Hypermedium
by William Warmus
This is a draft of an essay that was written for an exhibition I curated at the Norton Museum of Art in 2003. The final version appeared in the catalog for the show Fire and Form. Norton Museum of Art: West Palm Beach, 2003. ISBN 0-943411-39-4.
Chapter 1: Hyper-Medium
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
In its effort to be recognized as a viable and vital contemporary art form, studio glass has benefited from the recent multiplication of media and art styles. Enduring pluralism characterizes the present art scene. Art making is now global and multimedia, with no single style ascendant. Contradictory approaches are widely manifest, even within the work of an individual artist. Who would have thought that advertising, song, the spoken word, and Barbie dolls would someday find a place next to canvas, bronze, and marble? Artists (and audiences) have become more adventurous and may even be described as eager to explore and enjoy versatile and unorthodox materials and processes, whether high-tech nanotechnology, low-tech plywood, or something in between, such as glass. The medium of studio glass is characterized by countless styles developed in many countries, and so glass artists are inherently comfortable with multiple working approaches (think big factories and tiny blowtorches) and techniques (casting, blowing, engraving).
Glass is one of a small group of transparent and fluid media. The others include water and cyberspace. All three share a “tele-vision” mode: objects embedded in these media can, under the right conditions of manipulation, remain visible at a distance; mistakes are difficult to conceal in such transparent realms. Spaces can be artificially compressed, as when a slab of glass is ground into a telescope lens that makes the far seem near, or a stream of energy is coded to transmit an image from one place to another. And a key to the aesthetic of such media is the phenomenon of flotation, whereby objects embedded within these media defy gravity and appear to float in space, visible from all angles. This rich complexity makes the transparent media very challenging to the artist. They possess an openness, almost a nakedness, that inspires, as Herbert Muschamp has noted, both desire and aggression.1
And what sorts of art stories might be told in glass? Almost any type of story artists want, or need, to tell. That is among its chief attractions in an age of relentless artistic invention. In fact, it is a thesis of this book that studio glass artists have contributed significantly in four areas of creative innovation: abstraction, realism, the investigation of natural forms, and what I call stagecraft—the theatrical presentation of artworks to an audience.
Despite the attractions of pluralism, some key artists using glass remain unapologetic formalists who insist on beginning and ending with the art object. They seek to create sculptures that exhibit clearly articulated boundaries and that indulge integrity of form. The goal is to make something truly beautiful in an old-fashioned way, and to tempt age-old desires: the eye’s delight in delicate color, the hand’s hunger for rich texture. Some of this work is not afraid to appear costly and elitist. And though some of it is brittle, even fragile, it is also defiant and purposefully difficult. In the end, the viewer must find his or her way to the object itself (a reproduction just won’t do!), stand close to it, look at it, or even caress it. Formalist art is all about this challenge of appreciating and experiencing a definite object in all its lonely perfection. Formalists are the curmudgeons of the art world, but they can be endearing curmudgeons.
Glass Enters History
The natural history of glass begins dramatically wherever there are volcanoes, whose fiery eruptions emit rivers of molten rock including obsidian, a darkly colored and highly opaque glass that was worked by prehistoric and ancient civilizations into a variety of tools.
It was around 1500–1600 b.c. that the human hand became actively involved in the direct creation and shaping of molten glass. There is evidence, such as the excavated compound of the sculptor Tuthmosis, to indicate that glass was used at Amarna in what we would today describe as a small workshop setting. Maybe these ancient studios looked a little like the earliest contemporary glass studios, some of which had dirt floors and primitive glassmaker’s equipment (the log bench and tent that formed the studio in the early 1970s era of the Pilchuck Glass School north of Seattle come to mind). Glass was expensive to produce, requiring large quantities of scarce fuel to fire the furnaces, and working with it while in a molten state demanded great skill. Glass was considered an elite substance and a signifier of status, comparable to gold or silver, and it is probable that the material’s rarity contributed to its prestige and its use primarily in the royal compound. This established a pattern that has continued to this day: glass remains among the most expensive artistic materials.
Significantly, Egyptian royalty favored vivid colors in the decoration of palaces and tombs, and the flamboyant and intense colors available in glass vessels and inlays probably satisfied this aesthetic need. Glass was also recognized as an ideal enosemble player that sculptors could use to create complex multimedia works of art. The lapis blue glass inlays in the funerary mask of Pharaoh Tutankhamen coexist easily with the solid gold matrix. Today, artists such as Dan Dailey and Dale Chihuly produce intensely colored, flamboyantly crafted sculptures in workshop settings that would be the envy of the ancient Egyptians.
Ancient Egyptian glass was mostly cast or formed on a solid core, and it predates the invention of glassblowing. The earliest blown glass objects date from the first century b.c. and were created in the Roman Empire. Blowing is a fast process, and there was something of an explosion of interest in making glass for everything from drinking cups to souvenirs of gladiatorial contests to cinerary urns. Artists such as Lino Tagliapietra and Dante Marioni are direct successors to the phenomenal masters of ancient Rome.
