1.2 A Parallel World
I compare the emergence and methodologies of studio glass and conceptual art to tease out qualities that might add legitimacy to glasswork if it is to be engaged within the context of contemporary fine art practice.
Gallery owner Peter Kolliner opened his Kirra Gallery (specialising in studio glass) in Federation Square, Melbourne, deliberately opposite the public entrance to the Ian Potter Centre (part of the National Gallery of Victoria) – a collection of Australian art that does not exhibit contemporary Australian glass. Kolliner approached curators at the Ian Potter Centre about this omission and he said they told him, “It is just not our policy”[1] to exhibit glass. Contemporary art curator Juli Cho Bailer commented that as a curator of contemporary art coming to work at the Museum of Glass (Tacoma, Washington), it was as if there were two worlds each unaware of the other.[2] In between these worlds there are makers of studio glass who are annoyed that their work is not accepted within a contemporary art context.[3] This perceived lack of acceptance is an issue because there are practitioners in studio glass who do want their work engaged as contemporary art; and pragmatically there is more scope within contemporary art. The opportunity to show is wider, the recognition is broader and potentially financial returns are higher.
A Matter of Aesthetic Engagement?
The current director of the Bega Valley Regional Gallery, Megan Bottari, in reference to Tour De Force (an exhibition she curated that was focussed on the use of glass as a contemporary art medium) wrote:
"There needs to be a paradigm shift beyond the parameters of ‘heritage’ craft principles – beyond the inanimate object on wall or plinth, beyond the predictable. It’s time to re-introduce the development of strong conceptual practices that engage on a broader, humanist level – in a way that pushes the boundaries and intelligently interrogates the art-craft dichotomy. In other words, it’s time to encourage the upcoming generation of glass artists to spread their wings and start considering their work in terms of a bona fide contemporary art practice. And art isn’t about dexterous technique or material properties – art is the eloquent visual expression of the human condition.
Only a handful of practitioners tackle it, but those few who do have mastered and sublimated the craft in such a way that they have indeed succeeded in transcending the constrictions of the guild. There’s an indefinable quality to such work – a spark of creative genius – that communicates itself to the viewer on a purely intuitive level." [4]
Bottari is asking that work be affective viscerally, and she is suggesting that to achieve such engagement glasswork must extend beyond the technical competences that make it commercially desirable within its own community of galleries and collectors. The nature of works in the exhibition in question implied that this engagement would result from the artist’s individual sensibility exercised through conceptually strong and culturally relevant works. In the catalogue’s foreword Bottari is quoted as saying the show’s participants could be considered ‘artist’s artists’, creating work with “an undefinable quality that catches our breath and creates a shift, however modest, in the collective consciousness”.[5] She poses the rhetorical question, “Is there a way back to the wonder and joy?”[6] This question is asked in response to a perceived swing towards marketability through high-end virtuosity – commercial viability through “slickness”[7] in the maker’s mastery of glass techniques. Bottari draws a line around the refinement of technical processes so highly valued in our glass community, and makes it clear that technical excellence alone is insufficient justification for studio glasswork to be considered as contemporary fine art practice. As another perspective on this same issue Martin Beaver, Canberra gallery owner and dealer, when asked about more adventurous contemporary approaches in glass, said he sees glass art “as pigeon-holed at the moment”,[8] but hopes that it will become less so and feels that it should only be a matter of time for this situation to change.
Being seen as a glass artist may prove restrictive when compared to the exhibition opportunities available to contemporary artists, but there are examples of glass practitioners showing their work in a broader visual arts context. Sydney College of the Arts academic Jane Gavan sees professional positioning not as being about what you are making, but a strategic choice as to where you exhibit, how you think of yourself and how you describe yourself. That is, not in terms of the work itself, but in the way it is presented. If this is the case, Kolliner’s experience in Federation Square implies it will also depend on the availability of appropriate and willing galleries.
Evaluation exists between two poles, and those poles are brought into focus by asking: “Is a particular piece of studio glasswork contemporary art, or is it not?” If there are criteria enabling an answer to this question, what are they? Does the work satisfy those criteria, or does it not? Contemporary art practice is as diverse as it is complex. If categorising it is a matter of degrees, criteria may be easier to comprehend if they are in the nature of the dialectic – that is, the situation would be easier to understand if exemplified by a comparison between two fields of practice. Fortunately the timing of the emergence of studio glass provides opportunity for such a comparison.
A Contemporaneous Emergence
Studio glass folklore has it that the international studio glass movement was conceived during the American Craftsmen’s Council in 1959 with Harvey Littleton’s suggestion that “glass should be a medium for the individual artist”.[9] Following this, modern studio glass had its precarious birth in 1962 at hot glass workshop seminars in a garage in the garden of the Toledo Museum of Art.[10] Its creative base evolved as its practitioners developed innovative techniques unique to the medium of glass. In doing this they moved beyond the possibilities of the traditional vessel and its historic functionalism and, as sculptural form, explored the non-functional concerns of the 1960’s pop and funk cultures.[11] That is, they deliberately stepped away from the functionalism of craft towards contemporary forms they saw in fine art. However, because the movement was given necessary means by industry (notably through material technology provided by Dominick Labino), technical process was carried across this perceived border.
Given impetus by museum exhibitions (for instance by the Toledo Glass Nationals of 1966, 1968 and 1970), studio glass then established a critical political base as it was nursed by developing fine arts university courses.[12] Studio glass practitioners worked through experiment and trial and error innovation, and later they were assisted by the transference of skill from traditional European masters. Studio glass practitioners got their materials from innovative commercial producers and the movement was propelled by the determined enthusiasm of its makers. Ironically, given their initially stated aspirations, the creators of studio glass moved relatively rapidly from being technically uneducated makers of what American curator Susanne Frantz called, “numerous variations of the paperweight”[13] – their own expression of sculptural form – toward the craft value of facility afforded by technical mastery. Technical competence propelled studio glass through accumulative process. Adam Geczy points out in his book Art. Histories, Theories and Exceptions, as is commonly the case with the evolution within a technology, “... each change results in a new organization, a new process, a new set of expectations, a new set of rules for both deliverer and recipient, artist and spectator”[14].
This evolution continued to the point where one of the main criteria for judging contemporary art glass within its own community was technical virtuosity. Having reached this point, observers like Dan Klein and Ward Lloyd felt they could write, “obviously there cannot be artistry without technical skill and the skill itself becomes artistry”.[15] Anchoring artistry to technical skill in glass and its processes exposes an early dichotomy between an idea in sculptural form (as postulated by Littleton) and craft striving for perfection, often within the functional object (Labino).[16] From this birth the problematic tension between an aspiration to be accepted as fine arts practice and its bonding to technical process is embedded in studio glass – a tension evident within contemporary studio glass practice today.
