Excerpts from the 2004 Keynote Lecture to the Glass Art Society, speech entitled "Some Propositions on Glass (Art)":
2004 Andrei Codrescu:
"Dada and Surrealist artists, for instance, conceived of art as dangerous to society and its cherished defenses of class and power. Society mostly took these artists at their word and did its best to persecute them. Since then, a lot of art has flown under the bridges of Venice, and postmodern art, playful, accommodating, and quite socially acceptable, is only dangerous when it's not up to code--the safety code, not the social code. As far as glass art goes, the danger is mostly to the artist, not to society.
Practically then, glass art has the same concerns as any art now. Namely, now to be art and not-art at the same time. All its qualities--high birth, artistic pedigree, psychological pertinence, metaphorical reach, ubiquity, promiscuity, modesty, transparency, opticity, exploratory indispensibility, matrixity, conductivity, agency, and exemplariness--can often be a burden. No wonder glass has so often masqueraded as stone. Or maybe that was to draw attention to itself, like a drag queen; ooops, surprise! I'm really glass!
[...]However, most art created now, including glass art, finds itself in an oddly protected position: it is unbreakable--because it is 'art.' Without the subversive ideals of incitement to violence and passion or even the nervous ticks of the 20th century avant-garde, contemporary art is quite safe. The history of art has also been rewritten to read that even the avant-gardists who did profess those violent desires were in fact concerned with another fundamental challenge, namely, to make thought possible for those who care to think. That was a subversive proposition, this rewriting tells us, as long as thinking was itself deemed dangerous, but that isn't the case now, or at least, it isn't so obvious what is and what isn't unthinkable. In other words, the history of modern art has been largely rewritten for the benefit of glass art, for which safety is primary.
Anyone who has ever walked barefoot has stepped on glass, and that's about everyone. People who break glass bottles on the sidewalk are called Assholes.
Insofar as the shop window and the chandelier are seen as status symbols, not art, it is still possible to break them--but only in third-world countries with large masses of 19th-century-style poor people. In the West, the museum walls protect us from all that ideological hubris and, given the demotic nature of the museum, who'd dare defile an object that has only the best interests of your mind heart? Thinking leads to more thinking and that is what it's all about! So pay up."
Codrescu, A. " Some propositions on glass (art)." GAS Conference keynote lecture, 2004, New Orleans. GAS Journal, 2004. p 19-23.
2004 Regina Hackett:
"Opening night of the College Art Association Conference in Seattle belonged to the Guerrilla Girls.
They're this year's winners of the prestigious Frank Jewett Mather Award for art criticism. When four of them took the stage in gorilla masks, 3,000 art historians, students, artists and critics rose to their feet to applaud, leaving a few medievalists seated and shaking their heads.[...]
With corrosive wit, merry sarcasm and many buckets of wheat paste, their posters and billboards -- first in New York and now worldwide -- have made sexism and racism seem worse than wrong.
They've made it dull, stuffy and out of date, a three-strikes-you're-out combo for the museums and galleries that are most often their targets.
Now that the Guerrilla Girls are famous authors as well as agitators, they're doubly honored in the art world for remaining anonymous. If the original members of the band came forward, surely they'd boost their careers, but all have remained silent, passing on the masks to second and third generations.
New York artist Fred Wilson, the keynote speaker, let his work speak for him, screening "September Dreams," an elegiac response to the destruction of the World Trade Center, approaching the theme through Shakespeare. On four screens, the piece opened with Othello strangling Desdemona and rolled back to when they were happily in love, evoking the common desire, after disaster, to retreat to a happier time.
No one could have gone to more than a fraction of the 180 sessions that followed the Wednesday night opening and continued through Saturday at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center.
Anxious artists and doctoral students stood in long lines waiting their turns for a brief interview, hoping to make the short list for a college or university job that may or may not materialize in the age of scarce funding.
New York critic Eleanor Hartney dutifully attended the panel for which she served as moderator, "Public Art and the Art Critic: Advocate or Antagonist," and then skipped out to look at art. She said she liked Claire Cowie at James Harris Gallery, Ben Darby at Bryan Ohno Gallery and James Martin at Foster/White. Heading down to Tacoma, she was impressed by the new Tacoma Art Museum and the sweeping plaza exterior of the Museum of Glass. [...]
Points for honesty and insight go to painter Gregory Amenoff, who said on a landscape-in-crisis panel that he thought artist Andy Goldsworthy's insertions in the land were precious and overwrought. "Martha Stewart is a better artist," he said.
The most important panel locally was the least advertised, slipping in under the radar too late for inclusion in the catalog, a discussion of what went wrong at the Bellevue Art Museum, which closed in September.
After the story broke in the P-I, the issue was thoroughly chewed in the press. The Stranger thought an installation of thong underwear was the break point of Eastside audience alienation. The Seattle Times went with money mismanagement and, oddly, lack of communication with the community. (No museum has surveyed its audience more.)
Most peculiar was The New York Times, who blamed the fiasco on the museum's sweeping, postmodernist spaces. As anyone knows who ventured beyond the lobby into the galleries, they're boxy with low ceilings.
At Saturday's panel, participants tried to clear up some of the confusion.
Sharon Burke was director of finance for the museum, hired after it moved into its new building. The books were a mess, she said. Turns out the museum was running a $1.3 million deficit, instead of the $200,000 deficit the board knew about. Because there was no financial cushion, the museum started a downward spiral it was unable to pull out of.
She'd advise museums contemplating a new building to fold into the capital campaign another 10 percent operating surplus and get donors to commit to covering museum costs in the first three years.
Board president Rick Collette said the school within the museum was a disaster. Instead of providing income, it was a money drain. It won't be there when the museum reopens in the summer. The board is developing partnerships with the University of Washington's Burke Museum and Pilchuck Glass School to share a floor of exhibition space.
The interior needs a major remodel, he said.
"With what money?" called out former Bellevue curator Miriam Sternberg, from the audience.
"We need to raise it," he replied.
Former chief curator Brian Wallace said he thought it was important for institutions to encourage those who work there to maintain a healthy skepticism. "Don't drink the Kool-Aid," he said. "Don't buy into ill-founded enthusiasms."
Collette said the board has been meeting with more than 400 community, civic and art leaders on the Eastside and in Seattle and will, as a result, return to its craft roots, focusing on craft along with art and design.
"We let our supporters and the community down," he said. "We had to close to step back, take stock and fix it."
Doug McLennan, editor of artsjournal.com, said he thought the direct way the board handled the problem was admirable but worried about its survey-the-audience approach to articulating a vision.
Asked if he would have become board president if he'd known what was in store, Collette replied, "Absolutely not. Who would? But I'm staying around after we reopen. That will be the fun part. It will make all of this worthwhile."
The museum hopes to reopen at least in time for the next Bellevue Arts Fair in July."
Hackett, R. "College art conference goes wild over guerrilla girls." Seattle PI. February 24, 2004. http://www.seattlepi.com/visualart/161734_collegeart24.html
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