Is It Over?
The author of an article charting the “completion” of the studio glass movement appraises the future of glass art
Glass Quarterly. Summer 2012. Number 127
During the 50th anniversary year of the founding of studio glass, I wrote this essay as a follow on to my 1995 essay about “the End” of studio glass. History appeals to historians in part because it is endlessly complex and always subject to revision. The truth is out there, it just needs constant maintenance.
‘The End” appeared in the Fall 1995 issue of Glass, although essays targeting the same theme appeared in American, Australian and Japanese publications between 1992 and 1993. My argument was that by the early 1990s, the techniques and aesthetics of Studio Glass were essentially complete. Read those essays for the details.
I did not use the term then, but tabletop or pedestal sculpture seems an apt description of the glass from that period, and I use it in praise: Studio artists (and not just in glass) reinvented small-scale sculpture suitable for display in urban apartments and suburban homes. The work was aesthetically innovative and lovely to look at, or at least engaging. And alongside the artists grew an enthusiastic community of collectors, dealers, museums and scholars. I also observed that Studio Glass is largely about technique and broadening the definition of the factory.
The essay attracted attention. For example, the artists who call themselves Yukanjali (Anjali Srinivasan and Yuka Otani) cited “The End?” as influencing their curatorial and artistic work, quoting from my essay: “Studio glass itself is not stagnant, it is complete.” They used the term “post-glass” to distinguish between the new glass and Studio Glass, and concluded that: “Glass is not an art” but rather “Glass is a material. An amazing and wondrous thing that inspires the human spirit to create. It cannot, by itself become passé, although perhaps human intent can be, and maybe that lack of breakthrough is what we are facing now.”
Advance to 2012, the 50th anniversary of Studio Glass. What happened, and where are we now? Certain masters of the have been clearly established, including Harvey Littleton, Dale Chihuly, Tom Patti, Richard Marquis, Dan Dailey, Toots Zynsky and others.
Although I stand behind my 1992–1995 essays that argued that Studio Glass was complete, my definition of Studio Glass has evolved slightly. It is: a focus on glass as a medium for art that respects past traditions while at times forgetting those traditions in order to innovate.
This definition references Harvey Littleton’s proposition in his 1971 book, Glassblowing: A Search for Form: “The method used by the contemporary artist is a constant probing and questioning of the standards of the past and the definitions of the present to find an opening for new form statements in the material and process. It is even said that this search is an end in itself. Although knowledge of chemistry or physics as they apply to glass will broaden the artist’s possibilities, it cannot create them. Tools can be made, furnaces and annealing ovens can be built cheaply. But it is through the insatiable, adventurous urge of the artist to discover the essence of glass that his own means of expression will emerge.”
The founding of Studio Glass in 1962 was a confrontation of one culture with another: art encountering industry. It matured during a time when no one style in art was dominant (the post-Pop Art era), and yet the prevailing styles of criticism were, and to a certain extent remain, highly skeptical of glass as an art medium. Ash, trash, and fecal matter are widely admired as art media. But glass? It’s kitsch. Or so some say.
This attitude makes me argue that the central problem confronting the art world since the end of the era of dominant styles has been one of coexistence. Can we overcome art world skepticism and isolationism? We have come to see skepticism as implicitly aligned with a search for truthfulness, but why? If anything, it is easy to be a skeptic, and far more difficult to find ways to coexist. And yet perhaps coexistence, in all realms of life and aesthetics, is the most profound (and interesting) challenge of this century. Coexistence applies to history as well as the present: We need to find a way to allow the weight of history to coexist with the present, not as a burden or a negative challenge, in the sense of that which must not be repeated (when in fact it is impossible to repeat history—just try!), but as inspiration. And yes, by the way, it is also sometimes O.K. to forget!
My beloved medium of glass seems unusually open to coexistence. Glassmakers are willing to appropriate other art media; to range from an extremely small scale to a large one; to show their work at galleries, craft shows, flea markets, on eBay; to bond with collectors; to go any-where, anytime; to have outlandish parties dressed in glass fashions; to engage in “athletic” contests centered on the medium. Perhaps that is what irritates the rest of the art world, this kitschy embrace of all things—even a willing self-flagellation, seemingly forever and ever, over the art-or-craft question. And in the middle of this carnival are the curators, historians, editors and other “gatekeepers” who are trying to discern themes and detect quality.
So should I revise my 1995 theories and write a “new ending” for Studio Glass? In 2012, I do perceive a distinct shift away from tabletop sculpture toward flat glass, architecture and large-scale sculpture as the most exciting or intriguing “acts” in the Studio Glass realm.
This is quite a change since 1988, when the cover of GLASS seemed to herald the end of flat glass as a viable part of the Studio Glass domain. But if you read that issue care-fully, you will see that it was optimistic about the future of the medium, and that artists like Tom Patti were already leading the way.
