metropolis m

The artist and activist is presenting his largest retrospective exhibition in years at the M HKA in Antwerp. Bart De Baere, Michael Connor and Valerie Smith discuss his oeuvre on the basis of their favourite work.As a participant in the fall seminar at The Artist’s Institute last year, it was my responsibility to sit in the Institute’s basement space on New York’s Lower East Side for a weekend day, turning on the lights and plying visitors with conversation and coffee. On my assigned day, the city was blanketed with an unseasonably early, wet, driving snowstorm. As a result, there would be exactly zero visitors. During my hours in residence, I would do the following things: order Thai curry, watch part of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, drink approximately 200 cups of Anthony Huberman’s Nespresso, browse the Web for Halloween costume ideas, puzzle over one of the segments in Jimmie Durham’s video Collected Stones, check the Wikipedia entry for ‘Metternich.’Collected Stones is a series of 13 short videos in which stones are thrown at, dropped onto or placed on top of a series of technologies of more recent provenance, such as a telephone, a model boat or a refrigerator. Typically, the stones emerge from these encounters unscathed, while their more delicate counterparts are covered with dents, shattered, or otherwise rendered unsuitable for their normal function. These acts of juxtaposition call attention to the fact that the stones, too, are tools. They have long histories of social usage, but they also exist on a radically different time scale, far beyond that of the human. During my snow day with Collected Stones, the segment that I found most puzzling begins with an on-screen title that reads ‘A Stone from Metternich’s House in Bohemia’. This is followed by an image of a glass display vitrine – not a 19th century Mark Dion kind of vitrine, but a contemporary industrial model framed in brushed metal. It stands alone against the neutral background of a white wall; after a moment, a stone flies in from off-screen, smashing through the glass lid and taking its place inside the case. It sits there for a moment, motionless, before the segment ends. Only a few short, deadpan moments have passed.By introducing a stone into a social space from which humans have been carefully excluded, the video offers an opportunity to consider the stone’s role in human affairs, or our own relationship with it. The on-screen title at the start of the video appears to underline the stone’s social importance, but upon inspection, the statement begins to crumble. Metternich’s ‘house’ is also known as Castle Kynzvart; it dates back to the beginning of the 13th century, long before the time of Metternich. It is not a house, nor is it Metternich’s. Moreover, even if this stone was collected in Bohemia, how can a billion-year old geological formation be ‘from’ the house of a 19th century statesman? As a diplomat for the Austrian Empire, Klemens von Metternich helped restore stability to European states after the Napoleonic wars. The historian A.J.P. Taylor described him as ‘the most boring man in European history’, but he had a profound influence on at least one modern politician, Henry Kissinger. Given Metternich’s support of the status quo and his less than salutary latter-day adherents, one wonders if the stone was a part of the foundation of his house, or whether it flew through his window late one night, an expression of populist rage. The stone may be an agent of change, or one of stability. Just as the stone has an ambivalent relationship with Metternich’s house, it has an equally ambivalent relationship with the display case. The video concludes with the stone at rest inside the display case. Thus, by smashing the lid, the stone also becomes an historical artefact offered for the inspection of a viewer, thereby completing the expected function of the case. Alongside the stone, which has a rather uncertain historical relationship with Metternich, the case also contains some interesting broken glass – the evidence of its own destruction.Nature and culture, change and stability, old and new, construction and destruction: ‘A Stone from Metternich’s House in Bohemia’ suggests a series of binaries, then allows them collapse into one another. The stone is external to language, external to architecture, and external to the museum, but it is also thoroughly implicated in all of them, and in the broader human collective. Michael Connor is a writer and curator based in New York