As Rome fell, traditional glassmaking declined. The Middle Ages would have been a true dark age but for the medium: stained glass was invented, and it satisfied an urgent need for lighted (yet sheltered) space within the great (but at times glacial) cathedrals that were rising throughout Europe
If the Italian Renaissance saw the revival of, and gradual improvement upon, many of the lost techniques of glassmaking known to ancient Rome, it was the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that laid the most direct groundwork for contemporary glass. The Art Nouveau and Art Deco artists Emile Gallé, René Lalique, and Louis C. Tiffany, together with the visionary entrepreneur Paolo Venini, collectively explored and experimented with moany of the processes and themes that have been adapted by contemporary artists. Nature became a supreme source of inspiration, whether in the form of a dying orchid (Gallé) or a voluptuous peony blossom (Tiffany’s lamps). They willed their glass to come to life and flow like lava (Tiffany) or melt like ice (Lalique), and loved accidental effects and the look of ancient weathered glass. Small parts were composed into gigantic wholes or details were made so microscopically small that their effect became decadently precious and dreamlike. All four were masters of the ensemble and stagecraft nature of glassmaking, assembling skilled teams of individuals to execute their ideas, sometimes employing famous architects and sculptors as designers (Venini enticed the architect Carlo Scarpa to create handsome designs in fused glass). Chihuly is frequently described as the Tiffany of the twenty-first century because he creates on a grand scale and delights in theatrical presentation.
But glassmaking—especially glassblowing—is a difficult art to learn, and the equipment required to make it is expensive. By the time of World War II, the traditions of artistic glassmaking were in danger of dissolving: Tiffany, our nation’s premier artist using glass, had died in 1933 and his work was long out of fashion. Glassmaking with artistic pretensions had been replaced by “industrial design” as practiced in factories. What to do?
I consider the founding event of contemporary glass to be the creation by Harvey K. Littleton, in 1942By 1962 Littleton was able to conduct a series of workshops (with scientist Dominick Labino and others) at the Toledo Museum of Art that are generally thought to mark the birth of studio glass.
The rest would come later: the small furnaces (1962), the educational programs (1960s and 1970s), the museum and gallery exhibitions.4 Perhaps Littleton’s willfulness is the defining aspect of the contemporary glass movement—artists using glass are not noted for their reticence! Littleton, a Corning native, was influenced in this regard by Frederick Carder, the founder of Steuben Glass, who was something of a rebel and very strong willed.
Today we appear to have come full circle from Littleton’s earliest attempts to free art from industry, as artists (and not just those using glass) are ever more intent upon exploring the connections between art and science and technology, producing artworks that appear to have emerged from laboratories or factories, even as the appropriation of imagery from any age, era, or culture is accepted as an authentic method of art making. Glassmakers have been doing this, well, virtually forever, and so it is satisfying to see that the trajectories of the various parts of the art world are at last intersecting in fruitful ways. Perhaps one day this convergence will produce a seamless realm of art forms: the domain of the hyper-medium.
Chapter 2: Nature Probed
One explores deeper than the nerves or heart of nature, the womb or soul, to the bone, the careless white bone, the excellence.
—Robinson Jeffers, Gray Weather
Artists and nature have an ambivalent relationship. The natural world has always provided the artist with subject matter and raw materials, although the answer to the question of whether nature herself might be regarded as a work of art remains sublimely enigmatic. Naturalism as an artistic convention blossomed in Europe and America in the nineteenth century and included the writers Honoré de Balzac, Émile Zola, Thomas Hardy, and Jack London. These artists reacted against the escapism inherent in other art forms and in earlier literature and embraced the emerging evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin. A pragmatic artistic realism regarding the natural and human worlds seemed healthy, whereas anti-naturalism was viewed as decadent, artificial, and sterile. Balance was essential: when art and science interfered with nature too deeply and disrupted her rhythms, monsters were born; witness Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein of 1818.
The image of Frankenstein flags a continuing obsession: how to probe nature forcefully without creating monsters or destroying the fabric of life. The twentieth-century writer Vladimir Nabokov offered an unusually lucid observation, echoing a passage from the Bible, when he wrote that “the glory of god is to hide a thing and the glory of man is to find it.” (5) Some artists use glass because they find in this material a deep connection to nature, and an especially elegant and nondestructive way to explore natural forms. The early twentieth-century scientist D’Arcy Thompson was among the first to notice this profound relationship:
“The alimentary canal, the arterial system including the heart, the central nervous system of the vertebrate, including the brain itself, all begin as simple tubular structures. And with them Nature does just what the glass-blower does, and, we might even say, no more than he. For she can expand the tube here and narrow it there; thicken its walls or thin them. . . . Such a form as that of the human stomach is easily explained when it is regarded from this point of view; it is simply an ill-blown bubble. . . . The Florence flask, or any other handiwork of the glass-blower, is always beautiful, because its graded contours are, as in its living analogues, a picture of the graded forces by which it was conformed. It is an example of mathematical beauty, of which the machine-made, moulded bottle has no trace at all. “(6)
In the same way that nature takes a tube and twists it into a living heart, the glassmaker has an opportunity to create a vessel that mirrors nature. It seems almost unfair that the process of glassmaking should enjoy such a privileged relationship to the natural world. But it does.