Today, flat glass involves the use of glass on both a very large and a small handheld scale. Examples: the glass touchscreen of the iPad on which these words were written, and the large glass Apple stores that act as stylish trademarks for the company. Also in gigantic, nearly invisible glass walls, such as Jamie Carpenter’s atrium window at New York’s Time Warner Center, or his façade for 7 World Trade Center. And then there is Olafur Elliason’s Your Rainbow Panorama, a circular glass walkway symbolizing Dante’s Paradiso above the ARoS museum in Aarthus, Denmark. But are all these things works of Studio Glass?
I say they are. Although we tend to think of Studio Glass as primarily about glassblowing, there is a sequential progress in flat glass, from Harvey Littleton’s Glass Spectrum of 1974 through the work of Littleton’s student, Dale Chihuly, and the installation he made with Seaver Leslie for Artpark in 1975, and extending into the work of Dale Chihuly’s student Jamie Carpenter from the 1980s onward. From this point of view, the Apple Cube on Fifth Avenue in New York City, designed by Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, and Elliason’s Your Rainbow Panorama are both extensions of the Studio Glass aesthetic.
The pyramid by I.M. Pei at the Louvre (1989) must be included in any list of notable large-scale glass sculptures: it resembles an enlarged Czech optical-glass sculpture from the same time frame. And that leads me to think that some of the new glass architecture could be improved by a larger dose of Studio Glass aesthetics. Last year, scaffolding went up around the Apple Cube in New York City, and afterward a simpler Cube was revealed. Is it the iCube 2? See the before and after images, which reveal that the Cube went from about 90 exterior panes of glass to about 16.
While the new Cube improves on its predecessor, it might have been better inspired by artists like Václav Cigler or Stanislav Libensky and Jaroslava Brychtová. Perhaps, along with the new iPad of 2012, we need a new Apple Cube in New York, one that removes the visually irritating, thin structural struts that intersect the large panes at right angles. And surely Pei’s pyramid at the Louvre would be better if the existing glass were replaced with the new structural glass. But that change would require a weird conversion of the architecture world to the kind of freewheeling, media-driven aesthetic that glass-makers have lived with since 1962.
And what about the aesthetic of Gorilla Glass, made by Corning Inc., which is the “face” (or touch screen) of the iPad and the iPhone? Gorilla Glass encourages touch; it’s tough. But is it art, or even high craft? I feel that there
is an opportunity here for artists. Over a hundred years ago, Corning made the first light bulb for Edison, a triumph of glassblowing. But it took an artist, Louis Comfort Tiffany, to tame the electric flame and make it art by wrapping a stained-glass window around the bulb, creating lampshades such as Wisteria and Dragonfly that have become as iconic in American art as Andy Warhol’s portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Chairman Mao. Will some artist, using the Studio Glass conventions of experimen-talism with materials, find a way to humanize the emitted light and feel of the iPad?
Littleton seemed to anticipate these questions and the evolving architectural uses of glass when he wrote in Glassblowing: A Search for Form: “We have been very concerned with seeing glass. One of my students has suggested that another world awaits us when we learn what there is to see through glass.... The ethereal quality of the window, the wall that we barely see, huge plains so commonplace they should hold nothing for us, can be bent in our ovens ... to change our view, to create illusion, to make a new vision.”
Space does not leave me much room here to investigate a third exciting realm in which Studio Glass has had an impact since 1992: large-scale sculptures. I suggest a tour of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Not through the design galleries, where Studio Glass and the other craft media have been highlighted but also isolated, but rather upstairs through the contemporary art galleries, where you will find paintings by Jackson Pollock and Clyfford Still and Josef Albers nobly situated in context with the glass eyes of a Kiki Smith sculpture, the glowing glass tubes composing a work by Robert Irwin, and the glass beads of Liza Lou.
For me, this represents the triumphal entry of glass into the realm of high art. Sure, it was done in an unexpected way, as if by trickery, but I see it as a triumph for the spirit of coexistence that I view as the greatest challenge and opportunity of art in this century. We are truly in an era where media may be mixed, where in eco-logical terms an art ecosystem full of a diversity of life, like a sea full of large sharks and small shrimp and every-thing in between, is viewed as healthy and desirable. That is the new ending I hope we write for Studio Glass in this century. As I wrote in the 2009 Glass Art Society Journal regarding the 1979 exhibition “New Glass”: “As in nature, the most diverse ecosystems are the healthiest. New Glass made an effort to encompass all these areas. We only weaken our traditions and heritage if we focus too narrowly on one area at the expense of the others.”
WILLIAM WARMUS is a contributing editor of GLASS. An art appraiser, he is also working on a system for appraising the ocean realm, modeled on the uniform standards of appraisal practice.
