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.
2006 National Endowment for the Arts:
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| Artist Mitchell Gaudet applies the finishing touches to a sculpture in the Museum of Glass hot shop. Photo courtesy of the Museum of Glass |
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Although glass making might often be thought of more as a craft than an art form, the Museum of Glass, which opened in July 2002, celebrates the contribution glass artists have made to contemporary art. In its three galleries and surrounding outdoor space, the museum presents exhibitions and installations in glass, mixed media with glass, and in other media by internationally recognized artists, bringing in more than 170,000 people annually. The museum also houses the world’s largest hot shop amphitheater, which allows visitors to watch as many renowned and emerging guest artists create their artworks.
In FY 2006, the Museum of Glass received an NEA Access to Artistic Excellence grant of $35,000 for its 2006 Visiting Artist Program in which 20 artists from both the United States and around the world participated in five-day residencies at the museum.
Celebrated Czech artist René Roubícek’s residency from April 12-16 coincided with the exhibition, Czech Glass, 1945 – 1980: Design in an Age of Adversity. During his residency, Roubícek worked with fellow Czech artists Petr Novotny and Jirí Pacinek in the museum’s hot shop, creating bowls and vases, glass clarinets, and 10-foot-tall glass columns. All three artists participated in a panel discussion on their experiences working in the changing Czech political environment.
During another artist residency in August 2006, Mitchell Gaudet created a series of bowls and house forms with shapes, colors, and textures inspired by the ruined areas of New Orleans, his hometown. His personal photographs taken of both the destruction and recovery efforts in New Orleans were displayed on a big screen in the hot shop while he worked."
NEA "NEA Spotlight: Museum of Glass (Takoma [sic], WA)." 2006 Annual Report quoted on NEA website. Accessed June 19, 2009. http://www.nea.gov/features/storiesCMS/story.php?id=2008_02_02
Also supported in 2006 by the NEA were Pilchuck Glass School and Creative Glass Center:
"Pilchuck Glass School
Seattle, WA
$30,000
To support a summer artist residency program. Ten distinguished artists whose medium is not glass will be invited to one of the country's preeminent glassworking facilities.
Wheaton Village, Inc. (on behalf of Creative Glass Center)
Millville, NJ
$15,000
To support a residency program for emerging and mid-career glass artists. Artists will be provided with housing, a stipend, studio facilities, and technical assistance to work in glass."
NEA Visual Arts Grants 2006. accessed June 19, 2009. http://www.nea.gov/grants/recent/disciplines/Visualarts/06visual.html
2006 John Perreault:
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Kiki Smith: Lilith, 1994. Siliconbronze and glass.
Most art critics and art journalists avoid art issues. The products are described, sometimes adequately, sometimes not. Meanings are avoided, possibly because in most cases there are none. This might have been understandable in a time like the '80s, when art issues almost sank the ship, but nowadays, when the only issue is whether or not the art fairs will kill off Chelsea, we could use a few issues again.
"Kiki Smith: A Gathering, 1980--2005," which originated at the Walker Art Center and is now at the Whitney in New York (through February 11), brings up a lot of issues that some, I fear, would like to forget. That there is more going on in Smith's art than in the luxury products or investment markers now being offered in most galleries drives some people nuts.
Just when you thought all that feminist stuff had disappeared, here it is again. And more. To put it bluntly, does the body as an art topic still have legs? Is sex and gender passé? What do women artists want? What is the relationship of the body to language, to myth? Why are craft materials and craft techniques more or less still forbidden in the art world? What is an oeuvre? A signature style? What is the relationship of biography to photography? Who's image am I? How can pain and fear be expressed in art? Grief?
Also, now that we know that a major influence on Smith has been Nancy Spero, when will we get the Spero survey we deserve? Can we look at Smith through Spero and Spero's Artaud lenses? Dare we compare Smith to Beuys? Or is that like comparing hares and coyotes to wolves? And, in terms of materials, is glass the new fat?
A once-upon-a-time fan -- at least I think he was such -- attacked me at a party by saying that he liked reading me but that I was always solving problems he didn't know he had.
Answer: And now you know you have them, so you had better start thinking.
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Kiki Smith: Tale, 1992. Beeswax, microcrystaline wax, pigment, and papier-mache. Not at Whitney.
Birds Flying Around in Her House
A fellow art critic recently catalogued 34 materials used by Smith in the Whitney show, leaving out glass. How could he ignore glass? I counted 14 pieces made of glass. Invisible glass. Evil glass, I guess. The same writer, glorying in a not very funny paradox, calls Smith a major figure who makes minor art. Is her use of craft materials and methods what makes her minor? I also detect his usual loathing of the political. What else could calling Smith the "leading light of communally minded downtown avant-gardes" mean? Was there something wrong with being against the U.S. Nicaragua incursion or calling attention to AIDS?
One reason Smith is major is that she is fearless when it comes to materials, no matter how despised or humble. And, as the exhibition shows quite clearly, she employs beeswax, glass, clay, fabric and paper toward astoundingly expressive ends. If anyone thinks her work is just about material and form, then he needs his eyes examined. There are reasons for body parts and full-body casts, for representations of body fluids and eventually monsters, myths, and magical beasts.