There is one very big problem with this idea of simplicity resting at the heart of nature and of glassmaking: even if both begin with tubes, as Thompson theorized, you must still do something with those dumb tubes in order to instill life into them. And once a simple process is set into motion, complexity cascades like an avalanche. Few artists are able to control the process and maintain a deep and meaningful connection to natural forms. As the critic Clement Greenberg wrote, “The work of art eludes you the way a pellet of mercury does. . . .” (7)
One notable success is Venetian artist Lino Tagliapietra (pp. 34–35). Widely considered the preeminent glassblower working today, he has the technical skill to work glass and the intellectual capacity to direct the flow of expression and shape it into poetry. Tagliapietra describes his artistic program this way: “I have a total and exclusive relationship with glass, which I take from the furnace and bring into shape progressively. It is the center, the motor of the whole action. I follow it; I give it birth just like a midwife who must accompany natural movements.” He finds the medium almost intoxicating: “Nothing is flexible like glass, nothing has the beauty of glass. The combination of air, fire, water. Even gold has nothing to compare with glass. It is absolutely the most expressive material on the planet.” (8) But unlike Greenberg’s mercurial art, glass has the useful property of cooling into a solid mass after it is shaped. Glass retains the memory of its elusive liquid state in a solid form that is not elusive.
I once spoke to Tagliapietra about the role of breath in his work and he replied that it makes possible “the idea of perfect shape. The relationship of front and back in each object, connected by color, is very important. And that is mainly an issue of shaping by breath. And the shape must be connected to the shadow. Sometimes I want to leave a tiny space in the vessel, like a lens, where you can see through, see the light. If you can give the artwork a kind of profundity, it is like seeing deeply through the water of the glass.”9 In that cascade of sentences you can see the artist’s struggle to connect perfect breath to perfect shape, skill to art. The tools he uses are blowpipes and blowtorches, but just as important are elements of color, front and back, shadows and lenses.
Dante Marioni (who could also occupy a place in the chapter about abstraction and color that follows) honed his Venetian glassblowing skills after studying with Tagliapietra, creating a lean, unembellished body of work that personifies a minimalist spirit, although, as critic John Perreault has noted, “No minimalist would use such gorgeous color.” In his Mosaics (p. 28), he fuses many small glass tablets into a mosaic sheet, rolls the sheet up into a cylinder, and then blows and forms it until he attains a hollow vessel. These are perhaps the least modest of Marioni’s works and the most naturalistic: they evoke aggregates of cells and seem to be all about partitions, as might be found in the wing of a dragonfly, a honeycomb, a colony of coral.
The sculptures of Steven Weinberg seem to be complete opposites of Tagliapietra’s work, save for the shared connection to nature. Whereas Tagliapietra explores hollowness and lightness in blown forms, Weinberg casts glass and emphasizes the weighty and crusty aspects of the medium. Yet Weinberg also explores buoyancy and its intimacy with water. Look at the detail on page 21 and you’ll be staring down into symbolic ocean depths, through the top of one of Weinberg’s Buoys. Critic John Brunetti observes that this is “a horizontal cut across the top . . . that allows one to peer into their solid, capsule-shaped bodies. Given slight depressions, this edge implies the waterline and allows Weinberg to submerge us within the pressure of the sea.”10
Paul Stankard is widely considered to be one of the finest paperweight makers, but the work illustrated on pages 31–32 is one of his Orbs—a glass sphere embedded with a glass flower that is intended to be viewed from all sides. These are not miniatures, but sculptures appropriate in scale to their subject matter. His approach is so direct and simple that it is almost startling. Stankard says, “People who think that we’ve lost Nature have never walked down a highway and studied the wild flowers,”11 and so he offers us a dollop of glass enclosing the viscera of nature. According to his mother, Stankard ate flowers as a child. Today, he has sublimated that desire by making flowers rather than eating them, and the sharpness and clarity of his flora are a mark of their success in his eyes: they should look real, and if they are true to nature, then they are by definition spiritual.
Michael Glancy magnifies nature in order to reveal its underlying structure (pp. 22–27). He uses electron microscopes to inspect the eyes of insects; geology inspires him with its stratifications and crystallizations; and the vortex of randomness and chaos theory not only fails to intimidate him but provides a template for much of his work. Glancy’s two-dimensional sketches contain his musings on all of these matters, and he has found that sketching on glass is best suited to his ambitions. These became the flat glass panels that form sculptural bases for his artworks, and their structures unfold into and inspire the vessels that sit astride them. It is as if the two-dimensional universe had unfolded and warped itself into three dimensions. Recently, I spoke with Glancy about Stephen Wolfram’s controversial new book, A New Kind of Science, because the patterns on Glancy’s sculptures reminded me of the illustrations of cellular automata in that book. Wolfram is convinced that some of his automata can, when run on a computer, produce patterns and structures we associate with life (for example, the patterns on seashells), but he stops short of claiming that these computer programs will someday come to life. Glancy’s take is a little different: “I view the inanimate objects I make as damn near alive.”
Beyond an interest in the techniques of glassmaking, Tagliapietra, Marioni, Weinberg, Stankard, and Glancy share a strong curiosity about the forces of nature and how these might be presented artistically. Although the work of each is technically assured and perfected, it is born from a willingness to take a risk by plunging beneath the frenetic surface of nature, to strike down to the bone in pursuit of what is distinctly natural, and to harvest there inspiration for their work. This is what poet Robinson Jeffers called “the excellence”; he had an inkling that nature harbors a stillness at its center that is key to its distinctiveness, and ultimately to its brilliance. For these artists, the result of distilling this essence is so deeply linked to the natural world that it can sometimes seem hyper-realistic, as if the artist were merely copying nature (people often mistake the glass flowers enclosed in clear glass in Stankard’s work for real flowers). Perhaps this burden of intense naturalism is itself distinctive to some work in glass, and many of the crowning achievements seem almost too obvious or effortless: a small blossom, a simply shaped vessel, a massive lens. We should not lose sight of the accomplishments of these artists, which have been to focus our attention back to nature and to the processes of nature. That is itself the excellence.
