Invisibly Visible: Alan Glass’s Gnosopoetics

The Canadian-Mexican artist Alan Glass's early work Ouverture prochaine (1962; Fig. 1) is deceptively simple in its construction, comprising a black wooden box glazed and sealed with red wax. The glass pane has been painted white with clearly visible circular motions, creating the appearance of turbulent clouds, swirling winds, or an intricately adorned curtain about to part, as though confirming the titular promise that something is on the cusp of opening. This tantalizing promise of revelation aside, the box remains opaque, its suggested mysteries safeguarded for more than 60 years. Visually, Ouverture prochaine is an atypical work for Glass, yet, the box is telling for the sense of secrecy and mystery surrounding his vast oeuvre. Although none of his other boxed assemblages veil their contents in such a literal way, their intricate arrangements of found objects and quotes from or allusions to art, poetry, and a wide range of spiritual ideas appear to be cryptograms without anything like a preconceived solution or interpretation. Like so many of Glass's works, Ouverture prochaine suggests a search for gnosis in the sense of knowledge that cannot be discursively articulated but instead achieved through an experiential transgression of conventional reason. In the following pages, I provide an overview of Glass's early artistic production and then suggest that his works is characterized by gnosopoetics, or a search for suprarational knowledge through the making of surrealist art. I then focus on discussing Glass's treatment of death in his mid-1960s production and his late work. His many depictions of death extend his gnosopoetics to the realm of thanatognosis, as his artworks attempt to exalt death, decipher its mysteries, and probe it for secrets of transformation. Born in 1932 in Canada, Alan Glass is best known for his boxed assemblages, which he created from the early 1960s until he passed away in January 2023.1 His three-dimensional art forms part of the history of the surrealist object, as explored by such artists as Man Ray, Salvador Dalí, Claude Cahun, and Joan Miró; more specifically, Glass's assemblages and objects share affinities with the art of Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Cornell, and Adrien Dax, as well as his Canadian friends Mimi Parent and Jean Benoît.2 Complex, playful, and often esoteric at one and the same time, Glass's boxes are constructed out of found objects and imagery, including fragments of old advertisements or pieces of product packaging, toys, feathers, seeds, dried mushrooms, honeycomb, dolls, clocks, and matchboxes. His juxtapositions of disparate objects conjure up the latent poetic properties of the material world. As mysterious and humorous, they transform everyday materials into enchanted objects by combining their constituent parts according to the ludic analogical logic of surrealist poetics. Before he turned to the medium of assemblage, however, Glass developed an equally original two-dimensional practice. Having studied art in Montréal and Paris in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Glass worked in drawing, painting, and occasionally engraving throughout the 1950s. Arriving in Paris in June 1952 and drawn to surrealism, Glass set out on a fervent search for new means of expression. His discovery of the then-newly launched ballpoint pen in 1954 provided him with a new means to explore automatic drawing.3 Almost as soon as Glass picked up his first Bic pen, he started using the modest, mass-produced instrument to call forth protean shapes in mostly blue, but sometimes green or purple, ink. Teeming with detail, his alternately lush and crowded ballpoint pen drawings evoke and blur the line between vegetable, mineral, and animal shapes, biomorphism mutating into lithomorphism (Fig. 2). In the early period of Glass's automatic drawing, organic-looking caves, egg-like shapes, beehives, birds growing out of living rocks, and the odd hieratic woman emerge out of his unpremeditated wielding of the ballpoint pen. Toward the end of the 1950s, his drawings became denser and increasingly abstract. Some of them evince a sense of spiritual claustrophobia, their scratchy thickets of ink in marked contrast to the delicate, sometimes lace-like patterns in so many of his earlier drawings. Several of Glass's closest friends in Paris were drawn to surrealism, including the Chilean poet and mime Alejandro Jodorowsky, later a well-known film director, and fellow Canadians Benoît and Parent. Glass got in touch with the surrealist group around André Breton in 1955, after Glass left his address in the guest book at the surrealist Galerie de l'étoile scellée during an exhibition of the Swedish artist Max Walter Svanberg. The young surrealist poet Jacques Sennelier visited Glass in his small