On Andrew Zago’s 2018 Accident Series
Andrew Zago, Accident, Gent: Art Paper Editions, 2018.
To pick up on a method even behind the perceived madness, as Shakespeare once articulated it beautifully through one of his characters, seems to be the ultimate human ambition.
Man builds culture and civilization by bending the environment to his will, ideally harming it as little as possible in the process. He molds the given world into the world fit to his measure, inscribing his presence into it. He does this even while merely observing his natural surroundings – weak to the psychological mechanism of projection, engrossed in his vision of how things could yet be altered, man is the source of all patterns he identifies and further propagates around himself. One learns this not just by studying psychology but also the history of art, architecture, engineering, and what not.
Yet even once physically imposed on matter, order is fragile and ultimately transitory. Weathering, misuse, neglect, and simple material fatigue eventually cause deterioration and breakdowns in man-made structures. Such sights that typically bring disappointment to the instrumental reason, frustrating it with imbalance, disarray, or decay, are Andrew Zago‘s unusual subjects of interest. His 2018 photobook Accident is a record of what it looks like when previously closely watched systems and arrangements crumble down, betraying their makers.
A licensed architect, Zago is nonetheless not focused on the utilitarian aspect of the buildings, roads, machines, terrains, or any other motif in his photography work. He brings images together by the sheer logic of what they all capture, i.e. a certain kind of disobedience to man’s desire to rule over the material realm. Simultaneously, he bears witness to the remnants of a method, to what lingers after man’s involvement as evidence. To browse through these photographs is to decipher the workings of the mind that once assembled the now collapsing systems, to trace back its original aspirations.
Once considered next to each other, the scenes reveal their own twisted patterns – the cargo falls down in apparently predictable heaps, the glass smashes in a recognizable mosaic, the railroad swirls multiple times at matching angles. Even when completely different types of fallouts occur, implying vastly different mechanics or chemical reactions, they still seem to share a deeper bond, something that escapes the sense of total imperfection. No order falls apart disorderly, as if the series purports.
What could have prevented the captured accidents? The more one analyzes the photographs, the harder it is to drive such thoughts away. Several of the images show things caught midway through the process of their destruction. The system hasn’t even reached its new equilibrium – the explosion is still underway, the boxes are just about to fall from the ship, the dust from the plane crash hasn’t settled. The damage is yet to be determined. These sights demand incredible patience. Looking at them, one is forever stuck in a maddening state of anticipation, yet without agency. Tension release never comes.
It is just as human to catch oneself perversely delighted by the observed chaos. On some level, man is always curious to know what it would be like if even some of his most harmonious systems failed. This taboo reasoning is often acted out innocently in childhood – once in touch with their ability to create, children get a rush from smashing their sand castles down or ripping their beloved toys apart. Good upbringing restrains such aggressive impulses, teaching children these are only ever permitted in games of pretend, and even there merely up to a degree.
Aesthetic experience makes that same make-believe exercise available to the mind forever. It allows alternative ways to conceive of what appears to be definitely known, unchallenging. It introduces the possibility of disruption and friction that may now produce something new, making happenstance desirable. This is why, framed as they are, Zago’s accidents also fascinate. Suddenly, all familiar notions of harmony are questionable – whatever it is that man thinks he has put into its place is just a minuscule blob in all of the universe’s concordances.