1992 Betty Freudenheim:
"SPOTLIGHTS penetrate the translucent interiors and set off sparklike reflections on the surfaces of the art glass on display at the New Jersey Center for Visual Arts. "Contemporary Glass Sculpture: Innovative Form and Expression" is one of the most stunning craft exhibitions in this state in recent years.
Pat Kettenring, a curator of the show, said she had tried to include a broad range of glass techniques. The work shown demonstrates not only the intrinsic appeal of glass but also its value as a medium for expressing ideas. Ms. Kettenring and Kiku Fukui, the other curator, selected 42 pieces by nine American, three Japanese, one Swedish and two Czech artists.
Among them is Harvey Littleton. This year marks the 30th anniversary of his creation of a glass-blowing workshop on the grounds of the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio. The success of this workshop proved his theory that glass blowing does not require the superheated furnaces of mass production factories, that glass can be a medium for artists to explore in their own studios.
It was the start of the American glass movement. Alumni of the Toledo workshop and Mr. Littleton's follow-up courses at the University of Wisconsin initiated similar glassmaking programs on campuses across the country.
Mr. Littleton creates his distinctive ribbons of striated glass by rotating a rod with a ball of molten glass in the glowing furnace. When the rod is removed, it is swung like a pendulum until the sphere gradually lengthens into an oblong.
"Blue-Ruby Spray" looks as though Mr. Littleton stretched, pulled and twisted his molten glass into looping curves on a carnival taffy-making machine. The segments were sliced and arranged into this flowing ensemble of sinuous lines and hues.
Dale Chihuly, a student in Mr. Littleton's postgraduate program at Wisconsin, continued his glass training in Venice. He was the first American to apprentice at the Venini glass factory on the island of Murano. He is also the founder of Pilchuck, a glass art colony on a hillside overlooking Puget Sound in Washington State.
Snakelike coils with black blossoms encircle a vivid vase in "Cadmium Orange Venetian #493." Mr. Chihuly has carried the excesses of Murano blown glass to new extremes of complexity, color and voluptuous curves.
What a contrast with the quiescent mood of Stephen Dale Edwards's "Silence." Four matte-black heads are partly buried in white sand, the artist's comment on the Persian Gulf war. Features of the fourth face are almost obliterated.
This artist works with glass cast in molds. His "Hunter's Dream" is a masklike image cast in optical glass. As light is diffused through the translucent interior, the solemn features take on an awesome authority.
William Morris's "Artifact Still Life" resembles a find from an archeological dig. This pile of pale blue bones, shells and vases of translucent glass may relate to the contents of the tomb of an ancient Phoenecian glassmaker. Flecks of gold settle like dust on the mottled surfaces.
Bertil Vallien's cast-glass forms also suggest the ruins of vanished civilizations. This Swedish artist sculptures elongated molds in wet sand and lays miniature treasures inside before filling them with molten glass. The oblongs are suspended as tall, motionless pendulums. Each one has the majestic power of a Nordic myth; clues to the stories are hidden within.
Mary Ann (Toots) Zynsky is an American glass artist who works in the Netherlands. The vivid splashes of color of her "Tierra del Fuego" seem to have been painted with a stiff brush with each bristle leaving its mark. The bowl was formed with thin threads of fused glass that resemble dried vermicelli. The outer edges have been manipulated to give the form a slighlty irregular contour. This piece has verve and panache.
There was no glass tradition in Japan when Kyohei Fujita started his career in a factory in the 50's, so he created one. Rather than emulating European glass blowers, he turned to historic lacquerware for inspiration. His elegant small boxes are blown glass layered with gold and platinum foil and flecks of color.
Niyoko Ikata cuts shapes from plate glass and laminates them together into neat stacks. These piles of glass take on the graduated contours of a sea-green shape with a transparent interior. While some artists use this technique to create pseudo vases, she extends her forms into undulating wings. Their spontaneity gives no indication of the slow, meticulous process required to form them.
One wall has 16 variations on a theme: glass bones and wood sticks wrapped with wire and bandages. Michael Aschenbrenner, a Vietnam veteran, said his work was "about healing, not destruction."
