Why up to date artwork is on the rocks

What’s a stone? In a cemetery it’s solemn, in a shoe it’s a nuisance. A diamond ring and a lump of coal share mineral traits however can’t be swapped as presents. Stones will be markers and monuments and weapons; treasure or rubble. But, regardless of their disparate makes use of and meanings, minerals are sometimes imaginatively grouped collectively to suggest stability and endurance. To be ‘stony’ is, in fact, to be powerful, rigid, unmoving. Monarchies and marriages are conferred by treasured stones exactly as a result of they’re establishments conceived as eternal – ‘til loss of life do us half, and at loss of life carve our names into stone. Stones are considered absolutes. You hit all-time low. You make your self crystal clear.

Within the messy, malleable sludge of geological actuality although, like monarchies and marriages rocks are, in truth, not all that secure. They erode and sediment. They’re carried, carved, deposited, shattered; mapped, mythologised, named, used to wish and pave. Stones are contradictory: static and stressed; ecology and commodity.

In her new ebook Lapidarium: The Secret Lives of Stones (2022), the artwork critic Hettie Judah attracts a line between people’ longstanding lithic fascination and our incapacity to know deep time. ‘Traditionally,’ she writes within the introduction, ‘tales have helped us make sense of the incomprehensible period of the world.’ Stones turned myths, Judah suggests, as a result of people had no different method of conceiving time scales unimaginably larger than our personal lives: ‘tales of an historical flood helped clarify why the shells of sea creatures will be seen in rocks on a mountaintop.’ Grand narratives of religion and historical past, in different phrases, can all be traced in a single cliff face; baked right into a fold of the Earth’s crust.

Understanding the mineral world as one in every of delusion and thriller, Judah approaches her topic as a beachcomber, or mudlarker may – with no clear route, however the collector’s inclination to hoard and categorise. A lapidarium is a spot the place stone monuments and archaeological fragments are exhibited, and Judah describes hers as ‘a chamber of stones – a jumbled assortment of lithic curiosities’. Definitely, the ebook has the texture of a Wunderkammer. Dive in wherever, the ‘jumbled assortment’ urges, and forge your individual connections. Amethyst tells of Ametista do Sul – a area of Brazil identified for amethyst mining – and São Gabriel church, its partitions coruscating with crystals, ‘some pale as lavender, others brooding violet’. Black shale tells of fracking, and obsidian the videogame world of Minecraft. This can be a whistlestop tour by the strata of geography and historical past. Within the 1860s, Eugène Boban equipped crystal skulls to museums, scamming every into believing the carved quartz was an historical Aztec artefact; a century later, the tailor Nudie Cohn used quartz to show Elvis right into a gold lamé-suited ‘rhinestone cowboy’. Flip the web page and Barbara Hepworth is piercing a gap by pink alabaster, ‘describing the expertise as one in every of intense pleasure’.

In Lapidarium, spirituality and science usually appear to rub in opposition to one another. But, what’s fixed and clear is that humanity’s relationship with minerals has been entangled with humanity’s relationship to artwork for the entire breadth of human historical past – a temporal scale nearly as huge and unimaginable as that of deep time. A unique ebook to Judah’s – one trying to chronologically order as an alternative of jumble – might have opened with limestone, and a warty pig and buffalo hunt painted utilizing crimson ochre practically 44,000 years in the past in a cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. Found in 2017, the looking scene was the earliest identified cave portray on the time, and was described by researchers as ‘the oldest pictorial file of storytelling and the earliest figurative art work on this planet’. Rock to ochre and again once more; man, mineral, pig and pigment all held collectively.

As an alternative of prehistoric pigs, Judah comes to think about the transformation of rock to pigment by cinnabar, and its use within the mercurial work of alchemy. ‘As a compound of sulphur and mercury,’ cinnabar is ‘the closest manifestation in nature of that mythic substance, the thinker’s stone.’ From the third century BCE onwards – and cultures as various as China’s Qin Dynasty, eighth-century Iran, and fourteenth-century India – alchemists used cinnabar within the hunt for the elixir of life. However, as Judah notes, ‘artists, too, used cinnabar as a pigment’, romantically declaring that ‘using mineral colors honours the Earth as a residing soul, with the artist now assuming the function of the alchemist’. Maybe, then, we should always image the artist because the midpoint – or interlocutor – between scientist and religious healer.

