The End of Modernity, Or Its Beginnings?

By Shani Frymer

For undergraduate study I attended Bennington College where the lack of a CORE curriculum most Universities cling to provided the opportunity for students to build their own interdisciplinary backbones. Only in such an environment could dancers study physics, musicians calculus, and anthropology students study dated photographic techniques.

Since being in such a diversely creative environment, I had yet to see such symbiotic relationships between such different fields. Enter Josaih McElheny, an artist in residence at Ohio State Wexner Center for the Arts. During his residency, Ohio State had commissioned a piece which adventurous in its own rite had risen more than a bit of skepticism.

It was Mr. McElheny’s intent to create a piece of art combining the ideas and history of Big Bang Cosmology with the gorgeous Venetian Chandeliers at the Metropolitan Opera House. His mentor David Weinberg thought this to be highly ambitious due to the conceptual issues the project raised until he came face to face with Mr. McElhenys determination. Embarking on serious study of cosmological theories McElheny set off on a project made even more challenging by the fact that he had to produce more than one of it.

For those unfamiliar with the history of the universe from an Astronomical and Cosmological perspective, the Big Bang was developed in 1965 by Scientist Aleksander Friedmann, credited to Irwin Hubble, and is supported by Einstein’s theory of relativity. The theory describes the creation of our universe as an explosion from a single point known as a singularity. Particles and gas expanding outward from this point eventually formed the planets and stars that we know as our universe. This created a large amount of background radiation, material that we have had difficulty accounting for- known as dark matter- and a universe continually expanding outward as stars are born and die, providing force in the vacuum of space for other stars and solar systems to be created. It is complicated enough conceptually to build a model of the history of the universe, another thing altogether to merge these principles with a construction of Venetian Glass.

Yet somehow through tribulation Mr. McElheny has brought something new into the mix. A ten by fifteen-foot tall structure that is both beautiful to behold and representational of the greatest mystery to plague scientists. Mr. McElheny, now both an expert in glass blowing and the owner of a small glass studio in Brooklyn is responsible for making all of the thousand glass orbs that represent small galaxies on the Californian-made metal beams extending outward from the center of the piece. The flat glass discs were also poured by hand.

“The End of Modernity” on display at the Andrea Rosen Gallery in Chelsea despite its title seemingly represents a very modern thought process. Historically it represents a very specific time period- 1965 when the theory of the Big Bang was new and exciting, and when the chandeliers for the Metropolitan were just being put together by J & L Lobmeyr in Vienna. But this convergence of two studies which constantly contradict one another is a step into the future, and one that I hope to see more of in the coming years.