Leeds Arts University, 28th March 2019
Lisa Le Feuvre (LLF): You are an artist whose media are ideas and narrative. This narrative, you tell us, starts with a very particular encounter at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. It is the most amazing place for what it holds in its collection, for how it makes displays, for its antiquatedness, for its artistic resonance. Robert Smithson saw this as the most important museum that had ever existed. You started with a particular object in the collection.
Ilana Halperin (IH): Yes, it’s my favourite museum on Earth for many different reasons… It was always my dream to get into the stores of the American Museum of Natural History. I was introduced to Jamie Newman, a curator there, and she asked me what I wanted to see. Where do you start when someone asks what you want to see in the stores of a museum you have dreamed of visiting? There is a paralysis of over-excitement – so much to see, and no set path to begin from. I bounced the question back to Jamie and asked her which was her favourite object. She answered by going deep within the stores. She opened a drawer and took out a single crystal garnet the size of a large grapefruit, and deep blood-crimson red, announcing: ‘this is the Subway Garnet. This object is the most famous garnet on Earth because of where it was found.’ That place was 35th Street and Broadway – right in the heart of Manhattan, where I grew up.
LLF: That must have been quite a shock. So often we think the urban space is not the site of geological history.
IH: It blew my mind! It completely changed the way I understood my home city. I know New York in many ways, but I didn’t understand it as is as a site of potential geological phenomena, growth, and wonder. And that’s everything that was contained in this object. It had not been on view for decades. I asked Jamie if she had any other minerals from New York, and she said ‘yes, of course, we have a whole cabinet. They do not often get that much attention.’ Then, very casually, she said ‘you are very welcome to take a look.’ And I did.
There were a few hundred minerals in this set of drawers, and I incrementally worked my way through them. I felt this collection was astonishing, but I was overwhelmed. I decided to keep looking until something made sense. That was the encounter that started this all.
LLF: This garnet has a name. It has a classification, a drawer where there is a family of similar objects – a network formed by naming. Language is such a powerful thing. We use it and it eludes us, we use it for classification and often we try to break that naming to break assumptions. Naming makes an object different from others, it makes this garnet an exception. Why this object is called what it is? Was the Subway Garnet found in a subway?
IH: No! It was found in the sewer during an excavation in 1885. The city was drilling and preparing to build the sewer system near the site of the eventual subway system, and this object was found. A famous mineral collector named George F. Kunz donated it to the New York Mineralogical Club, and finally it made its way to the American Museum of Natural History. It was recognised as a beautiful, magnificent thing. I agree, it is. And I am sure the conversation went something like: ‘this is a beautiful, magnificent thing, we cannot call it “The Sewer Garnet.” It was found near the future subway construction site, so let’s call it “The Subway Garnet.” This iconic, magnificent name stuck.
LLF: Anyone who has ever worked in a museum knows that the public always want to get into the stores, and the truth is most museum workers feel the same. Many years ago, I worked at the National Maritime Museum in London and I would find every reason to go to the stores. Like most stores it was looked after by someone who rarely left the site, and who knew every story. I always wonder what it is about the storerooms that are so interesting… It is because they are not seen? Is it because there are stories? Potential discoveries?
IH: I think of it being like an iceberg: the collection on view is the top of the iceberg that you can see, and the stores are all the rest of the iceberg that you know is there but you don’t know what it is, how big it is, or what its volume is. I like slippery, difficult objects to categorise, impossible items to understand; things to work your way around, that are hiding in the drawers, that won’t sit as neatly within the curated collections on view. I’ve found that in every collection I’ve ever gone into.
LLF: We live on this planet, and we live in all kinds of places. It could be cities like Leeds, Glasgow and New York; it could be smaller places, or those locations in the American West where the population census records five people. The landscape, or earthscape, of this planet is first shaped by geological history – by glaciers, by time, by minerals. Then it is shaped by human history, and today there is no part of this planet that has not been shaped by both processes. When we collect these minerals we are doing a form of time-travel; we touch a time before we humans were here. My opinion is surely we now live in a world where there is no such thing as nature that has been untouched by humans. We are everywhere. Yet, geological processes will outlive us, and art history will be much longer than both of our short lives. Your artwork will outlive all of us.
