2009

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. The years are not in chronological order, there are posts from 1886 to 2009, you may search by year, i.e. "1981" in the search box.

2009 Roberta Smith:

"One of the most charged and polymorphous five-letter words in aesthetic discourse on a good day, craft has become especially slippery. Until lately the word was a pejorative in the contemporary-art world (and still is in some quarters), a code word for crunchy, multigrain hand-madeness.

In its world, the word craft tends to be cherished with a defensive reverence. It connotes a series of traditions nearly as old as human life, a vocabulary of skills and techniques that can’t be faked and the raison d’être of a vastly superior aesthetic endeavor, although a little recognition from the larger art world would be nice.

But the ground shifts. Peter Voulkos’s improvisational ceramic sculptures of the 1950s bade function adieu and eventually entered the history of Abstract Expressionism. One of his students, Ken Price, is represented by Matthew Marks, where Jasper Johns exhibits. George Ohr’s pots, the quilts of Gee’s Bend, the Weiner Werkstätte, the textile sculptures of Lenore Tawney are all part of collective art-world knowledge. The craze for all things 1950s didn’t hurt.

Today many aspects of craft have been absorbed — minus the reverence — by contemporary art, now considered in its postmedium phase. Embroidery, quilting, woodworking and glass blowing as art no longer surprise. A penchant for glazed and unglazed clay is especially evident of late, thanks to artists like Arlene Shechet, Lynda Benglis, Beverly Semmes, Nicole Cherubini, Jessica Jackson Hutchins and Sterling Ruby, who tend to push beyond traditional techniques in ways that might even take Voulkos aback.

Except for Voulkos, you’ll find none of these artists at SOFA, probably by mutual consent. Here the art-craft divide seems as firm as ever and thus especially interesting to contemplate.

If you mostly frequent art-world fairs, buckle up. You won’t be ticking off blue-chip or hot new names along these aisles, nor snoozing through stretches of bland derivatives. Nothing is neutral here, especially for first-timers. It’s either love or hate, and if it isn’t mostly hate, have your eyes, or mind, examined. But visual harassment can be stimulating. What good is taste if it doesn’t betray you? Hate can turn to love with just one close look, or maybe a few.

Harassments and betrayals abound at SOFA. The F for functional notwithstanding, far too much here seems generated by the conviction that an object made to serve no purpose whatever is automatically art. Too often the result is just really, really bad, whatever you call it: schlocky, oblivious of history, full of empty technique.

Art doesn’t have to do anything except convince you that it is art. Some works that succeed are historical, like the quiet but assertive and functional vessels of Lucy Rie (1902-95), one of the founders of modern British ceramics. Her influence is reflected at the stand of Clare Beck and Adrian Sassoon, in the glowing yellow porcelain tea set by Rupert Spira and the Morandi-like arrangements of Julian Stair. Kate Malone mines several degrees of exaggeration with large-scale vases and pitchers further bulked up to resemble pine cones or snail colonies.

Technical feats are not by definition empty. Proof positive is the Heller Gallery’s dazzling display of new work by Lino Tagliapietra. At 75, he is still extending the rich decorative-glass tradition of Venice (Murano, actually), even though he does most of his work in the United States. With their sinuous, exaggerated vase shapes and suspensions of bright patterns and shapes, they constitute their own category of Op Art.

Smith, Roberta. "Why Craft was never a four-letter word." NY Times, April 17, 2009. accessed April 18, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/18/arts/design/18sofa.html?pagewanted=1&adxnnlx=1240084826-E6Z3Hsy71Vb13ygXRILwEg

1985

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.

1985 Marsha Miro:

“For the 13th time, Ferdinand Hampson, director of Habatat Galleries in Lathrup Village, has gathered glass art from around the country for his annual invitational exhibition. The goal is to show what’s been done with glass during the year. But the topic of conversation is the state of the art—glass art—in the wake of recent talk in the art world that the glass-as-art movement is dead, dismissing it as a revolution that died of stagnation. Such pronouncements are pretty silly stuff. No one told Howard Ben Tre that he better stop making his seven-feet-high columns of cast green glass and copper. The Tre column at Habatat has a presence, an aura, that defies categorization, that simply says, “I’m right. I have a right to be created, to exist”—for the sake of beauty, mystery and power. What else justifies the making of art?”

