Litho-morphosis: Encounters beyond the human

By Stefanie Heine 

Nina Nowak’s works seem like dead bodies that defy clear-cut categories: zooming in and zooming out, scaling up and scaling down, they move back and forth between large and small, from mountains with expansive tunnel systems to grains of sand. The temporal dimension reaches from the vast span of deep time to the fleeting moment I saw a beetle passing by in the folds of a marl sculpture in front of ARKEN on a drizzly evening in May 2022. When I had visited the piece Material World Pt.I, Equilibrium Tide a day earlier, it looked different: no water was dripping on the stone from the pipe above, the color was a brighter ochre, the crevices darker and more starkly delineated in the sunlight. 

I wonder how the sculptures appeared inside, unexposed to the elements, in the Gallery Susanne Ottesen a year earlier, as part of A Timeline starting on the Surface. Material World Pt. I. As the title already suggests, what we see at ARKEN is a continuation of this earlier work. In fact, all the works presented in this book are interconnected. Nowak’s projects resist conceptions of the artwork as one stable, isolated piece: if you look from either of the two marl sculptures near the museum to the pipes looming over them and move your gaze along the pipe, you meet water, and then a machine to which the pipes are connected; you realize that the water dripping on the stone is related to this automaton. If you look at the water again and follow its course, you notice it is not a contained lake but a lagoon, connected to the ocean. And the ocean is what makes the machine work: linked to the rising and falling tide, it moves collected rainwater up and down, transporting it into the pipes and on the stones. If the water is as integral to the work as its obvious elements, the stones, pipes and machine, so are the atmosphere and the ocean—and where do these end? Nowak’s works are full of such entanglements, even composed of them. Extending into their environment, they cannot be divorced from their spatial context; neither can they be divorced from their temporal context—their borders become indeterminable. In talking about Equilibrium Tide, I am also, to some extent, talking about A Timeline starting on the Surface and Meet me at the Beachbecause their multiple elements are inextricably linked through the transfer of material elements and the interweaving of narrative threads.    

Nowak’s works may best be described as hybrid material-semiotic assemblages in Donna Haraway’s sense,[1] and one of their major characteristics is the unsettling of boundaries: between inside and outside, organic and inorganic, human and non-human, positive and negative space, micro and macro levels, past, present and future. Assemblages consist of a wide variety of entangled elements and are caught in a movement of continual becoming; they never reach a fixed state.[2] Nowak’s installations offer us some concrete terms for capturing how they work as assemblages: for example, the artist calls the pipes and the automaton at ARKEN prosthetic, bodily extensions. Nowak’s assemblages are bidirectional: some of the heterogeneous elements reach outwards, through extensions, while others are encapsulated inside and layered through folds and strata. Zooming in the following in and out of Material World Pt.I, Equilibrium Tide, I will explore some of the extensions and layers that make up Nowak’s works. 

Let us start with matter, materialities and bodies. Bordering on the amorphous, the stone sculptures nonetheless suggest certain figural resemblances. Oscillating according to perspective and angle as you move around them, a varied set of resemblances emerge in regarding the sculptures. Their surfaces remind one, by turn, of folded cloth, human skin or dried leaves, smooth textile, wrinkled flesh, or shriveled plant tissue. From a distance, the sculptures look like solidified viscous matter, chunks of dried lava maybe. Moving closer, you see entire mountains, vast landscapes. 

The sculptures are embedded in the surrounding grass, through which the pipes lead until they meet reeds and then water; maybe some algae has grown on them by now. Here we see the interaction of art and environment, turn from resemblance to material proximities and entanglements. Over time, unexpected “kinships”[3] emerge. Different animals become occasional and habitual visitors: the beetle I saw is most likely only one of many insects who have walked across the stones; fish may have investigated the pipes underwater. A couple of ducks started using the automaton as their regular resting place. Kayakers passing by in the water might wonder about the strange machine while museum visitors are look at it with an aesthetic lens, trying, maybe, to interpret and contextualize it.

