"A lot of my work comes from memory in the sense that
memory is always an imperfect remembrance."
"That’s
a big subject in my work—how ideas are contained in objects,
and how the idea and the object
can’t be disentangled. My belief is, there is no
such thing as the idea or the object. There is only a kind
of fusion of the two."
"I don’t really believe in history. And I think
that at some level that’s one subject of some of
my work—the fact that history is mutable, which is
essentially denying history."
The way that I am is somewhat
unusual. My education—art education—has led me to being
an artist. A very important part of it was going to Europe
and studying in these areas where they’ve always done
glass manufacturing. The reason I went there in the first
place was because I’d been told of a secretive romantic
oral tradition—this glass manufacturing tradition only passed
on person-to-person. These whole towns were involved over
many hundreds of years in this endeavor to produce glass.
Oftentimes the glass was for very wealthy people or aristocracy—in
response to fashion. So even if it was some isolated area,
they were connected to culture in a bigger and wider sense
being involved with architects and artists who would come
in and work with these factories to design tableware or specialty
objects.
What I found very interesting was that this information only
existed within this situation and in order to learn it you
had to go and be part of this situation. At the time I wasn’t
thinking about being an artist, I was mostly just a person
interested in going and experiencing what this might be like.
Previous to that I had been interested in art, but I from
the beginning I thought of it not so much as this idea of
expressing myself, but more as a way of participating in
a group dialogue, trying to understand ideas. And to do that
in a very direct way—not just reading about some philosophical
idea but enacting it or experiencing it.
I was interested in is this idea of being an apprentice.
In Europe that’s still a very normal idea. Here in
the United States there are remnants of this kind of system
of learning but in general it’s very anachronistic
and unusual, so I had this romantic notion about it. And
it sounds like it’s some guild system because of the
glass factories’ unusual connection to the wider culture.
They weren’t tradition-bound in the same sense of other
endeavors, where not only is the tradition of how to make
something continuous, but what is made is continuous.
ART:21:
Can say more about the process
of working with glass?
MCELHENY:
Glass is both special and difficult.
Because it’s very easy for it to imitate other things
it’s in flux all the time. The people I studied with
were very much involved in the invention of mid-century modernism,
so in some sense they were very far from the deep past. In
another sense they were very close to it because the way
they were working was essentially unaltered for hundreds
of years. They had figured out how to adapt this tradition
to make modern objects.
One thing I always mention as a funny example is that the
glass manufacturing process is a very unintuitive process.
If you watched it you wouldn’t imagine that a certain
form would have started out in the shape that it does. If
you want to make a classical Greek amphora you have to first
make a 1950s modern teardrop shape and then alter than into
the amphora. Basically what they did in collaboration with
designers was try to figure out what was possible with this
material in line with the ideas of the day. So they responded
to what the process naturally did and in so doing so helped
invent this vocabulary of form.
ART:21:
What role does memory play in
your work?
MCELHENY:
A lot of my work comes from
memory in the sense that memory is always an imperfect remembrance.
A lot of times I will see something in a book, a photograph
that actually misrepresents the original thing, and then
I take that as being “real” and I run with that.
Or in another case, I will either downplay or play up the
actual importance of something so I’m re-remembering,
creating a new memory of this anecdote that’s not really
real in terms of what it was at that time or, or what the
meaning
of those objects really were. I also think lately my work
is a kind of memory of objects, in the sense that at one
time these objects represented a deep striving for a certain
idea of the world and they don’t mean that anymore.
I made a series of works where I took some classic mid-century
modern furniture and decorative art objects—famous design
objects—and had them all remade in white. There’s
an element of it being a kind of display or history—or a
whitewash (whatever you want to call it)—and it’s
also supposed to be very seductive. Behind the whole thing
is my notion that the ideas of our modern era are applied
in, or infect, everything we do so that even an idea of aesthetic
beauty is not free from those associations. So my idea of
this whole series of white works is that you come in, and
it’s this very luscious, beautiful place to be.
ART:21:
Say more about the sources that
impact your work.
MCELHENY:
Some people have asked me whether
I have any desire to do something original. I often explain
that a lot of my work, all of my work, is derived from some
previous source at some level and that what I’m doing
is re-imagining something or shifting or transforming it
slightly but always very much in connection to its source.
I’m of the generation that doesn’t really believe
in originality. It’s never occurred to me—this idea
of “originality” being important.
One literary
source that I found captivating as a child was Jorge Luis
Borges. One of the attributes of many of his works is a kind
of indecipherable line between fact and fiction. They are
often fantastical but, at the same time, they often contain
so much information that is real that you can’t tell
where one starts and the other stops. And I found that a
very wonderful attitude. It’s very much in my work.
I’m not expert on anything in terms of historical sources,
but I’m interested in it and I do feel that I have
permission to play with it at some level. That’s something
that is also in my own generation, that kind of awareness
of history through education, but also just an awareness
of the limits of authority and truth and anybody’s
ability to make absolutely objective determination about
anything. So I think that I’ve just grown up with that.
ART:21:
What about history?
MCELHENY:
I don’t really believe
in history. And I think that at some level that’s one
subject of some of my work—the fact that history is mutable,
which is essentially denying history. So either you can believe
there is this thing called history which is a linear narrative
or in some general sense a linear narrative with a definable
kind of thrust to it, or you could say that there’s
just a lot of different stories. And if you believe that,
which I would argue I believe, then you can’t really
break with them. You could only reassemble them, possibly
in some other way. Or you could add your own. I am interested
in the past because for me it seems like a very rich thing
to try to understand, especially because art is essentially
a physical remnant of a moment.
You can have every idea that you want, but when you have
to actually create some lasting thing you bump up into reality.
So you have to translate your ideas somehow. And that creates
art. As an artist I’m interested in how art works—that
art has lots of ideas behind it and they somehow get embedded
into the object. It’s not a question of deciphering
what the original ideas are, but it’s letting those
ideas be useful for me now in another way. That’s a
big subject in my work—how ideas are contained in objects,
and how the idea and the object can’t be disentangled.
My belief is, there is no such thing as the idea or the object.
There is only a kind of fusion of the two.
ART:21:
Yet it’s hard to put finger
on what that fusion is...
MCELHENY:
If you assume that the artist
or whoever’s making something has an intention, an
idea of what they’re trying to do, basically whenever
they try to do it, they are always failing. In terms of Renaissance
art, if the actual notion is to communicate the relationship
between heaven and hell, they failed at their intention,
but in trying they’ve infected the object with all
these decisions and ideas. There’s information there,
which is essentially the human effort to communicate, understand,
and express ideas. And in every case it fails, but if the
artist is engaged enough with what they’re doing, then
maybe it will survive and can be translated into another
set of ideas for people in another time, in another context.
An object that’s made today, we can have more connection
to its intention because there could be literature about
it that explains it in a language that’s very contemporaneous.
If you look at the abstract expressionists, their whole language
and the way they talked about art seems rather foreign at
this point. It happens very quickly, this change. You lose
the ability to know what was happening the moment that an
artwork was made. So there’s only one thing left to
do, re-imagine your own context for it. If the artwork is
going to be useful, then you might as well feel like you
have the right to invent a meaning for yourself. As an artist,
it’s part of what my work is about. That’s what
makes art interesting—that it’s completed by everybody
else’s imagination. I’m not saying to disrespect
history or not to read history, but ultimately you can’t
access it. You can only access a series of stories that somebody
had the power to publish. And that isn’t the truth,
it’s just a story.