…Glass artists, for the most part, are decorative artists—as compared with fine artists like painters or sculptors—but decorative art should not be considered a pejorative term. Unfortunately, the term has acquired a negative connotation under the precepts of modern art. Glass as art can succeed by being precious, or pretty or ornamental if it’s good and indicative of an individual. At Habatat, Joel Philip Myers’ vase with its stretched proportions is a fine example. So are William Dexter’s shimmering collapsed bowls and Harvey Littleton’s new vase with its veiling of constrasting colors. Then there are the innovative works, which are experiments within the tradition of the medium—like Dan Dailey’s unforgettable red bowl with a monster carved in it; Christopher Ries’ golden egg, dealing like a prism with the qualities of like; Richard Marquis’ teapots that are a funky conglomeration; Sidney Hutter’s stacks of glass building into vase forms and Michael Cohn’s “Space Cups,” which continue to explore the cup form using constructivist and futurist ideas.

Finally there are the purely innovative works, which strike out beyond the traditional, like Hank Adams’ “Heads,” which contain information inside; Stephen Dee Edwards’ sea creatures dressed in metal; Michael Pavlik’s dense wheel forms; James Watkins’ exploration of shadows and painted shapes in glass; Sydney Cash’s pointillist picture of glass and David Huchthausen’s architectural structres.

Every one of these artists is pushing on in style and becoming more sophisticated in command of the materials.

To say the glass movement is stagnant is absurd. This show demonstrates, as did the last, that contemporary glass art is maturing, ripening. Early stages of the movement may have been fresher in that everything was the first time, but there is excitement in the work today; but it is a different more complex excitement, as a result of the years of experience.”

“Status of glass is unshattered” by Marsha Miro. Detroit Free Press, Sunday April 7, 1985. Located at http://www.habatat.com/article_detail.asp?id=3
Accessed April 15, 2009.


1985 Robert Kehlmann:

"The founders of GAS insisted upon a certain exclusivity by limiting its focus to blown glass. Not until 1978 were stained glass artists invited to speak at a GAS conference. Gradually, as the society's membership grew, collectors, gallery directors, art critics and others whose expertise relates only tangentially to glass have addressed the membership from the conference podiums. Thus did 'glass arts' evolve into a multi-faceted category....

...The Bauhaus idea that well-crafted and well-designed production work can be as pleasing and as valid and relevant as one-of-a-kind work forms the keystone of GAS's approach to the glass arts...During the organization's early years, technical presentations were of interest to virtually all who attended the conferences, but today they are rarely brought before the conference as a whole...As the society's membership has grown, issues of aesthetics have assumed greater importance....

...craftsmen tend to emphasize process when delivering slide presentations of their work...more attention to how an object is crafted than on why it looks the way it does. This fascination with the how rather than the why accounts in part for the observed absence of a solid body of criticism. Craftsmen must assume a portion of the responsibility for this void, for critics often take their cues from the words of the artists whose work they discuss. The few critics who deal with crafts tend to be descriptive, emphasizing their fascination with materials and process....

...The worlds of crafts and commerce are increasingly related, yet it remains unclear to what degree and in what manner these worlds should mix in the context of an educational service organization. These are but a few of the questions the society--and other craft groups--must face in the future."

"The Glass Art Society: Profile of a Changing Craft Organization." Kehlmann, Robert. American Craft. April/May 1985.

2001

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.

2001 Sylva Petrova:

“It appears that means (craftsmanship and technology) themselves become the goals and therefore many glassworks lose one aspect that everyone pretends to include in them: artistic expression… It may be this fact that makes some of modern art’s world renowned personalities convinced that glass as a whole does not deserve their attention.”

Petrova, S. Czech Glass. Gallery Prague, 2001.

2001 Sheila Farr:

"Tacoma is building a $63 million Museum of Glass, scheduled to open next summer, and with a name like that, you'd expect the first show to be, well - glass, right?