While the human and non-human agents engage with the installation in their own distinct ways, they are not entirely independent of one another. In ARKEN’s sculpture park, their paths and gazes will cross; on a larger scale, we are acutely aware that human activity has had a drastic influence on the earth’s climate and ecosystems. The exhibition started during the sunniest spring ever recorded in Denmark, and the driest one in 26 years—while Pakistan meanwhile was hit by devastating floods. It is hard not to be reminded of this fact when looking at and thinking about Material World Pt. I, Equilibrium Tide. The presence or absence of water dripping on the stones point to intricate environmental dynamics. This in mind, the copper oxide coloring—which makes the rock look wet even when no water is dripping from the pipes—might now evoke a toxic spill. The rocks might trigger a vision of a future world turned to desert while simultaneously bringing our imaginations far back into the past. 

The material components of the marl sculptures point to a time before humans existed, when lithic matter itself was forming. Marlstone incorporates fossils, so the beetle I saw was walking over the remains of long dead animals, most of them—perhaps all of them—long since extinct. As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen beautifully describes, “[a] common mode of petrogenesis (creation of stone) unfolds when tiny ocean dwellers settle in their mortuary billions to the subsea muck. Limestone[4] is a thick cemetery of mineral that had become animal now become rock again”.[5] Referring to the long tradition of using limestone as material for art (e.g. as a favored stone of the sculptors of the Italian quattrocento)[6], he further argues: “We create art with stone because we recognize the art that stone discloses: fossils, a museum of strata”.[7]We will now enter the museum of strata Nowak’s works present. 

“Stone’s archival force”[8] is unleashed not only in the material history it contains but also through the stories it is interspersed with. Such layered stories and histories are further elements of Nowak’s artistic assemblages. Apart from “mineral that had become animal now become rock again”[9], the marl sculptures at ARKEN are beaches that had become mountains and have now been returned to the beach again. A similar process is made visible in the cartoon Meet me at the Beach/MMAB, in which an entity tells the story of its origins as a fossil beach and its destination, a world of water. On the large silkscreen prints on cloth, we first see a vast labyrinthine tunnel system within a mountain range. We are invited to imagine this labyrinth as an imprint of a larger object. If the tunnel were a hollow casting mold, a negative form, what would the cast, the positive object, look like? In the cartoon, we encounter how this speculative object is transformed in different stages: emerging from the tunnel, dissolving into air, being submerged in water. The speaker of the cartoon, we might realize, is this speculated entity itself. This entity, as it will be called from here on, has its origin in the system of tunnels and embodies what the artist calls the materiality of the void.

The material surface of the large panel on which we see and read this story in the museum is important in this respect: the print is made of sand that was left over from the stone sculptures. The “I” telling the story of its origin—the letter we see printed on the panel—contains particles of limestone extracted from the depths of a mountain; the images of the tunnel system, a quarry, are printed in atomized material from such a quarry. In other words, the story incorporates the lithic matter it tells on the surface, inside and outside start oscillating. Through the sand, the speaker of the comic wears the innermost layer of history on its sleeves.  

The tunnels inside the mountain also involve stories that, as further extensions of the works, are worth telling. Let us listen to Nina Nowak’s experience of a mountain’s interior: What always fascinated me about quarries is that when you are inside, you are surrounded by one and the same material, you feel like you are inside a larger body. It feels terrifying and beautiful as well, maybe it is the dimensions. In the quarry, surrounded by the giant halls, and rectangular carved walls, even if it was too clean-cut to be organic, it felt like a desert from the inside. This experience ties in with another story, the myth about a monk who went into a mountain and came out seven years later. Inside the mountain, he not only experienced time differently but also encountered large lands, monasteries: The inside seemed bigger than its encapsulating skin. The shift of time and dimension is different inside and outside. Inside is a larger outside. A sublime dimension of deep time translated into a folklore tale about mining and caves.  

