Into the White: The Renaissance Arctic and the End of the Image

"What Heuer calls degraded visibility represents a breakdown of humanist stabilities and certainties. Artistic perspective, pioneered in the Renaissance, is the symbol of these certainties. Into the White is essentially saying that the experience of Arctic exploration, into the icy wilderness, was profoundly disorienting and destabilising and permanently challenged any assumptions we may have had about the efficacy of the subject’s attempt to grasp the object through representational regimes. This is a very original book. You would think there would be nothing to say about this vast emptiness. It’s a book that’s completely unlike Koerner’s in that it’s not structured by artists or their careers and oeuvres. It’s art history as cultural history. In some ways it’s also the opposite of Albus’s book. It’s all about blankness and whiteness, about abstraction and deficiency and lack. Whereas Albus’s work is all about abundance, an early Renaissance treasury. Here we go to raid the icebox and there’s nothing in it! Explorers in the 16th and 17th century go up to the Arctic and what is they find is extreme cold, ice, death, devastation, hardship and precious few resources. Here again we have the very opposite to what was being depicted in the Italian Renaissance, which is also always about abundance and an affirmation of this world. The book is also a foil to the explorations of the New World, the Americas, where again the rhetoric and the imagery is of sensory overload, an infinity of new species of plants and animals whereas the Arctic was just the opposite. Now, you might ask, well what does that have to do with art history? Well, Heuer’s ingenious intuition I would say is that there is some connection between this European “into the white” as he calls it and the iconoclastic or iconophobic tendencies that were roiling Europe in this period, particularly Northern, Protestant Europe. As we mentioned, Protestants were skeptical about images. Heuer invokes a painting by Bruegel where a religious scene is veiled by snow and ice. Snow interferes with our vision. This is somehow comparable to the whitewashing or concealing involved in the in Reformation. As Heuer points out, the Reformation wasn’t simply a matter of destroying images. It was often a matter of hiding or masking or disguising them. He claims that the explorations challenged ideas about representation and involved encounters with things like icebergs, which were out of scale with anything in previous European experience. If he sometimes stretches a point, I forgive him for the sheer verve and dynamism of his imagination. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Heuer also very deftly and naturally weaves in episodes and figures from contemporary art as well. He speaks about the American critic Lucy Lippard going up to the Arctic Circle in 1969 and creating a conceptual art project, or more recently the work of Olafur Eliasson; weaving these stories into a larger narrative present throughout the book about the prehistory of the environmental movement. In a way, this book is about climate change . Heuer ends with this wonderful, menacing final phrase: the Arctic is coming for you. The ice masses are melting and heading in our direction. It’s as if we have been repressing the Arctic all along. The forgotten nightmare of the original European encounter with the Arctic has been lying in ambush all this time. He says that we have often coped with this encounter through the romantic topos of the sublimity of the Arctic wilderness. Heuer’s Arctic wilderness is not sublime at all. It’s dangerous, apocalyptic, dehumanising, dead and difficult and hard to read. He chastises the Romantic and neo-Romantic approach to the Arctic. It’s all done with great skill and grace. Heuer’s book is in tune with the dominant theme over the ages of the Northern Renaissance, which is its negativity, its willingness to face the realities of opacity and disequilibrium, or the irrational. This takes the form in Bosch of the demonic and the grotesque. In Bruegel it takes the form of the comic and the badly proportioned. All of this in contrast to humanity’s dreams about mastery, order and reason. This is a constant theme of this field, which is still drawing younger scholars to it. The Northern Renaissance and studies about it are realistic about human nature. It does not impose idealised forms on what’s in fact an irregular reality. In the Renaissance there was a partitioning or delegation of these worldviews to these two systems—Italian and Northern. If there hadn’t been Northern art, it would have had to be invented. In fact, it was invented. The two of them together, Northern and Italian, amount to a total philosophy."