To that director Josi Callan has a prompt reply: "Don't forget the colon."

That colon precedes the rest of the museum's title: International Center for Contemporary Art.

And one of the museum's opening exhibits will have nothing at all to do with glass. Expect that kind of programing to continue.

At a walk-through of the site yesterday, Callan and architect Arthur Erickson unveiled a glimpse at a bold structure that will offer more than a place to display and create glass art. It's evolving as a wide-ranging institution that could offer strong competition to other regional museums, including the nearby Tacoma Art Museum.

It's a long way from the seven-year-old original concept as The Chihuly Center for Glass, Callan said.

"We don't use the words `glass art' or `glass artist' here," she insisted yesterday. "We feel that it marginalizes the artists." Although glass impresario Dale Chihuly was associated with the original idea, he plays no role in the museum now. "He's just a good buddy, a good friend," Callan insisted."

Farr, Sheila. "Museum on the rise Tacoma building has art of glass ... and more. " The Seattle Times (Seattle, WA). (Sept 7, 2001): B1. General OneFile. Gale. Seattle Public Library. 1 Apr. 2009. Gale Document Number:CJ78021210

2001 Matthew Kangas:

"Two artists of differing styles and materials, Hank Murta Adams at Elliott Brown Gallery and John Moilanen at Two Bells Tavern, offer their versions of representational art. Both condense and abbreviate recognizable imagery, but with distinct results.

Adams, 45, lives in Troy, N.Y., but has long ties to Seattle and the Pilchuck Glass School, where he studied in 1981 after graduating from Tennessee Tech in Cookeville, Tenn. He also spent significant time (1988-1994) as head designer at Blenko Glass Co. in Milton, W.Va., and has had solo exhibits of his cast-glass sculptures in New York City, San Francisco and Vienna.

Adams' status as a major American glass artist has a lot to do with how he handles a perplexing problem: how to bring up the size and scale of work that tends to be diminutive due to technical details such as the size of glass-furnace openings. Unlike Pilchuck artists Dale Chihuly or William Morris, Adams is not a glassblower but a glass-caster. In his new work, he attempts once again to complicate people's expectations of what glass can be. He does so, this time for his fourth Seattle show since 1986, by combining cast-glass elements with cast-plaster ones, and assembling them all with copper staples and wires.

Although all the new works share this material combination, there is no sense of the usual unending series approach, where glass artists do the same piece over and over. Instead, some of the works are wall-mounted, some pedestal size. Some employ found objects for which molds have been made before the glass or plaster is poured. Not wholly original, Adams is borrowing his found-object idea from better-known glass artists like Howard Ben Tré, Richard Posner and, above all, the late Italo Scanga, but he brings to the process his own identity.

In a few of the wall pieces, such as "Isolate," "Block Trinity" and "Knuckles," black and white glass and plaster shapes are in symmetrical compositions closer to design than abstract art.

The pedestal pieces fare better, mixing references to antique American glass bottles, ornamental Jell-O molds, animal decoys and even perhaps a well-known Swedish vodka bottle. In these, the Philadelphia native faces a bigger challenge for sculptors — how to make the front and back of the sculpture equally interesting. Despite silhouettes reinforced by black and white colors, Adams falls short of fully addressing this crucial problem. "Podsticksweetie Cluster" and "Spindlecluster" overcome it, however, and pass the 360-degree, walk-around test: Everything looks good from every angle.

Even better, "Bombcluster" and "Can Call" transcend the arbitrary look of many of the assemblages and suggest, respectively, spent nuclear-waste storage containers and a pile of ominous, portable explosives. If Adams could make his art more issue-oriented — a big order for business-as-usual decorative glass — and build on the strengths of "Bombcluster," the evidence of technical fabrication could be outweighed by deeper meaning."

