Three in a million: An epistemological study of a Portsmouth art project

I have a collection. On the face of it, three small ceramic shapes stamped with numbers might not seem a very impressive collection but, like pebbles thrown into a pond, considering their origins and history starts a series of ripples unforeseen by the thrower. These three, which belong to a family of many thousands, form the starting point to a series of reflections on contemporary art practice and its consumers – they are, in the words of Lévi-Strauss, ‘Good to think [with]’, ¹ and potentially have much to tell us about the ways in which art and collecting collide in the popular imagination.

For my three pebbles are part of Portsmouth (UK) sculptor and artist Pete Codling’s One Million Pebbles project, a scheme which aimed to engage the local community and visitors to Southsea (Hampshire) in the creation of 1 million pebbles to throw into the sea. This article will examine the project from a number of intersecting disciplinary viewpoints, combining a description of the project as it unfolded with a consideration of its historical, anthropological and artistic precursors, and an assessment of the impact it had in relation to both the artist’s own expectations and to those of the participants.

Codling’s exemplary documentation of this project ² reveals at the outset that he did not manage to complete a million pebbles in the period that the project ran – about half that number was made before the project funding (always piecemeal, drawing on the support of local businesses and the Arts Council, and never adequate) ran out. This shortfall received negative press coverage in some of the shriller British tabloids – the Daily Mail headline being (predictably enough): ‘Sculptor who spent 16 years throwing 1 million pebbles into the sea for artwork gives up halfway through’ (Wilkes, 2010). I shall return to the reception of the project later in this article. The basic process, however, was for Pete to set up his stand in various locations in Portsmouth and its seaside resort, Southsea, invite the public to make clay pebbles, then stamp them with a serial number before taking them to be fired and then thrown into the sea. The last batch went into the sea off Southsea seafront in May 2010. ³

In interviews with me in October 2010 and September 2011, the artist outlined how One Million Pebbles related to his ongoing body of work in the early 1990s, particularly his Objects of No Fixed Abode, portable items placed at different public locations which, far from being roped off from their viewers, invited handling and even removal. Both projects were a response to, and the antithesis of, the increasing commodification of art in the early 1990s, fuelled by collectors such as Charles Saatchi, and focusing on the site-specific installations of the (then) ‘Young British Artists’. ⁴ Against a background of rapid economic expansion in the UK, the consumption of art at spectacular prices was a mark of success, but at the same time called into question the nature of a piece if it was, essentially, made to an existing template. Codling’s works dissected this relationship between the artist, the gallery and the wealthy sponsor by seeking to connect directly with the viewer/spectator, and One Million Pebbles took this relationship further by inviting the public to become the makers of a work that was neither commissioned nor owned. Before the advent of the National Lottery in the UK totally devalued its impact as a number, a million was a suggestive, even emotive figure, a number that traders in the financial markets might aspire to, but was out of reach for most. The pebbles, therefore, were an alternative way for ordinary people to ‘make a million’.

The making of One Million Pebbles was contemporaneous with Field (1989 onwards) by Anthony Gormley. The latter work consisted of over 200,000 individual clay figurines, made and exhibited in locations as diverse as Humberside, Mexico, the Amazon Basin and Cardiff. Images of the exhibition of that work convey the impact of the multiple figures, whether arranged as an insistent crowd all staring in the same direction, or in strict geometric patterns against a white space. ⁵ One Million Pebbles was conceived to never be ‘exhibited’; it is not a gallery artwork and shared with Field only its most obvious feature, that it too was a clay work consisting of multiple objects forming a whole, and chimed in with the then strong interest in the processes of clay sculpture. ⁶ However the Pebbles concept, first proposed circa 1991 and started in 1993, owes more to the temporary nature of installation art, the Zeitgeist and the anti-commodity politics of the time. The early 1990s was a time when the terracotta army in China was being unearthed, when a million was worth a ‘million’, when youth culture was being outlawed from public places, along with raves, demonstrations, protests and travelling to Stonehenge for Solstice, when an artist aspired to being a ‘shaman’ and the battle for public space and its use were themes of the day. Codling refers to Rachel Whiteread’s cast objects and House sculpture, and to Richard Serra’s sculptures at the Tate as being inspirational at that moment: ‘The making of memories…. I am interested in the nature of the monument and how you can make something that is monumental in significance not necessary monumental in scale.’ Whereas Gormley, who came from a very different background and age group, had his ‘gorms’ manufactured for the gallery environment, Codling envisaged mass public participation in the making and ownership of the work at the outset and led the creation of the first 1000 pieces at his first solo exhibition at the Aspex Gallery in Portsmouth. These political differences between the two projects are important: Gormley’s Field series was repeatedly criticised for its perceived exploitation of those who actually made the figurines, particularly when he won the Turner Prize in 1994.