Three of Smith's most powerful nudes are not included in the survey at the Whitney --- Pee Body, 1992; Untitled (Train), 1993; and Tale, 1992. The first two are made of wax and glass beads. In the first, yellow glass beads clearly represent urine; in the second red ones emerge as menstrual fluid. In her catalog essay "Unholy Postures: Kiki Smith and the Body," art historian Linda Nochlin is particularly enamored, if that's the right word, of Tale, which depicts another naked woman, but with a long tail of excrement coming out of the appropriate opening. It is a shame these sculptures were not included, but obviously there's still enough indelicate material to discombobulate delicate souls. Even empty bottles labeled with the names of various body fluids ---Untitled, 1987, originally shown at MoMA-are enough to disturb.
Some are also strangely offended, it appears, by Smith's high visibility. She was indeed carried aloft as Art Goddess in Francis Alÿs' 2002 art parade from Manhattan to Queens, when part of the MoMA permanent collection was temporarily moved. There is also no denying she is the daughter of Tony Smith, who, by the way, will be seen as one of the great sculptors of our time, along with his daughter.
Smith claims not to have been reacting against her father's clean, clear, abstract, geometric sculptures -- she and her sisters even helped with making the cardboard maquettes, a story everyone repeats -- but instead was influenced by his devotion to art. Wouldn't this unfamilial devotion be annoying to a child? Perhaps she protests too much. She didn't start making art until he had passed on. The sons and daughters of famous fathers or mothers (I've known a few) have a hard go of it; don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Any material or leg-up advantage is cancelled by the hard-act-to-follow syndrome or simply the normal need for approval.
Smith, who never went to Yale, or Rhode Island School of Design, or Columbia Teachers College, or any other art school, never felt the need for a proper studio and to this day blends living and working. And, of course, when required she works at foundries, residencies and workshops. You are not expected to pour your own bronze or blow your own glass. Sewing and drawing is possible at home, as it were, but other forms of making are more specialized, and you need furnaces and people with specialized skills. Minimalism made outsourcing a visible part of its aesthetic. Kiki inherits that, but gives it her own, handmade twist.
If nothing else, one of Kiki Smith's great contributions to art culture is this fact: artists don't need big clean studios. Perhaps we can bury that requirement once and for all. If you can't imagine how an artwork will look in a gallery without an ersatz gallery to see it in, then you shouldn't be looking at art. Too often, dealers, curator, and collectors require the perfect white-walled studio, or they do not take the artist seriously -- even though all it means is a mommy or daddy who can come up with the bucks.
I remember an artist whose work I had followed for years telling me a horror story. He came from a poor background and liked working in a modest, cluttered apartment. In fact, his apartment on the Lower East Side was part of his art. He was able to move to a bigger place in Hell's Kitchen (now called Clinton), but soon it was merely a double-size version of his tinsel-strewn downtown digs. Once, an extremely famous and well-connected curator from Europe paid a visit. He took one look at my friend's amazing workplace and, proclaiming "I cannot look at art in a place like this, you are not a serious artist," marched right out the door.
Alice Neel painted in her living room. So did Hopper.
Kiki Smith, I am told, has birds flying around inside her house.
Kiki Smith: Wolf Girl, 1994. Etching
She Is Our Shaman
As an art-world personage, Smith is indeed strange and dreamy, with her mane of silver hair; but her art is deeper than fashion. What other artist do we know who, since Joseph Beuys, has attempted so much? She is our shaman.
A naked woman stepping out of the body of a dead wolf, as in Rapture of 2001? A hirsute Little Red Riding Hood as in Daughter of 1999? This is not the kind of art you can dismiss as bad form. It is not about formal values. Cross-culturally, shamans get their bodies cut up and they are reborn with a suitable animal guide. Smith has moved from body parts, to whole bodies, to saints and wolves."
Kiki Smith: Rapture, 2001. Bronze
Perreault, J. "Kiki Smith: glass is the new fat." December 4, 2006. Artopia blog. accessed June 19, 2009. http://www.artsjournal.com/artopia/2006/12/kiki_smith_glass_is_the_new_fa.html
2006 Business Wire:
"CHICAGO -- Global Arts Publishing LLC today announced the launch of World Art Glass Quarterly at the Sculpture Objects & Functional Art (SOFA) show. An upscale magazine, it is the only publication to focus solely on architectural and art glass. In the inaugural issue, featured artists include British artist Peter Layton, Savoy Studios, Bernard Katz, Melissa Ayotte, David Ruth, Rich Samsel, and the Tacoma Museum of glass. Upcoming issues will be featuring world famous artists such as Susan Rankin, Rick Satava, George Bucquet, Rick Strini, Steven Lundberg, and Narcissus Quagliata.
The magazine is filled with articles and photos, which allows readers to be immersed in the beauty of glass and the inspirations of the featured artists. The magazine itself is a work of art and something that can be displayed on coffee tables and in reference libraries. World Art Glass Quarterly offers large galleries as well as smaller galleries and artists the opportunity to connect with the world-wide community of collectors, designers, architects, and studios.
