2008 Seattle Weekly:
"The furnaces inside Viscosity Studio are set at 2000°. Tomoko Yoshitake repeatedly wipes sweat away from her forehead and downs several bottles of water as she works. "Glass is tricky," she says as she grabs a blowtorch and accosts the shapeless material before her. "It's like a relationship. I try my best, but that doesn't mean it's going to work out how I want. I can't control the whole thing."
But sometimes it seems she can. After an hour, she pulls her blowpipe from the fiery inferno, and emerging from the bubbling glass, still glowing orange from the heat, is...a teddy bear. Yoshitake cheers and sticks the creature back in the furnace to sit a little longer. Glass bears like this one are becoming this eccentric artist's most in-demand creation. Her ability to contort molten glass into zoo animals sets her apart from the countless glassblowers who produce (yawn) vases, chandeliers, and candleholders. To get to this point, Yoshitake admits, took years of trial and error. She's burnt herself badly more than once.
But in the process of studying and mastering the art form, Yoshitake also created a genre all her own. The beguiling beauty dresses up in fetishistic fashions and shoots photos of herself posing with her glass objects. Here's Yoshitake in a sexy nurse getup drinking out of a self-created martini glass. Or Yoshitake draped in chains and leather as she bends over a glass flower. The photos double as sellable art in their own right, and ingenious marketing. "Americans like Asians," Yoshitake says with a giggle. "I make sure to take advantage of that."
Most of her projects are inspired by visits to the toy store. And though her work reflects the kawaii (cute) aesthetic so prevalent in J-pop culture, she also wants it to be functional. The glass bubblegum machine she's planning is meant to hold real candy. She wants the goblets she creates to actually be used for drinking.
The latter activity, Yoshitake says, is another weakness she's discovered in Americans, one she took advantage of at the opening of her debut show, "All About Me," in April at Art/Not Terminal. The reception featured burlesque dancers, QFC catering, and...lots of beer. "People stick around if there's a keg of beer to finish," Yoshitake observes. She'll show her newest pieces at a collective exhibit titled "Toy Story" at Gallery 110 next month.—Erika Hobart www.tokyoglassart.com.
Tomoko Yoshitake's Picks: BEST CHEESECAKE: The Confectional in Pike Place Market. “Japanese people are obsessed with sweets,” Yoshitake says. “It took me a long time to find a good cheesecake, but I did. This is the best dessert in Seattle—actually, in King County.” BEST SCONE: Yoshitake orders the apple scone at Hi-Spot Café. “If you eat one, you’ll understand why it’s best,” she promises. BEST POLE DANCING CLASS: Free Movement Zone in the U District. Yoshitake attends this 90 minute class weekly. “It’s a hardcore workout,” she says. “You spend a lot of time strengthening your core muscles so you can climb up a pole.” BEST JAPANESE IMPORT: Daiso. “I buy my fake eyelashes there when I have a photo shoot. They have so much fun and random stuff.”"
Unknown. Date: 2008. Seattle Weekly. "Best Utilitarian Fetish-Modeling Glass Blower Tomoko Yoshitake" Website Accessed June 4, 2009. http://www.seattleweekly.com/bestof/2008/award/best-utilitarian-fetish-modeling-glass-blower-477023/
2008 Hollis Walker:
"Arnold and Doris Roland first fell for glass art in the mid-1990s at an auction in Santa Fe for a Native American charity. A small piece by Dale Chihuly, the most prominent glass artist in the country, captured their attention. They placed the winning bid—on a work from Chihuly’s basket series, in light blue with a red lip—and took it home, not knowing how it would fit into their existing collection. “We had a houseful of Native American art,” Doris recalls. “But it worked.”
From that serendipitous beginning grew a collection of some 200 pieces of glass, 27 of which the Rolands have loaned to the New Mexico Museum of Art (formerly the Museum of Fine Arts) for Flux: Reflections on Contemporary Glass, an exhibition opening June 7.
