Vault, no. 31, 2020.
Science, history, art? Robert Leonard takes the red pill.
Artists are curious, they pursue all kinds of obscure knowledge. Some like to do research, and art seems like as good a place as any to show off one’s interests. The ideas with staying power are those that intersect with an artist’s inclination for form, causing it to deepen and expand, like a paper flower that blooms when you put it in water.
—David Salle1
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I
Two years ago, the Wellington collectors Jim Barr and Mary Barr invited me to their apartment to check out their latest acquisition, a work by Zac Langdon-Pole. Based in Berlin, the young New Zealander had been making waves—he’d just won the 2018 Ars Viva Prize. I wanted to see what the fuss was about. They poured me a glass of wine and directed me to a framed colour photo showing a river winding through the bush to meet the sea—somewhere in New Zealand, I assumed. It was nicely composed and appealing—a tasteful but generic scenic view. But I was confused. I thought Langdon-Pole was a conceptual artist, not a landscape photographer. ‘Is that it?’, I asked.
Then—as she knew she would have to—Mary told me the story. Langdon-Pole made the work for his graduating show at Frankfurt’s Städelschule. Perversely, he’d commissioned his professor, Willem de Rooij, to visit the Coromandel to shoot this specific location in his usual style. De Rooij was to provide one shot only—fait accompli. The site is significant. In 1769, Captain Cook landed there to observe the transit of Mercury and raised the British flag. It became known as Cooks Beach and the wider area as Mercury Bay, bypassing its Māori name Te Whanganui-o-Hei, after Hei, the Māori chief who had arrived there more than 500 years before Cook. This back story made the innocuous postcard view radioactive with politics: the macro-politics of Hei and Cook (who should have their name on this place?) and the Oedipal art-world micro-politics of professor and protégé (who should have their name on this art?).
But my hosts weren’t done. With the glee of knowing something I didn’t, Jim lifted the work from the wall to reveal its back side. There, I found an unattributed quote, ‘The only things that are true are exaggerations.’ (paraphrasing a Theodor Adorno quip on psychoanalysis); a key for a substitution cipher using empty-frame symbols (‘Baroque Frame’ dingbats); and the quote translated into it. As a curator, I’m used to scrutinising the backs of pictures for clues, but I’d never seen an artist place them there so wilfully. At face value, the quote seemed so inherently illogical that it made me question everything. The cipher prompted me to think of the photo as a coded message, with a concealed meaning for those in the know. Was it all just a play of empty frames?
But that wasn’t all, for—as I discovered—there are at least ten variants on this work, each pairing the same photo with an alternative B side, a secret hidden key or digression. Back sides include a seashell sculpture made by the artist’s mum, an excerpt from Cook’s Journals, an article about New Zealand’s flag debate and treaty settlements, and a photo of poet Gregory Corso’s gravestone. As the series is ongoing, Langdon-Pole will continue to make variations on this theme, potentially without end.
So, De Rooij’s photo, the ostensible work, was just part of the puzzle. Here—where one became many, front met back, fresh water mixed with salt, protégé trumped professor, and Pākehā encroached upon Māori—frames of reference were scrambled. I felt I might never get to the bottom of this. Or was I there already?
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II
After that, I didn’t give Langdon-Pole much thought. Then, late last year, his Auckland dealer Michael Lett sent me a copy of his new monograph. Constellations had been published off the back of Langdon-Pole’s winning a prestigious award, for his 2018 Art Basel Hong Kong show (where he craftily inserted carved meteorite fragments into paper nautilus shells).2 The BMW Art Journey award enabled him to undertake a personalised round-the-world research trip. He based his itinerary on white stork and Arctic tern migration routes and on the history of celestial navigation by Pacific peoples and their colonisers. During the five-month odyssey—from London to the Netherlands and France, through the Pacific Islands, before arriving home in New Zealand—Langdon-Pole stopped off at significant spots to research celestial-mapping practices. The book interspersed documentation of the trip, documentation of six years of works (including works resulting from the trip), plus essays and an interview. The first plate was the De Rooij photo.
Constellations was a crash course in Langdon-Pole’s work. It was fascinating, but daunting. The works were varied, broaching a bewildering span of topics, with the artist never clearly settling into a signature idiom, medium, or manoeuvre. No one could understand the works by just looking at the pictures; each required some explanation, commentary, or key—its own reading list. I was constantly flipping between sections of the book, cross-referencing different orders of information to get my head around the project. Perhaps mirroring the artist’s wide-ranging erudition, his essayists largely dealt with the work at the level of its content, emphasising what it was about rather than how it was about it. There was mention of marine biology, astronomy, ornithology, colonial history, and personal history, but little on how the work fitted into and changed the landscape of art.
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III
After reading Constellations, my head hurt—like a student cramming a year’s required reading the night before the exam. However, when I stepped into Langdon-Pole’s Interbeing show at Lett’s in the new year, the work opened up—like a paper flower that blooms when you put it in water.
