Designer Rocks
Written by d/visible contributor Catherine G. Wagley
posted on Monday, July 14th, 2008
Carmine Iannaccone’s wood-laminate renderings of rocks are as much about love as they are about materialism, history and landscape. Rocks and romance go hand-in-hand. And not just in the conventional, precious gems sense.
In an angsty ballad by literary rock band Okkervil River, the narrator laments his lover’s disinterest. “You love a stone,” he sings. “You love white veins/ you love hard grey/ . . . the hollowest tone.” Though the song tells of love gone wrong, it also gives a surprisingly tender picture of a stone’s idiosyncrasies. The narrator continues, “And I think I believe that/ if stones could dream/ they’d dream of being laid/ side-by-side/ piece-by-piece/ and turned into a castle/ for some towering queen/ they’re unable to know.” With barely a hint of sarcasm, the song gives stones projected “feelings.” Distinguishing its nuances and personifying its emotions romanticizes an object more effectively than anything else. Usable Histories, Iannaccone’s recent exhibition at SolwayJones Gallery, may not be a literary love song, but it’s not too far off.
The nuances of rocks have been an object of human fascination for centuries. By the time of China’s Song dynasty, collected rocks had become established trappings of scholarly study. These scholars’ rocks could stand in for the natural landscape, encompassing all the gradations of the natural world and inspiring thinkers and artists. But not just any rock would do. Scholars’ rocks were the carefully, naturally designed products of erosion and, during the earlier Tang dynasty, a set of criteria had been established: acceptable scholars’ rocks had thinness, openness, perforations, and wrinkling. Natural processes designed the rocks to perfection, but humans determined whether or not a rock was scholarly enough.
The modern, Western instantiations of rock collection and design seem more like conquests. Nature can execute the initial blueprint, but we’ll take over after the sediments have formed. Geology and scholarship aside, a slew of consumer products exist to help people with their stone-collecting fetishes: grinders, tumblers, diamond blades, even kits that allow you to transfer family photos into the surfaces of polished gems. We apparently can’t help but project our own standards of beauty onto rocks, honing and designing them so that they fit our aesthetic purposes. It’s this conquistador mentality that leads to sculpted garden rocks, coffee table rocks and strategically arranged rocks in urban landscapes.
Iannaccone’s designed “rocks,” called Eccentric Boulders, maintain a reverence for natural processes while also dialoguing with contemporary rock conquistadors. His sculptures are, of course, not actually rocks at all, but layers of hardwood plywood that mimic layers of sediment. The rock-making process begins with a template. From this template, Iannaccone machine-cuts the parts and assembles the rocks. At first, each is exactly the same. But he carves into the individual structures, distinguishing them from each other. Even this distinguishing process is systematic, and a code number on the side of each form differentiates its design. The resulting forms have a collective identity—all seem to belong to the same sedimentary tribe—but each also has a distinct personality. Near the left wall, two small boulders hold up a larger, horizontal boulder, creating a precarious bridge. The smaller forms have clearly distinguishable gradations, while the larger boulder is a denser slab of wood. Another rock, standing vertically in front of the entrance to the back room, looks pert and delicate because of the way its thin plywood layers stand apart from each other. If caught in a landslide, it would likely shatter.
Iannaccone’s meticulous process is intriguing on its own, but the resulting forms would be striking even without their back story. Through the open door of SolwayJones Gallery, the rocks look like a peaceful band of bodies. They belong in that space and they seem completely at ease, having found a way to retain their natural integrity while still interacting with the commercial urban landscape. The sculptures, though buyable objects, question what it means to design, commercialize and appropriate the anatomy of nature.
Iannaccone has brought a miniature version of Intelligent Design into the 21st Century. The biblical accounts that form the basis for Intelligent Design describe God’s divine creation of all the universe’s nuances. Humans, animals, and landscapes had carefully thought-through purpose and meaning. Romantic painters and landscape artists of the 18th and 19th Centuries imbued their renderings of nature with a sense of the divine and, though the idea of Intelligent Design has been complicated and widely rejected in light of theories of evolution, artists still explore the notion that nature has an intentioned, meaningful form.
Iannaccone’s sculptures make this idea tangible. Using what he knows about sedimentation, Iannaccone constructs natural forms that do have intentional meaning. Because of their painstakingly crafted structures, the Eccentric Boulders embody both the history of romanticized landscape art and cultural fascinations with rocks, from Scholars’ Rocks to pet rocks to business park boulders. Instead of rejecting Western culture’s commercial relationship to landscape, these re-embodied rocks imbue that commercialism with a sense of natural and cultural history.
The Eccentric Boulders exhibit both pragmatism and romanticism. On the one hand, the rocks have been systematically designed in response to natural phenomena. On the other hand, the fact that Iannaccone designed rocks at all suggests a passion for natural anatomies. The tender attention to idiosyncrasy and nuance furthers the romantic aspect of the exhibition. Iannaccone treats rocks the way designer Hubert de Givenchy treated the immaculate dresses he designed for Audrey Hepburn, or the way Okkervil River’s song treats each attribute of the unresponsive but lovable stone. If stones could dream, they’d probably dream of being laid side by side, piece by piece, in a fraternity of forms like the one Iannaccone has arranged. They’d be treated affectionately and judiciously, made to nobly interact with their past and with their contemporary climate.
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