The question had been put to the studio glass artists many years ago: Is your art exploring new ideas in visual expression, or are you simply reinterpreting the art movements of history with a new medium. Even glass's own supporters found themselves describing new work using painting references from earlier times: Lino Tagliapietra's work was described as op-art in a curatorial statement and William Morris reminded one critic of so-and-so with a dash of the other. It was a fair question to be asked at the time, and it still would be a fair question today with the exception of a recent paradigm shift brought on by the young curatorial team yukanjali.
As we have so often experienced in museum glass shows, the curatorial essays and catalogs anticipate, cover up, and/or over-explain the misapprehensions and antagonistic feelings about the material by its critics before expressing delight in the viewer's immediate connection to the art. The art comes with a preface, and the preface's sweaty hand grasps at you through the entire show.
That might have been necessary in the previous decade, but with the arrival of yukanjali (Yuka + Anjali) with their first show 'How Is This Glass?' in 2009 and their upcoming 2010 Video Festival, the glass world is hopefully thankful that the awkward and heavy days of unnecessarily defending glass's reputation in the greater art world are coming to an end.
Anjali Srinivasan and Yuka Otani met at the Rhode Island School of Design while they were both grad students. During the 2007 Glass Art Society Conference in Pittsburg, while in a cab stuck in traffic, they had a conversation about feeling misplaced with the group of people who had converged for the conference. Otani explains, "Anjali and I shared a thought that our practices do not fit comfortably into those of pre-existing glass art genres, like blown glass, cast glass, flamework, etc." They wanted to start a dialogue with a broader peer group of artists on the subject of glass and so they became a team.
Alexander Rosenberg"Drawing 2"
Photo Credit: YUKANJALI
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Glass is not an art, Srinivasan says, "Glass is a material. An amazing and wondrous thing that inspires the human spirit to create. It cannot, by itself become passe, although perhaps human intent can be, and maybe that lack of breakthrough is what we are facing now."
The pair cite William Warmus's essay "The End?" as the beginning of their curatorial and artistic work. In it he writes: "Studio glass itself is not stagnant, it is complete." Studio Glass was not an appropriate category for the work they saw and made and so they defined the term 'Post-Glass' to distinguish between the two types of art work.
"So far, people are quite kicked about post-glass-ism. It is simply a voice for works that interest my practice," Srinivasan explains. "It is a word we are using to point to ideas or presentations thereof that are
1. multidisciplinary,
2. switch something about the way we comprehend or encounter something around us,
3. undeniably related to the vocabulary, history, perception or context of the material in some way."
But they aren't pushing the title, says Otani: "There is no pretension within this term to take over the current glass art scene."
In their curatorial debut 'How Is This Glass' in Corning, NY, they showed works by video artists, photographers, glass blowers, sound technicians, projection artists, performance artists, and sculptors. Each work relates to glass in a nontraditional way, each work grows from a groundwork laid by studio glass, and some works explore the scientific stereotypes inherent in glass.
"We would like for work to exceed these associations, [which is] not the same as negation of them" Srinivasan says, referring to the commonly held perceptions about glass, that it is "pristine," "immortal," "clinical," and "casteless."
Rebecca Cummins, Samuel Geer, Carmen Montoya and Naomi Kaly, Angus Powers, and Andrew Bearnot are a few of the artists represented in their first show. Photos of pieces/screen shots are available at their blog for which yukanjali received a Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Arts Writers Grant. On the blog are photos and commentary on post-glass works, and artists known affectionately as 'glass guerrillas.'
Although they use the academic language of art criticism to describe pieces in their Post-Glass show (2009)--"A group of organic, blown glass blobs, will be placed without particular fanfare or explanation into a public setting. When filled with water, they reflect the surrounding environment upside-down, and are subject to ephemeral phenomenological experience..."--yukanjali can also be lighthearted in a way that Glass Museum curators are not.
For example, the blog describes "Les Instantanes," a 1998 work by Julien Marie (one of the forerunners making works that can be called post-glass) as such: "My own experience of the work was a simple sigh of admiration and sheer joy at witnessing the precious construction of a moment." It is enlivening to read about art that confirms your spontaneous reaction to art as legitimate; so often glass inspires emotion based on it's reflective and luminous qualities, but those emotions can be felt while relating to glass and it's properties in other ways, and that is a break though for post-glass.
Rebecca Cummins "Shooting Stars"
Photo Credit: YUKANJALI
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"Going beyond treasuring glass becomes a driving force of post-glass," Otani says. She adds, "[An] increasing number of glassblowers are becoming interested in exploring the process of work rather than the resulting objects. And this type of practice could grow into a unique post-glass art." Yukanjali are currently accepting submissions for a 2010 Post-Glass Video Festival. Many of the post-glass entries from their first show in 2009 were from glass blowers, where as most of the 2010 submissions are from non-glass people in Europe. Photo Credit: YUKANJALI
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It will be exciting to see where How Is This Glass goes after this. "Based on what information we glean from that experience, we will know where (if) to head thereafter," Srinivasan thoughtfully predicts.
Anjali Srinivasan, from India, has a professional background in accessories design and grassroots empowerment of artisans through craft practice. She studied glass, ceramics, and expanded media at Alfred University before working with organizations in New York and New Delhi on research, product development, and education. She completed her graduate studies in glass and digital media at RISD, and currently works for Ann Hamilton as well as hold the position of visiting scholar at Ohio State University.
Yuka Otani is from Japan. She obtained her BFA and studied glass in the traditional craft contex at Tama Art University in Tokyo, Japan and then completed her MFA in the US at the Rhode Island School of Design. She has is a featured artist in the upcoming group show "Hand+Made Contemporary: The Performative Impulse in Art, Craft and Design" at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston, TX.
Quotes from this blog post are taken from How Is This Glass? and from email interviews conducted with Anjali Srinivasan and Yuka Otani in January of 2010.
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