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Glass Act: John Stuart Gordon and the Vitreous Curiosities of Yale
73 Plays7 years ago
Ben Miller talks to John Stuart Gordon about glass formed by the Trinity nuclear test and a stained-glass window smashed by a dining hall worker in 2016.
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Transcript
The Mystique of Glass
00:00:00
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The glass is a remarkable material.
00:00:03
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It can be transparent.
00:00:04
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It can be sharp.
00:00:06
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It can be luminous.
00:00:08
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It can be non-conductive.
00:00:10
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It can be radioactive.
00:00:12
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It can be broken.
00:00:13
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It can be mended.
00:00:14
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It has a lot of possibilities.
Introduction of the Podcast and Guests
00:00:23
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Hello, you're listening to Curious Objects, brought to you by the magazine Antiques.
00:00:26
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I'm Ben Miller.
00:00:28
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I have two objects to share with you today, and three guests.
00:00:31
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Our guide, whose voice you've just heard, is John Stuart Gordon, associate curator at the Yale Art Gallery, and author most recently of American Glass, the Collections at Yale.
00:00:41
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I've known John for years and am thrilled to have him on the show.
00:00:44
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He is one of the great examples of a new generation of curators.
00:00:47
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John and I will be joined first by Stefan Nicolescu, collections manager of the Division of Mineralogy and Meteorics, wow, at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History.
Highlighting Historical Objects
00:00:57
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Later on, we'll talk with David Blight, professor of American history, also at Yale.
00:01:02
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Our two curious objects today are both featured in John's book.
00:01:05
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We chose these particular pieces because they both, in very different ways, carry the weight of history.
00:01:10
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One is the byproduct of the most destructive force known to humankind.
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The other is a haunting memento of America's racial past and also a stark symbol of our present struggles.
00:01:21
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We have a lot of ground to cover, so let's get started.
00:01:25
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First, a word from our sponsor.
00:01:27
Speaker
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00:01:31
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The Birth of Trinitite
00:02:02
Speaker
Let's just dive straight into talking about this very curious object, which you tell me, should I be nervous sitting as close to it as I am?
00:02:15
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Not in the least.
00:02:17
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And why is that?
00:02:17
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Because it does come from a radioactive event.
00:02:22
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Yes, and it is still very, very mildly radioactive.
00:02:27
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but nothing that can affect anybody's health.
00:02:31
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Okay.
00:02:33
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I won't see my bones if I hold it in my hand.
00:02:36
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No, definitely not.
00:02:37
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Okay.
00:02:38
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Now tell me what is this object that we're looking at?
00:02:42
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So it is basically a molten
00:02:48
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rock.
00:02:49
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It was formed shortly after 5 29 a.m.
00:02:56
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on July 16, 1945, when the first nuclear explosion happened in south of Los Alamos in New Mexico.
00:03:07
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So this was the first test of an atomic bomb.
00:03:13
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And the material
00:03:16
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in this specimen that we have here, which is about, I don't know, three centimeters across, was actually the result of the high temperature generated, extremely high temperature generated by the explosion.
00:03:32
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The temperature in the cloud is estimated to have reached almost 15,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
00:03:41
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So what happened is that the
00:03:46
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material on the ground under the tower in which the explosion took place was kicked up into the cloud, the nuclear cloud.
00:03:58
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At that high temperature, the material basically got vaporized, but then it cooled down somewhat and it rained down as melt on the ground and it transformed itself into a glass.
00:04:14
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OK, let's back up here for a second, because we're talking throughout this episode about glass, but we haven't yet really defined what glass is.
00:04:24
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So there are a lot of different kinds of glass, and glass is formed in different ways.
00:04:29
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So tell me, what are the broad categories of types of glass?
00:04:35
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So glass is a solid that can be formed either by natural processes or by artificial processes.
00:04:45
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And the main characteristic that distinguishes it from other naturally formed solids is that it doesn't have crystal ordering.
00:04:58
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There is no crystal structure.
00:05:00
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It's an amorphous material.
00:05:02
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And so when people say that glass is a liquid, is that what they mean?
00:05:06
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Yeah, I know that.
00:05:07
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Is that correct?
Comparing Natural and Radioactive Glass
00:05:08
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You know, I didn't live long enough to see it indeed flowing a little bit.
00:05:11
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It's called like a very high viscosity fluid.
00:05:15
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Yeah.
00:05:16
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And so when you look at old glass, stained glass windows from Gothic cathedrals, for example, and you see a little bit of rippling in the surface, is that a result of that sort of liquid property of the material?
00:05:28
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Or
00:05:28
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No, that unfortunately is a myth.
00:05:30
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So people have taken the idea that glass is an amorphous solid and kind of extrapolated out to the fact that...
00:05:39
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the old glass has imperfections.
00:05:41
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So when you're looking at an old stained glass window and you see the ripples and you see the weight at the bottom edge of a piece, it's not the fact that it's been sagging over the past 100,000 years.
00:05:53
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That's imperfections to how it was made.
00:05:55
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What's going to sag faster is the lead holding the glass.
