In this time line I pull quotes to illustrate a thread in popular and scholarly writing and criticism about glass. Here we will see current glass artists defending their art against the accusations and separating themselves from these stereotypes and, hopefully, find out how and where the now-common opinion was born. Fundamentally, the general thesis seems to be born of the question, What Is Art? This question I will leave to others to answer, here I am only documenting the written history of a popular way of thinking and a popular taste.
2004 Mary Daniels:
"There is a magic to glass as an art form so espoused to celestial light it seems to have been created from the auras of angels.
The way glass is made, in itself, seems like alchemy, or a seemingly miraculous process.
Considered the oldest of manmade materials, glass is formed by a molten meeting of four natural elements: earth (sand, sodium and lime), fire, air and, often, water to cool. The outcome is a material that offers endless possibilities, from functional items such as drinking ware to sublime works such as stained-glass windows.
Though no one is sure where and by whom glass was first discovered, glassmaking dates back to ancient Mesopotamia, about 4,500 years ago, says Tina Oldknow, curator of modern glass at the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, N.Y. Over time, glass artisans developed many methods to shape glass heated to the consistency of chewing gum.
Glass blowing, while the most theatrical to watch, may not be the oldest one. Casting molten glass in premade blank molds, similar to pottery-making techniques, may be even older. (In ancient times, glassmakers burnt down entire forests heating their glass-melting furnaces. When out of fuel, they picked up and moved on to fresher fields, which is how glassmaking was disseminated worldwide.)
As old as glass is, contemporary artisans still are finding ways to create new expressions of beauty with it. At the 11th Annual International Exposition of Sculpture, Objects & Functional Art, held Nov. 5-7 in Chicago, patrons saw what the imagination of contemporary artists has wrought in glass.
Though media of every kind _ from furniture in rare woods to jewelry in precious metals _ was represented there, SOFA still is considered the most important exhibition of art glass in the world.
Visitors saw shimmering blown glass by greats such as American Dale Chihuly and Venetian Lino Tagliapietra, but there was examples of various other techniques as well.
A key innovator in kiln-formed glass is German-born Klaus Moje, regarded by many as the most distinguished artist working with glass in Australia today. In his hands, the results of the kiln-formed mosaic techniques with which he has experimented for more than three decades has a fluidity that exceeds earlier traditions.
"My starting point is colored sheet glass that I cut with a glass cutter into strips and fuse them with heat into a solid piece," Moje explains. "Cooled down to room temperature, they are laid over a mold and heated up again to where the glass gets soft and sinks into the mold. Finally, it is the grinding of the surface that produces the sharp distinction between the different colors and raises the linear effect."
Early on, Moje was not comfortable with glass blowing, he says, "because the initial design can become fluid and lose its direction." In German glass schools, he came in contact with "masters in cutting, painting and engraving who planted a seed in me," he says. "The discipline was set _ the love for a material, the wish to overcome limitations, to break through the resistance of this material."
When he moved to Australia to seek new horizons artistically, he came across aboriginal art with its repeated color patterns.
"For me aboriginal art was the most important discovery and definitely has been and is a major influence," Moje says. "It is not so much the imagery but the magic that is taking me into its spell."
AESTHETICS OVER FUNCTION
Czech artist Frantisek Vizner's great interest in the vessel form, says his daughter, Ida, was also influenced by his early apprenticeship and work experience in his native land.
After working for a factory with a hot glass master, he found the "cold" technique of cut glass "to be more interesting and challenging," adds Ida Vizner, who translated for her father. "He started thinking that it would be interesting to look at the vessel from the aesthetic point of view, rather than a functional one."
He creates his minimalist sculptures working alone with a grindstone, putting great emphasis on color in the glass, which he gets from a specialized glass factory in the Czech Republic, and experimenting with different shapes in different colors to capture the interaction between color, shape and light.
United Kingdom artist Tessa Clegg is also harnessing a traditional technique to bring something innovative to her art. Her newest work is done by the labor-intensive lost-wax technique, normally associated with casting metal. Making a series of molds of plaster, wood or clay is necessary to make colored lids or inserts to complete or punctuate a shape.
"I'm one of the few people who work with the vessel form, although abstracted," she says. "I love the way color comes through the transparent bubbles and veils.
