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.
2008 William Ganis:"Few artists working in glass have been able to transcend the contemporary art world's dismissive term 'glass artist.' It is used to indicate that one does not simply work in a medium, but is heavily invested in an infastructure paralled to--but not exactly a part of--the wider contemporary art world.... A glass artist's other sin in the eyes of the art world is a too-intense focus on the media and being process-based to a degree that approaches artisanal craft....
In an art world in which conceptual and political concerns are paramount, glassmakers only interested in technique risk becoming what the mason is to the architect, the film propmaker to the true auteur. Their virtuosic skills are most widely seen in work done for more famous artists, who rarely credit their fabricator who gave form to their conceptual ideas....
While most Studio Glass objects are relatively small, the work of these breakout artists [Dale Chihuly, Christopher Wilmarth, Rob Wynne, Josiah McElheny] is often large in scale....All glasswork deals with optical phenomena, but there's a huge difference between looking at an object and having an environment work on our senses. Associations with architecture and its scale again give presence and legitimacy....The use of the semiotic Band-Aid of 'artists-who-happen-to-use-glass' can't erase the marginalization by denying it exists. The 'glass artist' stigma marks a disconnection from the rest of our rich visual culture with work that refers only to itself. Whether caused by market pressures or self-selected, it marks an insularity that is just beginning...to change; it is up to individuals and institutions within the glass universe to raise the level of discourse rather than reinforce these relegations or pretend they don't exist.""Making the cut." Ganis, William. Page 80, Glass Quarterly, No. 110: Spring 2008.2008 Kelly O'Dell @ Vetri:
2008 Patricia Palson, Petra Class, Matthew Hatala:"It is an exciting time in the world of craft. Every spring ushers in another much-anticipated edition of the Smithsonian Craft Show. As cherry blossoms carpet the nation’s capital and the world outside refreshes itself,our spirits are renewed by the inspiration of fine craft artists from across the country showing jewelry, wearables, ceramics, glass, basketry, wood, and more. But there is more to the excitement about contemporary craft. As the lines between art, craft and design increasingly blur, fine craft stands at the crossroads of acceptance into the larger world of fine art. 'I agree that the lines have blurred and continue to do so. This is reflected in many exhibitions generated by contemporary arts institutions,' remarks juror Cindi Strauss, curator of modern and contemporary decorative arts at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston...
Artists in wood, ceramics, fiber, metal, and glass are finding their voices,
evolving beyond the utilitarian traditions of craft. 'Work that emphasizes content
is a trend that I am seeing moreand more in craft.By that I mean,artists are
making work whose concept or idea is ofparamount importance,' explains Strauss."
Patricia Palson, Petra Class, Matthew Hatala. "The 2008 Smithsonian Craft Show". www.smithsoniancraftshow.org/CS2009Show/OrnamentMagazineApril2008.pdf. Accessed March 30, 2009.
2008 Richard Remsen and Dante Marioni:
Richard Remsen @ Daniel Kany Gallery "Pulse Point", Portland Maine. June 6-28, 2008.
Dante Marioni @ Traver Gallery, Tacoma Feb 2-Mar 9, 2008. "Dante Marioni".2008 Alec Clayton:"Recent visual arts coverage in the Weekly Volcano has been all about glass. I was very generous in my praise of Lino Tagliapietra, Willim Morris, and Paul and Dante Marioni. But I might have rankled some glass lovers when I wrote: “I might as well confess right now that I am not particularly enamored of glass art. I’m rather sick of the proliferation of glass in the Northwest.”Maybe I need to explain. It’s just that I hate things that become too popular. Like reality TV, catch phrases such as “bottom line” and “at the end of the day,” and glass art.To make it simple, most of what is called glass art is craft, not art, and although the differences may be subtle and hard to explain, there is a difference between art and craft. Art is transformative, transcendental; it stimulates new ways of looking and thinking and feeling.Craft just looks nice. To elevate a craft to the status of art, which is what most of the Northwest glass art phenomenon has done, is like equating Harlequin Silhouette romance novels with the literature of Faulkner and Hemingway. It’s like equating Pat Boone’s “Love Letters in the Sand” with Bob Dylan’s “All I Really Want to Do (is, baby, be friends with you).”Next door to the Museum of Glass and connected to William Traver Gallery is Vetri, a gallery dedicated to fine glassware. It is filled with beautiful items to decorate your home. But there is seldom, if ever, any art to be found at Vetri. Traver and Museum of Glass, on the other hand, exhibit fine art, including sculpture, sometimes but rarely paintings, and craft items — most of which are made from glass or glass combined with other materials. The material is almost incidental.""Kicking Glass: The Weekly Volcano art guy explains himself." by Alec Clayton. The Volcano. Tacoma, WA. Feb 28, 2008. Accessed March 30. 2009.
