ART-PRESENTATION: Josiah McElheny-The Crystal Land
Through sculpture, writing, performance, and film, Josiah McElheny investigates the history of 20th Century Modernism in hope of expanding on the dominant historical narratives of art, aesthetics, design, and architecture, and the criticality of our relationship to them. His practice mines the past to lay the groundwork for a path forward, giving a glimpse into not only what could have been, but visions for what might be.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: White Cube Gallery Archive
In “The Crystal Land”, his solo exhibition at White Cube Gallery in London, Josiah McElheny narrates a decade of his efforts to visualise alternative histories of Modernism. In the exhibition are on presentation works made the period 2008-17 in various mediums, including sculpture, painting, film, installation, photograms and posters. The exhibition is divided into three sections, each of which is inspired by an individual: Robert Smithson, the writer Paul Scheerbart and the physicist Andrei Linde. In the first part of the exhibition, McElheny draws on some of Robert Smithson’s lesser-known works and writing from 1964-66, including his essay “The Crystal Land” (196)6 and from which the exhibition borrows its title. Using as models Smithson’s ‘paintings’ from that same period, McElheny has created his own series of “Landscape paintings”, taking the form of faceted wall reliefs constructed out of painted metal and glass mirror with illuminated interior chambers. Inside these chambers, infinitely repeating images of crystalline, abstract reflective shapes recede into the distance. In the second part of the exhibition, movie posters beckon the audience into a “Glass cinema”, whose subtle, multi-colored light emanating from glass-block windows, “The Light Club of Vizcaya: A Women’s Picture” (2012) emerged out of McElheny’s interest in the work of Paul Scheerbart and is part of his effort to bring the German author’s writing into the 21st Century. In this film, McElheny develops Scheerbart’s short story “The Light Club of Batavia: A Ladies’ Novelette” (1912), and presents a poetic, speculative expansion of Scheerbart’s original text, re-staging it in a different locale to create a story inside a story that playfully deals with themes of gender, sexuality, society and nature. Presenting an alternative view of Modernism, as experienced by a female protagonist, the work deals with Scheerbart’s notion of universalist politics as a wholly other possible path of history. It proposes that Modernism might have been redirected from efficiency and restraint to expand the concept of the human. In the third part of the exhibition is on presentation the installation “Island Universe” (2008). Appearing like a set of constellations, it comprises five suspended sculptures made from chrome-plated aluminum and glass encoded with highly accurate scientific information. The project was inspired by the aesthetically hybrid, starburst forms of nickel-plated brass and cut-glass crystal chandeliers of the Metropolitan Opera in New York. McElheny saw them as a kind of “Pop image of the Big Bang” and in an extensive collaboration with the astronomer David H Weinberg, went on to create models that depict various alternative interpretations of this event. The Super 16mm film “Island Universe” (2005-08), shot on location at the Metropolitan Opera, is presented on a continuous loop in the auditorium every Sunday for the duration of the exhibition.
Info: White Cube Gallery, 144-152 Bermondsey Street, London, Duration: 1/3-13/4/17, Days & hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, Sun 12:00-18:00, whitecube.com
