Introduction

“Reality is a collage composed of whatever grabs our attention.”[1] So might an art practice not also be considered as collage? As a subjective, selective accumulation of ideologies and processes, the thematic overlaying of praxis perhaps becomes an unwitting and unsolicited collaboration. The curator Suzanne Ramlijak correlates the composition of an art exhibition to that of an ecosystem. Just as nature is a synergistic alliance, an exhibition is a collective endeavour. [2]

This essay can also be seen as collective endeavour. Each of these elected texts have helped formulate and contextualise my art discourse and practice, helping inform my understanding and hone critical thinking. Each resonates with my core interests, those pertaining to the concepts of assimilation and exchange: Exchange as cultural, exchange as transformational, as replication, as commodity and as dialogue between cultures, objects or people.

_Notes: 

_{[1] Richard Flood. “Not about Mel Gibson,” in Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century (New York: Phaidon Press, 2007), 10-11.[2] Suzanne Ramlijak, Mark Dion and Alexis Rockman. Natural Wonders: The Sublime in Contemporary Art (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 2018), 127.}

Theatre Country: Essays on landscape & whenua

Authored by the ecologist and environmental historian Geoff Park. His evocative descriptions express a vivid and tactile sensitivity to the history and landscape of Aotearoa. He recalls an indigenous territory “before my own culture got to it with its ‘improving’ urge and what James Cook calls ‘better plants.’” [3] In his final essay, Park speaks of the living connection between the land and those who walk upon it. Within this concept of whenua, indigenous wisdom portrays land as life-giving placenta and invokes a visceral attachment to place. [4]

There is perhaps a pertinence in the difference between the word ‘belonging’ and ‘belongings’, expressly in relation to land. The former signifying an affinity and connection, the latter a referral to property and assets, bringing with it the associations of both literal and figurative baggage. It is these etymological connections, these elisions which ignite my creative impulse. I enjoy the analogy of landscape as an accumulation; [5] the sum of its composite histories; an un-still life. A landscape is a collage, which can be viewed variously: ‘as nature, habitat, artefact, system, problem, wealth, ideology, history, place and aesthetic;’ [6] all of these socially constructed and subjectively dictated by each viewer.

My understanding of land is rooted in the pastoral, the grand sculptured vistas of picturesque parkland or the manicured hedgerow of England’s home counties. My maunga are the rolling Chiltern hills. Forest as wild, primordial, untamed, is a relative unknown to me. As a comparatively recent arrival to Aotearoa New Zealand, I am drawn to the stories and histories held deep within the antipodal soil. The imperialist imperative saw the systematic incineration of swathes of indigenous lowland forest; a transacted transformation from forest to farmland, forming a rigid geometric patchwork ‘burnt and ready for balloting to eager, waiting settlers.’ [7]

Culpability for these unwarranted and thoroughly detrimental legacies lies squarely with my ancestral kin. “Nothing, says the landscape historian J.B. Jackson, more clearly shows the cherished values of a group than the manner in which they organise space.” [8] My preoccupation with the process of burning and with the materiality of earth and of wood, stem from this awareness. Inherent associations brought to bear through the usage of either native or non-native timber alters meaning within the artwork. So too, the connotations of the yaki-sugi charring process. Though seemingly destructive, this culturally appropriated practice conversely preserves and protects against the elemental agents of fire, water and decay.

Migrations are not only defined by relocated communities and their accompanying flora and fauna but also knowledge, traditions and techniques. The reciprocal interchange, overlaid and intertwined, that occurs within this interstitial terrain is fertile ground. It is here I situate my practice.

_Notes: 

_{[3] Geoff Park. Theatre Country: Essays on landscape & whenua (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2006), 10-11.
[4] Ibid., 240-244.
[5] Ibid., 9.
[6] D.W. Meinig. The Beholding Eye: Ten Versions of the Same Scene. In The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays. https://murphy.web.unc.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/12322/2018/09/Meing_1979_Beholding.pdf (accessed March 3,2021).
[7] Geoff Park. Ngā Uruora: The groves of life: Ecology and history in a New Zealand landscape. (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1995), 84.
[8] Ibid., 121-122.}

Constellations

Working variously with meteorites, exotic birds and colonial furniture, Zac Langdon-Pole’s artwork often addresses the vagaries of migration; matter out of place. His book, Constellations, features insightful interviews and essays on the ideologies and methodologies behind these and other works.

