McELHENY: A very important part of what has led me to being an artist
the way that I am...
was going to Europe and studying
these areas where they’ve always done glass manufacture.
I worked with glass
for a year and a half before I went there.
And the reason why I went there in the first place was because
I was interested in this story that I'd been told of it being this
secretive, romantic oral tradition
that was only passed on person to person.
I think also what I was interested in
is this idea of being an apprentice.
And in Europe, that's still a very normal idea.
And I didn't go there
with any kind of goal in mind, except to just experience that.
The people I stayed with were actually,
very much involved in the invention of mid-century modernism,
so in some sense, they were very, very far from the deep past.
In another sense, they were very, close to it because the way
they were working
essentially was unaltered for hundreds of years.
But...they were in connection with these,
famous architects and designers and artists.
They had figured out a way-- and been very instrumental in
figuring out a way to adapt this tradition
to make modern objects.
I've made this works
that were about this connection between a glass factory
and the designs of Christian Dior.
And they were displayed in an
installation that was based on the 1952 Venice Biennale.
Those objects that were parts of that piece,
they had to feel like a 1950s glass vase.
They had to look like a figurine,
and they had to look like the specific dress they were based on.
And then they had to look
balanced or not too ugly or not too...
Yeah, they had to have some kind of elegance.
So, a lot of times, it's also too, a kind of, you know,
a basic visual elegance or balance that I'm looking for.
A lot of my work comes from memory in the sense
that my work is a memory of objects.
All of my work is essentially derived
from some previous source at some level.
A lot of times what I'm doing is sort of reimagining
something or transforming it slightly, but it's always very much in connection
to its source.
I feel lucky that I have the opportunity
to know how to make some things myself.
I find it very pleasurable to really want to make a certain kind of thing,
and have an idea of how I want it to be,
and then to get fairly close to that.
—Stop.
It involves
working with other people, and I like that aspect of it.
You can't stop in the middle-- it's like playing a piece of music--
so you know you have to be in its own time throughout the period of making it.
It can be very, very frustrating.
The problem is, is you can't touch it.
If you could touch it, it would be very relatively easy to do,
so you have to manipulate it in other ways.
There's this visceral thing that you actually haven't touched it,
so once it cools off, you know, overnight or something,
I often have the feeling of, like,
even though I recognize that I made it, I don't really believe it
until I, you know, take it out and handle it for a few days, maybe,
and then I start to, like, "Okay, yeah, maybe I made that."
For me, what being an artist
offered was being part of a community of people interested in ideas.
And that was really the reason from the beginning
why I want to be an artist.
I did this installation
based on this famous star that Adolf Loos designed,
the same year that he wrote this essay called "Ornament and Crime."
This famous essay describes
how removing ornament from the world is more morally pure.
Basically, it says primitive
people are the people who decorate;
that the natural course of progress in man is to remove this
decorative impulse from our psyche.
And it is about making the world white,
in the sense of a world without ornamentation, without
individuation, without grayness.
Almost immediately it falls apart
and becomes something really, really horrible,
and especially when it becomes imposed upon the world.
Buckminster Fuller, the
the inventor of the geodesic dome,
and Isamu Noguchi, the famous American sculptor,
met in a bar in 1929 and had a conversation in which they
kind of invented a new kind of abstraction.
And it was an abstraction of total reflectivity.
And it was based on the notion that if you placed a reflective object
inside a totally reflective environment, that you would have
this completely new kind of seeing and this completely new experience
of form.
For this particular project, I wanted to use this--
this technique of silvering the inside of the glass
so that it's totally reflective to take advantage of this
natural property of the glass, creating this perfectly smooth surface.
All a mirror is this coating the backside of a piece of glass
with a coating of metal, so that the light reflects back at you.
You pour silver nitrate on a piece of glass and it turns into a mirror.
It's very simple, actually.
—Okay.
A recent show that I did was titled
"Total Reflective Abstraction."
There were three parts to it, three different rooms
that each contained a different kind of approach to this notion.
One was this project about Noguchi and Buckminster Fuller.
I took Noguchi's forms
and remade them as reflective objects.
And I created reflective environment, mostly based on his furniture designs
and proposals he did for abstract landscapes.
The forms are reflective in their environment,
the base on which they live, is reflective.
They're about a kind of utopia.
And they're the utopia of where everything is connected,
everything is perfect, seamless unity.
But it was important for me that these are models--
something that's never intended
to go beyond the model stage.
One set of works were what I called "Mirror Drawings,"
which were essentially just a sheet of glass mirror
put directly on the wall.
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.
Then when you stand in front of them, then suddenly you see yourself,
but you see yourself overlaid with this pattern.
It was sort of this idea of this metaphor of what art is.
The experience of art is a kind of fusion of your experience of yourself
and of the object.
In one of the other rooms
is two competing versions of the history of 20th-century design objects.
The displays themselves are completely reflective
on the outside and completely reflective on the inside.
And then across the front is a piece of two-way mirror.
And the effect of this
is that the objects on the inside of this
are reflected theoretically infinitely in the mirror.
In the back side of the case.
You yourself are not reflected because it's a two-way mirror.
The objects themselves are totally reflected.
So the reflections move a little bit, but basically
all these reflections in the objects stay totally still.
So I had this very airless quality.
The definition of being a modern person is to examine yourself,
to reflect on yourself, and to be a self-knowledgeable person.
So this is sort of a--a history of what it is to be 20th-century.
Here's these
objects that represent culture that you know, that is around us,
and then they're reflecting on themselves in an infinite
regression, in a kind of, you know, infinite narcissism.
So they're sort of, uh...
yes, this is sort of what the 20th century was.
I'm interested in
the question of seduction.
And I'm interested in the idea of how do you seduce people to be interested
in what you've done?
Seduction often involves presenting something
in a very kind of sumptuous way,
and that attracts people.
I hope that my work functions
to seduce you, so that you want to look at it.
To learn more about Art21: Art in the Twenty-First Century
and to download the Free Educators Guide, please visit PBS online at pbs.org.
Art21: Art in the Twenty-First Century is available on videocassette
or with additional features on DVD.
The companion book to the program is also available.
To order: Call PBS Home Video at one 800 play PBS.