maid's room at 5 rue Manuel. After seeing the drawings pinned to his walls, Sennelier introduced Glass to Breton. Impressed with Glass's employment of the ballpoint pen as an inventive automatist tool, Breton and Benjamin Péret organized a show of his works. In early 1958, Glass showed a selection of his ballpoint pen drawings at his first solo exhibition at Galerie le Terrain Vague, accompanied by a pamphlet featuring an essay by Jodorowsky (Nonaka 2012, 37–38). In many of these early drawings, it is as though Glass, aided by the humble Bic pen, peers through the surface of reality, trespassing into domains not ordinarily accessible to human perception. We can think of this practice as an embryonic gnosopoetics, characterized by a penetrating gaze detecting and depicting swirls of something mind-like or spiritual in the depths of matter. There are parallels between Glass's gnosopoetics and esoteric strands in the surrealist reception of art during this period. In the mid-1950s, Breton wrote that Jean Degottex's abstract paintings allow passage into a blossoming universe where the “spirit of things reveals itself” (Breton 2002, 341, emphasis original). Glass's earlier drawings, too, present blossoming images on the verge of germinating or sprouting new forms. But there is also a palpable sense of anxious perturbation in some of these works. These unsettling qualities bring to mind Glass's sense of affinity with the Welsh writer and occultist Arthur Machen. Glass frequently cited Machen's stance, expressed in his 1902 essay Hieroglyphics, that: “I am strangely inclined to think that all the quintessence of art is distilled from the subconscious and not from the conscious self; or, in other words, that the artificer seldom or never understands the ends and designs and spirit of the artist” (Machen 1960, 120). The notion that creativity stems from a place beyond conscious control or intention is, of course, a fundamental surrealist stance. In Machen's statement, there is also an intimation that the subconscious functions as a harbinger of gnosis, an elusive knowledge that the conscious self is not able to grasp or articulate but can only channel when directed by the creative spirit. Glass did not discover Machen's writings until the 1960s, when he came across one of his books at a flea market in Mexico City.4 Still, it seems to me that already Glass's early drawings evince a shared sensibility with Machen's descriptions of an invisible dimension of reality, glimpsed by characters entering visionary states. Glass shared Machen's predilection for those moments, simultaneously enchanting and frightening, when nature reveals itself to be profoundly alive with mysterious energies. When the protagonist Lucian Taylor in Machen's novel The Hill of Dreams (1907) enters deep into the forest above the village in which he lives, he discovers a primordial sense of life. Gazing at the vegetation, he is overwhelmed by its shifting appearance as it transforms before his eyes. Lucian's sense that “the wood was alive” can be understood as a moment of gnosis; rather than the result of reasoning, it is an experiential insight (Machen 2019, 19). Glass's drawings evince a familiarity with such states of heightened perception, which show the world to be teeming in ways disavowed by the modern materialist view of matter as mute mechanism.5 Not a branch was straight, not one was free, but all were interlaced and grew one about another; and just above ground, there were forms that imitated the human shape, and faces and twining limbs that amazed him. Green mosses were hair, and tresses were stark in grey lichen; a twisted root swelled into a limb; in the hollows of the rotted bark he saw the masks of men. His eyes were fixed and fascinated by the simulacra of the wood (Machen 2019, 18–19). Much like Machen, Glass unites fascination and fear in his watercolors. Another word for such a coincidentia oppositorum is the sacred. That seems like an apt description of Glass's gnosopoetics, seemingly shuddering with horror and trembling with delight in the face of the world's hidden mysteries. For Glass, the fear occasioned by the uncertainties of what hides in the invisible tends to be an agent of transformation. The ghostlike beings animate his paintings and drawings with a Romantic sense that nature is enchanted (Nonaka 2012, 258–59). A series of watercolors on goose and chicken eggs mounted in boxes emphasizes the transformative potential of these fleeting figures emanating from an invisible realm; as an organic Athanor, the egg harbors the potential for transmutation of matter into a marvelous new life (Fig. 4). Around the same time as he embarked on his ghostly watercolors and oil paintings, Glass started developing his idiosyncratic assemblage practice. His earliest three-dimensional works include constructions with