· Author: William Warmus
· Title: "The Subtle Iconoclast" (Profile of Tim Tate)
· Publication: American Craft magazine
· Issue: December/January 2018 (Vol. 77, No. 6)
Essay by William Warmus
Tim Tate has spent his life looking for a place to be himself.
It’s not a physical home he needs – he’s been ensconced in suburban DC at the Washington Glass School, which he founded, for 16 years, greeting more than 4,000 students. He lives nearby with his husband of two years. He’s the development chair on the board at the Penland School of Crafts, which he has visited so often it’s almost a second home.
No, what Tate has craved is a more spiritual space, an emotional terrain, where his work can evolve as he sees fit. Yet “evolve” may be the wrong term if it brings to mind a series of small modifications over a long period of time. What stands out about Tate’s work is that it transforms itself every few years. When he leaves behind a series – for example, the Reliquary works he made between 2004 and 2014, which earned him notice in several publications and galleries – it tends to stay behind. He’s been outspoken in his criticism of artists whose work does not evolve. So Tate is as much explorer as artist, seeking out the uncharted. “I try to find the ‘in-between’ spaces for my work,” he says. “Never fully fitting into any one definition of steampunk, studio glass, or video artist, I chose to embrace the gray spaces that surround them, creating my own domain, without the constrictions of history.”
Tate is an imposing guy with a big voice, a brash sense of humor, and friends in every corner of the craft and art worlds. Yet he says he’s always felt invisible: “I never fit in anywhere. In the studio glass world, I seemed to be the only gay man. Also, there was almost no glass world in Washington, DC at the time, so no one local could see or fully understand any of my successes. And as far as studio glass was concerned, I was a homeless man with no voice, pressing my nose against the window to get a glimpse inside.”
Born in Washington, DC, he was raised by Patricia (Hall) Tate, a housewife and avid craft maker, and Harry Tate, an accountant who worked for the Navy at the Pentagon and who was ardently conservative. His mother needle pointed, appliquéd, sequined, glittered, painted, glued, and sewed just about any material that would hold still. He had an adversarial relationship with his father, and yet his father’s analytical skills also contributed to Tate’s success as an artist: he is well organized, dependable, and rational. Maybe his attraction to in-between spaces is a result of unreconciled feelings about his family? Perhaps the ticket booth at the art expo is the point where commerce and art, father and mother meet for Tim.
After studying special education at the University of Maryland, graduating in 1979, he became a family therapist for the state of Maryland working with emotionally disturbed children and their families. He found his footing in glass by taking courses at Penland (an amazing 26 of them, beginning in 1989) as well as at Haystack and Pilchuck and the Studio at the Corning Museum of Glass. Tate: “I was a therapist until the late 1990’s. I took all my vacation time for ten years to go to Penland, all while working full time.”
From the beginning, when he focused on glass bowls, making things was healing for him. And there were times in his young life when he needed serious comforting and healing. “I experienced great loss in the time of the AIDS epidemic, attending 14 funerals in one year alone,” he recalls. “My closest and dearest group of friends numbered around 12 and functioned as a family would, headed by a dear man named Fendel who acted as a kind of father figure. I am the last of them living. Without me, all of their caring, their humor, their love….everything we did, will be lost forever. I’m the last vessel holding those memories. This breaks my heart. This was only to be the first group of friends I would lose.”
Diagnosed as HIV-positive himself, he was told that he had one year to live in 1984-- and each year thereafter got the same news--until a decade later when effective medicines became available. “In my mind, Penland and the artwork I was making during this time saved my life,” he recalls. “The focus on making was also a focus on healing. When you are told that you have one year to live, you choose the path that works for you. Many commit suicide, others drink and drug themselves to death. I chose to follow a dream I had since I first visit the Corning Museum of Glass as a child of 9. I wanted to create as much as I could before I died. It was my way of attempting a legacy at the time. For me, the diagnosis worked as if a sword of Damocles was hanging over my head, ready at any second to plunge down. It made me singularly focused to achieve this goal. It was as if I had a blow torch behind me, and I had to keep moving fast or get burned.” His creative work also provided a haven from non-stop grief. “In my imaginary world, my dear friends did not pass away. In my head, they still lived, played, spoke to me,” he says. “Inside my art, time and reality held new meanings. In these spaces the invisible boy was always visible. Not just for me, but for each viewer, feeling the healing power from within.”
At the time, glass was an important touchstone, but he’s long been ambivalent about being part of the glass community. He likes to say that he spent 10 years trying to master glass and 20 years trying to escape it. For years, in the privileged society of glass education, he felt invisible, as if no one noticed him. But as he became more comfortable in the community, especially at Penland, the isolation lifted, and since 2014 he has served as a Penland trustee. In 2001, he founded the Washington Glass School to focus on sculptural glass made by kiln casting, rather than on traditional studio glassblowing techniques. Founding a school is a big deal, but for Tate it had a very practical purpose: It saved him the dozens of hours he spent on the road shuttling back and forth between home in DC and the classes he took at Penland. And it gave him a permanent studio.
