Some Q&As are fun reads. This one with Josiah McElheny feels like essential reading.
Josiah McElheny wanted black coffee and chicken noodle soup when we met late one morning in March at the Hotel Zaza.
After several days of touring Houston with his students from the University of Pennsylvania, he was steeling himself for the final talk of his three-day Campbell Lecture Series at Rice University. With each talk, he shared stories of different eccentric, unheralded geniuses of the 20th century. The third night was going to be the most complex, ending with a riveting performance by saxophonist Joe McPhee of a Pauline Oliveros score.
McElheny, himself a 2006 MacArthur Award “genius,” said he never considered talking about his own work for three nights. “That would be an incredible hubris … and boring,” he said.
But one of his signature projects is on view at Moody Center, along with his compelling film about it. “Island Universe” is a scientifically accurate visualization of some mind-boggling cosmology — theoretical physicist Andrei Linde’s multiverse scenario of eternal inflation, an extension of the Big Bang theory — that also riffs on the Metropolitan Opera House’s Space Age chandeliers.
A hanging installation of five, monumental starburst sculptures made of individually sized steel rods that “explode” out to little galaxies of hand-blown transparent glass disks with lights, “Island Universe” is from a series of “cosmological sculptures” McElheny created from 2004-08 with Ohio State University astronomy professor David Weinberg, who wrote the computer programs for the designs.
McElheny had a lot to say in an hour. He was surprised and inspired by Houston, he said. (He had seen James Turrell’s sky space, the Buffalo Bayou Cistern, the Ship Channel and Project Row
Houses, eaten out a lot and noticed all the greenspace.) He also talked about the meaning of art, Donald Judd and the tradition of academic lectures. And, finally, his work on “Island Universe.” Then, with his soup gone cold, he had to leave for a sound check. Here are some essential bits.
Q: Is there an endless list of projects you want to do? You seem to absorb so much information.
A: I’m a really foolish artist. The best way to be an artist is to have one great idea and run with it. If it’s a big enough idea, you can live your whole life off of that. I have too many ideas. Also, I struggle intellectually with how to express ideas physically, in my own small way. How do you take a big idea and put it into a — fork?
Q: “Island Universe” percolated for years?
A: Yeah. Probably 100 people worked on it in some capacity. My job was initially to conceive of the idea and figure out how to plan it. But then a big part of my job was problem solving. There were many, many, many problems.
For example, at one point in the middle of the process, the whole thing came to a screeching halt because this NASA subcontractor in L.A. was making these very essential small parts. Their machines, which are used to make parts for the Mars lander, cost $2 million each, and they run 24 hours a day; you just rent time on them. They called and said, “It’s going to destroy our machine. We can’t figure it out. It just can’t be done.” I was, like, “You can’t just take a small little ball and drill a hole in it?”
The operators of these really fancy machines were very smart guys but didn’t speak English. Communication was difficult, but it immediately became clear that we had a conceptual problem: They thought the hole in the spheres had to be placed in a very specific spot. This is going to sound weird, but spheres are impossible to make on Earth because of gravity. Even a ball bearing is not perfectly round. It has bumps on it. The machine had to send a radio signal to the surface of the imperfect sphere; and it’s so accurate, it could only see this minutely bumpy object.
I was, like, “Oh, but you misunderstood. It’s not that it needs to meet the surface of the sphere correctly: It needs to line up with the center of the sphere.” They
McElheny’s “Island Universe” installation is on view at Rice University’s Moody Center for the Arts.
A: My main skill is stubbornness. My two most positive qualities are my curiosity — I want to know more — that’s my main goal in life; and I’m stubborn. I’m willing to fail an endless amount of times. If you try enough times, you’ll figure out the solution by accident. It’s only when you give up that things stop.
Q: Do you think of your work as political?
A: Ninety percent of artists become artists because of ethics, because they want things to mean something. They want people to care about things. They want to connect to people and to something larger. “Island Universe” has been a fantastic journey, but my commitment to it only makes any sense if I believe in whatever the reason is I’m doing it for. Because it’s been so hard — such a struggle to make it, to show it, to store it, to find new places to show it.
I made it for political reasons. That question, “Why did the world begin?” is a huge problem for scientists because they believe one of the basic laws of math and physics is that things balance out; that equations can be written in which one side matches the other; that states of matter eventually reach equilibrium; that energy is conserved, etc., etc., etc. But everything we know about the origin of the universe defies all those laws. It turns out — in a way that I also think is political and radical — that the world begins in imperfection.
For thousands of years, the three largest religions have told us that the world was perfect in the beginning, and we are the horrible beings that have infected it. I agree with that environmentally and with the way we kill each other; but I don’t agree that perfection is the state of being we should be striving for.
“Island Universe” is this weird thing that looks industrially made, and yet there’s no repetition. There’s a system, but it doesn’t look like one person’s system. Each piece is different. It looks designed but not designed. If people wander around and get that idea, I won the jackpot.