IH: I like collapsing all of those notions of time together to see what might happen. What if we disassemble the idea that, as humans, we are the dominant geologic force? We have, in certain pragmatic and practical ways, altered the surface of the Earth, the air, the atmosphere and the ocean – and in potentially irreversible ways. And at the same time, we are material. We are mineral, geologic material, intimately connected to any other strata above or below in this system we might call Earth. I think, in an ethical context, we need to learn to live in a way where we take responsibility for thinking about how we are embedded in these layers. The question I want to ask is: what signature, what traces are we embedding in these layers narratively, physically, materially? I would like us to leave us a good layer. I may not be as interested in what counts as nature, and instead much more interested in embodied ways of embedding ourselves in a complex system of continual change that we are a part of.
LLF: So let’s think about this in relation to art history. Do you see your work sitting within a lineage of what’s known as, albeit not a term that I like, Land Art?
IH: I would say that I share the legacy of some questions Land Artists were engaged with looking at, thinking about, and experimenting with – that is, finding new ways of connecting to inside and outside the gallery. I was thinking yesterday about works by Robert Smithson like Glue Pour [1969] and Asphalt Run Down [1969]. I was also thinking about Splitting [1974] by Gordon Matta-Clark. This was in the context of being in an art school environment in Leeds with Minerals of New York. I was also thinking about some of my early days and works and early things I was inspired by. I couldn’t think of them out with a geologic context.
When I saw Glue Pour, all I could think about was lava. When I saw Splitting, I had been spending a lot of time in Iceland thinking about earthquake records, and all I could do was imagine Splitting in the context of a geologic event. And I still feel that way. I think I connect to a lot of the more ephemeral and gestural activities of Land Artists than to more permanent works. [Smithson’s essay] ‘A Sedimentation of the Mind’ was a revelation. It totally changed what kind of language I could use to try to articulate these ideas that were just starting to form. I was making the piece Boiling Milk Solfataras [1999] at the same time as thinking about these landmark artworks. I also made a variation gestural work because I was thinking so much about Glue Pour while in this Icelandic landscape context. In short, I ended up pouring milk down a hill in the middle of the city of Akureyri. I also ended up pouring skyr (an Icelandic yogurt-like substance) down the street. What instigated this latter action was a conversation with a local volcanologist who explained that if you want to understand lava there are two types: First ‘Aa,’ which is a really thick and viscous. It doesn’t flow, rather it is rocky and crunchy and moves very slowly. Second there is ‘Pahoehoe,’ a long liquid, it goes far – and it flows. The volcanologist told me that if I wanted to understand these two types of lava that I had just been experiencing out in the middle of the fissure row, which had been actively erupting from the 1970s to the mid80s, I should ‘go to the store, get yourself some milk, then get yourself a container of skyr and pour them down the hill. Then you will understand lava.’ So I did it.
LLF: Again, you are coming back to time – this time of the flow, this time of sinking into the earth. Perhaps one of the most temporal things we can ever understand is our own temporary nature. I wonder if the very gesture of making artwork is to make us more aware of the temporalities within which we exist.
IH: I totally agree, and it also reminds me of another concept in palaeontology: the concept of trace fossils. Inspired by the early writing of Smithson, I have accumulated an alternative geologic vocabulary. The term ‘geologic intimacy’ is one of those things. The term ‘autobiographical trace fossil’ is another. In paleontological terms, a trace fossil is a record of an action in life – it might be a dinosaur footprint, or it could be tiny air bubbles – breathing patterns from some ancient creature that floated to the surface of a mud pool. Then perhaps there is a change in the weather pattern, the breath dried out, got infilled with more mud and then, 250-million years later, it is cracked open and you see somebody breathing. A trace fossil records the actions of life, whereas a traditional fossil as we would understand it is a presentation of the moment of death. Kind of like an assemblage of death.
LLF: You talk about the fossils being an assemblage of life and death – surely you can’t have one without the other?
IH: You can’t have one without the other but, in a trace fossil you never see the organism, you only see the trace of what it was doing while it was alive. I wonder what happens if we consider each of us individually leaving a biographical trace fossil as a series of actions.
LLF: Then you are also talking about memory. In this exhibition we have different lines of temporality. So around us as we are talking, there beautiful drawings observing mineralogy. Then, in the slideshow, you are tracing a particular urban biography of a block in New York through remembered history that is personal.
IH: The 35mm slideshow is primarily composed of photographs that my mother, Gayle Portnow Halperin, took in 1986 when the neighbourhood that I grew up in—the Upper West Side in New York City—was undergoing an intense wave of gentrification, the first wave of yuppie gentrification. The block from 86th Street to 87th Street and Broadway, which was linked to the building where I grew up, was mainly ‘mom-and-pop stores’ as we would describe them; or in British English, family-owned shops. Many of the businesses had been there for decades. Anything you needed to do in your life you could do on that block, and suddenly all of them were being closed and demolished. Before the shops shuttered up my mother interviewed each of the retailers to ask them ‘how long has this shop been here?’ and ‘will you close for good or will you be moving?’ Then, she would take a photograph of the shopfront and signage and some people in the neighbourhood. She set out to capture the feeling of the block before it was completely demolished.
