The End?
By William Warmus
This
essay appeared in Glass magazine, Autumn, 1995
Studio glass has its beginning and end
in America, where the present situation offers opportunities in two
directions. Looking back,
historians have an obligation to write the history of studio glass and
establish its key figures, its first wave. Looking to the future, artists have
the opportunity to incorporate the technical legacy of studio glass into new
narratives.
Studio glass is at a pivotal point in
its history. The recognition of established masters including Tom Patti and
Dale Chihuly (the alpha and omega of technique and marketing), Richard Marquis
and Dan Dailey (our humorists), Paul Stankard and Mark Peiser (pioneering
naturalists), Howard Ben Tre, Mary Shaffer and Marvin Lipofsky (all sculptors)
and the increasing attention paid to their work by writers, museums and
collectors indicates the passing of the era of isolated innovation within the
field. First wave work has the
fresh, innocent quality typical of profound innovation and when the history of
studio glass is written, the period from roughly the founding of the Glass Art
Society in 1971 into the late 1980s will be theirs as originators and
educators. And as innovators, they became the ones to challenge.
Originally, the concept of the glass
artist working alone in the studio made sense as a way of moving beyond the
meaningless and unproductive traditions that Harvey Littleton and others
sought to escape, as they existed
in the confines of the 1950s glass
factory, which had become highly commercialized and unresponsive to artist’s
needs. This led to a period of intense technical and stylistic innovation as
studio glassmakers slowly reinvented the factory concepts of continuous
technical experimentation, teamwork, efficient organization of space,
refinement through repetition. Now the early masters of studio glass have
become the champions of its traditions. The criticism leveled against many of
these artists--that they do not change--no longer seems valid as time reveals
the diversity of work produced during their careers. Significantly, these
pioneering figures may now be seen as justified in consolidating their
positions: they almost have a duty to perfect and publish techniques that took
decades to refine.
We have perhaps forgotten that studio
glass is largely about technique and broadening the definition of the factory:
although it began in the United States as a way to get the creative glassmaker
out of industry and into a pristine studio, it was also a way to put the
artist back in control of techniques and some kind of factory. Today artists
like Dale Chihuly and Dan Dailey are the direct heirs to Tiffany and Galle
who, in the words of Harvey Littleton, “were trained as artists and had
chosen glass, but [who] chose to work within the framework of factories that
they founded, factories that were totally under their control so that they
made very exciting things”. This
is why studio glass begins and ends in America, where glassmakers first felt
expelled from industry and where many now control their own homemade
factories.
Most art movements last only a
generation and the styles grouped together under the term studio glass are not
exempt. Exceptional is the fact that new waves of studio glassmakers and
collectors often behave as if their world will continue to evolve at the rapid
pace set by the early innovators. This leads to the marketing of “innovations”
that repeat, sometimes unknowingly, the early successes of the first wave. The
terrain of studio glass is only now being charted, its circumference and
boundaries measured, our susceptibility to imitations lessened. Criticism of
glass exists, but is sporadic and tends to be published in specialized
journals. We need forceful criticism as a gauge of originality and corrective
to excesses, whether of taste, price, or commercialism. Forget the endlessly
distracting quarrels over “Is it Art?” We need critics and historians to
engage in the debates from which consensus will emerge about the key artists
and objects of the studio glass era, even if some turn out to be industrial
designers, some objects made by production studios. And we desperately need
critics who will generously champion and defend the individuals they support.
I would venture to suggest that when
the history of studio glass is written, significant accomplishments will
include the growth of a community, the emergence within this community of
innovative approaches to the marketplace, and the cultivation of maximum
diversity within the medium itself.
Communities grow from a mixture of
common attributes and interest, and I challenge readers to find any art
communities that are more unified than the one focused on glass. As the
American art scene expanded from the 1960s onward it became increasingly
difficult to capture the sense of community shared by earlier groups such as
the abstract expressionists, unified by location (New York and the Hamptons),
dealers (Peggy Guggenheim), collectors, and critics (Greenberg and Rosenberg).