One Million Pebbles was also logistically a much larger undertaking than Field, despite the latter’s wider global reach, simply because it envisaged the creation of 1 million separate components. To make that many pebbles was a journey into the unknown – imagine (since they were to be made over a long period of time) how they might have looked all piled up. Over 20 tons of handmade pebbles were made, and up to 400,000 people participated. The sensory impact en masse might have been something along the lines of Ai Wei Wei’s recent Sunflower Seeds at the Tate Modern, London, only bigger in scale and artistic concept, and without the uniformity inherent in that work (the seeds were, after all, manufactured in moulds and hand-painted). ⁷ But – and this is the crucial difference – the visual impact of One Million Pebbles could only be imagined, since there was no intention to collect, pile or aggregate the pebbles that people made into a static piece of multiple parts. This was a massive, but ultimately invisible and imaginary, object, consisting of multiple pieces but not a multiple in the strict sense of the term, since each component would be different. ⁸

Pete’s original project site invited people to make a pebble to be thrown into the sea and, if they found one washed up on the shore, to throw it back in for others to find. For him, the process would be one of repeated disposal – recycling even. But the sea was now to be the final repository for the pebbles, however many times it returned its treasure ⁹ at high tide or in stormy weather. Those making pebbles (including, early on, Pete himself, and the present author and her husband sometime before 2000, of which more later) were therefore prepared never to see their pebbles again. The idea that they might become collectibles was not, in Pete’s initial concept, part of the project.

What intrigues me as an historian is the way in which this project – whether consciously or not – tapped into some very ancient practices of depositing artefacts. There are numerous examples throughout history of people casting valued items into water. ¹⁰ This could be part of a prayer to the gods inhabiting the pool/spring/river (and sea?), or a communal activity repeated periodically as a means of expressing community cohesion and/or subtly indicating social standing through the intrinsic value of the items being deposited. ¹¹ According to archaeologist Richard Bradley (1990), such deposits became a central, political activity in prehistoric society. None of the items – or bodies – sent into the water was intended to be retrieved, and their ‘loss’ was borne because the deposit of the object was understood to have a higher purpose; in the words of archaeologist Robin Osborne, they represented the ‘exchange of material objects for supernatural returns’ (2004: 2). The water, in this case, served as a liminal space (literally, if it had a shoreline for the donor to stand on as s/he cast away the object) – an intermediate space between donor and spirit or goddess. One of the most valuable items regularly entrusted to the waves was the body of a dead relative or colleague, and burial at sea remains a ritual full of religious significance. It also points up the fact that throwing objects into the water or immersing them is certainly not confined to pagan religions, and that the power of water as a transformative element also adhered to the living, who participated in the ritual of Christian baptism.

