Josiah McElheny: Endlessly Repeating Twentieth Century Modernism

Saw this sculpture/installation today at the MFA. The photo on the MFA website doesn't do it justice; there's a better photo of it here.

First of all, it's a beautiful piece. Entrancing is the word I'd choose. What it is is: a bunch of vases made of some highly reflective material lined up along the four sides of a glass-fronted box. The glass you see through is actually a two-way mirror: we can see in but the vases can't see out, so to speak. They get their reflection, and then reflect that back, infinitely. Behind the vases are more mirrors - the center of the box is another box, mirrored on the outside. The effect is of these vases infinitely reflected and infinitely reflecting. The lighting is soft white light, not overpowering - the thing doesn't shine inside so much as glow, and that glow diminishes with every reflection until the vases are just marching away into a sort of ethereal half-light.

The piece itself is just beautiful, in a really unexpected, haunting way. Then you read the card on the wall telling you about it. The artist is Josiah McElheny: you can read a little more about him here. The title of the piece is "Endlessly Repeating Twentieth Century Modernisms." A little tendentious, but okay.

But here's the text:

"Deploying the most sophisticated and virtuoso glass-working techniques combined with a conceptual rigor, McElheny creates sculptures and installations that explore crucial moments in the development of modernity, its visual and theoretical undercurrents. Over the past four years, McElheny has produced a series of works based on a conversation between sculptor Isamu Noguchi and designer/architect Buckminster Fuller that took place in 1929 during which they discussed a world of form without shadow; totally reflective forms inhabiting a totally reflective environment that would be totally self-enclosed - the perfect utopian environment. 'Endlessly Repeating Twentieth Century Modernism' presents the viewer with a seemingly infinite repetition of reflections of modernist design (decanters, vases, boxes, and bottles based on designs from Scandinavia, Italy, the former Czechoslovakia, and Austria from c. 1910 -1990) that attempts to depict the capitalist notion that all objects are eternally repeatable, that everything can be remanufactured endlessly without regard to era, geography, or culture. McElheny has stated that he aims to explore how "the act of looking at a reflective object could be connected to the mental act of reflecting on an idea."

Starts out nicely. I was interested to learn that the tendentious title wasn't pulled out of a hat, or an overheated graduate seminar, and finding out that he was inspired by this utopian idea of Noguchi and Fuller's made me see the work in a new light - opened it up for me.

But then we get to the "capitalist notion that all objects are eternally repeatable" business, and suddenly I want to heave (that's a sophisticated art-criticism term, by the way).

First of all, does capitalism really believe that? Maybe; it's arguable, at least.

Regardless of that, though, suddenly the wall text is telling me that I should see this beautiful sculpture as a critique of this or that or the other thing, a satire, a political statement.

I don't mind seeing art as any or all of those things. But if this piece is a critique of capitalism, it fails miserably, because the world inside this mirrored box is beautiful, just as beautiful as Noguchi and Fuller probably imagined it would be. It's a utopia of gracious forms, completely self-contained, completely peaceful. Nothing dystopian about it. (And really, nothing capitalist, either.)

So either the art is lame, because it fails to do what it tries to do, or the wall text is lame. Guess which one I'd side with. And most of all, this part of the wall text is unnecessary. It doesn't open the work up at all: it closes it down, by trying to control how we feel about it.

Mt. Auburn Cemetery

Is this art? Mrs. Sgt. Tanuki and I went on an outing last week to Mt. Auburn Cemetery here in Cambridge - it looked like it was the closest we were going to get this season to a serious leaf-peeping excursion.

It's an interesting place. First garden-style cemetery in the States (as opposed to the earlier churchyard-style cemeteries), and a pioneer in landscaping, precursor of the great urban parks of the 19th century, such as Central Park, or the Tanuki's favorite, St. Louis's Forest Park.

The difference is, of course, that this is a graveyard. It's full of dead people, and the stones that mark where they lie. So you stroll around enjoying the foliage, the carefully arranged treescapes and ponds and hills and hollows, but every prospect is centered around tombs.

Of course these are tombs of wealthy Bostonians from the mid- to late nineteenth century: romantic in the extreme, decorated with all manner of statuary, all kinds of Greco-Roman motifs and Romantic imagery.

Romantic is the key word: the whole place is like a strollthrough the Romantic imagination. The earth itself is sculpted so as to epitomize the contemporary ideal of the picturesque - hidden pools meant to evoke lonely cathedrals of nature, dells shaded by huge maples and ringed by gothic tomb entrances, mausolea designed to look like rustic forest chapels.

And everywhere there's mortuary sculpture. Angels, gods, eagles, urns, ivy, all of stone, all standing out white against the leaves and grass, like ghosts or something.

I've tramped around any number of old New England graveyards, the style that preceded Mt. Auburn - I can't get enough of them, the old death's-head tombstones, the eighteenth-century epitaphs. Compared to them, this would have been a startling new conception of death and the afterlife.

As well as a nice place for a stroll in early November.