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prologue
This is a book of stones doing something different from what people expect of stones. They stand improbably, carried to the edge or thrown into interdependence, and balancing on a precipice of their own making. And they seem to be of this very moment, in the viewing, impermanent, revealed as they are, enjoined in a further nature.
I call them axial, a word I use somewhat idiosyncratically to draw attention to a certain state of being—free being, or being coming into its natural state as free. This said, I willingly acknowledge that this state does not sit well or long in any definition, and indeed it sheds definitions through the force of its further appearance. I seem endlessly to be saying what it is, provisionally, perhaps because it’s my bent to do so, or because, as I think, once you get a sense of the axial you can’t resist trying to say, or show, what it is.
What is clear is that the axial is not a thing: not a philosophy; not a religion; not an aesthetic; in short, not itself any of the many ways that can be used to understand it. It’s more like a space, a worked space—an intentional state of awareness in which something unpredicted occurs: a unique event resulting in what seemingly embodies its origin and yet itself is original. At once unchanging and nonrepeating.
I call this result art because it carries unprecedented traces of its own generation and inclines to make more of itself. And I speak here of axial stones because, well, here they are, and in my view they speak for themselves. It took nearly 2,000 photos to get the small number that make up this book, where the standard was conveying not so much the object as the event.
What do they say in speaking for themselves? They speak the specific impact they have on viewer as on maker, which may include removing all sense of statement, at least for an instant, a blank mind following startle. They affect the body; they resonate through bodies. In some sense they are a specific state of resonance. It’s almost as if they ask to be seen by the whole body, not just eyes. Touch would tell more, but they’re far too precarious to permit touch; in fact, they’re rather dangerous. Yet the impact is “toucherly” if only by way of refusal to be touched, and touching in the felt lack of desired contact. They stand there in their precarious balance, attracting and refusing. Perhaps they bespeak a sense of zero, emptied of everything but their own unlikely emergencestones momentarily absent of the gravity of stones, while emanating the threat of grave consequences, should one transgress.
The axial is what makes these stones what they are as you see them; that is, in the way that they appear and in the process by which you see them. The axial is what presents them thus, at the horizon of their own event. For me, after some years of making them, to experience the event is to be awake at the horizon.
open axis
Sooner or later everything turns, and turning requires an axis, usually invisible. The Earth, the Sun, Jupiter, and people have at least one thing in common—they are bodies that move on an axis, whether axis mundi or spine. When the axis is open—that is, released, not forcefully held in place—things turn freely, subtly moving in and out of balance. Keeping the axis open and aware produces the state I have been calling the axial. For a human being (used to more or less walking “upright” rather than on all fours) to keep her or his own dynamic axis open requires a certain process of awareness, indeed a practice or discipline. There are many body-centered techniques, both Eastern and Western, for observing and preserving the health of the axis. These techniques somehow focus the senses directly on the axis (as spine, inner column, or whatever), toward discovering its role with respect to what may be considered the center. Center as a “dynamism,” or perhaps an intensively contained field of motion with feedback, rather than fixture of control or defense.
Art (broadly defined) has the potential to perform such a sense-based discipline of the axial, which could be thought of as a dynamic self-mentoring through the “medium” of the physical body. I have been interested in the possibility that when an art develops a disciplined awareness of the axial, its stance may be more “naturally” open to continuous change and discovery, perhaps deliberate innovation as well, but without necessarily valorizing innovation as such. Whether or not this is a generally applicable notion, I have found it to be a powerful way to think about art in relation to principle. It seems that the axial sense of art thrives best in an environment that values the unexpected, the unprecedented, and the radically new (which may or may not apply to the “avant-garde” sensibility). Joy, rather than, or at least equal to, fear before the unknown and the unnamable.
It also seems to follow from this way of thinking that, for an artist to enter into “the state of the axial,” she or he must be willing to be somehow “rediscovered”—or to be in such a state of flexibility that continuous change becomes normative. To some degree this describes the state of art itself, or at least what one might expect from art. After all, “axial” could be another name for “verse,” what develops through continuously “turning.” Yet there is something to be said for emphasizing a state of further axiality and its relatively high degree of precariousness. In this view the axial is, by definition, quite unstable, if axis is understood in relation to actual physical environments, always in flux. The “art” part emphasizes what might be called a willing instability.
Contrary to a “common sense” or otherwise consensual view, this instability is understood, implicitly if not always explicitly, to be fundamentally healthy. And, notwithstanding an intelligent mistrust of claims for the therapeutic value of art (especially if the claim promotes one art or method or style over another), we might entertain a non-invidious suggestion of benefit connected to the axial, the free state, an activated and activating state of possibility. This is tricky business, to be sure; and nothing is riskier—or more obviously contrary to the axial!—than privileging one set of values over another. And claims of “a deep and ancient wisdom of art”—a tempting notion in certain moods of enthusiastic embrace of possibility—too easily lead to Golden Age nostalgia, metaphysical revival, dogma and, frankly, a rigidity in the very insistence on flexibility. This would be to promote an “ideal” state, rather than inquire into what in any given instance is optimal.
“One law for the Lion & Ox,” wrote Blake, “is Oppression.”