The raw material for Peter Juhl’s art has been around for a billion years and probably will be around for thousands more.
But the art itself is destined to fall down.
Juhl, a 55-year-old Eagan resident, is a rock balancer, part of a coterie of people around the world who spend their free time seemingly able to defy gravity by precariously balancing rocks atop one another.
Juhl discovered rock balancing about 20 years ago, and what started as a pastime soon became an avocation, an obsession and an art form. His work has been the subject of gallery exhibitions, public demonstrations and classes he teaches. Thanks to the Internet, it also has become an worldwide community with international gatherings.
And now it’s a book: “Center of Gravity: A Guide to the Practice of Rock Balancing,” which Juhl self-published and is offering on Amazon.com.
In his book, Juhl defines rock balancing as “the placement of bare rocks on one another to create ephemeral art.”
In that sense, it’s different from semi-permanent rock cairns built by hikers on mountain trails or the Inuit rock sculptures called inuksuk that resemble human figures.
LUNCH TABLE TRICK
But according to Juhl, rock balancing has a kinship with those and other rock constructions, ranging from dry stone walls to Stonehenge. It’s a subset of land art, a movement embracing sculptures made in the landscape from natural materials like the Earth itself.
Juhl, who has a day job as a database administrator with Delta Air Lines, said his journey as a rock balancer started when he was killing time at a rocky beach on a family vacation along Lake Superior in the early 1990s.
The coarse sand of the beach reminded him of a trick demonstrated at hundreds of school lunch tables: balancing a salt shaker on its corner in a little pile of salt and then blowing the sand away, leaving the shaker still standing.
Juhl wondered if he could vertically balance a rock on its end in a pile of sand. It turned out the sand didn’t help, but he was able to get the rock to stand up by nestling it into a little indentation on the rock below.
Soon he was adding rocks, balancing one on another, and eventually getting rocks to rise vertically in a zig-zag pattern or in a counterbalanced arrangement.
“I felt I had invented something entirely original,” Juhl wrote.
He hadn’t seen anyone else doing something similar, and yet “knew I couldn’t be the only person in the world doing it.”
FLEETING FRUITION
Juhl would later discover that dozens of people around the world apparently were wondering the same thing, and they started to discover each other about five or six years ago thanks to a Facebook group created by an Italian rock balancer named Carlo Pietarossi.
Last year, Juhl gathered with Pietarossi and about a dozen other balancers at an Italian resort on the shores of the Adriatic for the first global conference of rock balancers, the 2012 Balance Art World Intermeeting.
To see one of Juhl’s sculptures, you either have to look at a picture or catch him in action because a day is a long time for one of his sculptures to remain upright on a beach. It might last for as little as a few seconds, just enough time to snap a photo, before it’s felled by a puff of wind, a bird landing or the touch of a passer-by who wants “to see if it’s real.”
“I think of it as temporary sculpture,” he said. “When it falls, it falls.”
He said, “Is it real?” is a common question asked by people who happen upon his sculptures. “I see a lot of double takes.”
“The thing that really delights them is when I take the thing apart and put it back together,” he said.
Another common comment: What kind of glue does he use?
“They think that’s an original joke. I’ve heard it a thousand times,” he said.
For the record, there is no glue, and Juhl said he doesn’t use any special tools or artificial supports to prop up the rocks when putting them together — just his two hands, and occasionally a knee or his head. He usually works with rocks about as big as an egg and up to about the size of a watermelon. Any smaller, and the sculpture blows over too easily. Any bigger and he risks too many smashed toes.
Juhl said he goes to the rocky beaches on the North Shore four or five times a year just to work on rock balancing.
“I’ve never run out of new things to try,” he said. “I’ve been continually amazed by the potential for new things to come about.”
When he’s stuck inside during the winter, he’ll try balancing five golf balls on top of each other, or an egg on the point of a pencil.
“You get a craving for balance,” he said.
His book is a survey of other rock balancers around the world mixed with a how-to guide, with technical discussions of center of gravity and “potential energy minimum.”
He touches on the ethics of altering the landscape and the aesthetics of a good sculpture: “The best balanced-rock sculptures are those that are closest to falling down.”
There’s a discussion of the meditative experience of trying to coax a rock into position, and the magical feeling when you take your fingers away and it stays in place.
“It’s a kind of flow,” he said.
He thinks almost anyone can learn how to do it.
“The fact that people react so strongly when they see it tells me it has the potential to be something bigger,” he said.
According to Juhl, there’s something special about seeing something that should fall down but doesn’t.
“It creates a sort of tension people find really compelling,” he said. “It evokes something in them, a sense of wonder.”
Richard Chin can be reached at 651-228-5560. Follow him at twitter.com/RRChin.
FYI
For more information about Juhl and rock balancing, see temporarysculpture.com.