"The quality of our Quarterly is unmatched in print quality, photography, writers and layout," said Curt Walton, co-founder and editor-in-chief of Art Glass Quarterly. "It is a world-class publication that showcases the finest glass artists throughout the globe."
World Art Glass Quarterly will be available November 24, 2006 at Borders, Barnes and Noble, and other fine bookstores throughout the United States and the U.K. Cover price is $11.95. For more information or to subscribe to the publication, visit www.artglassquarterly.com.
"Unknown. "World Art Glass Quarterly Magazine Focuses Exclusively on Architectural and Art Glass." Business Wire. November 10, 2006.
2006 Regina Hackett:
"Dale Chihuly is the most inventive glass sculptor in the history of the medium, but a massive career and many honors have not insulated him from personal and professional troubles that trail him lately like a bad smell.
A few weeks ago, the bad smell metaphor took material form.
Standing in an ornate garden surrounding a mansion in Medina, this son of a Tacoma meatpacker and union organizer frowned and checked his shoes.
"Did I step in something?" he asked. The garden was lovely, but the stink of fertilizer was overwhelming.
"Pig shit," he said. "Sometimes you can't get away from it."
You wouldn't know it to look at his work. Full of play and dazzling in its high theatrics, his sculptures give voluptuous shape to excess, making it shine.
But at age 64, he's where he never wanted to be, in court. He's suing two glass blowers for copyright infringement, contending they're imitating his work. They're threatening to sue him back, questioning whether Chihuly is the creative intelligence behind the art bearing his signature. And a former dealer is attacking him with a gusto rare in the art world. If that's not enough, his feet hurt.
Emotionally, he has been through the wringer.
Since 2001, a significant number of the people closest to him have died, some without warning. Partially because both his brother and father died in quick succession in his teens, he tends to experience each death as a blow to the body.
Last year he sank into a depression from which he is now recovering. Friends who haven't seen him in many months are being invited over for dinner. Another sign of his recovery: He married Leslie Jackson, his long-term girlfriend (and mother of his 8-year-old son) late last year. In the wedding photo, he's trying on a smile like a cautious man venturing into new land.
Interviewed several times in recent weeks, Chihuly appears to be a fragile version of his old self, but he becomes animated when talking about his work, his young son, the fine BLTs at a nearby diner and the movies. Chihuly loves the movies.
A mark of his distraction is how few he has seen lately.
He used to pop up everywhere in his pastel shirts, paint-splattered shoes and rakish eye patch. Although he travels less now, wherever he goes he's there already, with installations in seemingly numberless art museums and with glass vegetation giving God's handiwork a run for its money in garden conservatories, parks, public pools and aquariums.
That's not counting the tens of thousands of Chihulys resting on tabletops, floating in pools and hanging in brazenly spectacular chandelier form from the ceilings of private homes. Add his splatter paintings and thousands of lithographs, hundreds of picture books, DVDs, posters and notecards churned out by his Seattle publishing arm known as Portland Press, and the man's an industry.
Glass artist Benjamin Moore called Chihuly the most generous person he has ever known: "He's generous with everything, his friendship, his time, his loyalty, everything. But is he difficult? That's putting it mildly."
Bipolar disorder
Starting in his 40s, Chihuly has suffered from bipolar disorder. One glass blower said working for him was like reading tea leaves. "You have to allow for the emotional thing and work around it," he said.
Chihuly said he understands the problem more than he used to. "I thought I couldn't work well when I was down, but then I noticed the work could still be good," he said. "The reverse is true, too."
That means because quality of the art doesn't necessarily relate to the mood swings, he decided to balance them out medically and save his own life.
Glass artist William Morris said it's nice to see Chihuly return to the land of the living. "I was pretty worried about him for a while," he said.
Moore called Chihuly's disease "terrifying and heartbreaking, especially last year, when we didn't know if he'd make it."
Even in Chihuly's bleakest moments, however, the one constant is work.
"Nobody works harder than Dale," said Moore. "I think about the artists I know. They have lives. Dale is Dale all the time, constantly spiraling into his work, 365 days a year. He never makes time for anything but his mania for glass and mania for promoting himself."
Chihuly doesn't agree, quite, but he'll acknowledge that his work is rarely out of his mind. He does laps in his pool, and he's thinking about lighting and installation problems. He's watching his son play, and the shape of the child's arm thrown out reminds his father of the silky reach of glass reeds rising in green ponds.
Each month, his crews turn out Chihulys by the ton. He declined to say how much it costs him to keep his business afloat, but friends speculate it's somewhere between $250,000 and $500,000 each month. That's before he sees a profit and not counting the cost of special projects, which can run to the millions.
Asked if he thought his work ran him, rather than the other way around, he paused.
"There's probably truth in that," he said. "But there's also the thrill of figuring out a new piece or installation and coming up with new ideas. The vocabulary is there, but what I do with it continues to change."
'His own invention'
It takes a village to produce Chihulys, but what happens to the industry of that village when Chihuly's energy fails him? If the sorcerer's gone and the sorcerer's apprentices continue to punch the clock, whose work is it?
