|
not here
by Jeremy Millar
'Cornwallis Island
is perhaps one of the most dreary and desolate spots that can well
be conceived.'
- Papers of HMS Assistance, 1854
'There is something abominable about cameras, because they possess
the power to invent many worlds. As an artist who has been lost
in this wilderness of mechanical reproduction for many years, I
do not know which world to start with. I have seen fellow artists
driven to the point of frenzy by photography.'
- Robert Smithson, 'Art Through the Camera's Eye', c.1971
Erskine's having problems taking photographs here. The camera's
a problem, obviously, at these temperatures; the shutter freezes,
the wind-on freezes, the aperture freezes (he tries to prevent this
by carrying it underneath his arm, although sometimes it just freezes
to his jacket instead). Then there's the problem of looking through
the viewfinder while wearing the darkened glasses needed to protect
his eyes from the broken-glass light. He slides them over his cold-clamped
forehead, his eyes shrinking shut, his right then opening slightly,
as though thawing. His breath crystallises onto the viewfinder,
glazing it opaquely. He tries to scrape it off using a fat-gloved
finger, although it won't fit into the opening. He turns the finger
slightly and a crease in the seam becomes a point; the breath is
scraped in a scribble of lines. He does not want the metal box burning
cold against his skin and so his eye hovers behind the viewfinder.
He's not sure what he can see.
That's the other problem. What is there to see, to look at? What
is there to photograph, here, assuming that you are able photograph
anything at all? Can you photograph anything at all when there's
nothing at all to photograph? There's just white, just light. He
knows that all photographs are of just light, but they are of light
reflecting off something, and here light just seems to be reflecting
off light. One of the party, a silhouette, walks away, towards the
ridge, the only landmark; a vehicle lies in the distance beyond
him. It is something to aim for. His arms are rigid against the
sides of his chest and then the scene is frozen.
He's finding the whole thing quite disorientating. He must photograph
the new town site, yet it is difficult to make out where it should
begin or end, what it is. It is just empty space all around, difficult
to focus on, difficult - in this light, in these circumstances -
to place it in any sort of perspective. He must fix the image of
the town in his head, must fix it out here, in fact, outside his
head. See it clearly in this oh-so-clear light. This was what he
had attempted when he had photographed the site earlier, during
the summer. He walked towards some oil drums, empty ones, ten of
them, and started moving them into place. They were rolled, at an
angle, along the circumference of their rim, over the pebbles and
placed in a shape like that rim, but not a full circle, open at
the far end, like a horse-shoe, or a Greek amphitheatre. He felt
happier then, being able to see the shape of the town sitting there,
on the beach, in front of him, in front of where it will actually
be, explaining to the inhabitants there, people he'd interviewed,
showing them what their city would look like. He took a photograph
of it, only guessing through the viewfinder. He got most of the
drums in but not all, and its difficult to make out the shape he
made with them. In the picture you can see that another of the party
had walked behind them, looking the other way, across Resolute Bay
and out towards Barrow Strait. Their pick-up is there also, just
down the shore, its back door open, some of their gear sitting on
the floor nearby. A white wooden weather box is the only structure
to be seen.
Now, through the fumbling layers, he was beginning to wonder whether
he should have got his gloved hands on one of those special Hasselblads
which had been developed for use by NASA astronauts on the Apollo
missions. The conditions on the moon, and their means of dealing
with them, are even more extreme than those here; one of those cameras
would have been useful. Perhaps he can get one when he returns to
Sweden? He'd been thinking about the moon quite a bit recently,
following the discussions on building structures which could withstand
such a harsh environment. There were different technical considerations,
of course, but the issues were fundamentally the same. That would
be obvious, surely, to anyone. Certainly anyone who had seen his
scale model of the two-storey house he is proposing, its angular,
octagonal body, its strutting legs, its pipes and panels, its overwhelming
resemblance to the Lunar Module.
He's thinking of the photographs of the moon's surface taken on
recent fly-bys. Maybe that's what he needs here, a view from higher
up, an overview. He signals to one of the team, calling to him through
the ice collecting round the fur rim of his hood (manulik he thought
they called it). They trudge heavily to one of the pick-ups and
sit warmly inside. Water drips from their coats as they bump their
way towards the ridge, their hands banging against the windscreen
as they try to wipe away the condensation. When they finally arrive,
it takes almost as great an effort to leave the truck, its sun-trap,
its wind-barrier. He checks his camera, checks his clothes, checks
them again, checks which way he wants to be facing. He opens the
door and gets out, then looks through the camera. Mist has formed
in the lens. He looks out towards the site, and then notices the
old town on the beach behind the weather station. This was what
he looks at, when he can look through the camera; the old town in
the distance, indistinct, a crop of rock on the right, snow sloping
down to the wind-polished ice far beneath. How different this scene
will be in the future, he thinks.
