Art You Can't Get To

on December 14 1958

a group of 18 scientists

and explorers from the Soviet Union arrived

at the coldest and most remote

plot of land on earth which is known as the southern

pole of inaccessibility they

were travelling in a convoy of tractors

one of which carried

a prefabricated 240 square foot Hut and upon arrival the team installed

the hut and cleared an area for an airplane runway and they also placed

atop their research building

a plastic bust of the communist revolutionary

Vladimir Lenin the bust was faced north so that when and will be looking

toward Moscow this newly created Soviet

research station had six months of food and fuel but the expedition only

lasted 12 days before

the station was abandoned

because it became clear that even

by the extremely cold and

remote standards of Antarctica

this place with its average year-round

temperature of negative 58

degrees Celsius and its altitude of over 3,800

meters above sea level was

simply too inhospitable for

humans to have an ongoing presence

there so pole of inaccessibility is

a geography term referring to the spot farthest

from a coast in any land mass or body of

water North America's pole of inaccessibility is

in the Dakotas on land

owned by the Ogallala

Sioux it's more than a thousand

miles from the nearest ocean South

America's pole of inaccessibility is

in a Brazilian rainforest

Eurasia's is in the Garba Tonga desert near the border between China and

Kazakhstan the African pole of inaccessibility is

also very close to an international

border the tripoint border shared by the Central African Republic South

Sudan and the Democratic

Republic of the Congo every

ocean has such a place as well the Pacific

Oceans pole of inaccessibility is

the farthest you can be from land on earth that

spot is sometimes called point Nemo

and because it is so far from land unmanned

spacecraft returning to Earth are often

aimed at point Nemo as such it's become a kind of satellite graveyard

the abandoned Space Station near for instance is among hundreds

of spacecraft whose last and final resting place is near Point Nemo but the

most famous poem of inaccessibility

on earth is that one in Antarctica

it's much harder to reach than the geographic

South Pole is the southernmost point on earth while

humans made it to the geographic

South Pole in 1911

it took 47 more years

to reach the pole of inaccessibility in

those intervening years vladimir

lenin led the russian revolution and

became the first leader of the soviet union there

were two world wars and

tremendous shifts in mechanization

the development of nuclear weapons

and the launch of the first ever satellite

and even then explorers

accustomed to Antarctica's climb that lasted

less than a fortnight

before abandoning the post another

group of Soviet explorers made a brief visit in January

of 1964 later that year a team of Americans

arrived at the research station and stayed for over a month during

which time they apparently repositioned

the bust of Lenin so that it was facing not Moscow

but Washington DC and then the Soviets visited the station very briefly one more

time in 1967 at which point they apparently

turned lenin back toward moscow after that the mostly abandoned

research station was entirely abandoned

for 40 years no humans

made it back to the Antarctic

pole of inaccessibility and

in those 40 years most

of the world's many Lenin busts ended

up destroyed or removed from

public view after the Soviet Union collapsed a

bunch of them ended up underwater

off the coast of the Crimean Peninsula others

were melted down or ended up in junkyards

meanwhile nobody knew what had become of that research station

blown over probably destroyed

not by revolution but

by weather and then in 2007

an expedition made it back to the pole of inaccessibility and

as they approached they saw that the research station had

indeed been almost entirely

buried by four decades

of snowfall and shifting

ice and yet still

somehow that bust of Lenin being

at the tallest point of the structure survived

it had yellowed some but otherwise was in good shape the last time humans

visited in 2011 the

bust was still there a single

human intervention in what one Antarctic

Explorer called the white darkness

and that leads me to the point of this whole thing which is that

I find this remaining linen sculpture to be utter

beautiful and I'm trying to figure out why like

God knows I have no desire

to see it in person the

artwork itself is not particularly

masterful or compelling Lenin

busts were mass-produced and there's nothing extraordinary

about this one except

its location and the

bust was ultimately intended

as propaganda for a regime that killed

millions of its own citizens propagandistic

sculpture is often intended

to induce reverence or obedience or fear

but I feel none of that in 2018

when looking at pictures of the world's most inaccessible

Lenin bust instead I'm reminded

how contingent objects are how

they're always in conversation with

history and with their viewers how

they change over time even

if they don't look different

because we change that

lenin bust is about lenin of course but it's also about how it got

there and why which

way it's facing and

the fluctuating landscape of power maybe

what's beautiful in the end is

that this is a spot

so frozen in time of

course for all we know the lenin bust might already be gone finally

snowed under or destroyed

by wind in the past 7 years regardless

it won't last forever but

it has survived nearly

a human lifetime in

a place where humans themselves cannot

long survive that we can put art in places

we cannot put ourselves

captures both our stunning power and our absolute

fragility we have our hands all over everything

in this world we're reshaping the climate

and the planets biodiversity we

shoot so many things into space that we've wrapped our planets in satellites

and yet we are also

temporary we are small mortal

beings on a planet

that contains places we cannot visit very often

or for very long because

they are too cold and too

far removed from other humans

but even in those places we've left little some things in an attempt to

say we were here

we were I don't know if that's good or bad in the end but

it seems to me very

human I'm reminded of the negative

hand stencil cave paintings

that were independently created

by many prehistoric people

around the world our ancestors also painted

lots of other things all kinds of symbols and

many different kinds of animals

including some that are now extinct

we don't know what those paintings meant to the people who painted them or

looked at them by firelight as they fell asleep their paintings may have had

religious import or they could have been part of hunting rituals but

regardless of what they then they

mean something different to us now ancient

cave paintings remind us how long people have been part

of the story of our planet and

how deeply ingrained our

desire is to make

art the Lennon bust at the bottom of the world isn't as old of

course but it too is being changed by history

just as surely as it is being changed by the weather at any rate

I like imagining that the Lennon bust is still there still

being changed by many

different kinds of time and I wonder if there are objects

be they art or not close or far that

have changed meaning for you over time or

that you feel have been changed

by history let's discuss that in comments thanks

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