When the Australian glass movement emerges a decade after the rise of the American glass movement, the interests and aspirations of Australian studio glass artists are similar. Australian studio glass develops as a balance between skill, process and idea in the maker’s search for original forms with which to mark his or her individual artistic identity. However, if studio glass practitioners thought the glass object might be positioned in the field of contemporary art practice, their timing was poor. The methodology of studio glass was incongruent with what is to become a benchmark for contemporary art practice. Between 1967 and 1970, while the ceramicist, future Australian studio glass pioneer and glass evangelist, Stephen Skillitzi is being exposed to the emergent studio glass movement in the United States of America, a new paradigm is developing for contemporary art practice. The paradigm is exemplified by conceptual art. The methodology of conceptual art is the antithesis of an aesthetic object, realised in a seductive material, through the consummate skill of a maker. In that alternate world as Sol LeWitt wrote: … the material form is secondary, lightweight, ephemeral, cheap, unpretentious and/or dematerialised. [17]
With high modernism moving through to minimalism, studio glass had a shared interest in material and form, and the bold colour and exuberant energy of pop and funk imagery provided a natural zone for contemporary glass. For a period there are shared values in the material work as mythological object. Then there is a seismic shift in the contemporary art scene as LeWitt wrote, “Ideas alone can be works of art; they are a chain of development that may eventually find some form. All ideas need not be made physical.”[18]
The late sixties in America is marked by an unpopular interventionist war in Vietnam that results in protest reflecting a mistrust of the singular motive satisfied by a unitary style. Lucy Lippard states that the rising conceptualism movement “...was very much a product of, or fellow traveller with, the political ferment of the times.”[19] The word seismic is appropriate hyperbole. Lippard writes of a polemic that is Marxist, in which the art object is perceived as product, a vehicle for capitalist profiteering, and as such it is rejected. She also writes that originality and signature gesture (hallmarks of contemporary glass) are perceived as linked to the “genius theory cherished by patriarchal, ruling-class art”, and they are also rejected. Core elements in studio glass such as the “material aspects of uniqueness, permanence and decorative attractiveness”[20] are given little importance. In the context of the time studio glass is emerging, the contemporary art world is turning to values diametrically opposed to the methodology studio glass practitioners are developing.
Studio Glass and Conceptual Art
The terms by which studio glass and conceptual art engage their audiences appear to be points at either end of a continuum. Although, within their fields, both studio glass and conceptual art prosper through practitioner interrelationships, studio glass converges towards sublime skill utilising a singular material, while what Lucy Lippard called a “divergent fragmentation”[21] marks conceptualism. Studio glass trends toward a reworking of traditional techniques and forms, and does this through the tangible permanence of the object built on formal aesthetics (a tendency to modernist concerns). Conceptual art with installations and performances,[22] (often showing little of that overt political stance beyond irreverence) takes the mundane of the world and questions it, and in so doing, makes it exceptional and/or disconcerting. Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Wrapped Coast 1968-69 and Gilbert and George The Singing Sculpture 1973 are examples.
Conceptual art confronts the viewer’s attitudes and beliefs, and in this way it can be troublesome – but it also has to be compelling (disturbingly, or provocatively so). The compelling nature of confrontation echoes Bottari’s hopes for glasswork that arrests our senses. In contrast to aesthetically pleasing objects reflecting a material mastered by skill, contemporary art practice flows from the concept back to the skills required, and the medium is selected because it is most appropriate to the concept. Skills are developed (or co-opted in collaboration) as needed. Skills do not shape the project, as each project defines its own terms. The artist addresses what the project needs, rather than enforcing conformity with what they intend (or the technical skills they can impose). It is the response by the viewer confronted by the work that is important. If there is artistic intention, it should be that the experience of the work generates in the viewer some shift in sensibility and understanding of the world, rather than implanting a specific message or response.
On entry into Australia in the early seventies, both conceptual art and studio glass utilise aspects that are theatrical – tours, events, or performance by overseas practitioners to promote and establish their fields. In both, active participants become converts who develop into leading practitioners,[23] and who then achieve international standing. A decade into the second millennium and the capitalist contemporary gallery system remains intact, and that system has done its best to absorb and commodify an expanded conceptual art. Flagship establishment museums embrace it and acceptance is evidenced by the survey exhibition 40 Years: Kaldor Public Art Projects held at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in October 2009. This exhibition featured work that is now part of the institutionalised art history curriculum, and illustrates conceptualism’s seminal position within contemporary art practice.
There is a density and diversity in conceptual art, but it is accepted as a front-runner in contemporary art practice because its focus is sympathetic to contemporary concerns. That focus is analysis, in terms of an examination (often of the mundane) to better understand contentious cultural issues. Conceptual art is concerned with thought. It delivers arguments, which although at times esoteric and self-involved, rely on the exchange of information and ideas. Conceptual art derives its creative energy by pushing against the resistance of opposing ideas, and in this dialectic conceptual art challenges the accepted beliefs of the artistic, political, or social establishment.
Contemporary Practice Positioned by Object, by Material, or by Technique?
Contemporary art practice is a broad church and its multifaceted community includes practitioners who deal strongly through the materiality of their mediums. Utilising glass as a material does not exclude a practitioner from consideration as a contemporary artist. General statements segregating contemporary glass practice from, as an example conceptual art, based on the use of glass as one’s material are contradicted by the specific example of artist Joseph Kosuth, the foundation conceptual artist who utilises printed glass and neon. The artwork W.F.T #1 (yellow) 2008, neon (Art Gallery of NSW August 2009) is an extension of the major installation presented during the 2007 Venice Biennale. However, Kosuth is considered a contemporary artist not because he worked with neon, but because his primary concern is with the word and the delivery of information and argument. Kosuth described the project as having “its basis in language itself”. Alternately, on the use of a specific material in contemporary practice, Brian Parkes said, “...for each person that is critically, or conceptually driven there are as many formalists who are interested in the ‘painterly-ness’ of paint or the ‘canvas-ness’ of canvas. That is not seen as any less of a critical framework”.[24]
Australian contemporary artist Janet Laurence, although not considered a studio glass artist, favours glass as a material and uses a range of mediums for “the veiling and layering of images, surfaces, shadows and reflections which have become a defining feature of her work emanating as they do a strong poetic resonance”.[25] Her work is not objectless. It is her objects that engage the viewer in an affective experience.
Contemporary artist Fiona Hall used glass beads to intricately construct forms in her 1999 piece Understorey. Again this work is not about glass. The point of these glass beads is that, through their history as an instrument of European trade with indigenous peoples, they are redolent of colonialism. This medium, as aesthetically pleasing as it is, is used because it is loaded with multi-layered narratives that expand and deepen interpretation. When appropriate Hall will as readily use VHS tape and cannibalised Coca Cola cans and, although they are expertly crafted into forms, the purpose of their use is to garner the diversity of cultural reference utilised in her social critiques. As evidenced by Hall’s work, exhibiting virtuoso technical skill focused in the creation of objects does not exclude an artist from consideration as a contemporary artist. The exquisitely refined wall drawings by Sol LeWitt make a similar point.[26]
When restricting the work to glass, it is the power and integrity of concept that determines the wider artistic community’s critical acceptance of a work as part of contemporary fine art practice. But if acceptance as contemporary fine art practice is something a studio glass artist aspires to, then barriers do exist.
Points of Difference – Concept?
With conceptual art numerous examples are available that stand in strong contrast to what was being done by most studio glass practitioners. [27] Conceptual art remains an exercise of the intellect that is, at its essential core, concerned with ideas. These ideas are often expressed as what in essence are investigations of the world and our place in it, and this may focus down to theories on art itself. In some cases the form becomes document,[28] and method becomes documentary.[29] Emphasising transient form many conceptual art projects leave only documentation about the work as a testament, and that documentation is, in some cases, evidenced as the work itself. The methodology is critique, and the epistemology is art in terms of a political dialectic descending from the old avant-garde – that is, the intellectual challenging of accepted ideology.
In contrast most contemporary studio glass has been craft. Its methodology is hybrid and in flux, but centred in material process, and the object (often formally beautiful) anchors its epistemology. Studio glass practitioners can creatively explore wide-ranging issues through that dominating medium given form as aesthetic (often decorative) object. However, if the object itself contains, restrains and finalises the work, the discussion is over. If a studio glass practice is to be embraced as contemporary art, its works must have the potential to conceptually expand to affectively engage the viewer in aesthetic experience intended to change perspective.
In developing concept in contemporary art practice diversity is expanded by appropriation, as Hall’s articulate appropriation of histories exemplify. Contemporary practice expresses pluralistic viewpoints through multiple mediums. This is post modernism’s promiscuous approach to means. The expansive parameters of contemporary art practice strongly contrast with a single medium anchored by object that is contemporary studio glass. In terms of a contemporary fine art practice ‘material-ness’, or ‘craft’ are problematic when they are the work’s raison d’être, yet glass can be an artist’s preferred material and still be the means to a broader conceptual purpose.