"I set up a situation in the kiln, close the lid and the forces of gravity and heat form the glass. Sometimes it is such a good surprise. Sometimes it is a disaster."
While new takes on ancient techniques is one trend in art glass, there is something even more startling going on.
"There is more interest in mixed media, in adding new dimensions," Oldknow says. "Everything from dirt, fabric, living things, water, all kinds of materials are being mixed with glass." Experimentation with the material is adding different textures. It is all part of their wish to use glass as an artistic medium in sculpture." One of the most arresting is that of Seattle artist Mary Van Cline, known internationally for her combination of glass and photography in large-scale assemblages and sculptures in which she addresses themes of time and space. Van Cline has developed a technique similar to the photographic processes at the turn of the 19th century that used glass treated with light-sensitive emulsions. Van Cline's process, however, is a glass positive with an emulsion on it.
As a pioneer for putting photographic images in glass, Van Cline sees even more new stylistic and technical approaches in glass ahead.
MIXING IT UP
Also going forward on the mixed-media track is KeKe Cribbs, who lives on an island in Puget Sound in Washington state. Cribbs is long known for her glass mosaic work, a technique with ancient Moorish and Byzantine roots, but "it is still changing. I'm always hungry for the next thing," she says.
Her latest work mixes glass and ceramics, a direction she has explored for the last three years after she burned out with other methods like sandblasting.
"Once I was started in clay, I was home free," she says. She uses a technique known as "slumping," a slow flow of soft glass into a mold, "to bond the glass into the clay." Her latest work, "Terrine Man," mixes glass with porcelain.
These are only a sampling of the many world-class glass artisans whose own spells wrought in glass was on display.
"Glass is really an equal-opportunity material," Oldknow says.
"Daniels, M. " Pushing the art glass envelope." Chicago Tribune. November 5, 2004.
2004 Robin Rice:
"“I’m a very political person. I think about politics a lot, but I think of the driving force [of society] as cultural.” Resident Fellow at the Creative Glass Center of America in Spring 2004, Ben Wright has traveled quite a bit. He visited Haiti, Kenya, and Jamaica with his father, a doctor with the World Health Organization and as a child, learned that different cultures value different things. When he gave toy Matchbox cars to other children in a Kenyan farm village, he was surprised that his playmates thought these toys were superior to their handmade wire cars which he found “amazing.” In his recent sculpture, Wright explores how society establishes and protects what it values.
Since graduating from Dartmouth College with a biology degree in 1998, Wright has pursued a career as an artist The value and definition of security was the basis of his recent BFA exhibition at the Appalachian Center for Craft. Using the eye, really, the eyeball as an emblem, Wright looked at the way “security” has become a pervasive element of our lives. We are almost always under someone else’s eye, metaphorically and literally, and many find comfort in this. “What are we giving up for ‘security’?” Wright wonders.
More like a thematic show than an installation, many individual works from Wright’s BFA show are iconic in form as well as intent. The influence of African sculpture is evident in symmetrical, geometrical shapes and the repeated title “Guardian Figure.” A jewel-like, red-brown glass head dotted with small eyes is surmounted with a wire structure supporting eyes which resemble satellite dishes. In contrast, a huge translucent bag hanging from the ceiling bulges grotesquely with grapefruit-size glass eyeballs. In a wall-mounted row, individually framed eye spheres are each surrounded like fetishes with feathers. In making the many oversize glass eyes for the show, Wright realized that the more detail he included, the less convincing the image was. In the whimsical Missed Media, which in some ways is the most memorable piece in the show, a dangling light bulb illuminates a large door-size panel of grey Formica sprinkled with a plastic galaxy of 20,000 googly eyes.
The most ominous “eye” in the show is an authentic surveillance camera, one of the “Guardian Figures.” Friends of Wright’s recently moved into a community where constant surveillance is a selling point. Wright actually stole one of the video cameras mounted on the light posts, an act of deliberate irony.
Moving away from the eye motif, at CGCA Wright returned to his original interest in two-dimensional art. He has been engraving drawings onto slumped slighted tinted sheets of plate glass using techniques learned from the Czech engraver Jiri Harcuba. At CGCA, he worked on television-related glass screens. He is impressed with the power of television (another kind of eye), which he saw infrequently as a child. “That glass screen is a big Pandora’s box.”
