Quarry (2015)

Amie Siegel’s film Quarry opens in near darkness, deep beneath Vermont’s Dorset Mountain where white marble is excavated from colossal underground chambers, and ends some thirty minutes later on a sun-drenched concrete floor deck far above lower Manhattan’s financial district, where a luxury residential tower is being built. Between we are witness to the brutal process of extracting stone from the earth and to the hyper-refined sales galleries of high-end New York real estate developers. Conjoining these disparate spaces is the marble itself, which we see transformed from bedrock into the highly polished slabs adorning kitchens, bathrooms, walls, and floors of a particular, exclusive stratum of contemporary domestic architecture. Viewers familiar with Siegel’s previous work will recognize that trajectory, and Quarry certainly bears comparison with her Provenance (2013), which traced sought-after pieces of modernist furniture from the homes of wealthy collectors back to their origin in the government buildings designed by Le Corbusier in Chandigarh, India. Quarry, too, is about the production of value, but it tells that story on an altogether grander scale and with a rather darker undercurrent than had been apparent in her earlier work. Quarry is most obviously structured in two unequal halves – first the mining of the rock and then its deployment in the future homes of the wealthy in Manhattan – signaled by the repetition of the dramatic musical score, the “Neptune” suite from Gustav Holst’s The Planets, Op. 32 (1914-16). That composition, whose otherworldly, mystical quality seems so appropriate for the sublimity of the vast underground quarry, assumes a different character when paired with images from the sales galleries. Its very “cosmic” dimension mirrors the grandiosity of the developers’ simulations – the soaring towers, the infinite views out panoramic windows – even as it hints at an unspecified unease, an uncanny quality or feeling of dread that remains hard to pin down but is, perhaps, the true emotional undercurrent of Quarry. That title, which at first glance appears so clear, begins to suggest the complexities Siegel plumbs here. Of course “quarry” refers to the source of marble in rural Vermont, and the gridding of the stone blocks to be cut out of its walls could be understood to directly indicate the word’s origins in the Latin quadrare, “to square.” But “quarry” is a homonym, referring not only to mining but also, through an entirely different derivation from old French, to being hunted. Which might lead us to ask, who or what is the prey here? It cannot be other than the fantasies of a determinate social class and their aspirations to assume the mantle of distinction, which are so expertly targeted by the developers and speculators in their presentation of these luxury towers. For in Quarry, we see value being produced twice: first in the extraction and refining of the raw material, then again in its deployment as pure signifier of exclusivity. In Siegel’s work, this production of value is always accompanied by a telling moment of violence. In Provenance, it was the manner in which the restorers flayed furniture from Chandigarh, tearing away its upholstery to reveal the skeleton of a chair or couch before its reconstruction. Quarry’s violence is at once more obvious – in the mine we are dealing with multi-ton blocks of marble being moved about by giant machines – and more subtle; masked, perhaps, behind the seductive digital renderings of the developers, which at certain moments occupy the entirety of Siegel’s screen. The violence, then, lies just as much in the deathliness pervading the entire film, from the sepulchral quality of the quarry to those simulated interiors, devoid of life, individuality, or personality the better to present a blank slate for the commodified desires and projections of their potential buyers. Whether out of the cold earth or out of the human psyche itself, value is extracted in Quarry with a force at once precise and merciless. - Tom McDonough