Jocelyne Prince: Library of Amormhous Matter | Curator's Notes by Leora Maltz-Leca

JOCELYNE PRINCE: LIBRARY OF AMORPHOUS MATTER

Curator's Notes Leora Maltz-Leca

SUMMER 2021

In Library of Amorphous Matter, Jocelyne Prince considers the material properties of glass, an amorphous or noncrystalline solid that is the central protagonist of a fantastical library of cracks, drips and scars.

Slide Library (2002-present), exhibited in the Redwood’s Rovensky Delivery Room on custom “athenaeum-like” bookcases, features hundreds of intimately scaled, handblown glass slides, attesting to what Prince calls her longstanding “love affair with libraries.” Outside on the Library grounds, the artist has installed one hundred and ninety-two glass panes in the windows of Abraham Redwood’s eighteenth-century Summer House to create the site-specific installation Octadic Beacon (2021). The historic structure, illuminated from within as if lit by a fiery hearth, transforms into a radiant edifice: a shining beacon on a hill.

Semi-post-pandemic, the stakes of this Puritan image – and whether it can remain an American ideal – feel very timely.

If Octadic Beacon unites glass and light to intimate the Summer House as a sanctuary of radiant vitality, Prince also thinks of the gardens that surround it in terms of dynamic cycles of energy. Here nature’s harsh seasons of wilting, death and regeneration are echoed in the annual bouts of human labor needed to maintain a garden from creeping back to wilderness. Fire represents the ultimate agent of nature’s patterns of destruction and creation, hence Prince harnesses its fierce energy to produce an artwork that reflects on transformative cycles of energy and matter, using fire and breath to alter the amorphous material of glass from solid into liquid and back again. Prince smoked Octadic Beacon’s hundreds of flat glass sheets, then scorched them with cooking oil, leaving smoky imprints on the glass. As a result, the windows now appear stained, as if with the residue of decades of cooking fires.

Especially in the context of Newport's maritime history, when

Redwood’s Summer House is lit from within, one’s first association is with a lighthouse, and the concentrated beam it radiates into a vast oceanic landscape. Indeed, Prince made a connection between the Fresnel lenses used in lighthouses to produce this focused beam and the etymology of the word “focus,” which in Latin refers to a hearth. As this historical kinship between the words came to frame her thinking, the project’s own focus multiplied, expanding from an exterior light to include interior radiance too. The cooking oil Prince uses confirms associations with fire as the domestic center of energy, as does the further alliance between “hearth” and “heart.”

The oil “smokes” the glass with a visible suspension of carbon that reads as ghostly smudges on the vitreous plates. Peer closely, and all kinds of associations unfold in the windows: the arc of a drooping plant, the edge of a shirt, a butterfly’s wing. Yet even as one “sees into” the images – just as we “see into” clouds, as in Leonardo da Vinci’s famous example – each window of Octadic Beacon oscillates between being an object to look at – which invites connections and prompts recognitions – or a lens to peer through. These are windows, after all. And though the scorching on the glass further obscures visibility, most viewers will find themselves wanting to look through, as well as to look at, the windows.

This split in focus – and the hesitation in our largely automatic activity of viewing that it might produce in some viewers – underpins Prince’s installation, making us conscious, perhaps, of the thousands of daily, largely unreflective choices we make about where to look and what to focus on.

The extraordinary range and magnification of the focused beam of light found in an actual lighthouse is the result of the Fresnel lens, invented in the 1820s by the Frenchman, Augustin-Jean Fresnel, and introduced

to the US by the 1850s. Prince’s Octadic Beacon, by contrast, alternates between alluding to the lighthouse as a projector – an external focal point radiating miles into an inky landscape – and to the lighthouse as a internal focal point of energy. In this way, by complicating and expanding the associations of a “beacon” from public to private, from exterior facing to interior oriented, her work declines the simple grounding of a single point perspective. Instead Octadic Beacon’s unstable focal point calls attention to the very act of focusing as infinite micro decisions we make all the time: Outwards or inwards? Up or down? On self or other? What are the stakes of where we choose to train our attention? What is the politics of focus? And, most chillingly: how much are these “choices” the product of individual agency, or simply primed by mass cultural values that shape, if not actually program, our priorities and foci?

The gossamer forms of Octadic Beacon left by the oil and smoking process stand as the physical record of intense morphological transformations of matter, each the product of a different, yet related set of controlled conditions of conflagration and marking that attest to the artist’s interest in material experimentation. The impulse to document such phenomena via batteries of tests and close observation, handwritten labels and detailed notes emerges to the fore in Slide Library, a room sized installation in which several hundred glass slides are arranged on shelving remarkably similar to the Redwood's original bookshelves. Prince conceived Slide Library as both a library and an athenaeum: it is titled for the former yet presented on the artist’s “athenaeum-like” shelving. Prince explains that: “their transparency, alongside the whiteness of the shelves, creates a first impression of empty shelves, of nothingness. Yet close observation reveals projections of light on the shelf behind - akin to the projections

