Viva Brighton Issue #45 November 2016

TALK
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Antarctica
‘A continent synonymous with losers and failure’
A former Artist in
Residence for the British
Antarctic Society,
Chris Dobrowolski is
an expert on thermal
underwear and snow.
Here he talks to Viva
about making art in a
blank white space.
What were you
thinking, asking to
be sent to the most
inhospitable place on earth? I was doing a workshop
with this bloke, called ‘Re-evaluating Success’.
He’d say, ‘This is Chris, everyone. Chris is going
to be the case study - because, as well as being an
artist, he’s also - more importantly - a failure’. I
was essentially paying the rent on my bedsit being
a professional failure when I saw the residency
advertised. There’s Captain Scott’s disastrous attempt
to get to the South Pole, Shackleton failing
to cross the Antarctic, and it’ll be an environmental
disaster when it all melts. It’s an entire continent
synonymous with losers and failure - and I thought,
‘I’m your man!’
It’s hard not to think of Antarctica as a big
white expanse. Does your artwork attempt to
frame that space and make it knowable? Part
of the project was building a sledge out of golden
picture frames and taking it on a journey. I also took
loads of ‘pretend Antarctic things’ - rubber whales,
plastic penguins, toy sledges - kitsch things like that.
Then I’d photograph them in the Antarctic so when
they came back they’d be ‘real’ pretend Antarctic
objects. I’m not trying to recreate a real thing; I’m
making another ‘real’
thing - an artsy way of
putting it!
The show leads up to a
place I was trying to get
to called Sky Blu. It’s a
base that’s only open in
the Antarctic summer,
because there’s a naturally
occurring hard-surface
runway. Everything about
it - geographically and
culturally - is nothing. It’s the nothingness of it that
I find fascinating. There’s something called a lowcontrast
day - the sky’s white and you can’t see any
of the lumps in the snow or the horizon; everyone’s
walking around on this blank white sheet of paper.
Why do you think we are fascinated by the Antarctic?
The Antarctic is like the moon in the sense
that it’s difficult to get to; getting there has a way of
authenticating the most banal of objects. A lot of it
is a play on that old-fashioned notion of exploration;
one of the things I dwell on in the show is
the [late-1950s] Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic
Crossing - they called it the ‘last heroic age’ in
expeditions. We just don’t do that anymore.
What’s it like to relive Antarctica with an audience?
I love the attention. When I first did the
show, everyone who turned up was in their late 50s
or early 60s. One explained, ‘This was our moon
landing. When it happened, all of us were of that
age where it captured our imaginations.’ Brighton’s
different though, I’m expecting a much broader
selection of people. Amy Holtz
Antarctica, Brighton Dome, Tues 15th, 7.30pm, £10
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