JOSIAH MCELHENY
Josiah McElheny is an artist and sculptor, primarily known for his work with glass blowing and assemblages of glass and mirrored glassed objects. He is a 2006 recipient of the MacArthur Fellows Program. With his gleaming, dazzlingly reflected glassworks McElheny seduces the viewer to contemplate complex ideas from modernist utopias to unsettling cosmological concepts. The Brooklyn-based artist explores the visions of forgotten writers, underappreciated architects, missionary musicians as well as revolutionary astronomers and translates them into his medium. Only when looking through their beauty will his objects reveal the radical questions they pose.
Interview by Claudia Steinberg
Claudia Steinberg You have said that glass is a vehicle for looking, a tool for seeing through and closely – in other words, for clarification. Yet you have also said glass has physical qualities – like its enormous strength – that are still mysterious to scientists, as is the creation – to the non-scientist, at least – of something transparent from something as dull as sand. It still seems alchemical, in a sense, a material that is both from the earth and the sky. Do these qualities themselves mean anything to you?
Josiah McElheny In the most basic way, no. Materials don’t have meaning, but you remind me of the of the classic phrase “through a glass, darkly”, and of glass as a linguistic concept, as tool of cognition, perception, even intuition – an interrogatory process that needs a material intervention, like the light that has to pass through the glass for you to see some distorted reality through it. But the material has to be there for you to actually see the something that you then can interpret, so you can have this clarifying experience. The paradox is that the material isn’t in itself actually meaningful, yet it can intervene to move along ideas and even dreams. Somehow though, you need language to understand how to use this tool, and maybe it is the combination of language with material distortion in order to end up with alchemy.
CS You have long been interested in modernism and its loose ends, especially its utopian aspects, but also its errors. Glass was the preferred material of the modern idea, representative of transparency in every way, and thus so important to the International Style. You make the case for translucency, however.
JM What does transparency mean in terms of its material meaning? One might think of the word “invisibleness”, or lack of materiality. But in reality, transparency always has reflections too; it has colour and a surface that gets dirty almost immediately – one rainstorm will cover it with muck. Muck is actually a quite good word. Almost all the promoters of this “International Style” of transparent modernism are men, and men are often very afraid of muck. Life is mucky and transparency is something impossible, and even if you had it, I don’t know where it would get you? It’s a strange thing that we’ve based a lot of resources on. If you just take it at face value: why would we want to make a bunch of invisible buildings? Are there any other alternatives? That’s still an obsession of mine. I’ve been fascinated by that question from the point of view of history – could history have unfolded differently? We’re now at the cusp of a moment where people are not only talking about history unfolding in different ways, but also hopefully trying to reform some tragedies of the past in terms of racial reparations, and as also with climate change and other structural issues across the globe, all of this demonstrates the need for great imagination. One of the basic principles the modernists were looking for was a core human need: the desire to have natural light in your life. Is it transparency that makes this possible? No, it’s translucency, because it glows, it transmits light while protecting us somewhat from the sun. Translucency is a whole other concept: it’s about emanation, it’s about vibration and other kinds of metaphors. And one could think of how that would re-inflect all the ideas of architectural design and artistic modernism with a whole set of different metaphors that can already be found in many artistic enterprises, if we look.
CS You’ve also said that because capitalism won, we live in a monochrome world instead of a colourful one.
JM I’m not an historian, but if you look at the global capitalist expansion from, let’s say the 1920s or 1930s until now, it’s easy to see that the grand majority of buildings are either the colour of concrete, sheet glass or steel, and one can ask, does it have to be that way? The built environment comes from a very specific place: Western Europe. It was the dominant colonial force in the world, and the people who ran Western Europe also created the kind of educational systems that determine which kinds of buildings this global capitalist world would erect. And those people weren’t interested in anything that had colour in it – they could have dyed every single concrete building green or purple or any other colour for very little money. There are some pretty basic ideological reasons why they didn’t want to do that. And that ideology was the one of the centre-right, which went along with aesthetic restraint as a good fit with capitalism. In the period right before and just after the First World War, there was a fairly significant movement of left-wing thinkers who wanted to make the world brightly coloured. If the left wing had won these ideological battles, we could be living in a world in which modern Shanghai or Beijing was full of brightly coloured buildings, and transparent buildings were translucent, with windows in many different colours. That could have been the world we live in.