The snow has gone, that's the first thing you notice. There is some,
white patches, like animal markings, over the stone-green-grey of
the land. We are looking in a different direction also, due south
rather than south-west (although from here almost everything is
south-something-or-other). The ridge is on the left of the foreground
now, and the slopes are scree not snow. In the middle-distance,
just before a lake, a scattering of buildings lie across the ground,
thrown down, here and there. Cyan and red stand out; light blues
and greys, white take time to appear. A long yellow building marks
the furthest edge of the settlement. It is thirty years later.
In some ways it's easy to see why Joachim Koester decided to come
here, to Resolute on Cornwallis Island, in the Canadian Arctic,
in the Inuit State of Nunavut. It's so achingly, desperately beautiful,
this much is clear (look at the photographs), in this clear clean
light. Yet there are other reasons to come here, reasons which are
not so clear, murky reasons. Towards the end of the essay quoted
in the second epigraph, Robert Smithson remarks that each landscape,
no matter how calm and lovely, conceals a substrata of disaster,
and that is true here also, perhaps especially true. Sir John Franklin
sailed around the island, almost completely, during his 1845 expedition
to find the North-West Passage, the theoretical sea connection between
the Atlantic and the Pacific. Theoretical because no-one knew whether
there was one. If it did exist then it would be too far north to
be usefully navigated for trade; this was geographical discovery
for its own sake. The expedition was a disaster. Over the next twelve
years, approximately fifty relief parties were sent to look for
Franklin's lost group; the Royal Navy lost six ships and over two
hundred men, yet the British are more than capable of turning tragedy
into triumph (perhaps because they are also more than capable of
its inverse). Franklin was hailed a national hero, eventually, his
cenotaph unveiled in Westminster Abbey in 1875, inscribed with an
epitaph by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Not here! the white North has thy bones; and thou
Heroic sailor-soul,
Art passing on thine happier voyage now
Toward no earthly pole
The failure to return from the physical journey was elided into
a higher spiritual voyage. The Poles, North and South, were seen
as almost abstract spaces, unknown, unknowable perhaps, empty white
spaces onto which human hopes and fears could be projected. (In
this sense, they operated in a manner comparable to the moon, or
outer space, during much of the twentieth century). The icy expanses
were used by writers as diverse as Charlotte Brontë and Edgar
Allan Poe, Elizabeth Gaskell and Jules Verne. From her solitary
life in Amherst, Massachusetts, Emily Dickenson wrote of the slow
Ôletting go' which a freezing person might experience and shortly
afterwards Lady Franklin appeared, as a model of faithfulness, the
'lone British Lady'. Charles Dickens, also, wrote a commemorative
verse, for Franklin (Sir John) and Sir William Edward Parry, veteran
of five arctic expeditions, Secretary of the Admiralty and staunch
supporter of Franklin's final expedition. It was given as an overture
to Wilkie Collins' melodrama The Frozen Deep which was
mounted at Dickens' home, before being played again at the Manchester
Free Trade Hall, and at a command performance for Queen Victoria:
One savage footprint on the lonely shore,
Where one man listen'd to the surge's roar;
Not all the winds that stir the mighty sea
Can ever ruffle in the memory.
If such its interest and thrall, O then
Pause on the footprints of heroic men,
Making a garden of the desert wide
Where PARRY conquer'd and FRANKLIN died.
Despite the ravages of the arctic weather, those first explorers'
footprints would remain because, like Neil Armstrong's lunar steps,
they are placed upon ground not subject to atmospheric disturbance
- the surface of the mind. Through people, the wilderness is transformed.
So it is hoped.
'It was like landing on the moon. Looked one way and looked the
other and all we could see was gravel as far as the eye could see.
There was absolutely nothing - no man-made objects, no houses, nothing.
No vegetation, no animals, nothing.' - John Amagoliak, president,
Inuit Tapirisat of Canada
In 1953, nearly one hundred years after Franklin and his party were
officially declared dead, a small boat landed on the shore of Resolute
Bay, Cornwallis Island. The nineteen Inuit, and a member of the
Royal Canadian Mounted Police, disembarked and took a quick look
around the gravel beach. It was snowing, and they quickly began
to erect the seven tents which they had brought with them from their
homes in Port Harrison in Quebec, over 1000 miles away. From what
used to be their homes in Port Harrison, rather. Resolute was now
their home. In less than two months time it would be dark for another
four months.
