SECTION ONE
Chapter 1
Hunting the Narratives
In this chapter I examine the generation of narratives through the interaction of context and meaning in both the interpretation of a studio glasswork and in the interpretation of the practice that created that glasswork.
1.1 Giving Practice its Name
I examine ‘craft’ as an implicit label in studio glasswork. I question the validity of focusing on technical process, material and object to determine our engagement with a glasswork, and I propose that contemporary art practice can be an outcome derived from these same elements.
Studio Glass Texts
Looking for labels immediately leads me to existing literature in the field of studio glass. Examining the contents of library shelves exposes a range of approaches to recording the nature of studio glass. There are numerous books that describe and demonstrate technical process, however I am concerned with deeper insights into what we do as practitioners in this field. I start with the broad historical sweep based in the use of glass as a material that is The Art of Glass. Glass in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria by Geoffrey Edwards. This insightful book presents the poetic and enigmatic nature of our medium and its use as metaphor. Edwards traces the historic and technical development of the glass object from antiquity to the late twentieth century.
The technical evolution of world glass from antiquity to the modern is the theme of The History of Glass by Dan Klein and Ward Lloyd. More specifically Klein takes a closer look at studio glass in Glass A Contemporary Art. He opens by briefly covering the growth of the studio glass movement noting borders between craft and art raised by technique and material seduction. He then proceeds with an international survey and includes a chapter on Australia and New Zealand that introduces some of the key personalities in the genesis of Australasian studio glass. Finn Lynggaard provides an excellent history of the development of the studio glass movement in his book The Story of Studio Glass, in which Dr Gerry King contributes with a chapter on Australia. A local historical context is also provided by a section in Dr Grace Cochrane’s book, The Crafts Movement in Australia: A History. Contemporary Glass by Susanne K. Frantz provides a significant world survey based in the collection of the Corning Museum of Glass. Frantz provides dazzling illustrations of diverse modernist objects to validate glass as a medium for artists, although her book is lacking in Australian examples. 25 Years of New Glass Review. The Corning Museum of Glass is a survey by Tina Oldknow that corrects this oversight with seventeen Australian makers represented. In this book technique expands the glass object as form and narrative to open up a diverse aesthetic potential within creative glass. A survey of practitioners can also be seen in Contemporary International Glass 60 Artists in the V&A by Jennifer Hawkins Opie, who introduces her topic by advocating glass because of its versatility, she then moves the emphasis of her introduction from studio glass to glass art. Opie continues over creative glassmaking innovations in the nineteenth century into American promulgations of studio glass in the second half of the twentieth century. Touching on the origins of the art/craft debate she addresses technique in glassmaking and the potential of technique in individual expression. What follows is a varied survey, which presents individual artist statements with each artist entry displaying a large image of one work. These iconic objects are technically refined, modernist works. Artists in Glass. Late twentieth Century Masters in Glass again by Dan Klein provides another survey artist-by-artist proving technique can be exquisite, but perhaps also the master of all. The studio glass movement in the latter half of the twentieth century is the focus of American Studio Glass 1960-1990 by Martha Drexler Lynn. Beginning with the question, “Is it Art” she proceeds through the evolution of technique and presentation platforms to validate an affirmative answer to her question.
In his book 2Oth Century Glass Mark Cousins begins by lamenting the ‘myopic attitude towards glass’[1] that sees it as a ‘lesser’ decorative art form. His historic coverage moves quickly to the colour of the Arts and Crafts Movement then through the sensuous lines of Art Nouveau and the geometric elements of Art Deco to the functional modernism of the Bauhaus. Cousins continues to the late eighties with an optimistic view of studio glass as a means of individual expression. Through all this runs the undercurrent of glass and its techniques given form as design. Formal design is implied in the title Contemporary Glass. Color, Light & Form by Ray Leier, Jan Peters and Kevin Wallace, and design tracks technique and object through the brief commentary this book provides on the evolution of the studio glass object through to the book’s final chapters, Artist – Designer – Maker, Narrative in Glass and Glass as Sculpture. Here the examples provided often fall short of even the limited claims being made by the authors. Judith Miller provides a different perspective with a collector’s guide in 20th Century Glass. She proceeds by covering brands and production types. Studio glass artists have their own section where they are endorsed for the collectors’ market by naming the institutions that hold their work.
Margot Osborne’s Australian Glass Today is a significant book for Australian studio glass. The book opens with five knowledgeable writers, one artist and educator and four experienced curators – Osborne herself, Richard Whiteley, Geoffrey Edwards, Grace Cochrane and Suzzanne Frantz – each given a chapter to provide a perspective on Australian studio glass. These writers bind technical process tightly to the individual creative voice, and note the significance of key personalities and institutions in providing the means to access technique. The book is also a survey, which is extensive in dealing with the attainments of a large number of Australian studio glassmakers. Each glassmaker is presented to the reader in his or her allocated pages as seductive images of beautiful objects stunningly photographed, accompanied by a brief supportive background commentary.
The major book for Australian studio glass is Australian Studio Glass. The movement, its makers and their art, by Noris Ioannou. His later book Masters of Their Craft. Clay, Glass, Metal, Fibre, Wood provides a one-chapter addition to his opus as Glass – Allegories in Light. Ioannou in his comprehensive approach is close to providing a critical base for Australian studio glass. He addresses the properties of glass and the potential for diverse individual expression, as its practitioners become masters of their technique. Ioannou admits there is a lack of critical discourse while he argues that the unique qualities of glass and the conceptual sophistication of its makers are best united when emotional and intellectual experience is expressed through craftsmanship.
There are documents such as exhibition catalogues that mark points in the development of Australian studio glass, but there are also sources that track Australian studio glass over years. The Ausglass[2] archival files provide access to the conversations of the Australian studio community going back over thirty years starting from concerns with technique and moving to the critical positioning of studio glass in the eighties and remaining there until the present. For those interested specifically in Australian studio glass these conversations are augmented by serial catalogues such as those of the annual Ranamok Glass Prize founded in 1994. Perhaps the most important trace lies in the Australian magazine Craft Arts International, which from its first issue in 1984 remains a strong supporter of Australian studio glass.
Australian studio glass is a diverse practice providing numerous creative options, but there is room for further conceptual and aesthetic investigation. In this thesis I start from basics then reach beyond our traditional sources to, within technical process, concept, and creative voice, find a critical key to understanding our past and to unlock future practice.
The Appropriate Label
Labelling a work carries implications for the way a work is seen by its maker and interpreted by its viewer. It does this because a label frames the work’s presentation. The significance of a label does presuppose the viewer’s uncritical acceptance of such categorisation. A sophisticated viewer may ignore all labels and deal with the work in a process of unfettered aesthetic engagement. However, this does not mitigate the power a label holds to direct the nature of the viewer’s engagement with a work.
Placing a label on a studio glasswork is a significant act for the label is a defining term that acts as a specifically honed weapon in hierarchical battles, both political and commercial. Ideally, the application of a label is a considered decision based on the physical nature of the work, the nature of the practice that created it, and importantly, directed by the conceptual engagement called for by the work.
Studio glass is an historic term that, while anchored firmly in technical process, presents the glassmaker as artist.[3] In global terms the rubric ‘studio glass’ creates expectations and implies attitudes inherent in the use of glass as a sculptural medium for three-dimensional artworks. However, it also covers a multitude of approaches to which other labels are appropriately and inappropriately applied.
