Josiah McElheny – Island Universe
by Katelyn Fagan
Josiah McElheny stands apart from his art contemporaries as a trained hands-on artist who puts meaning behind his works. McElheny is a New York based artist who creates works of beautiful hand blown glass. His glass objects are alluring, simply because of the fact that they're made of glass. No matter how humble a drinking glass may be, there's always a mystery to it; because it's solid and transparent, and it's solid and it's fragile.[1] McElheny is an expert glassblower and artist, taking inspirations from books, classic paintings, history, and objects he sees around him. His latest work Island Universe, 2008, was inspired by the Lobmeyr designed chandeliers seen in the New York Metropolitan Opera House, and adapted to create vivid diagrams of the Big Bang. The philosophical, religious, and political thought that influenced the production of this piece, and others, make McElheny different than his contemporaries. He reacts to art and culture of both the past and the present. McElheny’s glassblowing techniques and his stylistic elements create a unique venture from his contemporaries as he turns ideas into productions.
Josiah McElheny, a MacArthur fellow, went to the Rhode Island School of Design to study photography originally, but the glass department captured his interests more. He loved the very exclusive, secretive guild community of the glass factory culture, and its long oral preservation and small circle of people who understood its language and methodology. The production of glass is expensive and difficult, and requires a number of people working together in a sort of apprenticeship tradition.[2] He went on to study with such glass masters as Ronald Wilkins, Lino Tagliapietra in Italy, and Jan-Erik Ritzman and Sven-Ake Carlsson in Sweden, honing his skills into that of a master. McElheny still prefers making objects himself to enlisting technically brilliant assistants, and he possesses a familiarity with methods that date back centuries. McElheny succeeds in making glass as relevant, as charged with as much intellectual and aesthetic inquiry as any other medium.[3]
McElheny uses his craft as he continues to explore what has become his primary field of interest in recent years: questioning the legacy of Modernism, and probing the very function of art—its use in a world in which our relation to objects is almost exclusively that of consumers rather than of producers.[4] McElheny exploits the nature of glass, in a true modernist feel in many of his works, by having the viewer contemplate the materialality of the glass—its transparency, reflection, illumination, and emptiness. Some of his stances on Modernism include claiming glass as the ultimate modern material because its nature is transparency and perfection, a twentieth century bigoted idea of being perfect, without differences. Most of his pieces play on the idea of Modernity, its influence in the past as well as the present. He himself often follows the Modernist idea that process and materials dictate form.[5]
One of McElheny's real strengths is creating visually enthralling pieces, as well as involving complex ideas about modernity, history, and science. McElheny integrates thought and action with the voices of many disciplines: sociology, history, philosophy, and psychology. Through his art and the research it entails, he seems to be on an all-encompassing mission—to understand the world and his place in it.[6] Josiah McElheny stated:
My work is generated from the study of the culture and ideas connected to objects, whether contemporary or antique. I believe that all cultural, physical manifestations are on a continuum. A contemporary art object exists with all the associations we apply to it. And it changes. To be human and alive is to respond to the ideas of others and of yourself and to apply those ideas to the physical world.[7]
His latest work Island Universe proved to be yet another work calling for an in-depth study and research. This work stems from Hans Harald Rath’s, of the famous Viennese firm J. & L. Lobmeyr, chandeliers in the New York Metropolitan Opera House. He saw these beautifully crafted chandeliers while at a performance and focused more thought to them than the performance. The chandeliers, just like the theater itself, seemed to have come from this weird transitional moment where Modernism became infected with other influences.[8] This led him to study these magnificent creations. He learned that the New York Metropolitan Opera House’s architect, Wallace K. Harrison, rejected Rath's initial designs, preferring instead something more space-age. The revised design resulted in these glittering and intricate chandeliers that have a note of distant galaxies and futuristic space stations, but still evoke ornate mansions and gilded opera halls of the past.[9] Ironically these chandeliers were designed in 1965; the year the cosmic microwave background was discovered and provided the crucial evidence needed to back up the Big Bang Theory. These chandeliers, already looking like a model of the Big Bang, caught McElheny’s attention. He wanted to remake these chandeliers into eye-level sculptures that would occupy the entire ground floor of the gallery and do so in a streamlined Modernist style—by eliminating their ornate sparkling quality—and incorporate the real science of the Big Bang into them. He enlisted the help of David Weinberg, an Ohio State University professor of astronomy, to help him research the Big Bang Theory as well as help him incorporate that theory into art.
