Last week saw the changing of the guard at the Henry Art
Gallery—20-year director Richard Andrews had his last day last
Friday, and new director Sylvia Wolf started this Monday—and as
if to commemorate, there was a lowering of the flag on the museum’s
Richard Andrews Overlook. (That’s the new name for the balcony above
the museum’s high-
ceilinged East Gallery.) It wasn’t a flag,
exactly, but a 12-foot-high sculpture that looks like a chandelier
brought low.
It is a chandelier brought low, but its
origins have
nothing to do with the Henry. I wish: I’d love to see a large,
commissioned exhibition by the extraordinary artist who created this
work, Josiah McElheny.
Instead, the work hangs alone, like a reinterpretation of something
in Jay Gatsby’s house. It’s titled The Last Scattering
Surface. McElheny, a former Seattle resident and a trained
glassblower, made the work in 2006, in an homage to the extravagant
modern-and–
Gilded Age chandeliers at the Metropolitan Opera
House in New York, as well as to the keystone discovery of modern
science, the big bang. It turns out that the Met chandeliers were
designed the same year as news reports of the first physical evidence
of the big bang—1965.
By then, the sturdy high walls of modernism were already pumped full
of holes and ready to fall into the crumbly, exuberantly disparate
remains of postmodernism. McElheny saw a correspondence between
postmodernism’s opening up of culture and the beginning of the
universe, represented by the moments when light and matter
decoupled, allowing the process of planets and stars and moons forming
to become visible. With help from cosmologist David Weinberg, McElheny
created, essentially, a monument to the moment of modernism’s
collapse.
He fabricated the thousand or so glass pieces by hand and hired a
California company for the 5,000 metal parts. The form is based in
fact: The length of each chrome rod represents an amount of time, and
glass pieces at the end of each rod demonstrate the galaxy
formations that were going on at that time.
The shift at the Henry is a shift in the Seattle art universe, and
we have little idea what it will end up forming. While I looked at
McElheny’s universe, Henry outgoing director Andrews was upstairs in
his office, packing boxes. For the new director, he was leaving behind
books and a pin that says, “Ask Me, I Know.” On the windowsill was a
brick pulled from the demolition of the old museum building, which
Andrews expanded. He couldn’t decide whether to leave it there or take
it home. 
