Summer 2005 - MINING A QUARRY: STABAT MATER BY DOROTHY CROSS
CIRCA 112 article MINING A QUARRY: STABAT MATER BY DOROTHY CROSS  |  | | Dorothy Cross: Stabat Mater , performance / installation shots; courtesy Kerlin Gallery | Stabat Mater , directed by Dorothy Cross, was a live performance of Giovanni Battista Pergolesi's seventeenth-century acclaimed arrangement of the Stabat Mater Dolorosa in a remote slate quarry and Marian grotto on the western edge of Valentia Island, in the southern tip of Ireland. The project, which took place in August 2004, was a collaboration with Dublin-based Opera Theatre Company. Stabat Mater was performed by two opera singers, a countertenor (Jonathan Kenny) and soprano (Lynda Lee), and a baroque chamber orchestra, costumed in dirty overalls and safety helmets. The performance took place at night at the mouth of the quarry cave on a site that doubled as the altar of the grotto. A large-scale video projection with sound appeared in the space on completion of the recital. The video was projected onto a screen that advanced mechanically from within the dramatically lit quarry cave towards the standing audience. The presence of a video work with a sound track of industrial noise in such a setting certainly challenged the audience to adjust their reception from stirring baroque music to the language of contemporary art. In this outdoor context the fifteen-minute video finale was unsettling and self-conscious, yet its disruptiveness made Cross' Stabat Mater a compelling and memorable site-specific work. There was a distinct secular, profane and even mundane quality to this recital of Stabat Mater ; the singers alternately mounted the grotto's altar in their work boots, and the audience looked on in waterproof or heavy clothing. Such a functional factory aesthetic is prevalent throughout Cross' varied work, and my first impression of this performance was of a historical afterimage of a trajectory of the avant garde in the last century. [1] As I watched the performance I had a fantasy about a quarry workers' collective that loved opera performing a beautiful, affecting, sonorous piece of music to local residents of the island and beyond. [2] In keeping with the credo of bringing art into life, this was a utopian image of a Soviet-style revolutionary experiment, where the production of art aligned itself to a shared political (evangelical) task and where the "art of the proletariat was not a holy shrine where things are lazily regarded, but work, a factory which produces new artistic things." [3] The history of industrialization in Ireland is uneven and even marginal, as the country remained largely agricultural until the 1960s, so the slate quarry at Valentia is something of a unique industrial space that converted into Marian grotto in a postindustrial transformation. The quarry opened in 1816 and at its height of production in 1858, the year of the apparition at Lourdes in France, it employed over 400 people. The slate was used on the Houses of Parliament in Westminster, Westminster Abbey, and the shelves of the Public Record Office in London. When it closed in the 1960s, the grotto was constructed; however, mining recommenced in 1998 and continues today on a small scale. The supplanting of functions has in a sense see-sawed, as religious devotion in contemporary Ireland has decreased dramatically in the wake of increased wealth and appalling revelations of institutional abuse of children by Church and State authorities in so-called Industrial Schools. Cross' attention with the video imagery (which dramatically took centre stage after the live performance) was specifically focused on factory production at the quarry. Close-up shots of engineering technology cutting and polishing slate were transformed in scale into the spectacle of utilitarian power, the power of the male machinists over nature demonstrated by a destructive torrent from a saw blade slicing stone effortlessly. The repeated cutting in the context of the passion of the Virgin Mary in Stabat Mater almost invited a comparison between the mining that has taken place in the quarry and an industrial tragedy. If our empathy was directed in the recital to feeling the pain of Mary, here in the video an air of melancholy shrouded the physical transformation of nature by machines. The video projected at night corrected our vision of the quarry as a place (with a sepulchral acoustic) for concert performances, appearing almost like an industrial apparition of ghost-like point-of-view shots recalling the indelible presence of the quarry by working day. Things begin in caves, the stone rolls away, stories emerge, witches gather, precious seams are discovered, accidents happen, visions occur. This sense of the video articulating an altered, lens-based reality after the 'Amen' of Stabat Mater , was clearly visible in the speeded-up, time-lapse, otherworld quality of the images of windblown heather and grasses, racing clouds, dripping or weeping moss, or the traces of nature gathered around the mouth of the quarry accompanied by the acceleration and roar of machines. At its most basic level, the narrative content of the video presented in long shot the two lead worker-singers silhouetted against the light of the aperture of the cave and followed their journey deep into its rear, to a tranquil pool. Both actors casually sat by the pool filled with submerged relics of earlier industry (fossils of progress) and gazed and sang faint notes that bled into the industrial noise returning to the light outside. Was this a typical break from labour for the worker singers? On their return the camera's attention rested briefly on a slogan painted on the container / site office of the quarry: 'quality is our future'.  |  | | Dorothy Cross: Stabat Mater , performance / installation shots; courtesy Kerlin Gallery | This phrase was particularly apt for a quarry that has its best days behind it. Niche orders are today's market, where the local becomes a luxury that no longer competes with imports from low-wage economies (where the neoliberal motto of the quarries might be 'work makes you free'). But the phrase also drew attention in a reflexive way to the new uses of sites of industry as a backdrop to culture. Cross has already worked with a decommissioned lightship and an abandoned power station. The nineteenth-century Paris Opera House (a venue for the 'quality') may have a pit and thick Valentia blue slates on its roof, but there the association with the quarry would have ended, until now. But both worker-singers sidestepped past this statement in a deliberate fashion and the final images of the video were shot in slow motion from a moving vehicle; they conveyed dark and bleak images of bars and numbered slabs of stone reminiscent of a war-time cemetery, or of a labour camp. The video was book-ended by images of the Marian grotto almost as if to represent other histories, the history of the role of the Virgin Mary in patriarchal culture and the collective unconscious, or the history of the tension between church control and the forces of industrialization. In this sense I would specifically link Stabat Mater with other, older works by Cross dealing with sex and death like Virgin shroud (1991) or Screen: ladies changing room (1991), or Parthenon (1991), works where the inference of a conjugal union between society and technology, to borrow Walter Benjamin's observation, "betrayed man and turned the bridal bed into a bloodbath." [4] The Marian grotto context was obviously an inspiration for the locating of Stabat Mater at the mouth of the quarry but again, as mentioned above, I do not believe that Cross was attempting to create a sacred work in directing this performance and creating the video work. Those members of the community who fifty years ago chose this site eighty feet above the ground for a grotto were clearly looking for visual impact and a sense of the sublime from the then disused quarry. [5] While the particularities of the devotion to the Virgin Mary (and her appearances) are important in Ireland, this quarry was already symbolic in a general sense of the cult of the Virgin Mary, her tears of sorrow and love from the waterfall / spring (the death of her offspring as the birth of baptism), her assumption at the extreme height. Again at a general level in a wider European context, Mary's appearances have been predominately associated with springs, caves, hills and stones. [6] However, there would seem to be an ambivalence about the siting of the grotto in this disused quarry. Firstly, it was never, despite its 'physical' suitability, the location of an apparition or vision of either Mary or St Bernadette; and secondly, on an island with a long history of intense tourist activity, religious tourists were a very distinct market, as the signposts for the grotto on the island and postcards of the grotto testify. The superficial similarity between the quarry and spring and the prototyptic spring at Lourdes implied a translation of Lourdes for a home audience. The words 'artificial grotto' are in essence a tautology. As the music of Stabat Mater got under your skin in the dramatic atmosphere of this telluric quarry (the rain also poured down on the night I attended), there was, however, to be no access (due to insurance restrictions) to shelter inside this "sacrificial shaft dug into Mother Earth." [7] The triangular or pyramidal shape of the mouth of the cave was accentuated through the locating of a tableau of Mary appearing to St Bernadette at the waterfall apex of the triangle. The interior seemed dead from industry, the exterior dead from the lapse in devotions. Within the physical subterranean volume, a prehistoric memory seemed to be sculpted from its nineteenth-century origins, a negative space of absence, though not unlike the negative space of a single breast, for example, like the negative space of Cross' iconic phallic breast in Amazon (1990). This association of the quarry with a breast / phallus in Stabat Mater was clearly intended by the still video image of an open women's mouth suspended and isolated in the mouth of the cave. This image also appeared on the invitation card. Indeed within the cult of the Virgin Mary, her single breast is all that we see of her shrouded virginal body; as Julia Kristeva outlines, "milk and tears become the privileged signs of Mater Dolorosa ". [8] For Kristeva and for many vision seers, the compassionate tears of the Mater Dolorosa become a kind of nonspeech, her emotional state becoming the 'content' of the apparition. Bernadette, kneeling with her back to the river, heard a tumult of voices that seemed to come out of the earth and break out on the waters of the Gave; they called one another, intersected, and clashed noisily as if a multitude in struggle. One voice, imposing itself on the others, called out stridently and angrily, 'Go Away! Go Away!" To this shout, which seemed to be a threat, the Lady raised her head and wrinkled her brow, looking toward the river. With this simple gesture, the voices panicked and fled in all directions. [9]  | | Dorothy Cross: Stabat Mater , performance / installation shot; courtesy Kerlin Gallery | Such a recourse to nonspeech is not entirely surprising, since the function of the intense grief of Mary in Stabat Mater is quite paradoxical as she (the 'Mother of God') weeps over a corpse she believes will be resurrected by the Almighty Father. The desire for the "glories of paradise" in the medieval poetic text of Stabat Mater (articulated through the deathly forlorn composition of Pergolese) is expressed through the desire for sharing Mary's grief and love for her only son prostrate at the foot of the cross. Mary's masochistic desire to feel with her own body the death of a masculine body (a body she gave birth to, nurtured, and the only male body she ever knew) commanded by the will of a remote Father, leads deep into the symbolic economy of women's desire and male authority in Western Christian culture. The function of the virginal maternal is complex, as is the modern abnegation of her human qualities in the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception formalized as dogma in 1854 at the peak of mining activity in Valentia. [10] Cross has been very attentive in previous works such as Chiasm (1999), Ghost ship (1999) and Parthenon (1991), to the social, mythic and symbolic function of the spaces she chooses to work with, and combined those aspects with concepts from psychoanalysis, history and personal experience. [11] Stabat Mater continued and developed themes and images from such work as it endeavoured to incorporate varying facets of contemporary site-specific work in a carefully arranged, unique outdoor night-time event. With the history of this previous work informing the direction of the present piece, Stabat Mater showed deliberate purpose, skill and clarity. It was not so much exploring a field as mining a quarry.
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