I'M NOT SURE I APPROVE OF THIS:

A Sense of Place, Stone by Stone
Art Around Town

By ERICA ORDEN
Staff Reporter of the Sun
February 13, 2008

The artist Michal Rovner estimates that she has collected more than 10,000 cubic-foot stones on her farm in Israel. There are so many stones that the municipality governing her village wants to investigate what she's up to. The answer, though, can be found easily enough at PaceWildenstein's West 22nd Street gallery in Manhattan. Ms. Rovner used about 1,200 stones from her farm to build a 60-ton archaeological sculpture, "Makom II," which goes on view today.

Ms. Rovner and a team of eight masons spent two weeks in New York constructing the cubic structure, which is made from stones she collected all over Israel and the West Bank, mostly from abandoned homes. To retrieve stones from Palestinian territories, the artist sent a non-Israeli colleague to transport a stone to the border checkpoint, where she would meet him with a truck. Ms. Rovner, a former video artist who received a mid-career retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2002, said she was drawn to work with found or recovered objects because of their varied history and origins. "The intention was to put together all of these places into a coherent structure," she said. "I wouldn't be interested if the stones were all from one place."

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If the stones are from abandoned modern houses, I suppose that's one thing. But I hope none of them are from ancient ruins.