At first the brilliance and variety of colors were the medium’s main attraction, Arnold explains. “But as you learn about glass, study it, see what a wonderful variety of shapes the artists are capable of producing in blown and cast glass, how lighting can make a piece look totally different. … It’s a never-ending discovery process.” The couple even went to great expense to retrofit their house’s existing lighting system for the best effect on their collection, which now fills both their Santa Fe and Tucson homes. “You fall in love, you get in trouble,” Doris says sheepishly.
That love affair has also lead to Flux. A few years ago, the couple—by then dedicated glass collectors—approached the NMMA about the possibility of mounting an exhibition of contemporary glass art. Museum director Marsha Bol embraced the idea, which coincided with the institution’s plans to change its name, effectively broadening its mission from a focus on painting and sculpture to include more works in other mediums. The Rolands also offered to fund an endowment that would help finance the show as well as the acquisition, display, and storage of contemporary glass art.
Laura Addison, the museum’s curator of contemporary art, was thrilled. Though she had included fine craft in exhibits in the past, Flux offered a rare opportunity to fully explore a material-based art. Glass was the obvious choice. “Glass art is omnipresent now,” Addison explains. “Everybody is collecting glass.”
The resulting show, on display through September 21, features 50 works, incorporating pieces by world-renowned glass artists including Chihuly, William Morris, the Czech husband-and-wife team of Stanislav Libensky and Joroslava Brychtová, Italian Lino Tagliapietra, and others. Also included are 13 New Mexico artists: Larry Bell, Michelle Cooke, Tammy Garcia, Elodie Holmes, Timothy Horn, Tony Jojola, Charlie Miner, Stacey Neff, Flo Perkins, Mary Shaffer, Judy Tuwaletstiwa, and the husband-and-wife team of Anne Marie Jugnet and Alain Clairet. Most pieces in Flux are on loan from private collectors; besides those of the Rolands, there are numerous works from the collections of Doug Ring and Cindy Miscikowski, and Susan Steinhauser and Daniel Greenberg. Both couples, oddly enough, split their time between Santa Fe and Los Angeles.
Today’s glass craze in the United States has actually been percolating since the development of what is called the “studio glass” movement of the 1960s (so called to distinguish handmade glass art from factory-made glass) and the 1971 opening of the Pilchuck Glass School, cofounded by Chihuly, outside of Seattle. Chihuly’s increasingly high profile and the many fine glass artists produced by Pilchuck and other institutions continued to raise public awareness of glass art. More recent significant events include the 2002 opening of the Tacoma Museum of Glass, with its spectacular pedestrian overpass created by Chihuly; and the Toledo Museum of Art’s 2006 addition of its Glass Pavilion, showcasing a 5,000-object collection. Many more museums are acquiring glass art, too, Addison says.
The movement reached Santa Fe shortly after its inception, through the trickle-down influence of the earliest studio glass artists. Mel Knowles and Jack Miller opened the city’s first “hot shop’’ glass-blowing operation, Canyon Road Studio, in 1968; Peet Robison, who had helped Chihuly build Pilchuck, soon joined the glassblowers there. In the mid-1970s, Chihuly came to visit, recalls artist Charlie Miner, who was also involved at the studio. Impressed with Santa Fe, Chihuly stayed on to help build a glass studio at the Santa Fe Indian School, as well as one in Taos. “The truth is, Chihuly has done more for the glass world than anyone else,” Miner notes.
After learning or honing their skills at Canyon Road Studio, many struck out on their own, like Miner, now of Tesuque Glassworks, who also shows at LewAllen Contemporary; and Elodie Holmes, of Liquid Light Glass and Prairie Dog Glass. “There’s a lot of glass art happening in Santa Fe, and there has been for a long time,” Holmes points out. “But the representation for glass in Santa Fe is a more recent thing.”
A few galleries here have long carried glass, including LewAllen. And until its closure this year, Glory Hole Glassworks, on Canyon Road, exhibited many local artists’ works. But for a long time, most Santa Fe glass artists sold the bulk of their pieces through businesses in other cities. Today the list of area galleries representing glass artists from here and elsewhere is extensive, including Jane Sauer Gallery, Blue Rain Gallery,
Gebert Contemporary, C Gallery, Victoria Price Art & Design, Winterowd Gallery, Wiford Gallery, Manitou Galleries, Arlene Siegel Gallery, Legends, and more.
