Rindon Johnson, Clattering, 2021

2021

Medium

Stained glass work (3 panels) and ash wood bench

Dimensions

360 × 158 cm

Status

In Gallery Collection

Collect24 Art ID

C24-155770

The three-part glass work "Clattering" (2021) is directly related to the novel of the same name, which Johnson created in collaboration with writer Rainer Diana Hamilton and which challenges our accustomed view of relationships, hierarchical structures and systems of reproduction. In “Clattering”, there is no gender, hunger, war, or physical violence, and yet certain feelings and emotion remain familiar and intensely palpable. Johnson's practice expands his writing into spatial installations that incorporate various elements or media. In the novel, Sima, one of the five main protagonists, masters the craft of glass and dreams of expanding on its capabilities. The three-panel glass window, “Clattering” is a manifestation of Sima’s window. The window forms a bridge transitioning from fiction to reality as Johnson allows the boundaries of narrative and physical image to merge: „the glass is my own fantasy about what one of our characters would have made, it’s a fabrication in order to manifest this speculative fiction.“ “Clattering” unfolds an auratic effect through incoming sunlight, which the artist places in the context of abstract expressionist painting from the 1940s to the 1960s, in which emotion and spontaneity took the place of formal compositions. Like Mark Rothko's color-field paintings, “Clattering” demands to be viewed over an extended period of time. In doing so, Johnson incorporates external influences such as the cycle of the sun that alter the work’s effects and bring out various auratic qualities within the exhibition space. In his examination of glass, the artist cites - as in many of his works - parts of American cultural history, such as the production of faceted glass. In “Clattering”, Johnson returns to his interest in Tiffany Glass and its contemporary reproduction. Using Tiffany Glass for his window Johnson plays through multiple narratives simultaneously: that of the story of Clattering and the historical use of Tiffany Glass and its status symbol for a certain American high-end consumer at the beginning of the 20th century, doubling down by replicating (or appropriating) the Jugendstil motifs of nature that were transferred onto the shaped glass.