The Puzzle of Prehistory By Maria Stavrinaki
To put a puzzle together, you first need to recognize its pieces. People long visited caves, looking at the images painted on or carved into the walls without really seeing them; for even longer, mankind lived in the world without thinking for a moment that its age could be measured by studying its mineral matter. Of course, people walking in fields after a storm were surprised that all the freshly turned up stones were more or less of the same sort. The sudden appearance of these stones and the similarity of their shapes were a cause of astonishment reflected in the name they were given: “ceraunia” or “thunderstones.” Even when science began to solve the enigma by declaring that such stones had not descended from the heavens but were chipped by men thousands of years earlier, they still remained a source of amazement. Having “fallen” from the heavens, the enigmatic stones now formed part of the history of the earth: astonishment at lightning segued into astonishment at the vastness of time prior to human history. This was the scale of time now confronting modern man, the scale now measuring their reason and imagination.
When Dominique Robin, climbing the paths of Tuscany, observes smooth stones that have clearly suffered a sudden split, he re-enacts the stupefaction that lay behind the invention of prehistory in the eighteenth century. His stone puzzles are a distillation of stupefaction as a specific psychic, gnoseological, and metaphysical condition forming the foundation of modern man. This foundation, never solidified because it is forever unknowable, is foregrounded and activated by what André Leroi-Gourhan referred to as an operational chain—a coherent sequence of technical and symbolic processes intended to guarantee mankind an effective grasp of the world. Robin observes the geological world juxtaposed with the domesticated world, recognizing stones forming a co- herent whole within a shapeless whole. He collects the stones, puts the fragments back together to photograph them, or photographs and films someone else’s hands putting the puzzle together.
The seventy-million-year-old stones gathered by Robin split suddenly, as if to marry two theories believed by nineteenth-century geologists to be incompatible: Charles Lyell’s theory of the imperceptible slowness of geolog- ical movement and Georges Cuvier’s catastrophism, which posited rapid geological change. Slow and sudden at the same time: the formation, erosion, and splitting of the stones summarizes not only geological processes, but also the paths taken by modern thought as it sought to understand geology—scientific hypotheses, religious beliefs and human experiences projected onto the inhuman scale of geology, and above all the need to “tame” a world indifferent to mankind by imbuing it with meaning. The stones, split and scattered, are strikingly so for anyone sensitive to the moment of splitting, eager to project their emotions onto the blind behaviors of minerals to humanize their radical otherness and contrarily to “make wild” the tamely familiar. When hesitant hands, filmed by the artist, set about the puzzle, they in turn re-enact the invention of prehistory, expressing the same stupefaction at accidental shapes that can generate an image, then draw on that sense of stupefaction to turn obtuse stones into the pieces of a puzzle.
(Translated by Susan Pickford)
Maria Stavrinaki is a habilitated Associate Professor in history of contemporary art at the Université Paris I-Panthéon-Sorbonne. She is also curator of the exhibition PRÉHISTOIRE, UNE ÉNIGME MODERNE at Centre Pompidou (Beaubourg)
Autres articles
- Actualité Nouvelle Aquitaine, été 2017, Stone puzzles, p67. Numéro consacré aux sentiers et chemins. Texte et photos : D. Robin
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