LewAllen currently represents seven artists who work solely in the medium, like Miner and Lucy Lyon, and a few, including the pioneering feminist artist Judy Chicago, who work with other materials as well. In the five years since owners Kenneth Marvel and Robert Gardner purchased the gallery, they’ve spent a great deal of time following developments in the field and seeking out new artists, according to Gardner. This year they’ve added Steve Klein, Sean Albert, and Ethan Stern to their glass “stable.” “Other than paintings, glass is the fastest-growing category” of art sold, he says. In June, they’ll open an exhibition of glass sculpture by Hiroshi Yamano, a Japanese artist whose works often have fish motifs and incorporate gold and silver leaf.
The heightened awareness of the medium in Santa Fe is due in part to Betsy Ehrenberg, a collector who moved here in September 2004 and was disappointed to find little in the way of glass art on display. Ehrenberg made it her personal, voluntary mission to persuade gallery owners to exhibit more glass art. “I spent six months putting artists and galleries together, showing galleries books on art glass,” she says.
But she went further than that, setting up tours for out-of-town collectors and taking them to artists’ studios, hot shops, and local galleries that carried glass works. True to her expectations, the visitors bought a great deal of art during the tours, reinforcing galleries’ growing interest.
Next Ehrenberg formed a group to do what glass artists here had been able to do only informally: network. The two-year-old New Mexico Glass Alliance includes artists, collectors, gallerists, and others, hosts talks and demonstrations, and brings renowned artists from around the world to Santa Fe to lecture and offer master classes.
Glass making, by necessity, is a collaborative process. Large works require teamwork, and it’s common for artists to help each other and borrow each other’s assistants. Hot-shop owners rent or trade time to those who don’t have shops, which are expensive to build and maintain. “We have a nice camaraderie here,” Holmes says. “Our attitude is ‘the more the merrier, let’s see what you’re doing,’ and we share new techniques and ideas.” Among the beneficiaries of that community spirit are a cadre of young and emerging entrepreneurs.
Meredith Gill works for veteran artist Lucy Lyon in her studio north of Santa Fe. Gill, 25, earned an art degree with a focus on glass at Ohio State University before moving to Santa Fe. She has worked for Lyon, who makes exquisite cast-glass artworks (exhibited locally at LewAllen Contemporary), for about a year. In addition to learning from a master, Gills says, “I get to use her equipment; that’s part of the deal.”
Robert “Spooner” Marcus, of Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo, learned the basics of glass in a factory in Española, followed by a stint with artist Tony Jojola at Taos Glass Arts. Marcus, 33, has since been active in other hot shops in Santa Fe. He makes glass vessels based on the shapes and surface designs of the traditional Pueblo ceramics his mother and grandmother made. Another young artist, Taos Pueblo native Ira Lujan, also blows glass into forms adapted from Pueblo culture, such as the ceramic water canteen. Both show their work at Victoria Price Art & Design.
Marcus and Lujan are the second generation of Native American artists to explore their cultural heritage in this new medium. Preston Singletary, of Seattle, who studied
at Pilchuck in the 1980s, has been transforming Tlingit woodcarving designs into contemporary glass art for nearly two decades, with his blown-glass vessels, masks,
animal figures, and abstract forms in museums throughout the country. In Santa Fe, he is represented by Blue Rain Gallery.
Tammy Garcia, a Santa Clara Pueblo native who also shows at Blue Rain (owned by her husband, Leroy Garcia), has spent the past several years collaborating with Singletary to produce two bodies of glass works. In doing so, Garcia follows in the footsteps of other established artists attracted to this relatively new material. After proving herself as one of the world’s foremost indigenous potters, Garcia added bronze to her repertoire. But her recent explorations of glass offered something neither of her previous mediums could: “Every single piece is a different color,” she explains. “I’m really exploring how it affects the design, and allowing the color to affect the imagery.” She’s also experimented with casting lead crystal and architectural-style panels. “It’s still new to me,” she says. (See blueraingallery.com for a video of Garcia and Singletary in process.) Her exploration has also led the gallery to expand its offerings: Four new glass artists debut work at Blue Rain in July.