He plans to reproduce a 1947 police scene (yet another “Guardian Figure”) on a screen within an arch-like frame and sketched screens for back projection to distort some two-dimensional representations. Wright calculates these graphically dynamic images to operate effectively in the “liminal space where we take in information as opposed to the narrow focus” of everyday life.
Like many CGCA fellows, Wright planned to spend most of his time at Wheaton Village making glass components which might be worked later. “The portion of time I spend blowing objects compared to the time I spend (engraving and cold) working them is miniscule, but I rarely have access to a hot shop so I’m taking advantage of it. I want the shape of the vessel to bring meaning to the object.” In a less conceptually rigorous mood, Wright finds satisfaction in making functional glass. He is one of the rare individuals who enjoys cold working and finds it meditative. At CGCA, a group of large functional bowls were destined to be surfaced with ground-down faceted areas in the battuto (hammered metal) style, and he made numerous vessels as vehicles for images.
He began a series of snuff bottles which, when complete, will address addiction—“value at it’s most skewed.” Fear is the emotion which he speculates drives addiction. Chinese snuff bottles are traditionally painted from the inside, and Wright plans to add a metal spoon, as in a traditional snuff bottle. His reverse paintings will deal with the negative value: “What are people scared of?”"
Rice, Robin. resident critic at Wheaton Arts New Jersey. "Ben Wright". 2004. website accessed May 2, 2009. http://www.wheatonarts.org/creativeglasscenteramerica/criticresidency/robinrice/wrightben
2004 Robin Rice:
"It is surprising to learn that Sisir Sahana is the sole artist in India who is primarily devoted to glass technology and making glass art. Sahana, a Spring 2004 Resident Fellow at the Creative Glass Center of America in Wheaton Village, draws on the great Indian tradition of figurative sculpture in his work and has been especially inspired by Hindu temples covered with many small figures executed in rough textured terracotta.
The son of a farmer, Sahana grew up in a small village in West Bengal, where he never saw a bus or a car until he was seven or eight years old. From a very early age, he was fascinated with the visual arts. His father tried to discourage him, even beating him for drawing and painting, but when Sahana’s artist uncle died, he left his crayons to the boy. The local teacher also encouraged him to develop his talent. Although his father refused to pay for art college, Sahana’s teacher told him, “You just go there,” and paid his fees.
Sahana went to the village of Santiniketan founded in 1863 by Maharishi Devendranath Tagore. In 1901 his son, Rabindranath Tagore, established an experimental open-air school which is now the internationally recognized Visva-Bharati University. There, attending classes held outdoors under the trees, Sahana “slowly entered into a real understanding of what an artist should do.” In the five year degree program he studied many materials and processes and came away with skills and a certainty of the central importance of nature. His painting had evolved to reverse painting on glass.
After graduating, Sahana went on to study stained-glass at St. Martins College of Art and Design in London, but, somehow, he became increasingly interested in glass as a medium in itself. After experimenting with slumping and fusing, he began moving toward the multicolored glass sculptures for which he’s best known, though he continues to make paintings, as well.
Sahana now maintains a studio in Hyderabad. He visits his family home, where his three brothers now manage the family farms, two or three times a year. He completed his first residency at the CGCA in 2000. Because the field of glass art is just beginning in India, many processes which are fairly straightforward in the United States are problematic. Melting temperatures of colored glass are not compatible and sophisticated facilities for grinding, polishing and fusing are not available. Though Sahana is able to hire workers to help with some of the more mechanical tasks, he was enthusiastic about the possibility of returning for a second residency at Wheaton Village, where he could tackle ambitious, large-scale subjects.
The theme of Sahana’s present work is “Geosocial Reality: The Transformation.” It’s a complex meditation on the ways life is changing on this planet. Four vertical relief panels combine nature motifs: leaves, farm animals, birds, and flowers mingle with human figures. A book labeled “Hi-Tec” is perused by a female figure in the upper register of one panel, while others have a more bucolic character. Sahana observes that “In India I have seen that urbanization--cutting down trees and carving up the rural lands—is very destructive. I pick up what is happening. I do not judge. There is no statement.” Nevertheless, he believes that the age-old struggle for survival and the power of nature continue to be the meaningful center of life.