"If you're asking if Dale Chihuly is the artist of his own work, the answer is yes, absolutely," said Elizabeth Brown, chief curator at the University of Washington's Henry Art Gallery. "It doesn't matter who fabricates it. He has a complete formal vocabulary that is his own invention."
This issue is of more than aesthetic interest. On the issue of copyright infringement, he's suing several glass blowers who are threatening to sue him back, arguing he can't copyright organic-looking glass.
These suits are not the only issue keeping Chihuly's legal team busy. An art dealer Chihuly fired won't go away. Even after an arbitration that Chihuly won on nearly all counts, the dealer, Doyle LaCount, claimed victory on his Web site, chihulyscrewedme.com, and boasted he's the reason the sun is setting on the Chihuly empire.
The glass blowers heading to court against Chihuly's legal team and the disgruntled former dealer all question whether Chihuly is entitled to claim his work as his own.
What is obvious inside the art world (it's his) may not be so obvious in court. That's why, when asked about it, curators and artists who have worked with him tend to sound as if they're speaking through megaphones.
Brown said once Chihuly approves a series of sculptures, drawings and prints, other people can create them for him. She's "amazed" that anyone could question his authorship after looking at his work.
"It's his without any ifs, ands or buts," said Moore. "I know. I worked for him and know people who still do. No matter what, Dale is always in charge."
Morris met Chihuly at Pilchuck Glass School when Chihuly was already a big deal and Morris was earning money for tuition by driving the Pilchuck truck. He remembers his reaction when he heard the older artist didn't make his own sculptures.
"I was appalled," he said. "I asked myself, 'What kind of f - - king phony is this?' But when I saw him on the floor, I realized how in charge he was. And when I started to blow for him, it was clear I was working on his work. You work for Dale, you tune in to his aesthetic. Everything about Dale is in his art. He's a great self-promoter, and that promotion is his art, too."
Glass sculptor Rich Royal said that Chihuly has figured out a system to allow other people to help create his visions. "Even when he was sick, he knew exactly what was happening with his work."
Throughout art history, artists have used assistants, sometimes liberally, but in the 20th century artists directly challenged the idea that art is more valuable as a hands-on operation.
From Marcel Duchamp to Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, Lawrence Weiner and Robert Gober, artists say that hands-on production is a choice, not an imperative.
'I liked the view'
Chihuly started out blowing his own glass and might still be if it weren't for a 1976 car accident that left him blind in one eye and lacking depth perception. Another accident that dislocated his shoulder meant he couldn't hold the glass blowing pipe.
"Once I stepped back, I liked the view," he said, seeing the work from more angles and able to anticipate problems faster.
Chihuly patiently explains that he's more choreographer than dancer, more supervisor than participant, more director than actor. And yet, people wonder if he's pulling a fast one.
It's the kind of dilemma Warhol appreciated, just as he appreciated Chihuly. In 1978, Warhol called the young glass sculptor and asked if he wanted to trade artwork.
Chihuly said yes immediately, but on the appointed day he was too busy to go and sent assistant Kate Elliott in his stead, armed with a slumped glass basket in Bubble Wrap.
In return, Warhol gave her a painting of a dollar sign and asked if she wanted to go shopping.
To this day, Chihuly kicks himself for delegating the opportunity of a lifetime.
"Shopping with Andy, that would have been great," said Chihuly.
Like Warhol in many ways, Chihuly likes to own a wide range of the world's consumer goods, but unlike Warhol, he doesn't like to shop for them.
He collects the way he produces art, in volume, buying big collections from other people. He has a depth in Navajo blankets, bird houses, fishing lures, painted chalk figures from Paris, string holders, vintage children's books, toy airplanes, adult canoes, antique bathing suits and musical instruments, especially accordions.
Chihuly didn't start the studio glass movement. Harvey Littleton did in the 1960s in Madison, Wis. But Littleton's work never went anywhere, and Chihuly's made the studio glass movement catch fire.
Littleton proved that glass could be blown in comparatively intimate, non-factory settings. Chihuly proved that a liquid light medium could carry consequence in contemporary art.
Admirers, critics abound
Those who have never taken glass seriously don't admire Chihuly, but he has admirers in high places, including art critics such as Arthur Danto and Donald Kuspit, and artists such as Jeff Koons, David Hockney, Kiki Smith and John Torreano.
In 2001, a solo Chihuly exhibit at London's Victoria and Albert Museum threw English critics into superlative overdrive. "Sensational," said the London Telegraph. The Sunday Times was "blown away," the Evening Standard was "dazzled," and the London Economist found it "breathtaking."
His shows are big draws in the Northwest, but on the ground among the region's artists, bashing him is a popular sport.
What do they have against him? He turned Seattle into the Manhattan of glass art. There are now more glass blowers in Seattle than in Venice. Even though Chihuly doesn't know more than a fraction, he's the reason they're here. More than anyone else, he created the environment that makes their careers possible.