The growing enthusiasm has also prompted the opening of at least one new gallery. Judy Youens owned an eponymous gallery in Houston, one of the first contemporary glass galleries in the country, from 1981 until 1998, when she moved to Santa Fe. On July 3, she opens another: Judy Youens Gallery, at 826 Canyon, where she will show glass art and a variety of other mediums. Youens never dreamed she’d be expanding, she says, “but it’s in my blood.”
The event that nudged longtime Santa Fe gallerist Jane Sauer into adding glass to her lineup of artists, primarily focused on redefining fine craft, is emblematic of the still-blossoming appreciation for this medium here. About two years ago, Brent Kee Young, a glass artist and the chairman of the glass department at Cleveland Art Institute, stopped in while on a lecture tour to meet Sauer and show her his work. She was enchanted by his delicate boat form, which was woven of “threads” of glass and glowed in the light flowing in through the building’s French doors. The gallery was full of people that day, including Arnold and Doris Roland, Sauer recalls, and everyone was impressed.
“Arnie took me aside and asked, ‘Do you love this work? And are you going to ask him to join the gallery?’” Sauer recounts. “I said yes.” The Rolands bought the piece on the spot—although they had to wait months, until Young had finished his tour, to claim it. Today, Sauer shows the work of eight glass artists from around the world, and the
medium has come to comprise a significant portion of her sales, she says.
Just as for the Rolands, all it took was one extraordinary piece to make Sauer a convert. And yes, the piece that did the trick—Young’s Matrix Series: Vessel I—will be on display all summer, courtesy of Flux."
Walker, H. "Blown Away." June/July 2008. Santa Fean Magazine. website accessed June 6, 2008. http://santafean.com/Santa-Fean-Magazine/June-July-2008/Blown-Away/
2008 Pilchuck:
"The Pilchuck Glass School board of trustees is thrilled to announce the selection of Arthur Jacobus to serve as the Chief Executive Officer and Executive Director of the school, effective October 27, 2008. Jacobus is an accomplished arts executive with strong ties to the Northwest. He succeeds Executive Director Patricia Watkinson, who retired from the position May 16, and Interim Executive Director Ralph Bufano.
Arthur Jacobus most recently served for three years as president of Copia: The American Center for Wine, Food and the Arts, Napa, CA, and during the previous three years, he served as president of The Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts in Louisville, KY. He distinguished himself as an exemplary leader in the arts as executive director of the San Francisco Ballet. Jacobus led the creation of a strategic plan at the San Francisco Ballet and helped build a $30M endowment that focused on national and international touring. Previous to his position at the San Francisco Ballet he served as president of Pacific Northwest Ballet for nine years. He helped build a strong board there and directly led a successful $13.5M capital campaign and increased corporate sponsorships.
Patricia Wallace, president of Pilchuck Glass School Board of Trustees, welcomes Jacobus warmly; "Arthur is a great leader, he has the perfect combination of experience and knowledge to guide the school. We look forward to working with him as we plan for the future of Pilchuck."
Jacobus feels "honored to have the opportunity to work closely with the Pilchuck community. Pilchuck is lucky to have such an extensive family of artists, donors and supporters who are all directly invested in the future of the school." Jacobus holds masters degrees in Business Administration, Arts Administration, and Human Resources Management, and has completed the University of Washington's Executive Management Program, as well as the Harvard Business School's Strategic Perspectives for Non-Profit Management Program and their program on non-profit governance."
Unknown. "Executive Director Selected." October 9, 2008. website accessed June 7, 2009. http://www.pilchuck.com/information/news_5.shtml
2008 Kathryn Shattuck:
"Summer hadn’t quite arrived in the city over the Memorial Day weekend, but in the garden of the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, on upper Fifth Avenue, it was several hundred degrees in the shade. Onstage in the Corning Museum GlassLab, four sweat-beaded men in black T-shirts rotated elongated rods — tipped with molten glass hot enough to ignite anything it touched, whether metal, wood or flesh — with the nonchalance of baton twirlers.
