Moving Stones as Lithic Intimacy

Two artists in dialogue with the earth

 

 ‘The world is continually in geological movement. Continental drift is at the speed our fingernails grow, and parts of Britain have come up from the South Atlantic. Nothing in the landscape is fixed; nothing has its ‘eternal’ place. Stones are always moving along rivers and glaciers, being thrown out of volcano’s or clattering down mountains. Those works in which I move stones around are just another part of this continuum.’ Richard Long (2002)

 

We can only practice exposure, if we know how to be intimate.

My research on rocks, stones and geological time started in 2012 when I was struck and affected by the encounter with pebbles, boulders, gems and meteorites. They had tumbled into exhibition spaces as if the earth had trembled.[1] They were caressed, polished, collected and moved around. In hindsight it revealed a Geophilia, a love which addresses and challenges (in)human togetherness, as well as the magic of earth in deep time. According to Jeffrey Cohen, ‘Geophilia names a reciprocal and intimate bond, signaling attractions, affiliations and movements toward connections often recognized retroactively, a proliferation of relation most evident over long distance’. Because, yes, ‘Lithic intimacy runs slow and deep.’ [2]  Cohen, an expert in Medieval literature, recognizes a shared Geophilia and lithic intimacy in the medieval and contemporary world, a shared recognition of the agency of rocks and stones, a willingness of exposure to timeframes and dimensions which are beyond the human. ‘Stone triggers the vertigo of inhuman scale, the discomfort of unfamiliar intimacy, and the unnatural desires that keep intermixing the discrete.’[3] A human willingness and desire which is certainly not easy, as for example Wislawa Szymborska’s poem Conversation with a stone (1962) reveals,

            

(…)

I knock at the stone’s front door

“It’s only me, let me come in”

 

You shall not enter

You lack the sense of taking part

No other sense can make up

For your missing sense of taking part

(…)[4]

 

How to feel and understand the continuum between human and stone? We do not share the same time frame or rather speed, we are oblivious to the infinite transformation and becoming of stone, its liquidity, its energy and dense agency. ‘I have no front door’ is the last remark of Szymborska’s stone, urging the impatient human to rethink what is meant by ‘taking part’. So how can we become intimate? We know – as medieval writers knew - that even the smallest pebble is ‘a durable link to a dynamic cosmos’.[5]  And our link to the pebble is the recognition that our bones are part of the geological continuum, that we share mineral history. But perhaps even more important is that we must realize that mineralization can also turn around into liquidization.[6]  Perhaps it is the sense of human fragility that makes us ask the stone to open up and share with us its cosmic strength. However, our human strategy of ‘linking up’ is lacking.  

I want to present two artists who show us ways to (re)connect with the earth, but with different strategies: Michael Heizer (1944-) and Richard Long (1945-).

 

Moving and being moved

Michael Heizer installed Levitated Mass in 2012. It consists of a 340 ton boulder ‘found’ by Heizer and brought to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Richard Long’s oeuvre consists of walking through landscapes and moving stones within that landscape, laying them out in circles and lines. And just by writing these lines I already convey an important difference between the two: Heizer’s work tends towards the monolithic monument, while Long’s work tends towards unobtrusive process-minded interventions.

The Levitated Mass project began long before 2012. Heizer had begun looking for the ‘perfect’ boulder

since 1968, so the story goes. When he had found it, it had to be moved from the south of California to Los Angeles. Heizer had already anticipated the cosmic appeal of the boulder, but he might not have anticipated the crowds that gathered when the boulder     , wrapped in plastic, was on its specially constructed truck moving very slowly through 22 cities in California.[7] Its progress seemed to electrify the air, and everyone wanted to touch it. Everyone wanted to knock on this boulder’s door.

The boulder is now permanently installed at the museum site and everyone walking underneath its bulk may feel its energy. Many commentators refer to the ancient monument of Stonehenge, a circle of large monoliths of which the history is still unrevealed. We know where the stones originate, but not how they were moved or why they were brought together in the way they are.  That must have been quite a sight too. Such a monument is a ‘vibratory machine’ according to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.[8] It does not represent something, but embodies sensations and intensities of events.   