00:05:59
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So if you see it moving and buckling, it's actually the lead framed.
00:06:03
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But it's a lovely myth.
00:06:05
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Yeah, that's funny.
00:06:06
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I like that you're debunking urban myths already.
00:06:09
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That's what we do here.
00:06:13
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I love the idea that glass is a liquid and a solid, and that's kind of what captures people's imagination about it, the fact that you can see it in these two states within a matter of minutes, but you rarely see it kind of changing on its own spontaneously.
00:06:32
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It needs some kind of action to move it from one state to the other.
00:06:37
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Now, Stefan, while you described glass as being either natural or artificial, this particular piece falls somewhere in between those two categories.
00:06:49
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No, I think it falls right into the artificial category.
00:06:52
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Right into the artificial.
00:06:53
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Because it wouldn't have happened without human intervention.
00:06:55
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Is there any natural glass that shares properties with this piece?
00:07:01
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Well, not in terms of radioactivity, but in terms of composition and in terms of lack of crystallinity, yes.
00:07:07
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So, for instance, when a lightning strikes the ground,
00:07:12
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That's what happens.
00:07:13
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So it's really, I think, the lightning strikes are in thousands of degrees Fahrenheit or Celsius temperature.
00:07:21
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And the sand quartz melts around 1,700 degrees Celsius.
00:07:29
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So that's what you get.
00:07:31
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The rock is called the fulgurite, and that is naturally formed glass.
00:07:35
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And there are other processes that generate natural glass.
00:07:39
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Now, how did this particular sample end up at Yale?
00:07:42
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It was purchased from a mineral dealer many decades ago when it was still legal.
00:07:47
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Yeah, the material got out very fast.
00:07:50
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The reporters who were there covering the story, the minute they were let out into the crater, people were scooping up this material as a souvenir.
00:08:01
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Life magazine and other periodicals were running specials about what to do with this new material.
00:08:10
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So there was quite a lot of it.
00:08:12
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There was a fair amount of it, and I found an ad for nuclear jewelry.
00:08:16
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People were taking pieces of trinitite and setting them as precious stones in brooches and earrings so you could actually wear this radioactive material as a symbol of the progress of the country.
00:08:30
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Right.
00:08:31
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John, give me a little bit more context here.
00:08:34
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We're talking about a piece.
00:08:36
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Your book has 150 something objects in it.
00:08:40
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And for the most part, we're talking about crafted glass, glass that was made for functional purposes or decorative purposes or artistic purposes.
00:08:50
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Um,
00:08:51
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This piece was made almost by accident.
00:08:56
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The reason the nuclear bomb was detonated was not to produce glass, right?
00:09:02
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It was to produce a destructive and lethal force.
00:09:06
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Why did you feel that it was important to include this piece in your book?
The Story Behind Trinitite's Name
00:09:11
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I got captivated by the story because here was something that, Stephan says, this is man-made glass.
00:09:21
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But it does kind of toe the line because it's man-made, but it's mimicking how a tectite or a fulgurite is made.
00:09:29
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And it's...
00:09:32
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It's pushing the envelope and it's tied to such an incredible story of the 20th century.
00:09:38
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Our quest for nuclear power, the destructive force of this science, the realities of war, and the war changed how we live.
00:09:50
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So to get an object that goes right to that one moment when man was able to harness the atom for something so powerful,
00:10:02
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destructive and potentially positive, that was really compelling.
00:10:07
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You mentioned collectors being enamored of the idea of their pieces of jewelry made from trinitite, tying them in a sense to technological progress, to the future of humanity.
00:10:22
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Was there also a sense
00:10:24
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among any of these people that what they were collecting and fashioning into jewelry and other things and wearing was also representative of terrible human destruction and, as you say now, the cost of war?
00:10:40
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Certainly.
00:10:41
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The anti-nuclear protests and people who are rallying against nuclear arms, that starts in 1945 and even earlier.
00:10:53
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I mean, it's fully... That idea of protesting nuclear proliferation is just as old as the atomic tests.
00:11:03
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It's certainly present at Los Alamos and among the scientists who are working on developing the technology.
00:11:09
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Oh yes, and you get a lot of sense of ambivalence about is this good, is this bad.
00:11:16
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Even biographies of Oppenheimer kind of dwell on the fact that he was conflicted about what he was doing.
00:11:23
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So although there's this sense of potential of the nuclear blast, there is this lethal side, and
00:11:32
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In many ways, a lot of the objects that end up in museum collections or in private collections that celebrate the atomic world are rather positive, like George Nelson's Atomic Clock or Eva Zeisel's Fantasy Pattern, or you can even think about
00:11:53
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like Pyrex and Peter Schlumbum's Chemex that comes out of thinking about science during wartime.
00:11:59
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These are rather positive aspirational objects.
00:12:02
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So I kind of like the fact that this is an uncomfortable object.
00:12:07
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It's a fragment, it's a shard,
00:12:09
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And it's just by coincidence, it's this bizarre color green that we do associate with radioactivity.