The arctic region had become a concern for the Canadian government
in Ottawa for a number of reasons. During the Second World War,
American acitivity in the region had increased dramatically, with
the building of a string of air-bases, and there were plans for
more. Now there were as many American citizens in the region as
there were Canadian, and this number would only increase if forty
US radar stations planned were actually built. There was little
fear of invasion by the Americans, simply a de facto take-over
if the Canadians did nothing. And then there was the growing awareness
of the wealth of raw materials to be found in the region; commercial,
as well as military, strategy demanded that Ottawa take action.
There were social concerns, also, which had resulted from the Canadians'
governance of the region 'in an almost continual state of absent-mindedness
for ninety years', according to the prime minister, Louis St Laurent.The
native Inuit were facing a crisis - a decline in the caribou population,
along with a similar collapse in fur trading. Following the introduction
of family allowance and government relief in 1944, the arctic's
social security bill was enormous, and there was official concern
that the Inuit might simply become a 'dependecy culture', surviving
on government hand-outs.
A proposal from the newly-established Department of Indian Affairs
and Northern Development seemed to address both issues (as one might
expect from a government agency with such a name). The proposal
was a 'rehabilitation project', whereby Inuits from 'overpopulated'
areas in north Quebec would be relocated to the remote islands of
the High Arctic; the Royal Canadian Mounted Police - the most visible
symbol of government power in the region, administering government
relief and handing out child allowances - would visit camps Inuit
camps and find 'volunteers'. The Canadian government hoped that
the Inuit would soon regain their independence and traditional way
of life while simultaneously becoming symbols of Canadian sovereignty,
human flag-poles.
Resolute Bay had been the site of a joint Canadian-American air
force base since 1947, as well as being home to a detachment of
the Canadian Air Force, and so it was hoped, initially, that some
of the Inuit would be able to find menial jobs at the base; in the
event, department officals were informed that there were no such
jobs before the CD Howe even steamed into Port Harrison to pick
up its human cargo. Base officials refused to support the new community
should things go wrong, and introduced a strict segregation policy
between the base and the new settlement. The Inuits' diet was severly
restricted in comparison with the variety they had enjoyed previously;
as the area had been designated a game reserve, even their ability
to hunt caribou and musk oxen was curtailed. Many survived on unfinished
airline food discarded on the local dump.
The experiment continued; Resolute prospered. As petro-chemical
companies moved in to exploit the arctic's mineral resources, ResoluteÕs
airport became one of Canada's busiest with even the Queen touching
down there in 1969. It was now decided that Resolute should become
a model community, racially integrated, supplied with all the necessary
social amenities, and so the London-born, Stockholm-based architect
Ralph Erskine, known for experimentation with community building
and environmental compatibility, was invited to build a new town.
His plans were ambitious - a new school, hotel, shopping mall, an
ice-hockey rink, even, all held within the embrace of a classic
Greek amphitheatre and covered by a glass dome. Even trees would
grow beneath its protective canopy.
However, there is always trouble in Eden. Concerns returned about
the integration of the Inuits and men from the base, particularly
in Erskine's utopian plans for communal living. The changes which
were forced by these worries, along with the difficulties of building
in such a hostile climate - meteorological, and otherwise - meant
that Erskine's scheme was abandoned after the completion of only
a small section, a curved terrace which sits at the town's south-eastern
edge. The people of Resolute call this building 'Row Housing'.
'Civilisation is the sum total of different cultures animated by
a common spiritual numerator, and its main vehicle speaking both
literally and metaphorically is translation.The wandering of a Greek
portico into the latitude of tundra is a translation.'
Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One, 1986
Nostalgia has diverse roots - both of them Greek, nostos
meaning home, algia meaning longing - although the word
itself seems to have been first used in the diagnoses of seventeenth-century
Swiss doctors. In the nineteenth century, geographical longing was
replaced with historical longing, la maladie du pays becoming,
instead mal du siecle, although there remained many similarities
between the two, and they were often difficult to distinguish with
any degree of clarity. I think that both forms can be found in Resolute,
and in its planning. It can be found in the desire of the Canadian
government to 'return' Inuit back to a land which they had abandoned
during the Little Ice Age approximately four hundred years earlier,
and to return them to a simpler, independent way of life safe from
the modern ailments of 'White Man's Diseases'. It can certainly
be found in the desire of the Inuit who were equally resolute to
return to Port Harrison after two years, as they thought they had
been promised, to return to their homes, yes, but also the lives
and families left behind. Nostalgia, like translation, can move
in opposing directions.