CS Le Corbusier based his idea that houses had to be white during a visit to Greece and the mistaken idea that the marble columns in their stately white were like the monochrome of the gods, and that this is how cerebral rational architecture with a certain amount of grandeur and dignity should look like.
JM Yes, but if you look at the history of these ideologues like Le Corbusier or Mies van der Rohe, all of these ideas around the celebration of white are both more complicated because, for example, the Villa Savoye was originally painted partially pink, an interesting fact that Mark Wigley at Columbia rediscovered from behind the pristine black-and-white photography we all know. These ideas of purity and restraint were cast in polemical, grand philosophical statements based on misbegotten notions. Overall, these ideas served as cover for the global capitalist enterprise, prettifying the emphasis on efficiency and other economic imperatives of global capitalism, resulting in a unified aesthetics as opposed to allowing regional styles. While Le Corbusier might speak in poetic terms, those ideas were utilised with a broad brush, and, when repeated throughout the 20th century, turned out to be useful for spreading global capitalist culture. It’s no accident that from 2000 to 2010, ten times as many skyscrapers were built in Shanghai as there are in New York, and every single one of those is basically a colourless tower on the Le Corbusier model. And let’s not forget that his 1925 Plan Voisin for Paris – which would have torn down large swathes of the city – was not really any different, for all of his poetical ideas around the purity of white, from the cruel and efficient ideas that Deng Xiaoping had for Shenzhen and Shanghai in the early 1980s.
CS Cruelty is what New York seems to have settled on even aesthetically with all these sharp, bluish splinters piercing the sky and that now are not even tenable as a business model, most dramatically in the case of the recently opened Hudson Yards.
JM Under new climate regulations, these buildings and other recent ones like them cannot even be built legally – they were grandfathered in. I would like to point to an alternative history to modernism that more and more people have become interested in: Bruno Taut, for example, had ideas about colour and translucency instead of perfect transparency. He and his friends aimed to build a modern world that didn’t put commerce but rather social connections and culture at the centre of society. I find that really inspiring as a possibility. The best examples of what they were able to build – like Taut’s fantastic middle-class housing districts in Berlin with their wildly colourful, incredibly sophisticated painted exteriors, or the interior of the Berlin Philharmonic, one of the greatest symphony halls in the world, by Hans Scharoun, where people with the expensive tickets enter the same way as those in the cheap seats – are examples of an alternative idea of modernism, and a world we could have had. We might think differently if we had gone in that direction.
CS We might be less depressed. Your work is inspired by counterpoints to cultural and political mistakes, yet you have complained that your gleaming, elegant objects have mainly been perceived as things of beauty. While these infinitely reflected forms have a nightmarish aspect, the viewer falls for the magical illusion.
JM I made a series of works of intricate reflections that were initially about the modernist idea of the end of all things fashionable, which suggested that you didn’t need to constantly reinvent things but could just invent things once and then simply repeat them forever. At first maybe, that sounded like a reasonable idea, but there’s something very dark about the concept because, the reinvention of life with each generation, with each day is what makes life worth living. And something infinitely repeated without change is not like a tree that grows and leaves its seed from which grows another tree in infinite repetition, because every tree is unique. They are not clones, and even clones are distinct because of their changing circumstances: individuality is actually the rule. So I wanted to make an image of the modernist dream of endless repetition, and I wanted to picture the seductive nature of this dark idea – its efficiency, its perfection. I didn’t realise until later that people might miss the dark aspect to the image or not be interested in that part of it, so I felt that I failed. I have always been fascinated with how I misunderstand things; that’s one of the driving forces of my work. It makes me feel alive that I think I understand something at eight o’clock, then by nine o’clock realise I misunderstood it. I might understand it a little better by ten! ◉