“Artwork can be about 'ugliness,' or things that are
disturbing—visually or viscerally. But in order for
them to actually have any kind of long-term viability as
art, they have to have their own beauty.”
“I’m completely fine with the fact that people
might dismiss my artwork and say, ‘This is too sumptuous.’
My only hope though, is that there’s another level
to it which says the opposite.”
“The whole notion of making all-reflective work is
this utopic nature of a reflective object. It gets you involved
in it because you see yourself in it, and then the kind
of horror, repellant nature of that at the same time.”
“I think that’s a lot of the subject of my work,
this idea of a utopia that falls apart.”
The question of beauty is a very
funny one to me, because basically, either beauty is in the
eye of the beholder or there is no beauty at all. If beauty
is determined by somebody else, I want nothing to do with
it.
Artwork can be about “ugliness,” or things that
are disturbing—visually or viscerally. But in order
for them to actually have any kind of long-term viability
as art, they have to have their own beauty. I think one could
argue that for somebody like Francis Bacon, whose work evokes
horror as well as beauty, that there is a great deal of beauty.
Beauty is about a kind of sympathy to a set of ideas or relationships.
I’m interested in the question of seduction. The idea
of, how do you seduce people to be interested in what you’ve
done? Seduction often involves presenting something in a very
sumptuous way that attracts people. I think that there’s
a question of morality in artwork, in the sense of, if something
is to be of value then it has to have a kind of gravity and
importance to it. In the Western world, there’s a very
deep suspicion of surfaces, of sumptuousness, because maybe
that represents a kind of immorality.
I think that my work does bring up that question—not
of beauty, but of morality—in the sense of, if something
is created to be specifically attractive at least in its initial
impression to other people, is that bad, is that immoral?
And I’m completely fine with the fact that people might
dismiss my artwork and say, “This is too sumptuous.”
My only hope though, is that there’s another level to
it which says the opposite. For instance, the all-reflective
work or the all-white work, they suggest at first a very seductive
thing, but if you think about it for half a second, they become
very awful too. Anything that is very seductive is also awful.
I mean if you go to a Renaissance palace in Europe, it could
be the most sumptuous thing, but if you think about who paid
for this, who made it, who had access to it, then you realize
it represents pure evil at some level.
The white works that I made were all about that very idea—perfection,
utopia, modernity—in the sense of a
world without ornamentation, without individuation, without
grayness. It’s a beautiful gesture in one sense, except
that almost immediately it falls apart and becomes something
really horrible—especially when it becomes imposed upon
the world. I did this installation that’s
a completely white room, incredibly bright, all based on this
bar by Adolph Loos from 1908. It was his bar essentially,
remade in white, and really beautiful, sumptuous.
The whole notion of making all-reflective work is this utopic
nature of a reflective object. It gets you involved in it
because you see yourself in it, and then the kind of horror,
repellant nature of that at the same time. I think that’s
a lot of the subject of my work, this idea of a utopia that
falls apart. We all want this utopia, we want this fantasy
of a perfect world. And yet any perfect world is the worst
place there is to be.
ART:21:
Talk a little more about the
the show of reflective objects in Chicago, at Donald Young
Gallery.
MCELHENY:
The show that I did there was
titled "Total Reflective Abstraction."
Basically there were three parts to it, three different
rooms
that each contained a different approach to this notion of
total reflective abstraction. One was about Isamu Noguchi
and Buckminster Fuller. The other was competing versions
of the history of 20th century design objects.
And the third was a series of mirror drawings, which were
abstraction turned into a literal mirror.
These three works interacted in the sense of expressing this
notion that abstraction was based on reflectivity. If you
sit down and reflect on a philosophical idea, you enter a
certain kind of state in your mind. If you look at a reflective
object and become involved with looking at it, your mind enters
a very similar kind of state. So looking at a reflective object
and reflecting on an idea might be very similar experiences.
My idea was that this could become a metaphor for how art
worked, because basically it’s looking at an object
and reflecting an idea.
One set of work, what I called "Mirror
Drawings", was essentially a sheet of glass
mirror put directly on the wall. Embedded inside the glass
itself
were
abstract lines, drawing lines. Instead of the lead of a carbon
pencil, they’re white, and when people look at them
they, they don’t know how they’re made and
assume that it’s some kind of etching process.
But if they had been etched—which implies some
kind of altering the surface of the glass—they
would not have looked the way they did. And what was
key to how they looked are
the lines, embedded inside the glass itself. It’s too
difficult to explain how it was done, but basically it was
something that I figured out from putting together a couple
of different kinds of glass manufacturing processes.
I made the glass itself—the piece of glass that became
a mirror. And at one point in the process I made this drawing
with another kind of glass and then sandwiched it in with
more glass on top. So they have a kind of quality where if
you walk in the room they don’t look like anything,
they just look white, because they’re reflecting the
white of the room. But when you stand in front of them, suddenly
you see yourself, but yourself overlaid with this pattern,
this abstract drawing. So again, that’s this metaphor
of what art is—the experience is a fusion of your experience
of yourself and the object.