The labels glassmakers use to identify practice become political in the studio glass community. When artist – teacher Kirstie Rea arrived as one of the first glass students at the Canberra School of Art in 1983, she remembers the inaugural head of studio Klaus Moje chiselling away the word ‘craft’ from the Glass Craft sign the school administration placed above the new glass workshop.[4] Today Rea says it is pointless talking about labelling our practice, because it revives a dead debate, and she considers everyone in the studio glass community ‘makers’.[5] Richard Whiteley, head of the Glass Workshop at the Australian National University School of Art, thinks the eighties may have seen the last of the question, “Which category do we fit in – are we crafts practitioners, are we designers, or are we artists?”[6] Whiteley sees his recent students embracing the pluralism that was being argued for by studio glass practitioners during the nineties. He argues that the understanding these students have of the history of studio glass, combined with their knowledge of specific techniques and processes, enables them to cross boundaries, which Whiteley admits would have daunted him as a student. He thinks this crossing of boundaries is evidence of the confidence these students have in the potential of their practice. In fact, the historic pattern is that Australian studio glass practitioners extend the creative possibilities of glass in their practice. This is evidenced by the numerous times the word ‘experiment’ is mentioned in the reminiscences of forerunners in the Australian glass movement.
There are practitioners who argue that labels are meaningless, it is the making that counts, and thus all talk of categorisation is irrelevant.[7] Yet, to quote critic, historian and writer Garth Clark, “without definition nothing is anything”.[8] Labels do mark the borders of categorical imperatives. Studio glass, as a broad practice, benefits from practitioners who develop and refine its conceptual complexity. From its beginning, studio glass gained impetus from supportive tertiary institutions,[9] and if glass practice does not challenge with its own unique conceptual complexity what justifies continued tertiary funding for the teaching of an expensive, specific material based practice?
Validation for our practice lies in differentiation. Studio glass practice should present unique qualities relevant to the aims of those tertiary institutions, if not, it may be subsumed by broader, less costly approaches to education, losing a research base that adds impetus to its evolution. I now look at words associated with our practice, and elements they bring into play as I analyse the contextual labels associated with the production of contemporary glass.
Craft
Labels carry histories shaped in controversy and debate. This was explicitly stated when theorist and writer Glenn Adamson wrote:
"Commercially viable studio craft – expertly hand-blown glass, sculptural jewellery, and the like – poses no problems. On the contrary: like a Victorian servant aping his or her betters, studio craft inadvertently ratifies the hierarchical arrangement of the art world by aspiring so transparently to a status that it cannot claim." [10]
Words such as hierarchical and status exemplify the perennial art/craft debate, a debate that did indeed originate in perceived hierarchies. The art/craft debate was at its height in the early and mid years of Australian studio glass,[11] when aspiring to the status of fine artist was a matter of perceived price-points.[12] As the Australian studio glass movement established itself, studio glass did achieve success within the marketplace. Studio glass was new, exciting and popular. It was a golden child, a material blessed with advantages of beauty and technical intrigue.[13] Studio glass has general public appeal because it presents itself in the form of materially beautiful objects, often decoratively functional. The observed processes of its production (particularly in hot shop)[14] are theatrical and entertaining, demonstrating virtuoso skill with a dangerously difficult, yet visually seductive material. Studio glass values proficiency in a technical skill that manipulates the material; but when seminal conceptual artist Sol LeWitt wrote “banal ideas cannot be rescued by beautiful execution”,[15] he was expressing a mistrust of work that made a demonstration of technical skill. Phrases such as ‘uncritical public acceptance’, ‘beautiful objects’, ‘decoratively functional’, ‘demonstration of expert manual skills’ and a ‘focus on material’ describe a craft object, and invoking the craft label leads the aesthetic arbiters of some fine art institutions to close their doors to contemporary studio glass.[16]
Accepting the designation craft is problematic because of a common interpretation of the “C word”, the label that Roberta Smith referred to as “the word that dare not speak its name”,[17] as a term of condescension. Smith wrote that until quite recently the label ‘craft’ was a pejorative in the contemporary art world, and “still is in some quarters”. This is exemplified when the flagship of the United States craft movement, the American Craft Museum, is re-named The Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), because its management perceive the label ‘craft’ to have a negative association with folk craft and handicrafts.[18] The implication of traditional handicraft is only one small aspect of the rich craft narrative that also ranges through the historic authenticity of William Morris’s Red House and the functional design of the Bauhaus.
At its centre craft focuses on technical competence. The ability to master a medium and skilfully make or replicate an object is a craft. Creative conceptualisation need not be part of such a process. As contemporary arts curator Juli Cho Bailer states, “Whereas an artist may be expected to take the wheel beyond its current form to become something else, the craftsperson/artisan reinvents and refines that wheel in terms of its function”.[19]
Craft is based in orthodoxy, and orthodoxy can be interpreted as an antonym for creativity. This relationship to orthodoxy may be one source of any schism between contemporary art practice and craft. Craft evolves as the proven ways and means, and promises technical success if the given procedure is followed. A commitment to technique can lead to resistance to new approaches. Artist Paddy Robinson made this point when she spoke of visiting the Czech Republic with a doyen of Australian glass engraving, Anne Dybka. Despite Dybka’s undisputable ability as a master engraver, her demonstration of flexible-drive engraving had no audience. Robinson lamented that the reason for this was that Dybka’s approach was perceived as irrelevant to traditional Czech engraving technique.[20] Resistance to change can be self-imposed in Australia as well. Once studio glassmakers evolve a distinct technique in their practice there is a propensity for them to continue to rely on that technique, and limited forms they create with it, as their means of differentiation from other practitioners.
The issue of craft runs deeper than resistance to change. The craft narrative can smother companion narratives by activating the dichotomy of hand and intellect based in the half-truth that technical skill with a material is ingrained through persistence, while creativity lies in bursts of spontaneous intellect. With this logic intellect, in articulating concept, neglects technical presentation. Such reasoning was fashionable in contemporary art practice in the late sixties when, as Lucy Lippard noted in her seminal book, The Dematerialization of the Art Object, “ideas alone could be works of art”.[21]
The word craft need not be pejorative. Neither should it be applied as a poorly considered label that determines our response to a work. Unfortunately this can occur if cliché pre-empts our sensibility. When the label craft solidifies our preconception of what is being viewed, craft as the context for our interpretation can block our deeper aesthetic engagement with the work.
All this considered, most studio glass practitioners are positive about their own relationship to craft. Contemporary craft practice seeks a creative balance between accepted processes and experimentation. As Richard Morrell stated in the Ausglass Post Conference Notes of 1991,(23) “it is a poor artist indeed whose imagination is cramped by skill” and to that statement he added “to write poetry one has to know the language”. From its inception Australian studio glass formed its own language in an intuitive and eclectic gathering from traditional and contemporary technique.
Australian studio glass pioneer, Dr Gerry King recalls that when he started out in art education in the sixties “craft was a radical way of addressing art”.[22] The use of glass requires craft, the combining skill and sensitivity as a means to articulate concept through material. The argument is that craft can be an alliance between material and maker leading into new and unpredicted outcomes as a concept is made into form by working with and pushing against the medium.
