1984 Clement Greenberg and Robert Kehlmann:
[Excerpted by ABJ Seattle Glass Online]
"Robert Kehlmann, editorial advisor to Glass Art Society Journal, interviewed Clement Greenberg on 19 May 1984, shortly after Greenberg's presentation at the Corning Conference. What follows is an edited transcript of their conversation. --Ed. [Robert C. Morgan]
Robert Kehlmann: When we were in Corning together for the jurying of 'New Glass Review 4' we took a walk through the museum. As I recall, you were particularly impressed by the galleries of ancient works.
Clement Greenberg: Yes, the lack of self-consciousness in the old art is remarkable. You see it written all over. You see self-consciousness in the contemporary work and you see it in the Galle exhibition that's on display now. Uneasy self-consciousness. Self-consciousness is always uneasy. Nineteenth century salon painting or sculpture wasn't so self-conscious but it was lost in a disarray of taste. At the same time a lot of nineteenth-century work is good...
... contrasting [twentieth-century work] with the Egyptian, the Greco-Roman, and other ancient glass, you feel there's no effort in the old work to make art...
... it just came from the natural order of things. Today, and I should have said this in my talk this morning, a glass artist or a ceramicist has to make an effort to make art. I'm speaking about art-art, not a good vessel or anything like that. It relates to the way painters and sculptors today make a desperate effort to be original. But it's not quite the same thing with glass and clay. I haven't really thought about it fully. I'll have to think about it some more...
How much of the unself-consciousness of the ancient pieces do you think relates to their functionality? They were made for a purpose, and as a result, they had a natural place in society. Most of the work in Corning's contemporary collection was ultimately made, I suppose, to be in a museum.
Yes but some of the old glass was done, I'm sure, just to be looked at. Like some of the old clay was just to be looked at. I have a friend in Utica who collects ancient glass. He's got delicious pieces that are just there to be looked at. You can't use them.
This is something other people have written about. It has to do with the aging of tradition. The aging of the Western tradition of art and of art in general. Western tradition is more than a thousand years old and you become conscious of it. It was noticed in the case of the Romans too. They inherited an old tradition, and they got 'arty' in a way, but they were so much less self-conscious than we are. We're the most self-conscious culture there ever was--self-inspecting and self-conscious. It stands to reason, because we're the latest...
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... How about Galle?...Can you remember other specific pieces that you liked?
If I only had a copy of the catalogue.
I have one here.
(The following comments are made while looking through the catalogue, Emile Galle: Dreams into Glass.)
In a piece like Cerebus he went wild with the painting, and it's damn interesting, but I think he paid no attention to the shape. He made a big mistake in Joan of Arc. The piece is Victorian in the wrong way. He makes mistakes all over the place. He has no discipline of taste, and that's part of what makes him extraordinary. I found myself liking him most when he was strict. You can say it's my modernist taste. I remember liking Magnolia. It's the clear glass in the piece--oh, I love the clear glass.
The success of Forest and Wildflowers depended upon the view. The problem is that he has some real illusionist painting and you begin looking at the painting instead of the vessel. The handles are wrong in Olives and Pines. I like the piece except for the handles. They don't belong. They're just stuck on. I though The Hazel Tree was one of the best things I saw in the exhibition, though the people I was with from your organization didn't like it at all.
Did you like it because of its shape?
Both the shape and the way he was discreet in coloring it. Again you can say it's my modern taste. Now I thought Thistles stank...
... In Beetle Vase, he should have taken the beetle out along with that heavy lip.
But the beetle is the subject of the work. That's why he made it.
He had a beautiful green there, and the beetle gets in the way of it. His decoration often gets in the way of some of his colors...
... What did you think of the "Mushroom Lamp"?
I thought that one really stank.
For the average person coming to the exhibition, I suspect the "Mushroom Lamp" would be the premier piece. It has colors. It has light inside it. It's a real eye-catcher.
The average person, like my neighbors in Norwich, would rather come this glass museum than walk around the block to see a painting.
Why is that? Do you think it's the material itself that just has that type of attraction?
Yes. Especially for the women...
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... Perhaps you're suggesting that someone working sculpturally with glass shouldn't necessarily be looking at the precedents in glass but rather those in modern sculpture. And someone working two-dimensionally should be looking at the precedents in painting rather than at contemporary German designers or Tiffany and La Farge.
I couldn't agree with you more. You said it though, and you're right. You're absolutely right. I could say that to you about your rather good piece in the Corning Collection. You should have looked more at what's called color-field painting--that awful label--and I'd say you would have made a better picture if you had left out
the whole upper-right hand corner... just omitted it; left it blank and not worried about the corners in a cubist way...
... A couple of the three-dimensional pieces I saw in the museum [Corning] would have been better in steel. The artists didn't realize this. They would have been way better off without the transparency. There was one piece, and unfortunately I don't remember the artist's name, that had two definite planes coming together. If the piece were made in steel the artist would have made his point. But the fact that one plane is showing through the other spoils what he did. He should have known that if one plane is going to show through the other, you work with that in mind--you exploit it. You turn a liability into an asset; it's been done in art all along.
I suspect you're arguing in favor of artistic flexibility. Aren't you saying that if you're going to be an artist, be an artist--don't be a glass artist unless glass is appropriate to what you're doing.
What I should have said this morning in my talk is that you glass artists don't know about the best art being done in your time. You go along with Kim Levin. But that's what's happened in art since the early sixties; it's this trendy stuff....
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...I felt I could stand behind most of the items we chose [for New Glass Review 4]. But it only came to me today in the museum that there's not yet any major art in glass--and i insist upon the distinction between major and minor, as I do in painting and sculpture. Not yet...
... I saw Tim Scott use Plexiglas, if you can call that glass, in his best works. Tim, being a defeatist, dropped that, but I think some of the best pieces made in this century were the big pieces Tim Scott made using Plexiglas. The material sort of delivered something to him, released something in him.
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...I think there's more of an immediate future for glass in the pictorial direction than in the direction of sculpture.
Pictorial being two-dimensional?
Yes.
I'm inclined to agree with you.
God, what you can do with glass by making a picture out of it!
Can you think of any specific contemporary painters who you'd like to see try their hand in the medium?
Any good ones, except the representational ones. If you begin doing illusionistic painting in glass you get into fancy effects.
So you think the material lends itself more toward abstraction?
Absolutely.
You made the comment in your talk this morning, and I assume you were talking more about sculpture than about two-dimensional work, that the human figure done in glass tends to become an objet d'art.
So far that's been the case.
Is that a comment on the material or the scale of most works in glass?
It has to do with the fact that the material attracts too much attention to itself in a way that clay, stone, and bronze
don't. It all relates to translucency, transparency, and so forth. Now someone will come along and someday and do
the human figure, the animal figure, in glass, and they'll bring it off. But it hasn't been brought off yet, and
I'd say, as I said in my talk, that the way for glass to become high art is through abstraction. In doing
landscape in the flat glass you'd work for a piquant effect, but it's a kind of piquancy you wouldn't want.
But still and all, you can do anything in art...
... I appreciated your response to the question this morning about why good criticism isn't written about glass. You said, "Make glass good enough and it will be written about."
Yes. It's the art that pulls. The critics can't resist when that happens. You don't wait for the critics to decide, "Today I'm going to write about it." The art pulls. Critics don't decide anything...they follow."
Kehlemann, R. and Greenberg, C. "An Interview with Clement Greenberg." May 1984. Clement Greenberg: Late Writings. edited by Robert C. Morgan. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. 2003.
