Tearing Granite
Visitors get a hands-on experience at Jesús Moroles art exhibit
Large, small, powerful, interesting.
Just when you thought an appropriate description escaped you, it starts coming at you in single phrases.
Let’s see, Jesús Moroles’ work is new. It’s fun. It’s strong, and it’s musical.
And it’s a playground.
So, let’s go play in this Moroles’ world of granite. Let’s dig in the sandboxes, dare to rock the giant wheel back and forth, build our biceps by moving pieces on the chess board and run a stick along the notches of the musical fish.
It sounds like a harp, doesn’t it? Play it again.
No one’s going to fuss. No one’s going to run in and yell, “Don’t touch.” If that were the case, Moroles would never have installed his work in the LSU Museum of Art.
Or anywhere else for that matter.
Because the entire point of this exhibit, Tearing Granite: Jesús Moroles, is to be a part of it. It runs through April 29, and the museum has scheduled several activities to coincide with the show.
The LSU Chess Club will be playing a tournament here, and the LSU School of Music will incorporate the exhibit’s musical pieces in a concert.
But all of this will happen later. For now, this playground is yours.
So, go ahead and touch the giant wheel. Nudge it and see what happens.
“This is probably the heaviest piece on this floor at 3,000 pounds,” Moroles said. “The idea is that you can use your finger to move something that weighs as much as a car.”
The wheel begins rocking back and forth on its foundation, yet doesn’t topple or roll away.
“There’s a pin holding it,” Moroles said. “It’s not going to go anywhere. But you’ll never know unless you touch it.”
Moroles helps museum workers during the installation of his pieces on this particular day. It’s the week preceding the show’s opening, which was Jan. 22, and this is his second trip to the museum.
He made the first trip from his Rockport, Texas, home in December. That’s when he installed the piece on the first floor of the Shaw Center for the Arts.
It serves as a good preview. Visitors can walk through the Shaw Center’s front doors and get a glimpse of what awaits them in the museum on the fifth floor.
Still, there’s another reason this piece was not included upstairs.
“We asked our engineers to come in and look at the museum to make sure our floor would be able to support the exhibit,” Natalie Mault said.
She’s the museum’s curator, as well as curator for this show.
“The museum’s floor suspends outward from the side of the Shaw Center,” Mault explained. “If the pieces were too heavy, it was a possibility that the floor could have collapsed. So, it was best to put the heaviest piece downstairs.”
The rest of the pieces were transported to the fifth floor by way of the Shaw Center’s freight elevator.
The show includes more than 35 free-standing and wall-mounted granite sculptures, as well as maquettes made from paper and pulp.
Moroles walks through the museum, demonstrating how each piece works. Every sculpture generates a smile, as if he’s discovering it for the first time. And he freely admits that he’s still amazed by the musical fishes. That’s what he calls the fish-shaped pieces with notches carved along the edges.
He made them from a chunk of granite discarded from a construction site. The notches were to be, well, just notches — a part of the first sculpture’s aesthetics.
That is, until it fell from the table on which Moroles was working. Moroles anticipated disaster but received a surprise when the sculpture’s notches brushed along the edge of the table on its way down to the floor.
“It sang,” Moroles said. “It sounded like a harp.”
He grabs a rod from beside one of his fish sculptures and lightly runs it along the notches. The music is sweet, angelic.
Moroles is right. This is a granite harp.
“Who knew granite could be musical?” he asked. “And this is the only piece of granite I’ve ever come across that does this. I have yet to find another piece that produces a musical sound.”
Moroles had made and sold other sculptures from that chunk of granite. He knew he had come across something special, so he began buying back the sculptures, then reshaping them into musical pieces.
Composers have since written special pieces for Moroles’ musical granite and have staged concerts at various venues.
“It was a great experience,” Moroles said. “In one museum, we had dancers dancing on the shells and musicians playing, and I was playing the musical fish. The sound was so big and exciting.”