few constituent parts, such as the secretive Ouverture prochaine or La Piège (1964), consisting of a doll equipped with majestic, colorful insect wings caught in a mouse trap mounted on a piece of wood. But, he also made elaborate pieces with a hieratic atmosphere, such as Nouvelle Roseé, Nouveau Miel (1963), with a found portrait of Queen Elizabeth I flanked by eggs and placed above a piece of honeycomb strewn with bees. The first in a series of works incorporating portraits of queens, the latter box bears the promise of rebirth and magical nourishment under the sign of sacred matriarchy. Across his six decades of making objects and boxed assemblages, Glass displayed a heightened sensitivity to analogical associations as well as to the latent, occult qualities of seemingly unassuming objects. As evidenced by his art as well as his readings, Glass had wide-ranging spiritual interests, which included Gnosticism, alchemy, mediumism, ancient Egyptian religion, Mexican syncretism, and tantric Buddhism. Some of his artworks feature overt esoteric allusions. References to ancient Egypt, the ostensible site of magic and associated with a cult of death and rebirth, recur in many of his artworks, and overtly so in Egyptian Box (1973), a double box with four sides. One of the faces displays a series of four sarcophagi with shifting appearances, possibly depicting the transformations of spirit and matter following the advent of death. Radical transformation is arguably the most prominent theme across Glass's oeuvre. The title of his 1996 box Agriculture céleste (Fig. 5) references alchemy, sometimes called “celestial agriculture” (Fulcanelli 1984, 91). The box includes small objects resembling plows, a miniature sheaf of corn, and a hollowed-out clock equipped with a star map and gold foil attached to the rim. Agriculture céleste depicts an alchemical process of transmutation, but it is not simply an illustration of the art; rather, the box is a poetic interpretation, through analogical-associative combinations of found and manipulated objects, of the secrets of celestial agriculture. Many of Glass's assemblages enact similar transmutations of base matter in the form of found objects into imagery, alluding to various forms of higher knowledge. In line with the esoteric philosopher Henry Corbin, one of Glass's most treasured writers, and his notion that images are potent vehicles of higher knowledge, these works can be conceived of as revelatory images aspiring to gnosis (Corbin 1997, 233–34). As suggested earlier, they can be described as gnosopoetic, a concept intended to designate attempts in art and poetry to arrive at, or at least conjure up the prospect of, gnosis. The term gnosis has long been used to signify a wide range of pursuits of suprarational knowledge, from the ancient Gnostics to the Romantic, surrealist, and occultist belief that dreams, the unconscious, and altered states of knowledge are potent means for achieving insights about the nature of the divine, a higher self, or the constitution of the world (Hanegraaff 2016, 382–3, 387–9). Surrealist affinities with gnosis have been traced back to Breton's statement in the second surrealist manifesto that surrealism a or in which to be as (Breton 2019, a in the mind the of logic and what Breton later to as for forms of suprarational knowledge (Breton As the of surrealism is well for artistic of gnosis, which by cannot be expressed in but rather on or 2019, In the of a surrealism in occult Breton his essay in by that the search for gnosis is a surrealist he back on the of as knowledge of visible in an (Breton The images created through poetic can be or in the of Glass's art, they appear in or three-dimensional Breton gnosis to be an of poetic Glass's gnosopoetics surrealist of and analogical associations with references to a of spiritual In the of this I focus on his treatment of death in a series of assemblages from the mid-1960s before with a of a work from which a with Glass's first solo exhibition of assemblages place at Galerie in Montréal in the exhibition also a selection of his watercolors. The however, was the La Fig. in a four Mexican with are placed black with a in the the with the for the four this Glass had long been to the that are a of the Mexican of the of the in early to an he first saw such a Mexican in the of his in Paris in the late and a of to its of death (Nonaka 2012, The four in La are adorned with colorful but their have and out of few parts, the its as it to of and into is in all but this of death is with and the of on the of The title of the exhibition the show under the sign of the mysteries of death. means and that death not be the but rather the of and shifting into a new the can be to to by the of forms of reason. the other works in the exhibition was The a boxed assemblage, which Glass described as in and