00:12:17
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Imagine low budget sci-fi movies and someone's radioactive and they're glowing green.
00:12:22
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That's not why this rock is green.
00:12:24
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Right.
00:12:24
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But it's a wonderful happenstance that it is.
00:12:31
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You mentioned Oppenheimer, and the name of the material, trinitite, is derived from something that Oppenheimer said, isn't it?
00:12:41
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Or I should say something that John Donne said that Oppenheimer was aware of and quoted.
00:12:46
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Yes.
00:12:46
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Yes, batter my heart, three-person God.
00:12:49
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Oppenheimer was incredibly well read, and the idea of salvation and redemption and destruction all coming together that John Doan talks about in that sonnet, Oppenheimer knowingly draws on when he names the test the Trinity test.
00:13:09
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And this rock has had, or piece of glass, has had many different names.
00:13:15
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right when it was created.
00:13:17
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It has a whole series of names.
00:13:18
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And I think Trinitite's the one that has kind of lasted through time.
00:13:23
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I like it because of those poetic ramifications.
00:13:26
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All
The Political Stained Glass Panel
00:13:28
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right.
00:13:28
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Well, I feel we've covered some interesting ground here.
00:13:32
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Thank you both very much.
00:13:33
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Thank you.
00:13:52
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We'll take a quick break before Jon Stewart, Gordon, and I join David Blight to talk about today's second object.
00:13:58
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Do you want to learn how much was paid for the most expensive American looking glass ever sold at auction?
00:14:02
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I know I do.
00:14:04
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Or what an article titled Puppies, Penguins, and Plagiarism could possibly be about?
00:14:09
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Freeman's, America's oldest auction house, has the answers.
00:14:12
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Discover how Thomas Aiken's gross clinic stayed in Philadelphia.
00:14:16
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Delve into the work of Wayne Thiebaud, the great draftsman.
00:14:19
Speaker
And much more on their website, freemansauction.com.
00:14:22
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From modern masters to French furniture, Freeman's takes you behind the scenes at auctions and exhibitions, delivering the latest in art market news, events, and stories.
00:14:30
Speaker
Subscribe to their bi-weekly magazine and get it sent straight to your inbox.
00:14:35
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Visit Freeman's at freemansauction.com to learn more.
00:14:42
Speaker
I'd like to take a moment each episode to thank you for listening.
00:14:46
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Your responses and comments are really helpful and encouraging, so do get in touch.
00:14:50
Speaker
You can email me at podcast at themagazineantiques.com or catch me on Instagram at Objective Interest.
00:14:57
Speaker
I post photos there about the podcast, including some behind-the-scenes shots.
00:15:01
Speaker
And you can always see relevant pictures at themagazineantiques.com.
00:15:05
Speaker
You'll definitely want to see pictures of this next object if you can.
00:15:08
Speaker
The other thing you can do that really helps me out is to leave a review and a rating on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening right now.
00:15:16
Speaker
Every time one of you does that, it helps more people find this podcast.
00:15:19
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So many, many thanks to those of you who have done that.
00:15:22
Speaker
Coming up in the next segment, our object is a stained glass panel with a troubled political history.
00:15:28
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It was installed at Yale in the 1930s as part of a tribute to the legacy of a controversial figure, John C. Calhoun.
00:15:34
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The reason you may have heard of it is that in 2016, a Yale dining hall worker named Corey Menifee destroyed the panel in an act of protest, sparking a national debate about the vestiges of slavery in objects that we see every day.
00:15:47
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John Stuart Gordon included the panel in his book, American Glass, but he asked Professor David Blight to help him understand the historical context around the piece.
00:15:55
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I spoke with both of them at the Yale Art Gallery.
00:15:59
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John, can you tell us what we're looking at?
00:16:02
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It's a panel of stained glass.
00:16:03
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It's about 9 by 12 inches, give or take, broken into fragments.
00:16:11
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Yes, this is a window that was originally installed in the dining room of Calhoun College in 1932.
00:16:17
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And just for clarification, that's one of the residential colleges within Yale.
00:16:25
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Correct.
00:16:26
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In the early 30s, Yale went through a period of rapid expansion.
00:16:30
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So they
00:16:32
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erected a new library, a hall of graduate studies, a gym, and a series of residential colleges, each named after notable people in Yale's past, either administrators or notable graduates.
00:16:47
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And John C. Calhoun, at that point, was the Yale graduate who probably reached the highest level of American government when he was vice president.
00:16:56
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So he was deemed an appropriate figure to be memorialized.
00:17:02
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So they named this one Calhoun, and there was a decorative program conceived to decorate the college.
00:17:14
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Like most of these buildings, they're Gothic revival.
00:17:17
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They have faux medieval stained glass in them, but often the stained glass reference some aspect of college life or
00:17:26
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Life of the Mind, and there is a staircase in Calhoun College that is decorated with prints by Currier and Ives sporting scenes.
00:17:40
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And
00:17:42
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The one wall of the dining hall was these kind of nostalgic views of the Old South, kind of a salvo to Calhoun and the world he inhabited.