Without him, there would be no Pilchuck Glass School and no Museum of Glass. No artist since Robert Rauschenberg has done more to create art opportunities for others. He was the prime mover behind the scenes at the Hilltop Glass program in Tacoma, which gives at-risk youths a chance to put hot air to practical use, a program copied in Seattle at Pratt Fine Arts Center and elsewhere around the country. He created Seniors Making Art.
He supports more charities than Jimmy Carter. The list of institutions thanking him is nine pages long (single-spaced) and includes museums, art centers, hospitals, schools and health programs, nearly all in this region. Look in vain for this list on his Web site. It isn't there. The master of self-promotion doesn't promote his own good deeds.
In the end, glass is the issue. If you like it, Chihuly's the guy to thank. If you don't, he's the guy to blame.
A recent online interview between Stranger art critic Jen Graves and arts editor Christopher Frizzelle wallowed in the blame game. Frizzelle began by asking, "Dale Chihuly seems sort of creepy. Is he?"
Dodging it by saying she didn't know Chihuly, Graves invited those who share her negative view ("terrible") of his supposedly bulletproof Bridge of Glass in Tacoma to express their displeasure by shooting at it.
With a gun.
Victim of success?
Is Chihuly victimized by the enormous size of his success? Fame casts both spotlight and shadow, and people disappear into their reputations.
Two weeks ago on a blustery day, Chihuly was noticeably limping as he headed for his car. His feet hurt. They've been hurting for more than a decade. Doctors advised surgery, but Chihuly said he's happy he didn't do it, because he knows somebody who went ahead and is now worse.
When Chihuly wants advice, he polls his friends. For him, it's all about his circle. Its members may not have gone to medical school, but they have his back.
The smell of fertilizer Chihuly noticed on his trip to Medina will be gone by the time a private benefit for the Seattle Art Museum's Olympic Sculpture Park opens there in May.
Chihuly will turn the mansion's wide lawn into a stage for his hothouse of blooming glass flowers, reeds and maybe a floral glass tower or two.
He's not getting paid, but he's thinking big.
"Remember Jeff Koons' giant puppy made of flowers?" he asked. "I love that."
He studied the lawn and its slope to Lake Washington.
"I can work with the yard, but we need to extend into the water," he said to his studio manager, Billy O'Neill. "Be sure they know that, Billy. I want the sensation of moving out and floating away."
THE CAREER OF DALE CHIHULY
1960s
1965: Earns bachelor of arts degree in interior design from the University of Washington.
1967: Earns master's degree in sculpture from the University of Wisconsin.
1968: Studies glass in Venice on a Fulbright Fellowship. Earns master of fine arts degree in ceramics from the Rhode Island School of Design. Establishes glass program at the school, teaches there 15 years, flying back and forth from Seattle.
1970s
1971: Establishes Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, underwritten by John and Anne Gould Hauberg. Creates "Glass Forest #1" (glass and neon) with Jamie Carpenter, collected by New York's American Craft Museum. Creates with Carpenter "20,000 Pounds of Neon and Ice."
1975: Navajo Blanket Series: The pattern of the blanket painted onto the glass as a second skin. Major museums begin to collect him as a sculptor, outside the decorative art category.
1977: Northwest Coast Basket Series: Chihuly flies in the face of 2,000 years of symmetrical glass art by allowing hot glass to do what it wants to: slump. His baskets were inspired by Northwest coast Indian baskets he'd seen as a child at the Washington History Society and collected by New York's Metropolitan Museum.
1980s
1980: Seaform Series: Ribbed strands of color strengthen thin glass walls. The sculptures look transparent. Chihuly begins to push the scale of his work, asking the hot shop crews to create larger and larger work. Chihuly's drawings begin to be not just blueprints for the actions of his crew, but art in themselves.
1981: Maccia Series: Italian for "marked." He lights all the candles on the cake, using every possible color in the hot shop and orchestrating the results. His "maccia" bowls, on tall stands, become forests.
1986: Persian Series: 12th- to 14th-century glass from the Middle East is the inspiration. Chihuly's line is supple, and his color restrained. Chihuly goes back to his roots as an installation artist and begins to make glass clusters that take over rooms.
1988: Venetian Series: He improvises off a private collection of Italian Art Deco, transforming history into a current event, a decorative style into mainstream sculpture.
1989: Ikebana Series: Japanese flower arrangements through a Chihuly lens.
1990s
1990: Back to Venetians: Allows eccentricity full rein. Over the top and then some.
1991: Niijima Floats: Six-foot spheres soaked in intricate but fresh color.
1992: Chandeliers: The first ones were relatively modest, but by the mid-1990s Chihuly had reinvented the symbol of a bygone era by hanging a ton of glass orbs together from the ceiling and calling them chandeliers. Some look like snakes, some like breasts, and some bristle with floral life, like Jeff Koons' giant flower puppies. Go to any art fair, and you'll see how many artists are making chandeliers in Chihuly's wake.
1995: Global Chihuly: Chihuly and his crews hit the road, working with glass factory workers in Italy, Finland and Ireland to create internationally celebrated installations.