Behind them a pyrotechnician stood ready in case the kilns, which turn glass to liquid at 2,100 degrees Fahrenheit, or the reheating furnaces called glory holes, which burn to a volcanic white-orange 2,300 degrees, got unruly. At the stage’s edge the designers Tobias Wong and Tom Scott hovered out of heat and harm’s way, gun glasses shielding their eyes from the occasional ricocheting glass shard.
Armed with inspiration and images, Mr. Wong, whose designs include a chair that lights up as a lamp and a white-rubber chandelier, and Mr. Scott, who fashions knitwear, gave gently precise instructions. After spinning yellow-hot lumps into pliable glass yarn, the craftsmen wove it into braids, chain stitches and, in homage to Central Park and Claes Oldenburg, pretzels. Pretzels with salt, no less.
“A big part of this process was an exploration in boundaries and how far you can push them, and knowing what your restrictions as a designer might be,” Mr. Wong said.
Mr. Scott added: “It was a true collaboration. We gave them a couple of ideas, and they took them to the next level. Who knew you could knit and crochet in glass?”
By the time the Corning GlassLab packs up its two-and-a-half-week visit on June 3, 19 designers will have tested the limits of a material that few of them had previously used, even as the artistic and structural potential of glass is being explored and exploited in fields like architecture and technology.
The GlassLab, a mobile hot-glass studio and offspring of the Corning Museum of Glass in upstate New York, made its debut last December at Design Miami 2007, where artists competed to become involved in the process. For its sojourn in Manhattan, GlassLab and the Cooper-Hewitt invited New York designers in a variety of mediums, including the product designers Harry Allen, and Constantin and Laurene Boym; Francisco Costa of Calvin Klein; the humorously avant-garde Sebastian Errazuriz; the architect Paul Haigh; Chad Phillips of the toymaker Kidrobot; Sigi Moeslinger and Masamichi Udagawa of Antenna Design (MetroCard vending machines, JetBlue check-in kiosks); Ted Muehling (jewelry, porcelain, glassware); and the sculptor Michele Oka Doner. Most had two or more sessions of transforming their concepts into prototypes.
The Corning Museum has long offered public demonstrations at its home base and, since 2001, it has gone on tour, with its Hot Glass Roadshow traveling to places like the Getty Villa in Malibu, Calif., and the Art Basel Miami. Later this year it will set sail on Celebrity cruise ships.
The GlassLab grew out of a three-year-old partnership with the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany; the two institutions have collaborated in summer design workshops at Domaine de Boisbuchet in southwestern France.
“The ‘aha moment’ was this magical thing that occurred when we brought the material and the horsepower of hot glass into the design environment and fundamentally let it happen,” said Robert K. Cassetti, the Corning Museum’s senior director of creative services and marketing.
For most designers, he said, “hot glass and the prototyping that can take place with glassblowing is relatively inaccessible. Take the obstacles away, and it can be a very rich creative environment.”
In his sessions at GlassLab, Tim Dubitsky, of the creative agency Li Inc., tried to create three-dimensional typography by cutting out glass with cookie molds and draping it in sheets over metal letters. His most ambitious project was to encase a book in glass, with the caveat that the container would have to be broken for the book to be read. The glass masters created a delicate casing a little more than one-eighth of an inch thick, which they allowed to cool overnight before inserting the book and then sealing up the end.
“It was super lovely — communication without words, like choreography, ” Mr. Dubitsky said of watching the men toil in silent unison. “You could tell they were going into a perfectionist mode.”
The august designer Massimo Vignelli, who worked for the Italian glass firm Venini at the start of his career nearly 50 years ago, arrived with intricate sketches for ribbed Venetian-style vessels.
A clear conical vase was meant to hold Mr. Vignelli’s favorite flower, the peony; a narrow-stemmed cylinder, an orchid.
“I prepared some drawings that apparently look easy but are not so easy,” he said. “Making glass is playing with the light. When you play with the corrugation of glass, you don’t need to add color because the light is adding color.”
