ART
-----------------------------------------Simon Faithfull’s Ice Blink
-----------------------------------------
Miranda Gavin
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Part travel diary, part artist’s endeavour, Simon Faithfull’s new body of work, Ice Blink, is a series of dispatches which bring science and art together on board the RSS Ernest Shackleton.
Supported by Arts Catalyst, with simultaneous touring exhibitions being held in Edinburgh, London, and New York, the lecture-performance Ice Blink: An Antarctic Essay is Faithfull’s story of his two-month voyage in 2004-5 to the ice continent.
Flanked by two projection screens, Faithfull delivers a multi-media circumnavigation of climate change and the ozone layer, the lifespan of icebergs and this wild, white continent as the ultimate blank screen or void – a site for the projection of myth, madness and colonial disputes over territory.
Living with scientists as part of a British Antarctic Survey, expedition, Faithfull recorded his journey to the ice-cliffs of Antarctica and the Halley research station using a variety of media. He began documenting the crew’s daily life and rituals as pixellated drawings www.simonfaithfull.org/antarctica/archive.html , sketched on a Palm Pilot, which he emailed on a daily basis to thousands of inboxes around the globe. With little contextual detail, apart from the title and precise location in longitude and latitude, Faithfull refers to these drawings as “elliptic missives” in which he “subjectively filtered the world” and “fixed it as a set of lines”. In contrast, the ship acted as an autonomous vehicle for Faithfull’s imagination as it took him through otherworldly territories and offered him, through his port-hole, a ready-framed view of a shifting and disorientating landscape. “I became more and more addicted to staring out of the window of my cabin,” Faithfull recalls.
Playing throughout his lecture-performance is video 44, which uses forty-four pieces of footage shot through the porthole and charting the voyage from the Falklands to the ice shelf. Like a metronome giving some sense of time, this silent film plays throughout the performance as the horizon tilts and shifts and the porthole becomes a glowing “portal into an altered reality” – a dazzling white, then a neon, indigo light mediating between the interior and an increasingly strange, exterior world. This lens on the journey south documents the changing horizon, past night and day, past sculptural icebergs with “gas-ring blue” insides – glowing, sapphire-like gems battered by waves into ever-changing forms and surfaces like a “Henry Moore or Barbara Hepworth sculpture with its negative space”, he suggests to the London audience crammed into the wooden pews at The Society of Antiquaries . In the video loop Falling, the sound of the ship’s ice reinforced prow cutting through pack ice accompanies the view. Shot at a vertical tilt the arrow-shaped hull ploughs through and splits ice – another fragment in Faithfull’s Antarctic voyage.
In a place where time, space and scale disappear, with no visible points of reference and constant daylight, the world “whites out” and disorientation sets in. There is literally nothing to see and Faithfull experienced “a collapsing of space and a sense of claustrophobia”. Using snapshot-like self-portrait photographs, Faithfull plays with these perceptions capturing representations of himself: a surrogate floating into the ozone hole; his upside-down reflection in a glass sphere; and as a Playmobil polar explorer. In Antarctica, the light also starts to behave oddly. There is ‘ice blink’ - where light bounces back off ice and onto low-lying clouds in sub-zero temperatures, creating an over-lit burnt-out sky, and its opposite; continuous slate-grey ‘water skies’.
With driving gale force winds, turbulent seas and impossible skies, it’s a place so inhospitable that only the most resilient survive. Even Shackleton’s boat, the Endurance, didn’t make it and was crushed by pack ice on its expedition south in the early 1900s. Shackleton and the other survivors spent two polar winters in this wilderness before some reached civilisation at the Stromness whaling station. And it is here that Faithfull’s experiments, or dispatches, clearly transcend the anecdotal and become metaphysical contemplations. Stromness is now inhabited by elephant and fur seals, the sole heirs to the once-thriving whaling station abandoned in the 1960s, and Faithfull’s 12-minute video, Experiment 5, which records an unplanned pit-stop to the abandoned derelict town, is haunting. With the rain lashing and blurring the camera lens and the wind a constant companion, this is a Midsummer bleakness, “as good as the weather gets”, and an ode to desolation. Yet, the slow horizontal pans surveying decayed buildings in muted bleeding tones capture an atmosphere that is almost lyrical - in some ways, echoing filmmaker Tarkovsky’s poetic shots.
Underpinned by a well-written diary, Faithfull ponders his Antarctic project and conveys “the awful beauty of a journey into the void” but is keen to avoid a “rehashing of the sublime” and a “National Geographic-type splendour”. Leaning towards an anti-heroic position, the artist is faced not with a romantic wilderness but a “mesmerising emptiness” – a no-thingness.
Faithfull’s multi-stranded body of work, curated by Lisa Le Feuvre , succeeds in conveying a sense of the “last gap in the global map” and a place with “a strange negative presence”, but there is the feeling that some ideas could have been taken further. Without reconnaissance, Faithfull had to respond intuitively to an unfamiliar world and both the 44 and Experiment 5 video footage, which were the result of a spontaneous response to the unknown, convey a more profound sense of Antarctica than the playful, self-portraits.
The accompanying book Ice Blink: An Antarctic Essay is a portable companion, an engaging read and an informative and meditative journal. But the absence of the live footage, which should be included as a DVD, makes it somewhat limited in conveying the breadth and depth of Faithfull’s journey. That said; if you get a chance, jump aboard the next ship south on a voyage into the heart of whiteness.
Ice Blink, an Arts Catalyst touring exhibition, can be seen at: Cell Project Space http://www.cell.org.uk/ , London until 28 April Parker’s Box, New York, US until 8 May Stills Gallery , Edinburgh, Scotland until 14 May
The book Ice Blink: An Antarctic Essay is co-published by Book Works and Arts Catalyst and is available from Book Works on 020 7247 2203. www.bookworks.org.uk. Price tbc.