In the kiln-cast panel Farmer Family, a man gazes nose-to-nose into the eyes of his cow: each being occupies a position of importance. The wife, above, is crowned like a goddess. All beings have a place on earth. In a related relief, a warrior with his horse and spear remind us that “Everybody is a warrior. The warrior is not past.” But, neither is the farmer. “The horse helps us to prosper. The cows [depicted in glass] come from my village and are part of our life. We all live together. If I die today I will go to the soil and be excavated. Everybody will go through that process. I love it.”
Sahana is not religious in the traditional sense, but he sees the Hindu gods within the living man and woman of today. His depictions of women in particular manifest the timeless variety of female deities and their stories. “Woman today may be the most powerful person. Woman struggles so much. They come into my work as imaginative forms. Maybe nature is a woman, feminine.” He acknowledges Hinduism as a way of life—an understanding of nature.
Sahana’s sculpture have something in common with the paintings of Chagall in their poetic use of color, free-floating dream-like forms, and rural village motifs. Often disembodied hands and heads in profile dominate his work. Sahana says his predilection for straight angular noses is partly based on the conventions of Greek sculpture. The nose, he believes, gives power to the face. Jewelry is essential to the figures he makes. Ornamentation and decoration are signs of joy in life itself.
Sahana sometimes joins several tall narrow panels into a single column, a monumental free-standing work. More often the panels are intended for residential settings where subject matter of family, interdependence and nature is particularly suitable. These pieces have been installed in homes in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, as well as India. He believes glass has great potentiality in India in spite of the fact that some still fear its fragility. Sahana has accepted a great responsibility. He stands at the beginning of glass sculpture in India, where the tradition of figurative sculpture in stone, metal and clay has evolved for hundreds of years. Fortunately, the energy, commitment, and vision of this young artist seem equal to the challenge."
Rice, R. "Sisir Sahana" 2004. Creative Glass Center of America. Wheaton Arts, NJ. website accessed May 2, 2009. http://www.wheatonarts.org/creativeglasscenteramerica/criticresidency/robinrice/sahanasisir
2004 Robin Rice:
"Einar and Jamex de la Torre, Fall 2004 Resident Fellows at the Creative Glass Center of America, are typical of some very successful artists today. They are cosmopolitan, articulate, and highly skilled. They work at a furious pace in locations around the world, including their studios in Ensenada, Mexico and San Diego: doing installations, demonstrations, public and individual pieces. A residency at CGCA permits the two a period for creative reflection which Jamex, the elder brother, notes is a first in their career. Here at Wheaton Village, they have a unique opportunity to experiment and refine techniques without the pressure of “way too many engagements.” However, anyone who observes them rapidly assembling substantial multi-part sculptures on the hot shop floor while accommodating a television interviewer and other visitors who want personal contact, recognizes the unmistakable fizzing champagne of celebrity. Such carnivalesque media multi-tasking is a reflection of the de la Torre’s own fantastical polycultural work. Though born in Mexico, they spent much of their early lives at school in the US. They were raised Catholic, but artists who make a sculptures like Los Testiculos de Dios and a worm-eaten satirical image of the Pope have clearly fallen away from the faith.
Jamex: “We went to college (California State University) back in the late ‘70’s, early ‘80’s. Art tended to be minimalist. It came to us that we were ‘Ultra-Baroque.’” This was the name they gave to an early show which traveled widely and helped to establish their reputations. At the time, their style was often understood as sophisticatedly folkloric, linked to Mesoamerican and Mestizo folk culture. It is, but the de la Torre’s critique of contemporary consumerism has become increasingly acknowledged by critics and strongly stated in their work. In an artists’ statement these brothers, who describe themselves as Mexican-American, though their parents are both Danish-Americans born in Mexico, admit to feeling a slight uneasiness about treating “the absurd pageantry of Catholicism and machismo” of Mexico and the “pornographic materialism [and] lingering Puritanism” of North America with “a certain irreverence,” though they spiritedly defend their irreverence as “a tool for reinvention.”
