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What is stone? What does stone mean? In a recent note written
by Michael Dan Archer, stone is 'intractable material'. Sculptors
who work with this material today, attacking it with pneumatic
chisels, cutting it with diamond saws, and lifting it with brute
machinery, are constantly exposed to the mindless resistance of
nature to human purposes. Some recent British sculpture has made
a truce with stone as nature, but only by romanticising it, or
treating it as a spoil of outdoor leisure. For Archer, his material,
his stone, stands not for a nature we can be at home in, but for
the stasis of death and the blind permanence of the earth. Stone
stands indifferent to our joy and suffering. Stone will not be
spoken without remainder.
There are different types of stone, of course. Archer works largely
with granites and marbles, which seem to him the male and female
of stones. In this curious metaphor he is following a long tradition
in art theory. G.W.F. Hegel considered the significance of stone
in his 'Lectures on Fine Art' given in the 1820's:
…the Egyptians chiselled their colossal sculptures with
painful labour in the hardest granite, syenite, basalt etc., but
marble with its soft purity, whiteness, absence of colour, and
the delicacy of its sheen harmonises in the most direct way with
the aim of sculpture, and especially through its granular character
and the gentle infusion of light…
These qualities are celebrated in the two marble 'gateways' or
window pieces from 1999, whose recessed planes are carved thin
enough to allow light to pass through them. So, does marble -
a stone which Archer calls 'subtle, enchanting' - reveal itself
less indifferent than granite to the human world? Perhaps. Yet
the shaping Archer chooses to perform on it is a long way from
the elaborate and expressive figure sculpture which Hegel had
in mind, and whose zenith was in the representation of Greek and
Roman gods. Archer always refuses to animate stone, always resists
the human figure. The marble pieces are no exception to this rule,
retaining their relative shapelessness, and bearing only surface
marks, like the cross motif which Archer relates to the 'you are
here' of the city map.
What does it mean to say that the window pieces are shapeless?
Archer's sculptures are all in an obvious sense heavily shaped.
The shapes they take on however are those coincident with the
fundamental forms in which we recognise stone as a material in
the guise of a piece of stone - the block or the slab. These provide
for two of the three basic modes ( I shall come to the third shortly)
in which Archer works - the massive and the planar. Each is apparent
in a wide variety of sculptures, and I do not mean to create a
simple distinction between pieces that stand against a wall (of
which there are very few) and pieces exhibited in the round. Works
such as Skelligs, or Mutable, even though they are conceived as
free-standing and can be viewed from all sides, have emphatic
architectural fronts. Between Two Worlds, in many respects a fully
rounded work, again has a dominant facade. Kilkenny Piece is the
most defiantly frontal, raising the bedrock before our eyes like
a wall, but breaking the illusion of geography with its protruding
step. In all these cases I think we are forcefully aware of the
block from which the work is carved, and thus of the stone itself
in its massiveness. It is this massive character against which
- or rather courtesy of which - planar articulations take place.
Doorways can be cut, niches carved out, and living worlds given
the protecting space to appear. All of this is only barely indicated,
however, and the living world of flux and growth - a world of
meaningful forming and shaping - sometimes seems provisional against
the static and formless block and slab. In this way the dialectic
between the immutable and mutable is made clear: it is impossible
to think of one without the other, just as the stone itself is
not separable from the portal or niche which it permits us to
form.
Stone as building material is ever present to Archer. He has
visited many ancient sites around the world, and has a particular
fascination for the tombs and temples cut into the mountains of
Turkey. In 1998, Archer was awarded a Bohuslans Stone Stipendiat
and invited to work in Sweden. The sculpture which resulted, Interface,
consisted of three elements: altar, wall with portal, and crucible,
united on a stage of stone chippings. The aura of magical or alchemical
ritual in this work, and Archer's interest in ancient sites and
monoliths are both in recognition of the role stone has played
in making our world possible. Photographs of the work show its
human scale dwarfed by the quarry itself, whose seams of rock
are striated by drilling and cutting machinery. Archer is not
appealing to ancient architecture and ritual as a way of healing
the wounds and alienation of modern industry, however. Rather
he seems to see a continuity between ancient interventions in
natural landscape and the modern urban environment.
In a famous essay of 1936, Martin Heidegger tried to capture
the achievement of an ancient Greek temple by thinking of it not
as a work of architecture, but as an inaugural event:
Standing there, the building rests on the rocky ground. This
resting of the work draws up out of the rock the obscurity of
the rock's bulky yet spontaneous support. Standing there, the
building holds its ground against the storm raging above it and
so first makes the storm itself manifest in its violence. The
lustre and gleam of the stone, though itself apparently glowing
only by the grace of the sun, yet first brings radiance to the
light of the day, the breadth of the sky, the darkness of the
night. The temple's firm towering makes visible the invisible
space of air.
In the recent public commission Cardiff Obelisk, Archer has similarly
used a wilfully shaped stone monolith to make both the sea and
sky of Cardiff Bay appear afresh. Such works are not things like
the surrounding slabs of paving stone or the ships at sea, but
inaugural events which happen continuously.
I mentioned above that I found three modes in Archer's work.
Apart from the massive and the planar, Archer works with thingness.
Heidegger points out that the category of a 'thing' is much more
difficult to unravel than we might think - and that it stretches
from the mere things which are stones to the thing which is the
work of art. In between, however, are those things which surround
us and which we use every day without ever really knowing them.
Shoes, cups, knives, cars. Archer has a special place for this
kind of thing, which recurs in his work as a fundamental tool
to ancient peoples. A crucible nestles in Skelligs and crowns
Mutable. Neon light stands for the heat of transformation in another
work, and the forms of Sea Change and Kilkenny Crucible may both
refer to the liquid pouring in the foundry or alchemist's laboratory.
Whereas the architectural aspect of Archer's sculpture trades
on the resistance of stone to form, and its obdurate mere thingness
as mass and surface, the crucibles Archer makes are the place
where he bends stone to his human will, and where the stoneness
of stone disappears (or disappears artistically) into the idea
of usefulness or craft. This is why Archer sees his crucibles
as sites of transformation both literally but also symbolically
- they mark the place where stone is consumed in human action.
Stone becomes a crucible in a way that it never becomes a building
or a wall. The problem with this solution is that it merely masks
the earth's resistance - it can never overcome it.
Archer is now working on two large blocks of marble brought back
from the Italian quarry of Fanti Scritti (the block which became
Michelangelo's David came from the same area). As well as exploiting
the usual open cast method, the Italians have tunnelled one mile
under the mountain. The vast cold caverns there offered the sculptor
a glimpse of the inhuman permanence which all his work aims to
overthrow.
"Catalogue essay written to accompany a solo exhibition
at 'Art & Design Gallery, University of Hertfordshire, 2000"
Neil Cox
University of
Essex
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