FUSE Glass Artist Residency

And when it’s exposed as kind of being
basically The Structure there is the sudden
shame of the sprung voyeur. The shame of
ideology unmasked as that, as if the stakes
were not declared. Which they weren’t.
And yeah, most of this is then instantly
repressed: ‘No, no that wasn’t happening!’
That’s how this structure functions.
The veracity of this line is supported by all
those analyses of this or that prison/
institutional/social formation whereby folk
modify their behaviours when visible as they
pull the look (of the authority, the jailor, the
dad, the cop, the bank) ‘inside’. All of which is
inherently relational which is why there were/
are centuries of those artists of the mirror
(Velasquez, Dan Graham et al.) who dealt and
deal with what it is to get caught up in the
binds of being a viewer and a viewed, being
in and out of the mechanism, split, splitting,
fractured, lost, corrupted, corrupting,
complicit. We’re wary of these forces even
if its in our bodies and reflex behaviours.
Just note the slip of gaffer tape over your
computer camera and tell me it’s not as
true today as it was in 1656.
Which is, yes, an admittedly super longwinded
way of saying that Marcel’s medium,
glass, even when not mirrored, is totally
implicated in all this stuff. I mean, it’s no
leap at all from the ground glass in Jimmy
Stewart’s telescope in Rear Window to the
great sheets that form the surfaces of the
skyscrapers that create an infinite sky above
us bouncing away in a non-transcendental
corporatised sublime. These notions and
experiences and tensions are all rising and
bubbling and mutating in what Marcel’s been
doing over the last two years or so; and with
increased focus and scale thanks to the FUSE
Residency that has allowed him to go larger
and more complex and draw on the talents of
those around him.
Which is another kind of relationality, and it’s
my sense his work carries that as much as it
carries itself as a series of propositions around
framing our positions in the world. What I
mean by that is that there is a human scale at
one end, whereby the limits of the object are
defined by the scale of the studio, the skills of
the people around, those things, and a way
more micro and macro level that starts to get
positively vertiginous. See, at that level he’s
operating around some pretty heady science
stuff emanating from Carlo Rovelli notions
that time doesn’t exist only space, and that
the universe is a kind of malleable web, that
is stretchable, and that within this we have
a whole related thing about absorption
and reflection, these forces that make
black holes and the like.
You can see how this relates to my preamble
while being another waaaaay big step
outwards from that. His mirrored forms pull
us into this zone where we’re caught by our
distorted reflection, even if this is partial (any
maybe especially so as it pulses us away
from our sense of cohesive form) and what’s
interesting is that he stages this in a manner
Trace No. 5, 2023
blown and mirrored glass. Photo: Pippy Mount
13