Now while Pebbles might not have had such spiritual overtones when it was conceived, it is clear that Codling understood and embraced this liminality in his view of what would be produced – ‘a landmark that’s sort of there and not there’, ¹² with him as the facilitator. There is, therefore, something undeniably ritualistic about the process of making this work, particularly since the enjoyable aspect of the project – the design and making of the pebbles – reminds us that ‘ritual need not be sombre’ (Wallis and Blain, 2003: 316). The sea was the ultimate repository, but the pebbles/offerings made by the public/devotees first had to pass into the care of the artist/high priest. He oversaw the firing, an act that transformed the offerings into something more permanent and meaningful, and was reminiscent of other deliberate burnings for ritualistic purposes, ¹³ before the final act (sometimes public, but often not) of depositing the pebbles in the sea. This may be allowing my interpretative imaginings to run away with me – and Codling’s appeal for ‘volunteer tossers’ to throw in the last batch in May 2010 certainly takes away a good deal of the mystical quality with which I have just credited the process. Nevertheless, the inherently ritual quality of his project was underlined when a visitor from India simply made his clay pebble, on the sea wall where the artist was working, turned around and threw it straight in the water, mirroring the ubiquity in Hinduism of throwing into water all symbols which might have been imbued with godly power or sakti. ¹⁴ This was a direct action between maker and water, and exceptional: for the rest of us, the pebble deposition was a mediated process, a bond of trust was being formed between the public and the artist when they completed their mini-artworks and handed them over to him for the firing stage.

The choice of Southsea seafront for the deposit, too, was quite deliberate. For the artist, the location was the ultimate ‘public place’ and chosen as a statement on the semantic art discussions of the time about the terms ‘site-specific art’, ‘installation art’ and ‘public art’. His choice of site, the public engagement, authorship and ultimate ownership reinforced the democratisation of the project, since it was a public space and owned by no-one, and stood in deliberate contrast to a gallery. The seafront was also imbued with a special meaning for the participants in the project: in effect this locale had become, to quote anthropologist Julia Hendon, ‘a dynamic container for structuring social interaction’ (2000: 44). ¹⁵

This raises the first issue of dissonance within the project. If the ultimate aim was disposal, defined like many deliberate depositions by the difficulty of easy retrieval (Hendon, 2000: 47), then why were some of the ‘pebbles’ that were made in Southsea so much more than simple, fired lumps of clay? One of those I have found on the beach is a lovingly crafted hedgehog, with its maker’s initials carved in for good measure. Why take so much trouble for something that was ostensibly going to be lost and then, as the sea wore it down, eventually destroyed? In taking the time and trouble to craft her/his piece, the maker was also making a public statement – at the workbench at least – that s/he valued the project itself as an original, artistic endeavour, and wanted to be a part of it; that s/he was willing to invest in a piece (admittedly free of charge) and risk losing it forever. There was a rhetorical and social purpose to this item – the apparent luxury of crafting it into so much more than a pebble acting as an incarnated sign of the maker’s investment. ¹⁶ And of course the form of this particular ‘pebble’ – rather more than a simple slab with a number on it, would also ensure that it was instantly identifiable by its owner should s/he ever find it again. This speaks of optimism and hope for a future for this piece – a redemptive return – and the hedgehog/pebble is not unique in this regard. Many of the pebbles made and since found washed up bear names, dates, identifiable signs and distinctive shapes (Codling himself engaged in some cross-cultural dialogue with at least one pebble bearing multi-lingual greetings, and a spell of pebble-making at the Caen clay festival in Normandy showed him that the French public were equally taken with his idea). Moreover, the makers of some pebbles used the opportunity to highlight contemporary historical events – the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997, or the fate of the Russian submarine Kurs in 2000 – and thus their pebbles became commemorative objects. All of these examples suggest that while their makers subscribed to the ‘communal’ idea of creating a mass of pebbles – a physical embodiment of their ties to the pebble-making community – they wished to express their individualism, and not simply be just another number.

