The white stuff

Marble isn’t big with New Zealand artists even though the country boasts large marble deposits in north-west Nelson and Fiordland. Most of our marble is used as building stone or crushed into powder as a coating or an ingredient of glass. One artist who did put marble together with art was Billy Apple, but he got rid of both. His removal of Romanelli’s copy cat sculpture The Wrestlers from the middle of the dome space in Wanganui’s Sarjeant Gallery caused a great fuss in 1979. We had a brush with it ourselves when we borrowed the work for an exhibition at the National Art Gallery called When Art Hits the Headlines. The Wrestlers needed a bit of a clean, but a week before the show was set to open conservators (no doubt thinking cotton buds and distilled water) said the clean up would take at least six months. The story of how it was cleaned in the end involved a wettex and an anonymous (and pragmatic) senior gallery official late at night.

It’s hard not to feel we must be missing something about this traditional and noble material, one that has become newly fashionable in contemporary art. Artists like Jeff Koons (Bourgeois Bust), Damien Hirst (Anatomy of an Angel) and Marc Quinn (Alison Lapper) are all into it. Turns out that these guys get their marble work done in a small Tuscan village called Pictrasanta where the marble is so white it got Michelangelo excited to the point that he had a road made to access it out of the then inaccessible mountains. Pictrasanta about 20 kilometres from the more famous Carrara deposits and before Jeff and the YBAs, Henry Moore was there and so too was Joan Miro.

As you probably figured, modern marble works are made by local artisans - it’s Donald Judd meets marble. Most of the artists send plaster or clay versions and follow up with the odd visit to see how things are going. Here’s the Financial Times article on the marble shaping folk of Pictrasanta.
Images: The whiteness of the Pictrasanta marble shines on through in Google’s satellite view.