Glenn Adamson’s upstairs/downstairs analogy itself provides room for positive interpretations of craft, because it incorporates his concept of the supplemental[23] – the submersion of one identity in service to another. That is, craft as the manipulation of material through skill can serve fine art. Fine art remains autonomous – as artists critically evaluate their role while they test the boundaries of self and society. From this perspective the art/craft debate dissipates, because sound technique facilitates the exploration of concept in glassmaking without diminishing the potential practice of artists using glass. Craft is not a detrimental issue in contemporary glassmaking when technical effort is subsumed by the work being created as an aesthetic experience for the viewer. Craft becomes problematic when technique is a distraction that stands in the way of our holistic experience of the work. If what is seen by the viewer is the skill executed (in what craftsman/critic Bruce Metcalf called the “fetish-isation of virtuoso technique”)[24] to the exclusion of other experiences, then craft is a barrier, even when it succeeds as a statement of personal virtuosity. Conversely, the same is the case if the maker’s lack of skill hinders our engagement with the glasswork.
Skill
If I consider triggers for the ‘it’s craft’ response that might lie between the work and the viewer’s deeper engagement one is often that dominant constituent of our practice – technical skill. Evident in praxis, skill is always a strong element in our engagement with studio glass. In working with glass it can be technical process that excites and engages us. When this happens, how something is done, not why, dominates.
Glassmaking is an ancient tradition anchored in material process, and it is a discipline heavily dependent on skill. Skill can intrigue a viewer, however excessive fascination with skill places means ahead of purpose and then the engagement with a work may be confined to admiration. If the demonstration of skill is perceived to determine a glasswork’s worth the work may be discounted as intellectually easy, which is misleading when glass has the potential to deliver much greater aesthetic effect.
If I accept that material skill is not the index of value in contemporary art practice it need not follow that studio glass practitioners are to be ignored in that context. It is unfortunate if evidence of skill in execution pre-empts critical evaluation of a work. Skill facilitates the presentation of concept. Without skill creative practice can be an exercise in frustration. As a contemporary glassmaker Deirdre Feeney argues, the more skill you have the less you are limited by technique.[25] For Richard Whiteley, the best result for education is a deep knowledge of process interwoven with ideas, while at the same time encouraging broader thinking.[26] In the context of the tertiary sector this act of thinking and enquiry is the institutional focus, rather than the act of making. Sustaining the nexus between making and enquiry is an on-going challenge, specifically in relationship to ways of thinking empowered by glass and its related processes.
Skill is an umbrella that covers multiple and various talents that are individually and collectively applicable to numerous situations. Australian studio glass provides a wide spectrum of both collectors and practitioners, and skill remains a strong attraction for many. For collector and co-founder of the Ranamok Glass Prize, Andy Plummer, workmanship is always crucial. Plummer states that if there is no craft ethos behind a work, no matter how good the idea, he is uninterested.[27] There are glassmakers who readily identify themselves as skilfull craft practitioners. Richard Clements, for example, learned how to handle glass tube, blow bubbles and join glass rods as a scientific glassblower. It was in 1975 that he started making perfume bottles, which remain his main source of income.
Skill shapes Australian studio glass, because skill is integral to glassmaking. Technique in the manipulation of glass is a defining marker of excellence in studio glass. In truth, technical process is central to the evolution of our field. But skill is not just a concern of studio glass practitioners. It is valued inside and outside the arts. As a synthesis of knowledge and dexterity, mind and hand, skill enables the application of intent, and with skill an artist is free to improvise. As Klaus Moje declared (in 1991), “skill will make us free”.[28] Skill can be ignored once you possess it, or you can coordinate and incorporate the skills of others in your work as needed.
Skill may provide limited on-going aesthetic engagement for the viewer, but the artist’s ability to flow with process and to creatively adapt skills within and beyond existing conceptual boundaries opens technique to greater possibilities. With glass, the skilled process[29] produces the work that is the desirable object, the “product of ideas and representation of the thing”.[30] That is, skill is the means that enables production of the object. The object as a self-contained thing can provoke our desire, but as the representation of an idea the object is conceptually expanded as a potential event stimulating on-going engagement through interpreted meaning. Both the object and any possibility of its interpretation by the viewer exist because of technique directed by artistic sensibility acting on insentient matter – that is, they exist because of skill.
Material
Materiality lies at the heart of studio glass. Even though as glassmakers we may be driven by ideas beyond the technical concerns of glass, many of us think in glass and its processes. This does not mean we deny the importance of concept, but identifying ourselves with glass and technical process leads to the confusion of the art/craft debate. Skill evidenced in the manipulation of a material lies at the heart of the craft narrative.
In glasswork the reference to a ‘jewel-like’ quality is common. It is often a cursory attraction that engages a viewer with a glass object. The inherent beauty of glass leaves studio glass practitioners open to criticism that they rely on visual seduction rather than content. Viewers look at a glasswork and feel confident in saying the work is beautiful, or it is not. If what they see is functional they do not have to ask the glasswork’s purpose before they feel they understand it. Unlike much contemporary art a response is quick, and it is easy. “I like it, because it is pleasing in appearance”, or “I do not like it, because it looks poorly made”. The viewer feels informed, but it is superficial response. Without reference to history, culture or contemporary dialogues, viewers feel the glass object is immediately accessible in terms of form, colour, texture, or demonstrated skill. The demonstration of skill in a beautiful medium is a safe-haven for those uninitiated in wider contemporary art practice.
Like many I am attracted to glass because it is seductive, but what it offers runs much deeper than superficiality. Glass is our chosen material and with it we create the visual poetry of our practice. Glass gives sound to our voice. Working with a focus on material does not proscribe the conceptual. New York interdisciplinary conceptual artist Paul Lamarre champions his love of materials, describing their sensuous nature is part of the “joy of being human”.[31] Artists whose practice is based in materiality still work through conceptual frameworks that evolve over years. To create something that resonates experientially, we need to work through a strong understanding of the materials that are being used. Accepting all that, the fact is, studio glass binds itself to one material. We chose to be glass artists, and the answer to our meaningful contemporary art practice lies within the nature of glass itself, and in the processes we use to exploit that nature.
Object
In Australian studio glass the practice of object making generates dazzlingly beautiful objects produced by a growing cohort of skilled makers. Many of these objects can be described as high-end ‘decorative’ art,[32] falling into what artist Cedar Prest calls “the cult of the object”, which she says thrives in high pricing specialist galleries. Prest feels Australia has followed this American trend, which she says comes with “the cult of names and a commercial pecking order”.[33] A cult of names is evidence of a market driven by the power of applied narratives. Narratives spin around artists’ names and related histories. Such narratives encase the work enhancing the market value of these objects for collectors.
An object may be appreciated as ornamental, and it is strong praise to call an object beautiful. Martin Beaver noted that with the 2009 Ranamok Glass Prize, although the winner was “a really interesting conceptual-based work”,[34] it was, as he put it, the ‘beautiful’ pieces that captivated the public. The significance of material beauty in studio glass is a natural outcome of the qualities of glass as a material. A decorative glass object may be desirable for the pleasure offered by its formal beauty, the configuration of sensuous material giving it form,[35] but that does not make it contemporary art. Beauty is a contentious concept in the contemporary art context, where it can be perceived as a connoisseurial and authoritarian framing device. In our pluralist society beauty is in the eye of the beholder. It is superficial to call a work art solely because its formal beauty engages my emotion and intellect as pleasure. The seduction of beauty is more justifiable if I defer to romanticism seeking beauty in some inner essence of form that reveals a truth, which moves me, and which shapes my vision of the world. This judgement goes beyond who made the object, or why it was made. I am strongly affected by the object, and that runs deeper than any attraction I might have to an object’s superficial prettiness.
