‘… memory is not an instrument for exploring the past, but rather a medium. It is the medium of that which is experienced, just as the earth is the medium in which ancient cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.’
Walter Benjamin, ‘Excavation and Memory’ (1932)
‘Nature, like a person, is not one-sided.’
Robert Smithson, ‘Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape’ (1973)1
Ilana Halperin’s Minerals of New York is at once a history of a city, a portrayal of the deep geological past, and a self-portrait (of sorts). It is made up of multiple elements that constellate around Halperin’s fascination with mineral treasures that were uncovered as the infrastructure of modern New York was dug out beneath the streets of Manhattan, her childhood home. In the exhibition we encounter geological specimens, meticulously observed drawings of such specimens, a photograph relating to the history of amateur mineralogy in New York, and a conceptual map that allows us to track the artist’s thinking and to locate the subject matter of her drawings on the city’s famous grid. We find a readymade sculpture of sorts – a fragment of real museum signage, hinting at Halperin’s formative interest in the display and interpretation of natural history, which is echoed too in the brass lettering which reiterates the exhibition’s title. And, not least, we hear the artist’s voice narrate the relationships between all these elements and more as she soundtracks a slideshow of photographs of the Upper West Side of Manhattan taken by her mother in the 1980s. Here the personal, intimate landscapes of one person’s singular biography are overlaid on a visual record of a city in transition, as real estate developers move in to bulldoze and build anew, and ever-higher, on its firm geological foundations.
An insistence that human lives, urban histories, and geological realities need to be understood in relation to each other runs throughout this exhibition, as it does through the artist’s practice more widely. In an argument that has deep resonance with Halperin’s work, the philosopher Manuel de Landa writes of human existence as supported both by a ‘mineralisation’ within us—the evolution of bone as a support for flesh and for movement—and one without, namely the creation of towns and cities that function as complex social exoskeletons. His reading allows us to see Halperin’s reference to a ‘mineral biography’ as more than a metaphor: ‘We live in a world populated by structures—a complex mixture of geological, biological, social, and linguistic constructions that are nothing but accumulations of materials shaped and hardened by history…. In turn, these synergistic combinations, whether of human origin or not, become the raw material for further mixtures. This is how the population of structures inhabiting our planet has acquired its rich variety, as the entry of novel materials into the mix triggers wild proliferations of new forms.’2
At one level, then, Minerals of New York offers a history that looks back at these formative mineralisations. At another, however, it corresponds to the urgent call made by theorist Donna Haraway for forward-thinking ways of grasping our place within the entwined man-made and natural worlds we inhabit today, beyond conventions derived from scientific taxonomy and grand political narratives. ‘All the thousand names are too big and too small; all the stories are too big and too small,’ Haraway writes, ‘we need stories (and theories) that are just big enough to gather up the complexities and keep the edges open and greedy for surprising new and old connections.’3
Questions of scale and of connection are indeed central to this exhibition. Halperin’s tender depictions of minerals are remarkable in their contemplation of interwoven timespans of greatly varying dimensions. At once they figure the time of their own making, the time that the minerals depicted spent within museum collections as exemplars of their kind, the moments (and places) of their discovery by human hands excavating modern New York, the deep time of their terrestrial formation, and even the cosmically distant time of their celestial beginnings. ‘Size determines an object, but scale determines art,’ wrote Robert Smithson, an artist important to Halperin as to many others.4 Though she reaches back through millennia, Halperin’s artistic treatment of temporal vastness allows it to be perceived and understood at human scale, with her own biography becoming a key measure. Looking at her drawings with this in mind, we might consider them not only as painstaking records of objective observation, but also as a process of empathetic connection with the very stuff of life and experience. In this way, Halperin’s ongoing concern with how we relate to natural history has a subtle ecological dimension too, asking us to think differently about terrestrial existence at a moment of incipient catastrophe.
Haraway’s thinking might again help us map this dimension of Halperin’s art. Haraway proposes the phrase “Make Kin Not Babies!” as a political slogan for our era, arguing that ‘if there is to be multispecies ecojustice, which can also embrace diverse human people, it is high time that feminists exercise leadership in imagination, theory, and action to unravel the ties of both genealogy and kin, and kin and species. … Who and whatever we are, we need to make-with—become-with, compose-with—the earth-bound… I think that the stretch and recomposition of kin are allowed by the fact that all earthlings are kin in the deepest sense, and it is past time to practice better care of kinds-as-assemblages (not species one at a time). Kin is an assembling sort of word.’5 In assembling the materials of her own life in a cocomposition with New York’s mineral history, Halperin enacts precisely the kind of expansive ‘making kin’ that Haraway sees as essential in our current ecological predicament. This ‘making kin’ is played out here also in a suite of earlier works by Halperin which figure her longstanding affinity for the Eldfell volcano in Iceland. Eldfell erupted in 1973, burying some 400 local houses in lava. That this natural event uncannily echoed Smithon’s Partially Buried Woodshed (1970) in a particularly dramatic instance of life imitating art was not lost on Halperin. But 1973 was also the year of her birth, and she decided to celebrate her 30th birthday in the company of the volcano, treating it as a kind of terrestrial twin. Drawings, a photograph, a mineral sample and a text from Halperin’s Eldfell project are held in The Hunterian’s permanent collection and join the Minerals of New York works here to offer a larger view of the artist’s oeuvre. Another early piece shown here, Boiling Milk Solfataras (1999), underscores the lightness of touch by which Halperin achieves the integration of cultural acts with natural phenomena.
It should be noted that the ecological is not the only political register here. In Halperin’s ‘mineral biography’ of New York epochal events in human history register at the edges of her storytelling, as tremors or fissures in the eons-long history of the earth. But they are no less affecting for that. As her slideshow narration alludes to the AIDS crisis, the politics of queer parenthood, to World War II, or as we hear her subtly intimate the deaths of relatives in the Holocaust, we are asked to relate to both the city and to mineralogy as possible sites of memory, as vectors of profound meaning and deep emotion. Her own biography emerges in this narrative as enmeshed with others, and with non-human materials and processes that might also be given a form of ‘biographical’ accounting. Halperin’s gift for making the artefacts of natural history into the subjects of stories finds expression not only in the slideshow, but also in her ‘map drawing’ and in the illuminating conversation with curator Lisa le Feuvre reproduced within the pages of this booklet. She offers us stories that, like those Haraway wishes for, gather up our complexities while keeping things open. Like the so-called ‘Subway Garnet,’ which is perhaps the most spectacular of the minerals found beneath New York, Halperin’s vision of human life on the earth is multi-faceted, crystalline and revelatory.
1 Robert Smithson, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, (Berkeley: University of California Press), p. 161.
2 Manuel de Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, (NY: Swerve, 2000), p. 25-6.
3 Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, (Duke University Press, 2016), p. 101
4 Smithson, ‘Spiral Jetty,’ in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, p. 147.
5 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, p. 102.