Chapter 3: In the Abstract
Since its development in the early twentieth century, abstraction has had a tenuous, sometimes confrontational relationship with representational forms of art. Some people say that it intimidates them, that they don’t understand the meaning of abstract works. Some critics complain that the audience for abstract art is minuscule compared to that for representational art, and that the average viewer lacks the tools to appreciate nonrepresentational works. But you don’t need to be an expert to appreciate and enjoy the evocative power of shapes and the emotional impact of colors.
Assembling the artworks for this exhibition required me to visit approximately two dozen private collections in southern Florida, and I soon became aware of how abstract painting was effortlessly integrated with sculpture in many homes: a Morris Louis might hang near a Chihuly; a Kenneth Noland next to a Ben Tré; a Jules Olitski near a Libenský and Brychtová. Both types of artwork live for light, and Florida continually bathes and renews them under its sometimes dramatically harsh, sometimes soothingly therapeutic sun. Moreover, there are no wall labels in private collections to separate and classify works by artist, genre, style (though this is occasionally disarming for a curator if you don’t recognize every artist in the house). However, the apparent chaos of the rooms would soon dissipate and the experience would take over: I became literally immersed in art. I was floating from collection to collection. It occurred to me that, at some level, it mattered less who made these things than that the experience of them was allowed to happen free from gravity, from the tug of everyday art-world concerns such as authorship, condition, provenance.
Tom Patti’s five-part sculpture, which opens this chapter, straddles the line between nature and abstraction, perhaps even suggesting a composite genre of “organic” abstraction. It might be pieces of beach glass or transparent stone worn down by ocean surf, polished to reveal geological strata. Made as a commission for a collector on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday, it contains fifty “layers” of fused glass sheets: here, a stratigraphy of human time replaces geologic time. The work is scaled to the human hand, but that represents the limits of its realism, its connection to some meaning that can be easily articulated. The work is not so much “about” anything as it is an opportunity to experience the visual and tactile worlds freshly, and to enjoy that experience. I stress that it is possible to read too much into abstraction, and in doing so to limit the experience. If anything, abstract work should challenge us to read less into experience, to seek escape velocity from daily cares.
The getaway route to abstraction taken by the founders of studio glass was almost a straight line. Despite Littleton’s brief forays into realism (see chapter 1), he segued rapidly into abstraction. This may have been due to a desire to distance the emerging medium from the tradition of functional vessels that, in the late 1960s, seemed to hold it back from entrance into high-art circles. From an art-historical viewpoint, the emergence of studio glass had the pleasant effect of extending the realm of abstraction into a new and potentially powerful sculptural medium. Glass artists shared with the minimalists working in paint, steel, and bronze an exploration of the effects of gravity and the use of industrial processes and materials. Glass additionally offered tantalizing new options to those interested in color and shape.
For example, if the color-field painter Morris Louis could achieve stunning effects by staining paint intimately and deeply into the fibers of the canvas, until the color seemed to glow from within, then imagine how exciting it must have been for Littleton to realize that he could experiment with glass sculptures (as opposed to vessels) that appeared stained with color throughout their mass, every layer visible to the eye. One of the goals of the painters had been to free color from gravity and structure—Jules Olitski even spoke of his wish to find a way to spray color into the air and coax it into staying in place. So they began to experiment with the framing of their canvases, sometimes making them diamond-shaped or constructed with irregular edges. The aim was to liberate color from structure, and the results were at times interestingly asymmetrical, echoing the awkward wooden framing that held the canvas in place. Ultimately, the pressure of the intense color fields these artists had unleashed was rupturing the frail canvas membranes upon which they were painted.
Looking at such artworks, Littleton and his students—Marvin Lipofsky and Dale Chihuly among them—came to realize that they could use their breath to stretch a glass canvas that, without exactly defying gravity, seemed to seduce the forces of gravity and enlist them in support of color. Most significantly, these glass artists had found a medium that could metaphorically absorb, display, and even celebrate shock waves of intense color without rupture, much as high-lead-content glass is used in specialized windows to absorb X-ray radiation while allowing light, and images, to pass uninhibited.
One thing that might have initially attracted collectors to this work was the relative rarity of interesting and ambitious small-scale sculptures of any sort during the post–World War II era. The works discussed here are mostly what we would call “table top” sculptures, and unlike much contemporary sculpture, which is intended to be moved by crane or forklift, they can be lifted with your hands. Even Chihuly’s recent massively scaled sculptures, such as his chandeliers and the Seaform ceiling he is creating for the new wing of the Norton Museum, are assembled by hand from smaller components. An intimacy with color was achieved that was lacking in other art forms, and artists such as Laura de Santillana and Toots Zynsky continue to explore it profoundly. Santillana collapses the glass bubble as if seeking a vacuum, and turns her vessels into breathless projectors of color (pp. 60–61). Zynsky pioneered an entirely new way of creating vessels from strands of glass fibers that are fused together. The result? Imagine if all the individual color-impregnated hairs from an artist’s brush could be woven into sheer air (pp. 64–67).