Nancy Mee complements the transparency and fragility of glass with rigid metals. Using a printmaking process, she transfers images of Greek goddesses onto plate glass and then bolts them to rusted steel plates. In "Veiled Goddess," a photograph of a skull X-ray is superimposed on the sculptured head, transfiguring its beauty. Her work becomes a metaphor for the relationship between the surface and inner beauty of women in a hard world.
The show runs through April 18. The New Jersey Center for Visual Arts is at 68 Elm Street. Hours are noon to 4 P.M. Monday through Friday and 2 to 4 P.M. Saturday and Sunday. Admission is free. A video shows the varied glassmaking techniques used by these artists.
Today at 3 P.M., William Warmus, a glass scholar, and Mr. Aschenbrenner, one of the exhibitors, will speak on "New Boundaries for Glass Art.""
Freudenheim, B. "CRAFTS; New reflections abound in glass art." The New York Times. March 15, 1992. accessed September 8, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/1992/03/15/nyregion/crafts-new-reflections-abound-in-glass-art.html
1992 Chihuly:
| "I instantly said, "Yes," when Speight Jenkins called to ask me to design Pelléas and Mélisande. Then I wondered what I had gotten myself into. I had never designed for the theater. One of the allures certainly was the opportunity to work on a grand scale. Over the years my architectural installations had increased in size and now I had the chance to go much bigger. Working on this scale with the extraordinary lighting instruments available in the theater was irresistible. Speight came over to my studio to read the libretto out loud, while we played the CD. When he finished, I was deep in the land of Allemonde and eager to tackle the opera's brutal, murky, erotic power. But first I had to unravel the mystery of Mélisande. Where did she come from? She marries Golaud, but why? She immediately captivates Golaud's little brother Pelléas, but does she love him? Did she lie to Golaud because she was frightened or was she just pathological? Is Mélisande a victim or a vixen? Was it Maeterlinck or Debussy or both who didn't want us to know? The story allowed my imagination to go in many directions and the ambiguity of the opera gave me great freedom. I began to envision immense glass forms on a black glass stage. A giant glass flower - the garden. A red tube - Golaud's broken heart. A pile of yellow glass - Mélisande's hair that was "longer than she." I wanted to suggest the essence of each scene in a way that was far more visual, visceral, intuitive than conceptual. I made drawings on black paper and then went into the hot shop where the glass blowers turned the images into sculptures. We made these objects to scale and placed them in maquettes of the stage. We then photographed them so we could study the options. Speight, Neil Peter Jampolis and Bob Schaub, the technical director, came to the Boathouse and together we spent two days making the decisions about which sets to realize. Naturally we didn't always agree. But as Speight told me in the beginning: "The opera is the most collaborative of all the arts." |
1992 Speight Jenkins:
| "As though it were a normal request of an opera director to a glass artist, in the summer of 1991, I called Dale Chihuly and said, "I would like you to design the sets for Debussy's Pelléas and Mélisande. I think your material and sensibilities are exactly right. Are you interested?" Chihuly said, "Yes. Why don't you come over and see me?" Armed with a CD of Pelléas and several books, I went. At the Boathouse, Chihuly's studio on Lake Union, I was taken on a tour by the irrepressible artist and was dumbfounded. I had never in my life imagined that one could do with glass what he has done. By the time we wound our way up the spiral metal stairway in his living quarters, I was convinced that only Dale Chihuly could design our Pelléas. I began to talk to him about the opera, to spin the story and to tell of Debussy and Maeterlinck. Then we listened to the Tower Scene, the end of the scene in the Abyss and the whole next scene. He was so fascinated that we went on to a bit of the hair-pulling scene and some of the final encounter of the lovers. That was enough. Chihuly was hooked. My enthusiasm for Chihuly as set designer, despite his complete inexperience in the theater, came directly from my feelings about the drama and music of Pelléas and Mélisande. It had immediately flashed in my mind when Jim Bailey, the Opera's late marketing director, and I discussed producing Debussy's impressionistic opera that nothing would be better than glass for the sets. Chihuly's preeminence in glass is a given; he has made Seattle an internationally known center for the glass arts. With this fame and his legendary inventiveness, I believed no one could better Pelléas and Mélisande. Chihuly could realize Debussy's own concept of an ideal opera: two associated dreams. No place, nor time. Pelléas and Mélisande is a bit like an onion - peeling away one layer only reveals the multitude of layers underneath. During the course of his life, Debussy