react/review: a responsive journal for art & architecture

Christopher Heuer's Into the White attends to phenomena that so often mark conclusions or dead ends in art history rather than beginnings: absence, loss, disintegration, the unseen, and the unknown. Opening with Martin Frobisher's ill-fated 1578 voyage from England in search of a northwest passage to Asia, Heuer introduces readers to chronicler Thomas Ellis' attempts to illustrate an iceberg. The resulting images of this "great and monstruous peece of yce" near abstraction, and deftly exemplify the core concerns that thread through the rest of the book. As Europeans explored, documented, weathered and succumbed to the Arctic, the resulting images and texts spoke back to European crises of the day: Protestant iconoclasm, the epistemological limits of the image, and the relationship between the unseen and the unknown. The project of visualizing the non- or poorly-visible, Heuer argues, resonated with Protestant arguments about the dangers of the image, the reification of "whiteness" as purity, and open questions about how and what objects mean.