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In 2009, I ran to the cinema for the first night of My Bloody Valentine 3D. It was little more than a sequence of set pieces in which people were killed using a miner’s pickaxe. Each instance was different—where it happened; how it happened; where the axe went into the body, at what angle, where it came out; etcetera. The filmmakers concocted novel solutions to a basic problem. However, it struck me as oddly bloodless—a formalist exercise, a physics experiment. I was reminded of the abstract painter Gordon Walters, whose work also unpacked the endless possibilities offered by ‘a deliberately limited range of forms’. As Walters explained: ‘dynamic relations are most clearly expressed by the repetition of a few simple elements’.
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In a flurry of Covid-lockdown recreational decluttering, I came across a talk I gave almost twenty years ago. Long before I’d heard of Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, I was trying to explain art after Duchamp to some university law students. Looking back, the talk was absurdly ill-conceived for its audience. It’s a problem, neglecting your listeners to indulgently think out loud. Here it is:

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Marcel Duchamp made Fountain in 1917. It was a game changer. The French artist acquired a porcelain urinal, laid it on its back, titled it Fountain, and signed it ‘R. Mutt’, declaring it art. The work was rejected from a supposedly sympathetic, anything-goes, all-comers exhibition organised by New York’s Society for Independent Artists. They said anyone paying six dollars could exhibit, but Fountain tested even their limits. Perhaps they thought it was a prank; perhaps it was.

When Fountain was rejected, an anonymous article (likely penned by Duchamp) defended its status as art, arguing that ‘Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under it under the new title and point of view—created a new thought for it.’ Of course, today, Fountain is not only accepted, it’s canonical. We live in a post-Fountain art world.

Before Fountain, art was different—it was a kind of thing. There were criteria—a traditionally grounded consensus about what art was, what forms it could take, why to do it and how. Back then, you could take an artwork out of an art context and still recognise it as art—it was clearly a painting, a sculpture, an etching, etcetera. But, when Fountain entered art, it changed everything. It signalled that being art no longer turned on an art object’s intrinsic properties, but on the position it occupied. It was art because it was in a gallery or an art magazine. Location, location. Fountain may have been iconoclastic, yet it bolstered the art institution. When art can take any form, the art institution becomes crucial in a new way, to assert and police what is art and isn’t. Now, the institution didn’t just recognise art status, it conferred it.

Fountain changed the art game, but it didn’t change it straight away. It took a while for its implications to filter through, and the Fountain idea has always faced resistance—still does. We have the Fountain idea of art, but it is everywhere attended—haunted—by the pre-Fountain idea. Some still want to think of art in old-school terms, praising beautiful, skilful, edifying art—‘good painting’—and dismissing lights going on and off. Curmudgeonly critics act as if Duchamp never happened. Pre-Fountain-idea art is still being made, but now the Fountain idea reframes it. There’s no way back.

What goes for art has changed, but ‘art’ includes what has gone for art in the past. In an art museum or an art-history book, we can move from a gilded Renaissance altarpiece (pre-Fountain) to Piero Manzoni’s tins of his own shit (post-Fountain) in a blink, and it’s all art, even as these works are premised on radically different, even contradictory, expectations as to what art can be. They are equally part of a tradition.

To address the implications of this, it’s useful to consider an insight from political science—anti-descriptivism. For descriptivists, names describe things. To be, say, ‘socialism’, a regime needs to have certain properties. If it once had them but lost them, it ceases to be socialism, even if it still bears the name. Anti-descriptivists go the other way. For them, names are proper and linked to their referents through ‘primal baptism’. Socialist regimes may evolve in all kinds of contradictory ways but remain socialist.

In his preface to Slavoj Žižek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology, Ernest Laclau takes this idea a step further: ‘What is overlooked, at least in the standard version of anti-descriptivism, is that this guaranteeing the identity of an object in all counterfactual situations—through a change of all its descriptive features—is the retroactive effect of naming itself: it is the name itself, the signifier, which supports the identity of the object. That “surplus” in the object which stays the same in all possible worlds is “something in it more than itself”, that is to say the Lacanian objet petit a: we search in vain for it in positive reality because it has no positive consistency—because it is just an objectification of a void, of a discontinuity opened in reality by the emergence of the signifier.’

This brand of anti-descriptivism offers a productive way to understand ‘art’. If the altarpiece and the tin of shit both belong to art, there’s something at stake in the name of art that exceeds its examples and transforms them.
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Last week, I was up in Auckland, interviewing artist Zac Langdon-Pole before a gathering of the faithful. The event was presented in conjunction with his Michael Lett show, Interbeing. I enjoyed it.

