NOMIS fellow Ruth Ezra’s 2023 conference Materializing Transparency brought together scholars from art history, history, film studies, archeology and various area studies, to conduct a trans-historical and inter-disciplinary discussion about transparency in its material and conceptual instantiations. Ezra began by asking: “What’s your angle?,” a question repeatedly posed to her by her colleagues as she was developing the conference, which turned out to be a crucial one in the study of transparency, both ideationally and physically. Framed by an invocation of Daniel Jütte’s new book Transparency: The Material History of an Idea (Yale, 2023), in which he traces the origins of what he terms the “mantra of transparency” --  an idea which characterized western modernity through various innovations of transparent media and materials -- and concluding with a reading by Marjolijn Bol of her new book The Varnish and the Glaze: Painting Splendor with Oil, 1100-1500 (Chicago, 2023), the conference was itself a study in transparency and opacity, with some papers mirroring each other in a kind of specular refraction and others occurring on a diaphanous continuum.

There were explorations of objects made from transparent materials, such as Roman engraved glassware, which revealed different meanings on either side (Patrick R. Crowley), and rock crystal crosses from the Medieval period playing with patterns of light that brought up problems of display in the contemporary period (Manuela Beer). There were materials that weren’t literally see-through, but which teased the observer with their appearance of transparency conveyed through multiple layers or gauzy materials: 13th-century engraved wood caskets (Arne Leopold) and 21st-century veiled rooms suffused with light (Leena Crasemann). Here, one was reminded of Ezra’s own research interest in transparency as stratigraphic — composed of various layers of material and air — as is the case with white mica (Muscovy glass), the subject of her ongoing book project. The materialization of invisible processes was the subject of a paper on Dürer’s decision to leave traces of rusty plates in his etchings (Elizabeth Rice Mattison), and untold histories was the subject of a reading of an experimental meta-history of Richard Reeve, peddler of the magic lantern, and his forgotten late wife, Alice Grove (Phillip Roberts). Next, themes of confinement, superstition, and the non-human wove through two talks on transparency in the nineteenth century: one, on the imaginary of the terrarium in Britain (Yanning Ma) and another on the glass witch balls hung in the better homes of New England to ward off evil spirits (Jennifer Y. Chuong). Finally, skin emerged as a material, whose construction as transparent surface has been historically linked to questions of race, enslavement, urbanization and technology in the 20th and 21st centuries in a contribution about Kodak’s analog musings on “celluloid skin” (Kirsty Sinclair Dootson) and in another one on Swiss artist Hannah Villiger’s use of Polaroid photography (Aïcha Revellat).  

Indeed, “material mimesis,” in Bol’s terms, and symbolism seemed to be present across many of the presentations as a dialectic, much like Muscovy glass, which appears either transparent or opaque depending on the angle of incidence – recall Ezra’s earlier "what’s your angle" question. Ann-Sophie Lehmann, who used the transparency of oil paint — what she identified as its affordance — to develop a theory of materials, argues that an attendance to materials in fact reveals a host of pertinent information about the cultural and social politics of a works’ creation and, indeed, are often metaphorized into ideas that guide us to this day. According to Jütte: “There is a certain tendency among historians to write the history of ideas and then to examine how these ideas influenced the historical reality. My goal is the opposite: a material history of ideas. I would like to explore whether it is possible to trace the material realities without which an idea such as transparency would not have emerged.”

As the conference revealed, material history, furthermore, is always already materialist history, with workshop laborers, glass blowers, quarry workers, indentured cotton pickers, textile specialists, human computers, mica technicians and, laterally, restorers, archivists, art handlers, registrars and installers, and their concerns and conditions, taking center stage.

Since the conference, I have been thinking about transparency in my own research on the art and practices of memorialization. Whether it comes in the form of layers of text over variously opaque or reflective stone in Maya Lin’s Vietnam War memorial, the (colored) glass used in many a contemporary official memorial design, from Sarajevo’s child victims memorial to the planned memorial amphitheater in Kigali, or structures that materialize absence, such as Rachel Whiteread’s House in East London, itself notoriously destroyed, or Igor Ripak’s (…) project, which makes Serbian officials’ denial of the Srebrenica Genocide plainly visible through a process of cutting and repasting book pages; Stanislava Pinchuk’s Surface to Air series, which traces the effects of Russia’s occupation of Ukraine since 2014 by mapping data with pin holes on paper, or the negative space of the Alabama lynching memorial. Here, too, as in the calls for politicians and tech moguls to be transparent about their activities, transparency in the form of acknowledgement of past crimes and complicities, as well as public acts of contrition and reparation offer governments a kind of blank slate, from which to operate, possibly obfuscating other wrongs.

The Materializing Transparency conference challenged triumphalist narratives about glass as the pinnacle of (western) achievement and indeed complicated easy definitions of what we mean when we speak about the glassine or the transparent. Papers from across periods, geographies and disciplines prompted us to look closer at the seemingly immaterial to reveal vital material histories crucial to the study of artistic and cultural production and beyond.