NEW GLASS REVIEW 42

EXCERPT:

“GLASS IS EVERYTHING, EVERYWHERE, ALL AT ONCE.

It mediates our experiences without us even noticing it. The silent facilitator of modernity, glass underpins the invention of linear perspective, optical science, hypermedia itself. Yet despite its profundity, glass does not demand recognition. Rather, it often defies attention and visibility by design. It quietly enables our perpetual global connectivity, moving encoded light across immense, invisible networks of glass fiber under oceans and over mountains. It traces, records, and bears witness to contemporary life.

As a visual anthropologist and curator of craft and design, I view glass as a compelling case study of material driving culture. Its rhizomatic nature—networked, vast, but often unseen—makes it particularly well suited to articulate a contemporary moment that has brought renewed and critical visibility to underlying infrastructures and systems—both corporeal and societal. Over the past two years, we bore witness—from glowing crystalline screens, no less—to a lethal virus, unjust law enforcement systems, and raging wildfires attacking the respiratory system. And that global witnessing, enabled by glass, successively exposed the failings of our social support systems. Just as Burnham’s seminal Systems Esthetics articulated a shift “from object-oriented to systems-oriented culture,” I similarly observed a shift from urgent, bombastic-object to abstract-systems thinking and formal restraint in this year’s New Glass Review submissions. From works re-visioning knowledge and justice systems to performances and installations enacting equitable caregiving systems and electroconductive Faraday circuits, all systems were a go.

The last time glass made me so acutely aware of our latent and interconnected power structures, I was in the bowels of the New Museum, gazing upward at Mika Rottenberg’s video of colored lightbulbs shattering under the blows of a hammer on the ceiling of the elevator. The video not only symbolically replaced the institutional glass lighting fixture with a representation of glass lights, but it also physically positioned viewers beneath a scene from another video presented in an upstairs gallery. That video, Cosmic Generator, follows the fictionalized flow of these glass bulbs across a quixotic, labyrinthine system of factories, workshops, and showrooms connected by tunnels. This glassy intervention on the structural portal between museum floors doubled down on Rottenberg’s satire of the bizarre interconnection of global production systems.

Similarly revealing global trade and production systems via the aggregated shattering of glass is Walead Beshty’s FedEx® Kraft Box Series. In this body of work, laminated glass cubes fabricated to fit FedEx’s proprietary dimensions are shipped to galleries around the world in their corresponding cardboard carriers. They accrue meaning—as well as impact fractures and collaged shipping labels— through transnational movement. These contingent objects are continually in the process of being made, rendering the global freight-shipping system as the method of artistic production in and of itself. The resulting sculptures, displayed as cracked vitrines atop airway-bill-littered cardboard pedestals, bring visibility to the behind-the-scenes labor systems that continuously form them.”