Seeing Things Through
How to document the invisible
I started this Substack to share some of my research into the cultures of glass in the modern period. Glass is a material that has quietly been shaping our visual imagination for the last two centuries. Our cities are glass, our homes are glass - even our perception of ourselves is unimaginable without the reflective guidance of glass. But too often we are not aesthetically conscious of what it is like to be surrounded by this transparent material. We are used to seeing things through it, in it, by it. But seeing glass itself requires a training of the eye. It demands that we visualize the invisible presence of glass in our everyday lives and attune ourselves to the way ordinary materials produced by ordinary people can turn into zones of profound aesthetic engagement. Modernist arts of the twentieth century (in visual art, architecture, literature, and performance) provide us with acute examples of how this ocular training is so central to modern aesthetics. Glass is the mirror Cocteau’s poet walked through, the site of Dadaist experiments in Duchamp’s work, the surface of dreamlike visions in Man Ray’s films and rayographs. But my intention is not only to highlight these famous glass-works by canonical artists. Rather, I would like to draw attention to the new modes of seeing engendered by glass, as well as how taking these new reflective modes seriously can enrich and complicate our idea of modernism. Modern artists were fascinated with this material because it allowed them to express what was changing in the way we perceived the world. Glass came to them with divine and magical properties (stained-glass windows, enchanted mirrors) but they saw in it the fundamental material of the machine age; a fragile surface that reflected the tensions and anxieties of modernity. In short, you will find here discussions of the avant-gardes, but also a lot on the anonymous artists of modern times who collectively produce our perceptual worlds, those invisible artists whose work blurs the boundaries of art and its opposites.
This blog is a companion to the Instagram account: @glass.nyc where I share images of glass in New York. That page has only visuals and no commentary, and this blog is meant to supplement some history and content to the images there; although there is no strict correlation and they can be followed separately.