Together they looked over diagrams of the varying theories, and discussed how a static object could represent the origin of space and time itself, an initiating expansion that occurs everywhere yet has no center.[10] The origin of the universe, as explored in the Big Bang Theory, holds that it emerged from a state of extremely high temperature and density in an explosive expansion 10 billion to 15 billion years ago. McElheny told Weinberg that looking to the universe for inspiration led to forms that were stranger, and much more complex and compelling than he could have come up with by mere invention.[11]
McElheny’s work was to be kinds of explosion of highly reflective chrome-plated aluminum, with a central sphere from which radiate rods of varying lengths. Each rod ends with either a unique cluster of objects—which include smaller rods topped by hand-formed glass discs and globes—or a single light.[12] In order to convert the chandeliers to a scientifically accurate model, glass pieces would represent galaxies and light bulbs represent quasars, the brightest entities known to exist in the cosmos. To represent the expansive time and nature of the universe, they would use the spatial dimension of the rods emanating from the center where one meter would equal 100 million years after the Big Bang. The center of the sculpture represents the primordial cosmos and the outer edge the present day, leaving the passage from one to the other to represent the 14 billion year history of the expanding universe.[13]
Photograph by Jason Schmidt in New York City
In their research they ultimately realized that the sculpture could make a correlation between two important things. One is that the history of the Big Bang is just that, a history, and although it is impossible to really draw a picture of the universe at any given moment, it is possible to ask what kinds of basic structures were being formed two, or seven, or ten billion years ago. To artistically represent this, the different arrangements of glass pieces at the end of each rod would show what kinds of galaxy formations were happening at the corresponding length or moment after the Big Bang. The second thing that the sculpture depicts in terms of science is the beautiful idea of the isotropic nature of the universe, which essentially means that any one place in the universe is just as likely to be as interesting or as boring as any other. To represent this they made it important that the rods did not come out in some kind of pattern but in a random formation.[14]
In 2005 after months of collaborating, McElheny created An End to Modernity, a twelve foot high, sixteen feet in diameter sculpture consisting of a central sphere with numerous radiating elements in glass and metal, suspended just above the floor. It represented the first of five chandeliers that would become part of Island Universe. This work was commissioned by the Wexner Center Residency Award program and was first exhibited at the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio.[15] The collaboration of art and science created a magnificent work of beauty and scientific thought, while addressing the affects of Modernism in the year 1965.
The final result of McElheny and Weinberg’s four-year collaboration is Island Universe. The five sculptures of this work are based on five possible models for the universe—Small Scale Violence, Frozen Structure, Heliocentric, Directional Structure, and Late Emergence—each with its own unique structure. His sculptures offer a three-dimensional map of the "Multiverse," an eternal expansion of possible universes accelerating endlessly into infinity. Along with the sculptures is a 19-minute film Conceptual Drawings for a Chandelier, 1965 where diagrams of the five structures appear.[16] The viewer lies on a giant beanbag to experience an astronomical journey through the Metropolitan Opera House where McElheny’s sculptures are featured, suspended in the black void, accompanied by an eerie soundtrack by composer Paul Schutze, an Australian ambient and electro-acoustic musician.[17] The music and the editing convey a rhythm that shifts, freezes and develops in relation to each model as well as the scientific speculations about other worlds.[18]
The highly reflective yet transparent nature of this piece lures in the viewer, and as he inspects, walks around, and steps towards it, the work changes. As a viewer, your reflection is found on the center sphere, or the center of the universe. As McElheny explains: "The central idea in the work is that we're isolated, and that we don't all come from the same place; we have different needs, different histories and different ways of thinking."[19] Many of McElheny’s pieces try to tap into central human questions of who we are and where we come from; what, if anything, is original about us—of our own aspirations in a confusing world, full of endless ideologies and competing influences.[20] “Politically, I’m against finding the single answer,” McElheny insists. “I’m more interested in what these questions mean to our sense of who we are.[21]
But regardless of how beautifully McElheny’s Island Universe creates a harmonious marriage between science and art, he is not the first glass blower to make scientifically accurate models. In 1936 Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, father and son partners from Dresden, Germany, completed a collection of 4,400 glass plants and flowers for the Botanical Museum at Harvard University that took a half-century to make. Their studio also made models of marine invertebrates that were sold to museums around the world. Also at the American Museum of Natural History, there is a series of single-celled protozoa completed in 1943 by Herman O. Mueller, a former museum staff member who came from a family of German glass-blowers.[22]
Josiah McElheny is not the only practicing contemporary art glassblower. In the Finger Lakes region of New York State is found the Corning Museum of Glass, the world's largest glass museum, featuring thirty-five centuries of glass artistry, and live glassblowing demonstrations. It is also home to the Rakow Research Library, which is the library of record on glass and glassmaking. It is also home to The Studio, a highly respected glassmaking school. While this school may not work on the McElheny’s preferred method of European oral tradition and craft, it certainly does an excellent job teaching glassblowing to the masses. Anyone can take a class, as well as view the museum that is full of rich glass culture and history of past and present artists.[23] Most of the artists featured in this museum work in abstract and organic forms, or mixed media, often not having the same simple-object feel that much of McElheny’s work contains. A lot of these works are beautiful and intriguing, but take a very different look at what glass can achieve.