1998: Chihuly gives gamblers in Las Vegas another kind of risk to contemplate with his "Fiori de Como" permanent glass flowers installation in the lobby of the Bellagio Hotel.
1999: Chihuly Jerusalem: 48-foot-tall glass sculpture in the old city, with Palestinian and Israeli crews.
2000s
2001: Back to the Garden: First exhibit in a greenhouse, at Chicago's Garfield Park Conservatory. His blooms amid the garden's blooms drew record crowds and helped revitalize the rundown neighborhood.
2002: Bridge of Glass: An arched span that presents a retrospective of Chihuly's work flanked by a pair of huge, transparent turquoise rocks. They welcome people to Tacoma, the city saved by art.
2003: Mille Flori: For the opening of the new Tacoma Art Museum, "1,000 Flowers." The show dazzled critics and audiences alike.
2005: London's Kew Gardens: In this most traditional of settings, Chihuly packed the place with so much color and derring-do, people applauded spontaneously, day after day."
Hackett, R. "Chihuly victimized by his own success?" The Seattle Post-Intelligencer. April 17, 2006. Website Accessed May 27, 2009. http://www.seattlepi.com/visualart/266953_dalechihuly17.html
2006 John Perreault:
"Notes on a Conference
1. Andrew Wagner, formerly of Dwell, is introduced as the new editor of American Craft Magazine. After 30 years, Lois Moran is retiring.
2. Sculptor Martin Puryear gives the keynote speech. Beforehand, he wonders why he had been asked, but, always a charmer, he handles his assignment well. Did not show one slide of his own work, which may have left some in the audience totally in the dark about why indeed he had been asked. Certainly not just because he has a show coming up at MoMA or, as he confesses, has a guilty hobby of making traditional furniture for his own use. Clearly he has a particular liking for wood and for handwork. Was he invited because he is not afraid to use the word "craft"?
3. Houston Museum of Fine Arts director Peter Marzio offers a lively exposition of the history of the fine arts versus craft in Houston and tells us why craft has become a part of the museum's program. One wishes for similar local histories to flesh out and complicate the subject, which is far too often generalized.
4. Texas-style sauced BBQ and two-step and line-dancing (not by me) at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, where sculptor James Surls' excellent exhibition "Finding Balance: Reconciling the Masculine/Feminine in Contemporary Art and Culture" holds forth.
It breaks some rules. Surls himself has work in the show, as does his wife, Charmaine Locke. Plus there's work of two former directors of the Anderson Ranch, at Snowmass, Colorado, where Surls sometimes teaches. (Full disclosure requires me to note that I have taught there, too.)
In the catalogue there's a kind of summary of Leonard Shlain'spopularizing "Sex, Time, and Power: How Women's Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution" by the author himself. Here, since the exhibition is about the relationship between men and women, he omits his gay chapter, wherein one may learn that gay men have a 15% larger corpus callosum than everyone else. The corpus callosum connects left and right hemispheres of the brain, thus suggesting easier traffic between the opposing lobes and less specialization, perhaps explaining the proposed greater creativity of gay men.
And yet the art is on the whole exceptional, the theme (or themes) explored in a complicated way, and the pauses-for-thought unavoidable. Surls was motivated by two factors: he not only has a wife, he is the father of seven daughters, and an Internet search with one of them revealed that most women's organizations worldwide exist mostly toprotect women from men. I say break more rules and certainly let more artists like Surls curate exhibitions. Surls is a shamanistic sculptor who most typically works with found wood in the form of branches and trees and is not usually thought of as a craftsperson. Perhaps it takes a craft venue like the Houston Center to force art out of its rule-abiding box.
5. Glenn Adamson (of the Victoria and Albert) and Edward Cooke (of Yale) use their discussion to announce their new peer-review periodical, The Journal of Modern Craft, forthcoming in 2008 out of Great Britain. Can they rewrite craft history by reexamining what has already been written, but is not acknowledged? Can a peer-review periodical offering academic points to contributors rise above the conformist and the mundane? We certainly hope so.
6. My friend had a great idea. We played hooky late one afternoon to tour some Houston Outsider Art treasures: Cleveland Turner's Flower Man House, Jefferson Davis McKissack's The Orange Show, John Milovisch's Beer Can House and the Art Car Museum. Craft may overlap sculpture, but no one ever points out the craft used in Outsider Art. The spectacular Orange Show, for instance, required woodworking, tiling, metalwork. Is this blind spot because of the Craft World's fear of Folk Art -- although Folk and Outsider are very different -- or because craft, to be Craft, now must be schooled?
7. David McFadden, the bright chief curator of the Museum of the Arts and Design, reveals that institution's opening exhibition in its controversial new site, the former Edward Darrel Stone Gallery of Modern Art at Columbus Circle. The opener will be called "Making It: Materials, Process, Meaning." His point seems to be to avoid both the words "craft" and "design." Although some design objects show up in the slides, most of the objects are craft. So maybe a rose with no name is still a rose.
8. Curator Timothy Anglin Burgard of the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco shows us how he has successfully integrated selected craft objects from their Sachs Collection into their fine-arts array.