featuring a with the box was a with which out a of green The turned green to the of and rebirth into a the more La Glass's solo place at de in Mexico in early Like its included visionary watercolors a series of new assemblages from this Glass had of Mexican in his works, by of from its of and As and poetic of the which remains of or their the boxes on were with a palpable sense of sacred Glass's feature or portraits of intricately with and other found or objects. and and and of new life in these In Glass's the into a of death, to the where it to to the prospect of These works extend the of the mysteries of death in La into a thanatognosis, a poetic of death as a of with transformative including that of rebirth or Like so of Glass's art, his are In an a small of The has been placed in a Almost by chicken and honeycomb with the to up a like the with the of the in Glass's novel The Another prominent of Glass's treatment of death is Fig. work incorporating a portrait of Queen Elizabeth the box also allusions to Egyptian In the Glass has mounted a of the portrait of the with a placed the of the The images are by of with painted eggs which in ancient of the of The of the portrait are with that the world of and and the world of and and conscious and unconscious, life and death are not so as This to of the which life and death, the and the and the and the and to be as (Breton In the colorful world above is by the realm of death and the The of a between life and death it in a in Glass's art of of death as an end than a or into a Glass's to death the and occultist of the that surrealist concept the of a higher in which mind and matter as on a transformation. For to the marvelous is to a death and rebirth, an that is to an the such an conventional of death. back and making sense of the sense and conventional knowledge in of a insight into the of death and rebirth as well as the transformative of and a I that there are in Glass's art that his practice to an similar to the one described by which seems to have been a of, and to a of, gnosis. Glass the of an of death that is of but which can be expressed through poetic imagery, and esoteric a is an transformative to the mystery of death. The most to death in have been de Fig. which was from by its the of the box is similar to that of a The wings to its but de of in of in with death as it his In the of the the of a woman is placed on an of equally the the of and the box an sense of In the a doll with to is in face turned a with eyes. of this Glass has mounted painted eggs set in de to be a of in book about the visionary potential and of the is with death. he that he has death, he is also by in in the form of his but The doll and the a in which is his not for nature with up a the of a woman at its When he he is that it is a of “I those I that the had on the appearance of a Some were is in the in the of the world to a in line with to between the world and into the out that his which had so from to was had passed Glass's box such from its of the in the as well as of the as and on with and including his notion of the as a second life. The in the be an to of the of a an and possibly with its it seemingly to the to visionary seeing in The wings on the of the well to belief that he has to death through his into a double in and from Glass insight that he has in a way, “the the In contrast to Glass's as they out a in the poetry of death. the best of knowledge, Glass never made wings are present in ways in his art throughout the years. with he often depicts them as between and the In assemblages, he also sometimes of a of of the in the of The depicts the under a and a of an to the star that them In Glass's works, he often or four out above the of the the into a a of the he the of like a of In a the is the many foil to the piece of that forms the these depictions of and wings to a with the mysteries of with of a solution to the of death. is the theme of an assemblage by Glass (Fig. which has a on of a black market the was a and the box for a of Glass has mounted a of on the of the box and equipped it with a miniature and drawings of this is the box to form a In the a of on of a out of which peers a to the Glass has mounted a from The to the with an illustration of the Man from the a the and around the by which the to the parts of a are above a which are mounted a black and drawings of the assemblage to the the visionary as states to gnosis. The of a from book to a esoteric of the In his of the Man on the the in states that this is a with all earlier of he the Man the between the and the and the can that the of his higher nature is in this that after the of there is a of As a work of gnosopoetics and thanatognosis, this assemblage to of rebirth articulated through surrealist associations as as through esoteric

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.