Call of the Wild

"TWO STONES REST ON a plinth. They look identical-as nearly identical as two nonidentical things can look. Across each lumpy dark-gray spheroid cuts an uneven line. Their surfaces speckle with multicolored inclusions. If these objects were closer to perfect spheres, their mass distributed more evenly, their colors scattered less stochastically, then their similarity might not surprise us. As it is, their resemblance strikes us more powerfully with each matching detail."

"Only one of these stones really is a stone. The other is a sculpture, cast from bronze by Vija Celmins and painted to match the original. Millimeter by millimeter, she copied her model in all its idiosyncrasy, each gesture dictated by the minutest nuance on the surface of the object that she had before her eyes. The more her work succeeds, the more alike the stones look, the more they invite us to ask what makes them different."

"If I drill into one, I will expose a core of brazen metal. If drill into the other, I will find only more stone. By holding the form constant, Celmins isolates the matter. But what's so interesting about the contrast between bronze versus stone? Our fascination with these objects has less to do with the substances themselves than the divide for which they stand. The difference between bronze and stone is not like that between bronze and steel or granite and basalt."

Two nearly identical stones are presented, one real and one a bronze sculpture painted to match. The sculptor reproduced the model millimeter by millimeter, copying every surface idiosyncrasy. The visual success of the mimicry intensifies curiosity about difference and material. Drilling would disclose either metal or stone, isolating matter while keeping form constant. The contrast between bronze and stone foregrounds a deeper, categorical split: art as a human product and nature as what exists apart from humanmaking. The distinction is framed as binary, with no intermediate category between human artifice and nonhuman nature.

Read at Artforum