly right level of brownness. Afterwards he is carefully burning the legend “80° N” onto each piece of toast with a small flame. “We’ve got to get beyond the old clichés of how to respond to nature,” he grumbles. “Making toast up here seemed like the most anomalous thing I could do.”

Osman Khan has created a pirate radio station that can broadcast from the boat, from anyone’s iPod or computer. “You know, for the polarbears, for the seals, for anyone who might be listening.” At first I thought it a bit of an obnoxious idea, broadcasting music out into the silent wilderness, but when we’re out there and we tune in on small transistor radios, it is pretty cool. The radio is only one of Khan’s interesting concepts. Ideas just pour out of him. He’s going to stitch together two pieces of broken glacier ice with yellow polyester rope. “I really got wet trying that out.” He’s filled some inflatable plastic pool toy walruses with fresh water and will freeze them, then cut off the plastic and send the ice molds out to sea. He wants to make the world’s largest popsicle. Then we can all lick it.

Raphaele Shirley, onetime apprentice to Nam June Paik, makes sculptures all over the world out of lasers and light. Here, she is photographing a rack of six laser lights zooming around in a zodiac in the waves. She sits on deck photographing the trails of red light, which look like musical staves wobbling with the warp and woof of the sea.

Heini Aho, a Finnish artist, attaches her video camera to a tripod on the white windswept plain of the Reinsdyrflya, a flat expanse surrounded by the distant white peaks beyond the Liefdefjord, or Fjord of Love. Then she poses in front of the camera and rapidly dresses and undresses herself with piles of hats, scarves, coats, gloves and fleeces. When she’s down to a black turtleneck and balaclava she looks like some kind of Arctic ninja performing some strange ritual that is not explained. “I am not sure what final form this work will take. Possibly an installation, possibly a film.”

The bell rings on deck, that means there’s something to see. “Ayeaah,” says the captain, usually a man of few words, “seven polar bears eating an old whale carcass. I have only seen something like this a few times in all my journeys in the North.”

Every artist rushes to our cabins, grabs our latest-model cameras, and runs up on deck. The bears don’t seem interested in us, that slimy whale backbone looks so delicious. We can smell it easily a few hundred yards away, it’s probably been there for months. “Ooohhh…” someone says, “it looks like something out of a Matthew Barney film.” [He’s a leading artist known for his long abstract movies full of lush, gooey scenes.] “Hey,” someone else has a bright idea, “let’s put those binoculars over a camera lens, see what kind of effect comes out.”

We watch the bears eating and playing for hours. It’s impossible to pull our eyes away. The raw reality of nature holds us transfixed. A couple of us remember Werner Herzog’s line in Grizzly Man, where the great director announces, coldly, “People think nature is beautiful, but I do not agree. To me it is nothing but a realm of cruelty, survival, and the relentless search for food.” With his beautiful documentaries Herzog shows that notion is just a pose, for he loves nature and has truly succeeded in revealing it in art, cutting far beyond the clichés and the preset stories of the wild we are all so used to.

Sure, I could tell you them all: the sea was rough, the cameras and computers were pitching to the floor. Wine glasses were breaking, milk spilled onto the floor. Waves from the sea sprayed us head to toe in the tiny zodiac as we made rough landings on shore. The light is indescribable, the snowy peaks stretched into the distance forever. The immense loneliness zeros straight in on the sublime, where the land is great because we are so small.

I tell you those things and all of them are true. But we are artists, not tourists, so it should not be enough to be impressed by walruses and polar bears. But we all love the polar bears! Their bloody faces smile as they chew on rancid whale meat. You don’t become an artist by denying any tourist instincts. We all want to see and love the world. Just as artists in the Age of Exploration were the only ones to offer up images grand and graphic enough to show people back home what the far reaches of the globe can offer, today we must cut through a world saturated with images and stories to see if there can still be a fresh way of expressing one’s experiences on the journey, careening through the sea and back and forth from the frozen, empty land.

“Perhaps the fact that we’re in the Arctic doesn’t matter,” says Aaron. “It may be more important to put a group of artists and scientists together in such close confinement, in tough conditions, just to see what happens.”

So we start as tourists but return with one extra responsibility, to turn our experiences into some lasting images that will make nature appear fresh, new, able to survive beyond the human tendency to destroy it. This is the challenge, and I hope we can be equal to it, and are able to cut through the twin temptations of depiction and irony to reveal the world in some whole new way.

So how do you think artists might best change the way we perceive and grasp the wildest edges of nature?

Check out thearcticcircle.org for information on coming exhibitions that will be mounted all over the world with work that derives from this journey.

David Rothenberg is professor of philosophy and music at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. He has been recording the sounds of the ship breaking through rafts of drifting ice in the hopes of turning it all into music.