The marl sculptures are not only interspersed with fossils and saturated with storied matter of remote temporalities and vast landscapes within tunnels; they also carry the memory of their making: Nina Nowak’s hands forming their cracks and crevices, miners’ hands extracting them from the mountain they came from, and, along with that, experience with stone masonry and quarry work, traditions of manual labor, new and older technologies and techniques. The artist’s fascination with such technologies and lithic material goes hand in hand with a thought that makes the matter more ambivalent: When you walk around in European suburbs, you see front yards made in a new fashion: they are covered with little white marble or grey slate stones that prevent plants from growing so that one does not need to take care of weeds. There are material interconnections that reach far and might tie into what Elizabeth Povinelli is describing in her book Geontologies when she speaks about how “geontopower” takes over environments that are determined by neoliberal settler capitalism: dead matter, fossil fuel and sands take over, leaving behind nothing but death and pollution, and keep returning like undead revenants.

Nowak’s sculptures partake in this spectral heritage as inanimate, mined matter and through the fossils. As Povinelli points out, fossils in the “form of fuel can provide the conditions for a specific form of life—contemporary, hypermodern,informationalized capital—and a new form of mass death and utter extinction”.[10] However, precisely because this muddy history is not hidden but evoked and made transparent through the attached machinery and the copper oxide, Nowak’s installations resist a central aspect of hypermodern lifestyle: its cleanness, from pebble gardens to shiny marble floors, to greenwashing. With her works, which embrace decay, rawness, and clashes of different materials, Nowak defies the fashionable aesthetics of slick surfaces. Here we come back to the fossils: the stones are B-quality because they contain flintstones and fossils. For this reason, they cannot be clean-cut for industrial purposes such as producing tiles. Acquiring this particular stone was a gesture of refusing to participate in the regular mining industry.

The former quarry worker from whom Nowak acquired the leftover stone inscribed his own story in the work: besides the mines’ histories of exploitation and capitalism, there is also the history of individual miners and their knowledge, which has been passed on from generation to generation. This is also a knowledge embodied in the hands, a certain understanding of materiality when you have been working so closely with it your whole life. The sound a stone makes can tell you its density, or if it has cracks or flintstones inside. Specific knowledge of the quarry worker from whom Nowak bought the stones for the sculptures found its way into them: he advised the artist on suitable tools and told her about the ways the marl stone reacts to humidity and fluids. The very specific property of the marl stone to absorb humidity and become harder and denser then led to additional ideas in the process of developing the works.

The further handling of the material is carving. This method, as Nowak stresses, is also related to the more general concept of zooming in and out. Carving here means imagining what is behind a shape or form. How does this shape look from a different perspective? In your mind, you are constantly shifting the vision between fore- and background, the sides, top, bottom, and between many different points of view and perspectives of a single thing. You are toggling the thing around, but not on a flat screen, the screen is in your head. In a way, you try to imagine what you cannot see inside a solid block. Here one can see that the process of their making is not only a means to an end in Nowak’s work; it rather keeps being an integral part of the installations we encounter in or in front of the museum. In other words: central concerns involved in the material and imaginative methods and practices of their production coincide with central concerns of the works in their “finished” state. 

This can be illustrated well with the videos of MMAB, Meet me at the Beach, Miniatures (2020/21). As a starting point for these animations, the artist worked on a small-scale model made of silicone. This model is based on a map of a real quarry structure. By following the lines of the two-dimensional drawing with a silicone gun, a three-dimensional object was created. This analogue object served as a basis for a digital transformation into 3D animation, using photogrammetry and animation software. The speculative entity or materiality of the void mentioned earlier has now become a body. In the animations, the speculative nature of this embodied form, which is also evoked in the comic, a genre strongly associated with fictionality and invented stories, becomes especially apparent. The animations make it quite transparent that what we see is artificial, a model rather than a real thing. In one video, we see the embodied form emerging from a map of the tunnel system—lifting itself off, as if it took on a life of its own and started acting independently, first drawing the viewers into a mesmerizing spectacle of “vibrant matter”[11], to then move out of the frame, withdrawing from our gazes. Meanwhile, the map and a grid remain visible in the background. 

