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November 2, 2015 – Review
“Listen to the Stones, Think Like a Mountain”
Mihnea Mircan
Stones have been “in” for quite some time: in recent years the “artist as archaeologist” has been rubbing shoulders—and comparing excavation gear—with the artist as geologist or speleologist, figures who have thus far received less scrutiny. Curated by Evelien Bracke, “Listen to the Stones, Think Like a Mountain” borrows the two halves of its title from the novelist Marguerite Yourcenar and environmentalist Aldo Leopold respectively, with polymath (and mineralogist) Roger Caillois as a tutelary figure. While Leopold’s injunction to “think like a mountain” does not echo in or between the works, the exhibition succeeds when it is closest to Yourcenar’s homage to Caillois, who taught her to hold the gaze of stones.
A series of juxtapositions in the show capture a paradoxical relation to stones, which are both obstacles to thought—by the unthinkable expanses of time they conjure—and conduits for reverie—disruptive or illuminating encounters with inertia or oblivion. Their uncanny photogeny and millennial indifference engenders a particular form of attention, a listening to the enigmatic shapes and temporal densities stones carry, a reciprocation of their murmured solicitation. For Caillois, the same lattices of meaning meander through the earth’s crust, insect behaviour, ritual or “primitive” belief: pebbles arrest this universal syntax—the “algebra, …