As Christina Barton astutely analyses, “Langdon-Pole’s art is not manufactured from scratch…Instead, the artist orchestrates a meaningful coalescence of pre-existing fragments that are put together in carefully constructed situations, so that in the instance of their combination the world in all its complexity is momentarily held together in a manner that is at once personal and political.” [9] I am drawn to this modus operandi, as one which I would wish to cultivate within my own art practice. In its configuration it demonstrates considerations of context and dialogue between carefully compiled and arranged images, words and objects to elicit their connections and associative histories and meanings. With his selective collating and re-combining, Langdon-Pole demonstrates a deft employment of allegory and elision.

I am increasingly intrigued by the ways one artist might borrow, reference or utilise existing objects or another artist’s artwork or art practice, inducing an exchange of authorship or executing perhaps, a respectful yet unsolicited collaboration. As documented in Constellations, Langdon-Pole has twice played interloper with the artworks of contemporaneous sculptor Dan Arps. First, (Untitled (Alex), 2013) with the subtle placement of groups of leaves within the other artist’s installation. [10] And later (The Pearl Diver, 2015) which saw Langdon-Pole re-purpose an Arps sculpture by adding an anchor chain and gilded tongue cast, thus re-contextualising the piece entirely. [11] These astute interferences tentatively balance upon the complex and complicit boundaries of ownership and authorship; a theme at the very core of my art inquiry.

Another mutual preoccupation is Langdon-Pole’s use of kintsugi, the Japanese tradition of repairing with precious metals. For his recent installation at the City Gallery, Wellington, Langdon-Pole re-floored the gallery space with recycled native timber. The title of the artwork, Punctatum (Library), referring to the borer beetle whose expansive tracks are both highlighted and ‘mended’ by the application of gold-leaf. Itself an unwitting migrant to these shores, the beetle becomes coloniser, its passage memorialised in gold. Walking across these despoiled then gilded boards, there is an understanding, a recognition of ‘‘our own passage across the land – across time and space – as something akin, and not.” [12]

As Thomas Girst identifies in his foreword, even the most basic tools of navigation, terms such as ‘cardinal direction’ and ‘celestial hemisphere’are culturally-bound and highly presumptuous in nature. [13] North, South, East and West – designated by whom exactly and relational to what? This notion of the ‘West’ and ‘East’ (or ‘non-West’), in the words of theorist Stuart Hall, ‘is as much an idea as a fact of geography” [14] It is a tool for classification, a politically charged construct. 

Issues pertaining to lands colonised and cultures usurped seem ever present in Langdon-Pole’s work. These themes are approached through sympathetic consideration and subtle allusion. In this, I see a possible path to navigate these fraught waters respectfully, to acknowledge problematic histories without expressing narratives to which I hold no claim.

_Notes: 

_{[9] Christina Barton. “Foreign bodies, strange parts,” in Constellations (Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2020), 75.
[10] Zac Langdon-Pole. Constellations (Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2020), 74.
[11] Ibid., 233.
[12] Robert Leonard. Containing Multitudes: exhibition guide (Wellington: City Gallery Wellington, 2020), 7.
[13] Langdon-Pole. Constellations, 26.
[14] Stuart Hall. The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power, 1992. https://analepsis.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/hall-west-the-rest.pdf. (accessed March 3,2021), 186.}

Kei konei koe / you are here: Mapping Auckland

A short collection of essays on the mapping of Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, this publication accompanied the 2011/12 exhibition at the Auckland War Memorial Museum. The opening extract states, ‘to map is in one way or another to take the measure of a world…in such a way that it may be communicated between people, places or times.’ [15] In this sense I see the formulation of map making as an act of exchange; both representational, where symbols stand-in for solid physical matter, and informational: a transmission of knowledge through one-way dialogue. Mapping is a language, a semiotic lexicon. As an indicator of demarcations and boundaries, it becomes a tool of possession. There is a claiming, an implied ownership in cartographical classification. To map privileges certain subsets of information, telling the subjective story of a place and time. It is a literal conveyance in both vernacular and legal terms in its relationship to both the act of communication and the transfer of property from one person (or people) to another.

The act of writing ‘’terra nullis’ on a pictorial representation of a land mass does not empirically make it so. Nor does the absence of cartographic precedence verify the emptiness of a given territory. Yet maps, throughout history have operated as authoritative mandates. If ‘knowledge is power’, then so too is the dissemination of that knowledge. It is these histories and these narratives which draw and engage me; the unspoken but inherent, the stories within. Inside each object, symbol or artefact resides a life, a meaning beyond that which is physically tangible, one which performs a reciprocal interplay when selectively combined in an unwritten languaging of contextual proximity.