Mr. Vignelli was fearless, following the glass masters — Eric Meek, Lewis Olson, Matt Urban and Dan Spitzer — to the kilns and glory holes, and leaning in closely as they silently twirled, shaped, reheated and reshaped the glowing wads until they started resembling what the designer imagined they could. “Glass is really a perfect design of teamwork, a ballet of designer and master,” Mr. Vignelli said.
Mr. Meek, who has been making glass for 15 years, said that the GlassLab collaboration with designers had opened his eyes to fresh possibilities. “It always leads to new and exciting ideas for things you might never think of until someone else leads you there,” he said.
If there’s one thing glassmakers live for, said the Corning Museum’s Mr. Cassetti, a former designer for Steuben, it’s the material’s future. “In Corning, it’s all about what’s next with glass,” he said. “So often you’ll see people talking to the material as they work, saying, ‘O.K., teach me something new today.’ ”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: May 30, 2008An article on Wednesday about the
Shattuck, K. "At Cooper-Hewitt, designers teach glass (and themselves) new tricks." May 28, 2005. The New York Times. website accessed June 12, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/28/arts/design/28glas.html?_r=1&ex=1212638400&en=4fd503442764c9da&ei=5070&emc=eta1
2008 John Perreault:
"
H. P. Lovecraft
Cthulhu or Chihuly?
A few weeks later, on our way back from our winter trip to Provincetown, we stopped at Providence, Rhode Island, not to offer our usual homage to boyhood favorite H. P. Lovecraft's beloved native city -- which nowadays doesn't look particularly possessed by ancient visitors from other galaxies or particularly spooky or eldritch, but to see Beth Lipman's installation at the Art Museum of the Rhode Island School of Design.
Lipman's installation is topnotch. But before we go there, some general considerations are in order.
Harvey Littleton is usually credited with jump-starting the studio glass movement, but it was Dale Chihuly at RISD (and then in Seattle) who pushed it over the top. RISD has a new exhibition space inaugurated by a so-so Chihuly show and a related exhibition of works by those many artists he taught or influenced.
Otherwise, the Museum of Art secretly ambles along behind the facades of several historic buildings. Nice for the preservationist in all of us, but difficult for pedestrians to picture what lurks behind the charming facades: Lovecraft's domains of Cthulhu? His realms of Azathoth?
Here I cannot resist the revelation that Lovecraft's Cthulhu prose cycle - concerning the malevolent presence of an ancient, horrific race from another world, hidden among us, in places like Providence, Red Hook (in Brooklyn, New York), or secluded New England forests further north - begins, it would seem, with the feverish "dreams" of young Henry Anthony Wilcox, a sculpture student at the Rhode Island School of Design. The story is called "The Call of Cthulhu," and the "dreams" it turns out are worldwide and seem to be offered selectively, turning sundry dreamers -- not just art students -- raving mad.
Note here that Lovecraft once escaped from Rhode Island and lived for two years in Brooklyn Heights in demonic New York City, where one of his pals was the great American poet Hart Crane. Returning to Providence, parents both in the madhouse, he spent the rest of his life living with two maiden aunts.
Note also how after reading a volume of Lovecraft even a modernist/postmodernist like myself begins to employ longer and longer sentences under the influence of this pulp pioneer who was truly one of the greatest 19th-century writers of tales of terror, second only to Edgar Allan Poe, although he composed his horrific, horror ouevre in the 20th.
I can report, however, that as of my visit two weeks ago, RISD is not currently the entrance to K'n-yan, Yoth, or N'Kar. In the immortal words of H.P., in Providence there can be no "hellish tracks of the living fungi from Yuggoth." I guess. I will also wager that no library in Providence has a copy of the dreaded, madness-inducing Arabic Necronomicon, so central to H.P.'s literary output.
If you want to get a glimpse of this oddball from Rhode Island, check out YouTube HERE for a WPA snippet filmed in 1937, the year of his death.