00:17:56
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And I will say, I am using the term Calhoun College.
00:18:00
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It has since been renamed Hopper College.
00:18:03
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After Grace Hopper.
00:18:04
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After Grace Hopper, the Navy Rear Admiral.
00:18:06
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And
00:18:09
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I'm just using the historical term just because this window is installed in a building of one name.
00:18:15
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Right.
00:18:17
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So, David, who was John C. Calhoun and why was he such a bad guy?
00:18:25
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Or important guy, too.
00:18:27
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John C. Calhoun was a major American statesman from South Carolina, a planter, but one who came north for his education, was educated at Yale early in the 19th century, read law in Connecticut, became a lawyer,
00:18:45
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He became a U.S. Senator.
00:18:47
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He became Secretary of State.
00:18:48
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He became Vice President.
00:18:51
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Calhoun, early in his South Carolina career, was known as a nationalist, but with time, particularly after the great tariff crisis of 1829-30,
00:19:06
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Calhoun became more and more of a sectionalist, a states rights advocate, a staunch philosophical believer in the theory of state sovereignty over federal power, but also a staunch supporter of slavery.
00:19:25
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he isn't the most important pro-slavery writer or advocate there were others who wrote much more on that subject but because of his political prominence what he did write in defense of slavery
00:19:41
Speaker
took on greater and greater significance in his own time and then over time as well.
00:19:46
Speaker
And segregation and race relations and so on, those were secondary to this political theory.
00:19:53
Speaker
Well, secondary, yes, secondary.
00:19:57
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Well, as issues in Calhoun's legacy, they were secondary for so long because of his writings about the Constitution, about federalism, and about political theory.
00:20:09
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That is not where our culture is at now.
00:20:13
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When this blew up in controversy, which led to the broken window, to suggest, as I actually did, and I wasn't defending Calhoun.
00:20:25
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When the question of Calhoun College's name came up, I did a tea or a talk at the college the very first autumn that it was brought up.
00:20:37
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And I just made the argument that, yes, Calhoun was a defender of slavery and a terrible defender of slavery.
00:20:43
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But before we forget about him, we might want to know why he was so important historically.
00:20:49
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So important that a Frederick Douglass, the great black leader about whom I've written probably too much about, Douglass used to refer to the South as Calhoun-dom.
00:21:02
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He called it that.
00:21:03
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Really?
00:21:05
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He would even mimic sometimes Calhoun by name in speeches when he wanted to mimic the ravings of a pro-slavery advocate.
00:21:15
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So that's how important Calvin was to abolitionists, that they would even label the South by his name.
00:21:22
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And I remember just suggesting to the students who came that day that, you know, you might want to know some of this before you take his name off this college, just to know how and why it ever got here.
00:21:32
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But it just was not a moment in which that mattered very much because we live in a we're living in a racial reckoning, an extended racial reckoning again in America.
Controversies and Renaming of Calhoun College
00:21:45
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especially after the massacre in Charleston, which led directly to President Soloway bringing this question up, such that by a year or so into this controversy, the idea of keeping Calhoun's name on the college became pretty much politically unviable.
00:22:06
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Yeah.
00:22:08
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Well, let's rewind back to the 1930s.
00:22:11
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And I want to talk about nostalgia because the scene depicted on this glass is a sort of bucolic idea of what slavery might have looked like.
00:22:20
Speaker
And it's two slaves working in a cotton field.
00:22:27
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:22:28
Speaker
As you suggested earlier, they seem to be in a kind of a quaint, calm disposition.
00:22:38
Speaker
They seem to be comfortable.
00:22:39
Speaker
There's no visible sign of struggle or of pain or of pain.
00:22:48
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Yeah, their clothes are not torn.
00:22:49
Speaker
They actually seem quite well-kempt.
00:22:52
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The landscape is quite serene.
00:22:56
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Orderly.
00:22:57
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Orderly.
00:22:58
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Now, I think that today it would be hard to find someone who wouldn't say that's a gross misrepresentation, at least of anything that we know about the condition of slavery in the antebellum South.
00:23:12
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Where did this idea come?
00:23:13
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How would this scene have come to be portrayed in this way in the 1930s?
00:23:18
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Well, it had been portrayed this way hundreds and hundreds of times in lithographs, paintings, for 60 years by then.
00:23:31
Speaker
This was the image of the idyllic, noble, patriarchal,
00:23:39
Speaker
South of the cotton kingdom and they're surrounded by cotton here.
00:23:42
Speaker
These are cotton fields.
00:23:44
Speaker
We see balls of cotton all around them.
00:23:46
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They're both holding baskets of cotton on their heads and African style.
00:23:54
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A civilization that
00:23:57
Speaker
Yes, it required slavery, but it was essentially seen as benign, as somehow necessary for a people destined for labor, and perhaps even destined to be beyond slavery and beyond labor, but this was seen as a stage of history that, you know,
00:24:17
Speaker
they and the country had to somehow live through.
