Josiah McElheny in “Memory” - Season 3 | “Art in the Twenty-First Century"

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

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