But if the 1 million pebbles (or, more precisely, the 500,000 made) were intended to be a permanent addition to the seabed, with only occasional resurfacing and return, where does that leave the many people whose online blogs and message boards describe in loving detail those they have found and taken home? For collecting the pebbles seems to have become something of a cult during the life of the project. Several themes arise here. One is the legitimacy of taking anything away from the beach – it is in fact an offence in UK law to take material from beaches, although here the issue is usually one of quantity. But not always. Just to cite a couple of recent high-profile cases, the Brighton Argus reported on 22 May 2010 that local Member of Parliament Caroline Lucas’s:

decision to affirm her allegiance to the Queen clutching a pebble from Brighton beach brought her close to a brush with the law.… A city council spokesman said: ‘Technically it’s illegal to remove pebbles from Brighton beach but while our seafront officers are instructed to report anyone taking large quantities of pebbles to the police they are unlikely to report visitors taking a single pebble home to remember their visit.’ … In 2003 the council held an amnesty, promising not to prosecute anyone who returned stones, shells or larger items to Brighton beach. ¹⁷

Earlier, writer Ian McEwan was pursued by the authorities responsible for Chesil Beach when he mentioned in a radio interview in 2007 that he had taken a handful of pebbles from that famous landmark to inspire him while he wrote On Chesil Beach. The UK Guardian commented:

If he had confessed to loading one of the sarsen boulders from Stonehenge into his car boot, the response could hardly have been more ferocious. (Kennedy, 2007)

Now the obvious difference between these two cases and our pebble-collectors is that the material the latter are collecting is not part of the beach’s natural make-up. Major coastal erosion is not going to occur because of the removal of these man-made items. But is collecting the pebbles nevertheless a subversive activity? Are those who don’t return them to be condemned as privatising the art project, and undermining its purpose by reducing the chances of others finding pebbles and/or finding out why they were on the beach? Or is the ‘handmade monument to the people by the people for the people’ that the artist envisaged one whose very fragmentation into 500,000 pieces enables it to be housed in as many locations as there are pebbles? It would seem so – in an interview with the Daily Mail published in May 2010, Codling in fact acknowledges the practice of collecting the pebbles, and effectively legitimises it saying (albeit rather defensively, given the newspaper’s attack on the project in its headline, quoted earlier), ‘people who find them can put their own value on them and decide what to do with them, keep them and take them home or throw them back in’ (Wilkes, 2010). As an exercise in the democratisation of art, it cannot be bettered, therefore.

But why give such items house room? That word ‘value’ returns me to my earlier use of ‘treasure’ to describe the pebbles washed up. It might be argued that their journey into and back out of the sea has transformed the capital of these lumps of clay into something more special, more collectible. Pebbles have a wider cultural significance, beyond their materiality. In an evocative passage, the poet Yehuda Amichai wrote:

The Jews are buffed by suffering and polished by torments/ Like pebbles on the seashore. (in Harshav and Harshav, 1994: 463)

Our pebbles have undergone the same treatment, and survived to tell a tale: does this imbue them with a value that they would not otherwise have had? ‘Treasure’ is often interpreted as having a monetary value, but its original etymology referred to the place where valuable things were stored, the thesaurus or treasure-house, and this I think expresses far better the idea that the pebbles are considered sufficiently valuable – in an aesthetic or collectible sense – to take them away and store them in assemblages (see Hendon, 2000).

So what do people see in them? The practice of collecting and the presence of material objects in everyday life has attracted much academic attention from historians, museums professionals, archaeologists and anthropologists (see Elsner and Cardinal, 1994; Hodder, 1991; Martin, 1999; Miller, 2005, 2009). Ragnar Johnson comments that ‘the criteria of what is rare, unusual or of exceptional quality are social constructs’ and that collecting a particular type of object marks the owner as ‘a member of a reference group that share an evaluation of these types of objects’ (1986: 82–3); pebble-collectors, by this definition, form something of a club, and value their finds because of the links they represent to other collectors. One of the attractions of One Million Pebbles for collectors was perhaps the fact that no monetary transaction is involved. I would suggest that among the pebble-collectors there are two categories, who keep the pebbles ‘transcendent and out of circulation in the face of all the pressures to give them to others’ (Weiner, 1992: 7, cited in Hendon, 2000: 46). The first group consists of the potentially half-million people who actually made a pebble, the second, those who did not and who may or may not recognise the significance of the pebble/s they find. Let us deal with each group in turn.