The work plays with the notion of “animation” in two senses: the “action or process of imparting life, vitality, or (as a sign of life) motion” going back to the Latin word anima, which means soul, air, wind, breath, and life; and the technical term designating the “process or technique of filming successive drawings […] or models to create an illusion of movement when the film is shown as a sequence”.[12] The video thus not only makes our perception vacillate between inside and outside and between the fluid movement and vitality of the thing in front of us and the rigidity and lifelessness we associate with lithic matter, but also between immersion in what we see on screen and an alienation effect that makes us realize we are faced with an artificial world, a model. In the video simulating a movement through the tunnel, a similar effect is created by the box on the top left side, where you can check your location on the map, like a computer game. 

The grid used in two of the videos not only works as a signifier for scale and dimension but also implies an aesthetic strategy to undermine the speculative nature of the videos, evoking didactic animations you would watch in school or in documentary films in order to understand “how things really work”.  At the same, Nowak maintains that the technology used is more about the human incapacity or condition itself, that one cannot grasp the whole thing. Importantly, the 3-D animations in MMAB, Meet me at the Beach, Miniatures do not create a model in the conventional sense, but rather a construction of something that does not actually exist. In fact, the speculative form “represents” something that cannot even be imagined—we notice that the work is challenging the vocabulary we tend to use when we talk about art: the terms “representation” or “imitation” do not function properly, because there is no original that can then be reproduced aesthetically. What we see in the videos (and on the panels of the cartoon) exceeds our imaginative capacity; this becomes transparent through the visible indicators of scale. We are made aware that we are supposed to be faced with a scaled down version of 120 kilometers of tunnel. However, these temporal dimensions exceed our imagination—like a hyperobject in Timothy Morton’s sense, the speculative entity “burn[s] a hole in your mind”.[13]

This leads us to a general concern expressed in the works: the impossibility of representing entities that are too large in scale, time and/or dimension. Such ungraspable entities are also a focus of Jean-François Lyotard, when he considers the sublime. Maybe a sense of incapacity and inadequacy is the inner motor of my work. I believe with the tools and materials that art provides, I can come closest to the mind games and freedom of speculation. Lyotard describes the sublime as a kind of absolute outside to human existence—one that is, for that very reason, terrifying. Trying to envision the sublime, we will fail he says: “every presentation of an object destined to ‘make visible’ this absolute greatness or power appears to us painfully inadequate”.[14] I think this pain is interesting to work with. Being inadequate should be visible in the means of production, but in the best, meaning the most precise way. 

If technology has often been an attempt to get in touch with the unperceivable, the sublime, the dead, this attempt also has to display the insufficiency inherent in the endeavor—and this is precisely what her use of technology does. The technique of laser scanning and photogrammetry used for the 3D animation does not produce a complete animation of a tunnel system inside a mountain. Using the most advanced technology would result in a neat realist animation, which would, however, cover up a blind spot: that you cannot see in 4D, and cannot see the whole thing from all perspectives in a given moment, in its actual scale. I think realism is in vain in this context, it misses the point. Perfection is not precision.Precision here involves a non-anthropocentric Socratic ignorance of acknowledging what you cannot know, and of making this lack of knowledge explicit. The animations have their origin in the analogue sculptural methods described earlier, which are then transformed through photogrammetry, animation software and game design. One could have employed larger laser scanning equipment as it is used by archaeologists and geologists. But the artistic process was more about figuring things out with the technologies at hand. The DIY factor has a democratic implication: I can do this with this. That is what I would call the teeth of my work in general. Works need to have teeth. It means saying something with a different urgency. If one wants to figure out something that is impossible to figure out, knowing that the undertaking of such an action is most likely impossible opens doors to a different understanding.

