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The smallest gust of air can extinguish a flame, while a strong wind can whip a fire into a raging frenzy. The simple shape of a cross is a symbol of hope around the world, yet it is also associated with the grave and the tomb. The information catalogued in our books and libraries is the very basis of knowledge, but words and facts streaming into our lives in an uninterpreted cacaphony obscure truth and obstruct knowledge.

George Stone’s DOUBLE CROSS, created expressly for this Laguna Art Museum exhibition, suggests these paradoxes but does not resolve them. Instead, the work serves as a reminder: of the fragility of such social constructs as “communication” or “information,” of the need for constant vigilance in our search for truth, of the inadequacy of metaphor as a substitute for the real.

The work is relatively simple in its construction and execution. It consists of two crosses occupying two separate rooms: a glass case in the shape of a cross—a positive form—in the center of one gallery and an adjoining gallery which is itself a cross, defined in negative by the walls of the room.

The case contains rows of open books, their blank pages occasionally fluttering in the wind of tiny fans that start and stop at odd moments. Words, seemingly blown from the pages of the blank books (they were actually chosen from a dictionary by an automatic, artist-devised system), cover the walls of the cruciform gallery next door. Four tiny spotlights roam this otherwise dark room, stopping here or there for a few seconds to create random text combinations in a manner that recalls Surrealist poetic methods. On the wall of the first gallery, seen best from the exit of the darkened room/cross, is a large color photograph of a flame—an image intensified and enlarged by its reflection in the polished surface of the glass case.

DOUBLE CROSS is an environment rich with hints of visual brilliance unreachable by any literary means. The cross-shaped gallery, with its regular stacks of words like little skeletons or labels on a cabinet, reminds us of catacombs, mausoleums and memorial architecture. The words appear to have been carefully saved, as if precious. The glass coffins holding the books are assembled with the same commercial hardware used for the most mundane display case in the shopping mall just outside the gallery walls. The work speaks of catalogues and categories as graveyards and headstones; information as commodity.

The cross is presented here as container rather than as support structure—a passive receptacle that might receive or encase ideas but does not serve as an active, strengthening framework. Stone’s crosses speak of transparency, not substance; enclosure and imprisonment, not glorious martyrdom. The Book yields no answers and the Word is ephemeral. The title of the piece suggests duplicity as well as duplication, though a careful reading suggests betrayal not by a person (or a deity), but by symbols-by the decorative trappings of an ancient belief system.

A profound distrust of the symbolic lies at the heart of DOUBLE CROSS. The book, age-old emblem of wisdom, is empty. Words, which can give life to ideas and dreams, are entombed. (Though potential is suggested, too, by the empty books and enshrined words: their metamorphosis into new symbols is at least a possibility.)

A picture—one kind of symbol—is worth more than a thousand words, the subtitle of the work tells us. The single picture presented here is the photograph of yellow and orange tongues of flame. But does the flame stand for life? Or is it an eternal flame of memorial? Does it light our way or blind us?

Which bums hotter: the flame of the lamp of knowledge or the censor’s bonfire of books?