Although themes in studio glass artists may range widely through visual form, landscape and social issues, be broadly political or intimately personal, a central concern of studio glass practice is implied by virtue of the label, studio glass. To be otherwise, studio glass would need to move beyond that singular material, and in doing that studio glass would sacrifice its identity. An ideal accommodation of studio glass in the world of contemporary practice would come from work that is conceptually driven by appropriately embedded narratives, and/or work that engages as aesthetic experience generated by intrinsic properties offered up by glass and its processes.
Points of Similarity – the Generation of an Aesthetic Experience
There are Australian artists who, while working specifically with glass as their material, do want their work to be more than object. Cobi Cockburn wants her works to ‘hum’.[30] She wants her works to intuitively resonate in the viewer. This is aesthetic experience – the interplay of two sides of perceptual experience – visual form and the subjectivity of the observer. In terms of romanticism, what positions object as art is the intensity of this aesthetic connection. Delivering an anecdote supporting this hypothesis, current Director of Geelong Gallery, Geoffrey Edwards tells of a conversation with Sydney sculptor Ken Unsworth in National Gallery of Victoria. Asked by Edwards to indicate which works spoke most eloquently and compellingly to him, Unsworth deflected the question, saying it was a visceral thing.[31] He wanted confronting works that came at him like a knife thrust in the dark. Generating this level of engagement expands a tangible object into the most esoteric of experiences.
Points of Similarity – Installation
Contemporary installation is a strategy concerned with discourse rather than medium. That discourse investigates the relationship between artist and audience, and as part of this investigation installation positions its audience in mutating and disconcerting spaces that reflect the nature of contemporary societies. Through its use of a multifarious materials and techniques contemporary installation reflects the character of contemporary art. My question is, how can contemporary installation relate to studio glass, when it appears to make the aesthetic object maker obsolete?
Installation introduces greater subjectivity as viewers, though immersion in an experience, become “generators of their own meanings”.[32] There is an emphasis on sensation and subjectivity as work is manifested as an environment. In a number of contemporary installations light plays a significant part in an immersive experience.[33] The use of light extends a tendril toward studio glass, and if it is accepted that a glass object can radiate a psychological aura, a link is established with installation. If a glass object generates an environment, its psychological reach is expanded. The work becomes less an object, and more a space. The work can emotionally charge this space, and in doing so provide a greater potential for aesthetic engagement with its viewer.
That linkage is tenuous, but the relationship between studio glass and installation is historic. Forms of installation are used throughout the evolution of Australian studio glass. Australian studio glass pioneer, Cedar Prest, talks of being in California in 1970 at the dawn of the Happening[34] – art and music performance events associated with the social revolution of the late sixties. Prest later translated her experience into an approach whereby her work is event where light acts within a space. Gallery director and Australian studio glass pioneer Maureen Cahill made installations in which light is her medium as much as glass, and used public space as her canvas. Australian studio glass pioneer Stephen Skillitzi demonstrates an interest in installation and performance art beginning with his time in New York in the sixties. Installation gave him the opportunity to use a series of scenarios to indicate the progression of thought. In the early eighties Skillitzi’s installations manifest a political polemic (what he calls his “struggle with world systems”)[35] with his didactic literary works that at times are more words than object. Glass pieces Skillitzi presents as games develop into series of works, each fully playable with written rules. In the 1980s he creates short-term site-specific installation events.
A performative dimension interests Australian contemporary artist Denise Higgins, who trained in the glass workshop at the Australian National University. Not that she, or her audience are being performative – her objects as installations are the centre of an event in which she sculpts time and place.[36] Higgins takes the open qualities of glass and light to another level, incorporating sound and vibrating surfaces to envelop the beholder. Her work is about meaning making and dialogue. She uses material and scale to engage the world in a playful and generative way. Higgins is dealing with serious issues. She works with notions of darkness not commonly related to glass, and with intimacy. Her installations distort reality to involve the viewer in a meditative space within which the viewer’s responses become active in physically constructing the work. Higgins’ work is ephemeral, with changing elements that poetically engage a range of senses. She rejects the object as fetish and is conscious of her position as what she calls one of the “out-riders”[37] in the glass world. Higgins’ works do not deliver an object to be owned, but rather they deliver experiences that resonate within the viewer.
New media artist Lynette Wallworth[38] structures situations in which glass forms are galvanised by human touch under projected light. As an immersive installation her work baths the environment in projected imagery, and the participant in reflected luminosity. Australian contemporary artist Deirdre Feeney also uses projection in her work, and although she uses a variety of glassmaking techniques, Feeney argues that her work is not about glass per se, but about the expression of an idea. Working literally through objects (she projects her images through her constructed glass fabrications), her practice is about a tangible visualisation of the idea. Incorporating light in the form of a video projection, Feeney utilises the transparency of the glass to create an ephemeral extension into the surrounding space in what becomes an installation. The object becomes an active agent that Feeney calls the “creator of space”[39] within which the viewer is immersed in an experience. This creation of space defeats the constriction of object and scale that often binds glass, moving out from the precious, self-contained object to occupy a space. Video and projection put energy and movement into the still object. As an experience, imagery and space play with memory in acts of visual poetry.
The practical component of my own project presents two methodologies that expand the glasswork beyond object to aesthetically engage with the viewer. Both are installations. The first installation, Voices in the Glass is displayed around the viewing space as an orthodox gallery wall hanging. These are paintings on glass that expand through the multiple narratives they encompass. The second installation expands as a charged area as it presents for its viewer as a psychological encounter with form, light, and as the ambiguity that results from the interaction of these visual elements.
The first installation consists of thirty-nine approximately life-sized portraits. I surround the viewers with these portraits at eye level, and place the viewer in what, I hope, they recognise as a community. This presents as a metaphor – a conversation echoing the engagement I had with the studio glass community while gathering material for the project. The power of this installation is dependent on the narratives it generates. As a conservative hanging it flows around the four walls of the gallery space to surround and enclose the viewer. This arrangement is one of a number of possible arrangements and its selection is determined by the nature of the gallery, the lighting available and the circumstances of the examination.
My second installation is a sculptural work, Nebulous Landscapes. The sculpture consisted of five pieces. It is the glass in its interaction with light that generates the power of this installation. When making work I am intuitively governed by my understanding of medium and technical process. My engagement is tactile and responsive. The work is sensuous, and it is most affective in an area of solitude where a viewer can move around and between the pieces. Given appropriate placement, light acting on the formal elements of the work enables the work to visually dominate the space it occupies. Quoting the sculptor Alberto Giacometti, Kirstie Rea talked of the importance of the space around an object, and she recalls one of her wall pieces, Balancing the Blades, psychologically pushing viewers away.[40] With both my portraits and my sculpture I am attempting to activate and aesthetically charge the surrounding space.
Working with installation moves makers away from being glass artists towards artists who use glass. Installation presents the artist with the opportunity to utilise other materials in a more cross-discipline approach, but this does not mean glass is not central to the experience of the work. Glass is a medium that can facilitate engagement with its surroundings, expanding from an object as a generated experience. Works can become what Ross Gibson described as a “charged space that is available for divination”.[41] Higgins and Feeney are contemporary art practitioners. In their installations the core object physically expands out into its surroundings, encompassing and charging space into which the viewer enters to participate in an event.