I think that we might find a nostalgic impulse in Joachim Koester's
work also. There is a stong sense of distancing in this project,
an estrangement one might call it, an ironic nostalgia which makes
use of the paradoxes of displacement rather than attemping to bring
about a corrective resolution. It is a nostalgia where longing is
emphasised over place, where algia is put before nostos.
This is not to say that an emotional sense is absent, or insincerely
felt, or that place is not important (no, it is not to say that
at all). Rather it is to acknowledge that identities, whether personal
or national, are composed of conflicting desires, for alienation
as much as belonging, longings which make it impossible to recreate
a lost 'home' but allow, instead, its reimagination as something
new, and slightly unfamiliar.
We can see this in works by Robert Smithson, an undoubted influence
upon Koester, and in particular his photo-text work A Tour of
the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey (1967), published in Artforum.
Smithson returned to his birthplace a few months before his thirtieth
birthday, photographing various 'monuments' along the entropic landscape
of the Passaic River bank, along which a new highway was being built.
Typically, temporal periods are collapsed upon one another - mechanical
diggers becoming 'prehistoric creatures trapped in the mud' - or
reversed - If the future is "out of date" and "old fashioned", then
I have been in the future.' The photographs themselves - 'a few
listless, entropic snapshots' - attempt to situate a place which
is disappearing under the highway construction, yet there is no
attempt to reconstruct the landscape of his youth but rather make
it seem even more strange, more dislocated temporally - in either
the distant past or future - or as simply unreal, a picture already,
as when Smithson describes his activities as 'like photographing
a photograph'. The familiar is utterly transformed. The most banal
view is afforded the greatest significance, as on the moon, where
the most barren scene is given the most beautiful name. Smithson
photographed the earth as if it were an alien environment, his birth
town as if it were another planet, an enviroment which he was placing
under a series of experiments, testing its physical and conceptual
parameters, one against the other. In the twelfth century, Hugo
of St Victor said, 'The man who finds his country sweet is only
a raw beginner; the man for whom each country is as his own is already
strong; but only the man for whom the whole world is like a foreign
country is perfect', and I think that we might be able to apply
this final state to Smithson, and Koester.
'Reality is not limited to the familiar, the commonplace, for it
consists in huge part of a latent, as yet unspoken future word.'
- Dostoevsky, Notebooks
Perhaps even more than the widely-read Smithson, Koester is obsessed
with literature and its workings, the paraxial area somehow connected
to both the real and the imaginary, yet in which neither can wholly
be found. Koester adopts the realistic mode as a restraint, a form
of limitation which allows for an increased potentiality of language,
as Perec might have done (a particularly important writer for the
artist), or Calvino, two members of the Oulipo group which was described
by founder Raymond Queneau as 'rats who build the labyrinth from
which they plan to escape'. Koester has himself written that the
restraint of the documentary form is a 'set of rules which I then
test in relation to the subject matter', a remark which I think
has an interesting echo elsewhere.
'The fantastic serves here not in the positive embodiment
of the truth,' writes Mikhail Bakhtin of the fantastic in relation
to Dostoevsky, 'but in the search after the truth, its provocation
and, most importantly its testing.' Perhaps we might consider
Koester's practice, then, as the 'documentary fantastic', a practice
which he might share with the writers William T. Vollmann, of course,
or W.G. Sebald or Iain Sinclair, or film-makers such as Chris Marker
or Patrick Keiller, a practice in which an imaginary site is paradoxically
investigated through its material reality.
One of the most well-known exponents of what became known as the
'new topographics', Lewis Baltz, described his desire to document
those bleak and featureless zones where 'the man-made, the cultural,
and the natural are entropically merged', and I think that is a
perfect description also of the photographs which Koester is presenting
to us here. The documentary fantastic can be seen in that view from
the ridge, an overview of solidity and permanence, from rock to
water, the human settlements found somewhere between the two. It
can be seen in the empty full beach, stained with green and rusted
plants, and marked with a line, diagonally, although it is impossible
to say how it was made. It can be seen in the black snow-mobile,
beached on the pebbles, as though it had been washed up in the tides
of change. And it can be seen in that face, in that engaging blank
stare, a stare of an outsider once now faced with another, unsure,
uncertain yet determined, a face which silently speaks of history
and geography, a face which has seen much and in which there is
much to see, so much yet to see.
From Row Housing, a book by Joachim Koester to be published
April 2002, by Galleri Nicolai Wallner.
|
|