Surveying the up to date artworld, it’s laborious to keep away from the sense that that is certainly what number of artists are positioning themselves. A lot has been made from each tradition’s current ‘mystical flip’ and a renewed curiosity within the microbial and mycological. Fungi and clay; ecology and tactility. Mixed, these two actions kind a wave of New Materialism, which seeks to re-examine inert understanding of matter and provides it a dynamic, religious dimension; to carry out alchemy. On the coronary heart of that is stone, or, extra precisely an expansive geology that appears, from sure angles, like a wierd merging of the Neolithic and the New Age. Certainly, in a current article to accompany the discharge of Lapidarium, Judah appears to be like on the current Frieze London artwork honest ‘suffering from lumps of rock’ – ‘obsidian carved by Julian Charrière, Daniel Arsham’s techno fossils, and Liz Larner’s ceramic sculptures with giant crystals coruscating from the glaze’ – and declares ‘the artworld has taken a geological flip’.

But, this ‘flip’ has been coming for a while. So, let’s dig. When the US housing market collapsed over a decade in the past and stresses started to point out within the world monetary system, within the artworld treasured stones and crystals turned proxies for anxieties about overconsumption – their contradictory nature permitting artists to create works that had been stunning however gestured in the direction of extra and destruction. In Marilyn Minter’s giant enamel portray Crystal Swallow (2006), parted crimson lips maintain a string of jewels like gumdrops. However, regardless of aping modern style imagery, this isn’t a portrait of fabric luxurious or religious therapeutic. Drops of perspiration across the mouth mimic the gems, making Minter’s work glisten with horror. Crystal Swallow appears to be like like an assault of overconsumption; like drowning. Then, in 2008, Seizure. Roger Hiorns claimed a former council flat in a south London block scheduled for demolition, and grew inside it copper sulphate crystals at an industrial scale. Reportedly a supply of inspiration for Björk’s music ‘Crystalline’ (2011), Seizure appeared without delay like an historical cave, a luminescent and sacred tomb, and a room left to rot – the crystals wavering between treasure and decay.

Then, in 2010, one other strata began to kind when political theorist Jane Bennett revealed Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Issues, arguing in opposition to the widespread division of the world into ‘uninteresting matter (it, issues) and vibrant life (us, beings)’. Working from the concept that the ‘picture of lifeless or completely instrumentalized matter feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption’, Bennett advocated for a ‘important materiality’ that understands ‘issues’ as vibrant brokers or forces. The ‘being-ness of issues’ and the ‘thingness of being’ turned of important concern, with theorists and artists alike reflecting on full of life nonhuman forces and the interdependency of all processes within the pure world. Artist Miya Ando submerged aluminium sheets in electrochemical baths and plated them with sapphire crystals which take up dyes extra readily – reworking industrial supplies into radiant, ephemeral artworks, resembling 2011’s Tides. In 2013, in a solo exhibition on the Museum for Modern Artwork in Tokyo, Tokujin Yoshioka uncovered crystals to the orchestral vibrations of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake (1876), prompting them to develop into unusual work and sculptures of ‘unintended magnificence’. A 12 months later, thinker Steven Shaviro, in The Universe of Issues (2014), requested, ‘what’s it prefer to be a rock?’

