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  • The Light Club of Vizcaya: A Women’s Picture by Josiah McElheny
  • Erica Ando
Josiah McElheny. The Light Club of Vizcaya: A Women’s Picture. Vizcaya Museum and Gardens, Miami, FL November 19, 2012–March 18, 2013

In 2007, the artist Josiah McElheny stumbled across a reference to a little-known short story by Paul Scheerbart, “Der Lichtklub von Batavia: Eine Damen-Novellette” (“The Light Club of Batavia: A Ladies’ Novelette”) (1912). McElheny, recognized for his work with glassblowing and elaborate sculptural installations consisting of glass and mirrored objects, was already familiar with Scheerbart’s utopian treatise on glass architecture, which called for the creation of a spiritual environment built from new technology, “the new environment [that] . . . must bring with it a new culture.”1 The artist’s fascination with Scheerbart’s writing extended beyond a shared interest in the medium of glass. In his work, McElheny often challenges the legacy of modernism and explores its utopian aspirations; Scheerbart, he believes, offers an alternative to blueprint utopias by assuming that the outcome of our propositions will diverge from our careful planning, so that “the best we can hope for is an ironic utopia.”2

McElheny’s quest to locate a copy of “Der Lichtklub von Batavia” proved difficult. Only three copies of it (in its original German) existed in the United States, reflecting Scheerbart’s unpopularity throughout the twentieth century. In fact, Scheerbart’s only work to be translated into English until 2001 was the 1972 publication of Glass Architecture (originally published in German in 1914). Scheerbart was a poet closely associated with “expressionist architecture,” a revolutionary architectural movement whose reputation has suffered from having preceded International Style modernist architecture. [End Page 350] With its emphases on fantasy, distortion, and nonrepressive individualism, expressionist architecture and its spokesperson Scheerbart have been dismissed as juvenile and self-absorbed, representing a negligible phase within the history of modern architecture.

Scheerbart was widely influential in his time for endorsing an individualistic spirit in art and design that contrasted with the German government’s insistence that industry develop a widely recognizable national “type” that could be exported for profit. To Scheerbart, industry could serve society better by promoting clarity and free expression; glass bricks could eliminate opaque walls in buildings, symbolically eliminating the divide between one’s inner and outer realities. His writings were especially influential with the architect Bruno Taut, whose landmark Glass Pavilion (1914) was created in collaboration with Scheerbart. Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius also held Scheerbart in high esteem early in their careers when they sympathized with expressionist attitudes, before their architecture became practically synonymous with the International Style.

For McElheny, Scheerbart’s “Der Lichtklub von Batavia” exhibited a complex conception of utopia, a “resonant, romantic, ridiculous, repugnant, and sublime proposal,”3 that revealed outdated, almost bizarre, ideas about the promises of technology and yet, offered glimmerings of an alternative to the sweeping, destructive tendencies of modernist utopias. Scheerbart depicted a utopia that acknowledged its own presumptions and failings, atypical of the modernist utopias of Le Corbusier, Mies, and Gropius.

In the story, a small, exclusive club aspires to build an underground spa of light. Over bottles of champagne, the group of five members, led by the protagonist, Mrs. Hortense, a bored socialite, plans the Light Club. The plans call for a large-scale resort for many people (“ten villas and two large hotels”)4 in which high technology fuses with the stimulating and curative effects of light, brightly colored by the opalescence of Tiffany glass.

A year later, Mrs. Hortense has spent her considerable fortune to build the light-filled mine. Upon visiting it, the group “found everything to be true—full of light in the highest degree—all the light behind Tiffany-glass.” Scheerbart’s tale ends by exposing the Light Club’s foolishness: the socialites have neglected to invite others to join their utopian world of light and color— “A very—very—quiet light colony it was.”5

In 2009, McElheny was invited to create a special project at Miami’s Vizcaya Museum and Gardens, an extravagant, pseudo-Venetian estate built in the 1910s by the Chicago industrialist James Deering. A public museum [End...

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