When is a rock not a rock?

People who read this chronic screed must know that I subscribe to way too many magazines.  Well, I protest weakly, I'm interested in a lot of things, and magazines give me easy little bites of this and that.

Sometimes they deliver the unexpected.  This afternoon I was relaxing in the tub, belatedly paging through the June number of Modern Painters (which, as I've pointed out here, is an art journal that goes far afield from painting) – and I came across an article that might have appeared, tongue in cheek, in Astronomy or Sky and Telescope.  It's about two artists, Katie Paterson and Cornelia Parker, who both want to use meteorites as artistic mediums.

Paterson has a postmodern idea that's not going to warm the hearts of any astronomers.  She wants to make a mold of a substantial meteorite, then melt the meteorite down, and recast it in its own form.  It's a pretty interesting po-mo statement, but in terms of science it's just plain vandalism.  All relevant information is lost – including, actually, the composition of the meteorite, since there wouldn't be any attempt to save or measure volatiles.

On the other hand, a meteorite is an object, which can be bought.  She's looking for a substantial one, about 150 kilograms, maybe half a meter wide.  (Googling, I found a 106-kg. one for – price lowered! -- $96,400.  Hope she's good at writing grants.) 

Still, art is art, and objets d'art are objects.  I could buy a drawing by Leonardo, shred it, bleach the shreds, and turn it back into a piece of paper, and then write upon that piece of paper a villanelle about the process.  No reasonable person would deny that the result is a piece of art, though even I, the artist, would admit that it also was irreversible  vandalism.

Cornelia Parker has less destructive ideas for performance art done with meteorites.  She would like to shoot one back into orbit, an idea that kind of tickles me (NASA wouldn't give her a rocket, though, because she's not a U.S. citizen).   She's put a ground-up Chinese meteorite into a fireworks display, appropriate on a couple of levels.  Her most interesting act, though, was throwing a tektite (a kind of meteorite blasted from the lunar surface) into a lake in Boston in the middle of the night.  By the morning she had commemorated the event with aluminum signs reading "At the Bottom of this Lake Lies a Piece of the Moon 2000."

I do cringe a little at the loss of exhibit materials, but have to admit I kind of love this stuff.   Art and science kicked off the rails by imagination.

Joe