There are also geometric and architectural approaches to abstraction in glass, in which color plays a more controlled and compositional role. Whereas Santillana creates nongeometric works that are about color ethereally squeezed and diffused and projected, Patti, in his geometric mode, compresses color between narrow planes that are precisely defined and then extruded out to our eyes (pp. 56–59). Whereas Littleton organically twists color and Zynsky stretches and threads it, with all the looseness those processes imply and celebrate, František Vízner shapes color with infinite care and patience as he carves by hand abstract vessels from blocks of solid glass (pp.62–63). Jaroslava Brychtová, Stanislav Libenskfý, Howard Ben Tré, and Daniel Clayman all cast abstract color using molds to control shape, and they frequently work on an architectural scale, or at the scale of the big things that go inside buildings as furnishings or outside them as monuments (pp. 43–51). Here, abstraction melds into realism, and the tug of war between the two becomes the point: Ben Tré gives us not simply a basin, but a massive one that holds color instead of water. The critic Arthur Danto observes that “Ben Tré uses glass to represent glass. . . . He uses beauty . . . to exemplify what it would mean to live in a society defined by beauty.”12
Libenský and Brychtová use abstract color symbolically as well as structurally to evoke a reaction or suggest a mood: “Definitely, there is a symbolism in our colors. . . . We have made heads with red coloration. Those were a kind of violent shock. We have used blue for other themes, as metaphors of hope or open space, or for views through space” (Brychtová). “In our most recent pieces we are trying to choose colors that are as light and as sublime as possible. We prefer glass that has almost no color, which has only a slight shade of warmth, or something cold in it, but which is possibly not color” (Libenský).13
Truthfully, most works of art are seldom purely this or that but revel in a delicious ambiguity, as elusive as Greenberg’s drop of mercury, driving art critics insane and inspiring poets. The fused planes of glass in Patti’s work, for example, may also be read as horizon lines, as if these creations compress within their transparent skin many layers and multiplex views of the landscape, forming a mass that is the scale of the human hand or brain: the landscape in your hand, the universe in your mind’s eye. So maybe there is no such thing as abstract art, maybe all abstraction should be called realism: after all, what could be more concrete (and should be less intimidating) than color and form?
Chapter 4: Flesh and Bone
What is known is never written. . . . Speech will never stain the blue.
—Lawrence Durrell, The Prayer-Wheel
Human character is an enigma. Individuals are never static; their personalities change over time. Nothing is more problematic for the historian or the artist than the interpretation of personal character and the exploration of individual passions. The problem comes down to this: how to celebrate the plurality that so enriches character while creating a stable and sharply focused portrait? You don’t want puppets attached to strings, you want flesh-and-blood, vitally alive creations. Edward Gibbon summed up the struggle this way: only “reason and virtue pursue a steady uniform course, while extravagant wanderings of vice and folly are infinite.”14 Most richly developed characters contain a mixture of virtues and vices, some hidden deeply, some on flagrant public display. But how to simultaneously depict what is underneath and what is on the surface?
If Durrell was correct, and what is known can be shown but not written, then sculpture has an advantage when it comes to representing truth and temperament. And there is no better medium for exploring character both three-dimensionally and under the skin than glass, whose translucency can be precisely calibrated by the artist, allowing a variety of depths of psychic penetration.
The work of Scandinavian artist Bertil Vallien comes immediately to mind (pp. 94–97). Many of his heads and cast figures consist of a static, even bland, outer shell combined with a Y-shaped or rectangular polished “window” that provides a clear view into the interior. One head is frosted, with no facial details, but a window placed squarely where those facial features would normally be reveals a smiling face within. Sometimes the inner life is more turbulent and the portals that allow us to peer inside begin to resemble those of a fortress or a prison, holding an icy northern light within frozen outer walls. Vallien even talks about how “glass eats light.” Unlike Vallien, whose work is icy, mystical, and muted (speech will never stain his blue), sculptor Hank Murta Adams makes rough, massive works that have the subtlety of a hammer: one figure has a bomb wired to his right temple, the other a bit piercing the mouth (pp.73, 75). In contrast to Vallien’s subtle interiority, Adams’ approach is to create like a volcano, symbolically throwing boulders of glass out of molten interiors and using eruptions to adorn the features of his potent and all-too-real sculptures.
Sometimes you don’t need the human face or a gesture to explore character. Sometimes one of the implements that form an extension of the hand or the mouth suffices to set up a story. Richard Marquis offers us three teapots and an oversized pill resting on a woven bag (pp. 84–85). They are all emblazoned with details from the American flag. The gathering of these four works was at least initially unintentional. While visiting collections in Florida, I began to realize that several collectors had acquired the artist’s flag-motif teapots and other objects (all are nonfunctional), and I was drawn to the sweetness (or in one case bitterness) of this devotion to the flag. These works are not about patrioteering (cashing in on the patriotic): they were made long before September 11, 2001. Rather, I see the three teapots as commemorating sweetness and domesticity and the oversized capsule as representing the big pill of patriotism that is hard to swallow and bitter, but is medicine indeed.
