From The Archives: Toan Klein

©Toan Klein

For the past two weeks I have been slowly sorting and shifting and thinking about glass, slides, photography, and family. Buoyed by an experimental documentary I am working on about master glass-artist Toan Klein - who also happens to be my Dad - questions of archival intervention, storage versus museum, and integration of the familial into the archival have been streaming readily to the surface. As an art historian in a family of artists, what is my responsibility to the work, and what is the responsibility to the person behind it?

Toan’s glass, which incorporates photographs into its many layers of translucency, makes readily available metaphors of nostalgia and pause, memory and its instability. Acting as a magnifier, distorter, and home to the photographs, the glass becomes a lens through which to see the photographs, encased in their shroud of transformed sand and heat. Truly, glass is alchemy. So too, is photography (see here, Barthes et al.) Perhaps this project should be simply called Alchemy, and I can write lyrical poetry on heat and fire, and on how something can be both so solid and breakable.

© Toan Klein

In actuality, the project is tentatively called, “How To Hold Glass”, and it is in process in the way all my projects are in process: scattered, inspiring, and overwhelming. I have hundreds of slides to view, photographs to looks at, and videos to digitize. I have a phone-line to the artist’s personal number (that is, my childhood phone number), a distinct and unheard of advantage for an early modern art historian, and a plethora of fascinating material. Over the next few months I will be trying to gather these diverse mediums into something viewable, which captures not only the history of the artist, but the pulse of his art. If anyone needs me, I’ll be googling how to use Davinci Resolve!

© Toan Klein