Installation view of “Anneke Eussen: Beyond Purpose,” 2024, Document/Photo: Document

Published in New City. 11.22.24

Glass is meant to be looked through not looked at. It separates us from the outside world with as little visual interference as possible. As a frame over a picture, it demarcates the border where the art ends and the world begins. Anneke Eussen in her solo exhibition, “Beyond Purpose,” now showing at Document, zooms in on this border with her compositions in discarded panes of window and auto glass.

Directed by a location app under glass, through a glass front door, in the belly of a glass vehicle sharing thoughts about intimacy at 75 mph, my partner and I passed through the sheet-glass façade of the gallery, into the compelling world of Eussen’s wall pieces of layered and repurposed glass sheets and shards stained with the residue of their former lives. Arranged in geometric and gestural patterns, the compositions speak the language of minimalist abstraction, landscape and religious icon paintings and invite a cascade of thoughts about the unstable spaces between things.

For most of our history, humans were blessed and cursed with a relative lack of separation from the outside. We had only mud huts and caves to protect us from the elements, and art and religion (and weapons) to protect us from ourselves. We make pictures of things that we want or fear—a buffalo, a saint, a landscape, a demon—and perform rituals to become them or ward them off. Art is a way to alter, hijack, reflect, or absorb reality. The jury is still out on whether the capacity to wonder what it might be like to be something else belongs to humans alone, or if a squirrel could wonder what it might be like to be a chipmunk, or even entertain ambitions to be a better squirrel. If so, we might expect to eventually encounter squirrels in chipmunk costumes, along with remorseful carnivores.

Installation view of “Anneke Eussen: Beyond Purpose,” 2024, Document/Photo: Document

Two modernist sayings, “art for art’s sake” and “truth to materials,” further demonstrate the panpsychist (panpsychism: the belief that consciousness is present in inanimate things) commitment to a material world with wishes of its own, and suggest that maybe we are its handmaids rather than the other way round. Jung claims that we don’t have ideas but they have us. W.J.T. Mitchell sounds almost exasperated by the problem, with his book titled, “What Do Pictures Want?” Psychonaut philosopher Terence McKenna, after many heroic doses of psychedelic mushrooms, reports that plants invented humans to move them around. Though Mitchell may stop short of saying that pictures invented artists to do their bidding, his question has lived in humans, if not in squirrels, since we began making pictures.

The seductive, shapeshifting capacity of pictures long ago led Jews and Muslims alike to prohibit representational artworks. Whereas, in spite of occasional revolts from the iconoclasts along the way, pictures prevailed in the Christian tradition. We may have the sixth-century patriarch Pope Gregory to thank for TikTok and Instagram, not to mention the history of Western art. And this may be why we are more inclined to approach artworks as expressions of the will of the artist rather than of the materials from which they are made, or of some other being speaking through them. So when Kazimir Malevich paints a tiny black square in 1915 and calls it the “zero point of painting,” he is asking why a painting should have to point beyond itself at all, and why we should want to be anything other than what we already are. What happens when a picture is not a window but a wall, not an escape hatch but a trap? Boredom is what happens! The great spiritual frontier.

Installation view of “Anneke Eussen: Beyond Purpose,” 2024, Document/Photo: Document

Eussen gives us picture windows with nothing to see through them. A picture, as Mitchell argues, wants to be consumed, taken in, devoured. And when an artwork moves us, the materials, colors or notes make a familiar sound, as if wondering what it might be like to be us. It evokes inexorability as if, given the powers to do so, the bits of glass would have arranged themselves into this very configuration. This capacity of a picture to be so deeply resonant with some internal harmonic instrument is what compels us to imitate them, to our benefit and peril.

And so I approach these hollow icons as quiet angels or demons that want me to consume them. But why should I? Because unlike TikTok and Instagram, by pointing us toward the screen between things Eussen deftly offers us an opportunity to wonder what it might be like to be ourselves.

“Anneke Eussen: Beyond Purpose” is on view at Document, 1709 West Chicago, through December 21.