Beaded Bottle c. 20th century

This anonymous beaded bottle is here at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and goodness, what a thing! Someone, somewhere, turned glass beads into a whole lotta somethin’. The process of making this bottle is wild to imagine. There is a hypnotic rhythm of repeated shapes, that checkerboard pattern on the base just gets me. But then these irregular diamonds start floating above, it’s like the architecture is starting to dream. There are so many colors, but they are buried in this rigorous geometry, there is a real tension in that. Each tiny bead is a physical mark. It’s an almost unbelievable feat of labor, the physical effort, the sheer will to make this. All these tiny units combine to form a whole, and there’s no fakery here, no shortcuts. Think about a painter like Gustav Klimt who also used pattern and decoration to add texture and meaning to his paintings.