00:24:21
Speaker
I think of that as a southern myth, and I grew up in the south, in a place where there are plenty of people who still hold this.
00:24:27
Speaker
Where in the south?
00:24:28
Speaker
Tennessee.
00:24:30
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But this is a window that was...
00:24:34
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made for a building in New Haven, Connecticut, by a firm in Pennsylvania.
00:24:40
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Correct, in Philadelphia, commissioned by a New York architect.
00:24:43
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It's a northern story, but it does show how far the lost cause ideology pervaded.
00:24:53
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I remember talking to someone.
00:24:54
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I'm sorry, can we hit that nail on the head?
00:24:56
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The lost cause ideology.
00:24:59
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Not everyone may be familiar with what exactly that refers to.
00:25:04
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Can we define the lost cause?
00:25:09
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Well, John put his finger right on the button.
00:25:12
Speaker
the success of this set of arguments with Northerners that tells the story.
00:25:19
Speaker
The Lost Cause came into existence as a sort of cultural response to defeat, and no Americans other than Native Americans have ever been defeated quite as much as the White South, the Confederacy.
00:25:32
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So, immediately in the wake of the Civil War and for the next 20, 25 years,
00:25:38
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They needed a story to explain defeat.
00:25:40
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They needed a story to explain their poverty.
00:25:43
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They needed a story to explain loss on a terrible scale.
Myths of the Lost Cause
00:25:50
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And part of that story, only one part of it, became that they never really fought for slavery.
00:25:58
Speaker
The argument was that slavery was probably going to die out anyway.
00:26:02
Speaker
And on top of that, it was never that terrible.
00:26:06
Speaker
The war, this argument said, only really came about because of fanatical abolitionists from the North forcing the issue, forcing the issue into American politics and then forcing disunion.
00:26:19
Speaker
by part of the south to defend its civilization.
00:26:23
Speaker
It was an effort to try to portray the confederacy and the effort of the confederacy as noble, as really the legacy of the American Revolution being carried out.
00:26:39
Speaker
So a benign slavery with well-clad slaves, even in a cotton field, is necessary to that tradition.
00:26:50
Speaker
At the heart of it also emerged a popular culture, enormously popular fiction and literature about faithful slaves, as odd as it seems in the 21st century, especially to young people,
00:27:06
Speaker
that readers all over the country and particularly northern readers would buy into thomas nelson page's stories of faithful slaves who always had names like uncle billy and aunt harriet wistfully talking about the old days under slavery when everything seemed to be in order
00:27:25
Speaker
Master treated us well, and now in freedom, you know, it's just chaos.
00:27:29
Speaker
But it's sunk deeply into popular culture, into visual culture, into popular literature, into politics, into every element of American life, such that by the time these amazing windows were produced, they're produced by northerners, northern companies, northern artists.
00:27:48
Speaker
Because if you were to depict the life of Calhoun, which is what these windows are doing,
00:27:55
Speaker
and his Fort Hill plantation in what is now Clemson in South Carolina, well, it was a civilization, it was a society and a plantation that was part of the Cotton Kingdom.
00:28:09
Speaker
This is where Calhoun was.
00:28:10
Speaker
So part of those stained glass windows depicting Calhoun's life are not about his service to the country, his service and political center, but were about his plantation.
00:28:23
Speaker
The plantation in America's past and the popular imagination at that time meant reasonably contented black people in a cotton field doing their labor.
00:28:35
Speaker
There are no overseers with whips.
00:28:40
Speaker
There's no auction block.
00:28:42
Speaker
In the 19th century, the most prominent visual images of slavery
00:28:49
Speaker
with a runaway slave produced by the North before the Civil War, with a runaway slave, the auction block, and sometimes other depictions of slaves in a wilderness somewhere trying to escape.
00:29:09
Speaker
And then lastly, the lash, whipping.
00:29:14
Speaker
That was the old abolitionist, and there's a lot of this stuff, visual imagery of slavery.
00:29:19
Speaker
By the turn of the 20th century, it needs to be this benign civilization that's now lost and gone.
00:29:25
Speaker
Of course.
00:29:26
Speaker
So this is not atypical for the period in terms of how northerners might have thought of the history of slavery.
00:29:32
Speaker
Harper's Weekly had run stuff like this back in the 1870s and 1880s.
00:29:36
Speaker
Not always that benign, but images of this older, now gone civilization that wasn't gone entirely by any means
00:29:49
Speaker
Cotton production had revived very well by the early 20th century.
00:29:56
Speaker
But anyway, but to associate this with Calhoun is because he had himself indeed owned a major plantation in central South Carolina.
00:30:05
Speaker
And then this window is part of a larger composition, and there are four or five windows that form this kind of suite together, talking about plantation life.
00:30:18
Speaker
The rest of the windows are flora, fauna of the south, but there is this...
00:30:23
Speaker
group that depict plantation life, and one depicts Fort Hill, Catherine's house.
00:30:29
Speaker
One depicts a slave cabin.
00:30:32
Speaker
One depicts the gin house, where the cotton gin was.
00:30:35
Speaker
And you have then the slaves in the field.
