Directions to a Gravel Quarry

Having been situated already at the site of extraction, the quarry, thanks to Shadi Harouni’s single channel video, The Lightest of the Stones (2015), we can operate at the intersection of art and use. These categories don’t really make poles. I’m following Lucy Lippard’s injunction to abandon the word “landscape” for “land use,” sitting in a dark corner observing dialogue exchanged by a cluster of men in front of a black mountain pumice quarry in Iranian Kurdistan, the site of a labor now profitless because of trade sanctions against Iran.

“It’s like this place was once boiling” (The Lightest of the Stones, 2015).

The oldest bedrock exposed in the New York City area is Fordham Gneiss, a billion-year-old deformed sequence of metasedimentary, metavolcanic, and metaplutonic rock that is exposed in the Bronx, with portions existing beneath the Cretaceous and overlying glacial sediment of Queens and Brooklyn, extending into the subsurface of Manhattan. The rock consists primarily of quartz, feldspar, mica(s), amphiboles, pyroxene, and garnet, usually with “accessory minerals” kyanite, sillimanite, epidote, and magnetite.

We know we’re interested in description, that writing can describe the world and remind us of where we are as a species, as bodies, capacities, and subjectivities. We know we’re interested in how observation is also fantasy and documentation is also imagination. In producing these objects, texts, experiences, we can imagine and demarcate other possibilities, impossible realities, and different kinds of permissible violence: like the violence of narration, of constructing alternative personal and cultural histories.

Directions to a gravel quarry: Take the George Washington Bridge to the Cross Bronx Expressway. Follow the Cross Bronx Expressway to the Whitestone Bridge. You will then be on the Whitestone Expressway. Take the Whitestone Expressway to Exit 14 (Linden Boulevard). Stay on the service road and go through three lights until the end. Then make a left onto College Point Boulevard. The terminal is a quarter-mile down the road on the right (before Best Concrete).

What if it becomes important to see “slow” and/or “death” as essential nonce taxonomies invested with strains of irrational, uncanny, disloyal, even cruel resistance to hegemonic notions of wealth and prosperity—as decidedly unheroic, but essential? If we do away with investments in fit-ness, longevity, and citizenship as a priori?

“There was a time this place was all molten iron” (Stones, 2015).

The word “todt” is a variant of the Dutch word for death, thought to refer to Todt Hill’s history as a burial ground and site of colonial violence against indigenous inhabitants by Dutch settlers. (The residue of violence restricts itself to a line of notation on signage posted at Sports Park, Toad Hall Playground, by the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation.) The first instances of iron mining in the New York City area have been traced back to the excavation of iron ore from the decomposition of serpentine rock on Todt Hill, Staten Island, in 1644.

“It could be extracted with relative ease” (Signage, Sports Park, New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, as part of the Historical Signs Project).

In her center room installation, Barb Smith displays “the things we keep” (Memory of a tiptoe…, Mixed media installation, 2016), “granite dust from a monument making shop in Queens, fine bone china rims, when all the color goes away, rubber cast of how to move in 1939.” Hardened—our word—object, memory foam soaked in resin in which her bodily form is impressed. “Chunk glass”; “sinking pewter.” These excavations aren’t without their languages, traumas, histories.