To the Provocation of Failure
Jaxon Kelly
“Weight tends to drop, but we desire to lift it; and when we cannot, we imagine we can.” –
Gaston Bachelard
River Dancers, Costa Rica, 2021
Jaxon Kelly
Metaphysically, gravity holds connotations of both seriousness and attraction, the former exemplified in, the gravity of a situation, while the latter character is more specifically drawn from the symptoms of the gravitational force, to fall for someone.
A sense of melancholy and dread has been assigned to weight and subjects, or rather vehicles, of its burden. In many ways we hope to escape it, floating or flying away in the aether, out of its grasp. However, while shirking the heft of heaviness, we still search for an ultimate experience of grounding and solidity.
In his essay, The Psychology of Gravity, Bachelard refers to the fear of immovable weight, a feat innate to our human minds, a consequence of our continuous struggles to comprehend the sheer mass and scale of the world and universe around our dwelling1. We settle this fear through comparison to our own size, our own strength. In consideration of our ability or inability to lift something, we have introduced a relation of achievement and failure to density.
1 Bachelard, Gaston, “The Psychology of Gravity,” 271.
Consider the myth of Sisyphus and his futile infinity fought against the boulder and its inevitable mass. We could not lift a mountain; therefore, any attempt would result in inevitable failure. Bachelard proposes that if we instead believe we are the mountain, the scales shift alongside the metaphorical meaning of the term2. Atlas raises the world on his shoulders; the human form wielding a planet with grace and control. Perhaps it is this sense of ownership and power which we seek to achieve in venerating the substance that carries the weight of planets, mountains and boulders. Our collective path to achievement has always been paved in stone, a material so common and universally present, the matter of our world.
2 Bachelard, Gaston, “The Psychology of Gravity,” 264.As a species we assign great value to mass and matter, anthropomorphizing both through our constructed material networks and interaction. It is these interactions and the effects of the inanimate which have propagated the mythic thinking process of animism and the many branches of its thought. Being an internal consideration so innate to humans that even before given a name it flooded the archaic communities of the first man, animism is the drive behind our infatuation with matter.
All matter, whether alive or inanimate, hosts a resonant vitality, a stored force of motion not necessarily dependent on the presence of life. Jane Bennett describes this inherent vibrance as,
[T]he capacity of things – edibles, commodities, storms, metals – not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own3 .
Quoted above is an excerpt from Bennett’s book, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, a philosophical text exploring animist thought. Bennett subverts the idea that things, in the most general sense of the word, are not passive. Time has shown repeatedly that the human race has always regarded objects and their subsisting matter with a sense of vitality rather than as something dull4
3 Bennett, Jane, “Vibrant Matter,” viii. 4 Marenko, Betti, “Neo-Animism and Design,” 224.
Self Portrait In Stone, South Shields, 2022
Jaxon Kelly
Throughout the development of communal human existence, stone has been a crucial and founding medium in progress of nearly all fields. Although the gift of fire is attributed to Prometheus in the legends of the ancient Greeks, it was the strike of flint that allowed man to harness the heat of the flame. The hands of the first men are ossified in the pigmented walls of the caves in which they sought shelter, their relics and tools carved and shaped from obsidian and limestone. Treated as the flesh of Earth itself, the sacred character of the mineral concretions cannot be understated.
Poets and philosophers both contemporary and ancient have paid due respect to stone in every capacity, from the minute grains that populate the seas and deserts to the cragged faces of gargantuan cliffs, worshipping and fearing their vastness and immobility. It is the material’s physical being and metaphysical connotations which subtend our awe Rock reminds us a world in which the stone giants and their fragmented comrades were the only denizens of this place It is no wonder that these relics of some Dantesque proto-land, that indefinitely inhabit our planet’s organic skin, have been so integral to our understanding of the natural and the cultural5 .
5 Bachelard, Gaston, “The Psychology of Gravity,” 152.
Broken Line, Fuengirola, 2022 Jaxon Kelly
In human worship of rock, usage can be simplified to the dichotomy of Levi-Strauss’ proposed consideration of, ‘the raw’ and ‘the cooked’. ‘The raw’ referring to instances which occur naturally while ‘the cooked’ must arise by human intervention. Things deemed raw have connotations of being fresh and wild while traditionally, it is the transition of cooking which imbues differing values of culture6
As previously discussed, it is not uncommon for our species to adore, or at least to be infatuated with, mass, casting ourselves into the place of the stone and occupying its matter as our own through anthropomorphizing the inanimate concretions. It is the hardness of the material that leads our desire, the characteristic shared with the instruments with which we enact change on our surroundings.
To manipulate the form of stone is a task which most often requires forces beyond those our bodies, let alone two hands, allow. We may sculpt, crush, melt or pierce its solid matter with tools, but to truly effect change on its shapes and natures it is necessary to harness a heat and energy we ourselves are unable to produce with the soft bodies we inhabit. Static, when framed in the time period of our short existence, rock is imbued with the character of stoicism, enduring the forces of the day to day while in actuality being subject to a fluid shift over the span of eons.