00:30:38
Speaker
There's a banjo player too, isn't there?
00:30:40
Speaker
There's a banjo player, which is a slightly different format.
00:30:44
Speaker
Not a better message, but it doesn't kind of fit into this series.
00:30:50
Speaker
And the handling of the imagery in this series is very similar, and we have yet to find the print source, but given that most of these windows were made after prints or illustrations,
00:31:05
Speaker
I know out there, we just need to find it, is the book, probably a book on Calhoun's life or a survey of the South where they have a chapter on South Carolina.
00:31:15
Speaker
And these images are going to appear.
00:31:18
Speaker
And because these windows are being made as part of large orders.
00:31:23
Speaker
There are a couple hundred in each building on campus.
00:31:26
Speaker
And Sterling Library alone has 2,000 windows like this.
00:31:30
Speaker
Mass production.
00:31:31
Speaker
Yeah.
00:31:31
Speaker
Yeah, so the artists are not going to struggle to create a new composition.
00:31:37
Speaker
They're going to source compositions that they can repurpose.
00:31:40
Speaker
If you look at it closely, it's a few pieces of glass.
00:31:44
Speaker
One is slightly blue-tinted, one's whitish-tinted, one's a little green.
00:31:48
Speaker
So this was never a complete window.
00:31:50
Speaker
Even when it was fresh out of the studio, it was broken and reassembled.
00:31:55
Speaker
And a lot of these images are broken and reassembled.
00:31:59
Speaker
And I like that metaphor that they're depicting a past that never existed, and they're also depicting something that was inherently broken.
00:32:10
Speaker
So long before a worker in Kalen's dining room, Cory Menofy, broke the window, this idea of rupture and disruption was already present in the image.
Protest and Reflection on Historical Narratives
00:32:21
Speaker
Okay, so we've been jumping around between time periods, but let's, now that you've mentioned Corey Manaphy's name, let's jump into the present.
00:32:29
Speaker
There's a reason that this panel is broken.
00:32:32
Speaker
It didn't happen by accident.
00:32:35
Speaker
John, what's the, how did this come to happen?
00:32:36
Speaker
John?
00:32:38
Speaker
It was the summer of 2016, and this dining hall worker, a man named Cory Menefee, as he later recounts, his job has him located in that dining hall for long hours at a time.
00:32:57
Speaker
And you take in your surroundings if you're in a space like that.
00:33:02
Speaker
Many of the people who just come in for a quick meal may not internalize the decorations as much, but he had the time to really study the windows and kind of see how problematic they were and how uncomfortable they made him.
00:33:16
Speaker
And the question, why is this imagery in an institution like this?
00:33:20
Speaker
Why do I have to sit here and look at it all day?
00:33:23
Speaker
And as he recounted, one day he just
00:33:27
Speaker
kind of snapped.
00:33:28
Speaker
And was like, yep, it's coming down today.
00:33:32
Speaker
And he got a broom, he moved a chair over to the wall, stood on the chair and hid the window out.
00:33:39
Speaker
And it was just that moment of kind of like he'd had enough of looking at this image.
00:33:45
Speaker
And I want to read that he was quoted in the New Haven Independent.
00:33:49
Speaker
Yes.
00:33:50
Speaker
Shortly after the incident.
00:33:53
Speaker
And this quote really struck me.
00:33:55
Speaker
It's pithy.
00:33:57
Speaker
He said, quote, it's 2016.
00:34:00
Speaker
I shouldn't have to come to work and see things like that.
00:34:04
Speaker
Yeah.
00:34:05
Speaker
It's profound in its simplicity.
00:34:08
Speaker
And he knew what he was doing was inappropriate.
00:34:15
Speaker
But at the same time...
00:34:18
Speaker
The image is inappropriate, so they kind of canceled each other out.
00:34:23
Speaker
And the window broke out into the street, at which point it became an issue of glass could have hit someone, and the New Haven police were brought in, and it became a full investigation, and the story kind of snowballed from there.
00:34:42
Speaker
But you've included this in your book as a sort of an epilogue.
00:34:47
Speaker
Correct.
00:34:49
Speaker
It's not included in the normal catalog of objects.
00:34:53
Speaker
Correct.
00:34:53
Speaker
And it's the final entry at the very end of the book.
00:35:00
Speaker
Why?
00:35:01
Speaker
Why?
00:35:02
Speaker
Why did you, I think we can all imagine why you felt it was important to include this in the book, but what was your thought process and how did you decide to do it in the way that you did it?
00:35:14
Speaker
It was a difficult decision.
00:35:15
Speaker
I initially wasn't going to include this in the book.
00:35:19
Speaker
It was a hot button issue.
00:35:23
Speaker
When I was writing this, it was still 2016, 17, and I
00:35:28
Speaker
this action wasn't alone.
00:35:34
Speaker
It was right in line with larger discussions on campus about race and representation, larger discussions in our culture about it.
00:35:42
Speaker
So it was kind of a flashpoint issue.