The current art situation mirrors
the present political situation in the United States: it is too diverse and
factional to be called a community in the traditional sense. But the glass
world, the glass ghetto so disparaged in some circles, is not. It has remained
a community on the order of the earlier ones that are now disbanded. That is
something to celebrate, not dismiss and discourage. If you are an insider and
have forgotten the warmth of individual members and the strength of the crowd,
or a newcomer and want to see for yourself, visit any of the great gatherings
of the clan (the phrase of one prominent critic): the October Pilchuck School
benefit auction, the springtime Glass Art Society conferences, the great
exhibition and collector reunion at SOFA Chicago every fall.
The market for studio glass matured
from roughly 1979-1989, led by legendary dealers, notably Ferdinand Hampson
and Douglas Heller, who in many ways took the place of art critics as
promoters of the “new glass”. In my mind, the key innovation in this
market was the development of a close knit and highly involved community of
collectors on a national (not regional) scale, unlike anything in the
artworld, who for many reasons found that they enjoyed each other’s company,
enjoyed taking glassblowing lessons, founding philanthropic societies to
support emerging artists, etc.. Many were couples who collected as a means of
enhancing a relationship, and many collectors were successful business people
who brought a benignly competitive approach to acquiring studio glass.
Since 1990, stagnation has been
evident. Many of the founding collectors have built large, mature collections
and consequently are less active. Impersonal
forces, primarily discounting and studio sales, drive the nineties market and
have taken the lead away from pro-active dealers and collectors: who are the
new Hampsons, Hellers and Saxes of the nineties?
What are the bold moves, such as opening a gallery in SoHo or
energizing a major art museum (Toledo) to renew its support for contemporary
glass? There are certainly signs of optimism, as some members of the new
generation of studio glassmakers have
been able to raise their prices by showing in a fine arts context where prices
are traditionally higher. But should we be optimistic that the studio glass
community and market is increasingly driven by external forces, and no longer
by its own internal momentum, which now seems dissipated?
Art communities are defined more by
shared aspirations than shared achievements, which tend to be recognized as
individual. As leading figures in studio glass achieve national attention and
distance themselves from their origins, the aspirations of the community
become diffused and susceptible to sentimentalizing. Now, as younger artists
working with studio glass techniques develop stronger roots in the art world,
signs of disintegration are only emphasized. Their aspirations lie elsewhere,
as may their community ties. This is inevitable: communities are destined to
dissolve or evolve. And while the ever present fear in political communities,
republican or democratic, is that they will succumb to tyranny, art
communities might rightly fear more the effects of neglect and marginalization.
The pond may be drying up.
The glassmakers who came after the
first wave and matured in the 1980s, as well as those now entering the field,
face a daunting situation. Stagnation, exhaustion and lack of direction are
words applied in the 1990s not only to studio glass, but to all aspects of
life in the United States. The end of the cold war has unmasked the decay of
moral values in nations on both sides of the iron curtain. Artists, aware of
the changes within society, have documented this corruption. Pathological art,
art about the sickness of society, has replaced the avant-garde art in the
mainstream. Are we witnessing the
desperate end of an era, or a stillborn birth?
Studio glass itself is not stagnant, it
is complete. There is an uncanny parallel
between the development of studio glass and of glass blowing in ancient Rome.
As Donald Harden noticed, in writing for The Glass of the Caesars, “There
must have been some experimenting before glass-blowing became accepted and
well understood by glassworkers... but ...within twenty or thirty years they
proved capable of developing almost all the inflation techniques still present
nearly 2,000 years later in the workshops of their modern successors.”
I believe the argument can be made that the period of innovation in
studio glass, roughly from 1962 through the end of the nineteen eighties, was
the most significant period in the history of glass since Roman times.
