1media/Limestone, natural medal or Magdaleian maternity.jpg2018-08-04T21:25:13+00:00Paul A. Harris0462def817acd13db43634107b67e5f0f737f3f112Limestone, "Natural Currency" 11 x 7.5 x 2cmplain2018-08-04T21:25:38+00:002015052515471920150525154719Photo by Paul A. HarrisPaul A. Harris0462def817acd13db43634107b67e5f0f737f3f1
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12018-07-31T20:42:37+00:00Roger Caillois Mineral Collection29gallery12018-08-11T18:07:47+00:00Roger Caillois bequeathed his renowned mineral collection to the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle in Paris. The collection, featured at the 2013 Venice Biennale, can be seen at the galerie de Minéralogie et de Géologie. The following pages present images of selected pieces from the collection, paired with passages from Caillois's The Writing of Stones (Trans. Barbara Bray, University of Virginia Press, 1985). This content supplements but also contextualizes the excerpts from Caillois's Pierres réfléchies featured in Rock Records, as well as treatments of Caillois in the issue by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Paul Prudence, and Paul A. Harris.
Caillois's opening words in The Writing of Stones provide a portal through which to enter this virtual gallery.
"Just as men have always sought after precious stones, so they have always prized curious ones, those that catch the attention through some anomaly of form, some suggestive oddity of color or pattern. Stones possess a kind of gravitas, something ultimate and unchanging, something that will never perish or else has already done so. They act through an intrinsic, infallible, immediate beauty, answerable to no one, necessarily perfect yet excluding the idea of perfection in order to exclude approximation, error, and excess. This spontaneous beauty thus precedes and goes beyond the actual notion of beauty, of which it is at once the promise and the foundation" (The Writing of Stones, 1-2).
12018-08-09T21:05:47+00:00"Natural Currency" (limestone)4plain2018-08-11T18:10:59+00:00"The more unusual, definite, and undeniable the image, the more the stone is prized... They should not exist, and yet they do, at once impossible and inescapable. At the same time, they are treasures, the results of thousands upon thousands of chances, the winning number in an infinite lottery.... They have no market rate or price. Their value is not commercial and cannot be calculated in any currency.... It depends solely on the covetousness, pride and competitiveness generated by the desire to possess or the pleasure of possessing them. Each stone, as unique and irreplaceable as a work of genius, is a valuable at once pointless and priceless, with which the laws of economics have nothing to do" (The Writing of Stones, 11).
