Baldwin Guggisberg essay for Glass Quarterly  (exhibition review)

William Warmus 

 This essay was published in Glass Quarterly in 2021

Having curated a museum exhibition in Venice that opened and closed during the pandemic, I am aware of the problems reviewers face. So I ask the reader’s indulgence as I write about another pandemic era exhibition, one at the Glasmuseet  in Ebeltoft, Denmark. I was not able to see Monica Guggisberg and Philip Baldwin’s show in person, but thanks to a handsome and well illustrated 144 page catalog, as well as conversations and emails with the artists, I feel I can at least discuss the project intelligently.

The collaborative team of Baldwin and Guggisberg are well known to readers of Glass Quarterly, having been featured here on several occasions. Their origins are solidly within the sphere of Venetian aesthetics and glassmaking techniques, and they design for the venerable firm of Venini. They are, in essence, artists who use glass as central to their practice of art.

It all begins with a meteor of glass, a theme that runs throughout the show. The meteor symbolizes destruction, but also beauty because of its form and color. As environmental theorist Dougald Hine writes in his expansive essay for the catalog “There is a story about a rogue object…” In the pool outside the museum, the rogue is red, surrounded by delicately bent wires, perhaps signifying atmospheric turbulence. And there are more meteors on display inside the museum. Some of these exhibit the opulently refined surfaces of high Venetian techniques including cutting or abrading by other means. But the show is not all about an impending meteor shower. There is, for example, a mediation on how the use of the glass bottle slowly gave way to plastic bottles and how that rapidly resulted in pollution, especially in our oceans. An unusual timeline in the catalog carries the personal perspective of the artists on our own gradual transition from creatures synchronized within the natural world to godlike figures (or maybe demons?) actively contributing to its demise.

The artists themselves feel the show posed a delicate question: how to maintain a balance between their identity as glassmakers and as more expansive artists. Baldwin mentioned that the “sand is running through the hour glass” and that we are in dire straights, so they feel they should express their concerns through glass, but they no longer feel they have to do everything through that medium, and besides, they have long had an engagement with metals. Especially since their well received cathedral shows in 2016 in Edinburgh and Canterbury in 2018 they feel that they have been liberated from traditional restraints. The thing that strays most from their traditional glass practice, Baldwin indicated, is the Timeline in this show.

In another place in the catalog, Hine discusses the confidence that defines modernity and the loss of confidence, due for example to the emerging environmental crises, that ushered in the post-modern. Perhaps. Yet to be able to create a show like this and pull it off during a time of trial requires tremendous confidence, so maybe modernity isn’t dead yet. And maybe that is what Guggisberg and Baldwin want us to contemplate: that the times are indeed frightening, but that we must have the strength to find solutions.

In this light, the Bonfire that took place during the exhibition is instructive. Maybe the most extreme departure from their work in glass, it takes them into performance art. Because it was outdoors, 30-40 people could participate under epidemiological guidelines in place in Denmark at the time. Sure, the fire addresses the theme of destruction, but Baldwin also saw it as a ritual act of renewal, in honor of bonfires throughout history like Guy Fawkes night in the U.K. and the annual bonfires in Switzerland on August 1, and I suggest the creative force of the glass furnace as well. As Philip said speaking from his studio in Wales: There is “Something cleansing about a bonfire. We need one now.”

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