From the book, I knew Langdon-Pole had been making photograms of sand sampled from stops on his trip. They were labelled with evidential precision: place and date. However, while locations were distinct and specific, the photograms were largely indistinguishable and interchangeable. They didn’t offer up significant forensic insights into the sites, which included both Cooks Beach, where Cook had enjoyed a mini break, and Kealakekua Bay, Hawaii, where he was killed. Was place a red herring? Perversely, these depthless, cameraless images recalled the sublimity of deep space, with those tiny grains (resting on the print’s surface) suggesting immense stars (light years away from it). In the show, some photograms were presented at original scale, others were enlarged, one to mural scale. These enlargements were rhetorically impressive, but contained no extra information. I was reminded of the 1966 film Blow-Up, where successive enlargements of photos of a possible murder scene dissolved into film grain. The photograms seemed to riff on Langdon-Pole’s research mission: traversing the Earth’s surface while pondering how we had looked to the heavens to help us find our way. Did he have his head in the sand?
Langdon-Pole had also been messing about with anatomical models. For Orbits (2019), he inserted glassy spheres into pairs of eye-socket models, where the eyeballs would sit. In one pair, the spheres contained a dandelion head and petrified sequoia wood; in the other, a dandelion head and rainbow obsidian. There was a disjunction between the time frames suggested by those ephemeral dandelions (albeit now fossilised) and the other materials (although they too were once something else, something organic or liquid). In the company of the photograms, the glassy spheres looked like little planets. But what the works had to do with eyes was hard to see. The Orbits seemed to be non sequiturs—pointless, puzzling, poetic. In another anatomical-model work, Cleave Study (2019), Langdon-Pole grafted a human-tongue model onto an actual xenophora shell, as if the tongue 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, mostly other shells, assimilating them. But, here, had the shell colonised the human tongue or vice versa? If the Orbits made me think about myself looking at them, Cleave Study made me think about how it would feel and taste to have my own tongue there.
I lingered longest with Assimilation Study (2020). Painted wooden blocks were scattered in a Perspex-topped display case. They came from that common educational shape-sorter toy that teaches tots to put square pegs into square holes. Shape-sorter blocks are a selective-attention exercise, asking us to focus on a specific dimension of difference (shape) at the expense of all others. That may be why it took a moment to notice that Langdon-Pole had switched out one piece. A wooden wedge had been replaced with a metal one—a piece of Campo del Cielo meteorite—tooled to the same dimensions. Over four billion years ago, its nickel iron had been in the core of a small planet that broke apart. It fell to Earth some 4,000 years ago, landing in what is now Argentina. In Langdon-Pole’s work, it’s as if this alien artefact had infiltrated the children’s game and was hiding in plain sight. As two blocks were star shaped and as the work was surrounded by photograms that looked like night skies, this meteorite might have already felt at home.
Assimilation Study set me thinking. I was reminded of the nineteenth-century inventor of kindergarten, Friedrich Froebel, and his ‘gifts’ for children, which include geometric blocks. A crystallographer, he wrote ‘my rocks and crystals served me as a mirror wherein I might descry mankind, and man’s development and history’.3 I thought of Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, where geometric minimalist monoliths of ancient origin—some passing through the cosmos—prompt giant leaps in human education. And I remembered a 1993 Michael Parekōwhai installation of enlarged shape-sorter blocks—Epiphany: Matiu 2:9 ‘The Star in the East Went before Them’—that asks us to rethink the Christian story within te ao Māori. In retrospect, none of these connections was irrelevant. Or, rather, the work begged 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 Froebel, before Christ, before humans—but on a collision course with us anyway, addressed to us before we were a twinkle. Here, retooled, it comes to rest in Langdon-Pole’s work at an Auckland gallery in 2020. Has it been domesticated by the artist, drawn into his game, or does it exceed his presumption to frame it? Langdon-Pole relativises frameworks—even his own.
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IV
Langdon-Pole is an artist, not a historian or scientist. His works refer to history and science, but don’t contribute to them; they contribute to art. Once upon a time, serious art eschewed ‘content’; formalism was all the rage. But these days, art’s in thrall to content. I call it ‘aboutism’. There’s bad aboutism (all ‘about’, no ‘art’) and good aboutism (veined and animated by artistic complications). Simon Starling is a pioneer of good aboutism and Langdon-Pole and fellow Städelschule graduate Danh Vō are among its current heroes. In good aboutism, information and objects with backstories operate as springboards into epistemological-hermeneutical enquiries concerning how we think—our turns of mind. But this doesn’t mean that content is arbitrary (a means to an end). Indeed, Langdon-Pole’s skeptical-conceptual shell games insistently orbit his favourite hot-potato topics—empire, environment, etcetera—where we now pay the price for past certainties.
- ‘Introduction’, How to See: Looking, Talking, and Thinking about Art (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2016), 3–4.
- Constellations: Zac Langdon-Pole’s Art Journey (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2020).
- Autobiography of Friedrich Froebel, trans. Emilie Michaelis (London: Swan Sonneschein and Company, 1892), 97.