Josiah McElheny | “The Alpine Cathedral and the City-Crown”
EXCLUSIVE: Josiah McElheny discusses his installation The Alpine Cathedral and the City-Crown (2007) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Josiah McElheny creates finely crafted, handmade glass objects that he combines with photographs, text, and museological displays to evoke notions of meaning and memory. McElheny’s work takes as its subject the history of Modernism and the impact it has made on society, aesthetics, and contemporary thought.
Josiah McElheny is featured in the Season 3 (2005) episode Memory of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS.
ART21: What drew you to the architect Bruno Taut and his secret society of architects? How did early modernist practice become a touchstone for your work The Alpine Cathedral and the City-Crown?
MCELHENY: This set of architects, this secret society called the Crystal Chain, they laid the foundations for the modern world as it’s been built today. They basically set up the structures for all the modern architecture that exists. The group’s whole portfolio of drawings was about an impossible architecture, of trying to push something that could be translated into practical things. Just to draw a picture of a different world. Continue reading »
McElheny, Mies, & Modernism
In this week’s Art:21 video and interview The Alpine Cathedral and the City-Crown, artist Josiah McElheny references a number of modernist figures and projects, from architects Bruno Taut and Mies van der Rohe to the failed Chicago housing project Cabrini-Green. See what he’s talking about in these videos on YouTube:
VIDEO | Josiah McElheny presenting at MoMA
The lecture that Josiah McElheny gave at MoMA on the topic of “Artists and Models” is a condensed overview, with the artist riffing on Isamu Noguchi, Buckminster Fuller, and other modernist icons.
VIDEO | Farnsworth House
This all access tour of Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House illustrates some of what Josiah McElheny means when he says about Modernist architecture that “you have to live like the building tells you to live.”
VIDEO | Mies on Architecture Island
Did it take virtual reality to realize the utopian ideals of modernism? Take a Second Life tour of Mies van der Rohe’s Fansworth House on Architecture Island (The Homestead).
VIDEO | Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle
Art:21 artist Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle (Season 4) brings a sinister edge to modern architecture in Climate (2000), filmed in Mies van der Rohe’s Lake Shore Drive Apartments in Chicago.
VIDEO | Cabrini Green: Past and Present
Josiah McElheny’s question “how do you both believe in utopia…and at the same time keep it within limits?” can be felt in this homemade video when the narrator states that Chicago’s Cabrini-Green “started out as a place where poor people had hope.”
Josiah McElheny at the Henry Art Gallery
The Last Scattering Surface, an enormous spherical sculpture composed of metal and glass by Art21 artist Josiah McElheny (Season 3), has traveled to the University of Washington’s Henry Art Gallery. The sculpture is on view through August 17, 2008.
The Henry will also exhibit a series of conceptual drawings and the artist‚Äôs first film, shot on location at the New York Metropolitan Opera House. The film features the 1965-commissioned Lobmeyer chandeliers, which were gifts of the Austrian government. The largest of these chandeliers is lit with 260 bulbs, measures over 20 feet across, and weighs one and a half tons. In 1966, Austrian Foreign Minister Lujo Toncic-Soring declared them ‚Äúforever a shining and glittering symbol of the friendship between Austria and the United States.” While The Last Scattering Surface relates to industrial design of the mid-1960s and the science of the Big Bang, it also relates to a historical moment when “the universal linear narrative of modernity‚Äôs progress began to fracture, instigating a ’scattering’ of histories and viewpoints about society‚Äôs development over the ages.”
Read more about the exhibition here.
Last chance to visit Josiah McElheny’s The Last Scattering Surface
Through Monday August 27, the Rochester Art Center in Minnesota is featuring The Last Scattering Surface by Season 3 artist Josiah McElheny. In this exhibition, McElheny continues his investigation of the history and implications of twentieth-century modernism through a series of new and past works that revolve around the unusual intersection of theoretical cosmology and industrial design.
Since 2004, McElheny has collaborated with The Ohio State University cosmology professor David Weinberg on the conceptual realization of a series of sculptures that depict the theory of the Big Bang with the language of mid-1960s industrial design. This unexpected pairing of high modernist thought finds its origins in 1965, the year the Big Bang was first confirmed by physical evidence and when the Viennese firm Lobmeyr and Co. was commissioned to design a chandelier with a “galactic appearance” for New York City’s Metropolitan Opera House. The serendipity of these two events inspired McElheny to create his series of scientifically accurate, precisely manufactured sculptures.
Also on view as part of The Last Scattering Surface is McElheny’s first film, Conceptual Drawings for a Chandelier, 1965, shot in part on location at the Metropolitan Opera House, as well as a series of related photographs and digital images.
Read more about the exhibition here.
Josiah McElheny at Donald Young Gallery in Chicago
Through August 17, 2007, Donald Young Gallery in Chicago presents a solo show by Season 3 featured artist Josiah McElheny.
Cosmology, Design and Landscape‚ÄîPart Two features four new sculptures by McElheny that further explore the legacies of twentieth century modernism. Part One, in September 2006, featured a large-scale sculpture and film that linked mid-century theories of the universe’s origins to period design. Now, Part Two presents a foreboding vision of endlessly repeating modernist design objects and imagines the idea of urban/industrial landscapes remade as a totally reflective aesthetic utopia. These works attempt to realize the attraction and horror of the modern ideal: a perfect world of objects and architecture.
Watch McElheny discuss his work in a lecture given in conjunction with the series Artists and Models at MoMA on March 12, 2007.
