Josiah McElheny - Towards a Light Club

Edited by Ann Bremner, Karen Kelly, Wexner Center for the Arts, texts by Richard Fletcher, Lisa Florman, Flaminia Gennari-Santori, Amanda Gluibizzi, Tom Gunning, Bill Horrigan, Josiah McElheny, Jeff Preiss, Katy M. Reis, Jason Simon, Rachel Zolf, graphic design by Conny Purtill
English
2013. 162 pp., 97 colour ills.
18.00 x 23.50 cm hardcover
ISBN 978-3-7757-3452-3
€ 35,--

Glass: an artistic examination of the material of modern architecture

This book is the catalogue released parallel to the exposition in the Wexner Center for the Arts, The Ohio State University, Columbus, January 26–April 7, 2013
Using glass to explore a provocative range of artistic and intellectual concerns, Josiah McElheny (1966, Boston) produces dazzling fabricated objects that address such subjects as the nature of visual perception, the narratives of modernism, and the origin of the universe. Since 2007 he has produced a series of sculptures and a film inspired by The Light Club of Batavia, a 1912 text by German Expressionist writer Paul Scheerbart. This publication focuses on McElheny’s Light Club works, which investigate the role of glass in utopian ideas about modernist architecture, and features essays by curator Bill Horrigan and film scholar Thomas Gunning, shorter texts by visual artists Jeff Preiss and Jason Simon, a commentary by classicist Richard Fletcher, a conversation among Horrigan, artist Doug Ashford, and curator Helen Molesworth, entries on McElheny’s art objects by art historians Lisa Florman and Kris Paulsen, and the script, by poet Rachel Zolf, for McElheny’s 2012 Light Club film.

This very well-made and interesting book in which the texts and good pictures interpret the work on the basis of art, art history, architecture and the qualities of glass such as reflection that are considered by McElheny as independent media.
Highly recommended for anyone who wants to know when glass art is an autonomous discipline.

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