Living in Lang Time
by Paul Carey Kent
The first things you notice when you come across art are likely to be material, scale, form, colour, and – if it is overt – subject matter. In Liane Lang’s case, however, it may be that the first thing you see is time. You might object that you can’t actually see time: even if you watch a clock move round you’re only seeing the representation of time, not time itself. You might object that, even if you could see time, you wouldn’t know what sort of time you were looking at. But I think it is possible to embody time, and to distinguish several types that Lang keeps in play. Take ‘The Two Ends of Memory’. We see landscapes, hands and feet spread across fragments of marble from found memorial headstones. That’s a rich mixture of geological, historical and human time.
Let’s start with the marble. Geological time is somewhat differently scaled from our brief forays. The earth is 4.5 billion years old, making the first life on land fairly recent at 400m years, and humans decidedly latter-day interlopers – we’ve been around for a mere 2m years. Most marble was formed before life on land began: its origins lie in the calcite-rich shells left behind by marine organisms. As water bodies evaporate, these deposited remains form limestone. If the limestone gets buried under heavy layers of rock, the intense pressure and heat cause it to metamorphose into marble. That formed from the purest limestone is the white marble characteristic of the Carrara we have here.
Marble is, of course, quarried. And Lang is highly attuned to the traces of activity left on the landscape. The evidence of mining and quarrying is prominent in Wirksworth. And that’s the source of the materials Lang uses – roaming around the town and its surroundings, looking for evidence of the past stories, of the sweat and toil that has left its marks. Wirksworth was the primary source of lead before international competition and the need to move to less easily-accessed ores rendered that uneconomic. By then, though - the late 19th century - quarrying activity had switched to limestone, as the arrival of railways enabled its ready distribution. Only in the last fifty years has the story of Wirksworth moved on from the business of extraction to dealing with its aftermath. What Lang is showing us is part of the long human history of using the products of geological time – even if marble isn’t found locally, limestone and lead are part of the same continuum. And the evidence of local use can be traced back to Neolithic standing stones.
The history of using marble in particular includes many memorials, triggering thoughts of the people who worked in Wirksworth during its industrial peak. So historical time is doubly enacted in ‘Two Ends of Memory’: through the activity of mining, and through the use made of what is mined. The specific purpose of the memorial, however, is to commemorate and remember the lost one. That leads to human time and to the work’s title: one type of end is that of a person’s own living memory, on death; the other is, in a Judaic phrase, ‘when your name is spoken for the last time’ – the end of the memory of the departed that a memorial seeks to defer.
Memory itself might be described as a function of person plus time. That brings us to what is shown on the marble: Lang has printed images of hands and feet in the landscape. The person is brought in, evoking labour and individual presence and posing questions around how we relate to the landscape. However, in the context of Lang’s wider practice, we are likely to be aware that those are wax limbs – not the person recorded directly, but memorialised in another way; not the living person frozen by the photographic process, but stilled by casting prior to the recording mechanism of the photograph. So we’re at a two-fold distance from bodily reality – yet, even when we know that, it is hard not to be drawn into the apparent human presence. That potential for the figure to be simultaneously alive and not alive points to something already present in how we engage with sculpture. As Lang has put it: ‘We don’t feel ambiguous about aliveness in any other object: you know it’s a dead thing. But the figurative sculpture somehow manages to get in there and create this ambiguous space. What interests me is that we imbue it with so much special power’. Psychologically, moreover, the use of wax is a complicating move: the glimpses of apparent figures might be seen as closer to dolls, with a link to childhood and a potentially cloying sweetness – but, as they’re not whole, dismemberment is also suggested, to opposite effect. And they pick up an extra charge through the connection to how other artists have used dolls and artificial flesh. Hans Bellmer, Paul Thek and Cindy Sherman may come to mind: another aspect of historical time is incorporated, another dimension of our memories comes into play.
Pan out to other works, and we will see materials with different underlying timescales.
Several prints are on agate, another metaphoric rock used in hardstone carving - but one better known as jewellery, or for its centrality in the increasingly fashionable alternative therapy of crystal healing. Agate is said, for example, to ‘provide a protective shield around the body, ward off negative energies, and promote safety and security’. Perhaps there’s some of that in ‘Glass Heart’. Others are on slices of tree, the rings of which record the years even as the surfaces show prints of trees in the landscape. Such rings also indicate climactic conditions: the weather, the industrial revolution and future global warming will all be so inscribed. Lang also prints onto manmade materials. Leeds bricklayer Joseph Aspdin made the first cement in the early nineteenth century by burning powdered limestone and clay in his kitchen stove – so its use has run pretty-much parallel with the industrial revolution it has supported. Cutting blades and salvaged steel evoke the processes of manufacturing and construction even more directly. And Tarmac, a relatively modern combination associated with the 20th century development of the road network, was conceived nearby in Derbyshire. Edgar Purnell Hooley was walking in Denby in 1901, when he noticed a smooth stretch of road close to an ironworks. He was told that a barrel of tar had fallen onto the road, and someone had poured waste slag from the nearby furnaces to cover up the mess. That had solidified the road, leading Hooley to patent the mechanical mixing tar and aggregate and form the Tar Macadam company. Cue Lang’s images of Wirksworth’s pathways.
Evidently the materials chosen by Lang introduce their own distinct chronologies. As for scale, form, colour, and subject matter – yes, they are present and well worth discussing… but I see them primarily as the means through which time is shown. What is the function of representing the categories of time in these various ways? To enable Touch Stone as a whole to enact the experience of engaging with the historically layered landscape, with how what’s visible now evokes multiple pasts. And where do such thoughts about time occur? In the present, in the personal time of viewers, in the future memory of their experiences. When we look at Lang’s work we are in time – where else can we live? – thinking about time.