HH: "But, you know, we were used to teachers that were trained and Harvey was totally untrained, so he was kind of an anomaly in this world of trained teachers. He could teach ceramics because he had studied with Maija Grotel at Cranbrook [Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI], and so on. So he knew the formality of it. But Harvey was inventing this as he went along. We were basically reinventing the wheel, and Harvey was the hub and we were the spokes.
And I think that is in itself an amazing accomplishment. And the fact that we became disciples-not of glass, but we became disciples of Harvey-it was Harvey's philosophy-he was wrong about a few things, but they were inconsequential things. We figured out he was wrong, and we had no problems with figuring out that there was some things that were wrong.
For instance-like the potters, he wanted us to do it alone. He didn't want us to work in teams like they did in factories. He wanted to separate everything from the factory. He wanted a totally different image and he wanted us to work alone. He didn't want anyone bringing punties or bits and stuff like that. And we figured out pretty quick, you can't do it, you know. You can do it alone, but it is counterproductive.
And so time went on and people would come through, and Fritz showed up all of the time with his yellow Suburban and he would-he was always one step ahead of us. He figured things out-he was really good with his hands. And we invented glassblowing in the way that we did it. I mean, if you think of what was going on at the time with the incredible Italian stuff that was going on in Murano [Venice, Italy] and Sweden and Germany and-there was some incredible glass being blown. But we were blowing early American glass. We were blowing, as we eventually called them-I mean, these were just these misshapen things, but the thrill of being able to drink something out of what you made.
We used to go to Jingle's Tap, which was right next door. You would go out the back door and Jingle's had this bar. And we would bring our mugs, and he would take them and fill them beer and charge us for the beer, and we get like probably three ounces of beer in the mug, but it was exciting.
I was only there a year. The other guys were there a few years, but that one year as Harvey's assistant out on the farm was very interesting. I ground and polished a lot of Harvey's work, and Harvey was very serious about what he was doing. I wasn't a great fan of his aesthetic, but I don't know really what aesthetic I was comparing it to. I didn't know really what I was looking at.
What I did know that moved me to stay in glass, though, was when I saw the work of Erwin Eisch. And I was pretty familiar with art forms-different periods of time and art movements. And when I saw Erwin's work and I saw this German Expressionism in glass and the plasticity of the material that he was able to elicit from it, I thought, wow, there is some potential to this."
Oral history interview with Henry Halem, 2005 May 14, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/oralhistories/transcripts/halem05.htm
No comments:
Post a Comment