One famous glass blower of the 20th century, Dale Chihuly, focused on the materiality and color that can be achieved through glass blowing. Chihuly was the first American studio glass artist to travel to Murano to observe Venetian glassmaking techniques, which he would bring back to the United States, using them to build the glass program at the Rhode Island School of Design.[24] McElheny owes much to this famous American glassblower that came before him.
But, I do believe that Josiah McElheny does offer something different than the others that have come before and those that are his contemporaries. He does not believe in being original, because all of his work is derived from some previous source, and what he’s doing is re-imagining something or shifting or transforming it slightly but always very much in connection to its source. He is interested in the past, especially because art is essentially a physical remnant of a moment.[25] His desire is to bring these objects and ideas and contexts into the modern world. The way in which he does so is by masterfully creating these seductive, reflective pieces that are so attractive to the general public. He believes that in today’s materialistic society that if something is to be of value then it has to have a kind of gravity and importance to it, or a sense of sumptuousness. He gets the viewer into his works with his highly or all-reflective objects, because the viewer sees himself in it. In other ways he tries to create a perfect, pristine utopian feel to his works.[26]
I believe his works accomplish all that McElheny sets out to do concerning his artistic methodologies. McElheny’s works are intoxicating to look at and to study. They capture and awe you. I am greatly impressed with his research and training. Very few artists today seem to care about expertise or craftsmanship, especially those who remove their hands completely from the production process. I personally think that art has been slandered and defaced by contemporary artists who love pushing the limits of art. I believe there should be a mastering of craft and skill. Because of McElheny and other 20th and 21st Century glass-blowers, glass-blowing can no longer been seen only as a craft or a trade. McElheny has emphasized the materiality of glass in a very Greenbergian fashion of Modernism, and done so powerfully.
Josiah McElheny’s works consist of thought: his thoughts, philosophical thought, scientific thoughts, artistic thoughts, and religious thoughts. These thoughts not only influenced Island Universe, but every piece made before it and every piece he will continue to make. This makes him different. His works are not about “sticking it to the man” or using common everyday materials in new ways just to make art. He creates legitimate, beautiful, stand alone works that aren’t about making art for art’s sake. They are about something. He reacts to art and culture of both the past and present, but does so with a real honed and learned skill. This makes him unique.
Works Cited
Browne, Alex. "The Big Picture." New York Times, September 26, 2008: MM64.
Corning Museum of Glass. 2009. http://www.cmog.org/dynamic.aspx?id=194 (accessed June 11,
2009).
White Cube. Josiah McElheny: Island Universe. 2008.
http://www.whitecube.com/exhibitions/josiah_mcelheny_hs/ (accessed June 11, 2009).
Eldrige-Ford, Ashley. Frieze Week 2008: The Gallery Recap - Josiah McElheny, Island Universe
White Cube, London. October 14, 2008.
Http://artcomments.blogspot.com/2008_10_01_archive.html (accessed June 11, 2009).
Hixson, Kathryn. "Glass, Apprenticeship, and Josiah McElheney." New Art Examiner, 2001
: 72.
: 72.Ivatts, Rebecca. "Blowing the glass fantastic." El Pais, 2009: 8.
Art: 21--Art in the Twenty-First Century Season 3, Episode: "Memory"
. Directed by PBS Home
. Directed by PBS HomePrograms. Performed by Josiah McElheny. 2005.
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia. January 28, 2009.
mcelheny_en.html (accessed June 11, 2009).