If we wish a glasswork to be more than the delivered distraction of possession, investment, or amusement – if it is to be deeply aesthetically affective (and so available to emotionally shift its viewer’s perspective) – then the object should demand more of our engagement than admiration. The studio glass object is not an object in nature, but something a person made for the purpose of affecting our response. The world abounds in objects, and against this abundance art practitioners place triggers in the objects they make to generate on-going engagement. The potential power of these triggers is indicated when Karen Chambers writes, “the answer lies hidden, always, in the object itself. It touches you in a way you cannot ignore”.[36] Through such triggers an object is redefined, from the “static and final … finished product …”[37] – American artist Robert Morris’s ‘icon-object’ – to become a continually reforming dynamic event.
Klaus Moje is a consummate glass object maker of international status, but object is his secondary concern. Like a painter, he works from the plane, not from the final form, and he adds the volume of an object for presentation.[38] Moje’s object acts as his means for presenting planes of colour to the viewer, but the object he makes is more than a platform for presenting design. The object holds evidence of the different stages through which he worked. Artist Anne Dybka argued passionately for the permanence of the artwork/object as tangible evidence of a spiritual thread running through generations. In studio glass that spiritual thread is spun from our technical and conceptual ancestry. Here two fields provide powerful triggers for an object’s connection with a viewer. One field lies in visual form, and the other in narrative.
Owner and director of Narek Galleries, Karen O’Clery looks for an experience beyond the context of an object’s immediate presentation (when, as she stated, the object “has that timeless quality”).[39] Formal elements deliver that experience. The object’s form releases it from a specific situation. The work’s formal elements are continually available as an affective stimulus as they present to the viewer. At the core of O’Clery’s comment is the autonomy of visual form, and that form is available to the subjective intuition of any viewer. Visual form stimulating the subjective intuition of the viewer moves an object into art as a symbol system linked to aesthetic experience and artistic insight. The viewer’s potential engagement is extended beyond a tangible boundary within a single context. In the second field the narratives generated by the object become intrinsic to the experience the object offers to the viewer. Narratives surround the object as context and history, and they are interpreted as the object. Each viewer holds the potential to regenerate narratives in every act of viewing the object. Form and narrative empower the object as it becomes an event affecting the viewer’s response to the world. The power of this response introduces the quality of depth. An object that is inexhaustible is profound.
Design
Beyond the individual hands-on maker, glass has a strong tradition in team production through the division of skills. As was the case with glassmakers for centuries, today’s glassmakers often work in partnership to produce work. They delegate production roles to maximise efficiency. The practitioner’s role can move into that of designer, and well-known contemporary glassmakers use the technical skills of others to realise their designs. Historian and author Garth Clark argues that craft should seek alliance with design.[40] As production or commission work, design is an operational means within glassmaking.[41] The prominence of design is evident in the focus of the JamFactory, a major player in creative glass in Australia. Officially called the JamFactory Craft and Design Centre, it carries historic links to design education going back into the mid-nineteenth century.[42] Design is central to of Mark Cousins’ book Twentieth Century Glass, and that book culminates with interpretations of new design of the 1980s appealing to the senses, rather than the intellect.[43] And in 1994 Jenny Zimmer[44] (writing of the Glass Triennial as a reflection of the previous six years for Australian studio glass) uses the term ‘design’ as if it is unquestioningly associated with glass.
Design implies precognition, and that precognition is aimed at function utilising ‘pertinence and prescience’[45] in a fitness for purpose. Function often determines the context of our engagement with a work. Generally, function is the easiest of contexts to read and the easiest to close and disengage. As part of the practical world, design pushes against the resistance of an idea utilizing problem solving to reach a solution. This separates its methodology from art. Design is a process that seeks termination in resolution, where art opens into poetry through aesthetic interpretation. Where design resolves in function, art begins in engagement. As a future direction for studio glassmakers design is a natural career option, because it continues the studio glass movement’s commitment to technical process. Design is a natural path to follow if you are a glassmaker raised in a culture of technical and functional problem solving.
Whether or not the term designer is applied to his or her practice, the essence of design can still be integral to the work of a maker. Design can engage as efficient function or as formal arrangement and then be dismissed, even if it is aesthetically pleasing. But again, as with skill, design is activated in praxis, where it operates as means rather than end. Artist Judi Elliott has always been interested in design.[46] The formal elements of her work are embodied by the creative journey she took with material through technique. A creator of beautiful ceramic forms in her youth, she now works like a painter, layering and cutting back fused glass to reveal opaque colour.
An internationally recognised Australian glassmaker, Elliott always sees herself as an artist, whatever her medium. Her work exhibits mastery of the formal elements of design in her work, but it is more than that. Although appearing to be the antithesis of an international contemporary artist like Silvia Levenson,[47] Elliott’s work is still a deeply bedded and subtle narrative of self and space.[48] What at first may appear to be stylish formal abstraction, at a deeper level is metaphor for the body protected and encased. Strata are revealed as the surface is penetrated, and formal design is exposed as a fascinating means of engaging human identity. With these insights, material, technique, subject and design may be seen to combine as form in a romantic layering of narratives that create a work with the potential to expose a great deal of its maker.
Intention
Design as a process carries the maker’s intention through to fruition, but does a maker’s intention assist us in appropriately labelling a glasswork as contemporary art practice? According to Donald Preziosi, “... the most pervasive theory of the art object … was its conception as a medium of expression … a vehicle by means of which intentions, values, attitudes, ideas, political or other messages, or the emotional state(s) of the maker … were conveyed”[49].
As a theory intentionality is compatible with studio glass being seen as unique works, which are made by independent artists. However, the artwork as a form realising an artist’s specific intention in its engagement with its viewers assumes one can predetermine and constrict engagement in a way that is, in reality, improbable. To assume a work will be contained by one intention behind its making is to limit its poetic potential; that is, the open potential for making meaning. The work will exist as an entity removed from its maker, and may be interpreted in ways that the maker may never have considered.
Beyond aesthetic triggers implanted by a maker, the artist’s intent may or may not attach to the work. If the intent is obvious in the work, then the work tells: it becomes didactic. A moral agenda sits upon many Romantic works, and allegory is the frequent approach to its subject matter, but the artwork as a sermon can bring closure and end engagement. In our language as visual artists we use form and symbol to express what words cannot render. Once subject and meaning are fused as visual forms within a glasswork it is then free to draw experiences from the centre of the viewer’s being. The result is the glasswork’s presumptive semantic carrying capacity,[50] with its potential for multiple interpretations facilitating relevant and deep engagement with its viewer. This deep engagement is a mark of great art.
Aesthetic Experience: Beyond Skill and the Object
Artist Jessica Loughlin is respected for her technical skill, and is rigorous in the application of her technique, but she told me she regards her work as failing if technique is what she sees when she looks at her work.[51] As well as technical skill, Loughlin demonstrates sensitivity in her use of material, but her work is about more than glass. Her skill and the materiality of glass are seamlessly integrated into form and subject matter to create the event that is the viewer’s experience of the work, and if that experience is open to emotionally engage the viewer, then the work legitimately demands recognition as something beyond its craft.