Sydney College of the Arts academic and chair of the Ausglass Peripheral Vision conference, Andrew Lavery, perceives changes in studio glass happening internationally. Ways of using glass are becoming less conventional as artists move away from the vessel and traditional objects on plinths to more experimental works – often involving installation. Major overseas galleries (such as Heller Gallery in New York) known for their strong support of glass are now open to installation being shown alongside traditional object-based work. And some students of contemporary glass are being exposed to more radical approaches.[42] Having little interest in the contained and highly finished object of the traditional studio glass market, post-glass[43] practitioners create temporal installations and performances that are contemporary art practice, but that are also reminiscent of the innocent experimentation with material and process characteristic of Australian studio glass pioneer Stephen Skillitzi’s early glassblowing performances.
Glass may play a less obvious role as artists use it, but since it remains central to the practice of studio glass and can throw its craft narrative against any concept it is intended to carry, glass can leave some artists stranded between worlds. Deirdre Feeney commented when she spoke at the 2011 Ausglass conference in Sydney, that while glass-focused galleries may see her work as contemporary art, commercial contemporary fine art galleries see it as ‘limited’ to being glasswork.
The work of Tom Moore provides an intriguing blend of studio glass methodology focusing on object and skill (with corresponding elements of vessel and function) and contemporary art’s plurality. Recognised by his peers as a skilled technician and an expert glassmaker, in his contemporary art practice Moore creates exquisitely executed novelty glass objects reflecting a highly personal worldview. These are hybrid glass creatures he produces in number and groups with low value materials in stylised dioramas, which he at times uses as sets for primitively animated, but professionally made videos. While appearing naive and comic, these installations critique contemporary issues.
As strangely innocent imaginings, they resonate with Donald Kuspit’s words on being “childlike”[44] in that they may be a way of coping in an insane world. Moore plays with paradox, using sophisticated techniques to create his child-like imagery and exercising highly planned controls to create something that appears spontaneous. His forms did not find a ready home within glass culture, perhaps because, as Moore admits, his earlier ideas were technically rough and unresolved. In commercial limbo, Moore developed and refined his dioramas with the intention of creating animated documentaries that would exist as robust artworks in their own right.
Moore developed a studio practice that, as a unique voice dealing with contemporary issues, was of interest to major contemporary art institutions, (such as the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney) and to contemporary art dealers like Ray Hughes. Moore understands that his work, with its use of mixed media (incorporating materials like dirt and cardboard) and busy, humorous narratives, would not easily fit within conventional glass gallery presentations. From his example it appears that while expert technical process will win admiration from the glass community, it is a unique voice (whatever the material) that will attract the interest of contemporary art dealers.
Returning to the comparison between studio glass and conceptual art, I raised points of difference in methodology, selection of material, approach to technique and in forms of presentation, but given the diversity of contemporary art practice these are permeable borders. Meaningful engagement of the viewer crosses these borders, and a generic romanticism, as evident in the intensity of the aesthetic experience generated by a glasswork, can place a glasswork into the context of contemporary Fine Art.
[1] Peter Kolliner, personal interview, 25/09/09, 4.
[2] Juli Cho Bailer, “Intersections – Applying peripheral vision to a focused practice”, (keynote address, Peripheral Vision, The 15th Biennial Ausglass Conference, Sydney: Ausglass), 2011. Bailer was a curator at the Museum of Glass from 2004 to 2007.
[3] Andrew Lavery, personal interview, 23/11/09, 4.
[4] Megan Bottari, ‘Tour de Force: in case of emergency, break the glass...’, glass central canberra, Feburary 2009, glasscentralcanberra.wordpress.com.
[5] Megan Bottari, Tour De Force. In Case of Emergency Break Glass, catalogue, Wagga Wagga: Artisan, 2009, 6.
[6] Ibid., 4.
[7] Megan Bottari, “You’re a Tradie, Get Over It”, (talk, Peripheral Vision, Sydney: Ausglass Conference, 2011).
[8] Martin Beaver, personal interview, 11/12/09, 4.
[9] Dan Klein and Lloyd Ward, The History of Glass, London: Little Brown and Company, 2000. 262. Considering his specific focus on blown glass, Littleton’s role as the ‘single progenitor of studio glass is an oversimplification’ (See Lynn American Studio Glass 35) See p. 59 of the same publication which shows Littleton at the base of the family tree of American glassblowers.
[10] Martha Drexler Lynn, ‘8 Days In Toledo’, The UrbanGlass Art Quarterly no. 98, New York: UrbanGlass Spring, 2005, 33-34, also Finn Lynggaard, The Story of Studio Glass, Copenhagen: Rhodos, 1998, 16.
[11] Klein & Ward, The History of Glass, 263.
[12] Lynn, American Studio Glass, 57.
[13] Susanne K Frantz, Contemporary Glass. 53.
[14] Adam Geczy, Art. Histories, Theories and Exceptions, Oxford and New York: Berg, 2008. 84.
[15] Klein & Ward, The History of Glass, 268.
[16] Susanne K. Frantz, Contemporary Glass, 53-54.
[17] Sol LeWitt quoted in Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1973, vii.
[18] Lippard , Six Years, xiii.
[19] Ibid., x.
[20] Ibid., 5
[21] Ibid., 6
[22] Stephen Skillitzi, personal interview, 17/01/09 and 21/10/09. Australian Stephen Skillitzi was involved in contemporary art performances in the USA in the sixties and carried performance and installation (often with political themes) into his Australian studio glass practice.
[23] Imants Tillers worked with Christo and Jean Claude on Wrapped Coast 1968-9 and Nick Mount worked with Bill Boysen and Dick Marquis on their Australian glassblowing tour 1974.
[24] Brian Parkes, personal interview, 17/08/09, 4.
[25] Alex Baker, Jane Devery, Kelly Gellatly, 2009 Clemenger Contemporary Art Award, catalogue, Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2009, 37.
[26] Sol Le Witt, Wall drawing #337, 1971, John Kaldor Family Collection, Art Gallery NSW.
[27] Examples such as Mike Parr’s visceral Let a friend bite your shoulder until blood appears 1972. Mike Parr, Artist Talk, Melbourne: Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, September 2010 and Richard Long’s meditative Stone Line 1977. Forbat, Sophie ed., 40 Years: Kaldor Public Art Projects, catalogue, Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2009,134.
[28] Morris, Continuous Project. 69-70.
[29] Jonathan Fineberg, Art Since 1940, New Jersey: Prentice Hall Inc, 1995, 341. For example, Vito Acconci’s Following Piece, 1969-88.
[30] Charles Butcher and Cobi Cockburn, Personal interview,18/01/2010, 6.
[31] Geoffrey Edwards, personal interview, 24/09/09, 5.
[32] Nicolas De Oliveira, Nicola Oxley, Michael Petry, Installation Art in the New Millennium. The Empire of the Senses, London: Thames & Hudson Ltd, 2003,17.
[33] Ibid., for example, Marcel Biefer/Beat Zgraggen, God, 53. Ann Veronica Janssens, Blue, Red and Yellow, 56. Believe/Disbelieve, Mischa Kuball, 62.
[34] Cedar Prest, personal interview, 11/01/10, 6.
[35] Steven Skillitzi, personal interview, 17/01/09 and 21/10/09, 5.
[36] Denise Higgins, personal interview, 12/12/09, 1.
[37] Ibid., 6.
[38] Dan Klein, ‘Interactive Luminance’, Craft Arts International no. 68, Sydney: Craft Arts Pty Ltd, 2006, 22-27.
[39] Deirdre Feeney, personal interview, 13/10/09, 2.
[40] Kirstie Rea, personal interview, 19/03/09, 7-8.
[41] Ross Gibson, personal interview, 01/12/09, 1-2.
[42] Anjali Srinivasan, “Living Cultures in Glass: Entropy, Agriculture and Post-Glass,” (artist talk, Sydney: Sydney College of the Arts, May 11, 2011).
[43] Post-glass was featured at the 2011 Ausglass conference. It incorporated digital video in phenomenological experiments with glass technical process that challenge orthodox approaches to the studio glass object.
[44] Donald Kuspit, The End of Art, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008,138.
