A Perfect Zero (Neon Stonehenge)

In its time Stonehenge has been imagined variously as a Roman / Buddist / Jewish Temple. It’s been magically transported from Ireland by Merlin, as a place of wild revelry or intimate tragedy. It has been abandoned and discovered. It’s been understood as a clock and a computer, a device and a place. It has acted as a symbol of counterculture and revolution as well as conservatism and nostalgia. As a place where things end and others begin. Stonehenge continually surfaces from its pre-history as though it were brand new.

Stonehenge’s massive presence is in direct disproportion to the little we know about what it was supposed to be. This lopsided disparity liberates its form from any singular or particular content. Stonehenge becomes a sign without a meaning. Or so many possible meanings that the very idea of meaning collapses. Its blankness allows us to rapidly re-write its significance.Though it sits at the heart of  British culture it is also like a compass at magnetic north the place where we lose our bearings.  All the issues – like history, tradition and nature – which play such significance to the nation’s psyche swirl around the ancient stones without settling.

Like a conspiracy theory, the desire to fix meaning delivers a cascade of alternatives. Narratives expand into its vacuum exponentially. The real archaeology of Stonehenge is not essentialist; it is an archaeology of speculation.

Here, Stonehenge’s elevation is rendered in neon. The solid stones originally arranged in relation to the position of the sun become light itself. The stones are suspended in the air, recalling the myth of Merlin transporting it from Ireland. 

Stonehenge’s emptiness of its own meaning turns it into a floating signifier that is both the start and end of history. Those massive, ancient stones perform a cultural backflip – a kind of historical prolapse where the beginning is the end and the end is the beginning. Just like its circular plan, Stonehenge is a perfect zero, perpetually vacuous and sublime, forever prehistory and the future.