"Tearing Granite"

This blog has remained dormant for some time due to my focused attention on developing my prospectus and the dissertation chapters themselves.  However, I would like to take this opportunity to awaken it with the sounds of granite that I heard last evening at a musical performance taking place and involving a exposition of Jesús Moroles's sculptures.  My brother played about an hour of music with three other musicians.  Each part consisted of a site of improvisation.  They circled around different sites, utilizing the different textures and tones of the granite itself, often waiting on the stone itself to finish the composition.

Much of my current research has been thinking about globalization and local identities in Iberia through ecological representations of cultural identity.  One helpful productive lens to think about these issues has been object-oriented thinking, represented by the thought of Graham Harman, Timothy Morton, Levi Bryant and Ian Bogost.  After working through difference parts of my prospectus and thinking a bit about the role of nonhumans in esthetics, I attended my brother's concert.  About 10 to 15 minutes in, I impulsively started taking notes on how the granite seemed to be speaking as much as (if not more than) each of the humans involved in the performance.  The following is a summary of the notes I took.

The performance might be seen as a mode of encountering, rendering or summoning.  Primarily, sounds were the consequence of mallets, sticks and tuning forks striking the granite formations.  This encounter in turn renders a sonic scale of effects from the stone itself.  Importantly, these sounds would have remained absent, if the performers (and the audience) had remained at a comfortable normal distance from the art objects.  Yet, with Moroles, the spectator becomes a performer and summons these qualities of the granite.  Qualities, for Moroles, that were "born of fire."

There is more to be said about what is actually being summoned in such an encounter.  I would describe it as a summoning of nonhuman time and space scales.  If the musician were simply expected to leave the instruments untouched, there would be no cause to the sounding out of the rock.  Instead what began was a musicality of causation, a summoning of something we, as viewers, had to wait on.  The rock provided the final cesura.  It is the granite that is performing just as much as any of the human performers.  From the audience's point of view, we remained in a limbo of waiting, a kind of spectatorship of waiting.  This waiting was a way of slowing down the duration of music.  It was a way of imbuing the sonic textures of granite into the composition.  Our expectations mutated as time slowed down.

As mentioned above, each part was a loosely structured improvisation.  Yet there was composition with each of the elements at work in each site.  Each site provided a particular kind of sounding out of the sculpture This sounding out leads to another way of considering the encounter between each objects as enclosed within a larger envelope: a table, a chessboard, or a large circular stone, for example.  These envelopes served as points of contact between the different instruments and, in fact, changed how each object interacted.  In Heidegger's terms, the situatedness of these objects provided different arranged "moods" for each moment.

The net result, I think, is what might be called slow creating, after Moroles's own term, a tearing or severing.  What is most interesting here is how the performance and the medium of the sculptures themselves are not entirely within our control.  Instead, it's the granite performing just as much as anyone else.