I count myself among the first group, and suggest that for this group finding and keeping one or more of the pebbles acts as a kind of souvenir of the original act of making. I made my own pebble sometime before 2000 alongside my husband. I can be sure of the date as it was before my son was born in millennium year. Ironically, however, I have no recall whatsoever of what I made – I thought that I simply stuck to the brief and made a pebble. But I am wrong. Making pebbles was as much a performance as a personal act of making: I don’t remember what I made – but my husband recalls clearly. ¹⁸ These pebbles, then, could function as ‘pegs for memory’ (van Houts, 1999) – although the chances of the original maker finding their own pebble again were slight, participants in the making project share a mutual knowledge which binds them together in a shared social memory of the day they made their small part of this massive artwork. ¹⁹ (Codling is particularly proud that the pebbles project made it in to the UK tabloid newspaper The Sun in the 1990s, when a young boy from Portsmouth claimed to have found his own pebble on the beach.) And since it was ‘art’, some took the trouble to sign their pieces. Does this ‘knowing’ promote these collectors and impart a social capital that ‘not knowing’ denies other collectors? It would seem so – one of the collectors whom I contacted, when apprised of what she actually had collected, remarked ‘I wish I’d been one of the creators of the pebbles myself.’ ²⁰

The second group, therefore, are effectively in the position of seekers of knowledge. As people find the pebbles they are not always aware of their origins, leading in this digital age to people seeking answers online. Find one, and it is an intriguing mystery. Find and collect more than one, however, and the impetus to find out becomes stronger. As Richard Osborne has commented, it is the assemblage that speaks, not the uncontextualised, single object (which is also a strong argument for resisting the long-established practice of museums to disaggregate archaeological assemblages into separate groups based on an antiquated scheme of typological categorization; see Osborne, 2004: 3). But if the potential visual impact of One Million Pebbles was an unobtainable dream, ²¹ the work’s playfulness as a piece of psychogeography, encouraging the viewer/collector to interact with their environment in order to find more fragments, continues unabated.

A key to identification, ultimately, is the stamped number on each piece. Codling’s intention was that the number stamp would not only count the artworks made but also tell the ‘finder’ that this was part of something much bigger, a giant work of art dispersed, dissolved across the entire beach. Numbers loom large in this piece of art. It is interesting that finders posting on message boards such as The Ranger’s Blog ²² make a point of including the serial number in their reports, although other distinguishing features are also described. In this case the number functions both to legitimise the find as belonging to the project, but I wonder whether the finders reflect on where in the entire series their particular pebble sits? Does an older one (lower number) have a kudos that a nearly new one (close to 500,000) doesn’t? Has number 041427 been thrown in and re-found more than once? The numbers, in fact, were what prompted curiosity about what had been found. For example, there is a discussion thread about found pebbles on the weblog Geology Rocks, where a group of serious-minded geologists came up with the theory that the pebbles with numbers were either an experiment by the University of Southampton’s Oceanography Centre to test drift and currents or numerical markers for burials at sea! ²³

As a medieval historian, I am well-used to dealing with fragmentary sources whose context (and author) are totally unknown to us. But in this case the pleasure of the pebbles as text lies in the process of interpretation. Historians are of course bound by the need to provide evidence for their conclusions – these stones however invite the observer to imagine the story behind the piece. Why make a hedgehog? Why inscribe ‘Pokemon’? Why date a piece, as ‘Vicky’ did on 21 August 1999 or ‘Karen Coles, 2000’? The pleasure of speculating, I suggest, is the ‘supernatural return’ for the effort made to make and deposit the pebbles in the first place.

