Rabbit Hole: Zac Langdon-Pole
Science, history, art? Robert Leonard takes the red pill.
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 for Visual Arts. 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 raise 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 .. Subscribe to read this article in full