Jay Musler provides us with a string of goblets suitable for toasting most of the themes in this book: they are treated as canvases for the display of Musler’s uniquely abstracted color sensibility, they twist organically and seem to have grown from the same ground as the grapevine, and yet they throw down a challenge to take them up and drink from them, if you dare. Therman Statom, in his wall panel of nine playing cards (pp. 92–93) and other works, suggests that the mundane instruments of everyday life—a deck of cards, a chair, a ladder—can be made into art. And so he imitates them in glass, paints them abstractly, and generally coaxes them into becoming works of art. As critic Regina Hackett observes: “Therman Statom’s glass houses are the essential metaphor for vulnerability. To protect himself from stone throwers, he has nothing to offer but his beauty, his blue scribbles of paint on the wall, his glass chunks.”15
Bringing diverse inanimate components together and willing them to life is a specialty of Ginny Ruffner, who delights in making connections. What are we to make of a work such as Mae Clean Floor (p. 91)? It captures and visualizes in three dimensions the first words of a child, a moment that resonates with the artist, who had to learn to speak all over again after an automobile accident. As Ruffner has said, “Who would understand this moment better than me?” According to the collectors who commissioned the sculpture, “The letter PN stands for our grandson Nicky, surrounded by children’s blocks that spell out the phrase Mae Clean Floor. A vacuum symbolizes Mae, who cleans the house. Pearls symbolize the child’s grandmother. The hibiscus symbolizes Florida, where we live.”16
Several artists in this book are represented by what might be called “iconic” work: artworks that are, in the minds of collectors, quintessential or indispensable or breakthrough objects. Ancient Egypt inspired several of them. William Morris gives us his interpretation of canopic jars—containers that held the internal organs of the mummified deceased—although he crowns his with depictions of animal heads rather than gods (p. 86). Dan Dailey has created a wall frieze, titled Nude on the Phone, suitable (technically if not thematically) to decorate a palace in ancient Amarna, although it would probably be more at home in one of those Art Deco palaces described so eloquently by F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby.
Morris’ Canopic Jars and Dailey’s wall panel share a high degree of technical finesse and a very sophisticated approach to color. The canopic jars are shaped by hand from molten hot glass, with exquisitely subtle facial expressions. Dailey’s work is brash, but the devil is in the details: these are extraordinarily deluxe (a word the artist favors) assemblages of glass and metal, each detail drawn by hand beforehand and then intricately cut from flat glass and arranged into a mosaic that springs to life as flesh and blood. Unlike most studio glass artists, who emphasize a high-gloss sheen, Morris prefers a muted, smoky, and matte palette. And Dailey, rather than applying color in thin veils, uses sheets of glass in which rich, solid color permeates to the very edges. The masterful attention to detail endows these works with an integrity that commands instant respect. As Dailey says, “Beauty is in the making.”
The innovative works of Joey Kirkpatrick and Flora Mace were highly unusual, and unlike anything in the history of glassmaking, when they were created in the 1980s, and they remain unparalleled in 2003. The figures that adorn their vessels are made from wire drawings that have been filled in with transparent glass, as if they were stained-glass window panes (pp. 80–81). It is as if each figure, made from wire twisted into shape and animated by the artist, had magically absorbed the lifeblood of color into its skeleton. Rarely have metal and glass been so skillfully and effectively melded together.
But is it possible to improve on flesh and bone? Isn’t that the unspoken desire at the heart of realism in art? If art is capable of capturing the character locked inside flesh and bone, can it then dissect character and transcend its frailties? And should such uncharted territory, marked on antique maps simply by “Here be monsters,” even be explored?
Two artists contribute concluding thoughts to this arena. Nicolas Africano (pp.76–77) and Janusz Walentynowicz (pp. 99–101) both show us mysterious women posed in classical form: silent, isolated, meditative perhaps. Glass is used here to blur and obfuscate rather than to focus and clarify, but it is also used to reflect, literally and symbolically. We live in an era when animate humans are merging with inanimate devices even as inorganic objects are on the verge of coming to life. These two artists understand the modern condition where flesh and bone converge with transparent media such as glass and cyberspace, and art converges with life.
Chapter 5: Stagecraft
All the world’s a stage, and all the artists actors. Since Shakespeare, and more recently Jackson Pollock, this observation has become cliché. Glass lends itself to theatricality quite naturally and comfortably; after all, what could be more dramatic than the erupting volcano that made a cameo appearance in our first chapter as the earliest glass furnace? And the glassblowing studio—the stage upon which much studio glass is made—represents a sort of chamber theater that has all the warmth and intimacy generated by a communal campfire around which stories are told. Like actors or playwrights, the artists in this section take us into the realm of the theatrical as they carry glass into citadels, mount sculptures over canals, attach neon masts to cars and drive them around salt flats out West, re-create medieval stained-glass traditions, and replace pillars of stone with pillars of knitted glass.
