Friday Reads: The Light club

Today’s post comes from Christina Huffaker, who worked as a public services intern at the Rakow Library this past fall.

“Paul Scheerbart (1863–1915) was a visionary German novelist, theorist, poet, and artist who made a lasting impression on such icons of modernism as Walter Benjamin, Bruno Taut, and Walter Gropius. Fascinated with the potential of glass architecture, Scheerbart’s satirical fantasies envisioned an electrified future, a world composed entirely of crystalline, colored glass.” (The Light Club, The University of Chicago Press Books)

In The Light club, published in 2010, artist Josiah McElheny, whose 2000 Rakow Commission Untitled (White) hangs in the Museum’s new Contemporary Art + Design Wing,  collects an array of literary responses to The Light Club of Batavia, a Ladies’ Novelette by Scheerbart, first published in German in 1912. It also contains the first English translation of the 1912 novelle, which tells the story of a club formed for people to bathe in a spa, not of water but of light, built at the bottom of an old mineshaft.

The collaborating authors on this book reference Scheerbart’s passion for light and glass architecture, highlighting the driving force of aesthetics behind Scheerbart’s work through their own literary responses to The Light Club. Another nod to the significance of aesthetics in this work can be found in the book’s artwork. The copyright page describes: “All images in this book and on the cover are film stills from Josiah McElheny and Jeff Preiss, Light Club, 2008, 16mm film transferred to high-definition video with audio.”

The anthology’s table of contents:

• A Small, Silent Utopia, An Introduction by Josiah McElheny
• Der Lichtklub von Batavia: Eine Damen-Novellette von Paul Scheerbart
• The Light Club of Batavia: A Ladies Novelette by Paul Scheerbart
• Translated from the German by Wilhelm Werthern
• From the Shadows, A Poem by Gregg Bordowitz and Ulrike Müller
• The Club of Visionaries, A Play by Andrea Geyer
• The Light Spa in the Mine, A Short Story by Josiah McElheny
• Über Scheerbart von Georg Hecht
• About Scheerbart by Georg Hecht, Translated from the German by Barbara Schroeder
• On Scheerbart, An Essay by Branden W. Joseph

You can find The Light club in our collection, along with Josiah McElheny: towards a light club, a book about McElheny’s ‘Light Club’ works, published in conjunction with a 2013 exhibition at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University.

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The Rakow Research Library is open to the public 9am to 5pm every day. We encourage everyone to explore our collections in person or online. If you have questions or need help with your research, please use our Ask a Glass Question service.