Weight of stone

In the essay from 1989 titled 'Between the Furniture and the /Building (Between a Rock and a Hard Place), the artist Jimmie Durham suggested that;

'Some materials, innocent in themselves, have been overly scripted; given roles that re too dense.[...] Stone suffers from architectural weight, the weight of metaphor and the weight of history.'

Durham's work at the time was a piece that he intended would 'free up the stones' from their architectural and historic weight. The work, commissioned by The Museum of Contemporary Art in Pori, Finland, saw Durham scattering the floor of the museum with first sized rocks and stones. The work, by Durham's account, was playful and but didn't rely upon theatricality in order to work.

This sense of weight, of metaphor, history and architecture is palpable in the stone I see in Whitehall on the walls of the Ministry of Defence and the Cenotaph.

Reference:

Jimmie Durham, from 'Between the Furniture and the Building (Between a Rock and a Hard Place)' (1998), in Durham, Waiting to be Interrupted: Selected Writings 1993-2012 (Milan: Mousse Publishing/Antwerp:MUHKA, 2014)