BLINMAN SLAG GRAYSON COOKE
BLINMAN SLAG by Warwick Mules Adjunct Associate Professor, Southern Cross University
“Slag is beautiful stuff, volcanic burnt rock.” (Susan Pearl, Blinman Slag) “But the power of a beginning is only in wanting in general” (F.W.J. Schelling, Ages of the World). Grayson Cooke’s Blinman Slag project takes you on a journey back in time to the beginnings of the earth, revealed in sedimentary rock exposed in layers through erosion over millennia. As drone images
float across the beautifully sculpted landscape of the Flinders Ranges in South Australia, human voices provide background information about the geology of the area. What do these beautiful images tell us about the past and the deep time in which they (and we) are embedded?
Blinman Slag is a wonderful evocation of Earth’s deep time history. Through the power of visual imagery, the artist has not only captured the beauty of the Flinders Ranges but also something of its sublime reality – its more-than-human dimensions. But the film also tells us of another story – the story of the pioneer miners: European settler-colonists who invaded Adnyamathanha country and found a treasure
trove in the rocks. Copper ore for the burgeoning industries of the mother country and its insatiable desire for expansion. Austere black and white photographs of old mines and slag heaps make for a severe contrast with the sublime images of the ochre drenched ranges. As image upon image of rock formation appear and disappear in the montage accompanied by the striking chords of an electric guitar, the voices begin telling a different, more recent story: of the extraction of minerals from the earth by mining. Pre-human Deep Time and the historical time of the modern Anthropos (the humans who currently inhabit and control the earth) are juxtaposed in an image montage, together with the eerily prescient chords of Mike Cooper’s electric guitar. As the story of mining unfolds we become aware of a more disturbing aspect: the miners’ activities start to have a direct effect on the environment. Mines fill with water while the countryside is stripped of its native pines to fuel the furnaces for smelting copper ore. The Anthropos is stirring and in a flash Nature strikes back. At this point, the film takes on an entirely different tone. Gone are the floating drone images of the Flinders Ranges and the languid guitar chords of a blues-tinged world, replaced by a blank mauve screen accompanied by electronic screeching sounds scratching the image surface. Split screen. Now mauve and green. Underneath this smooth, striated space we discover vast forces. Geomorphic transformation. Vulcanism. Fiery heat. The cosmic lightning flash. Here we witness the birth of slag. Grayson Cooke’s artwork has managed to capture the sudden and dramatic shift from a pre-industrial, prehistorical time to the time of the Anthropocene – the time when humans begin to lose control of the Earth rendered passive to their intrusions; a time when slag – the waste product of mining – becomes an object of beauty: a thing in itself. The images now become surreal, floating in a phantasmagoria of abstract forms – a crystallographic display of synthetic objects – the Slag-Thing rejected by humans as worthless, but which Nature now reclaims as its own. Here, we see the Slag-Thing in all its glory – luminescent slag rocks with their shiny-craggy surfaces, purple-tinged in light and shade, created by the intense heat of the smelting furnaces and glistening like some kind of asteroid out
of Kubrick’s 2001: a Space Odyssey now rotating on their axis as cosmic automatons – sentinels of the abyss. Flicker. Yet more images of rocks moving in sync to the Lucretian cosmic void. Quantum Event. Voices. What do they say? Return to human explanation: the rocks are part of a process, “step by step.” The ore is broken down for smelting to produce slag as nonrenewable waste. Slag is useless sludge. Where is this leading us? To something inhuman? And where does the human fit in? Or does it at all? These are the major questions raised by Grayson Cooke’s wonderful film. In its uselessness, slag becomes art. But what does it say? The images now become transmogrified in the fiery furnace, as the artist creates something out of the useless nothing of the discarded slag. Subject to enormous heat, the slag becomes what it was before its evisceration from the earth – part of the cosmic wonder called forth by the film. As the heating process intensifies, the images begin to flicker at rapid speed as if in a particle accelerator – the Big Bang awaits, enormous forces unleashed. Metamorphism. Ovid’s universe of magically mutating forms evoked. We are told that the metamorphosed rock is “man made,” but is it? Its origins lie elsewhere, in what Man did not want and what now comes back to claim it as something else. The rock sits strangely in the man’s hand as if it did not belong there; as if it really belonged to the phantasmagoria of the artist’s images. Signs of another life now begin to appear: the rock has been enmeshed in a photogrammetric grid. Like something from outer space measured by alien intelligence, the rock remains inscrutable to humans yet intelligible nonetheless. An other life form now appears: a crystallographic object set in orbit around the rock now looks down on a scientist providing explanations as to its creation. The master’s gaze outmastered? Perhaps. As if the process of life had been set in motion yet again but on nonhuman terms. Eternal Return. In a remarkable sequence of images, Cooke takes us into the very heart of the cosmic furnace where the rock explodes, releasing untold energy. In this image of the Big Bang, we enter the void – the infinitely expanding universe of space-time matter whose traces we saw at the beginning of the film; in the layers of sedimentary rock exposed in the Flinders Ranges. At this point, the human re-enters the scene. In mimicry of the
cosmic furnace, humans are shown crushing ore for smelting not copper but slag, while humanoid figures in asbestos suits clutching giant pincers pour molten rock heated in the factory furnace into ingot moulds for cooling. Everything turns to the turning point to begin again but on different terms. The story Blinman Slag tells can be read in two ways: one way tells the story of man’s historical relation to nature, first as a resource for extracting metals for industrial purposes and then as an object of scientific enquiry and aesthetic contemplation. This is the story told through the voices we hear. The second way tells another story: the story of the Earth as part of the Cosmos, its history measured in deep time magnitudes
beyond human scale, while its matter remains stubbornly resistant to human intervention and value exchange. This is the story told through the images we see. Does the film resolve these two stories? Can there even be a resolution? This is the profound question posed by Grayson Cooke’s Blinman Slag.
images front cover: Slag Dump 01 2018, Fujiflex digital print on aluminium, 150 x 60cm inside left and right: Slag Sample 06 2018, inkjet print on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag, 80 x 80cm;
Slag Sample 05 2018, inkjet print on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag, 80 x 80cm All images courtesy the artist
Exhibition dates: 1 February – 5 April 2020 at Lismore Regional Gallery
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