The significance of studio glass may be
its cultivation of and openness to diversity, not in an ethnic sense but in a
technical, material one. The preserve of glass is everywhere, not just in the
artworld. Sometimes it seems that
glassmakers make things for no reason at all except the technical challenge,
but in fact studio glassmakers are willing heirs to a long and mixed tradition
of craftmakers, artists, souvenir shops, anomalous extra-artistic stuff,
stuff so beautiful or unusual or peculiar that glass has become a loose
cannon among media: it is unpredictable how any glass object will be
appreciated once it is made. The unpredictable beauty inherent in glass means
that an extreme surplus of value may at any moment be attached to any object:
a factory made souvenir or the damaged 200 inch telescope mirror blank on
display at The Corning Glass Center. This suggests that some of the best works
in glass are not necessarily magnificent works, but those that inspire
magnificently. These may be turned out by many different kinds of studios, and
it is the willingness of many to accept this diversity
that has kept the community vital.
Will another 2,000 years be required
before the word new can again be applied to glass making?
The confused and incomplete styles of art we see emerging from glass
studios today are indicative of experimental, transitional, rococo and
mannerist work that, in moving away from studio glass traditions, has yet to
establish its own identity. Some of the best work has simply taken its place
in the art world in general and is unrecognizable as studio glass: Christopher
Wilmarth, never a studio glassmaker, led the way in this direction.
Despite the success of Duchamp’s “Large
Glass,” glass as a material for art has never been comfortable in
association with the avant-garde or its pathological successors (even Galle,
the sickliest of glassmakers, asserted the vitality of nature through his
symbolism). Art glass that
imitates the look and actions of the avant-garde
appears immature and kitschy or stale and pompous. Maybe glass is too
inherently healthy, glassmakers too accepting of diversity, to fully
participate in the current art scene. Tiffany and Galle may yet emerge as more
central to glass than Duchamp or neo-expressionism.
Perhaps the most promising glassmakers
are now renovating venerable glassmaking traditions by producing vessels and
figures within a narrative art that has links to traditional storytelling.
Maybe the word renovation will come to replace the word deconstruction
as a mantra for the nineties. The interest in narration, in narrative art, is
significant for renovation: retelling is a means of renewal. Narration
promises to be the tool that is added to the “technical” tools developed
by studio glassmakers over the last 30-odd years, a tool that is necessary for
retrieving lost legacies and for opening up future horizons. As Paul Ricoeur,
the essential philosopher of narrative, wrote: “Making and narrating have
become the two sides of one process.”
Today, making glass and narrating are
the two sides of one process. Yet narrative studio glass should not be
weakened by narrowing its definition to a sort of three-dimensional
storytelling or by appropriating to itself the roles of painting and sculpture
as documentarians of the pathological and the unhealthy. The role of narrative
in glass, like the role of telescopes in astronomy, should be nothing less
than the humanization of time and space, so that we can make a home in the
expanding universe. This project
promises to establish for glass a role independent from the other arts.
William Warmus
Ithaca
June, 1995
End note:
This
essay appeared in Glass magazine, Autumn, 1995. It was reprinted in Glashelder,
#5, January 1996. Precursors have appeared in Design Visions, the exhibition
catalog for the Australian Crafts Triennial, 1992, where I am grateful to
Robert Bell for his encouragement, and in an exhibition catalog for the New
Jersey Center for the Visual Arts earlier in 1992. Lost Legacies Salvaged:
In the Aftermath of Studio Glass was published in Glasswork magazine in
Japan in 1993, with the support of Koji Matano. The quote from Littleton is
from a letter to the author dated August 26, 1993. For those who would
question the role of the factory in the development of studio glass, I suggest
they consider the definition of a factory in Webster’s Unabridged: “an
establishment for the manufacture of goods”
where manufacture means to make “by hand, or especially, by
machinery.” For those interested in approaches to studio glass as a
community, I suggest New Communitarian Thinking edited by Amitai,
Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995.