Aesthetic response can subsume technique. In fact, technique at its best is invisible, as Dr Gerry King said, “technique can be hidden under excellence”.[52] Rather than discount our craft, our craft takes on active relevance as it facilitates the viewer’s engagement. Richard Whiteley stated, understanding the process and having dialogue with the material can be a sculptural process without denying their connections to traditional notions of craft,[53] that is craft as the maker’s skill and sensibility brought into action on a material. Indeed this action opens the path to something greater.
Curator Brian Parkes feels that if glassmakers wish to be involved in broader contemporary art dialogues, a path may be through work that is transcendent – that is, by having something in the work that is compelling.[54] A work can be compelling in a number of ways. Even confined within a craft and its material, execution of skill can be exquisite in its refinement, and the revelation of material can be profound as affect on the maker and the viewer. It is at this point the division of craft from art dissolves, for skill and material are pillars of American Clement Greenberg’s critiques. Skill and material are dominant elements in Greenberg’s pursuit of the pure forms of the absolute,[55] and through formalism provide contemporary glass-making’s strongest link to Modernism.[56] In the Greenberg essay (‘Art & Culture’ 6-7) painting masters of the Modern period are named as deriving inspiration from their medium (as would a craftsperson). In this they are restrained within the disciplines and processes of their art (as is a craftsperson). This way they evolved the forms that articulated their ideas. Operating within the constraints of their craft, their gesture guided by their artistic sensibility, they expressed ideas through their medium.
A Clear and Appropriate Distinction
Teacher and artist George Aslanis says, he does not believe in hierarchy. He does not believe in the conceptual or cultural divisions that distinguish high art / low art – he believes in differences. He believes in clear and appropriate distinction being made between areas.[57] A label carries semantic power (in narratives it attaches to an object or practice). There are infrastructures, communities, associations, publications and worldviews associated with, for example, contemporary art, craft, decorative arts, production, or design. It does not mean a practitioner must confine his or her practice within a singular field, but when operating within the selected area, each label forms, as well as reveals, attitudes and suggests approaches. Each points to a methodology through which a practice may find its direction. Each label delivers its methods and processes. These labels also carry curatorial implications, because they project inferences. These labels create expectations, and significantly each label provides a context, which determines criteria with which the effectiveness of any specific endeavour is critically assessed. The conceptual force of a label creates its own parameters. These labels provide contexts for critical engagement, or as readily lead to our disengagement.
When curator Megan Bottari writes that intellectual affectation can “sit like stigmata on glass”,[58] I deduce that somehow inappropriate labels are being applied to glassworks. The wrong label holds two dangers for our engagement with object and practice. First, if misused by the maker, the narratives carried by the wrong label set the maker up for failure for their work will be received and engaged within an inappropriate context. Second, if an audience incorrectly attaches a narrative (pejorative or not) to a work before they engage with the work, the engagement is misdirected. Such engagement can end before it begins, and the work is denied opportunity.
Author Hugh Honour writing on Romanticism, quotes Paul Valéry as saying, “Nobody can get drunk or quench his thirst on labels”.[59] This indicates the primacy of aesthetic engagement in Romanticism. A label is not the experience, but it is a guide as to its nature. Perhaps it is not so much the label ‘artist’ that glass practitioners want as much as no label at all. A passionate individualist finds being placed in any ‘norm’ antipathetic. This reaction to labelling is essentially a romantic trait.
If the material and technical process labels associated with studio glass do provide a guide toward contemporary fine art practice, one guide might follow the following steps. Studio glass is centred on material and technical process. Its platform is the glass object. Material and technical process will transmit the craft narrative, and that acts most energetically to give context to the reading of the glasswork. However, an artist’s interaction with material through his or her developed skills can give craft an individual voice. Uniting individual voice and concept in the exploitation of the materiality of glass and its intrinsic processes can subsume the force of the craft narrative by making a glasswork transcendent.
[1] Mark Cousins, Twentieth Century Glass, London: New Burlington Books, 1989, 8.
[2] Australian Association of Glass Artists
[3] Susanne K. Frantz, Contemporary Glass, New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1989, 46.
[4]Kirstie Rea, personal interview, 19/03/09, 1.
[5] Vicky Halper, “Makers and Designers: Collisions and Intersections”, (lecture, Sydney: COFA, April 2011). The American curator, writer and historian Vicki Halper commented that in the United States, ‘maker’ is now an accepted euphemism for craftsperson.
[6]Richard Whiteley, personal interview, 10/12/09, 1.
[7] Marvin Lipofsky, question time response from the floor to Bruce Metcalf’s critical analysis at American Glass Art Society Conference, 2009.
[8] Garth Clark, “How Envy Killed the Crafts Movement.” Lecture, Portland: Museum of Contemporary Craft and Northwest College of Art, 2008.
[9] University of Wisconsin, Alfred University, University of Iowa, Sydney College of the Arts, Monash University, Australian National University, University of South Australia, Charles Sturt University, Curtin University of Technology.
[10] Glenn Adamson, Thinking Through Craft, Oxford: Berg, 2007, 139.
[11] Grace Cochrane. ‘Crafts in the Eighties. A discussion paper’ Ausglass Magazine, winter ed. 1989.
[12] A point supported by Bruce Metcalf, “The Art Glass Conundrum” Strattman Lecture, 39th Annual Conference Journal, Corning: Glass Art Society, 2009, 20 and Martha Drexler Lynn, American Studio Glass 1960 – 1990: An Interpretive Study, New York and Manchester: Hudson Hills Press, 2004, 107.
[13] Denise Higgins, personal interview, 12/12/09, 8.
[14] Hot glass is furnace glass manipulated at around 1100c, often as blown glass. The hot shop is the furnace area for hot glass manipulation.
[15] Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, Art in Theory. 1900 – 2000, Melbourne: Blackwell, 2003,851.
[16] Bruce Metcalf, “The Art Glass Conundrum”, 27.
[17] Roberta Smith, ‘Why Craft was Never a Four-Letter Word’. New York Times Art Review, April 18, 2009, C5.
[18] David R. McFadden, “Museum of Arts and Design”, (public talk, Sydney: COFA and Object, 2010).
[19] Juli Cho Bailer, “Intersections – Applying peripheral vision to a focused practice.” (Keynote address, Peripheral Vision, The 15th Biennial Ausglass Conference, Sydney: Ausglass, 2011).
[20] Paddy Robinson, personal interview, 09/11/10, 2.
[21] Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1973, xiii.
[22] Dr Gerry King, personal interview, 20/10/09, 10. See also Lynn, American Studio Glass, ‘Craft items, represented as part of a European avant-garde aesthetic, were touted through the modernist Good Design exhibitions held during the 1950s at the trendsetting Museum of Modern Art in New York’, 26.
[23] Glen Adamson, Thinking Through Craft, 9-21.
[24] Metcalf, “The Art Glass Conundrum”, 22.
[25] Deirdre Feeney, personal interview, 13/10/09, 1.
[26] Richard Whiteley, personal interview, 10/12/09, 2.
[27] Andy Plummer, personal interview, 27/04/09, 3.
[28] Klaus Moje, ‘Technique and Skill: It’s Use, Development and Importance in Contemporary Glass’, Ausglass Post Conference ed. 1991, 34.