6 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, “The Raw and the Cooked,” 28.“He looked at the granite. To be cut, he thought, and made into walls. He looked at a tree. To be split and made into rafters. He looked at a streak of rust on the stone and thought of iron ore under the ground. To be melted and to emerge as girders against the sky.
These rocks, he thought, are here for me; waiting for the drill, the dynamite and my voice; waiting to be split, ripped, pounded, reborn; waiting for the shape my hands will give them.” – Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead7
7 Rand, Ayn, “The Fountainhead, ” 7.There is value in the appreciation of stones as they have been shaped by the entropic forces of the universe, the infinite randomness that lifts objects of such great mass and wears them down into pieces as unique as the human fingerprint. Edges smoothed by millennia of constant friction against wind and water, colors stained by exposure both biological and inorganic.
It is this seemingly infinite existence of stone, regardless of its scale or composition, that I am infatuated by, the allure of ‘the raw’. My collection reveals a reverence for these shards of fractured mountains. The hues, found in its striations and formed from inimitable combinations of chemical and mineral collisions, reflect matter and time in dual suspension. Every pebble has lasted and will last longer than any of us, suggesting a quality of the sacred
Monuments of megalithic form, Göbekli Tepe, Stonehenge, cyclopean walls and the sparse dolmens which dot the proto-cities and sites of cultures lost exemplify ‘the raw’ through the use of stone as a sheer mass. ‘The cooked’ use of stone demands a more destructive approach.
Stone’s hardness offers both a challenge and boon. It can impede progress, acting as an obstacle in its resistance, hindering movement and development. Simultaneously, stone and its constituent minerals play a variety of roles in our human history. It is stone’s hardness, stability and weight that lent itself to the creation of the first weapons of man, and it is its hardness which allows its application in the blades of rotary tools in order to cut through the dense matter of modern construction. This extraordinary range of applications is only achievable through human imposition on rock in exercise of ‘the cooked’.
I, however, would argue that where Lévi-Strauss sees a distinct separation between the qualities of ‘the raw’ and ‘the cooked’ there is instead an axis. On one end sits ‘the raw’, material in its most natural form prior to being mined from the earth, and on the other ‘the cooked’, our will and culture imposed on the physical, and in some cases chemical makeup of the material8 Viewing these concepts as a spectrum rather than a dichotomy places the artwork of so many in a position between cultural formation and natural existence, the mark of man pressed into universal matter.
8 Elyada, Ouzi, “The Raw and The Cooked,” 56.
Grey Funicular, Seaburn, 2022
Jaxon Kelly
Along the raw-cooked axis, work still does tend to sway towards one or the other, favoring the natural or cultural in some sense over their counterpart. The work of Andy Goldsworthy exemplifies an instinct for ‘the raw’ with an approach of ‘the cooked’ in that he selects and manipulates natural materials in order to produce forms and pieces which, despite being unnatural in appearance, propagate an understanding of the quality of their constitution, highlighting the roughness of stone in the construction of soft form. Goldsworthy situates his interventions in spaces where their constituent elements are found, enlisting chance in a manner that studio-based art cannot achieve.
In contrast to Goldsworthy’s interventions, the sculptor Gutzon Borglum exercised his will over matter within the natural landscape, in this way demonstrating a lasting and more ‘cooked’ approach to stone. Best known for his monumental carved faces at Mount Rushmore, Borglum approached his work with a passion for control. Evident colossal sculptural feat, Borglum treated stone as something to be conquered by man, reformation into human likeness. These approaches to the monumental in art and structure have always been present in human existence, exemplified by the multitude of stone giants and landmarks around the world. Although any sense of cultural inclusion deems the work ‘cooked’, there is always a remnant of the natural, ‘raw’.
Within my own practice, I incline more to the ‘raw’ rather than the ‘cooked’ Where sculptors see form contained in ‘the raw’ matter of stone, working with chisel and hammer to free their creations from their detention in mineral entanglement, I seek to find form in spatial organization, the lines of gravity which pass through solid bodies and into the earth below, mass as a medium of spontaneous design.
