Terra Antarctica: a History of Cognition and Landscape

The evolution of our perception of the Antarctic from an unknown space to a comprehensible place can be traced through the evolution of its portrayal in visual art. Early expedition artists relied upon the topographically-based aesthetic traditions of northern European landscape painting as the polar region was first charted, and the continent's outlines were traced in coastal profiles during the late eighteenth through mid-nineteenth centuries. This pragmatic approach with its close ties to cartographic needs was later superseded by increasingly symbolic depictions of the environment. The artists accompanying Scott, Shackleton and Mawson, for example, often portrayed the Antarctic as an historic stage for heroic action. With the International Geophysical Year in 1957–1958, modernist aesthetics reached the continent. Visiting artists sponsored by national programs began to abstract the environment in photography and painting. By the turn of the century, sculptors and installation artists had helped bring the Antarctic more fully into the international cultural arena as a subject for contemporary art. This aesthetic shift is both a symptom of, and part of the process for, the transformation of a terra incognita into a terra Antarctica.