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I compare the emergence and methodologies of studio glass and conceptual art to tease out qualities that might add legitimacy to glasswork if it is to be engaged within the context of contemporary fine art practice.
Gallery owner Peter Kolliner opened his Kirra Gallery (specialising in studio glass) in Federation Square, Melbourne, deliberately opposite the public entrance to the Ian Potter Centre (part of the National Gallery of Victoria) – a collection of Australian art that does not exhibit contemporary Australian glass. Kolliner approached curators at the Ian Potter Centre about this omission and he said they told him, “It is just not our policy”[1] to exhibit glass. Contemporary art curator Juli Cho Bailer commented that as a curator of contemporary art coming to work at the Museum of Glass (Tacoma, Washington), it was as if there were two worlds each unaware of the other.[2] In between these worlds there are makers of studio glass who are annoyed that their work is not accepted within a contemporary art context.[3] This perceived lack of acceptance is an issue because there are practitioners in studio glass who do want their work engaged as contemporary art; and pragmatically there is more scope within contemporary art. The opportunity to show is wider, the recognition is broader and potentially financial returns are higher.
A Matter of Aesthetic Engagement?
The current director of the Bega Valley Regional Gallery, Megan Bottari, in reference to Tour De Force (an exhibition she curated that was focussed on the use of glass as a contemporary art medium) wrote:
"There needs to be a paradigm shift beyond the parameters of ‘heritage’ craft principles – beyond the inanimate object on wall or plinth, beyond the predictable. It’s time to re-introduce the development of strong conceptual practices that engage on a broader, humanist level – in a way that pushes the boundaries and intelligently interrogates the art-craft dichotomy. In other words, it’s time to encourage the upcoming generation of glass artists to spread their wings and start considering their work in terms of a bona fide contemporary art practice. And art isn’t about dexterous technique or material properties – art is the eloquent visual expression of the human condition.
Only a handful of practitioners tackle it, but those few who do have mastered and sublimated the craft in such a way that they have indeed succeeded in transcending the constrictions of the guild. There’s an indefinable quality to such work – a spark of creative genius – that communicates itself to the viewer on a purely intuitive level." [4]
Bottari is asking that work be affective viscerally, and she is suggesting that to achieve such engagement glasswork must extend beyond the technical competences that make it commercially desirable within its own community of galleries and collectors. The nature of works in the exhibition in question implied that this engagement would result from the artist’s individual sensibility exercised through conceptually strong and culturally relevant works. In the catalogue’s foreword Bottari is quoted as saying the show’s participants could be considered ‘artist’s artists’, creating work with “an undefinable quality that catches our breath and creates a shift, however modest, in the collective consciousness”.[5] She poses the rhetorical question, “Is there a way back to the wonder and joy?”[6] This question is asked in response to a perceived swing towards marketability through high-end virtuosity – commercial viability through “slickness”[7] in the maker’s mastery of glass techniques. Bottari draws a line around the refinement of technical processes so highly valued in our glass community, and makes it clear that technical excellence alone is insufficient justification for studio glasswork to be considered as contemporary fine art practice. As another perspective on this same issue Martin Beaver, Canberra gallery owner and dealer, when asked about more adventurous contemporary approaches in glass, said he sees glass art “as pigeon-holed at the moment”,[8] but hopes that it will become less so and feels that it should only be a matter of time for this situation to change.
Being seen as a glass artist may prove restrictive when compared to the exhibition opportunities available to contemporary artists, but there are examples of glass practitioners showing their work in a broader visual arts context. Sydney College of the Arts academic Jane Gavan sees professional positioning not as being about what you are making, but a strategic choice as to where you exhibit, how you think of yourself and how you describe yourself. That is, not in terms of the work itself, but in the way it is presented. If this is the case, Kolliner’s experience in Federation Square implies it will also depend on the availability of appropriate and willing galleries.
Evaluation exists between two poles, and those poles are brought into focus by asking: “Is a particular piece of studio glasswork contemporary art, or is it not?” If there are criteria enabling an answer to this question, what are they? Does the work satisfy those criteria, or does it not? Contemporary art practice is as diverse as it is complex. If categorising it is a matter of degrees, criteria may be easier to comprehend if they are in the nature of the dialectic – that is, the situation would be easier to understand if exemplified by a comparison between two fields of practice. Fortunately the timing of the emergence of studio glass provides opportunity for such a comparison.
A Contemporaneous Emergence
Studio glass folklore has it that the international studio glass movement was conceived during the American Craftsmen’s Council in 1959 with Harvey Littleton’s suggestion that “glass should be a medium for the individual artist”.[9] Following this, modern studio glass had its precarious birth in 1962 at hot glass workshop seminars in a garage in the garden of the Toledo Museum of Art.[10] Its creative base evolved as its practitioners developed innovative techniques unique to the medium of glass. In doing this they moved beyond the possibilities of the traditional vessel and its historic functionalism and, as sculptural form, explored the non-functional concerns of the 1960’s pop and funk cultures.[11] That is, they deliberately stepped away from the functionalism of craft towards contemporary forms they saw in fine art. However, because the movement was given necessary means by industry (notably through material technology provided by Dominick Labino), technical process was carried across this perceived border.
Given impetus by museum exhibitions (for instance by the Toledo Glass Nationals of 1966, 1968 and 1970), studio glass then established a critical political base as it was nursed by developing fine arts university courses.[12] Studio glass practitioners worked through experiment and trial and error innovation, and later they were assisted by the transference of skill from traditional European masters. Studio glass practitioners got their materials from innovative commercial producers and the movement was propelled by the determined enthusiasm of its makers. Ironically, given their initially stated aspirations, the creators of studio glass moved relatively rapidly from being technically uneducated makers of what American curator Susanne Frantz called, “numerous variations of the paperweight”[13] – their own expression of sculptural form – toward the craft value of facility afforded by technical mastery. Technical competence propelled studio glass through accumulative process. Adam Geczy points out in his book Art. Histories, Theories and Exceptions, as is commonly the case with the evolution within a technology, “... each change results in a new organization, a new process, a new set of expectations, a new set of rules for both deliverer and recipient, artist and spectator”[14].
This evolution continued to the point where one of the main criteria for judging contemporary art glass within its own community was technical virtuosity. Having reached this point, observers like Dan Klein and Ward Lloyd felt they could write, “obviously there cannot be artistry without technical skill and the skill itself becomes artistry”.[15] Anchoring artistry to technical skill in glass and its processes exposes an early dichotomy between an idea in sculptural form (as postulated by Littleton) and craft striving for perfection, often within the functional object (Labino).[16] From this birth the problematic tension between an aspiration to be accepted as fine arts practice and its bonding to technical process is embedded in studio glass – a tension evident within contemporary studio glass practice today.