To contemplate rocks, in other words, is to entertain the possibility of being crushed by them. One may, it seems, with courage delay the collapse, but the fatal day will come when one will be crushed beneath a granite avalanche. The world is filled with tombstones that illustrate this point!9
This dream of the crushing weight of stone and the repercussions of its collapse stray far beyond the physical implications of an object falling The fear of mass moves from the physical to the realm of the metaphysical, in reflection of our own futility and failure
9 Bachelard, Gaston, “The Psychology of Gravity,” 148.
With my art, I shift rock, redolent of tangible eternity, finding an introspective state in my patient search for pure material balance. I have reduced my interventions to the simple title of rock stacking, however, to me this practice is so much more than just the placement of one stone on top of another. My ability to find balance has developed through years of the exercise, learning to understand the geometry and gravitational qualities of any rock I pick up. It is this attention, which lies somewhere between intention and intuition, that is the foundation of my work
My process begins with the assessment of the ground on which I intend to build. I find the quickest way to understand the stability of the space is to move across it, scanning the area and feeling the stones beneath my feet. I reach for the rocks that speak to me through their form and color, beginning with a base large enough to build onto while still subverting understood perceptions of natural forces in its placement. I search for facets, flattened sections and divots which allow for me to nestle the next stone into a stable position. It often takes time to find a suitable orientation for my chosen pieces, but once I have selected a component, I work with diligence to ensure it is a part of the final construct.
To raise the weight of my stones often requires more support and stability in their spatial allocation than I can provide with my hands alone. It is in these instances that I prop their mass against my chest and thighs, pressing against their expected fall in the establishment of solid lines of gravity. As I work against the natural instinct to be crushed, I exercise the courage Bachelard describes in the delay of the collapse, subverting the innate human fear of the immovable object in my sheer will to control mass10
As with Sisyphus and his toil, it is the contest of man against stone which animates matter in this sense. To push against an almost immoveable object creates a mental and physical state, a reality principle which illuminates our presence through the feeling of effort “A rock which is the object of so prodigious a human effort becomes itself human,” Bachelard claims in his analysis of Camus’s writing in consideration of the tragic king of Ephyra11 I take a similar approach in the construction of my cairns, striving to address this idea of anthropomorphism in the name of my pieces.
Inevitably, however, my works do collapse in the process of their creation, just as the stone of Sisyphus will certainly roll back down the hill. This failure is necessary for progress The ruin of a cairn is revealing in that it highlights instabilities that require reconsideration. Despite the temporal nature of the work [the tower will always fall] the goal of every sculpture is to postpone failure for as long as possible by creating sound lines of gravity through the stones. It is the instant between the placement of the final piece and the thunderous tumble of the form; its failure which constitutes its beauty, a climax in a momentary shift12 .
11 Bachelard, Gaston, “The Psychology of Gravity,” 149.
12 “Balance is most beautiful just before it collapses.” Subtitle for the book, Fischli and Weiss: The Way Things Go
Collapse Three, Marsden Bay, 2022
Jaxon Kelly
The tower of petrified entropy is awakened by the slightest vibration of the ground beneath the system, the rise of tide around the structure, or simply the intervention of a brief squall. It is the transient hang of the mass in space, the shattering of balance which occurs in a tick is the real meaning of my work. It is something inevitable, suspended between the dry connections of stone against stone, surrendering weight to surreal lightness.
The Point, Wapping, 2022
Jaxon Kelly
As is the case in all other forms of art, completion is a subjective goal which is never truly achieved. A cairn may reach a height or precarity that solidifies it in my eyes as finished, however, there is always the potential for expansion, the push to add just one more piece. This urge to find a boundary of possibility, a threshold of equilibrium that is on the precipice of the work’s destruction, is at the core of my practice
Despite the temporal nature of my sculptures, I tend to eternalize their forms through photographs and video, capturing their fleeting existences and the rubbled aftermath of their failures. Often, if others are witness to my craft, I avoid taking this final measure of freezing form in pixelated infinity. I battle the conflicted emotions of ossifying something so evanescent as my tumbling assemblages, but I do find I take photographs in order to share my work with others. This act I find to be a subtle braggadocio, a pride in my practice of challenging gravity.
Regardless of my internal philosophical and moral contradictions in my work, it is in this search for the purity of a solid form, the frozen moment of suspended mass, where I find myself in the nearest condition to Bachelard’s dream of lifting mountains.
Works Cited:
Bachelard, Gaston, et al. “The Psychology of Gravity.” Earth and Reveries of Will: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, Dallas, 2002, pp. 141-158, 262–309.
Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Christofides, C. G. “Gaston Bachelard and the Imagination of Matter.” Revue Internationale de Philosophie, vol. 17, no. 66 (4), 1963, pp. 47–91.
Elyada, Ouzi. The Raw and the Cooked: Claude LéviStrauss and the Hidden Structures of Myth, Haifa University Press, 2007, pp. 52-58.
James, William. The Feeling of Effort. Boston Society of Natural History, 1880.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology. Pimlico, 1994.
Marenko, Betti (2014) Neo-Animism and Design, Design and Culture, 6:2, 219-241
Millar, Jeremy. Fischli and Weiss: The Way Things Go. MIT Press, 2007, pp. 72-73.
Rand, Ayn. The Fountainhead. New York, NY: Penguin Putnam, 1996, pp 7.
Schama, Simon. Landscape and Memory. Vintage Books, 1996.