[29] Adamson, Thinking Through Craft, 3.
[30] Lorraine Daston, ed., Things That Talk, Object Lessons from Art and Science, New York: Zone Books, 2004, quoting Martin Heidegger, 16.
[31] Paul Lamarre, and Melissa Wolfe, “EIDIA”, (Forum presentation Sydney: Sydney College of the Arts, April 201).
[32] Metcalf, ”The Art Glass Conundrum”, 24.
[33] Cedar Prest, personal interview, 11/01/10, 4.
[34] Martin Beaver, personal interview, 11/12/09, 6.
[35] T.M. Knox, Hegel’s Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art. Volume 1, Oxford: Claredon Press, 1975, 70.
[36] Karen S. Chambers, ‘Glass in the Environment’, Craft Arts International no. 62, Sydney: Craft Arts Pty Ltd, 2004, 71.
[37] Robert Morris, Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris, Cambridge: The MIT Pfres 1995. 68.
[38] Klaus Moje, personal interview, 20/02/10, 1.
[39] Karen O’Clery, personal interview, 08/03/10, 5.
[40] Clark, “How Envy Killed the Crafts Movement”.
[41] Mark Cousins,Twentieth Century Glass, London: Sandstone Books, 1995. As a glassmaker René Lalique was recognised as the consummate designer of his age and honoured as such with a major retrospective exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris in 1933. 64-65. The homogeneity of design generated by the Art Deco Movement and enabled by the processes championed by the likes of Lalique eased the birth of the modern movement. 70.
[42] John Neylon, ‘Gerry King and Graduates’, Craft Arts International no. 37, Sydney: Craft Arts Pty Ltd, 1996,100.
[43] Cousins, Twentieth Century Glass, 108-109.
[44] Jenny Zimmer, ‘The Cutting Edge’, Craft Arts International no. 32, Sydney: Craft Arts Pty Ltd, 1995, 93.
[45] Ted Snell, “Good Design. Prospects for Contemporary Jewellery and Object Making”, (keynote lecture, JMGA conference, Perth 2010).
[46] Judi Elliott, personal interview, 11/12/09, 5.
[47] Paola Tognon, Martina Corgnati and Manuela Gandini, ‘Narratives of Paradox’, Craft Arts International no. 61, Sydney: Craft Arts Pty Ltd, 2004, 53-58.
[48] Dick Aitken, ‘People in Glass Houses’, Crafts Arts International no. 47, Sydney: Craft Arts Pty Ltd, 1990, 66-70. See also Judi Elliott, `To Buckle on One’s Armour’, Ranamok catalogue. Ranamok Glass Prize, 2005, 42,
[49] Donald Preziosi, The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. 9.
[50] Ibid.
[51] Jessica Loughlin, personal interview, 19/10/09, 2.
[52] Dr Gerry King, personal interview, 20/10/09, 3.
[53] Richard Whiteley, personal interview, 08/04/06, 4.
[54] Brian Parkes, personal interview, 17/08/09, 9.
[55] Clement Greenberg ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ first published in Partisan Review, New York, VI, no. 5, Fall 1939, 34-49, reprinted in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, Art in Theory, 541.
[56] Well before this, Christopher Dresser (See Mark Cousins, Twentieth Century Glass, London: Sandstone Books, 1995, 70-71) set down the aesthetics of functionalism as requirements for the design and manufacture of glass in his Principles of Decorative Design (1873), prefiguring the Bauhaus by fifty years.
[57] George Aslanis, personal interview, 17/07/09, 2.
[58] Megan Bottari, ‘Intrinsic Elements … It Goes Without Saying’, Craft Arts International no. 74, Sydney: Craft Arts Pty Ltd, 2008, 107. This specific reference concerned tertiary education programs.
[59] Hugh Honour, Romanticism, New York: Westview Press, 1979, 23.
Return to contents page
Chapter 1
Hunting the Narratives
In this chapter I examine the generation of narratives through the interaction of context and meaning in both the interpretation of a studio glasswork and in the interpretation of the practice that created that glasswork.
1.1 Giving Practice its Name
I examine ‘craft’ as an implicit label in studio glasswork. I question the validity of focusing on technical process, material and object to determine our engagement with a glasswork, and I propose that contemporary art practice can be an outcome derived from these same elements.
Studio Glass Texts
Looking for labels immediately leads me to existing literature in the field of studio glass. Examining the contents of library shelves exposes a range of approaches to recording the nature of studio glass. There are numerous books that describe and demonstrate technical process, however I am concerned with deeper insights into what we do as practitioners in this field. I start with the broad historical sweep based in the use of glass as a material that is The Art of Glass. Glass in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria by Geoffrey Edwards. This insightful book presents the poetic and enigmatic nature of our medium and its use as metaphor. Edwards traces the historic and technical development of the glass object from antiquity to the late twentieth century.
The technical evolution of world glass from antiquity to the modern is the theme of The History of Glass by Dan Klein and Ward Lloyd. More specifically Klein takes a closer look at studio glass in Glass A Contemporary Art. He opens by briefly covering the growth of the studio glass movement noting borders between craft and art raised by technique and material seduction. He then proceeds with an international survey and includes a chapter on Australia and New Zealand that introduces some of the key personalities in the genesis of Australasian studio glass. Finn Lynggaard provides an excellent history of the development of the studio glass movement in his book The Story of Studio Glass, in which Dr Gerry King contributes with a chapter on Australia. A local historical context is also provided by a section in Dr Grace Cochrane’s book, The Crafts Movement in Australia: A History. Contemporary Glass by Susanne K. Frantz provides a significant world survey based in the collection of the Corning Museum of Glass. Frantz provides dazzling illustrations of diverse modernist objects to validate glass as a medium for artists, although her book is lacking in Australian examples. 25 Years of New Glass Review. The Corning Museum of Glass is a survey by Tina Oldknow that corrects this oversight with seventeen Australian makers represented. In this book technique expands the glass object as form and narrative to open up a diverse aesthetic potential within creative glass. A survey of practitioners can also be seen in Contemporary International Glass 60 Artists in the V&A by Jennifer Hawkins Opie, who introduces her topic by advocating glass because of its versatility, she then moves the emphasis of her introduction from studio glass to glass art. Opie continues over creative glassmaking innovations in the nineteenth century into American promulgations of studio glass in the second half of the twentieth century. Touching on the origins of the art/craft debate she addresses technique in glassmaking and the potential of technique in individual expression. What follows is a varied survey, which presents individual artist statements with each artist entry displaying a large image of one work. These iconic objects are technically refined, modernist works. Artists in Glass. Late twentieth Century Masters in Glass again by Dan Klein provides another survey artist-by-artist proving technique can be exquisite, but perhaps also the master of all. The studio glass movement in the latter half of the twentieth century is the focus of American Studio Glass 1960-1990 by Martha Drexler Lynn. Beginning with the question, “Is it Art” she proceeds through the evolution of technique and presentation platforms to validate an affirmative answer to her question.