00:35:46
Speaker
And I didn't feel I was equipped to handle it, because I was still living in it myself.
00:35:54
Speaker
And yet, every time I
00:35:57
Speaker
would meet people and tell them I was writing a book about glass at Yale, their first question was, oh, you mean the window?
00:36:04
Speaker
What happened to the window?
00:36:06
Speaker
And I finally realized that
00:36:09
Speaker
I'm going to keep getting that question.
00:36:11
Speaker
And then once the book is out, the question will shift to why not the window and why didn't you want it in there?
00:36:16
Speaker
For me, there was a problem, though.
00:36:18
Speaker
When I did a survey of all the stained glass windows on campus to find ones to include in the book, these didn't rank as kind of coherent works of art in a formalist, traditional approach.
00:36:32
Speaker
I went other places.
00:36:37
Speaker
None of the windows in any of the halls?
00:36:40
Speaker
I have a window from Sterling Library and one from HGS, but not from Calhoun.
00:36:45
Speaker
Okay, okay.
00:36:45
Speaker
And I have a Tiffany window from on campus as well.
00:36:49
Speaker
But for some reason, we have a couple thousand windows like this on campus, so how do you choose?
00:36:56
Speaker
And this one wouldn't have been on my initial list.
00:37:01
Speaker
So I had a hard time putting it...
00:37:03
Speaker
into the book, and the book is roughly chronological.
00:37:07
Speaker
So then I had a second problem.
00:37:10
Speaker
The window as an object of the 1930s
00:37:15
Speaker
We now think about it as actually a really compelling example of lost cause ideology, the sustained racism of the kind.
00:37:21
Speaker
I mean, you could actually unpack this in incredible ways now.
00:37:26
Speaker
But I was like, I don't really know how to deal with this as a 1930s object.
00:37:29
Speaker
What makes it so compelling is something that happened in 2016.
00:37:31
Speaker
So is it appropriate to make it be a 2016 object when the window is kind of refashioned into this object?
00:37:42
Speaker
its new afterlife.
00:37:44
Speaker
That didn't seem comfortable as well.
00:37:46
Speaker
And the fact that it needed to be unpacked and explored with probably a little more depth and sensitivity than most other objects in the book, it didn't feel right to kind of squeeze it into a catalog entry.
00:38:01
Speaker
So my editor and I decided to let it kind of sit on its own, because it is a slightly different story than most of the other objects in the book.
00:38:09
Speaker
It has a politics to it.
00:38:11
Speaker
Yeah.
00:38:12
Speaker
Perhaps most of your other works don't, although some may.
00:38:15
Speaker
DAVID KERRYSCHEKERSON Some do.
00:38:17
Speaker
But the politics are different.
00:38:20
Speaker
And the fact that this is about an object's afterlife
00:38:25
Speaker
is a slightly different interpretation for most of the other objects.
00:38:28
Speaker
Well, it has a political life today in a way that, well, other objects may have political significance or cultural significance for their time.
00:38:37
Speaker
Yes.
00:38:39
Speaker
This remains relevant.
00:38:41
Speaker
In fact, it is much more important today than it ever was when it was made.
00:38:44
Speaker
Right.
00:38:45
Speaker
Yes.
00:38:46
Speaker
Right.
00:38:47
Speaker
Ignored by thousands until it was broken.
00:38:50
Speaker
Yes.
00:38:51
Speaker
And I reached out to a number of
00:38:54
Speaker
Calhoun alums and people who live in Hopper today and asked them what their memories were of this window and was struck by the varied reactions.
00:39:04
Speaker
Some people did remember it and were uncomfortable, and others had no idea.
00:39:11
Speaker
And whether or not you noticed it or were aware of it did not break down on racial lines, did not break down on age lines.
00:39:21
Speaker
It was fascinating to see that just some people were aware and some people weren't.
00:39:26
Speaker
But those who were aware had been uncomfortable for a long time.
00:39:31
Speaker
So as you said, this was a rather different subject for you to approach from other objects in the book.
Impact of Imagery and Open Dialogue
00:39:40
Speaker
Sensitive, challenging.
00:39:42
Speaker
I was struck by ideas of memory and transformation and the fact that something as seemingly benign as a windowpane could be so powerful.
00:39:56
Speaker
And the fact that a work of art could
00:40:00
Speaker
generate such emotion and such reaction.
00:40:05
Speaker
We seem to become anesthetized to images today.
00:40:09
Speaker
We're so bombarded by images.
00:40:11
Speaker
The fact that an image could actually stir someone to action, could start a campus debate, I found that really powerful.
00:40:20
Speaker
But I didn't know how to get from there back.
00:40:25
Speaker
It took the abstraction out of it.
00:40:27
Speaker
I mean, the way you tell it is fascinating.
00:40:29
Speaker
It took all this abstraction out of all this ideology, whether it's the act of the guy with the broom or the larger debate about the name of the college.
00:40:39
Speaker
It shows us that there are these confluences of
00:40:45
Speaker
events in society, actions by people, ideologies, artworks, all kinds of things that can come together at once and cause a new politics, cause a new turn that you can never predict.