Kangas, M. "Painter, glass artist break out new works." Friday, November 2, 2001. The Seattle Times.Accessed April 22, 2009. http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=20011102&slug=visart02

2001 James Yood:

"Many art media concern themselves with color and light, but at the end of the day these are the trump cards of glass. In no other medium do color and light so suggestively interweave, shifting, changing and endlessly cross-pollinating. Among the most nuanced seekers after the eternally sensual and elusive mysteries of light and color in glass is Stephen Rolfe Powell, whose upbeat vessels for more than a decade have bubbled, blistered and erupted in fugues of chromatic suggestion. He can be seen as an accomplished color-field painter, though he neither paints nor makes color-fields. Instead, his world provides globular prismatic bursts, an irrepressible ebullience of hue and a tintinnabulation of tincture that maintains, as Van Gogh put it, that "color expresses something by itself."

But what's the point of color without form? The pointillist play of Powell's blots of pure color is tremendously energized and reinforced by the very shapes they come to sheathe and define. He makes vessels, round and bulbous, curvaceous and ribald, replete with generous Intimations of the sensuality of the human body. Their lobes and swellings inevitably suggest buttocks or breasts or testicles, the soft and vulnerable zones of sexuality, in a warm eroticism heightened by the fantastic color scheme. The weight of these lobes, the sense of their being pulled down by gravity, is countered by the exquisite tension of Powell's attenuated and elongated necks, which strain upward in some Parmigianino rhythm, as if these vessels were simultaneously bulb and sprout. Through these forms Powell makes color volumetric, enhancing its possibilities[...]

[...]There have been subtle shifts in his work, as Powell tries to push the edges of his process and explore new strategies. The necks of his vessels, which a decade ago were modestly tapered, have recently been stretched close to breaking point and often are as long as the bodies they surmount. He has tried to create larger murrine to ease the transition from neck to body, to have the color of the neck ooze into the body in some handsome attenuation. And his color too is intensifying, as he shifts from translucency to opacity within the same piece.

His titles exude the "keep-on-truckin"' amiability that is at the core of his work. Usually three words long, these curious names-Tangerine Cheeks Smith, Piranha Gasp Johnson, Purple Zippy Mania, Naive Laughing Cheeks, Undulating Groan Jones, Purple Aloof Cleavage, Pyronic Marilyn Monroe- are important to Powell for their free-and-easy patter. A word or two in a title does describe some aspect of the piece-a shape or color or feeling-but the total effect recalls the 1970s sensibility in which this artist was formed.

Things are good for Powell-his work is successful in the marketplace, he enjoys teaching and lives with his wife and two sons on a 44-acre farm outside Danville. He recently co produced a documentary on the Muranese glass master Lino Tagliapietra's visit to Kentucky and is looking forward to an exhibition of his own work at Galleria Rossella Junck in Venice next year. There is not an iota of fatigue or closure in his commitment to his quest, to have color sing again, to create in glass some vestige of the pursuits he sees in artists such as Mark Rothko, Claude Monet, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Georges Seurat. Colorists, it is sometimes observed, are born not made Their pursuit of subtlety and beauty, their search for the optical exhilaration that begins where language ends and taste begins, certainly stretches as far as Stephen Rolfe Powell's cooling pools of breathtaking color in Kentucky."

Yood, J. "Stephen Rolfe Powell." American Craft. June/July 2001. http://www.stephenrolfepowell.com/articles/amercraft/index.html
Accessed April 23, 2009.

2001 Robin Rice:

""The end result is what I aim for -- not the perfection of 'Wow, what an amazing technical feat!' " explains Beth Lipman, a fall, 2001 Fellow at the Creative Glass Center of America. Nevertheless, Lipman undeniably wows viewers with the glittering virtuosity of her three-dimensional recreations of 17th and 18th century still life paintings, each incorporating 50 to 100 pieces of glass.

Much of Lipman's earlier work dealt with abundance and excess and, especially, food, which she values as a "universal known thing." An early collaboration with a fellow student combined real food like melted sugar and jelly beans with glass images of lobsters, bread loaves, and fish. The paintings which serve as models for Lipman's current series, "The Still Life Revisited," are rich with meaning and sensuous surfaces. On one level, still life painting traditionally pays homage to the bounty of nature, God's gift to humanity. More superficially but inescapably, these paintings recorded the affluent circumstances of the artist or patron who commissioned them: fine linens, crystal and fresh, abundant food, the stuff of life. Countering this show of vanity, many historic still lifes were vanitas paintings, reminders of the brevity of life, which emphasized fleeting material pleasure as a contrast to infinite, ineffable spiritual joy.

