Erosion and weathering are not usually thought of as productive acts, but there is a possibility that subtraction can be enhancing. The inevitable deterioration of materials in the face of time and natural forces can actually be something that we account for. The slow erosion of a stone by water produces a possibility of use.

San Vito D’altivole, Italy. 1969-1978. The two leaning sarcophagi at the Brion Cemetery bear tremendous emotional content, alluding to both the crib and the coffi n as forms which bookend life, and to the gesture of a couple in eternity. Scarpa said of the work, “It is as it should be that two people who loved each other in life bend toward each other in greeting after death.” The poignancy of Scarpa’s treatment of love and death is intensifi ed by discovering his own headstone in a hidden corner of the compound.

Krems An Der Donan, Austria. 1993. The brick sculptures of Per Kirkeby are pseudo-ruins. His work appeals to the sublime monumentality of the past, using an archaic formal and material vocabulary. Kirkeby’s work is responsive to location; engaging notions of place, and often, confusing site with object. Here, the distinction between wall as context and wall as art object is ambivalent. Photographed in the snow, the wall takes on an intensified sense of ruin.

Corinth, Greece. Pastel and Charcoal on Paper. 1951. 10¾ x 10¼ in. During his life, Louis Kahn made many trips to the ruins of antiquity. Each time, his sketches exposed another set of insights and discoveries regarding his interests in monumentality, material, and the past. This drawing, from a trip made later in life, is particularly expressionistic; revealing an interest in color with respect to landscape, natural phenomena and notions of the sublime.

Stone undergoes an epic transformation in its extraction from the land. A ragged and colossal rock face is quickly broken out of the mountain and carved into the precision of a Corinthian column or the supple bust of a goddess. Although stone seems impervious to wear, it will eventually return to a state where its vulnerability is revealed over time, by weather and use, and its origin in the irregularity of the mountain shows through.

1970. This seven hour silent opera explores many of Wilson’s interests in duration; and the complexities of expression that can be revealed in slow motion. In this scene, played by actress Sheryl Sutton, a murder takes place over an hour of slow, seemingly geologic movements. Wilson often had Sutton chew gum while performing this scene, contrasting the slow gesture of the knife traveling from the table to the boy with the quick and repetitive movements of her mouth.

2004. In the original photographs of Le Corbusier’s early villas, a fish lies with its mouth agape on a kitchen counter, marveling at an immanent death or the wonders of modern accommodation. A pair of owl-eye glasses and a bowler hat sit carefully poised on a table in a roof garden. The meaning behind these planted objects has never been revealed, but for the few that knew Le Corbusier had lost sight in one eye at early age, or recalled his archetypal interest in water, the presence of the eyeglasses and the glistening fi sh are not so obscure. These photographs are much like modern equivalents of Dutch still life paintings, rich in symbolism, autobiography, and the multiple temporalities that are present in an extraordinary life. In 2004, the eccentric architect, Philip Johnson was photographed at his famous glass house in New Canaan, Connecticut, just months before he died. This same richness of symbol and metaphor is captured here, as he sits playing solitaire against himself, peering out of his own owl-eye glasses.

1663. Oil On Canvas. 24½ x 19¼ in. In the 1630’s tulip mania struck Holland. This intoxicating frenzy, brought on by the introduction of the Turkish flower, raised fundamental questions about the nature of value, ephemerality, and beauty. This mania, along with the Dutch interest in the arts and sciences, gardening, and breeding led to the emergence of the still life genre. These paintings often refl ected changes in aesthetic taste or indicated the extent of recent explorations. The flower arrangements depicted in the paintings frequently contained species that could never have been in bloom simultaneously, and are therefore believed to be emblematic of the brevity and complexity of life. Insects and objects, such as pocket watches and glasses, are symbolic of decay, rebirth, time, and knowledge.

In 1971 Donald Judd moved from New York to a remote town in southwest Texas, where he purchased a decommissioned military base and eventually much of the nearby civilian town. He turned the former bank into his print studio, and a number of the homes and warehouses into an intermingling of dwelling and studio practice. Many of these buildings are veritable palimpsests. The original buildings and the new interventions and edits, as well as acquired work and made work; are compressed into one time and place and register new sets of relationships.

Plate No.4 1844. 10.75 x 16.25 in. At age forty, Frederick Catherwood traveled to Central America with the British writer John Lloyd Stephens. Together they were the first modern men to rediscover the ancient pre-Columbian cities of the Americas. In the tradition of earlier explorations by the British and French to the ancient ruins of Rome, Greece, and Egypt; Catherwood and Stephens made many accounts of their findings in the form of drawings and writing. Catherwood imported his sensibilities of the English picturesque into his drawings, by aestheticizing the ruins and aligning them with European pictorialism. His drawings express the transience of civilization and the persistence of nature to prevail over the works of man.

Canary Islands. 1968. The Canary Islands exist as evidence of the slow accumulation of volcanic events over millions of years. In 1730 an eruption left a volcanic trail cascading down the south face of Lanzarote Island. It was here that the artist César Manrique decided to build a house and a studio for himself. The rooms and galleries of his compound are all carefully nestled into the molten landscape of the lava fl ow, to create a rich contrast of colors and textures; the light space of a gallery with the dark pumice of the island, the organic with the manmade, and the productive space of art-making with the incendiary forces of nature.

Cast Plaster. 1995-1996. 26¾ x 147¾ x 204½ in. The volcanic presence at Manrique’s island compound has an uncanny relationship to the work of Rachel Whiteread. In a monograph on the artist, Charlotte Mullins writes about the fortuitous link of Mount Vesuvius to Whiteread’s sculptures. In 79 AD, volcanic ash from a massive eruption buried in the city of Pompeii in a single day. Centuries later, as archaeologists unearthed the city, they discovered voids in the shape of Pompeii’s ancient citizens. The archaeologists poured plaster of Paris into these pockets revealing the population of the city preserved in its last moments of life. The transformation of the invisible into solid and precise forms provoked the mystery of absence often associated with fossils, petrified wood, and even death itself. Whiteread, whose work is made from casting the undersides, insides, and voids created by architecture and furniture, replaces space with matter, and lets the certainty of absence and presence flutter.

Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah. Photograph. 1992. At the Annual World Land Speed Records, Misrach captured a series of photographs (The Desert Cantos XV: The Salt Flats) of inhabitation forcing a surreal and ironic relationship with nature, as the sublimity of landscape is tethered for a moment by the domesticity of common furniture.

Beverly Hills, California. 2000. The historical avant-garde sought to conflate life and art, and in the end failed to do so. But occasionally when art is trafficked through a particular medium and scale the possibility becomes viable. McMakin’s Pool House, at once, furniture, architecture, and landscape intervention, is also still life, diorama, and stage set; where the exchange of art and life is an impromptu performance.

Box Construction. 1961. 9¾ x 14 x 3½ in. The 18c. writings of the English philosopher Edmund Burke often equated beauty with smallness. In Cornell’s framed microcosms, the objects of everyday life are placed in landscapes of dissonant scale; the vastness of sky or ocean is met by a drinking glass, a pair of butterfl y wings, or the face of an Elgin watch. Cornell’s simultaneous worlds were not limited to issues of scale. He would often place objects of disparate times and places, materials, and forms of representation together in the same small box. Cornell, as well as such early 20c. artists as Kurt Schwitters and Marcel Duchamp, explored the assemblage of found objects as a form of sculpture, distinct from the tradition of carving and moulding; elevating an object to the status of art by selection rather than by intrinsic aesthetic properties.