When the Australian glass movement emerges a decade after the rise of the American glass movement, the interests and aspirations of Australian studio glass artists are similar. Australian studio glass develops as a balance between skill, process and idea in the maker’s search for original forms with which to mark his or her individual artistic identity. However, if studio glass practitioners thought the glass object might be positioned in the field of contemporary art practice, their timing was poor. The methodology of studio glass was incongruent with what is to become a benchmark for contemporary art practice. Between 1967 and 1970, while the ceramicist, future Australian studio glass pioneer and glass evangelist, Stephen Skillitzi is being exposed to the emergent studio glass movement in the United States of America, a new paradigm is developing for contemporary art practice. The paradigm is exemplified by conceptual art. The methodology of conceptual art is the antithesis of an aesthetic object, realised in a seductive material, through the consummate skill of a maker. In that alternate world as Sol LeWitt wrote: … the material form is secondary, lightweight, ephemeral, cheap, unpretentious and/or dematerialised. [17]
With high modernism moving through to minimalism, studio glass had a shared interest in material and form, and the bold colour and exuberant energy of pop and funk imagery provided a natural zone for contemporary glass. For a period there are shared values in the material work as mythological object. Then there is a seismic shift in the contemporary art scene as LeWitt wrote, “Ideas alone can be works of art; they are a chain of development that may eventually find some form. All ideas need not be made physical.”[18]
The late sixties in America is marked by an unpopular interventionist war in Vietnam that results in protest reflecting a mistrust of the singular motive satisfied by a unitary style. Lucy Lippard states that the rising conceptualism movement “...was very much a product of, or fellow traveller with, the political ferment of the times.”[19] The word seismic is appropriate hyperbole. Lippard writes of a polemic that is Marxist, in which the art object is perceived as product, a vehicle for capitalist profiteering, and as such it is rejected. She also writes that originality and signature gesture (hallmarks of contemporary glass) are perceived as linked to the “genius theory cherished by patriarchal, ruling-class art”, and they are also rejected. Core elements in studio glass such as the “material aspects of uniqueness, permanence and decorative attractiveness”[20] are given little importance. In the context of the time studio glass is emerging, the contemporary art world is turning to values diametrically opposed to the methodology studio glass practitioners are developing.
Studio Glass and Conceptual Art
The terms by which studio glass and conceptual art engage their audiences appear to be points at either end of a continuum. Although, within their fields, both studio glass and conceptual art prosper through practitioner interrelationships, studio glass converges towards sublime skill utilising a singular material, while what Lucy Lippard called a “divergent fragmentation”[21] marks conceptualism. Studio glass trends toward a reworking of traditional techniques and forms, and does this through the tangible permanence of the object built on formal aesthetics (a tendency to modernist concerns). Conceptual art with installations and performances,[22] (often showing little of that overt political stance beyond irreverence) takes the mundane of the world and questions it, and in so doing, makes it exceptional and/or disconcerting. Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Wrapped Coast 1968-69 and Gilbert and George The Singing Sculpture 1973 are examples.
Conceptual art confronts the viewer’s attitudes and beliefs, and in this way it can be troublesome – but it also has to be compelling (disturbingly, or provocatively so). The compelling nature of confrontation echoes Bottari’s hopes for glasswork that arrests our senses. In contrast to aesthetically pleasing objects reflecting a material mastered by skill, contemporary art practice flows from the concept back to the skills required, and the medium is selected because it is most appropriate to the concept. Skills are developed (or co-opted in collaboration) as needed. Skills do not shape the project, as each project defines its own terms. The artist addresses what the project needs, rather than enforcing conformity with what they intend (or the technical skills they can impose). It is the response by the viewer confronted by the work that is important. If there is artistic intention, it should be that the experience of the work generates in the viewer some shift in sensibility and understanding of the world, rather than implanting a specific message or response.
On entry into Australia in the early seventies, both conceptual art and studio glass utilise aspects that are theatrical – tours, events, or performance by overseas practitioners to promote and establish their fields. In both, active participants become converts who develop into leading practitioners,[23] and who then achieve international standing. A decade into the second millennium and the capitalist contemporary gallery system remains intact, and that system has done its best to absorb and commodify an expanded conceptual art. Flagship establishment museums embrace it and acceptance is evidenced by the survey exhibition 40 Years: Kaldor Public Art Projects held at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in October 2009. This exhibition featured work that is now part of the institutionalised art history curriculum, and illustrates conceptualism’s seminal position within contemporary art practice.
There is a density and diversity in conceptual art, but it is accepted as a front-runner in contemporary art practice because its focus is sympathetic to contemporary concerns. That focus is analysis, in terms of an examination (often of the mundane) to better understand contentious cultural issues. Conceptual art is concerned with thought. It delivers arguments, which although at times esoteric and self-involved, rely on the exchange of information and ideas. Conceptual art derives its creative energy by pushing against the resistance of opposing ideas, and in this dialectic conceptual art challenges the accepted beliefs of the artistic, political, or social establishment.
Contemporary Practice Positioned by Object, by Material, or by Technique?
Contemporary art practice is a broad church and its multifaceted community includes practitioners who deal strongly through the materiality of their mediums. Utilising glass as a material does not exclude a practitioner from consideration as a contemporary artist. General statements segregating contemporary glass practice from, as an example conceptual art, based on the use of glass as one’s material are contradicted by the specific example of artist Joseph Kosuth, the foundation conceptual artist who utilises printed glass and neon. The artwork W.F.T #1 (yellow) 2008, neon (Art Gallery of NSW August 2009) is an extension of the major installation presented during the 2007 Venice Biennale. However, Kosuth is considered a contemporary artist not because he worked with neon, but because his primary concern is with the word and the delivery of information and argument. Kosuth described the project as having “its basis in language itself”. Alternately, on the use of a specific material in contemporary practice, Brian Parkes said, “...for each person that is critically, or conceptually driven there are as many formalists who are interested in the ‘painterly-ness’ of paint or the ‘canvas-ness’ of canvas. That is not seen as any less of a critical framework”.[24]
Australian contemporary artist Janet Laurence, although not considered a studio glass artist, favours glass as a material and uses a range of mediums for “the veiling and layering of images, surfaces, shadows and reflections which have become a defining feature of her work emanating as they do a strong poetic resonance”.[25] Her work is not objectless. It is her objects that engage the viewer in an affective experience.
Contemporary artist Fiona Hall used glass beads to intricately construct forms in her 1999 piece Understorey. Again this work is not about glass. The point of these glass beads is that, through their history as an instrument of European trade with indigenous peoples, they are redolent of colonialism. This medium, as aesthetically pleasing as it is, is used because it is loaded with multi-layered narratives that expand and deepen interpretation. When appropriate Hall will as readily use VHS tape and cannibalised Coca Cola cans and, although they are expertly crafted into forms, the purpose of their use is to garner the diversity of cultural reference utilised in her social critiques. As evidenced by Hall’s work, exhibiting virtuoso technical skill focused in the creation of objects does not exclude an artist from consideration as a contemporary artist. The exquisitely refined wall drawings by Sol LeWitt make a similar point.[26]
When restricting the work to glass, it is the power and integrity of concept that determines the wider artistic community’s critical acceptance of a work as part of contemporary fine art practice. But if acceptance as contemporary fine art practice is something a studio glass artist aspires to, then barriers do exist.
Points of Difference – Concept?
With conceptual art numerous examples are available that stand in strong contrast to what was being done by most studio glass practitioners. [27] Conceptual art remains an exercise of the intellect that is, at its essential core, concerned with ideas. These ideas are often expressed as what in essence are investigations of the world and our place in it, and this may focus down to theories on art itself. In some cases the form becomes document,[28] and method becomes documentary.[29] Emphasising transient form many conceptual art projects leave only documentation about the work as a testament, and that documentation is, in some cases, evidenced as the work itself. The methodology is critique, and the epistemology is art in terms of a political dialectic descending from the old avant-garde – that is, the intellectual challenging of accepted ideology.
In contrast most contemporary studio glass has been craft. Its methodology is hybrid and in flux, but centred in material process, and the object (often formally beautiful) anchors its epistemology. Studio glass practitioners can creatively explore wide-ranging issues through that dominating medium given form as aesthetic (often decorative) object. However, if the object itself contains, restrains and finalises the work, the discussion is over. If a studio glass practice is to be embraced as contemporary art, its works must have the potential to conceptually expand to affectively engage the viewer in aesthetic experience intended to change perspective.
In developing concept in contemporary art practice diversity is expanded by appropriation, as Hall’s articulate appropriation of histories exemplify. Contemporary practice expresses pluralistic viewpoints through multiple mediums. This is post modernism’s promiscuous approach to means. The expansive parameters of contemporary art practice strongly contrast with a single medium anchored by object that is contemporary studio glass. In terms of a contemporary fine art practice ‘material-ness’, or ‘craft’ are problematic when they are the work’s raison d’être, yet glass can be an artist’s preferred material and still be the means to a broader conceptual purpose.