produced in the lighthouse." 1 Although Prince’s work has long organized itself in the guise of pseudoscientific modes of documentation, Slide Library especially draws on the logic attributed to the grid and the order we project onto geometric form as “rational,” even as her artwork models an exquisitely handmade product of consummate expertise meeting chance (each glass slide is hand blown and coaxed into flatness by extreme heat). “Yet the moment something is handmade, we don’t think of it as scientific…I think there’s such a hierarchy, and that’s why I’m fascinated by 2 materials, and material explorations," Prince explains, declining the crude distinction between scientific knowledge as rational and conceptual, and art as a handmade expression wrought of the emotional and intuitive. Prince’s work troubles this dichotomy not only by producing marks that are often the indexes of material experiments rather than composed forms, but also by referring back to midnineteenth-century visual codes (like taxonomic orders and glass display cases), as well as signature nineteenth-century technologies (like magic lantern slides and projected light). Such precisely datable technical apparatuses and formats cue a time when art and science were better understood as closely related – if not codependent – modes of knowledge, with science, like art, conceived as a hands-on enterprise, dependent on touch, observation and perhaps a little intuition.

The glass slides especially evoke the long nineteenth century, when they were first used in magic lantern shows for entertainment and illusion, before being repurposed for education, accompanying illustrated lectures and such. Prince's interest in the athenaeum, and Slide Library's visual evocations of its technologies and epistemologies,

thus takes shape within the artist’s larger, ongoing set of investigations of the nineteenth century as a time when image and text – like the scientific and the handmade – comfortably cohabitated. And it prompts the larger question: what might it mean for our contemporary zeitgeist that the two have shifted from parallel modes of understanding the 3 world into a distinct hierarchy of knowledge?

Cracks and Watermarks, two series of Slide Library (from a larger group of eight) are being shown at the Redwood Library & Athenaeum. Both highlight Prince’s interest in making as testing: as a rigorous exploration of materials subjected to various kinds of strains and tensions. Her process pushes the material of glass “so as to challenge its properties” she explains, trading in the risk necessary to map the dynamics of the 4 breaking point. Whereas Watermarks is produced by drops of water carving form as they trickle across molten glass, cooling en route, so that the ripples dig in to the pristine surface, the Crack series is the product of a touch to the molten glass initiating an uncontrollable pucker of a crack. Most of the Crack slides obey their title, and end up on the floor, shattered into a thousand fragments. The few survivors that are now on display emphasize the artist’s goal of a controlled rift that creates form through a seam of repair. The glass, wounded, nonetheless repairs the fracture to maintain its wholeness. The cracks are sutures, scars of burns, that testify to tensile strength and the material’s urge to rehabilitation.

In both series, Prince deploys what is traditionally perceived as a weakness or failure in the materiality of glass as the provocation to produce form. Water and cracks (like dust, the subject of another series) are held to be defects on the surface of blown glass, just as they are deemed unwanted on vintage glass slides. Prince's process works

like an inoculation: it wields an irritant material or a destructive force in a reduced and highly controlled manner so as to cajole the glass into revealing its latent capacities. The organic material responds not unlike the way a plant or animal might, exhibiting its resilience and powers of healing. “I create conditions such that there’s a way that I have to listen to the glass,” Prince explains, emphasizing the production of each piece as a match of force and counterforce, push and resist that is necessarily 5 a dialog.

The fluid pressure and counterpressure that defines Prince’s working process is not simply a convenient technical modus operandi. There are values at work here, not least of which is an ethical commitment to partner with materials as vital collaborators through an attention to their limits and capacities. Embedded in Prince’s responsive, dialogic process of working with glass is a profound disinterest in overpowering her material. This suggests a self-conscious rebuff of mastery and all it implies. Why, one might wonder, would an artist choose to spurn such a long-held “ideal”?

There are many reasons to refuse the illusions of mastery, but perhaps one is that, historically, the insistence on dominating natural materials has often gone hand in hand with a catastrophic modernist delusion that total control of nature, animals or people is both possible and desirable. Prince’s exacting artistic process – like that of so many artists – models a way of being in the world that, for all its flirtation with nineteenth-century formats and epistemologies, is firmly contemporary in its value system. It exchanges doctrines of mastery and supreme authority in favor of the chaos of material experimentation, the possibilities of responsive attention, and the quiet rewards of listening to glass crackle and heal.

[1] Zoom conversation of May 26, 2021.

[2] Zoom conversation of May 26, 2021.

[3] Historians of Science like Heinrich van Staden have argued convincingly that science largely replaced religion as the dominant mode of understanding the world, just as religion in turn replaced myth. Science offers a holistic, even totalizing worldview, that can be understood as an organizing belief system structurally akin to religion and myth – even as it tends to be incompatible with those two competing modes of making sense of the world.

[4] Zoom conversation of May 26, 2021.

[5] Zoom conversation of May 26, 2021.

Redwood Library & Athenæum 50 Bellevue Avenue Newport, Rhode Island 02840 Phone: 401-847-0292

redwoodlibrary.org

Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday 11:00 AM - 4:00 PM

The exhibition is made possible by a generous donation from Cornelius C. Bond and Ann E. Blackwell and an in-kind donation

by Sandra Liotus Lighting LLC.