The Place of Stone
Thinking about colour, whether in general or of specific instances of individual colours, has produced a lengthening shelf of books since this century’s turn. These have ranged from the biographical focus of social and scientific histories like Simon Garfield’s Mauve, the-one-colour-at-a-time analyses of Michel Pastoureau’s lavishly illustrated art histories of individual colours, and the seriously black and white Chromophobia, David Batchelor’s literary/philosophical account of Western culture’s fear of colour.1 Exhibitions too have examined the general, for instance the Museum of Modern Art’s Color Chart, indebted to Batchelor’s work as well as the eponymous hardware shop staple, and also the particular, including A Red Like No Other: How Cochineal Conquered the World, at Santa Fe’s Museum of International Folk Art.2 Turkish artist Asli Çavuşoğlu’s The Place of Stone (2018), a 22 panel fresco running the length of the New Museum’s Lobby Gallery, can be considered a further contribution to this growing field of colour studies, its subject not simply blue, but the very specific blue produced from lapis lazuli, a semi-precious stone found principally in Afghanistan.
The history of lapis extraction in Afghanistan extends back some 6,000 years. Çavuşoğlu’s work is titled after the English translation of Sar-I Sang, the site of lapis mines in Afghanistan where most of the stone has been sourced since the seventh century BCE. Lapis featured as inlays in Tutankhamen’s death mask, while in Europe it was typically used ground as a pigment in frescoes, most famously in Giotto’s Marian cycle in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. Some centuries later in China, Buddhist hermits carved figurines in lapis during the Qing Dynasty. While the Greeks, along with Romans in Britain
Aslı Çavuşoğlu, The Place of Stone, 2018. Installation view and detail, New Museum, New York. Photograph Maris Hutchinson/EPW Studio.