http://www.weeklyvolcano.com/2008-02-28/visual-edge/1875/2008 Kenneth Baker"Admirers of empty virtuosity may thrill to "Chihuly at the de Young," the de Young Museum's celebration of contemporary glass master Dale Chihuly. But so will those among the art public building a dossier against director John Buchanan's leadership of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
Perhaps in today's arts funding environment, every museum must work a potboiler or two into its exhibition calendar. But Chihuly has come to personify everything meretricious in contemporary art. The most exciting thing about his work: Its status as art stands in question.
Worse, the de Young originated this one-venue exhibition.
Chihuly's presentation at the de Young consists of ensembles of works in blown glass, so theatrically lighted that they make a visitor feel like a walk-on performer in some costly, unnamed spectacle. That spectacle is Chihuly's career.
With the Rhode Island School of Design as his first important launch pad, Chihuly, a Tacoma, Wash., native, propelled himself into the international glassworks world. He bootstrapped his own glass-blowing mastery into an impresario role, eventually leading teams of glass craftsmen around the world. The outcome of these collaborations always bears his name.
A fair-minded critic must ask why Chihuly's work cannot be taken seriously as sculpture. Sculptors of acknowledged importance have at times made good use of glass: Robert Smithson (1938-1973), Christopher Wilmarth (1943-1987), Barry Le Va, Kiki Smith. But all of them shunned Chihuly's forte: decoration.
Perhaps dreamy color, glossy surfaces and flamboyant design - the signal qualities of Chihuly's work - should be enough. But in a culture where only intellectual content still distinguishes art from knickknacks, they are not.
The skeptical visitor to "Chihuly at the de Young," starting in the second of its 11 rooms, gets the queasy sense that here the gift shop inevitably barnacled to such exhibitions has finally engulfed its host. The earliest of Chihuly's installations, from 1972, and one of the latest, "Mille Fiori" (2008), look like surrealistic passages in a forest fit for Gump's. The many inanities of conceptual and other contemporary art may have inflamed the appetite for craft skill that Chihuly superficially satisfies.
He even exploits the open formal rhetoric of installation art. But there never develops any sense of linkage in thought or form to the work of a master of sculptural installation such as Jannis Kounellis, Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) or even Ann Hamilton.
Chihuly's most considered example at the de Young is "Tabac Baskets" (2008). On a series of long, horizontal shelves, he has placed glass vessels he made in response to American Indian baskets - ectoplasmic abstractions of the irregularities the baskets develop from the effect of gravity and the pliant nature of their material.
Baskets from Chihuly's own collection flank his pieces throughout the display, but the tiny spotlights under the lip of each shelf fall not on the baskets but on the glass works.
Educated viewers cannot look for long at Chihuly's work without wishing there were something to think about. So they think about something else. The capacity to hold our attention, in the moment or in reflection later, is a mark of significant art in an era when mass media work hard to abbreviate attention spans so as to cut costs and decapitate questions.
The history of art is a history of ideas, not just of valuable property. Chihuly has no place in it, and the de Young disserves its public by pretending that he does.