The principle of precision instead of perfection is also crucial for Nowak’s automata, which are designed to “work” while retaining teeth and rough edges: I think of these machines or tools in the context of prosthetics. They operate mechanically but are dysfunctional other ways. Unlike industrial machines, Nowak’s automata do not produce a specific product, and their function is not immediately clear. If their function is to entertain the viewers of an art exhibition, they sometimes fail—the water is not always dripping, the machines can work, but they don’t always do so. Speaking with Giorgio Agamben, one could claim that they are not exhausted in being means to an end.[15] The machines we see at the exhibitions are not necessarily pretty; sometimes they even look somewhat clumsy, like the piece Up in the air! Machine part 2/2. (pp. xx-xx). For Nowak, the primary aesthetic importance of the machines is creating prosthetic technological extensions. In Up in the Air, a concrete cast vehicle is connected to a pneumatic pump, which pushes air on rolls back and forth on two rails when it is moved. The air fills up a giant balloon made of foil. It becomes evident that the machine is a prosthetic extension of the human body. The object becomes an invitation for the visitor for further use, even if it is not the nicest one: the concrete cast is heavy, and the vehicle is set in motion when you sit down on it and start moving heavy matter back and forth with bodily labor in order to blow up a big balloon. The machine itself is an abstracted allusion to what happens in a sandstone quarry on a small scale: sand/matter becomes concrete, becomes heat, becomes void/air. A reenactment of a different kind is effected through the visitors’ participation. 

The clash between living bodies and seemingly dead matter created in Up in the Air brings us back to Material World Pt.I, Equilibrium Tide. When I first visited the installation, the object in the water was not at the center of my attention, even though it stands out so imposingly in the water. Yet it is essential to the assemblage: it functions as a prosthetic system superimposed on the earth-system with which the work is entangled. The machine’s functionality depends on the ocean with its tidal rhythms. Even though the tide of the Baltic Sea is quite moderate in comparison to the North Sea, its movements are also connected to the moon and the earth’s rotation around its own axis. In contrast to Up in the Air, where visitors set the mechanism in motion, the automaton in Material World Pt.I, Equilibrium Tide is determined by extra-human rhythms. The machine works without human assistance, which also means that what it does (or does not do) cannot be controlled by the artist. Such a balance between control and loss of control is crucial for Nowak: I built settings for things to happen. It is like a test in a laboratory, but over time, things are happening on their own.

Painful as it can be, giving up control and letting go is essential if one wants to invite transformation, dirt and decayand acknowledge exchanges between living and non-living things. The posthuman aspect of the machine in Material World Pt.I, Equilibrium Tide, i.e. the fact that it functions according to earthly cycles, invites to think in non-anthropocentric terms and beyond the pain of letting go: things will go on without us. By letting go, Nowak also opens her works to what Anna Tsing calls “livable collaborations” in a contaminated world.[16] This openness contains another temporal dimension: futurity. What might Material World Pt.I, Equilibrium Tide look like in ten, fifty, a hundred, a thousand, or a million years? Which elements might become parts of the assemblage? What will the world look like?

[1] Cf. Donna Haraway. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016.

[2] Cf. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. 8.

[3] Cf. Haraway.

[4] Marlstone is a subcategory of limestone, containing a higher percentage of clay. 

[5] Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman. University of Minnesota Press, 2015. 20.

[6] For further reading, see: Arthur Rose. “Limestone Poetics in Adrian Stokes, W. H. Auden and Kamau Brathwaite”. figurationen 23/1 (2022): 50-64.

[7] Cohen, 20.

[8] Cohen, 35.

[9] Cohen, 20.

[10] Elizabeth A. Povinelli. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. 15.

[11] Cf. Jane Bennett. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.

[12] “animation, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, September 2022. Web. 25 September 2022.

[13] Timothy Morton. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010. 130.

[14] Jean-François Lyotard. “Answering to the question: what is postmodernism?”. Trans. Régis Durand. Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. Ed. David Lodge and Nigel Wood. Harlow: Pearson, 2008. 412-420. 417.

[15] Cf. Giorgio Agamben. The Use of Bodies. Trans. Adam Kotsko. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016.

[16] Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Yale University Press, 2015. 28.