Although themes in studio glass artists may range widely through visual form, landscape and social issues, be broadly political or intimately personal, a central concern of studio glass practice is implied by virtue of the label, studio glass. To be otherwise, studio glass would need to move beyond that singular material, and in doing that studio glass would sacrifice its identity. An ideal accommodation of studio glass in the world of contemporary practice would come from work that is conceptually driven by appropriately embedded narratives, and/or work that engages as aesthetic experience generated by intrinsic properties offered up by glass and its processes.
Points of Similarity – the Generation of an Aesthetic Experience
There are Australian artists who, while working specifically with glass as their material, do want their work to be more than object. Cobi Cockburn wants her works to ‘hum’.[30] She wants her works to intuitively resonate in the viewer. This is aesthetic experience – the interplay of two sides of perceptual experience – visual form and the subjectivity of the observer. In terms of romanticism, what positions object as art is the intensity of this aesthetic connection. Delivering an anecdote supporting this hypothesis, current Director of Geelong Gallery, Geoffrey Edwards tells of a conversation with Sydney sculptor Ken Unsworth in National Gallery of Victoria. Asked by Edwards to indicate which works spoke most eloquently and compellingly to him, Unsworth deflected the question, saying it was a visceral thing.[31] He wanted confronting works that came at him like a knife thrust in the dark. Generating this level of engagement expands a tangible object into the most esoteric of experiences.
Points of Similarity – Installation
Contemporary installation is a strategy concerned with discourse rather than medium. That discourse investigates the relationship between artist and audience, and as part of this investigation installation positions its audience in mutating and disconcerting spaces that reflect the nature of contemporary societies. Through its use of a multifarious materials and techniques contemporary installation reflects the character of contemporary art. My question is, how can contemporary installation relate to studio glass, when it appears to make the aesthetic object maker obsolete?
Installation introduces greater subjectivity as viewers, though immersion in an experience, become “generators of their own meanings”.[32] There is an emphasis on sensation and subjectivity as work is manifested as an environment. In a number of contemporary installations light plays a significant part in an immersive experience.[33] The use of light extends a tendril toward studio glass, and if it is accepted that a glass object can radiate a psychological aura, a link is established with installation. If a glass object generates an environment, its psychological reach is expanded. The work becomes less an object, and more a space. The work can emotionally charge this space, and in doing so provide a greater potential for aesthetic engagement with its viewer.
That linkage is tenuous, but the relationship between studio glass and installation is historic. Forms of installation are used throughout the evolution of Australian studio glass. Australian studio glass pioneer, Cedar Prest, talks of being in California in 1970 at the dawn of the Happening[34] – art and music performance events associated with the social revolution of the late sixties. Prest later translated her experience into an approach whereby her work is event where light acts within a space. Gallery director and Australian studio glass pioneer Maureen Cahill made installations in which light is her medium as much as glass, and used public space as her canvas. Australian studio glass pioneer Stephen Skillitzi demonstrates an interest in installation and performance art beginning with his time in New York in the sixties. Installation gave him the opportunity to use a series of scenarios to indicate the progression of thought. In the early eighties Skillitzi’s installations manifest a political polemic (what he calls his “struggle with world systems”)[35] with his didactic literary works that at times are more words than object. Glass pieces Skillitzi presents as games develop into series of works, each fully playable with written rules. In the 1980s he creates short-term site-specific installation events.
A performative dimension interests Australian contemporary artist Denise Higgins, who trained in the glass workshop at the Australian National University. Not that she, or her audience are being performative – her objects as installations are the centre of an event in which she sculpts time and place.[36] Higgins takes the open qualities of glass and light to another level, incorporating sound and vibrating surfaces to envelop the beholder. Her work is about meaning making and dialogue. She uses material and scale to engage the world in a playful and generative way. Higgins is dealing with serious issues. She works with notions of darkness not commonly related to glass, and with intimacy. Her installations distort reality to involve the viewer in a meditative space within which the viewer’s responses become active in physically constructing the work. Higgins’ work is ephemeral, with changing elements that poetically engage a range of senses. She rejects the object as fetish and is conscious of her position as what she calls one of the “out-riders”[37] in the glass world. Higgins’ works do not deliver an object to be owned, but rather they deliver experiences that resonate within the viewer.
New media artist Lynette Wallworth[38] structures situations in which glass forms are galvanised by human touch under projected light. As an immersive installation her work baths the environment in projected imagery, and the participant in reflected luminosity. Australian contemporary artist Deirdre Feeney also uses projection in her work, and although she uses a variety of glassmaking techniques, Feeney argues that her work is not about glass per se, but about the expression of an idea. Working literally through objects (she projects her images through her constructed glass fabrications), her practice is about a tangible visualisation of the idea. Incorporating light in the form of a video projection, Feeney utilises the transparency of the glass to create an ephemeral extension into the surrounding space in what becomes an installation. The object becomes an active agent that Feeney calls the “creator of space”[39] within which the viewer is immersed in an experience. This creation of space defeats the constriction of object and scale that often binds glass, moving out from the precious, self-contained object to occupy a space. Video and projection put energy and movement into the still object. As an experience, imagery and space play with memory in acts of visual poetry.
The practical component of my own project presents two methodologies that expand the glasswork beyond object to aesthetically engage with the viewer. Both are installations. The first installation, Voices in the Glass is displayed around the viewing space as an orthodox gallery wall hanging. These are paintings on glass that expand through the multiple narratives they encompass. The second installation expands as a charged area as it presents for its viewer as a psychological encounter with form, light, and as the ambiguity that results from the interaction of these visual elements.
The first installation consists of thirty-nine approximately life-sized portraits. I surround the viewers with these portraits at eye level, and place the viewer in what, I hope, they recognise as a community. This presents as a metaphor – a conversation echoing the engagement I had with the studio glass community while gathering material for the project. The power of this installation is dependent on the narratives it generates. As a conservative hanging it flows around the four walls of the gallery space to surround and enclose the viewer. This arrangement is one of a number of possible arrangements and its selection is determined by the nature of the gallery, the lighting available and the circumstances of the examination.
My second installation is a sculptural work, Nebulous Landscapes. The sculpture consisted of five pieces. It is the glass in its interaction with light that generates the power of this installation. When making work I am intuitively governed by my understanding of medium and technical process. My engagement is tactile and responsive. The work is sensuous, and it is most affective in an area of solitude where a viewer can move around and between the pieces. Given appropriate placement, light acting on the formal elements of the work enables the work to visually dominate the space it occupies. Quoting the sculptor Alberto Giacometti, Kirstie Rea talked of the importance of the space around an object, and she recalls one of her wall pieces, Balancing the Blades, psychologically pushing viewers away.[40] With both my portraits and my sculpture I am attempting to activate and aesthetically charge the surrounding space.
Working with installation moves makers away from being glass artists towards artists who use glass. Installation presents the artist with the opportunity to utilise other materials in a more cross-discipline approach, but this does not mean glass is not central to the experience of the work. Glass is a medium that can facilitate engagement with its surroundings, expanding from an object as a generated experience. Works can become what Ross Gibson described as a “charged space that is available for divination”.[41] Higgins and Feeney are contemporary art practitioners. In their installations the core object physically expands out into its surroundings, encompassing and charging space into which the viewer enters to participate in an event.
