Tag: glass

The Apotheosis of the Absorption of the Ambient

Dia:Beacon, New York
Dia:Beacon, New York

Gerhard Richter.

“…Purged of all evidence of the maker’s presence, they absorb as their content the ambient world before them in all its transitory serendipity. Subsuming spectators into that fluctuating matrix, depriving them of any clear, fixed, stable relationship to space and place, his mirrors seductively undermine the viewers’ authorial independence and autonomy by dissembling traditional hieratic perspectival systems of perception.” Read more…

Cold, Northern Self-Portrait

Dia:Beacon, New York
Dia:Beacon, New York

Joseph Beuys.

“…Besides the panels of photographs, he incorporated three panes of colored glass—two in royal blue, evoking the cold northern sky, and one in golden yellow, redolent of the southern sun—that might be thought of as filters through which the remaining panels are seen.”

A Shimmering Collapse of Decreated Sharpness

Dia: Beacon, New York
Dia: Beacon, New York

I like landscapes that suggest prehistory,” said Smithson. The countless fragments of shattered glass that form Map of Broken Glass (Atlantis) (1969) are layered both literally and figuratively. As the title implies, the sculpture is to be seen
 not simply as a pile of sharp, transparent fragments but also as a map of a legendary lost continent. “It is a shimmering collapse of decreated sharpness . . . arrested by the friction of stability.” Similar to other fictive territories, Map of Broken Glass foreshadows Smithson’s most ambitious realization: a spiral-shaped artificial peninsula made out of mud, salt crystals, and basalt rocks named Spiral Jetty, which he built in the Great Salt Lake, Utah, in 1970. Read more…

Fortress of Solitude?

Madison Green, New York
Madison Green, New York

There’s an art installation at Madison Green now, with all the works encased in clear domes (Paula Hayes, Gazing Globes), like the one where Superman kept the tiny, shrunken city from his home planet Krypton in his northerly Fortress of Solitude. I framed it so the Empire State Building lighting up the night sky would pierce the dome.