William Warmus review of Donald Kuspit

Published in New Work: Glass (now Glass Quarterly) .Winter 1987 Number 28, p.34

This is an old essay I wrote while the Editor of Glass Quarterly magazine, which was at the time called New Work: Glass. I have always admired Kuspit’s insights, so important to glass criticism. My critique of some of his interpretations is just part of how criticism works, as an ongoing dialog among critics.

Similarly, I’ve always been a big fan of the work of Therman Statom. My criticism here is simply pointing out how I interpret the meaning and purpose of his painted surfaces.

Donald Kuspit. and "High Glass Art"

Essay review by William Warmus 

Kuspit’s essay appeared in:

Cast Glass Sculpture (catalog for the exhibition)

The Main Art Gallery,

California State University at

Fullerton, 12 April - 11 May, 1986.

Exhibition organized by Dextra Frankel.

In an essay written to accompany the Cast Glass Sculpture exhibition at Fullerton, Donald

Kuspit discovers several striking aspects of glass as a medium for art. He is impressed

that "glass can carry us as far toward the idea of the spiritual…as it is possible to go

in the material world." and that it "seems the embodiment of self-consciousness

seeing through it is like seeing through the self, knowing it as the other; yet it can only

be seen through if it is thoroughly seen, and kept steadily in sight." He feels that "The

conflict between the optical and the tactile is the oldest one in art glass implies their

inseparability " In reference to the work of Jaroslava Brychtova and Stanislav Libensky,

Kuspit uncovers the central "dialectic" of much glass sculpture: .....the attempt to

evoke, from clearly static and highly structured work, the sensation of the "expressive."

primordial, molten process in which glass is made"

Kuspit seems most intrigued by the primordial , self-conscious, even sexual

underpinnings of some of the objects exhibited. He praises Bertil Vallien's work as

fully accredited high art where "phallic" appendages abound and penetrate, light

produces an " insane aura," the whole conveying a sense of "unconscious wildness."

Most importantly, Vallien’s work and especially the work of Thomas Bang have

the poignancy of high art " Because they do not seem able to name what they want to

evoke, and so become experimental...invocations of some unknown spirit.:..'

At times the text seems contradictory. At first we are told that "Today there is

no...medium that can be assumed to be a necessarily high art medium, that does not

have to reinvent its formal and ideological possibilities." Later we learn that "At the

center of contemporary developments in glass sculpture has been the struggle to

assimilate modernist styles and attitudes..;" as if glass must copy rather than invent

anew. In fact much of Kuspit's argument for glass as high art rests on its success at

imitating modernist painting or sculpture or modernism's illegitimate offspring,

neo-expressionism and post-modernism. No doubt this is why Vallien and Bang receive

high marks while Brychtova and Libensky as well as Trinkley, whose works are rooted in

internal glass traditions, are seen as limited or not mentioned at all. Kuspit does not

discuss the importance of stylistic inventions appropriate to glass such as certain

aspects of the vessel, even though it might aid in the interpretation of Vallien's work, or

the lens cutting tradition and laws of optics, which might add greatly to an appreciation

of Brychtova and Libensky's work. Thus he sees the latter's art as "…'inhibited' by

familiar shape" and "overly insistent on the volume/ density of glass." Yet the shape and

volume of their work is often dictated by a pursuit to capture the spirituality of light

just as lens makers know that only certain precisely cut lenses of the correct thickness

will magnify without distortion.

Unsettling in Kuspit’s analysis of the exhibition is an indifferent concern for

quality-many of his ebullient descriptions could be transferred to works by other,

lesser, artists. Kuspit does this in discussing the work of Therman Statom, whose "…cast

glass houses offer a more intriguing approach to the relationship of molten glass

and gestural paint." In this reviewer's opinion Statom's painted surfaces lack

quality, such as we experience in the painted surfaces of Pollock or Olitski. If they

are anything, Statom's brushmarks are signs or symbol s representing the brushstrokes of

these other artists, but they lack completely the "gestural" quality of the masters. Kuspit

sometimes allows his intellectual virtuosity to blind his aesthetic eye and might be

accused of what Clement Greenberg (whose writings are used to introduce this essay on

glass) would call judging before experiencing: "To hold that one kind of art must invariably

be superior or inferior to another kind means to judge before experiencing: and the

whole history of art is there to demonstrate the futility of rules of preference laid down

beforehand.." (Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture).

If one goal of glass criticism is to compel those outside the medium to emulate its

aesthetic, then Kuspit’s words are a mixed blessing. But for those deeply involved with

glass who have for some time desired an outsider's authoritative critical view of the

field, Kuspit is to be praised for his insightful assessment. He goes beyond the

journalistic reporting of facts and begins to uncover "an infinite inwardness through an

obsessive clarification." Such writing is indeed welcome and controversial, as good

criticism should be.

WilliamWarmus,

Editor, New Work: Glass (now Glass Quarterly magazine)