Two months earlier, I knew little about the young, high-flying, Berlin-based New Zealand artist—a winner of the 2018 Ars Viva Prize and the 2019 winner of the seventh BMW Art Journey. To prepare for the interview, I devoured Constellations, a new monograph covering the last six years of his work. As I ploughed through it, like a student cramming for a test, I found Langdon-Pole’s project erudite, juggling myriad knowledge systems—scientific, cultural, historical—through works that take ever-different forms. Brilliant and informative, the book yielded much, too much, leaving me gasping for air, with little space for my own speculations and responses. When I set foot in the Interbeing show, however, my experience of the work was very different.

Langdon-Pole had been making photograms of sprinkled sand, collected from various locations. While the locations were distinctive, the photograms were largely indistinguishable. In the show, some were presented at original scale, some were enlarged, one to mural scale. Perversely, these shallow images suggested the sublimity of deep space—with tiny sand grains standing in for solar masses—and the history of human endeavours to make sense of it. (I recalled a Cerith Wyn Evans text work, referring to astronomers confusing specks of dust on their photos with faint stars millions of light years away.) The enlargements were rhetorically impressive, but contained no extra information, as in the film Blow-Up, where successive enlargements of a possible-murder-scene photo offer no further clues, revealing only the grain of the negative itself.

Langdon-Pole had also been messing about with anatomical teaching models. For Orbits (2019), he replaced the eyeballs in two paired eye-socket models with glassy spheres—one pair had spheres containing a dandelion head and petrified sequoia wood, the other a dandelion head and rainbow obsidian. There was a disjunction between the time frames implied by the ephemeral dandelions (albeit frozen) and the other materials, but what this had to do with eyes was hard to see. The Orbits seemed to be non sequiturs; pointless, but provocative, puzzling, poetic. In Cleave Study (2019), Langdon-Pole grafted a model of a human tongue onto a xenophora shell, as if a tongue like mine had taken the place of the shell’s former inhabitant. The xenophora is a curious thing. As its shell grows, it fuses with things in its vicinity, particularly other shells—it’s a collage artist, an appropriator. But was the artist’s idea that the shell had colonised a human tongue or vice versa?

I lingered longest with Assimilation Study (2020). Painted wooden blocks—squares, circles, half circles, stars, wedges—were scattered in a perspex-topped display case. They came from that common educational shape-sorting toy that teaches tots not to put square pegs into round holes. It took a moment to notice that Langdon-Pole had switched out a piece. A wooden wedge had been replaced with a piece of Campo del Cielo meteorite tooled to the same dimensions. Over four billion years ago, this nickel-iron extraterrestrial had been part of the core of a small planet that broke apart. It fell to Earth around 4,000 years ago, landing in what is now Argentina. In Langdon-Pole’s work, it’s as if this alien artefact has infiltrated the common children’s game to hide in plain sight. The work draws attention to the way the game prioritises shape at the expense of other (here, more profound) factors. (Perhaps, as two blocks are star shaped—and as the work is surrounded by photograms that look like night skies—it’s easy to think of the blocks as a constellation in which a meteorite might already feel at home.)

Assimilation Study set me thinking. I recalled the nineteenth-century inventor of kindergarten, Friedrich Fröbel, and his ‘gifts’ for children, which include building blocks. He also happened to be the crystallographer who wrote ‘my rocks and crystals served me as a mirror wherein I might descry mankind, and man’s development and history’. I thought of Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), where minimalist monoliths of ancient alien origin—some passing through the cosmos—prompt giant leaps in human education. And I remembered a 1993 Michael Parekōwhai work that enlarged and repurposed the very same children’s game, but to different ends. In his allegorical installation—Epiphany: Matiu 2:9 ‘The Star in the East Went before Them’—the star blocks prompt us to think of the star that heralded the messiah, but also to consider how this might be re-understood within te ao Māori.

In retrospect, none of these connections are totally irrelevant. Or, rather, the work begs the question ‘what is relevant?’ That meteorite had been flying through space for aeons—aeons before Langdon-Pole, before Parekōwhai, before Kubrick, before shape-sorter blocks, before Fröbel, before Christ, before humans—but on a collision course with us anyway, addressed to us before we even existed. And now, here, retooled, it comes to rest in Langdon-Pole’s work at Michael Lett’s gallery in 2020. Has it been domesticated by the artist, drawn into his game, or does it highlight his/our hubris, his/our presumption to intellectually frame it, albeit momentarily? Is he assimilating it or is it assimilating us? Langdon-Pole relativises frameworks—even his own.
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