Temporada 3 · Espasmos del Fin · JVV-T3-28
Anti-telluric art
I Definition
Art that does not want to go back to the earth.
II Table of opposition
| Telluric | Anti-telluric | |
|---|---|---|
| Material | clay, stone, wood | polymer, oxide, slag |
| Time | season, harvest | service life, warranty |
| Gesture | to bury | to suspend |
| Origin | the site | the catalogue |
| Destiny | to decompose | to persist badly |
| Scale | the body | 3.7 millimetres of annual drift |
| Humidity | necessary | corrosive |
| Authority | the ancestral | the batch number |
III Aphorisms
Every buried sculpture is a bet against geology. It almost always loses.
Dust returns to the earth; polystyrene stays and watches.
A noble material ages. An industrial one expires. The difference is not chemical: it is whose turn it is to clean up.
The ancestral gets invoked once there is no grandfather left to correct it.
The museum runs at 21 °C and 50 % humidity to stop time. Anti-telluric work needs no museum: it had already stopped.
Whoever says return to the earth forgets that the earth now holds 0.5 % microplastic by mass in its first twenty centimetres. Returning is no longer returning.
A root looks for water. A cable looks for current. Both branch the same way and only one gets praised.
Clay cracks as it dries. That is how it admits it was liquid. Acrylic admits nothing.
A broken pot is recognised by the gap. A broken casing is recognised by the model number.
The telluric is counted in seasons; the anti-telluric, in versions. Nobody has seen the 2.4 harvest.
The fossil is matter that accepted its calendar. The landfill is matter that negotiated it and won.
8.3 tonnes of plastic per inhabitant have been produced since 1950. Of those, 0.6 were recycled. The rest is somewhere, intact, waiting for an archaeologist who will no longer know what it was.
If a material outlives the language it was named in, it stops being material and becomes landscape.
IV Household ritualsafe
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01
Pick an object in your home that will never decompose.
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02
Set it on soil, on the ground, out in the open, for one night.
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03
Look at it in the morning: it is the same.
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04
Write down what you felt on finding that nothing happened to it.
Zero risk, zero waste: the object comes back inside. The discomfort is this exercise's material.
V Risk
Celebrating the imperishable is a comfortable aesthetic for whoever produces the rubbish.
Distinguish: the anti-telluric describes a condition, it does not applaud it. The error would be to mistake the diagnosis for the programme —and that error has a trade name and a catalogue of its own.
VI Coda
If the ground has stopped being the place things return to, then the sculpture is no longer planted: it is abandoned. And what is left abandoned on the earth, neither sinking nor dissolving, is the closest thing to a monument this century has managed to produce without meaning to.