In his book 2Oth Century Glass Mark Cousins begins by lamenting the ‘myopic attitude towards glass’[1] that sees it as a ‘lesser’ decorative art form. His historic coverage moves quickly to the colour of the Arts and Crafts Movement then through the sensuous lines of Art Nouveau and the geometric elements of Art Deco to the functional modernism of the Bauhaus. Cousins continues to the late eighties with an optimistic view of studio glass as a means of individual expression. Through all this runs the undercurrent of glass and its techniques given form as design. Formal design is implied in the title Contemporary Glass. Color, Light & Form by Ray Leier, Jan Peters and Kevin Wallace, and design tracks technique and object through the brief commentary this book provides on the evolution of the studio glass object through to the book’s final chapters, Artist – Designer – Maker, Narrative in Glass and Glass as Sculpture. Here the examples provided often fall short of even the limited claims being made by the authors. Judith Miller provides a different perspective with a collector’s guide in 20th Century Glass. She proceeds by covering brands and production types. Studio glass artists have their own section where they are endorsed for the collectors’ market by naming the institutions that hold their work.
Margot Osborne’s Australian Glass Today is a significant book for Australian studio glass. The book opens with five knowledgeable writers, one artist and educator and four experienced curators – Osborne herself, Richard Whiteley, Geoffrey Edwards, Grace Cochrane and Suzzanne Frantz – each given a chapter to provide a perspective on Australian studio glass. These writers bind technical process tightly to the individual creative voice, and note the significance of key personalities and institutions in providing the means to access technique. The book is also a survey, which is extensive in dealing with the attainments of a large number of Australian studio glassmakers. Each glassmaker is presented to the reader in his or her allocated pages as seductive images of beautiful objects stunningly photographed, accompanied by a brief supportive background commentary.
The major book for Australian studio glass is Australian Studio Glass. The movement, its makers and their art, by Noris Ioannou. His later book Masters of Their Craft. Clay, Glass, Metal, Fibre, Wood provides a one-chapter addition to his opus as Glass – Allegories in Light. Ioannou in his comprehensive approach is close to providing a critical base for Australian studio glass. He addresses the properties of glass and the potential for diverse individual expression, as its practitioners become masters of their technique. Ioannou admits there is a lack of critical discourse while he argues that the unique qualities of glass and the conceptual sophistication of its makers are best united when emotional and intellectual experience is expressed through craftsmanship.
There are documents such as exhibition catalogues that mark points in the development of Australian studio glass, but there are also sources that track Australian studio glass over years. The Ausglass[2] archival files provide access to the conversations of the Australian studio community going back over thirty years starting from concerns with technique and moving to the critical positioning of studio glass in the eighties and remaining there until the present. For those interested specifically in Australian studio glass these conversations are augmented by serial catalogues such as those of the annual Ranamok Glass Prize founded in 1994. Perhaps the most important trace lies in the Australian magazine Craft Arts International, which from its first issue in 1984 remains a strong supporter of Australian studio glass.
Australian studio glass is a diverse practice providing numerous creative options, but there is room for further conceptual and aesthetic investigation. In this thesis I start from basics then reach beyond our traditional sources to, within technical process, concept, and creative voice, find a critical key to understanding our past and to unlock future practice.
The Appropriate Label
Labelling a work carries implications for the way a work is seen by its maker and interpreted by its viewer. It does this because a label frames the work’s presentation. The significance of a label does presuppose the viewer’s uncritical acceptance of such categorisation. A sophisticated viewer may ignore all labels and deal with the work in a process of unfettered aesthetic engagement. However, this does not mitigate the power a label holds to direct the nature of the viewer’s engagement with a work.
Placing a label on a studio glasswork is a significant act for the label is a defining term that acts as a specifically honed weapon in hierarchical battles, both political and commercial. Ideally, the application of a label is a considered decision based on the physical nature of the work, the nature of the practice that created it, and importantly, directed by the conceptual engagement called for by the work.
Studio glass is an historic term that, while anchored firmly in technical process, presents the glassmaker as artist.[3] In global terms the rubric ‘studio glass’ creates expectations and implies attitudes inherent in the use of glass as a sculptural medium for three-dimensional artworks. However, it also covers a multitude of approaches to which other labels are appropriately and inappropriately applied.
The labels glassmakers use to identify practice become political in the studio glass community. When artist – teacher Kirstie Rea arrived as one of the first glass students at the Canberra School of Art in 1983, she remembers the inaugural head of studio Klaus Moje chiselling away the word ‘craft’ from the Glass Craft sign the school administration placed above the new glass workshop.[4] Today Rea says it is pointless talking about labelling our practice, because it revives a dead debate, and she considers everyone in the studio glass community ‘makers’.[5] Richard Whiteley, head of the Glass Workshop at the Australian National University School of Art, thinks the eighties may have seen the last of the question, “Which category do we fit in – are we crafts practitioners, are we designers, or are we artists?”[6] Whiteley sees his recent students embracing the pluralism that was being argued for by studio glass practitioners during the nineties. He argues that the understanding these students have of the history of studio glass, combined with their knowledge of specific techniques and processes, enables them to cross boundaries, which Whiteley admits would have daunted him as a student. He thinks this crossing of boundaries is evidence of the confidence these students have in the potential of their practice. In fact, the historic pattern is that Australian studio glass practitioners extend the creative possibilities of glass in their practice. This is evidenced by the numerous times the word ‘experiment’ is mentioned in the reminiscences of forerunners in the Australian glass movement.
There are practitioners who argue that labels are meaningless, it is the making that counts, and thus all talk of categorisation is irrelevant.[7] Yet, to quote critic, historian and writer Garth Clark, “without definition nothing is anything”.[8] Labels do mark the borders of categorical imperatives. Studio glass, as a broad practice, benefits from practitioners who develop and refine its conceptual complexity. From its beginning, studio glass gained impetus from supportive tertiary institutions,[9] and if glass practice does not challenge with its own unique conceptual complexity what justifies continued tertiary funding for the teaching of an expensive, specific material based practice?
Validation for our practice lies in differentiation. Studio glass practice should present unique qualities relevant to the aims of those tertiary institutions, if not, it may be subsumed by broader, less costly approaches to education, losing a research base that adds impetus to its evolution. I now look at words associated with our practice, and elements they bring into play as I analyse the contextual labels associated with the production of contemporary glass.
Craft
Labels carry histories shaped in controversy and debate. This was explicitly stated when theorist and writer Glenn Adamson wrote:
"Commercially viable studio craft – expertly hand-blown glass, sculptural jewellery, and the like – poses no problems. On the contrary: like a Victorian servant aping his or her betters, studio craft inadvertently ratifies the hierarchical arrangement of the art world by aspiring so transparently to a status that it cannot claim." [10]
Words such as hierarchical and status exemplify the perennial art/craft debate, a debate that did indeed originate in perceived hierarchies. The art/craft debate was at its height in the early and mid years of Australian studio glass,[11] when aspiring to the status of fine artist was a matter of perceived price-points.[12] As the Australian studio glass movement established itself, studio glass did achieve success within the marketplace. Studio glass was new, exciting and popular. It was a golden child, a material blessed with advantages of beauty and technical intrigue.[13] Studio glass has general public appeal because it presents itself in the form of materially beautiful objects, often decoratively functional. The observed processes of its production (particularly in hot shop)[14] are theatrical and entertaining, demonstrating virtuoso skill with a dangerously difficult, yet visually seductive material. Studio glass values proficiency in a technical skill that manipulates the material; but when seminal conceptual artist Sol LeWitt wrote “banal ideas cannot be rescued by beautiful execution”,[15] he was expressing a mistrust of work that made a demonstration of technical skill. Phrases such as ‘uncritical public acceptance’, ‘beautiful objects’, ‘decoratively functional’, ‘demonstration of expert manual skills’ and a ‘focus on material’ describe a craft object, and invoking the craft label leads the aesthetic arbiters of some fine art institutions to close their doors to contemporary studio glass.[16]
Accepting the designation craft is problematic because of a common interpretation of the “C word”, the label that Roberta Smith referred to as “the word that dare not speak its name”,[17] as a term of condescension. Smith wrote that until quite recently the label ‘craft’ was a pejorative in the contemporary art world, and “still is in some quarters”. This is exemplified when the flagship of the United States craft movement, the American Craft Museum, is re-named The Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), because its management perceive the label ‘craft’ to have a negative association with folk craft and handicrafts.[18] The implication of traditional handicraft is only one small aspect of the rich craft narrative that also ranges through the historic authenticity of William Morris’s Red House and the functional design of the Bauhaus.
