File Note 10: Ilana Halperin

A colleague — a museum-based geologist — was recently seeking an art historical perspective on what might be the more curious ways of his profession; the practices that differentiate art curator from geology curator; the underlying differences in patterns of collecting, interpretation, and display. On the face of it, the distinctions appear clear enough; the gallery curator uses a series of more or less developed forms of aesthetic determination to refine (and even possibly, on occasion, extend) a canon from which collections and exhibitions are selected and staged. There appears to be no similar canon of geological value around which the geologist can work; the prize geological exhibit is, to some extent, always under our feet — our planet an almost infinite repository of geological stories, a limitless store of the specimens through which those stories can be told. The geologist tramps towards a distant horizon, stops, picks up a rock and either hits it with a hammer, puts it in his bag, or discards it. Once examined, turned over in the hand, even the act of being discarded in favour of the next rock cannot undo the process which briefly identified that one tiny fragment of the Earth as an object laden with potential for documentation, taxonomic disputation and finally public interpretation. Once chosen however, rarely is it the raw rock of the ground beneath our feet which the museum geologist brings to our attention; the objects from which layman and expert discover the physical structure of our planet are shaped and polished to conform to clearly defined scientific and aesthetic criteria. Chance has intervened to change the very nature of this shard; the geologist’s glance and the blow of a hammer accomplishes what millions of years of geological process could not — a removal from the generality of our planet’s crust and a reinvention as an object existing in human time and experience.

A more subtle perspective emerges — an interpretation of the museum geologist’s role as more akin to the artist than the gallery curator; the un-coverer of potential for detailed interrogation among the infinite possibilities presented by our every step through the world; the producer of a commodity which mediates through a clearly defined aesthetic between ourselves and almost everything around us; the teller of stories about ourselves and where and how we stand in relation to here and now and not here and not now.

For the most part, humanity rests comfortable in the thought that geological inquiry interrogates passages of time which are almost unfathomably of the ‘not now’. Our experience of the geological ‘now’ is too apocalyptic to be confronted more closely than through the newsman’s telescopic lens; earthquake, volcano and landslide all put before us challenges to our sense that geology is something that happened in the mists of time and that humanity, by contrast, is what is happening now. There are, however, places on the planet where this relationship between the human and the geological undergoes a seismic shift; geologist or not, to take a journey through the landscape of Iceland is to realise that geological time is indefatigably ‘now’. For an artist, to make such a journey is to realise that cataclysmic human events, even at the most personal level, conceal and manifest themselves no less enigmatically in the individual than do the processes of geology in that shard, collected by Halperin, from the crest of the Eldfell volcano. The very encounter with a living landmass confounds our daily assumptions about relationships with our pasts, our presents and our futures. Once among the lava flows and steaming craters, geological process manifests itself as less cataclysmic entropy than creative energy — past catching up with future, the forces of entropy fusing with those of creativity.