1984

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.

1984 Clement Greenberg:

"Five years ago almost to the day, I spoke at a conference on ceramic art held at Syracuse University. I know only a little more about clay that I do about glass, but I could see what was on the minds of most of the conferees: the status of their medium, ‘graduating’ from craft to fine art. And how did ceramists hope to get that done? By becoming full-fledged sculptors or even pictorial artists. That’s what was conveyed to me.

This might look like, but really isn’t, an academic question. There has been ceramic sculpture all along, long before the beginning of urban art in Mesopotamia and elsewhere. But it was still felt that clay hadn’t yet asserted itself in its own nonutilitarian right. The question was whether ceramics as a craft could become ore than that, could become a ‘sculptural genre’ (as Garth Clark put it); whether ceramists could make high sculpture and remain ceramists instead of becoming sculptors who happen to use clay as a medium. This is no mere terminological quibble. There is a distinction between ceramists who make sculpture and sculptors who resort to clay (as they would wax or another medium). It’s there in the way craft lines are drawn, there in the minds of ceramists and in the minds of sculptors too.

The case may be different with glass, but not radically so, though it does look more ‘difficult’. Glass carries fewer reminiscences of fine-art tradition. It’s only relatively late that medieval stained glass gained the status of fine art as distinct from decoration, and it has done so as pictorial art, not glassmaking. There has been no equivalent to stained glass in glass sculpture, no equally large and splendid equivalent. Objects sculpted in glass remained objets d’art, curiosities for the most part. True, this was due in some part to the small size to which glass objects were confined in the past. But I think there was still another reason. Experience shows that human and animal forms sculpted in glass tend to have about them a quality of tour de force, of displayed skill and also of improbability—improbability of the kind that ‘simple’ people marvel at as at all ‘improbable’ feats of skill, beautiful and unbeautiful.

Such was the plight of glass art as I see it. I say ‘was’ advisedly. For now abstractness has come to the rescue; abstractness as other than decoration. A sculpted work in glass that doesn’t represent anything seen n nature can escape the cluster of associations just mentioned. An abstract object in glass stands freer, has more of the autonomy that belongs to fine art. Pictorial glass, too, stands freer when it’s abstract. (But I’m tentative in saying this last, for I’m not so sure that pictorial glass needs liberation the way sculpted glass does: I can imagine a fauve glass painting, with color in, not just on, the glass what would compare with anything done in the same vein on canvas.) I entertain the notion in any cast that abstractness may bring greater benefit to glass than to any other medium in terms of aesthetic results.

But will the advent of ambitiously realized glass sculpture and pictorial art erase the distinction such as that which persists in ceramics between craft and high fine art? Sheer quality would, I feel, do that, in glass as in ceramics. And anyhow that distinction is becoming beside the point, as well it should, no matter what happen with respect to aesthetic quality. The consciousness of that distinction is becoming more and more—to adapt a fashionable Marxist term—a false consciousness.

Ceramic artist complain about lacking serious critical attention. I say make art good enough and it won't be denied such attention in the long run (and serious art nowadays, in most mediums, demands the long run—by craft lines—by the notion of ‘craft’—which may be the hardest thing of all to do, harder even that making superior art.

P.S. it was reported to me after I gave this talk in Corning that many in the audience felt I’d been patronizing, condescending, in what I said. Maybe. All I can say in self-justification is that I’d not yet seen much in recent glass art that stood up against the best in recent sculpture and painting in their conventional mediums. The note of exhortation with which my talk ended must have reflected that. When you exhort artists it means you don’t yet like enough what they’ve done.”

Greenberg, C. "Glass as High Art." 1984-85. published in "Clement Greenberg Late Writings." edited by Robert C. Morgan. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. 2003. pp 137-9.