The Light Club : On Paul Scheerbart's "The Light Club of Batavia"

Paul Scheerbart (1863-1915) was a visionary German novelist, theorist, poet, and artist who made a lasting impression on such icons of modernism as Walter Benjamin, Bruno Taut, and Walter Gropius. Fascinated with the potential of glass as a medium for expressionist architecture and moved by tales of the fantastic, Scheerbart envisioned the sublime through a series of futurist milieus composed entirely of crystalline, colored glass architecture. In 1912, Scheerbart published "The Light Club of Batavia", a novelette about the formation of a club dedicated to building a glass spa for bathing - not in water, but in light - at the bottom of an abandoned mineshaft. Translated here into English for the first time, this rare story serves as a point of departure for Josiah McElheny, who, with an esteemed group of collaborators, offers a fascinating array of responses to this enigmatic work. "The Light Club" makes clear that the themes of utopian hope, desire, and madness in Scheerbart's tale represent a part of modernism's lost project: a world that would have looked entirely different from the one we now inhabit.
In his compelling introduction, McElheny describes Scheerbart's life as well as his own enchantment with the artist, and he explains the ways in which 'The Light Club of Batavia' inspired him to produce art of uncommon breadth. "The Light Club" also features inspired writings from Gregg Bordowitz and Ulrike Muller, Andrea Geyer, and Branden W. Joseph, as well as translations of original texts by and about Scheerbart. A unique response by one visionary artist to another, "The Light Club" is an unforgettable examination of what it might mean to see radical potential in the readily transparent.