00:40:59
Speaker
I mean, how could you have predicted two and a half years ago that we'd be sitting here
00:41:05
Speaker
or is it three years ago already, we'd be sitting here looking at this broken object smile.
00:41:10
Speaker
Well, I think one way you might have anticipated that is to think about the way that people react to Confederate sculptures, for example.
00:41:22
Speaker
And to my mind, as an antiques and decorative arts person, it's a great reminder of the power that physical objects have.
00:41:31
Speaker
Oh, God, yeah.
00:41:32
Speaker
And how that dovetails so often with ideology.
00:41:34
Speaker
And it leads to an interesting sort of paradox for, John, for you as a curator.
00:41:42
Speaker
Your job is to preserve historical objects.
00:41:46
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:41:48
Speaker
And here we have an object that was not only not preserved, but it was intentionally defaced.
00:41:54
Speaker
Vandalized.
00:41:55
Speaker
Vandalized.
00:41:55
Speaker
And yet we all understand the reason that it was vandalized.
00:42:04
Speaker
And I think it's hard not to sympathize with that reason, with that motivation.
00:42:10
Speaker
And so John, as a curator,
00:42:12
Speaker
How do you think about that?
00:42:15
Speaker
How do you grapple with that conflict of priorities of interests?
00:42:26
Speaker
It's a really difficult point, and I feel conflicted about it daily.
00:42:32
Speaker
And the fact that we are still talking about this window, and I talk about this window a lot with people because it's so powerful, I'm constantly conflicted.
00:42:43
Speaker
I honestly, actually, I don't know how I feel about that, because I don't want to say that this kind of action is all right, or it's justified.
00:42:57
Speaker
But at the same time, I acknowledge that it has a purpose, and I acknowledge the good that comes out of it.
00:43:08
Speaker
or the good that can come out of acts like this.
00:43:12
Speaker
And if you just broke a window or topple a statue and walked away and never thought about the actions, I'm not sure anything has been learned.
00:43:21
Speaker
So I can't reverse the breaking of the window, but I can try to make sure we learn something from that and use that to start a different discussion.
00:43:33
Speaker
So maybe the next window doesn't have to be broken.
00:43:37
Speaker
But we understand more and have more open dialogue.
00:43:41
Speaker
OK, I want to back up and ask a philosophical question.
00:43:47
Speaker
I don't know if this is philosophical.
00:43:48
Speaker
Maybe it's a very practical question.
00:43:51
Speaker
So I'm a Yale alum.
00:43:54
Speaker
I spent four years on campus.
00:43:56
Speaker
Some of the pieces in your book, I recognize a few of them.
00:43:59
Speaker
Many of them I don't, either because they were...
00:44:03
Speaker
in a gallery that I didn't visit or they were in storage or because they, like this window in Calhoun College, I might have just walked by and never noticed.
00:44:17
Speaker
So you've written an entire book about glass at Yale.
00:44:21
Speaker
Yes.
00:44:22
Speaker
And I want to know if all of the interesting glass on Yale campus were removed, replaced with uninteresting glass.
Speculation on the Absence of Glass at Yale
00:44:34
Speaker
How would life on campus be different for you, for undergraduates, for faculty, for residents?
00:44:44
Speaker
How would things change?
00:44:46
Speaker
Well, certainly the art gallery would feel a little more empty because we would have lost some of our great objects.
00:44:54
Speaker
The residence halls, the library, the classrooms would be less interesting because they would have lost their stained glass.
00:45:03
Speaker
The science labs would be a little less effective because they would have lost their microscopes and their test tubes.
00:45:09
Speaker
It's really everywhere.
00:45:13
Speaker
You would have lost big portions of the mineral display at the Peabody, although we know glass is not a mineral.
00:45:21
Speaker
And...
00:45:24
Speaker
It's one of those materials that's so ever-present that I don't think you would actually notice until it all went away.
00:45:31
Speaker
I have a pair of eyeglasses in my book.
00:45:33
Speaker
Does that mean we take all the eyeglasses away?
00:45:35
Speaker
This would be a very different place if no one had eyeglasses.
00:45:39
Speaker
Thank you both so much.
00:45:40
Speaker
Thank you.
Conclusion and Credits
00:45:51
Speaker
That's all for today.
00:45:51
Speaker
I hope you enjoyed it and maybe took something away from it.
00:45:54
Speaker
Again, photos are at themagazineantiques.com and on Instagram at Objective Interest.
00:46:00
Speaker
Thanks again to Stefan Nicolescu, to David Blight, and of course to John Stuart Gordon.
00:46:05
Speaker
I strongly recommend checking out his book, American Glass.
00:46:08
Speaker
It's actually a page turner, which is something of a rarity in the world of art books.
00:46:12
Speaker
The objects are fascinating and the photographs are beautiful.
00:46:15
Speaker
Today's episode was edited and produced by Sammy Dilati.
00:46:18
Speaker
Our music is by Trap Rabbit.
00:46:20
Speaker
And I'm Ben Miller.