Going back to ancient Egypt, where glassmaking emerged to answer the royal need for brilliantly colored, precious materials that reinforced status and signaled the presence of the pharaoh and his entourage, artists using glass scripted their “performances” for the maximum pleasure of their patrons and audiences. And throughout history, glass works have reflected the high drama of pleasure and politics, mystery and intrigue, of the palaces and cathedrals that housed the chief patrons for such works. If there is a unity to the approach of the four artists discussed in this chapter, it is a desire to activate an atmosphere that will bathe the audience in color and light, to give us actual physical access to mysterious and mesmerizing spaces that have more in common with the spirit of the great medieval cathedrals than with the art and atmosphere of the modern era. Some artists using glass today have styles anchored more deeply than the twentieth century, when academic theory took over as the major driving force of avant-garde painting and sculpture, sending them off on a trajectory that has since oscillated between the poles of Picasso and Duchamp—between formal cubism and intellectual conceptualism—and on to ever more esoteric aesthetic styles that are increasingly divorced from the spirit of object making.
It is crucial to remember, however, that the artist working with glass has always had to trek back to his or her rough, industrial studio, where the brilliant ideas discussed at court (or in academia or in the Chelsea galleries or in the art press) had to be sweated out if they were ever to be realized as art. This intimate connection with manual labor has, more than anything else, separated the artist using glass (or bronze or steel) from the painter, the writer, and now the video or Internet artist. And this gritty world of industriousness, of the physical act of building, is what forms the muscular structure of glassmaking as theater.
Against this backdrop, the artists discussed here recapitulate the subjects of the previous chapters: naturalism is represented by Fred Tschida and Dale Chihuly; abstraction by Anna Skibska and, again, Chihuly; and realism by Judith Schaechter. All of these artists are adept at working in glass and equally fluent in the ways of drama.
Dale Chihuly is a powerful artist whose blockbuster exhibitions are so well attended (more than a million people for one show in Jerusalem) that they border on inciting a popular art rebellion. Chihuly is about the amplification of all things, including his art, and he is not afraid to use some high drama or low theater to achieve those ends (pp. 108–9). As the late Henry Geldzahler, curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, wrote, “Chihuly challenges taste by not being concerned with it. His sole concerns are color, drawing, and form. He does go over the top at times, with pieces about which people say, ‘This is really too much,’ but perhaps not. Five or ten years later, it’s no longer too much.”17 Witness some examples of Chihuly’s intensification: the sculptures he mounted over the canals of Venice and in the Doge’s Palace in 1996; the forty-eight-foot-tall Blue Tower (a remarkable color-field sculpture as well as a monument to gigantism in glass) that he erected within the ancient Citadel of Jerusalem in 1999–2000; and the highly theatrical Persian and Seaform installations, including the 2000 ceiling at the Bellagio Resort in Las Vegas. The Seaform ceiling Chihuly has created for the Norton Museum’s new wing is intended to engulf the space—and the viewer with it—like the climactic scene in an opera. All of Chihuly’s works throw down the gauntlet, challenging mere paint to compete with ambidextrous glass. Whereas paint is dry and flaky and requires beige canvas in a supporting role, glass is ever liquid, self-supporting, supremely and mesmerizingly colorful, and triumphant in spite of its resounding fragility—or at least that is the script Chihuly has so masterfully composed for the medium he loves so very much.
Incessant escalation can lead to gigantism and collapse, both in art and in opera. Chihuly’s genius has been to establish a rhythm to his approach. Like the ocean tides, his art waxes and wanes in scale. He delights in the large and the small, reminding us that intensification can mean miniaturization, in which broad and sweeping artistic effects are distilled and made precious, as in the ceilings that are built up from hundreds of small components.
Anna Skibska takes this approach to heart, knitting together many small glass parts into powerful structures (pp. 114–15). She creates drawings suspended in space, joining the finite to the infinite and suggesting the ethereal architecture of tornadoes. For Skibska, glass supersedes stone as the ideal substance for suggesting architecture. When Skibska arrived in the United States from her native Poland, she saw Manhattan as a mountain of crystal and thought of America as one big stage set where “unreality defines America’s originality, where we see everyday life reflected in buildings. But when the buildings are lost in the clouds, it is as if God is holding a mirror to the sky.”18 Skibska’s observation reminds me of Nabokov’s dictum that “the glory of god is to hide a thing and the glory of man is to find it.” Our tall, glass-clad buildings “find” the face of the sky for pedestrians too busy to look directly up; Skibska seeks to reflect the essence of this proposition in her work, in which she knits molten glass into solid things that are simultaneously clouds and architecture, mirror and mirrored.
Fred Tschida takes neon into natural and urban settings where unexpected juxtapositions create dramatic effects. In 1975 he harnessed 180 feet of neon and with twenty-eight friends in tow carried the glowing line of light four miles, passing over the Mississippi River and attracting crowds in a surreal action worthy of The X-Files. At the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, in 1980, Tschida mounted a twenty-two-foot-tall neon column atop his car because he “wanted to make light drawings, to create spaces while driving using the car as a moving platform for that vertical tube, so I could make planes of light in space, ribbons of light, walls of light.”19 According to Tschida, who studied with Chihuly, “My work is a series of experiments—research focused on isolating light phenomenon in everyday experience.” Many of his creations involve neon-glass tubes filled with a gas that glows when an electrical current is passed through it. We are accustomed to common neon signs flashing from storefronts and motels. For the Norton Museum, Tschida has created a work inspired in part by the two pieces illustrated in this book (pp. 116–17): he creates an atmosphere of light by suspending many neon elements, each of which becomes a light projector. This cloud of light is intended to subtly overwhelm the space and us, but also to respond to our presence. Motion remains important to Tschida, and the elements of the neon cloud will tremble ever so slightly on the fluctuating thermals created by the shifting crowds of visitors.
