INTERFACE

REVIEW

The Glass Delusion

National Glass Centre, Sunderland
21 May - 3 October

Reviewed by: Paul Usherwood »

‘The Glass Delusion’ is a fascinating ragbag of an exhibition, a jumble of artworks, artefacts and bric-a-brac (some of it glass, some of it not) which explores how over the centuries glass as a material has often been associated, metaphorically, with various types of psychological abnormality.

Some of these objects focus on the tricky, deceptive nature of glass. This is certainly the case with the Artificial Horizon, a type of distorting mirror that painters in the eighteenth century employed to paint idealised landscapes, and Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Cubic Metre of Infinity (1966) with its illusion of endless sheets of glass disappearing into space. It is true also of Jorge Macchi’s Vidas Paralelas (1998), a pair of shattered panes of glass, each displaying, spookily, exactly the same pattern of cracks, whilst Carla Guagliardi’s As Parcas E Oa Edi (1995) presents conundrums of a different kind. This small round, transparent glass vessel suspended in mid-air by three strings fastened to the walls, which, due to its being filled with distilled water, presents a weird, distorted image of everything in the room. More unexpectedly, it also changes position. The three strings aren’t actually attached to its side but run through it. This means that they get wet with the result that the cotton and copper strings gradually lose their tension over time.

Other exhibits point to various kinds of obsession. A strange shift of gear? Well, yes. The rationale is that in the Middle Ages ‘glass delusion’ was the name for a type of depression in which sufferers succumb to obsessions and imagine themselves to be at once both physically fragile and especially vulnerable to other people’s scrutiny. Some strange and disturbing things are included under this heading, for example, specimens of the cycling champion Alfie West’s amazing skill at splitting hairs and the famous 1963 photograph of the Vietnamese monk who set fire to himself as an act of protest and then remained seated, apparently deep in prayer, as the flames engulfed him. There is also a huge drawing by Anne Vibeke Mou of snow piling up in an avalanche composed of myriad tiny marks which seem to have spread across the paper and formed into cloud-like shapes of their own accord, and Celia Baker’s voluminous woollen blanket made of sewn-together brightly coloured squares, which is hung up in a corner of the gallery to look as though it is not so much knitted as pouring through a hole in the ceiling.

The idea of obsession accounts as well for one of the simplest yet most charged pieces in the exhibition, Peter J. Evans’ Matter into Matter into Matter (2007). This is a smallish piece of paper covered with ruled lines – vertical lines, diagonal lines, horizontal lines. At first it seems like nothing so much as one of those games that children devise to amuse themselves in boring lessons at school, but then it becomes apparent that Evans has gone on and on adding lines. The consequence of this is that eventually the graphite is so piled up in places it looks not just black but shiny black and in one spot the paper is worn all the way through. It is as if Sol Le Witt has momentarily lost control and produced something akin to one of Goya’s Black Paintings.

Venue detail:
National Glass Centre »
Liberty Way, Sunderland SR6 0GL

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