In her introduction, Kathy Waghorn frames the actions and intentions of map making. She references the materiality of the map, and calls attention to its ability ‘to hold meaning in place.’ [16] Though the veracity of any singular meaning is problematic at best and somewhat historically contingent. In the delineation and binding of space inevitably the lattice of interrelations and cross-cultural entanglements that traverse these boundaries are disregarded, forgotten. Like the interwoven roots and vast mycelial networks beneath the forest floor of Geoff Park’s Ngā Uruora, these secondary essential narratives are buried.

The cartographical act of measuring, classifying and containing finds parity with the taxonomic museological practices of the era. I consider this in part as pictorial archive, a cultural collage even; a themed and categorised illustrative assemblage; an art form of its own. In this way perhaps my art practice might also be considered cartographically, as a “spatial fixing”, [17] with its rendering of landscape populated with codified artefacts, imparting a subjective narrative of a particular time and place; an illustrative dissemination of a set of selective data; a curated still-life.

I am interested in maps as a mode of organising space and the way a 2-dimensional image becomes placeholder and descriptor for a 3-dimensional form. I am interested in the tales they tell about themselves and those who created or commissioned them, their subjective veracity, purported authority, bias and influence; colonial documents revealing and concealing in equal measures. I am interested in the curatorial decision-making involved.

_Notes: 

_{[15] Dennis Cosgrove. “Mapping Meaning,” In Mappings (London: Reaktion Books, 1999). Available: http://appliedmapping.fiu.edu/readings/cosgrove.pdf (accessed March 10th 2021), 1-2. 
[16] Kathy Waghorn. Kei konei koe/you are here: Mapping Auckland (Auckland: Auckland War Memorial Museum, 2011), 8.
[17] Ibid., 6.}

The Artist as Curator

In her introduction, editor Celina Jeffery posits the question, “When does the artist’s arrangement of his or her own work become a curatorial initiative and hence a form of artist-curating?” [18] Equally, I would ask: When does a curatorial act become artwork in its own right? And if this exchange or transferral takes place, where does authorship lie? Artworks which rely on the implementation of written instructions by anonymous appointees, such as the monumental wall drawings of Sol Lewitt and Zac Langdon-Pole’s Untitled (Alex) 2013, demonstrate an art that lies in conception rather than execution. As LeWitt states in his Paragraphs on conceptual art, 1967, “The idea itself, even if not made visual, is as much a work of art as any finished product.” [19] May the ideas surrounding curatorial praxis be considered similarly? The curation of ideas, as non-tangible artefacts is integral to art making. Like cartographers, an artist must collate, select and therefore privilege certain objects, materials, and processes to evoke, provoke or carry selected meaning. These delineations of role become increasingly indistinct as they relate to exchange of agency and authorship.

In 1989 the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York installed the exhibition ‘Burton on Brancusi’ as part of an innovative and somewhat controversial ‘Artist’s choice’ series: an exhibition program in which appointed artists were invited to assemble and curate installations comprised chiefly from the Museum’s own collection. By involving contemporary artists in the curatorial procedures of the institution, it was hoped that these elected artefacts might be re-contextualised and reinvigorated.

Scott Burton, as first artist-curator in this series, chose to feature the works of the great modernist sculptor Constantin Brancusi. Controversially, and most pertinently, he chose to display a couple of Brancusi’s plinths devoid of their customary accompanying artworks. With this bold breach of convention, Burton subverted the hierarchical order of subject/object and effected the unbinding of sculptural form from the practical application of its functional role, effectively re-contextualising it as an artwork in its own right; [20] an action in keeping with the writings of Sol LeWitt, who states that,  “Art is not utilitarian. When three-dimensional art starts to take on some of the characteristics, such as forming utilitarian areas, it weakens its function as art.” [21]

I am interested in this relationship between utility and value and how both are contextually bound. A map can be illustrative artefact, historical document or navigational tool. A lone pedestal or empty plinth transmutes into self-referencing monument and objet d’art. This is the transaction of display displayed, the action of presentation as presentation subject; a static performance piece perhaps.

I see Burton’s provocative gesture as aligning to the conventions of his own art practice where his architectonic chair-like forms traverse the conventional boundaries between pure sculpture and furniture, between aestheticism and utility. Has one artist (or artist-curator) assimilated another artist’s practice within his own? These exchanges and uncertain balances hold a charged fascination for me.

