The Stones of Ivittuut Extracting Stories from Rocks

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Salt Manufacturing Company, which paid a 20 percent royalty to Denmark to secure total control of the mineral on this side of the Atlantic. 2 The Aluminum Company of America would become the Pennsylvania Salt Manufacturing Company's best cryolite customer, two monopolies content to coexist in a state of mutual selfinterest for decades. Increased demand for the mineral involved considerable logistical challenges. In the late nineteenth century, the trip to Greenland was made by a fleet of specially made wooden sailing ships. The one-thousand-mile journey was only possible in the summer, and each journey from Philadelphia to Ivittuut could take sixty to seventy days.
Sometimes, boats could become stuck in the ice and fog for weeks at a time. 3 From Pennsylvania, cryolite was sent by rail to the Pennsylvania Salt Manufacturing Company's plant in Natrona, twenty miles northeast of Pittsburgh, not far from Alcoa's facility in New Kensington.
Like the ocean transport upon which it relied, the Ivittuut mine was seasonal. It was operated by 130 or so, mainly male, migrant workers in the summer and about half that in the winter. One account does mention an Inuit woman known as Maria, employed as a servant for the European miners. 4 Indeed, the very "discovery" of cryolite by German actor turned mineralogist Karl Ludwig Giesecke in the early years of the nineteenth century-and its introduction to European markets-was a product of colonialism's appetite for indigenous knowledge. 5 As Giesecke himself recorded in an 1822 account, "We owe the first discovery of cryolite to the Greenlanders, who, in finding it to be a soft substance, employed the waterworn rounded fragments as weights on their anglings." 6 It was specimens in this form that represented the first appearance of the mineral in Europe. "It was of course incorrectly stated in some periodical papers, that the cryolite was discovered by me; I only found its geological situation, and I dare say by a mere accident," Giesecke admitted, still neglecting the Inuit sailors that guided his own journey. 7 What was no accident, however, was that the commercial extraction of cryolite, like so many products of colonial trade, would produce little benefit for the island's indigenous population.
By the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, the quarry at Ivittuut blasted about nine thousand tons of cryolite each year; but by the 1940s, production had reached around 46,000 tons. 8 The German occupation of Denmark in World War II not only left Greenland an "unoccupied territory of an occupied nation" (never mind its population of some twenty thousand people) but also threatened its cryolite-a particular concern given aluminum's use in aircraft. 9 As a 1940 article noted: "The problem of defending the hemisphere against attack from Greenland is not so much in the hands of the State or War Departments 2 For a useful account of the industry in the late nineteenth century, see "Greenland's Queer By 1985, cryolite shipments to the United States spiked at 110,000 tons. And then in 1987, the deposits at Ivittuut ran out. The mine was shuttered, and the surrounding town eventually abandoned. The aluminum business would replace the mineral with a synthetic equivalent, an invention that had been in development since the 1930s, and was in fact pioneered by Germany during the war to circumvent their limited access to the mineralalthough the factory was bombed before this synthetic substitute could reach its productive potential. 12 By the time Ivittuut had no more cryolite, Alcoa had established its own subsidiary to make its chemical substitute. Cryolite might have the dubious honor of becoming the first mineral mined to commercial extinction, but its exhaustion was invisible to consumers for whom the supply of sparkling aluminum products seemed uninterrupted and unending, disconnected from the finite natural resources it had exhausted. 13 The role of the aluminum industry in causing this rock to become all but extinct was the origin of my interest in cryolite, and it was for this reason that a specimen of the material was installed-alongside other forms and stages from the production of aluminum-in a vitrine at the University Art Gallery in Fall 2019. The occasion for this display was an exhibition titled 11 In a 1942 article, Scientific American already sought to deflect this connection: "Greenland, you will recall, is now occupied by American troops. It is probable that more cryolite may be found in Iceland. But there is no connection between the United States troops and cryolite. We have all the cryolite we need; we could also make synthetic cryolite, fully as good as the real thing." Henry W. America caused by bauxite mining, or of labor conditions in Trinidad where the ore was transferred to the cruise ships. Instead, they offered, as related advertisements explained, a 'paradise' where flowering trees and 'blended' races promised an escape from modern 15 I acknowledge and thank the assistance of Debra Wilson, collection manager in the Section of Minerals at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History for her assistance borrowing these samples, along with Eric Dorfman, Steve Tonsor, and many other collaborators at the museum that provided their assistance to this project.   . 6), we explored this museum's expansive mineral collections. As Pogson's tour emphasized, these were aesthetic as well as scientific objects.
But they were also indelibly commercial samples, tied to the state support for extractive industries that has long underpinned the Australian economy. Indeed, many of the specimens we inspected were once held by Sydney's former Geological and Mining Museum, an institution founded by the government's Department of Mineral Resources. 18 Perhaps it was the notion of scarcity that attracted me, as an art historian, to the idea of exhibiting a lump of cryolite like a rare sculpture. And, in a way, this rock is a precious objecta specimen that escaped the material's use value to be preserved in a museum. But the limited edition to which it more profoundly points is, of course, the earth itself. Attending to collections beyond the conventional limits of art history helps underscore how often works of art are also tied to the long histories of material extraction and, often, exploitation that reached their apex under colonial expansion and industrial modernity. The material manifestations of these histories are no less important for art historians than they are for geologists, and the workshops I have described here have only reinforced my sense that there remains much to learn from each other's ways of looking. When rocks are transformed into self-consciously aesthetic objects, it is easy to lose sight of these material histories; even loose-cut gemstones seem to me to occlude, as their sparkle seduces our eye, the systems of labor and commerce within which they circulate. But rocks themselves have a brute, ponderous presence that makes it usefully difficult to avoid these fundamental questions about how humans have interacted with the earth, and about who has profited from its resources. 18 For further details about this conference, see https://www.powerpublications.com.au/conference-mining-value. For a summary of the organizer's perspectives on the outcomes of this conference, and its contribution to a broader series of scholarly events exploring economic perspectives on art, see Maggie M. Cao, Sophie Cras, and Alex J. Taylor, "Art and Economics Beyond the Market," American Art 33, no. 3 (Fall 2019): 20-26.

Figure 6
Mining Value conference speakers in minerology collection storage at the Australian Museum, Sydney, August 2018.

Figure 5
Mining Value conference speakers at the Mitchell Library, SLNSW, August 2018.