Even as he developed work that emphasizes narrative and has a clear vocabulary, he needed to make it in his own way. Between 1999 and 2005, for example, he made about 30 large blown-glass hearts – hearts meaning healing in his vernacular. Making the hearts required a gaffer and a team, which he didn’t like because it meant loss of direct control over such a personally meaningful symbolism. “I stopped making those because of that,” he says.
In 2011, Tate took a risk toward visibility and community by starting (with this writer) a Facebook page devoted to “glass secessionism.” Controversially, it posited that that in order to understand glass today, it is necessary to look beyond studio glass. GS, as it is known to its followers, became among the earliest and most active social media sites for the discussion of glass in the 21st century, with over 3300 members, thousands of curated images and a million words of dialog in its archives. It became an active online space for glass artists who wanted to break free from the technique driven aesthetic orientation of studio glass.
Tate’s art concepts originate far from mainline studio glass. He admires artist and filmmaker Joseph Cornell and his assemblages of found components to tell a story. He reveres Josef von Sternberg, whose 1934 movie The Scarlet Empress “taught me that more is never enough and to fill a frame with as much narrative information as will fit.” He describes himself as a “Victorian techno-fetishist,” who has steampunk associations via the Jules Verne of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and the Telectroscope (2008) installation by Paul St [MLM1] [WW2] [WW3] George that linked London and New York. “The more centuries I can span, the happier I am,” he says with a laugh. Within this world, Tate has expanded his hearts-equal-healing vocabulary, with bell jars and flames connoting memories and delicately etched inscriptions defining surface boundaries between spaces.
Today, his “escape” from glass is evident when he exhibits at fine-art expos such as Scope in Miami during Art Basel week. In the work he is producing now, he has found new territory all his own, and it may be that the two series he has developed in the second decade of the 21st century will be known as his most iconic: the video frames, which suggest healing but also watchfulness and surrealism when they are centered on a mysterious blinking eye, and the Endless Mirrors, which create those special secret spaces that he so longs to inhabit.
“The spaces seen in the mirror do not exist in reality,” he says of the Endless Mirror works. “These spaces are formed only by the viewer’s interactions. We all know they are but an illusion, yet there it is, visible to the invisible boy within all of us. We claim this space for ourselves, to populate it with whomever and whatever we choose.”
The choice of format is important: “I use a round format, like a portal or eye,” Tate says. “Voyeurs choose to cut holes into walls so they can spy on others. My portals make you ask, “Am I that voyeur?”
Of his research in the mirrors, Tate says: “Other than architecture and movies, where I saw my first endless mirrors (All About Eve and Citizen Kane were my favorites), I cant find any earlier than the 1960’s. I saw a Spencer Gifts catalog with an endless mirror in it when I was ten years old. I convinced my mom and aunt to drive from Washington, DC to Paramus, New Jersey because that was the closest store. I bought one there and took it apart to see how it worked. I then saw as an adult the work of Chul Hyun Ahn and loved it. I thought then that I would use this technique and make it in my own style. My favorite infinity artists today are Yayoi Kusama, Ivan Navarro and Peter Gronquist. “
For Tate, the mirrors have taken on an almost mystical quality: “It is said that if you see past 13 images in an infinity mirror, you are seeing into the next world. The closer to the front represents the present and past, though reinvented by me to symbolize what I choose to discuss. The future, in those images past 13, is indistinct, barely visible.” The series has been ideal for symbolically addressing societal ills caused by the multiplication of forces, for example, the vast waves of migration caused by the unsettled politics of the Middle East or the seemingly endless cycle of gun violence followed by attempts at gun control.
Ultimately this recent series is important and classic in the range of Tate’s work because the “beauty of endless mirrors is in creating a space that exists nowhere else on Earth. Maybe you can even bring back those who were lost.” If, as he says, the endless mirrors reflect our world in the first dozen or so layers, and deeper than that they begin to reveal infinite space, then somewhere in that ambiguous zone between our world and infinity is the place where worlds meet. That’s the place to be, Tate says. It is the place where, if only for a brief moment, everything and everyone is immortal.
Sidebar—Timeline of objects:
1989 to 1999 Glass bowls, about 50 in total: “I wasn’t very fast then, and I had a full time job too.”
1999 to 2005 Sacred Hearts: “Large blown hearts, maybe 30 in total. These required a gaffer and a team. I stopped making those because of that.” Working with Michael Janis, he blew about 100 small hearts.
2003 to 2006 Deep-relief dry cast panels: probably 50 of these. “I deeded the technique to the Washington Glass School for public art projects.”
2006 to 2009 Etched glass domes enclosing cast glass components, about 100
2008 to 2014 Video domes: small video screens and cast glass components under a glass dome, about 100
2013 to 2015 Video frames: A central video screen surrounded by a cast frame, about 50
2015 to 2017 Endless mirrors: Cast components are reflected endlessly in deep space in a mirrored enclosure. About 30 to date.
2016 to 2017 Floral fields, cast with or without a central video component. Six to date.
[MLM1]Cq (that is journalese for “this looks weird, but it’s correct.”)