Yoichi Ohira: The Perfect Tradition

By William Warmus

This essay was written for the book Yoichi Ohira: a Phenomenon in Glass

New York: Barry Friedman (dist. by Rizzoli), 2002. ISBN: 9780972310802

Glass as a material for humanistic expression has long been associated with multi-media artworks and cultural diversity. The funerary mask of the ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamen, embellished with richly colored inlays, is a masterpiece of collaboration between the goldsmith and the glassmaker. That was 3500 years ago. By the year zero, glassmaking had begun to spread throughout the Roman Empire and beyond, its products used by princes and paupers.

Today, the art world is described by some critics as having entered into an era of permanent pluralism. Unlike the 1950s and 1960s, dominated by abstract expressionism and pop art, the current situation is multi-faceted and multi-media, with no single style in ascendancy. The dividing lines between kitsch (once considered as bad art) and the avant-garde (the world of advanced art) have blurred, as have the boundaries between artists, dealers, public relations and museums. Individuals identified with feminist, gender, and post-colonial art co-exist with video and installation artists as well as painters and sculptors.

Contemporary glass has been the beneficiary of pluralism in several ways. Artists and the art public are more willing, even eager, to explore and enjoy versatile and exotic materials like glass. Studio glass artists work in many styles and many countries, and so studio glass is inherently pluralistic. While this was sometimes seen in the 1960s and 1970s as a limitation, it is now perceived as a distinct advantage. Glass has come to be called “the new bronze” because of its flexibility.

Yoichi Ohira seems to fit perfectly within this new world. He merges three different cultural styles: Japanese formalism, Italian technical and coloristic bravado, and American edginess or quirkiness of expression. Specifically, I believe that Ohira has created a body of work that advances two artistic styles: abstraction and naturalism.

In a profound sense, however, Ohira is not a pluralist. Pluralism emerged from the challenge to formalism that began in the early 1960s. It emphasizes context over object: Politics, philosophy, psychology, geography all become essential elements in understanding the meaning of the artwork. Pluralism also introduces speed. In the absence of any defining style, all styles and all media compete for attention, and the successful artist is the one who can outrun his peers, capture the fleeting attention of the media and art public, and then move on to some new innovation or sensation.

I see Ohira, however, as an unrepentant formalist. He starts with the art object itself and builds upon the venerable tradition of glassmaking. His exquisite vessels exhibit strict boundaries, and they have integrity. They are truly beautiful in an age old way, and they tantalize age old senses: the eye’s taste for subtle color, the hand’s longing for restrained texture. This work is not afraid to be precious and a little elitist: It has a brittle, fragile existence as a glass object. But the work is also defiant: ultimately, the audience for Ohira’s art must find their way to the object, stand in front of it, and look at it. Formalist art is all about this challenge of appreciating and experiencing a definite object in all its lonely perfection.

For most of today’s critics, that is too simple (and too difficult) an experience: they want words, and much context, and redundancy: the object, the image of the object, the label describing the object, the video of the object in context, the conference about the artist and the meaning of the work that will validate the serious intent of it all. Instead, Ohira gives us good work whose purpose need not be defined too specifically. Looking at an Ohira, I sometimes feel like I am on holiday from the business of the artworld.

A second large difference: Ohira’s familiarity with, and mastery of, traditions. This inevitably enriches his artwork and art process, embossing it with an aura of venerability and wisdom. He truly respects the legacy of glass, especially as it has been kept alive in Venice by the maestros (master glassblowers) that he works with to make his art. Such reverence for craftsmanship is largely lacking in a pluralist artworld where technical skills are relegated to the same status as typing skills: something to be outsourced.

Ohira is also the beneficiary of a rich artistic tradition stretching back to the late nineteenth century. In particular I find his work to share sentiment with the chief art nouveau artist using glass, Emile Gallé (1846-1904), about whom the critic Jules Henrivaux wrote: “An artist like Gallé makes us think of a quintessential abstraction that attempts to materialize the impalpable and to turn the dream into glass.” Aside from a tendency toward abstraction, Gallé and Ohira also share a fascination with the unpredictability of the forms generated by the natural world and the challenge nature presents to the artist. In one essay, Gallé, struggling to represent natural forms in the crystal goblet that he later presented to Louis Pasteur, wrote: “In order to produce these figures I would have needed not the rod of a glass-blower but the brush of a Hokusai…” At last, 100 years later, we have an artist who has merged rod and brush: Ohira!

Ultimately, I think that Ohira’s significance is in his ability to evoke a vibrant world in the confines of a small vessel. That world is dynamic and at times stormy, representing an ongoing struggle between two aesthetic impulses: abstraction, that revels in simplicity, and naturalism, the world of muddying complexity and organic decay. Several of his vessels bear the marks of this struggle in the form of a transitional band at the waist, for example “Sentiero Bianco” (#7662) and “Campo dei Fiori” (#7655). Discrete abstract passages of fused mosaic patterns at the top and the bottom of these artworks appear to collide at the center. But rather than becoming muddy or confused, these bands are transformed into geological passages of compressed color and structure. In another type of vessel, such as “Fontana Verde” (#7774), a regular fused mosaic pattern appears to be dissected from beneath by an opposing color, in this case, brown-amber lozenges of mosaic are corroded by a deep sea blue that seems to be seeping into the vessel walls.

Finally, I enjoy Ohira because he is a champion of, and living link to, the old-fashioned romantic ideal of “the past, the dear, sweet, sainted past” that so transfixed, for example, the heroine of Giorgio Bassani’s “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis.” His works speak to the enduring human need for beauty and integrity and goodness. These are not the empty words that some writers would have us believe need to be re-invented periodically in order to be appreciated. Beauty has been forever, and good work like Ohira’s stands in a long unbroken line stretching back to ancient times, affirming the sacredness of traditions. If the past is sweet to such romantic souls as Micol Finzi-Contini (who collected làttimi glass in Bassani’s novel), the artwork is an effective means of evoking the past. And like Micol, I long to let my gaze wander over to the luminous mists of the Ohiras in the cabinet, as I am submerged in a world of dreams.

William Warmus is a writer and curator.