The blogger K Mitchell Snow suggests that both Stonehenge and Levitated Mass stir our emotions because they evoke a primeval time.[9] Levitated Mass would thus belong to the realm of the eighteenth century Sublime and express a fear of nature, and its power over human fragility. 

This brings another work of Heizer to mind: Negative Megalith #5 (1998). A huge Diorite Granite monolith set in a shallow steel niche. It is Nature’s power encased, transformed at best into an object of devotion.  Could we say the same of Levitated Mass? It is right there, and spectacularly so, levitated on a pedestal, and thus - situated, suspended between earth and clouds.

 

Richard Long takes walks. During his walks he ‘feels’ or aligns with the landscape, and sometimes he shifts stones, so they end up in a line or a circle in the landscape. He sometimes picks up a stone, to put it back on the ground after he walked for a mile, or for an hour. He relocates stones, and roles stones down mountain slopes, quite as they do themselves over time. And it is also the other way around: his circles and lines will be dissolved by being shifted and dissembled through the shift of the mountains or glaciers themselves.[10] What struck me first, was the sensitivity that Long displays with the landscape, and his persistence and endurance. He can sit, stand or walk for a long time to find correspondences and to engage with the flux of the landscape and its elements – rocks and water.[11]  This search for connections between human and earth – from the rocky crust of the earth to the landscape – is foremost an exploration of the interface of scales and dimensions.[12] But stone itself is also an interface of scales and dimensions, regarding matter and time. ‘Stones are like grains of sand or sub-atomic particles’, Long writes.[13] At the same time they might be Neolithic monuments, they certainly have geological time – as such, they are dynamic archives from deep time.[14]    Long’s work Megalithic to Subatomic. From Carnac to Cern (2008) is a 603 mile walk in nineteen days across France to Switzerland. The walking is a time-framed and dynamic (in the sense of matter-energy) encounter across these different scales and dimensions. This might point to scientific, geological or quantum-physical knowledge, but it also reveals another correspondence, which is with Buddhism, or more precise, Japanese Zen gardens. The Japanese Zen garden not only fundamentally summons an encounter between different scales – the stone is at the same time a mountain – it ‘summons a memory of what is unseen, what is hidden in plain sight’, as Sophie Walker describes it, and it can never be fully grasped, ‘it guards its secrets of scale and context’. [15]  Meditation or what Long calls contemplation, might open you up to those dimensions. Richard Long’s work MindRock (1992) is an eleven day walk in the mountains north of Kyoto – ‘bearing a rock in mind, and beginning and ending with looking at the same rock at Ryoanji’.[16]  A stronger ‘moving with’ is hardly imaginable. What is hidden in plain sight is this material connectivity between human and earth, not only in its mineral sense, but also in its capacity to shift, transform, liquidize. We gain knowledge and insight not by knocking at the imaginative stone’s door to get in and know its secrets, but to let the stone ‘enter you’ in a way. 

 

Powerplay versus Exposure

We humans still adhere to our all too human system of knowledge: we need to know what something is  and what it means, thus defining the borders of our all too human reality.

But if we want to know what stone is in and for itself as well as its agency, if we genuinely want to give up human power over objects (because we fear their power over us), we need another take on reality. That might be the humble and humbling variety of a speculative realism in the sense Graham Harman and Timothy Morton propose. In his essay The third table, Harman explains that it cannot be the scientific way of breaking down the object to is smallest particles in order to know what it is, nor putting the object in our human context to identify its effect. Harman and Morton view both strategies with the object as reductive. [17]  Instead there ‘is a genuine/substantial reality deeper than any theoretical or practical encounter’ Harman writes, and he likes to call it ‘weird’ – it is something which emerges ‘in between’.[18]  To find it, seems to hunt an alluring ghost, something the human in Szymborska’s poem desperately tries, but without result.

