We all know what makes glass art so great: Amazing shapes and stunning colors and the sheer miracle of what molten sand can do. And Josiah McElheny, a 45-year old Brooklynite, has become today’s most important glass artist by going against that consensus. (The Chihuly Accord, we could call it.) McElheny thinks that the glass that he shapes can have the same ambitions as other major art forms–that it can say important, subtle things about the world around us. Beginning Friday June 22, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston is giving McElheny his first U.S. survey, presenting almost 20 years of his most significant work around the theme of time. As curator Helen Molesworth puts it, McElheny, though once apprenticed to master glass blowers, has since “placed as much (if not more) emphasis on the ideas and intentions that surround and accompany the art work as on the finished object itself.” In his show, those ideas include the history of modern aesthetics, traditions of museum display and the birth of the cosmos in the Big Bang. This web gallery shows how McElheny makes glass speak of such immaterial things.
– Blake Gopnik
(All images courtesy Josiah McElheny and Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, Donald Young Gallery, Chicago and White Cube. © Josiah McElheny)
This 2005 work presents eight hand-blown decanters, in a classic modernist style. But because they are presented in a mirrored box, they stretch out into infinity like objects from an assembly line. The piece conjures up what McElheny, the craftsman, has called "the horror of endlessly repeated production."
A detail from McElheny's 2005 piece, making clear how beautifully made his works always are. They never get so invested in ideas that they don't also have flawless workmanship.
This 2008 installation was inspired in equal parts by the gorgeously decorative Lobmeyer light fixtures at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York and by the astrophysics of the Big Bang. McElheny's "chandeliers" reflect real features of the universe we live in.
Read as a scientific model, McElheny's objects use lightbulbs to stand for quasars, affixed to rods that represent the time those bodies have been around.
In 2007, McElheny found inspiration in the New York playground designs of the great mid-century sculptor Isamu Noguchi–not one of which was ever built. Where Noguchi's playgrounds were meant to be explored by the bodies of young New Yorkers, McElheny's reflective riff on them is there for the eyes alone to get lost in. There's a purity in those surfaces that is also frightening. The piece recalls the frigid sheen of some of modernism's most utopian conceits.
A piece made this year, "Study" is actually a conceptual map of a tiny fragment of the night sky, made in collaboration with cosmologist David Weinberg.
Although McElheny's works clearly function in the world of fine art, part of their charm lies in how they could also work as functional objects – if sometimes somewhat tacky ones. In fact, McElheny seems to revel in the kitchiness that is always a risk with glass art.
This is a detail of a 1995 work in which McElheny took on exhibition display. The display of empty vials comes with two different labels. One, dated circa 1860, makes the romantic claim that they once contained mourners' tears. The other, dated to circa 1925, takes a tougher, more scientific approach: They are simply "empty cosmetic jars." In fact, the vials are McElheny's meticulous reproductions of Roman originals, left empty of fixed meanings, and waiting to be filled.