Baker, K. "Art review: Chihuly at the de Young." San Francisco Chronicle. Saturday, July 5, 2008. E-1. http://66.35.240.8/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/07/05/DD9811I6MN.DTL2008 David Littlejohn:"For all his triumphant commercial success, and the awed adoration he inspires among his devotees, Mr. Chihuly is only now having his first comprehensive exhibition at a major general art museum. "Chihuly at the de Young" (which will not travel) is, in fact, the first big show originated by the museum's new director at its new Herzog and de Meuron building in Golden Gate Park. Mr. Chihuly has had solo shows in Seattle, Tacoma and Portland, as a local boy made good; in smaller museums around the country; and in museums in Washington, London and Paris devoted to the decorative arts. But never anything on this scale, or at a major "fine art" museum....But -- with the possible exception of that last complex, well-composed installation -- these objects strike me as ill-suited for an art museum with top-tier pretensions. In Gallery 7, two flat-bottomed wooden boats stand on a mirror base. One is piled high with garishly colored glass spheres; the other sprouts a jungle of twisting glass weeds or snakes or fingers. While throngs of fans clicked away on their little cameras, I found myself nauseated by the grotesque, gleaming, pointless excess....
Kenneth Baker, art critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, outraged the glass man's admirers (and no doubt some interior decorators) by dismissing him as an interior decorator. I wouldn't go that far. Team Chihuly decorates exterior spaces as well."Littlejohn, D. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121797479216614823.html Accessed April 4, 2009. "Decorative, Yes, but Why
Does It Merit This Show?". August 6, 2008. Wall Street Journal.2007-08 Victoria Josslin:"Since Albrecht Durer depicted himself wearing gloves, artists have claimed that they are gentlemen, not artisans. Museum of Glass adjunct curator Juli Cho Bailer...seems intent on pursuing Durer's argument. In her catalogue essay she insists on dissociating the work in this exhibition from the traditions of craft or American Studio Glass, emphasizing the hands-off nature of the work. She contrasts 'the artistry of glass in earlier centuries [that] stressed technical mastery of the medium by the artisan, a convention that still influences much of glass art-making today' to the more conceptual work of the current exhibition 'since all the glass elements were conceived by the artists, yet fabricated by others.' The press release, too, shields the artists from association with the work for which the museum is best known: 'While the artists of the Studio Glass movement have brought glass as a medium to the forefront of contemporary art,' it reads,'the artists selected for this exhibition have minimal relationship to that movement and tent to use glass differently in their work.'It's amusing to consider a world in which Wim Delvoy's X-rays of copulating couples are fine, but there's something not quite nice about the hot shop....Bailer writes that the work in the exhibition 'suggest[s] passages through which we can see beyond the technical matters that overwhelm our appreciation of glass and begin to observe and understand the deeper issues that concern artists today.'Is there some inherent quality in technical accomplishment that perverts us from addressing deeper issues?...I do have a hard time believing that there's an inevitable disconnect between execution and content, skill and conceptual power....If the artists had brilliantly fabricated their own glass, would the content of the work be diminished?""Immaculate Conception". Josslin, Victoria. Glass Quarterly, Number 109. Winter 2007-08.
2008 CCTV:
Author Unknown. "Today, glass is a common necessity. It is also the basis of an art form. It has special flexibility and changes its qualities under different temperatures. It is a medium for artists. On today's the List, we will get to know a glass artist, who not only sculptures the fragile material into beautiful shapes and colors, but also endows it with new meaning.
...Guan [Donghai] said, "It's rare to see Chinese glass artists on the international scene. So the overseas glass critics and collectors have strong interest in Chinese glass art. A Chinese glass artist who has ingenious creativity and the sense of his nationality will be warmly welcomed. It is exactly the pursuit in my career. Meanwhile I want to bring up a group of young talented artists, like my students. They are innovative and they keep polishing their works to maturity. I would like to promote them as a team and arrange exhibitions for them abroad. Then the international glass art community will really see the development of contemporary Chinese glass art.
...Apparently he has transferred his concept of power to his followers. The earnest efforts of the young artists, promise a glittering future for Chinese glass art."Unknown. "Glass artist Guan Donghai". December 19, 2008. CCTV. Accessed April 18, 2009. http://www.china.org.cn/video/2008-12/19/content_16976734_4.htm
