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McELHENY: A very important
part of what has led me to being an artist

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the way that I am...

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was going to Europe and studying

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these areas where they’ve always 
done glass manufacture.

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I worked with glass

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for a year and a half before I went there.

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And the reason why I went there
in the first place was because

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I was interested in this story
that I'd been told of it being this

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secretive, romantic oral tradition

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that was only passed on person to person.

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I think also what I was interested in

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is this idea of being an apprentice.

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And in Europe,
that's still a very normal idea.

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And I didn't go there

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with any kind of goal in mind,
except to just experience that.

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The people I stayed with were actually,

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very much involved in the invention
of mid-century modernism,

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so in some sense, they were very,
very far from the deep past.

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In another sense, they were very, 
close to it because the way

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they were working

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essentially
was unaltered for hundreds of years.

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But...they were in connection with these,

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famous architects
and designers and artists.

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They had figured out a way--
and been very instrumental in

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figuring out a way to adapt this tradition

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to make modern objects.

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I've made this works

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that were about this connection
between a glass factory

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and the designs of Christian Dior.

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And they were displayed in an

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installation that was based on the 1952
Venice Biennale.

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Those objects
that were parts of that piece,

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they had to feel like a 1950s glass vase.

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They had to look like a figurine,

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and they had to look like the specific
dress they were based on.

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And then they had to look

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balanced or not too ugly or not too...

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Yeah, they had to 
have some kind of elegance.

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So, a lot of times, it's also too, a kind of,
you know,

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a basic visual elegance or balance
that I'm looking for.

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A lot of my work
comes from memory in the sense

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that my work is a memory of objects.

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All of my work is essentially derived

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from some previous source at some level.

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A lot of times
what I'm doing is sort of reimagining

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something or transforming it slightly,
but it's always very much in connection

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to its source.

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I feel lucky that I have the opportunity

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to know how to make some things myself.

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I find it very pleasurable to really want
to make a certain kind of thing,

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and have an idea of how I want it to be,

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and then to get fairly close
to that.

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—Stop.

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It involves

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working with other people,
and I like that aspect of it.

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You can't stop in the middle--
it's like playing a piece of music--

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so you know you have to be in its own time
throughout the period of making it.

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It can be very, very frustrating.

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The problem is, is you can't touch it.

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If you could touch it,
it would be very relatively easy to do,

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so you have to manipulate it
in other ways.

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There's this visceral thing
that you actually haven't touched it,

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so once it cools off,
you know, overnight or something,

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I often have the feeling of, like,

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even though I recognize that I made it,
I don't really believe it

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until I, you know, take it out
and handle it for a few days, maybe,

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and then I start to, like, 
"Okay, yeah, maybe I made that."

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For me, what being an artist

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offered was being part of a community
of people interested in ideas.

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And that was really the reason
from the beginning

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why I want to be an artist.

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I did this installation

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based on this famous star
that Adolf Loos designed,

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the same year that he wrote this essay
called "Ornament and Crime."

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This famous essay describes

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how removing ornament from the world
is more morally pure.

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Basically, it says primitive

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people are the people who decorate;

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that the natural course of progress in man
is to remove this

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decorative impulse from our psyche.

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And it is about making
the world white,

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in the sense of a world
without ornamentation, without

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individuation, without grayness.

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Almost immediately 
it falls apart

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and becomes something 
really, really horrible,

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and especially when it becomes 
imposed upon the world.

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Buckminster Fuller, the

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the inventor of the geodesic dome,

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and Isamu Noguchi,
the famous American sculptor,

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met in a bar in 1929
and had a conversation in which they

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kind of invented a new 
kind of abstraction.

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And it was an abstraction
of total reflectivity.

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And it was based on the notion
that if you placed a reflective object

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inside a totally reflective environment,
that you would have

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this completely new kind of seeing
and this completely new experience

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of form.

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For this particular project,
I wanted to use this--

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this technique of 
silvering the inside of the glass

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so that it's totally reflective
to take advantage of this

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natural property of the glass,
creating this perfectly smooth surface.

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All a mirror is this coating the backside
of a piece of glass

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with a coating of metal,
so that the light reflects back at you.

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You pour silver nitrate on a
piece of glass and it turns into a mirror.

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It's very simple, actually.

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—Okay.

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A recent show that I did was titled

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"Total Reflective Abstraction."

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There were three parts to it,
three different rooms

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that each contained a different kind of approach to this notion.

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One was this project about
Noguchi and Buckminster Fuller.

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I took Noguchi's forms

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and remade them as reflective objects.

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And I created reflective environment,
mostly based on his furniture designs

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and proposals he did 
for abstract landscapes.

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The forms are reflective
in their environment,

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the base on which they live, is reflective.

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They're about a kind of utopia.

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And they're the utopia of where
everything is connected,

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everything is perfect,
seamless unity.

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But it was important
for me that these are models--

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something that's never intended

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to go beyond the model stage.

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One set of works were what
I called "Mirror Drawings,"

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which were essentially
just a sheet of glass mirror

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put directly on the wall.

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I made the glass itself,

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the piece of glass that became a mirror.

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And...

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at one point in the process, I made this drawing
with another kind of glass,

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and then sandwiched it
in with more glass on top.

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Then when you stand in front of them,
then suddenly you see yourself,

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but you see yourself overlaid
with this pattern.

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It was sort of this idea of this metaphor
of what art is.

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The experience of art is a kind of fusion
of your experience of yourself

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and of the object.

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In one of the other rooms

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is two competing versions of the history
of 20th-century design objects.

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The displays
themselves are completely reflective

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on the outside
and completely reflective on the inside.

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And then across
the front is a piece of two-way mirror.

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And the effect of this

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is that the objects on the inside of this

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are reflected
theoretically infinitely in the mirror.

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In the back side of the case.

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You yourself are not reflected
because it's a two-way mirror.

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The objects
themselves are totally reflected.

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So the reflections move a little bit,
but basically

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all these reflections in the objects
stay totally still.

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So I had this very airless quality.

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The definition of being a modern
person is to examine yourself,

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to reflect on yourself,
and to be a self-knowledgeable person.

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So this is sort of a--a history
of what it is to be 20th-century.

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Here's these

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objects that represent culture
that you know, that is around us,

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and then they're reflecting on themselves
in an infinite

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regression, in a kind of,
you know, infinite narcissism.

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So they're sort of, uh...

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yes, this is sort of what
the 20th century was.

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I'm interested in

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the question of seduction.

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And I'm interested in the idea of how do you seduce people to be interested

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in what you've done?

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Seduction often involves
presenting something

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in a very kind of sumptuous way,

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and that attracts people.

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I hope that my work functions

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to seduce you, so that 
you want to look at it.

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To learn more about Art21: Art in the Twenty-First Century

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and to download the Free Educators
Guide, please visit PBS online at pbs.org.

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Art21: Art in the Twenty-First Century is available on videocassette

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or with additional features on DVD.

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The companion
book to the program is also available.

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To order: Call PBS Home Video at one 800 play PBS.