FUSE Glass Artist Residency
Marcel Hoogstad Hay: Sublime Scales
Marcel Hoogstad Hay: Sublime Scales
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And when it’s exposed as kind of being<br />
basically The Structure there is the sudden<br />
shame of the sprung voyeur. The shame of<br />
ideology unmasked as that, as if the stakes<br />
were not declared. Which they weren’t.<br />
And yeah, most of this is then instantly<br />
repressed: ‘No, no that wasn’t happening!’<br />
That’s how this structure functions.<br />
The veracity of this line is supported by all<br />
those analyses of this or that prison/<br />
institutional/social formation whereby folk<br />
modify their behaviours when visible as they<br />
pull the look (of the authority, the jailor, the<br />
dad, the cop, the bank) ‘inside’. All of which is<br />
inherently relational which is why there were/<br />
are centuries of those artists of the mirror<br />
(Velasquez, Dan Graham et al.) who dealt and<br />
deal with what it is to get caught up in the<br />
binds of being a viewer and a viewed, being<br />
in and out of the mechanism, split, splitting,<br />
fractured, lost, corrupted, corrupting,<br />
complicit. We’re wary of these forces even<br />
if its in our bodies and reflex behaviours.<br />
Just note the slip of gaffer tape over your<br />
computer camera and tell me it’s not as<br />
true today as it was in 1656.<br />
Which is, yes, an admittedly super longwinded<br />
way of saying that Marcel’s medium,<br />
glass, even when not mirrored, is totally<br />
implicated in all this stuff. I mean, it’s no<br />
leap at all from the ground glass in Jimmy<br />
Stewart’s telescope in Rear Window to the<br />
great sheets that form the surfaces of the<br />
skyscrapers that create an infinite sky above<br />
us bouncing away in a non-transcendental<br />
corporatised sublime. These notions and<br />
experiences and tensions are all rising and<br />
bubbling and mutating in what Marcel’s been<br />
doing over the last two years or so; and with<br />
increased focus and scale thanks to the <strong>FUSE</strong><br />
<strong>Residency</strong> that has allowed him to go larger<br />
and more complex and draw on the talents of<br />
those around him.<br />
Which is another kind of relationality, and it’s<br />
my sense his work carries that as much as it<br />
carries itself as a series of propositions around<br />
framing our positions in the world. What I<br />
mean by that is that there is a human scale at<br />
one end, whereby the limits of the object are<br />
defined by the scale of the studio, the skills of<br />
the people around, those things, and a way<br />
more micro and macro level that starts to get<br />
positively vertiginous. See, at that level he’s<br />
operating around some pretty heady science<br />
stuff emanating from Carlo Rovelli notions<br />
that time doesn’t exist only space, and that<br />
the universe is a kind of malleable web, that<br />
is stretchable, and that within this we have<br />
a whole related thing about absorption<br />
and reflection, these forces that make<br />
black holes and the like.<br />
You can see how this relates to my preamble<br />
while being another waaaaay big step<br />
outwards from that. His mirrored forms pull<br />
us into this zone where we’re caught by our<br />
distorted reflection, even if this is partial (any<br />
maybe especially so as it pulses us away<br />
from our sense of cohesive form) and what’s<br />
interesting is that he stages this in a manner<br />
Trace No. 5, 2023<br />
blown and mirrored glass. Photo: Pippy Mount<br />
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