Judith Schaechter gives us clotted, claustrophobic compositions in painted stained glass, with dark, gothic details that are “cured” by the lovely execution and refreshed by the light that streams in from behind and vivifies them (pp. 110–13). Light and subject matter—narrative—come precisely together in Bigtop Flophouse Bedspins (selected for the Whitney Biennial in 2001), which presents a world shrouded in a carnival atmosphere, with cartoony animals and a clown exhaling a sigh. The work is part indulgent nostalgia, part unbridled fantasy à la Hieronymus Bosch. Regarding her themes, Schaechter says: “I think I’m a fairly normal human specimen. My main interests are sex and death, with romance and violence the obvious runners-up.”20
Answering Beauty
And so each venture/Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate/With shabby equipment always deteriorating/In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,/Undisciplined squads of emotion./And what there is to conquer/By strength and submission, has already been discovered/Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope/To emulate—but there is no competition—/There is only the fight to recover what has been lost/And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions/That seem unpropitious./But perhaps neither gain nor loss./For us, there is only the trying./The rest is not our business.
—T. S. Eliot, “East Coker”
Glass is an optimistic and buoyant art. It amplifies color and light. It occupies a space in between the two states of liquid and solid, like dolphins jumping between water and air. Glassmakers themselves are often optimists, perhaps because glassmaking is primarily a team activity in which enthusiasm is a virtue and there is always room to share new knowledge or help someone in the blowing of an especially difficult bubble of glass. The pleasure derived from this sense of community has spilled over to those collecting the new medium and is one of the main reasons that glass works diverged from the art world in general. And, of course, it has been a main source of criticism. Glass was seen as too brash, too beautiful, too well crafted, and ultimately too empty, much as one critic recently described the 007 movie series: “a creature of immaculate exterior and no core, and thus an ideal vessel of the fantastic.”21
As if in answer to these excesses of spectacle and beauty, a trend developed to make glass as ugly as possible, as if that alone could lend the work artistic credibility and enable it to avoid the label of “kitsch.” But there is ugly kitsch as well as cute kitsch. And glass is a stubborn medium. The beauty that the ancient Egyptians so admired kept asserting its birthright. It is a thesis of this book that over time artists have come to reconcile themselves with the realities and the limits of glass as a medium for art: it is very physical and very good-looking and it has a history. The works in this book represent the tangible assets of this struggle to recover the past, and they might just add a bit of spin to the verses by T. S. Eliot quoted above: that in the fight to recover what has been lost and found and lost again, the raid on the inarticulate can transform unpropitious conditions into works of art.
Notes
1. The critic Herbert Muschamp has been exploring the effects of desire and aggression in architecture in the pages of the New York Times since 2001.
2. Literally, “Ennion made [it].”
3. Donald B. Harden, The Glass of the Caesars, exh. cat. (Milan: Olivetti, 1987), p. 2.
4. For an overview of these and other developments, see the Selected Chronological Bibliography of Contemporary Glass on page 123.
5. Brian Boyd and Robert Michael Pyle, eds., Nabokov’s Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), p. 20. The quote is from Nabokov’s “Bend Sinister.”
6. D’Arcy Thompson, On Growth and Form (1917; reprint, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), p. 287.
7. Clement Greenberg, Homemade Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 85.
8. Interview with the author, August 2002.
9. Conversation with the author, summer 2002.
10. John Brunetti, Steven Weinberg (Delle, France: Salon International de la Sculpture, 2000), p. 10.
11. Stankard, quoted in Ulysses Grant Dietz, Paul J. Stankard: Homage to Nature (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996), p. 25.
12. Arthur C. Danto, Mary Jane Jacob, and Patterson Sims, Howard Ben Tré (New York: Hudson Hills Press, in association with Scottsdale Museum for Contemporary Art, 1999), pp. 78 and 89.
13. Quoted in Robert Kehlmann, The Inner Light: Sculpture by Stanislav Libenskry´ and Jaroslava Brychtová, exh. cat. (Seattle: University of Washington Press; Tacoma, Wash.: Museum of Glass, International Center for Contemporary Art, 2002), pp. 83 and 84.
14. See Patricia B. Craddock, ed., The English Essays of Edward Gibbon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 41.
15. Regina Hackett, “Old Tradition Shines with a Bold, New Identity at Tacoma’s Museum of Glass,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer,October 26, 2002.
16. E-mail conversation between the author and collecttor Doug Anderson.
17. Henry Geldzahler (1993), quoted in William Warmus, The Essential Dale Chihuly (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2000), p. 10.
18. Skibska, quoted in Peter Slatin, “Anna Skibska: The Force of Delicacy,” Glass, no. 52 (summer 1993), p. 28.
19. Tschida, quoted in William Warmus, “Everyone Will Be Illuminated for 15 Minutes: Tschida Stories,” Glass, no. 62 (spring 1996), p. 31.
20. Schaechter, quoted in Judith Tannenbaum, Judith Schaechter: Heart Attacks, exh. cat. (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 1995), _p. 11.
21. Anthony Lane, “Mondo Bondo: Forty Years of 007,” The New Yorker, November 4, 2002, pp. 78–82.