Visit Palm Pilot www.simonfaithfull.org for more.
Supported by Arts Catalyst, with simultaneous touring exhibitions being held in Edinburgh, London, and New York, the lecture-performance Ice Blink: An Antarctic Essay is Faithfull’s story of his two-month voyage in 2004-5 to the ice continent.
Flanked by two projection screens, Faithfull delivers a multi-media circumnavigation of climate change and the ozone layer, the lifespan of icebergs and this wild, white continent as the ultimate blank screen or void – a site for the projection of myth, madness and colonial disputes over territory.
Living with scientists as part of a British Antarctic Survey, expedition, Faithfull recorded his journey to the ice-cliffs of Antarctica and the Halley research station using a variety of media. He began documenting the crew’s daily life and rituals as pixellated drawings www.simonfaithfull.org/antarctica/archive.html , sketched on a Palm Pilot, which he emailed on a daily basis to thousands of inboxes around the globe. With little contextual detail, apart from the title and precise location in longitude and latitude, Faithfull refers to these drawings as “elliptic missives” in which he “subjectively filtered the world” and “fixed it as a set of lines”. In contrast, the ship acted as an autonomous vehicle for Faithfull’s imagination as it took him through otherworldly territories and offered him, through his port-hole, a ready-framed view of a shifting and disorientating landscape. “I became more and more addicted to staring out of the window of my cabin,” Faithfull recalls.
Playing throughout his lecture-performance is video 44, which uses forty-four pieces of footage shot through the porthole and charting the voyage from the Falklands to the ice shelf. Like a metronome giving some sense of time, this silent film plays throughout the performance as the horizon tilts and shifts and the porthole becomes a glowing “portal into an altered reality” – a dazzling white, then a neon, indigo light mediating between the interior and an increasingly strange, exterior world. This lens on the journey south documents the changing horizon, past night and day, past sculptural icebergs with “gas-ring blue” insides – glowing, sapphire-like gems battered by waves into ever-changing forms and surfaces like a “Henry Moore or Barbara Hepworth sculpture with its negative space”, he suggests to the London audience crammed into the wooden pews at The Society of Antiquaries . In the video loop Falling, the sound of the ship’s ice reinforced prow cutting through pack ice accompanies the view. Shot at a vertical tilt the arrow-shaped hull ploughs through and splits ice – another fragment in Faithfull’s Antarctic voyage.
In a place where time, space and scale disappear, with no visible points of reference and constant daylight, the world “whites out” and disorientation sets in. There is literally nothing to see and Faithfull experienced “a collapsing of space and a sense of claustrophobia”. Using snapshot-like self-portrait photographs, Faithfull plays with these perceptions capturing representations of himself: a surrogate floating into the ozone hole; his upside-down reflection in a glass sphere; and as a Playmobil polar explorer. In Antarctica, the light also starts to behave oddly. There is ‘ice blink’ - where light bounces back off ice and onto low-lying clouds in sub-zero temperatures, creating an over-lit burnt-out sky, and its opposite; continuous slate-grey ‘water skies’.
With driving gale force winds, turbulent seas and impossible skies, it’s a place so inhospitable that only the most resilient survive. Even Shackleton’s boat, the Endurance, didn’t make it and was crushed by pack ice on its expedition south in the early 1900s. Shackleton and the other survivors spent two polar winters in this wilderness before some reached civilisation at the Stromness whaling station. And it is here that Faithfull’s experiments, or dispatches, clearly transcend the anecdotal and become metaphysical contemplations. Stromness is now inhabited by elephant and fur seals, the sole heirs to the once-thriving whaling station abandoned in the 1960s, and Faithfull’s 12-minute video, Experiment 5, which records an unplanned pit-stop to the abandoned derelict town, is haunting. With the rain lashing and blurring the camera lens and the wind a constant companion, this is a Midsummer bleakness, “as good as the weather gets”, and an ode to desolation. Yet, the slow horizontal pans surveying decayed buildings in muted bleeding tones capture an atmosphere that is almost lyrical - in some ways, echoing filmmaker Tarkovsky’s poetic shots.
Underpinned by a well-written diary, Faithfull ponders his Antarctic project and conveys “the awful beauty of a journey into the void” but is keen to avoid a “rehashing of the sublime” and a “National Geographic-type splendour”. Leaning towards an anti-heroic position, the artist is faced not with a romantic wilderness but a “mesmerising emptiness” – a no-thingness.
Faithfull’s multi-stranded body of work, curated by Lisa Le Feuvre , succeeds in conveying a sense of the “last gap in the global map” and a place with “a strange negative presence”, but there is the feeling that some ideas could have been taken further. Without reconnaissance, Faithfull had to respond intuitively to an unfamiliar world and both the 44 and Experiment 5 video footage, which were the result of a spontaneous response to the unknown, convey a more profound sense of Antarctica than the playful, self-portraits.
The accompanying book Ice Blink: An Antarctic Essay is a portable companion, an engaging read and an informative and meditative journal. But the absence of the live footage, which should be included as a DVD, makes it somewhat limited in conveying the breadth and depth of Faithfull’s journey. That said; if you get a chance, jump aboard the next ship south on a voyage into the heart of whiteness.
Ice Blink, an Arts Catalyst touring exhibition, can be seen at: Cell Project Space http://www.cell.org.uk/ , London until 28 April Parker’s Box, New York, US until 8 May Stills Gallery , Edinburgh, Scotland until 14 May
The book Ice Blink: An Antarctic Essay is co-published by Book Works and Arts Catalyst and is available from Book Works on 020 7247 2203. www.bookworks.org.uk. Price tbc.
Visit Palm Pilot www.simonfaithfull.org for more.