Reading the Icebox
What really surprised me was one particular display of permanent-collection items housed elsewhere in the museum. Mid-20th-century objects from RISD's extensive permanent collection are now deployed in several rooms with none of the usual department store divisions. Furniture, fashion, jewelry, dinnerware are offered in conjunction with and placed to demand the same level of attention as, for instance, a painting by Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko. And it all works. Dare we posit something as backward-looking as a "period style" or a congruence of visual forms within particular time-frames? Is there a "trickle down" from painting to clothing? Or is everyone looking at and being influenced by the same things?
This kind of cross-discipline survey is a great setup for teaching, but even the uncoerced can deduce connections among items usually held far apart for fear of intra-categorical contamination or confusion of price-points. The array seems both charmingly old-fashioned and breathtakingly avant-garde: the former, because in ancient times the various arts were so displayed in academies and homes of the well-heeled; the latter, because separate and unequal is generally the rule.
So why the usual rigidity in most other museums? Retrieval devices for image repositories, like slide libraries, required hard categories before digitalization, but now we should be able to search over a multitude of fields. Yet fiefdoms everywhere have hardened. Is this because they are threatened? Try proposing to a museum an exhibition that will require cooperation among its various esoteric departments. It simply will not work. Professionals will risk their jobs rather than loosen territorial control or dilute the prestige of their uncontested expertise.
Another, but perhaps more amusing, theory is that art categories have to do with storage, preservation, and display. Particularly storage. Backstage, paintings need racks, and everything else needs shelves or specially reinforced floors. Fiber art and paintings have the same climate-control requirements. Metal sculpture probably shouldn't be stored next to glass. And metal, which may rust or oxidize, shouldn't be stored within the same humidity parameters required by cloth, paper, or canvas. But specialization has taken command, becoming a rule rather than a tool.
Although a period style is just as much a construct as anything else, it is also an art angle that could be nicely reinstated. I would like full-blown 20th-century "period rooms" like the "period rooms" in the RISD Art Museum's Pendleton House that provided the inspiration for Lipman's remarkable installation in another building, on another floor.
Andy's Icebox
Beth Lipman's After You've Gone reminded me of "Raid the Icebox With Andy Warhol," which I saw at Rice University in Houston in 1969. It was Andy at his best: a gigantic readymade consisting of old shoes amassed, chairs on the floor and chairs in the air; everything and nothing. Things broken, things that were fixed, real things and things that were fakes. Everything had been selected from RISD's collection of "decorative arts."
"Decorative arts"? This is a too-fancy and misleading category that some of us prefer to call material culture so that it may include the humble as well as emblems of wealth -- and not exclude meanings, both formal and social. Chairs and guitars, porridge bowls, hat boxes, and chamber pots often have more meanings and tell better stories than ruby-red goblets or paintings.
Hot Glass Comes in Out of the Cold
Alembic. Europe. 18th century? Corning Museum of Glass
There is something ghostly about glass. Something both scientific and weird. A smidgeon of research will turn up too many details about the alchemical pursuit of crystal clarity. I was entertained by "Glass of the Alchemist" at Corning, mentioned above. I learned that alchemy, might be seen as merely the mother of chemistry rather than as an occult discipline of personal/universal transformation. I learned how crystal-clear glass, ruby-red glass (achieved by a smidgeon of gold added to the "metal"), and milk glass were invented in the West; how glass discoveries spread throughout Europe and even to China and Jamestown in the New World. I confess I truly hated the profusion of ruby-glass goblets, but loved the few examples of alchemy instruments - an alembic, two retorts, and what is identified as an oil separator. And then there's the little matter of the glob of gold that was supposedly created by alchemist Johann Bottger in Dresden on March 20, 1713, in the presence of King Augustus II of Poland. Now that's exhibition gold!
As partial closure, here's a quote from the sumptuous catalog:
And hence the most ancient Commentators upon the Sacred Writings have told us, that the whole World, when it shall be destroyed by Fire at the general conflagration, will be turned into Glass." -- Herman Boerhaave, London, 1735.
Glass Today
Beth Lipman: Laid Table (Still Life With Metal Pitcher) from 2007. Centerpiece of After You're Gone, 2008.
