"The Universe Is a Quiet Catastrophe": Alan Glass's Late Assemblages

Abstract: This article examines a selection of the assemblage artist Alan Glass's art made during the COVID-19 pandemic. In either direct or oblique ways, many of Glass's works from 2020 to 2022 allude to the pandemic and other ongoing crises including war and ecological catastrophe. Drawing on archival material and interviews with the artist, the article emphasizes the significance of poetry and esotericism for his art, and interprets the works under consideration as examples of gnosopoetics, or the pursuit of higher knowledge and radical transformation through surrealist art. After outlining Glass's trajectory from drawing and painting to the medium of assemblage and situating his art in the context of Surrealism in Canada, France, and Mexico, the author proceeds to a thematic discussion of Glass's pandemic-era works. These alternate between, on the one hand, depicting a broken world and thematizing death, and, on the other, calling forth possibilities of transformation through a surrealist poetics of the ascendant sign as well as imaginary forms of communication.