Sydney College of the Arts academic and chair of the Ausglass Peripheral Vision conference, Andrew Lavery, perceives changes in studio glass happening internationally. Ways of using glass are becoming less conventional as artists move away from the vessel and traditional objects on plinths to more experimental works – often involving installation. Major overseas galleries (such as Heller Gallery in New York) known for their strong support of glass are now open to installation being shown alongside traditional object-based work. And some students of contemporary glass are being exposed to more radical approaches.[42] Having little interest in the contained and highly finished object of the traditional studio glass market, post-glass[43] practitioners create temporal installations and performances that are contemporary art practice, but that are also reminiscent of the innocent experimentation with material and process characteristic of Australian studio glass pioneer Stephen Skillitzi’s early glassblowing performances.
Glass may play a less obvious role as artists use it, but since it remains central to the practice of studio glass and can throw its craft narrative against any concept it is intended to carry, glass can leave some artists stranded between worlds. Deirdre Feeney commented when she spoke at the 2011 Ausglass conference in Sydney, that while glass-focused galleries may see her work as contemporary art, commercial contemporary fine art galleries see it as ‘limited’ to being glasswork.
The work of Tom Moore provides an intriguing blend of studio glass methodology focusing on object and skill (with corresponding elements of vessel and function) and contemporary art’s plurality. Recognised by his peers as a skilled technician and an expert glassmaker, in his contemporary art practice Moore creates exquisitely executed novelty glass objects reflecting a highly personal worldview. These are hybrid glass creatures he produces in number and groups with low value materials in stylised dioramas, which he at times uses as sets for primitively animated, but professionally made videos. While appearing naive and comic, these installations critique contemporary issues.
As strangely innocent imaginings, they resonate with Donald Kuspit’s words on being “childlike”[44] in that they may be a way of coping in an insane world. Moore plays with paradox, using sophisticated techniques to create his child-like imagery and exercising highly planned controls to create something that appears spontaneous. His forms did not find a ready home within glass culture, perhaps because, as Moore admits, his earlier ideas were technically rough and unresolved. In commercial limbo, Moore developed and refined his dioramas with the intention of creating animated documentaries that would exist as robust artworks in their own right.
Moore developed a studio practice that, as a unique voice dealing with contemporary issues, was of interest to major contemporary art institutions, (such as the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney) and to contemporary art dealers like Ray Hughes. Moore understands that his work, with its use of mixed media (incorporating materials like dirt and cardboard) and busy, humorous narratives, would not easily fit within conventional glass gallery presentations. From his example it appears that while expert technical process will win admiration from the glass community, it is a unique voice (whatever the material) that will attract the interest of contemporary art dealers.
Returning to the comparison between studio glass and conceptual art, I raised points of difference in methodology, selection of material, approach to technique and in forms of presentation, but given the diversity of contemporary art practice these are permeable borders. Meaningful engagement of the viewer crosses these borders, and a generic romanticism, as evident in the intensity of the aesthetic experience generated by a glasswork, can place a glasswork into the context of contemporary Fine Art.
[1] Peter Kolliner, personal interview, 25/09/09, 4.
[2] Juli Cho Bailer, “Intersections – Applying peripheral vision to a focused practice”, (keynote address, Peripheral Vision, The 15th Biennial Ausglass Conference, Sydney: Ausglass), 2011. Bailer was a curator at the Museum of Glass from 2004 to 2007.
[3] Andrew Lavery, personal interview, 23/11/09, 4.
[4] Megan Bottari, ‘Tour de Force: in case of emergency, break the glass...’, glass central canberra, Feburary 2009, glasscentralcanberra.wordpress.com.
[5] Megan Bottari, Tour De Force. In Case of Emergency Break Glass, catalogue, Wagga Wagga: Artisan, 2009, 6.
[6] Ibid., 4.
[7] Megan Bottari, “You’re a Tradie, Get Over It”, (talk, Peripheral Vision, Sydney: Ausglass Conference, 2011).
[8] Martin Beaver, personal interview, 11/12/09, 4.
[9] Dan Klein and Lloyd Ward, The History of Glass, London: Little Brown and Company, 2000. 262. Considering his specific focus on blown glass, Littleton’s role as the ‘single progenitor of studio glass is an oversimplification’ (See Lynn American Studio Glass 35) See p. 59 of the same publication which shows Littleton at the base of the family tree of American glassblowers.
[10] Martha Drexler Lynn, ‘8 Days In Toledo’, The UrbanGlass Art Quarterly no. 98, New York: UrbanGlass Spring, 2005, 33-34, also Finn Lynggaard, The Story of Studio Glass, Copenhagen: Rhodos, 1998, 16.
[11] Klein & Ward, The History of Glass, 263.
[12] Lynn, American Studio Glass, 57.
[13] Susanne K Frantz, Contemporary Glass. 53.
[14] Adam Geczy, Art. Histories, Theories and Exceptions, Oxford and New York: Berg, 2008. 84.
[15] Klein & Ward, The History of Glass, 268.
[16] Susanne K. Frantz, Contemporary Glass, 53-54.
[17] Sol LeWitt quoted in Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1973, vii.
[18] Lippard , Six Years, xiii.
[19] Ibid., x.
[20] Ibid., 5
[21] Ibid., 6
[22] Stephen Skillitzi, personal interview, 17/01/09 and 21/10/09. Australian Stephen Skillitzi was involved in contemporary art performances in the USA in the sixties and carried performance and installation (often with political themes) into his Australian studio glass practice.
[23] Imants Tillers worked with Christo and Jean Claude on Wrapped Coast 1968-9 and Nick Mount worked with Bill Boysen and Dick Marquis on their Australian glassblowing tour 1974.
[24] Brian Parkes, personal interview, 17/08/09, 4.
[25] Alex Baker, Jane Devery, Kelly Gellatly, 2009 Clemenger Contemporary Art Award, catalogue, Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2009, 37.
[26] Sol Le Witt, Wall drawing #337, 1971, John Kaldor Family Collection, Art Gallery NSW.
[27] Examples such as Mike Parr’s visceral Let a friend bite your shoulder until blood appears 1972. Mike Parr, Artist Talk, Melbourne: Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, September 2010 and Richard Long’s meditative Stone Line 1977. Forbat, Sophie ed., 40 Years: Kaldor Public Art Projects, catalogue, Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2009,134.
[28] Morris, Continuous Project. 69-70.
[29] Jonathan Fineberg, Art Since 1940, New Jersey: Prentice Hall Inc, 1995, 341. For example, Vito Acconci’s Following Piece, 1969-88.
[30] Charles Butcher and Cobi Cockburn, Personal interview,18/01/2010, 6.
[31] Geoffrey Edwards, personal interview, 24/09/09, 5.
[32] Nicolas De Oliveira, Nicola Oxley, Michael Petry, Installation Art in the New Millennium. The Empire of the Senses, London: Thames & Hudson Ltd, 2003,17.
[33] Ibid., for example, Marcel Biefer/Beat Zgraggen, God, 53. Ann Veronica Janssens, Blue, Red and Yellow, 56. Believe/Disbelieve, Mischa Kuball, 62.
[34] Cedar Prest, personal interview, 11/01/10, 6.
[35] Steven Skillitzi, personal interview, 17/01/09 and 21/10/09, 5.
[36] Denise Higgins, personal interview, 12/12/09, 1.
[37] Ibid., 6.
[38] Dan Klein, ‘Interactive Luminance’, Craft Arts International no. 68, Sydney: Craft Arts Pty Ltd, 2006, 22-27.
[39] Deirdre Feeney, personal interview, 13/10/09, 2.
[40] Kirstie Rea, personal interview, 19/03/09, 7-8.
[41] Ross Gibson, personal interview, 01/12/09, 1-2.
[42] Anjali Srinivasan, “Living Cultures in Glass: Entropy, Agriculture and Post-Glass,” (artist talk, Sydney: Sydney College of the Arts, May 11, 2011).
[43] Post-glass was featured at the 2011 Ausglass conference. It incorporated digital video in phenomenological experiments with glass technical process that challenge orthodox approaches to the studio glass object.
[44] Donald Kuspit, The End of Art, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008,138.
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