Lipman: Wallpaper, blown, lampworked and kiln-formed glass. 2008
Glass like gold has an easy beauty, an unearned beauty. But Lipman transforms the glass act into a class act, offerings meanings as well as glitz.
Prediction: Lipman will be the next artist to leap from the glass world to the art world, like the very clever storyteller Josiah McElheny. Like McElheny, Lipman has not shielded herself from the curse of glass (as many have) by hiring artisans to make her work. The blown glass and instances of cast glass are all her own efforts, but they are in service of concepts far more complicated than what is usually found in glass art coming from the studio-craft movement. In any case, some now claim that Post-World War II phenomenon is over and done with.
Corning curator Tina Oldknow, in her catalog essay for her "Contemporary Glass Sculptures and Panels in The Corning Museum of Glass" has this to say:
In the 2000s glass has increasingly been used as a material for sculpture by artists from outside the glass world as well as by artists form whom glass is a primary material. Glass is intersecting with the world of design and contemporary art in multiple directions, and the American Studio Glass movement as it was defined from the 1960s through the 1980s no longer exists..
These statements, on top of rechristening the American Craft Museum the Museum of Arts and Design --do not bode well for art-world alternatives. But now that pricing will drop across the board for all artworks will there be any need for craft to turn its back on crafts? The craft cult will merely be further purified - having been purged of far too many High Art wannabees - and go underground, again.
In the meantime, we gotta have art, in no matter what form. Even if it is made of glass or grass or linoleum or body fluids. Or marble. Or even paint on canvas.
Beth Lipman's fresh work is a case in point.
Lipman: Settee (After Grinling Gibbons), 2008
.
Who's Going to Miss You?
The centerpiece of Lipman's installation, "After You've Gone," is Laid Table (Still Life With Metal Pitcher) from 2007, which is a profusion of vessels all made of blown glass including the "metal pitcher" of the title. But Lipman has added a jumping squirrel, a sitting squirrel, and lampworked snails on the periphery of vision. But then there are creations inspired directly by the RISD collection and made on site in the school hot-shop, beginning with glass wallpaper. I kid you not. And a glass settee. Meanings proliferate. The spectacular and dangerous double-chair-back settee is based on an early-20th century copy of a 19th-century reproduction of an 18th-century chair that collector/patron Mr. Charles Pendelton thought until his death was "the greatest 18th century English chair in this country."
Still-life paintings are often memento mori. In this case, a whole room is a memento mori. Lipman's After You've Gone is about what we leave behind: piles of drinking glasses, wallpaper, empty picture frames. Art! Ghosts! Glass is usually perceived as glitzy and celebratory; Lipman uncovers the emotions attached to loss and fragility. And of fakery, too.
Like Warhol's surprisingly forlorn "Raid the Icebox" so many decades ago, Lipman's installation points out the stuff - sometimes loveable, sometimes vulgar, always telling - that clutters up the world with fascinating but mostly unintended messages and meanings. Can we see through materialism, or are we possessed by our possessions and afterwards haunted by them? Are we determined by our decor? Isn't there a strange beauty in how we grasp for stability? And how we remember?"
Perreault, J. "Beth Lipman, smart glass and various time warps." Artopia: John Perreault's art diary. exact posting date unknown, 2008. accessed June 17, 2009. http://www.artsjournal.com/artopia/2008/12/beth_lipman_smart_glass_and_va.html
2008 National Endowment for the Arts:
"Pilchuck Glass School
Seattle, WA
$10,000
To support a summer artist residency program. Artists will be provided with resources, facilities, and technical assistance to experiment with new work in glass.
Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center, Inc. (on behalf of Creative Glass Center of America)
Millville, NJ
$20,000
To support a residency program for emerging and mid-career glass artists at the Creative Glass Center of America. Artists will be provided with housing, a stipend, studio facilities, and technical assistance to work in glass."
National Endowment for the Arts FY 2008 Visual Arts Grants. website accessed June 19, 2009. http://www.nea.gov/grants/recent/disciplines/Visualarts/08visual.php?CAT=Access%20to%20Artistic%20Excellence&DIS=Visual%20Arts&TABLE=1