Representations of decadence, decay and waste are reminders of mortality. They include tipped-over wine glasses, insects and the damage caused by them, as well as broken stems and bruises. Split melons in John F. Francis' Still Life with Fruit, one of the works Lipman is recreating at CGCA, seem almost eviscerated, while cascading grapes hang like bloody gobbets. Just as the bloom on a peach fades, so does youth and life. These paintings remind us that though life may be pleasant at the moment and possessions plentiful, "You can't take it with you." Yet, paradoxically, although the subjects of the paintings, their owners, and authors are dust today, the represented scene remains vivid and fresh for our contemplation.

At a third remove from the original living fruit, Lipman's glass versions are even more ambiguous. Glass is solid and almost imperishable, though fragile by definition. Moreover, representing painted objects in clear glass, as she does in her reconstruction of the Francis painting, perversely dissolves solidity in an optically challenging maze of reflections and transparencies. "It's about the essence of the lusciousness of what's going on," Lipman says.

She chose the Francis piece because, John Francis (1808-1886), the most famous American still life painter of his day, lived and worked in Philadelphia where Lipman plans to show this sculpture at the Mangel Gallery in early 2002. For this show, she's also basing sculptures on works by another important Philadelphia still life artist Raphaelle Peale (1774-1825).

The subject of still life attracted Lipman in part because it has always been considered a secondary or lower form of painting -- not as elite, challenging or content-driven as portraiture or "history painting," for example. Glass and fiber (Lipman's other primary medium), are often considered second-class materials for fine arts; so she sees them as akin to still life.

Furthermore, Lipman explains, "I'm a woman working in a material (glass) that 30 years ago a woman wasn't allowed to touch." Her observation reminds us that for centuries aspiring women painters were not allowed to work from the nude (to protect their "modesty"), but still life was considered a suitably ladylike subject and one which was not overly challenging.

Nevertheless, Lipman's glass still lives are challenging and labor intensive. Transcending the pejorative "crafts" label, she presents her work as a consummate complete sculpture. In the hot shop, Lipman works almost expressionistically, knifing a gather of soft solid glass on the end of a metal rod into rugged facets to suggest rather than represent individual, life-size grapes and turning out dozens of peaches in short order. "I'm striving for drawing in glass, not an academic rendition but a translation of objects in my voice and my material." She is not bound to functional perfection when making the props like baskets, spoons and sugar bowls. Lids lack flanges, baskets lack symmetry and slumped spoons are a little flat. In the finished work, they will not be handled. The carefully calculated arrangements of glass objects are permanently mounted on tables built by woodworker Richard McCoy to Lipman's specifications.

An admirer of outsider art, Lipman describes herself as a "craft child," who frequently helped her mother with tole painting and other similar projects. At one time, she disdained the decorative "country" craft aesthetic, but now she respects "the humility of making utilitarian decorative objects" and freely borrows useful techniques. For example, she painted crosshatch tole stokes in fire-on enamels to give a basket in the Francis work a sense of texture.

The most ambitious piece she began at CGCA was a version of Wolfgang Heimbach's Table Still Life with Maid behind a Window. "This piece will be a summary of how I feel about the viewer interacting with the work," she explains. The glass fruit in the McCoy's wooden shadow box will again be clear. In the painting, a maid behind a cracked window eyes the fruit, perhaps covetously. In Lipman's version, the window will be a mirror reflecting the viewer's contemplation of her three-dimensional banquet, a frozen ghostly array of glittering overabundance in which food and consumption have political and social implications. Though it has plenty of intellectual content, Lipman's sculpture is powerfully seductive. When the viewer is literally part of the picture, it is complete and instantly contemporary."

Rice, Robin. "Beth Lipman" Wheaton Arts, NJ. Creative Glass Center of America. 2001. website accessed May 2, 2009. http://www.wheatonarts.org/creativeglasscenteramerica/criticresidency/robinrice/lipmanbeth