Speaking of dates, another theme crops up here. Over a decade later, it is hard to recapture the wave of millennial anxiety that swirled around the world in the late 1990s, with doom-laden prophecies of the ‘millennium bug’ causing computers to crash, and aeroplanes to fall out of the sky at midnight on New Year’s Eve 1999, particularly when viewed through the distorted lens created by the apocalyptic events of 9/11. ²⁴ Not surprisingly, the year 2000 was an unusually rich time for medieval historians, drafted in by the media to explain how the second millennium (in some calendars at least) differed from the first in 1000. ²⁵ The year 2000 had a cultural resonance as well, prompting a need to engage in multiple acts of marking the turning of the old millennium (see Coles, 2003). Thus many art projects at the time were funded specifically by the UK Millennium Commission to have an outcome or impact on or around the year 2000, ²⁶ and One Million Pebbles certainly fits that template. When I asked Pete about this, however, he was keen to distance himself from the millennial art label – for him, the pebbles made by residents of and visitors to Portsmouth, especially in the years around 2000, were a refreshing antidote to the overblown pomposity of the same city’s over-budget and overdue Spinnaker Tower, and it was more by accident than design that One Million Pebbles was adopted by local media as part of a wider millennial dialogue.

The engagement of children in the project was clearly a deliberate strategy, for it increased the number of potential participants exponentially, and the chances that the memory of the project would enjoy greater longevity – Pete intended that it would become an ‘urban myth’: ‘Everyone in Portsmouth’, he commented, ‘if not themselves, would know someone who has made one by the time I have finished, these are the “Pompey pebbles”.’ However: ‘In order to manufacture histories, others need to notice, comment on and interpret’ (Hendon, 2000: 49). And collecting has the capacity to stimulate this commentary. But the dynamics of social memory will ensure that what people think these pebbles represent will form as much a part of their myth as what other people know. If the urge to collect wins out, then there will be fewer and fewer finds to captivate people and excite their imagination. There is some evidence that the artist is aware of this, as his original web page (which he clearly updates regularly) suggested setting up a website to which collectors could upload photographs of their pebbles, thereby restoring the mini-artworks to the public domain and, as a by-product, creating a new, virtual beach for viewers to enjoy and comment upon. A Facebook page already has multiple entries, raising the intriguing possibility that more pebbles will be reunited virtually than could be physically. ²⁷

Some, however, will find a pebble and not take it home. The urge to throw back also has primeval origins. Throwing pebbles into the sea is a peculiarly persistent practice. Throwing stones with mystical powers has a place in many ancient cultures, such the Greek myth of repopulating the world after a great flood (sound familiar?) by Deucalian and Pyrrha, throwing stones over their shoulders into the earth (he throws stones that become men, hers become women). So did we all throw a little piece of ourselves into the sea when we made our pebbles? Hard to say. But it is striking that leaving offerings, of whatever nature, in public places or at significant sites, has recently been identified as a practice with very recent origins. ²⁸ This may well be – if so, it is a revival of something much, much older.

In a year when the word ‘legacy’ looms large in British culture, what lasting outcomes will this public art project have, now that no more pebbles are being made to remind us of it? Ultimately, One Million Pebbles has succeeded in its aim, to make a piece which is truly ‘public’ (in contrast to the ‘public art’ commissioned by local councils and often driven by the commissioners rather than the artist), to provoke discussions about value, and to leave all its participants, as well as those who now collect the pebbles, with a collective, shared memory which can be passed on, virtually, if not materially, to future generations. The last word on this goes to ‘Danny Boy’, a blogger from Portsmouth, responding to the negative Daily Mail commentators:

My daughter found one of the pebbles on the beach in Southsea when she was five that said ‘Imagine world peace’ – well, for a five-year-old that was a message worth a million pebbles!

If there was ever a better definition of ‘impact’, I haven’t yet met it …