9. Curator James Elaine of the Hammer Museum in L.A is puzzled, like Puryear, by his invitation to speak. The mystery is solved when he shows slides of his award-winning 2005 exhibition, "Thing." Many of the works use craft materials and techniques. By the way, Kristin Morgan's unfired clay, life-size automobile (from "Thing") is, next to works by Josiah McElheney, the most-shown image at the conference. What does this prove?
10. Brett Littman's panel seemed to upset a few people because of a handout called "New Paradigms in Curating Craft and Design: A Manifesto." Littman, that firebrand, is deputy director of P.S. 1 and a self-identified crafts patsy, having worked with me at UrbanGlass in Brooklyn. At this point he has also curated a number of craft and design exhibitions, most notoriously "Civic Matters," a Swedish-American continuous collaboration with no end or end-product. During the Q & A, my anonymous contribution to "The Manifesto" was publicly singled out by one university jeweler as being particularly outrageous: "Change the name of the Museum of Modern Art to the Museum of Modern Art, Craft and Design." Irony, alas, will always fail. (And I had always liked her work!) Perhaps, as now seems to be the fashion, the ACC should also drop "craft" from its name and begin calling itself the American Arts Council. This would please a lot of collectors and, alas, craft artists too.
* * *
The conference, however, can best be judged by what it did not include: no discussion of whether the ACC mission is still valid, no discussion of the use of computers in craft-making, no discussion of the Internet as a salesroom for craft, no discussion of the bland ACC Website, no discussion of how the public can be educated to embrace craft values, no discussion of how to improve the taste level of the craft fairs that give craft such a bad name.
If the ACC mission is to educate, then the mission is in trouble.
If the mission should be to encourage and preserve handmade art that uses traditional craft forms, techniques and materials, then one might wonder if craft-media groups such as G.A.S., S.N.A.G., N.C.E.C.A. are already doing that, plus providing peer-to-peer forums, pep rallies, and technical and career information.
American Craft Magazine is still important because of the possibility of cross-referencing among ceramists, glassworkers, woodworkers, weavers, metalsmiths and the promotion of a common cause. More cross-disciplinary conferences are needed. Twenty years was too long to wait. But why not hold a conference of representatives from all the media groups?
On the other hand, perhaps the American Craft Movement is over. It has been around for over 80 years. Did Cubism or Surrealism or Abstract Expressionism last that long?
Answer: Craft is not an art movement. Craft is a belief system, like art itself."
Perreault, J. Excerpted from blog post: "The Texas Cure: Art and Life part two." Artopia Blog. October 30 2006. accessed June 17, 2009. http://www.artsjournal.com/artopia/2006/10/the_texas_cure_art_and_life_pa.html
2006 John Perreault:
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How cynical can I be? Is it an accident that not too long after the Edward Broida Collection display at MoMA, which included a whole room of Ken Price ceramic "gloop" works, Matthew Marks Gallery schedules an exhibition of more of the same? Business is business. The Broida gloops are now in the MoMA permanent collection.
The gloops have no openings, so they are not vessels. Cups used to be what Price was famous for, and we loved them for their references and wit. The gloops, except for a giant bronze (at Matthew Marks, 522 West 22nd Street, to Nov. 4), are made of clay that has been painted rather than glazed. They are Arps in color or shiny, speckled ca-ca, outsize Chelsea penthouse poodle poop. The latter association, which makes them funny -- unlike Piero Manzoni's classic canned excrement -- shows that you cannot totally defunk one of the primo California funksters of years gone by.
A big display of Price's previously unexhibited drawings gives the show away. Cups lurk here and there. Also, the openings of previous vessels are compared to vaginas. Anyone who knows ceramics knows that vessels are bodies and their openings are vaginas, anuses, mouths. Oh, what a surprise. That is part of their charm. But I guess sculpture people need to be shown this, graphically.
Discounting the vessel drawings, the stealth tactic works. Price is no longer a ceramic artist. His prices probably reflect this. On the other hand, instead of competing with Peter Voulkos, Robert Arneson, and Ron Nagel, he now has to compete with Tony Smith, Donald Judd, and Richard Serra. How will his gloops hold up?
CanCraft Have Class?
A younger craftsmen, glassblower Josiah McElheny, became a sculptor when he had his first show at Andrea Rosen. He was subsequently in a Whitney Biennial and then ascended to the MoMA permanent collection. As director of UrbanGlass in Brooklyn, I facilitated McElheny's first exhibition in N.Y. in 1994, but that didn't count: the curse of craft, I suppose. The exhibition does not appear on the artist's official biography. But now, McElheny has won a MacArthur Fellowship.
McElheny is indeed extremely talented. Not only is he a master glassblower, he has the brains to marry his skill to narrative-art perspectives and art-about-art points of view. The latter are not new, but the marriage is surprising enough to impress the informed. I wish I could say: call it craft, call it sculpture, a rose by any other name is still a rose.
I used to say, rather sarcastically, that the only difference between craft and art is that you are allowed to handle craft before you buy it -- and, even more important, art costs more.
