1media/Monstre decharne USA.jpg2018-08-04T20:21:18+00:00Paul A. Harris0462def817acd13db43634107b67e5f0f737f3f113Septaria, "Monstre décharné" (Bony monster), USA 12 x 10 x 2.5cmplain2018-08-09T21:31:34+00:002015052515470220150525154702Photo 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).
12018-08-09T21:28:11+00:00"Bony monster" (septaria)3plain2018-08-11T18:08:53+00:00"Septaria are siliceous nodules crisscrossed with cracks filled with calcite.... Septaria are quite varied, since the name applies not to a particular species of mineral but to a structure which may occur in several.... Partly metallized deposits suggest underwater fishermen in harness and helmets brandishing the catch still transfixed on their harpoons; floating phantoms; tightrope-walking demons with eyes on stalks; a whole chilly sabbath of spirits, harpies, and bacilli" (The Writing of Stones, 45; 55).
