Killing The Kilogram: Le Grand K – Reviewed

On May 20th of 2019, the scientific community bid adieu to a weighty artefact affectionately known as Le Grand K. On the same day, World Metrology Day, a new book was launched. Nina Hanz reviews…

Gone are the days where materials were more than just artefacts, kept in cabinets – closed off – collecting dust. ‘Did the missing objects biodegrade, giving back to matter what was always rightfully owned?’ writes Andrea Khôra, ‘Or was it paradoxically lost, dropping the weight of existence?’  It was inevitable, a unanimous decision, fated that physics would become metaphysics and history all at the same time. With one swift killing of a kilogram.

Since 1889, the kilogram has been defined not in words or measurements per se, but in the manifestation of a sleek cylinder used as the base unit of measurement known as Le Grand K. Anonymous, it’s replacement, as agreed upon at the General Conference on Weights and Measures hosted by the supreme authority of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures last November, is a more accurate system using electromagnetics to calculate the amount of force required to counteract an object’s weight. Still, tensions remain.

This new book, titled affectionately after its namesake, Le Grand K was edited by Dasha Loyko, Károly Tendl and Khôra into what is best described as an experimental eulogy, liberal and explorative in the honouring of the weighty prototype’s death. Syndicating various texts and artworks to commemorate both the material object and human fondness for ascribing value to the world around us, Le Grand K is both a departure from and a commemoration of this tool’s former glory. While certain texts and visuals appear coded and obscured, as an anthology it offers much to unpick for oneself. As a work of art in its own right, it thrives as a tactful reflection of contemporary culture while still maintaining awareness for the gravity of the past.

As with any death, the act of transcribing the physical into allusion, this book contributes to the mystification of Le Grand K, transforming it into legend. In Soliloquy of a Single-winged Fly, Alice Bucknell pairs distorted images of an insect’s delicate wing with a text imagining what it would have been like to be a fly on the wall at the conference in Versailles that determined the new measuring system. And in Demelza Toy Toy & Annie Pender’s An introduction to the Theories and Practices of New Week Association, the abbreviation NWA gets new meaning as a fictional measurement-driven society exploring further restructuring. These, and an artist by the name of Nikolia’s methodical reimagining of the conference broken down into timestamps, use fictionalisation to revivify Le Grand K, allowing the prototype to live on through the words on the page rather than the absoluteness of mass. As in Bucknell’s text: “I fell into a scientist’s glass of merlot when applause thundered down the table at the decision to kill K… Here are fifty countries with tears in their eye and ecstasy in their throats cheering on a revolution.”

Still, it seems odd that amid Brexit stand-offs, American presidential primaries and the global arm-wrestle known as the left-right spectrum, that any decision could so unanimously be agreed upon. But maybe that was because it wasn’t much of a choice in the first place.

Despite a three-tiered bell jar enclosed in the lower vault in the basement of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Sévres, Paris, the prototype of the base kilogram had begun to show minuscule discrepancies compared to the replicas distributed around the globe. While these inconsistencies were no more than the weight of an eye lash (or a bug’s wing), there was no preventing the platinum-based ingot’s shedding, moulting movement towards full deterioration. By the next century, as a standard of measurement, Le Grand K’s performance would have been unacceptable, causing massive variations to the measurement of important scientific areas of research and distribution such as drug development, precision engineering and nanotechnology. This begs the question, what’s the purpose of a hardcopy of a book to mark this transition in this socio-political atmosphere of fracture, liquefaction and automation?

Perhaps it can be justified purely as an act of counteraction or perhaps it can be answered in content.

While the artists involved seemed to have virtually free rein, having the book centralise around the very death of Le Grand K produced a reoccurring motif, the symptom of governance: bullshit bureaucracy. Artists like Károly Tendl, Arieh Frosh, Marijn Ottenhof, are some of the many writers featured in the anthology using the slippery genre of fiction to parody bureaucracy, lampooning the very killing of the kilogram and the systems in place regulating how we value our ever-increasing pixelated age. Referring again to An introduction to the Theories and Practices of New Week Association, Toy Toy and Pender embody the institutional tone to promote their amendments (or improvements) to the weekly schedule by redefining the ‘societal Monday’ to Sunday, all-the-while pinching the UK and European governments through NWA. In the very reshaping (or rather dissolving) of Europe, such contributions collected for the publication measure up to our zeitgeist of shifting ideologies, critical awareness and the behind-closed-doors deals.

As the intangibles continue to fill the spaces previously held by our measured, material domain, Loyko, Tendl and Khôra’s Le Grand K offers a palpable object filled with layers of critical thinking and quick-witted kilogram karma. In an impressively presented book loaded with photography, poetry and graphics, the reanimation of Le Grand K is made possible through lively fictionalisation and clever satire. As a moment in human history, this chunky, block-shaped edition transforms into a monument of its own accord.

Nina Hanz

Le Grand K is available from Gossamer Fog gallery, London

Images, from top: Le Grand K cover artwork visual identity by Farvash; Le Grand K Demelza Toy Toy and Annie Pender These Are Not My Days_ Conditions of Impermanence, Science Museum London 2019 photography Dasha Loyko