I gave up trying to convince both crafters and sculptors that the craft/art muddle is a language mistake. It is not a question of art versus craft. Craft is art as much as photography, performance art, painting, et al., are Formulating art versus craft is like proposing fruit versus apples, meat versus ham. If you like oppositions, you should be opposing sculpture and craft. And, of course, we have not addressed the idea of hierarchy, or if there really needs to be one. Some might put craft at the top and conceptual art at the bottom. But are apples better than pears?
Then again, one could say, as former MoMA curator Robert Storr once did at a Glass Art Conference, that craft and art are engaged in different games, so why would MoMA be interested? You could have heard a pin drop. Or a blowpipe.
I myself would rather say that craft artists are competing with a different set of ancestors than sculptors are. A ceramist is competing with George Ohr; a sculptor is competing with David Smith.
The C-Word
As it happens, this week I am off to the American Craft Council's Leadership Conference in Houston, where I am sure the muddle will hold forth, particularly now that there is no American Craft Museum, but instead something called the Museum of Arts and Design (M.A.D.).
Mad, indeed. Just because currently there is a rampant fear of the C-word doesn't mean that craft will go away. I think some artists will continue to make things by hand, referencing utilitarian forms and using craft-based processes, but the word "craft" is now too hard a sell. Are the values associated with the American Craft Movement irrelevant? And if so, why?
In general, these values are:
The preservation and the encouragement of traditional craft techniques and the use of traditional craft materials.
The use of utilitarian forms.
The valorization of the designer and the maker as one.
This does not mean that individual expression and originality are disdained. In fact, within the above brief, they are more difficult than in unfettered and perhaps overtly self-indulgent object-making.
There can be no doubt that most of what is called craft is garbage; but the same can be said for painting or sculpture or photography. One walk through the Washington Square Outdoor Art Show never made anyone give up on painting (although nowadays, one walk through Chelsea might).
Since there is a conservative, mindless, focus-group-generated trend to drop the C-word from the names of museums and even schools, my proposal is that the Museum of Modern Art -- which once operated a craft program for G.I.s; where genius James Prestini, the turned-wood vessel-maker, had a solo exhibition in 1949; which includes George Ohr in its design collection; which now owns work by Kenneth Price and Josiah McElheny -- should seize the opportunity and change its name to the Museum of Modern Art and Craft."
Perreault, J. "Ken Price." October 15, 2006. Artopia blog, excerpted. accessed June 17, 2009. http://www.artsjournal.com/artopia/2006/10/ken_price.html
"CORNING, N.Y.- The Rockwell Museum of Western Art will present, as one of four special exhibitions this year, Fusing Traditions: Transformations in Glass by Native American Artists. Complementing the Rockwell Museum's broad permanent collection of Native American art, this exhibition introduces the first generation of Native American studio glass artists. These eighteen artists fuse cultural heritage and individual creativity into dazzling new glass forms. This traveling exhibition features thirty-seven artworks and was organized by the Museum of Craft & Folk Art (MOCFA) in San Francisco, California. Meet the Artists: Fusing Traditions recognizes an important artistic movement that began in the 1970s when Tony Jojola (Isleta Pueblo) first experimented in glass at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Most recently, Preston Singletary (Tlingit) realized his dream when a cedar totem pole with glass and neon components was raised at the Pilchuck Glass School in celebration of the school's thirtieth anniversary. Influenced by their experience at the glass school, master carvers Joe David (Nuu-cha-nulth), John Hagen (Alaskan Native), and Wayne Price (Tlingit), began to experiment with glass in their subsequent art. This artistic exchange demonstrates the strength of the ties between the Pilchuck Glass School and the vigor of the Native American artists who have studied there. The movement continues, as both Jojola and Singletary teach Native students in Seattle and Taos. Two of Singletary's students are represented in the exhibition. The artwork of Robert Tannahill (Mohawk/Metis) and Brian Barber (Pawnee) have broken with the functional and decorative origins of glass to create enigmatic and authoritative forms based in their cultural traditions. Both artists are working in a cultural realm where the visible is not always legible to the uninitiated, yet even the culturally initiated will find these figures in glass startlingly new. In Fusing Traditions, cultural art forms - beadwork, pottery, masks, spindle whorls, dance wands, and hats - are reinvigorated and re-imagined. Preston Singletary and Susan Point (Coast Salish) use the strong Northwest Coast imagery of their cultures to create revolutionary new glass forms in sand blasted and carved glass. Tony Jojola transforms pottery shapes into light-filled blown glass vessels. Drawing from American popular culture, Marcus Amerman's (Choctaw) glass-bead art relocates Native American art in the twenty-first century. The exhibition also includes the artwork of Larry Ahvakana (Inupiaq), Michael Carius (Siberian Y’upic), Conrad House (Navajo), Clarissa Hudson (Tlingit), Ramson Lomatewama (Hopi), Ed Archie NoiseCat (Salish), Marvin Oliver (Quinalt), Shaun Peterson (Salish), and C. S. Tarpley (Choctaw). The neon artwork of David Svenson, a non-Native American, is featured in this exhibition at the request of his students who honor him. He has been an influential teacher at the Pilchuck Glass School for many of the Native artists."
