Viewing Stone(s) and Considering Art
Contemporary artists presenting stones and boulders in fine art galleries and museums
By Richard Turner, July, 2020
Each of us brings our own experiences to an encounter with a work of art. What we bring to our meeting with a painting or a sculpture, for example, can be a key to understanding, a distraction and even an impediment to a meaningful dialogue with the artwork. As collectors and connoisseurs of viewing stones, we bring a unique perspective to the experience of artworks that feature stones. In this article, we will use that expertise to look at the work of three different artists with whom we may find that we have more in common than we thought.
Levitated Mass by Michael Heizer
New PIn 2012 artist Michael Heizer installed Levitated Mass at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The centerpiece of the artwork is a 340-ton boulder quarried in Riverside county, 105 miles from the museum. Due to its massive size, the boulder required a complex and thoroughly reviewed transportation process from the quarry to the museum. The transporter carrying the boulder traveled on a specially designated route—covering four counties and twenty-two cities—with movement happening only at night. The outsize ambition of the project, the much-ballyhooed journey of the boulder through the city, and my respect for Mr. Heizer’s work gave rise to high expectations for the piece. When I did finally see it, however, I was disappointed. The boulder was, indeed, massive, but otherwise lacking in qualities I had come to value in stones. It did not evoke features of the larger landscape. It was rough and scarred and without distinctive coloration, patterns, or texture. Its form was unremarkable. It was just big!
Mr. Heizer, of course, had no intention of selecting a stone for its inherent beauty. His title for the piece, Levitated "Mass" says it all. It is not the sort of title we might use for a stone in our collections. I should have paid more attention to what the title was telling me. Although my encounter with Levitated Mass is an example of my appreciation of viewing stones being a distraction, it is more often the case that what I know about viewing stones deepens my understanding of an artwork. The work of Korean artist Lee Ufan is a case in point.
Sculptures by Lee Ufan
Lee Ufan is one of the founders of the Mono-ha art movement, a Japanese and Korean group of artists whose work explores the encounter between natural and industrial materials. The works focus as much on the interdependency of these various elements and the surrounding space as on the materials themselves. Lee Ufan’s sculptures typically feature stones that are paired with plate glass, slabs of concrete, sand, gravel or steel plate. For a 2011 exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, he installed a group of seven boulders on flat pillows. Most viewers would probably regard this piece, Marking Infinity, as an intriguing arrangement of stones animating the architectural space. Those of us familiar with viewing stone display would instantly recognize the flat pillows as a provisional form of display, one that we use with stones that we are studying, stones for which we have not yet carved a daiza. Similarly, in Lee Ufan’s sculpture garden pieces, such as this one at the Lee Ufan museum in Naoshima, Japan, we cannot help but notice the similarity between this architectural space and the much smaller space of the suiban. The placement of the stone and steel plate on the bed of gravel is as carefully considered as the arrangement of an island stone in the sand-filled suiban. As you might expect, Lee Ufan is well aware of the Japanese and Korean forms of stone display.
Ugo Rondione sculptures, each about 9 to 10 meters high
The work of Swiss-born artist Ugo Rondinone presents a different opportunity for us to bring our knowledge of viewing stones into the gallery. His 2008 installation Twelve Sunsets, Twenty Nine Dawns, All In One at Galerie Eva Presenhuber in Zurich consists of a suite of larger-than-life sculptures made of sand, gravel, concrete and steel that are immediately identifiable as being inspired by Chinese scholar rocks. Rondinone’s sculptures are not simply inspired by taihu stones; they are enlargements of casts taken from the real objects. Here, again, our understanding of the artist’s work is clearly enhanced by our familiarity with the long tradition of viewing stone appreciation in China. The relation between table-sized stones called scholar rocks in the west, and the much larger rocks used in traditional Chinese gardens further informs our understanding of Rondinone’s scaled-up sculptures. Because we are already familiar with the sources of Rondinone’s inspiration, we can easily move on to speculation about the artist’s motives and intentions for the meanings of the pieces.
Rondinone’s 2016 public artwork Seven Magic Mountains, consists of locally-sourced limestone boulders stacked vertically in groups ranging between three and six. Each stone boasts a different fluorescent color; each totem stands between thirty and thirty-five feet high (9.1- 10.7 meters). Located in the Nevada desert south of Las Vegas, the towering stacks seem poised between monumentality and collapse. Reminiscent of naturally-occurring hoodoos, they are both geological forms and abstract compositions. As knowledgeable viewing stone aficionados, we might, at first, be inclined to dismiss Seven Magic Mountains. Painted stones, that is heresy! Balanced rocks, that’s child’s play, a mere hobby outside the refined world of “viewing stone appreciation.” But take a minute and remind yourself of Rondinone’s scholar rock sculptures. Seven Magic Mountains is the work of an artist who has a demonstrated understanding of the aesthetics of stones and the history of stone veneration, at least in China. Seven Magic Mountains challenges the conventions of stone appreciation. Painting the boulders transforms them into abstract “rock-like” forms. The fluorescent colors reference the gaudy neon signage of nearby Las Vegas. The piece asks us to consider the beauty of stones from a fresh perspective, which brings me back to Michael Heizer and Levitated Mass. Maybe I was too close-minded. Maybe, if I take into account what I have learned about stone appreciation from Lee Ufan and Ugo Rondinone, I can return to Levitated Mass with unbiased curiosity rather than distracting preconceptions.