[…]
LLF: This project is very much a biography that focuses on the minerals of New York. You now live in Glasgow, and you are temporarily here in Leeds. Have you thought what would be a mineral biography of Glasgow? I know you don’t know Leeds that well, but what is your immediate thought of a mineral biography of this city?
IH: Before I came I had been wondering about the geological history of Leeds. Thinking about what’s underneath the ground, what’s above, and what’s below. One the one hand we can consider any city to be a series of geological core samples that incorporate personal histories, geological histories, biological histories, mineral histories, political histories, cultural histories. And they are all entangled together. Any city can explore itself through time, including deep time. Wool is an example of an embodied layer of strata within the history of Leeds, in the same way as the foundational bedrock.
LLF: What about Glasgow?
IH: Glasgow! My second home city! Well – first the Fossil Grove comes to mind, which is an incredible 330-million-year-old petrified tree grove in the middle of the city, but after that, I automatically connect Glasgow to what’s outside of it. Glasgow is intrinsically connected to the hills. I live part-time on the Isle of Bute, and that is a really volcanic island. It also has a really dynamic geology, so it has a very full mineral history in a different way. You can find garnets there. Scotland has a very similar mineral history, in parts, to New York. Rocks that are really old that have melted over time, over and over again. It is also a very nice way to think back to New York as a city with people that are from everywhere, and so is the landmass. And when we think that the west of Scotland was connected to part of Greenland, was connected to part of Norway, to Appalachia. And actually any territory that you are on has been somewhere else before and travelled. Rocks are really the first immigrants.
[…]
LLF: What about the physicality of the research you are doing? You talked about looking at the minerals, but did you also touch them?
IH: Yes. I must admit, because of the access I was getting, I had to be hyper-aware and very careful. Coming back out of the museum and into a mineral awareness of the city, I always come back to mica. New York is a city of mica. It’s a really egalitarian mineral, it’s everywhere, it sparkles, it’s glorious and totally accessible…
Audience question (Howard Eaglestone): You are building intelligence into this material. If one thinks about archaeological drawings, they tend to convey information, but your drawings have imagination.
IH: I think that gets to the heart of them. They are not trying to illustrate the mineral but to get a sense of it. I think it is a leap to say I am having a conversation with them. That would be a step too far, but I am spending time with that mineral, trying to get to know it. Your words remind me of a volcanologist William Melson. He spent 40 years working on the same volcano, and when talking to him I was likening his experience in some ways to my burgeoning relationship with the Eldfell Volcano, in Iceland (which formed the same year I was born). That is a really long relationship, longer than most marriages, and I asked ‘Do you miss it? Do you think about it?’ He said that ‘you love what you get to know…this is not a passive form of love, this is how I feel. I don’t need to see the volcano to know that I love it, just as I don’t need to see my daughters to know that I love them.’ This is what I have been doing with the minerals. I know and love them, and have been building an incremental relationship with them, and so for drawing them I allowed myself to have a fluidity with them in terms of that relationship. I am not trying to replicate them. For a mineralogist these are probably highly inaccurate, but I don’t mind because this isn’t what I am trying to do with them. I am trying to cultivate a different kind of story.
LLF: I want to close on two very particular things that I think are going to stay with me for much longer than today. One is this importance of developing a relationship with minerals. What does that mean? Relationships are about building time, about respect. Of being present through memory and imagining. The other is this idea of rocks being the first immigrants. Perhaps we can take this further, it is not just on this terrestrial territory. It goes beyond that. Art is something that really matters, that has something to teach us about being human. Your art is the perfect case in point.
Conceived and transcribed by Dr Catriona McAra. Edited for The Hunterian by Lauren Cross and Dominic Paterson. A full transcript appears in Felt Events, a book on Halperin’s work, edited by Dr McAra.
Lisa Le Feuvre is the inaugural Executive Director of Holt/Smithson Foundation, an artist-endowed foundation dedicated to furthering the creative legacies of the Nancy Holt (19382014) and Robert Smithson (1938-73). Le Feuvre’s research takes the form of exhibitions, publications, collections and public lectures. She has curated exhibitions in museums and galleries across Europe, published her writings in international publications and journals, spoken in museums and universities across the world and has played a pivotal role in shaping academic and arts organisations.