He points to the different pieces within the LSU Museum of Art’s galleries as he describes the scene, maybe even imagining such an event happening in Baton Rouge.
The shells to which he refers are just that, smooth, shell-shaped sculptures with rounded sides. Visitors can stand on top, feet positioned on either side and rock back and forth.
The rocking can make an echo-like noise, so the dancers in that past concert also added to the music.
Moroles’ smile returns. He enjoys his work, true, but it’s more than that. He has fun with it — has fun making new discoveries. And each piece is a new discovery.
And because he’s having fun, he wants those experiencing his work to have fun, too.
Now, this work wasn’t always fun. At least not in the beginning.
Moroles earned his bachelor of fine arts degree at North Texas State University in Denton, Texas. It’s where he started working with granite.
He remembers choosing a piece of granite from a nearby quarry, then taking it back to his studio at the university. And he remembers his chisel breaking upon impact. Granite is second only to diamonds in its level of hardness. It’s commonly used for household construction, and few have ventured to use the stone to produce fine art.
And Moroles quickly discovered he could not do that through a hammer and chisel.
Instead, he employs untraditional carving techniques, using a diamond saw almost like a chisel, to painstakingly cut through the dense stone. Pushing the saw up and out repeatedly creates slices through the layers of granite.
Moroles then allows the stone to break on its own, creating a contrast between rough and smooth surfaces, hence the idea of tearing granite.
Literally.
Moroles purchased his first large diamond saw in 1981 and began constructing his studio in Rockport in 1983.
“The workings of the studio became a family effort with the artist involving his parents Jose and Maria, his brother, Hilario, his sister, Suzanna, and brother-in-law, Kurt Kangas as integral parts of the Moroles Studio,” his biography states. “This facility is unequaled in the country for the making of large scale sculptures.”
To date, Moroles’ work has been included in more than 130 one-person exhibitions and more than 200 group exhibitions.
His large scale works include the 22-foot-sculpture fountain, “Floating Mesa Fountain,” for the Albuquerque Museum in New Mexico; the 64-ton, 22-foot-tall sculpture, “Lapstrake,” for the E.F. Hutton, CBS Plaza in New York City; and the 120-by-120-foot sculpture “Houston Police Officers Memorial,” in Houston.
He also created the sculpture plaza for the Edwin A. Ultich Museum in Wichita, Kan. The plaza is a granite landscape of terraced slabs forming a stone riverway, a 30-foot-long fountain wall and a 30-foot-long granite weaving wall.
All of it is touchable. Just as it is in the LSU Museum of Art.
Some of sculptures to be found in the museum’s galleries resemble large, prehistoric monolithic stones, a reminder of Stonehenge.
“Jesús Moroles’ sculptures are celebrated for their serenity, which strike a delicate balance between nature and man-made,” Tom Livesay, the museum’s executive director said.
“His process may at first seem simple, but he has a deep understanding of the stone,” Livesay added. “He finds ‘personality’ within each piece and extracts it through a series of deliberate movements.”
And one of those personalities can be found in the chess board. It’s a full chess set created, of course, entirely of granite. Moroles created it to commemorate the chess set that once stood in Alfred Stieglitz’s New York art gallery in the 1920s.
Stieglitz was artist Georgia O’Keeffe’s husband. His gallery was known as a salon to artists. The likes of Marcel Duchamp and French painter and poet Francis Picabia would gather there to play chess.
Moroles also is a chess player.
“And chess is meant to be played on this board,” he said.
Players won’t be able to sit at a table and contemplate. They’ll have to physically lift each piece, then walk onto the board to play the game. But what an experience. Really, how many times do chess players get a chance to actually become a part of the game?
And how many exhibits include sand boxes for younger visitors to create their own sculptures? You’ll find those in Tearing Granite: Jesús Moroles, too.
An exhibit that’s big, powerful, interesting, fun, musical.
And best of all, touchable.