> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://hyperallergic.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# Weekend Words: Stone
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/weekend-words-stone/
- Published: 2014-07-13T14:02:38.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:33:12.000Z
- Description: On Wednesday, Hyperallergic’s Jillian Steinhauer brought the news of Marina Abramović’s latest endeavor, a video collaboration with Adidas reenacting the artist’s performance piece, “Work/Relation,” from 1978.
- Author: Weekend Editors
- Tags: Opinion, Weekend, Weekend Words, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 07:03 (2014, 2015, part 1)

![stone](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2014/07/stone.jpg)

Gustave Courbet, “The Stonebreakers” (1849). Oil on canvas, 165 x 257 cm. Gemäldegalerie, Dresden (destroyed). (image via Web Gallery of Art)

On Wednesday, *Hyperallergic’s* Jillian Steinhauer brought the [news](https://hyperallergic.com/marina-abramovic-made-a-film-with-adidas/) of Marina Abramović’s latest endeavor, a video collaboration with Adidas reenacting the artist’s performance piece, “Work/Relation,” from 1978:

> In case anyone was unclear on the branding going on here, the 11 performers wear Adidas shell-toe sneakers and Marina Abramović Institute apron-coats  
> \[…\]  
> The Adidas video features 11 people (the same number as a soccer team in play) demonstrating the different methods that Abramović and Ulay tried for transporting stones: each alone with a bucket, two people sharing buckets, or in a human chain. In voice-over, Abramović delivers the (*completely unexpected*) conclusion: “The chain is the most efficient message. The chain has the most endurance. The chain stays forever.” Unless that chain is the Brazilian World Cup team. (Too soon?)

> “The man who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.”  
>  
> **—William Faulkner**

> “The stone unhewn and cold  
> Becomes a living mould,  
> The more the marble wastes  
> The more the statue grows.”  
>  
> **—Michelangelo Buonarroti**

> “Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing a new road.”  
>  
> **—Voltaire**

> “Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.”  
>  
> **—Adrienne Rich, *What Is Found There***

> “Let him that is without stone among you cast the first thing he can lay his hands on.”  
>  
> **—Robert Frost**

> “The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.”  
>  
> **—Sigmund Freud**

> “The last resort of kings, the cannonball. The last resort of the people, the paving stone.”  
>  
> **—Victor Hugo**

> “If you can take the hot lead enema, then you can cast the first stone.”  
>  
> **—Lenny Bruce**

> “The Feet, mechanical, go round —  
> A Wooden way  
> Of Ground, or Air, or Ought —  
> Regardless grown,  
> A Quartz contentment, like a stone — ”  
>  
> **—Emily Dickinson, “After great pain, a formal feeling comes —”**

> “The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.”  
>  
> **—Bertrand Russell**

> “Too long a sacrifice  
> Can make a stone of the heart.”  
>  
> **—William Butler Yeats, “Easter 1916”**