_Notes: 

_{[18] Celina Jeffery. The Artist as Curator. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), 7.
[19] Sol LeWitt. “Paragraphs on conceptual art,” in Artforum, June 1967.  http://arteducation.sfu-kras.ru/files/documents/lewitt-paragraphs-on-conceptual-art1.pdf. (accessed March 14th 2021), 2.
[20] Cher Krause Knight. “Both Object and Subject: MoMA’s Burton on Brancusi,” In The Artist as Curator. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), 61-75.
[21] LeWitt. “Paragraphs on conceptual art”, 2.}

Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century

Published in 2007 to accompany The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York’s inaugural exhibition, this volume of essays and biographies showcases the work of 30 contemporary sculptors exploring the realm of the unmonumental. 

Historically, sculpture holds close association with the mores of permanence and grandeur. Built to preserve in perpetuity a likeness or memory, monuments are placeholders, substitutes of and for the living; frozen replications; still lifes. Traditional materials of stone and bronze are demonstrative of this solidity and perceived indestructibility, resolutely forestalling entropic decline. [22] This too is exemplified within the conventional Museum construct, in the stolid frameworks of both its governance and architecture; civic monument seemingly unchanged and unchallengeable.

This exhibition and its accompanying texts however, present an alternative sculptural mode of being. They speak of “a world in pieces and a parallel impulse in art-making.” [23] In his review, Steven Stern identifies “a shared language of refusal. Industrial fabrication, precious materials, the well-made object – all these were obviously jettisoned.” [24] Conversely, I recognise it is precisely these conventions and aesthetic attributes with which I find resonance and wish to instil and install within my own art practice: specifically precious materials or materials preciously treated, with a clarity of form and high production values. Might my work therefore, despite a non-heroic scale or far-reaching historical import, nevertheless sit within the oppositional domain of the monumental?  

The artist Caroline Rothwell asserts her interest in both the monument and the anti-monument, [25] and has successfully propagated an art practice which bridges this binary divide. Working with endangered plants, soot and furniture, (materials and themes similar to my own), she explores the complex relationship between the anthropological and natural worlds since the start of industrialisation; unpacking the past to contemplate the future. [26] Plants she describes as historical signifiers; markers within the politics of place, tools of mapping. Like Langdon-Pole, she is engaged with the exotic mythologies of birds of paradise and also the industrial readymade. And similarly, there is a recognition of ‘how the European colonial connection with the landscape of ‘elsewhere’ began through curiosity’ and continued through consumption. [27]

As monolithic and monocultural museological paradigms finally shift away from the authoritative and didactic, new hierarchies are likewise formed within the institutional walls. As witnessed in Brancusi’s Endless Column, the sculptural object dismounts the pedestal or amalgamates with it, absorbing the plinth within its own form. “We have come to live in an age that defines itself by the disappearance of monuments and the erasure of symbols – a headless century.” [28] Yet monumentalism is still apparent within the panoply of the Arts. Land Art by its very scale is colossal in both physical form and geological duration. Installation art can create momentous experiences as grandiose as more orthodox immemorial sculpture. [29] Incongruously, in bearing witness to the cultural zeitgeist, the self-professed ‘unmonumental’ acts as commemorative marker of enduring significance and as such antithetically becomes, in effect, monumental. 

_Notes: 

_{[22] Massimiliano Gioni. “Ask the Dust,” In Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century (New York: Phaidon Press, 2007), 64.
[23] Lisa Philips. In Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century (New York: Phaidon Press, 2007), 7.
[24] Steven Stern. “Unmonumental (review)”, In Frieze magazine, issue 114, April 1, 2008. https://www.frieze.com/article/unmonumental (accessed 26 March 2021.)
[25] Tessa Molden. “Caroline Rothwell: Follies of Industrialisation”,  In Ocula Magazine, March 2021. https://ocula.com/magazine/conversations/caroline-rothwell-follies-of-industrialisation/ (accessed April 2, 2021.)
[26] Ibid.
[27] Ibid.
[28] Gioni, “Ask the Dust,” 65.
[29] Gioni, “Ask the Dust,” 64, 65.}

Conclusion

My art practice is centred upon the migration and exchange of materials, objects and cultural contexts. It is a discussion pertaining to landscape, as a definitive ‘un-still’ lifeform. Its focus lies in the collation of potent artefacts and in excavating the agential stories and histories embedded within. “Maps are records of the known, and as such, they need not be made of lines on paper.” [30] This essay is a map; one realised from infinite possible iterations. It acts as signpost and archive, shepherding the subsequent and plotting the prior. It is a curated assemblage of unearthed connections and inter-twinnings, and a contextual insight into such formative influences that lie behind my current art practice.

