The Glass Age by Cole Swensen

The Glass Age Reviews

• 
  Lightsey

  Actually I just finished my once-through. Compelling, rather odd, sleepy, surprising--part of the school of research art, but with charming breaks in the erudition, in which figures glide half-seen across the field of vision--not to sound too British, but it's rather nice. Despite being research-y, it's not pretentious. And Swensen invokes the Crystal Palace, which is one of my own touchstones, so I love that.
• 
  Elizabeth Metzger

  A book you talk to. A book you read fast all the way through, and then continue to pick up and thumb through for who knows how long. More and more, like the windows within window throughout the book. Wonderful.
• 
  Krzysztof

  When a light flickers on
  in a window at night
  I think of my grandmother
  and all her lonesome peers
  entering a room in the dark
  never entirely sure
  whether the light will come on at all.
• 
  M.W.P.M.

  The Glass Age is divided into three parts: "The Open Window", "The Glass Act", and "Glazier, Glazier"...
  
  From "The Open Window"...
  
  

  Pierre Bonnard, 1867-1947, painted next to a north-facing window. The battle over just what constitutes realism was at that moment particularly acute - an emotional thing, such as a cardinal out my window. Could streak away and shatter the composition of the world into a vivid wind in which the world goes astray.
  

  - pg. 3

  
  * * *
  
  A painting always has a model on its outside; it is always a window.
  

  - Gilles Deleuze

  
  When Leon Alberti published his De Pictura in 1435, he proposed the picture plane as an open window "through which I regard the scene..." through which the painting opens a world that was not there just seconds before.
  
  And his carefully ruled and drafted pavimenti, in ways so like the paned window, now unattainable, to reach
  
  is not necessarily to touch, and so on.
  

  - pg.

  
  
  From "The Glass Act"...
  
  

  Vilhelm Hammershøi, 1864-1916, obsessively painted windows looking out on windows.
  
  And painted through repeating glass doors that opened into rooms with nothing in them. Pale green on pale grey. The doors are often. They look into other rooms also open. He also painted women, often from the back, and often leaning over something in their laps,
  but he tended not to mix them with the windows.
  
  "I see no difference," he said, "I have a nervous habit
  
  of tracing a heart in his palm with his thumb.
  

  - pg. 35

  
  * * *
  
  In 1898, in the apartment of Claude Terrasse, Bonnard helped Alfred Jarry set up his Théâtre des Pantins and made him over three hundred marionettes for the revival of Ubu Roi. The Lumière brothers' early movies were still very much on his mind, in which the shadows on the walls, in which the gesture leaves a life. He worked a little more on the lights. He hand-carved their strings from ice. Jarry's 'Pataphysical masterpiece The Exploits & Opinions of Dr. Faustroll includes a chapter dedicated to Bonnard and titled "How One Obtained Canvas." In it, everything turns to gold including the eye and all seeing is seeing as
  if there were enough light.
  

  - pg. 44

  
  
  From "Glazier, Glazier"...
  
  

  While in France, they built whole mansions of glass;
  called orangeries or serres or vies, a conservatory can be
  
  made, paned, claimed
  
  I grew a lemon from a forest of thieves. I grieve
  
  still for the infinitesimal
  
  difference between
  what you can see and what you cannot see.
  

  - pg. 53

  
  * * *
  
  There is nothing more said Baudelaire, and here
  inserted
  numerous
  adjectives
  than a window lighted by a single candle. The flame at that distance resembles a face, which glances out, then turns away. The profile cuts the light in half. As the face, now only half in this world, builds a half-world on the other side, claimed Bonnard, any face is half a world away. And waits.
  

  - pg. 66
• 
  M

  When I was a child, I had a glass kite. Said the child staring out the window of the speeding train.
• 
  Debs

  3.5 stars
• 
  Laurie

  I'm reminded of Thylias Moss' poems in Tokyo Butter about image, seeing, not seeing, disappearance, abduction, representation, photographs, etc. Swensen just happens to be much more linear & properly-historical (?) in her account of past artists who represented these themes. Moss is decidedly un-linear & historical in a different sense.
• 
  Megan

  slippery surface of a read...satisfying in its way.