Rothkopf, Scott. "1000 words: Josiah McElheny
; Talks about an end to modernity and
; Talks about an end to modernity and conceptual drawing for a chandelier, 1965, both 2005." Artforum International
, Nov 2005.
, Nov 2005.Spears, Dorothy. "The Entire Universe on a Dimmer Switch." New York Times
, May 7, 2006:
, May 7, 2006:2.19.
Tarlow, Lois. "Profile: Josiah McElheny." Art New England,
Ag/S 2002: 21-23.
Ag/S 2002: 21-23.Volk, Gregory. "An Infinity of Objects." Art in America, 2006: 166-169.
Weinberg, David. "The glass universe: Where astronomy meets art." New Scientist
, Dec 2008:
, Dec 2008: 1-2.
[1] Lois Tarlow, "Profile: Josiah McElheny," Art New England, Ag/S 2002: 22
[2] Lois Tarlow, "Profile: Josiah McElheny," Art New England, Ag/S 2002: 21.
[3] Gregory Volk, "An Infinity of Objects," Art in America, 2006: 166.
[4] Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia,”Josiah McElheny-A Space for an Island Universe,” January 28, 2009; available from http://www.museoreinasofia.es/exposiciones/expos-pasadas/2009/josiah-mcelheny_en.html Internet; accessed June 11, 2009).
[5] Kathryn Hixson, "Glass, Apprenticeship, and Josiah McElheney," New Art Examiner, 2001: 72.
[6] Lois Tarlow, "Profile: Josiah McElheny," Art New England, Ag/S 2002: 21.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Scott Rothkopf, "1000 words: Josiah McElheny; Talks about an end to modernity and conceptual drawing for a chandelier, 1965, both 2005," Artforum International, Nov 2005.
[9] Gregory Volk, "An Infinity of Objects," Art in America, 2006: 168
[10] David Weinberg, "The glass universe: Where astronomy meets art." New Scientist, Dec 2008: 1.
[11]Rebecca Ivatts, "Blowing the glass fantastic," El Pais, 2009: 8.
[12] White Cube, Josiah McElheny: Island Universe, 2008; Available at http://www.whitecube.com/exhibitions/josiah_mcelheny_hs/; Internet; accessed June 11, 2009.
[13] David Weinberg, "The glass universe: Where astronomy meets art," New Scientist, Dec 2008: 1.
[14] Scott Rothkopf, "1000 words: Josiah McElheny; Talks about an end to modernity and conceptual drawing for a chandelier, 1965, both 2005," Artforum International, Nov 2005.
; Talks about an end to modernity and conceptual drawing for a chandelier, 1965, both 2005," Artforum International, Nov 2005.[15] Gregory Volk, "An Infinity of Objects," Art in America, 2006: 168
[16] Rebecca Ivatts, "Blowing the glass fantastic," El Pais, 2009: 8.
[17] Ashley Eldrige-Ford, Frieze Week 2008: The Gallery Recap - Josiah McElheny, Island Universe White Cube, London, October 14, 2008; Available at http://artcomments.blogspot.com/2008_10_01_archive.html; Internet; accessed June 11, 2009.
[18] White Cube, Josiah McElheny: Island Universe, 2008; Available at http://www.whitecube.com/exhibitions/josiah_mcelheny_hs/; Internet; accessed June 11, 2009.
[19] Ivatts, “Blowing the glass fantastic,” 9
[20] Gregory Volk, "An Infinity of Objects," Art in America, 2006: 169
[21] Alex Browne, "The Big Picture," New York Times, September 26, 2008: MM64.
[22] Dorothy Spears, "The Entire Universe on a Dimmer Switch," New York Times, May 7, 2006: 2.19.
[23] Corning Museum of Glass, 2009, “Ben W. Heineman Sr. Family Gallery of Contemporary Glass”; available at http://www.cmog.org/dynamic.aspx?id=194 ; Internet accessed June 11, 2009.
[24] Corning Museum of Glass, 2009, “Ben W. Heineman Sr. Family Gallery of Contemporary Glass”; available at http://www.cmog.org/dynamic.aspx?id=194 ; Internet accessed June 11, 2009.
[25] Art: 21--Art in the Twenty-First Century Season 3, Episode: "Memory," Directed by PBS Home Programs; performed by Josiah McElheny, 2005.
[26] Art: 21--Art in the Twenty-First Century Season 3, Episode: "Memory," Directed by PBS Home Programs; performed by Josiah McElheny, 2005.
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