Beyond his vital contribution to literature as the founder of New Narrative, Robert Glück has, since 1966, built up a corpus of ceramics, which is now exhibited for the first time in “Ghosts and Universes: Lingams, Rattles , and Genies”. A stone’s throw from the hometown of Margery Kempe – the illiterate, aspiring saint and subject of her 1994 novel – the exhibit applies New Narrative’s deep sentiment to pot throwing. Glück declines the phallic sandstone votives in bands of pale blues and pinks (which he dedicates to Agnès Martin) or embellishes them with ceramic beads like fascinators; he paints ghostly specters and glues human faces – his own, those of his friends and lovers – with a distinctive matte underglaze.
The dominant hue is blue – cobalt, lapis, cerulean passing to gray – to which Glück turns for affect; it is not a melancholic blue but funny, sometimes surprising, a blue through which the living reach out to touch the dead and vice versa. Rattle Make-It-Stop (Bob), 2023, depicts the artist with her mouth open, ready to ring out the shards of ceramic which, when shaken, slam inside. The scratched exterior of Genie Bottle2019 – one of several gnarled, lustful votives arranged on plinths against the far wall like urns in a graveyard – collapses to reveal the bare, swaying torso of a bent-over man.
Almost all the pieces are hollow, but apart from a series of elegant celadon jars, most have no openings. In other words, these containers are not meant to be filled. They do not acquiesce in utility in the material sense, but rather contain a void, much like the “void to travel with history” that the artist aspires to in his writing.
