21. Erratic affinities

Before Cavenago’s research on the erratic boulder, other artists had already released stone from its immobility.

Cavenago began building his erratics in 2018, but the question that work poses has a longer history. In the preceding decades, a few artists had already taken a boulder and set it in motion: copying it, planting it, dropping it, making it travel. They are neither models nor direct precedents. They are fellow travellers.

In 1981, with Essere fiume, Giuseppe Penone carves a stone until it is identical to the one smoothed by the river: copying a stone means repeating the work of the water (see 10. Repetition and difference).

In 1982, at documenta 7, Joseph Beuys has seven thousand basalt columns piled up in front of the Fridericianum in Kassel. Each stone will be planted beside a young oak, and the heap will gradually disappear as the city fills with trees. The boulder does not remain: it is consumed over time.

In 2007 Jimmie Durham drops a large volcanic boulder onto a car with a crane. The boulder becomes once again what it was in the Morgarten fresco: a falling mass.

In 2012 Michael Heizer has a 340-tonne boulder travel for eleven nights from the quarry to the museum in Los Angeles. Along the streets people gather to watch it pass. The glacier is replaced by a convoy, and the journey becomes part of the work.

The constructed erratic takes a different step. Cavenago does not copy a stone, consume it, drop it or transport it: he builds it. He starts from the cube and entrusts its transformation into a boulder to chance.

With Souvenir di montagna the boulder opens up. Emptied of its mass, it becomes a shelter, almost a bunker: a place to enter and from which to look at the landscape through the slits. Stone, which for the others remained an object to be looked at, moved or consumed, can here be inhabited.

These are erratic affinities: they share a question, not an answer.

Translation: Archivio Umberto Cavenago

Beuys, 7000 Eichen: a heap of basalt columns on the lawn in front of the Fridericianum in Kassel, 1982

Joseph Beuys, 7000 Eichen, documenta 7, Kassel, 1982: the basalt columns in front of the Fridericianum. On the frieze, the inscription by Lawrence Weiner.

Giuseppe Penone, Essere fiume: two almost identical stones side by side on a floor, black and white

Giuseppe Penone, Essere fiume, 1981
at Konrad Fischer’s gallery in Düsseldorf

Heizer, Levitated Mass: a huge granite boulder suspended above a concrete ramp, palm trees behind

Michael Heizer, Levitated Mass, 2012
Los Angeles County Museum of Art