The polycultural sensibility of the de la Torres is shared by many artists today. They know almost too much. The conviction that there is one superior and proper mode of life is difficult to maintain in the face of one’s knowledge and experience of diverse functional societies, each with positive features and drawbacks.
Sometimes it is said that to know all is to forgive all. However, to know all is also to be driven from the paradise of certainty, of belonging. As an individual, a cosmopolitan artist may be quite sure who he or she is, but art-making tends to arise from a cultural center, a multi-faceted belief system which often includes religion. Are those who have experienced more doomed to the limbo of perpetual irony? There are more such individuals every day, especially in the internationalized world of glass. What remains valid for such artists?
Certainly, as the de la Torres will be the first to tell you, irony has its uses. In addition, there are constant anchoring features in an artist’s world. First, of course, there is technique. The mastery of technique is additive. Unlike religions, techniques do not cancel one another out.
De la Torre glass is like fusion cuisine: The ingredients are unexpected, a little off-center but surprisingly tasty, and most artfully garnished. It is pretty amazing to watch them fashion a flowered skull, a Day of the Dead sugar treat in hot glass, adding color to different elements and applying it hot to a large cross. Jamex points out that they do not use hot colored glass. “We always take color from the marver [by rolling the glass in frit] to be as direct and fresh as possible.” In exhibitions, crosses and images of vulvas are equally lavished with decorations of flowers and glittery accents.
The accretion of polymorpous and polycultural “Bit work,” applied cast or lamp-worked elements to hot blown glass: “That’s definitely our specialty,” says Jamex. He studied lamp working at CSU, concentrating on the figure executed in clear glass. About three years later, Einar came along and developed an interest in blown glass.
“There’s a strange reverence for the material. It’s eye-candy no doubt about that,” Einar acknowledges. But the ingredients on the de la Torre bill of fare don’t end with glass; video, assemblage and other sources are blended in. Many ambitious pieces are installations. Even the glass doesn’t necessarily end with objects made by the two brothers. At CGCA, they incorporated tchotchkes purchased at the local dollar store: glass corn, celery, and pineapples.
Beauty can mitigate the harshness of irony, but postmodern art, with its intellectual, anti-retinal bias, is somewhat ambivalent about beauty. But like sex, beauty will never go out of style, though ideas about what is most pleasing vary.
Jamex: “A lot of times we play with what’s ‘low class’ and try to make it elegant, We try to capture [the viewer] with the beauty of the material.”
Einar: “Art is elitist almost by nature. We have a real issue with taste. It’s a filter that’s more about class than anything else.” Einar believes that ugliness and beauty form a kind of circle. “Beauty goes so far it becomes ugly. There’s a sublime moment that things can start reaching around and touching the opposite pole.”
Irony can support or attack belief. The use of a symbol does not commit one to a belief in that symbol-system. More interesting, the ironic use of a symbol does not necessarily commit one to non-belief. This is evident in Andres Serrano’s notorious photograph Piss Christ. One interpretation of the photograph of a dramatically lit but cheap crucifix submerged in urine is that Serrano is reminding us that even the most debased objects may promote deep religious feelings.
Einar recalls their mother’s fondness for puns as a likely source for the brothers’ own interest in multiple layers of understanding. He recognizes that some people may get only one layer of the intended meaning. “Hopefully there’s more to it than one-liners.”
The de la Torres joke about “Waztecos, white Aztecs” from imaginary “Wazteco,” a region near Monterrey, who are infatuated with pre-Colombian culture and imagine they understand it.
“We’re gonna open a casino,” Einar laughs. “We’ll give you the money but we’ll take the human heart.” Ruby red hearts with applied blood vessels frequently figure in de la Torre work. The imagery has so many levels: human sacrifice in Christianity as well as the Aztec world or, as Einar suggests with the most conviction, “the classist sacrifice of the poor by the rich.” He reflects wryly on his own position as a working artist, perhaps dubious about satirizing the hand that feeds: “People with money buy your work.” Jamex is not concerned: “The irony is on them.”"
Rice, R. "Einar and Jamex de la Torre" Wheaton Arts Creative Glass Center of AMerica, NJ. 2004. website accessed May 2, 2009. http://www.wheatonarts.org/creativeglasscenteramerica/criticresidency/robinrice/delatorres