_Notes: 

_{[30] John McCrystal. Singing the Trail: The story of mapping Aotearoa, New Zealand (Auckland: Allen & Unwin, 2019), 7.}

Illustrations

1. Henry Charles Clarke Wright, Unidentified area of bush, 1890s, Henry Wright Collection, G-20688-1/1, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington.

2. Zac Langdon-Pole, Punctatum (Library), 2020, Borer-scarred native-timber floorboards, 24ct gold.

3. Der Isthmus von Auckland (The Isthmus of Auckland). Geology by Ferdinand von Hochstetter (1829-1884) in 1859, cartography by A. Petermann in 1862, published in Geologisch-Topographischer Atlas von Neu-Seeland in 1863, Auckland War Memorial MuseumLibrary: Res G9081,C5 HOC.

4. Installation view of the exhibition, Artist’s Choice: Burton on Brancusi, 7 April – 4 July 1989, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

5. Installation view of the exhibition, Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century, 1 Dec 2007- March 30 2008, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York.

Bibliography:

Museum, New. Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century. New York: Phaidon Press, 2007.

Ramlijak, Suzanne, Mark Dion and Alexis Rockman. Natural Wonders: The Sublime in Contemporary Art. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 2018, p. 127

Park, Geoff. Theatre Country: Essays on landscape & whenua. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2006.

Meinig, D.W., The Beholding Eye: Ten Versions of the Same Scene. In The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays, edited by D. W. Meinig and John Brinckerhoff Jackson. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.

Available at: https://murphy.web.unc.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/12322/2018/09/Meing_1979_Beholding.pdf (accessed March 3rd, 2021)

Park, Geoff. Ngā  Uruora:: The groves of life: Ecology and history in a New Zealand landscape. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1995.

Langdon-Pole, Zac. Constellations. Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2020.

Leonard, Robert. Containing Multitudes: exhibition guide. Wellington: City Gallery Wellington, 2020.

Hall, Stuart. The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power. 1992. Available: https://analepsis.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/hall-west-the-rest.pdf. (accessed March 3,2021).

Mutambu, Tendai John. “Zac Langdon-Pole: Lines of Flight”, In Ocula Magazine, November 2019. Available: https://ocula.com/magazine/conversations/zac-langdon-pole-lines-of-flight/ (accessed March 2nd 2021.)

Cosgrove, Dennis. “Mapping Meaning,” In Mappings edited by Denis Cosgrove. London: Reaktion Books, 1999. Available: http://appliedmapping.fiu.edu/readings/cosgrove.pdf (accessed March 10th 2021).

Waghorn, Kathy. Kei konei koe/you are here: Mapping Auckland.Auckland: Auckland War Memorial Museum, 2011.

Jeffery, Celina (ed.). The Artist as Curator.Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015.

Lewitt, Sol. “Paragraphs on conceptual art,” in Artforum, June 1967. Available: http://arteducation.sfu-kras.ru/files/documents/lewitt-paragraphs-on-conceptual-art1.pdf. (accessed March 14th 2021.)

Knight, Cher Krause. “Both Object and Subject: MoMA’s Burton on Brancusi,” In The Artist as Curator, edited by Celina Jeffery. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015.

Curatingthecontemporary. Curator as Artist as Curator.Blogpost April 30, 2015. Available: https://curatingthecontemporary.org/2015/04/30/curator-as-artist-as-curator/ (accessed March 3rd 2021.)

Gioni, Massimiliano. “Ask the Dust,” In Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century. New York: Phaidon Press, 2007: 64 -77

Museum, New. Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century. New York: Phaidon Press, 2007.

Stern, Steven. “Unmonumental (review)”, In Frieze magazine, issue 114, 1st April 2008. Available: https://www.frieze.com/article/unmonumental (accessed 26 March 2021.)

Moldan, Tessa. “Caroline Rothwell: Follies of Industrialisation”,  In Ocula Magazine, March 2021. Available: https://ocula.com/magazine/conversations/caroline-rothwell-follies-of-industrialisation/ (accessed April 2nd 2021.)

McCrystal, John. Singing the Trail: The story of mapping Aotearoa, New Zealand. Auckland: Allen & Unwin, 2019.