Looking at Michael Heizer’s Levitated Mass we get two messages, one is about the metaphysical power of the boulder – a chosen example of Nature, of Earth – and two is about the power of the artist to ‘move heaven and earth’ with large machines to excavate and move the boulder to a site which then becomes ‘site-specific’. By making a spectacular mark, creating a monument on a pedestal, Heizer displays Nature to awe us. Levitated, yes, but by sheer mechanical power. It is a powerplay even beyond knocking at the boulder’s door.

Richard Long seems to invest in a form of realism which is both empirical and holistic, scientific and cosmic. He walks, he exposes himself to the (rugged) landscapes, as well as to the formal arrangement of the Japanese garden and the stones within them. He is alone when he puts stones in his pocket. He does not need any machinery, just his own matter-energy. The landscape is not a spectacular other, he is part of it and registers its potentialities, as well as his own. Together with the landscape and moving with the stones Richard Long performs what I would call lithic intimacy. Anne Seymour has formulated it beautifully:       

 

‘The artist moves through time at his pace, leaving only the faintest traces of his passing (…), nature moves at hers. Though the two are related they each have their own roles. On a walk the two meet and converse, they even dance together (…).’ Seymour (1985)

 

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[Notes]

[1] For example, Documenta 13 (Giuseppe Penone’s Essere Fiume, Guillermo Faivovich and Nicolas Goldberg, El Chaco), Whitney Biennial (Matt Hoyt’s Untitled), The 55th Venice Biennial (Roger Caillois’ collection of agathes, Sara Sze’s Triple Point at the American Pavilion). 

[2] Jeffrey J. Cohen, Stones. An ecology of the inhuman (Minneapolis en London: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 24. Cohen devotes a whole chapter to Geophilia, what he also calls ‘ an ecological allure” (25).   

[3] Cohen, Stones, 23-24.

[4] Wislawa Szymborska, Poems, New and Collected, 1957-1997, vertaald door Stanislaw Baranczak en Clare Cavanagh (New York: Harcourt, 1998), 63. The poem and its interpretations are widely available on the internet. In short, it shows our desire for knowledge, but we can never know all that we wish. We have to acknowledge a reality beyond ourselves.

[5] Cohen, Stones, 22. Cohen offers many examples, such as Hildegard von Bingen’s vision that stones thrum with elemental dynamism, p. 64. 

[6] For more geological information: Jan Zalasiewicz, The Planet in a Pebble. A Journey into Earth’s deep history (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). The idea that we could simply ‘melt’ is not some science fiction. Compare Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology. For a logic of future co-existence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018)

[7] A film was made by Doug Pray: Levitated Mass DVD (2014). You can find fragments of the film on YouTube. 

[8] Gilles Deleuze en F. Guattari, What is Philosophy?  (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 176

[9]  www.culturespectator.com It is not an active blog, but still available.

[10] ‘I liked the idea that in my A Line in the Himalayas (1975) (…) the sculpture would be on the move, slowly disintegrating and disappearing down the moraine, as soon as I had made it.’ Long in: Claire Wallis red., Stones, Clouds, Miles. A Richard Long Reader(Londen: Ridinghouse, 2017), 301.

[11] See for example Walking in a moving world, a five day walk registering natural elements which move (at different speeds: cloud shadows, headwind, a river, spring bracken, a beech tree, a glacial boulder). www.richardlong.org

[12] Richard Long, Paul Moorhouse en Denise Hooker, Richard Long. Walking the Line (Londen: Thames and Hudson, 2002), 69

[13] Long in: Wallis, Stones, Clouds, Miles, 295

[14] Cohen, Stones, 77-78 .See also Zalasiewics, The Planet in a Pebble .   

[15] Sophie Walker, The Japanese Garden.(New York: Phaidon, 2017), 184. Long visited the Ryoan-Ji garden in Kyoto, as many artists did in the seventies. 

[16] Long, Moorhouse en Hooker, Richard Long, 76. Long always uses words to describe the work.

[17] Graham Harman, “The third table”, 100 Notes, 100 Thoughts: Documenta Series 085 (2012);  Timothy Morton, Realist Magic, (Open Humanities Press, 2013)

[18] See Stephen Alexander for a clear synopsis and critique of Harman’s essay. www.torpedotheark.blogspot.com