supplied reasons as to why. The composer believed that the dream-like atmosphere of Pelléas was far closer to real life than the romantic realism of the operas of his contemporaries. He said, "In Pelléas (the original play by Maurice Maeterlinck), there is evocative language whose sensitivity could be extended into music and the orchestral decor." He loved the symbolist quality of Maeterlinck and felt that he could create the complexity of real people with this text. Through the years audience reaction to Pelléas has not equaled musicians' and critics' evaluation. The premiere at the Opéra-Comique in Paris on April 30, 1902, was moderately successful though the press was divided and certain conservative elements of the public were outraged. Vincent d'Indy, an important composer of the time, wrote probably the most perceptive review. He stated that the crux to understanding the opera was to "find in Pelléas not what one had come to look for, but what the composer had intended to put in it." Even though the opera was given in Paris every season until the beginning of World War II and made its way to every major opera house in the world, its unrelieved subtlety has proved difficult for many in its audience. Pelléas and Mélisande is allusive, illusive and elusive. The text and music allude to countless unspoken ideas and feelings. We must intuit Mélisande's feelings from her words and what the music tells us she is thinking. The illusive quality of the work can also be seen in Mélisande: Does she love Pelléas or not? Finally the elusive point can be made in the reasons behind her lying. Why not tell Golaud that she lost the ring in the well? In this opera the audience must know precisely what the characters are saying. They may not tell you what they are thinking or feeling, but one must know their words for the music and their actions to communicate their true feelings. Having loved Pelléas since my first exposure to it at the Metropolitan in 1960, I felt that part of the problem of making Pelléas accessible to the public could be corrected by supratitles. I also believed that the dreamy sets, which have characterized most Pelléas productions of my lifetime, reinforce a surface reading of the music. They are, in short, too much of a good thing. The public sees a visual spectacle so close to what they are hearing that they become bored. It seemed to me that the very abstract qualities of glass combined with Chihuly's remarkable, indeed unique eye for color would give us what we wanted visually. So we were going to do a glass Pelléas. What on earth did that mean? Pieces of glass on stage? Stagehands in terror lest a wrong move destroy an art object, not just a theatrical prop? Chihuly was concerned about how we could realize his sculptural visions. I explained that we had extraordinarily gifted people who could create virtually any design at the appropriate scale. Robert Schaub, Seattle Opera's technical director, would be responsible for recreating Chihuly's designs for the stage. Chihuly already knew that one of his former students, Margie Jervis, was our talented chief scenic painter. Chihuly wanted to know more about stage lighting so we rented Intiman Theater and then the high school auditorium at Shoreline to show him the possibilities. Working with Chihuly at every step was the director, Neil Peter Jampolis, who has won Tonys and Emmys for a host of lighting and set designs. He has been acclaimed for a great many opera sets and with Fidelio in Seattle in 1991 has had a distinguished beginning as a director. Jampolis had seen Chihuly's one-man show at the Seattle Art Museum in the summer of 1992 and had loved Chihuly's idea for the opera's Forest Scene - a shiny, apparently transparent green plastic material shaped into columns. When Chihuly and Jampolis met, they went over Chihuly's rough sketches and Jampolis explained his ideas for the show. Through their conversations it became clear that Chihuly's design should be abstract, capturing a moment of feeling or perhaps conveying the whole spirit of the scene in one visual creation that would be glass or glass-like. Like the music the sets should be evocative and symbolist, not literal or realistic. Jampolis believes that the crucial moment of mutual understanding came after a spaghetti dinner in the Boathouse when the two of them were washing the dishes. He was suddenly able to communicate clearly to Chihuly what his role should be: Rather than turn himself into a stage designer, Chihuly should look within his own artistic sensibility to find a visual equivalent for each of the scenes. The Opera's duty would be to execute those ideas. At the time of this writing, all the contracts are let and construction is moving forward. Now we can only hope that it will bring forth what we envision. On March 13th we hope that we will lead you to a magical Allemonde, a dramatic and aural experience worthy of Debussy and a visual experience worthy of that master of glass, Dale Chihuly. |
Jenkins, S. "Opera Director's Statement". 1992. http://www.chihuly.com/installations/pelleas/opera.html |