The reflection’s not “perfect,” it’s
a handmade sheet of glass, so it has some rippling. That also
calls attention to the fact that it’s not machine-made.
It’s an intentional thing to have created this artwork
that both reflects you and shows my intention.
One of the other rooms is darkened with lit displays of objects,
and the displays themselves are completely reflective on
the
outside and completely reflective on the inside. Across the
front is a two-way mirror, and the effect is that the objects
on the inside are reflected in the mirror in the back side
of the case—theoretically infinitely. It’s very
confusing as a viewer when you first come upon it because
you yourself are not reflected, because it’s a two-way
mirror. Optically they’re in a brightly lit room and
you’re in a dark room.
Everybody has seen this kind of infinite effect with mirrors.
You can even see it in a dressing room with a three-way mirror,
that the objects themselves are totally reflective. They reflect
every reflection that’s being reflected within it and
these reflections don’t move. That’s confusing
because normally when you walk across a mirror, everything
moves as you walk across it. So the reflections move a little
bit, but basically all these reflections in the objects stay
totally still. So they have this very airless quality. One
is a set of objects made from around 1952 and a set from around
1962—classic mid-century modernist objects
remade as reflective objects. They’re quite close in
size, shape and technique to the original ones. An expert
in that era of design objects would recognize them, but everybody
can recognize them as kind of aesthetic. They see it as the
original or as knockoffs made now by many factories across
the world.
Basically the idea was to say, “Okay, the definition
of being a modern person in the 20th century is to examine
yourself.” It’s not to be a forthright person
according to what situation you were born into, but it’s
to reflect on yourself and be a self-knowledgeable person—that’s
what it is to be modern in many ways. This again is a very
wonderful thing, but also kind of horrible. These objects
represent that culture, reflecting on themselves
in an infinite regression, in a kind infinite narcissism.
This is sort of what the 20th century is.
ART:21:
Tell the story about Noguchi
and Fuller, about their conversation and how it relates
to the reflective works.
MCELHENY:
In this other section of the
show I made a series of works about a conversation between
Noguchi and Buckminster Fuller—an aesthetic proposal
from 1929—in which they talked about a kind of sculpture
or sculpture abstraction that could exist without any shadow.
Buckminster Fuller, was a kind of scientist-engineer-inventor
who’s most well-known for having “invented”
the geodesic dome, and Isamu Noguchi, who was a Japanese-American
sculptor said to be sort of a bridge between the east and
the west but also very well-known for his famous paper lamps
which you can still buy.
They met in 1929 at a bar called Romany Marie’s in the
West Village and Noguchi had just returned from apprenticing
to Brancusi, and they got into a conversation about the notion
of abstract sculpture. Could you have a three-dimensional
object that had no shadow? They said it would have to be a
perfectly reflective sculpture in a perfectly reflective environment—the
ultimate aesthetic utopia where the context and object are
unified completely. And Fuller convinced Noguchi to go to
his studio on Madison and in a laundry room on the top of
the building paint the whole interior reflective silver and
create a chrome-plated sculpture—in this case, a bust
of Fuller himself—and place it within this environment.
I was very struck by this story. I thought, “How could
I try to realize this idea?” They did this experiment
but nothing every happened about it. So I very simply tried
to realize what they proposed. I took Noguchi’s forms
and remade them as reflective objects. I created a reflective
environment mostly based on his furniture designs or proposals
he did for abstract landscapes. So the forms are reflective
and their environment, the base on which they live, is reflective.
It’s a confusing thing to photograph because basically
you can never see it except seeing yourself reflected many
thousands of times within all the forms and within the plane
of the landscape. Also it’s funny to look at because
you can’t tell where the object starts and where the
reflection starts—object and reflection become one.
ART:21:
Why do you think the incident
between Fuller and Noguchi resonated so powerfully for
you?
MCELHENY:
Well, I think that a lot of these
ideas are important, recycled ideas invented at a certain
point in history. They didn’t fit within the context
of the moment they were invented, or they have always been
there but are constantly being returned to because they are
needed in a different way, according to the needs of the day.
This idea of total reflective abstraction
that Noguchi and Fuller invented together in a bar, maybe
it was too soon for that to become a central theme. Or maybe
it was just not important enough, I don’t know. It seems
like it has a huge amount of resonance today. It’s something
that we’re talking about right now—even the subject
of privacy is about this same idea. Transparency, reflectivity,
connection, seamlessness—all these themes are expressed
in many kinds of dialogues today.
I also wanted to say they’re about a kind of utopia.
The utopia where everything is connected. Everything is perfect,
seamless unity. There is something very beautiful about that,
but like I said before, it’s not hard to see how it
becomes awful really quickly. It was important for me that
these are models and that’s an interesting way to discuss
utopia now. In 1929 it was possible to propose literal utopia,
“This is how we should live, we should create a society
that’s structured on these utopian principles and we
will have a better world.” I think it’s really
clear that as soon as you actually try to create utopia, or
impose utopia, it creates horrible violence.
I have this notion of talking about utopia as a model, something
that’s never intended to go beyond the model stage.
And as an artist, that’s something I can do, I can create
a model. I can’t create a society, but I can create
a model.