Because it turned more and more commonplace to think about matter as alive – even presumably possessing minds or ‘souls’ – what a lot of this amounted to was the re-enchantment of nature. As in alchemy, stones had been imaginatively reworked from inert matter into dynamic materials with a charged, even religious energy. Crucially, they had been conceived as having the facility to affect human behaviour, with Shaviro declaring that ‘our elementary situation is one in every of ubiquitous and inescapable connections’. Equally, in Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (2015), literary scholar Jeffrey Jerome Cohen instructed that ‘regardless of its incalculable temporality, the lithic just isn’t some huge and alien outdoors. A limit-breaching intimacy persistently unfolds.’ And, in up to date artwork too, ‘limit-breaching intimacy’ turns into the order of the day. In a bit titled Swallow all of the Brains (2015), Jason de Haan perched clam and ammonite fossils on the spouts of black ultrasonic humidifiers, vaporising them. The broken-down particles of historical creatures and minerals flow into within the gallery house and are ingested into the lungs of viewers – a cycle of involuntary, inescapable interplay. Crystals in Artwork: Historical to In the present day (2019) on the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Artwork, Arkansas displayed Minter’s Crystal Swallow in dialogue with Marina Abramovic’s movie Dozing Consciousness, during which the artist’s face is buried in quartz crystals that shift as she inhales and exhales, as if in reverie. A five-foot tall quartz chunk is put in close by, named ‘The Holy Grail’.

So, stone comes alive and the artwork world petrifies. However what actually occurs when a stressed rock-in-process turns into an set up, offered and labelled in an exhibition house? How is it valued? Does it change into a product? The artworld, in any case, just isn’t the one business that has witnessed a ‘geological flip’ within the final decade or so. With style, magnificence and wellness all falling prey to a crystalline craze, it appears the re-enchantment of nature can be a worthwhile enterprise enterprise. Riccardo Tisci’s fashions wore slices of agate round their necks as a part of his SS17 Givenchy assortment; Christopher Kane festooned Balenciaga crocs with crystal-like rocks; Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen handed out white and black stones (the previous for ‘common concord’, the latter for ‘safety’) to friends at their New York Trend Week present for label The Row. Are these cases additionally proof of a brand new reverence for humanity’s inescapable connection to the mineral world? Ought to Gwyneth Paltrow promoting quartz crystal-infused water bottles for £70 (supposedly to stimulate optimistic power) be lumped into the identical cultural second as de Haan’s Swallow all of the Brains? Each use ingestion to advertise a ‘limit-breaching intimacy’ with the mineral world, in any case.

But, by placing stones within the service of revenue, it’s clear that the up to date crystal development nonetheless upholds what Bennett describes as humanity’s ‘earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption’. A CBNC video in 2019 reported that mine homeowners have seen the value of amethyst crystals enhance fivefold over the previous 10 years. Different reviews instructed such minerals and crystals might now be the brand new ‘blood or battle diamond’. The one distinction, maybe, with this up to date crystal rush is that the story being informed about it has taken on a romantic gloss – with theories that enable us to see the dynamic, religious qualities of matter, stones are actually mined and bought as emotional and religious sources. Certainly, Los Angeles-based tremendous jewelry designer Jacquie Aiche summed it up when she informed the New York Instances, ‘I don’t promote jewelry, I promote power’.

And with regards to extractive and ‘earth-destroying fantasies’, is the crystal-crazed up to date artworld any totally different? Within the article ‘Taking the Romance out of Extraction’ (2011), Peter Hodgins and Peter Thompson describe the ‘extractive gaze’ as that which reduces nature to a ‘cache of inert matter to be dammed, dug up, minimize down, flattened out, raised up, divided and sub-divided, harvested, photographed, mapped, assayed, purchased, and bought and usually manipulated with a purpose to serve all-too-human functions’. After the final decade of cultural petrification, we is likely to be much less possible to think about matter as ‘inert’ or ‘lifeless’, however it stays completely instrumentalized.

So maybe now, because the ‘geological flip’ enters a brand new cycle, the artworld must take the romance out and really familiarize yourself with its personal ‘extractive gaze’. It should take note of the methods the religious, ‘important’ qualities of nature will be mined and bought – with commodity chains obscured – as sources of emotional succour inside and in opposition to a coldly rational capitalist world. Somewhat than imagining the artist as alchemist reworking base matter into refined magic, this wave of New Materialism should insist in opposition to such treasure fantasies, making its bedrock the uncooked, messy actuality of dust itself.