At its centre craft focuses on technical competence. The ability to master a medium and skilfully make or replicate an object is a craft. Creative conceptualisation need not be part of such a process. As contemporary arts curator Juli Cho Bailer states, “Whereas an artist may be expected to take the wheel beyond its current form to become something else, the craftsperson/artisan reinvents and refines that wheel in terms of its function”.[19]
Craft is based in orthodoxy, and orthodoxy can be interpreted as an antonym for creativity. This relationship to orthodoxy may be one source of any schism between contemporary art practice and craft. Craft evolves as the proven ways and means, and promises technical success if the given procedure is followed. A commitment to technique can lead to resistance to new approaches. Artist Paddy Robinson made this point when she spoke of visiting the Czech Republic with a doyen of Australian glass engraving, Anne Dybka. Despite Dybka’s undisputable ability as a master engraver, her demonstration of flexible-drive engraving had no audience. Robinson lamented that the reason for this was that Dybka’s approach was perceived as irrelevant to traditional Czech engraving technique.[20] Resistance to change can be self-imposed in Australia as well. Once studio glassmakers evolve a distinct technique in their practice there is a propensity for them to continue to rely on that technique, and limited forms they create with it, as their means of differentiation from other practitioners.
The issue of craft runs deeper than resistance to change. The craft narrative can smother companion narratives by activating the dichotomy of hand and intellect based in the half-truth that technical skill with a material is ingrained through persistence, while creativity lies in bursts of spontaneous intellect. With this logic intellect, in articulating concept, neglects technical presentation. Such reasoning was fashionable in contemporary art practice in the late sixties when, as Lucy Lippard noted in her seminal book, The Dematerialization of the Art Object, “ideas alone could be works of art”.[21]
The word craft need not be pejorative. Neither should it be applied as a poorly considered label that determines our response to a work. Unfortunately this can occur if cliché pre-empts our sensibility. When the label craft solidifies our preconception of what is being viewed, craft as the context for our interpretation can block our deeper aesthetic engagement with the work.
All this considered, most studio glass practitioners are positive about their own relationship to craft. Contemporary craft practice seeks a creative balance between accepted processes and experimentation. As Richard Morrell stated in the Ausglass Post Conference Notes of 1991,(23) “it is a poor artist indeed whose imagination is cramped by skill” and to that statement he added “to write poetry one has to know the language”. From its inception Australian studio glass formed its own language in an intuitive and eclectic gathering from traditional and contemporary technique.
Australian studio glass pioneer, Dr Gerry King recalls that when he started out in art education in the sixties “craft was a radical way of addressing art”.[22] The use of glass requires craft, the combining skill and sensitivity as a means to articulate concept through material. The argument is that craft can be an alliance between material and maker leading into new and unpredicted outcomes as a concept is made into form by working with and pushing against the medium.
Glenn Adamson’s upstairs/downstairs analogy itself provides room for positive interpretations of craft, because it incorporates his concept of the supplemental[23] – the submersion of one identity in service to another. That is, craft as the manipulation of material through skill can serve fine art. Fine art remains autonomous – as artists critically evaluate their role while they test the boundaries of self and society. From this perspective the art/craft debate dissipates, because sound technique facilitates the exploration of concept in glassmaking without diminishing the potential practice of artists using glass. Craft is not a detrimental issue in contemporary glassmaking when technical effort is subsumed by the work being created as an aesthetic experience for the viewer. Craft becomes problematic when technique is a distraction that stands in the way of our holistic experience of the work. If what is seen by the viewer is the skill executed (in what craftsman/critic Bruce Metcalf called the “fetish-isation of virtuoso technique”)[24] to the exclusion of other experiences, then craft is a barrier, even when it succeeds as a statement of personal virtuosity. Conversely, the same is the case if the maker’s lack of skill hinders our engagement with the glasswork.
Skill
If I consider triggers for the ‘it’s craft’ response that might lie between the work and the viewer’s deeper engagement one is often that dominant constituent of our practice – technical skill. Evident in praxis, skill is always a strong element in our engagement with studio glass. In working with glass it can be technical process that excites and engages us. When this happens, how something is done, not why, dominates.
Glassmaking is an ancient tradition anchored in material process, and it is a discipline heavily dependent on skill. Skill can intrigue a viewer, however excessive fascination with skill places means ahead of purpose and then the engagement with a work may be confined to admiration. If the demonstration of skill is perceived to determine a glasswork’s worth the work may be discounted as intellectually easy, which is misleading when glass has the potential to deliver much greater aesthetic effect.
If I accept that material skill is not the index of value in contemporary art practice it need not follow that studio glass practitioners are to be ignored in that context. It is unfortunate if evidence of skill in execution pre-empts critical evaluation of a work. Skill facilitates the presentation of concept. Without skill creative practice can be an exercise in frustration. As a contemporary glassmaker Deirdre Feeney argues, the more skill you have the less you are limited by technique.[25] For Richard Whiteley, the best result for education is a deep knowledge of process interwoven with ideas, while at the same time encouraging broader thinking.[26] In the context of the tertiary sector this act of thinking and enquiry is the institutional focus, rather than the act of making. Sustaining the nexus between making and enquiry is an on-going challenge, specifically in relationship to ways of thinking empowered by glass and its related processes.
Skill is an umbrella that covers multiple and various talents that are individually and collectively applicable to numerous situations. Australian studio glass provides a wide spectrum of both collectors and practitioners, and skill remains a strong attraction for many. For collector and co-founder of the Ranamok Glass Prize, Andy Plummer, workmanship is always crucial. Plummer states that if there is no craft ethos behind a work, no matter how good the idea, he is uninterested.[27] There are glassmakers who readily identify themselves as skilfull craft practitioners. Richard Clements, for example, learned how to handle glass tube, blow bubbles and join glass rods as a scientific glassblower. It was in 1975 that he started making perfume bottles, which remain his main source of income.
Skill shapes Australian studio glass, because skill is integral to glassmaking. Technique in the manipulation of glass is a defining marker of excellence in studio glass. In truth, technical process is central to the evolution of our field. But skill is not just a concern of studio glass practitioners. It is valued inside and outside the arts. As a synthesis of knowledge and dexterity, mind and hand, skill enables the application of intent, and with skill an artist is free to improvise. As Klaus Moje declared (in 1991), “skill will make us free”.[28] Skill can be ignored once you possess it, or you can coordinate and incorporate the skills of others in your work as needed.
Skill may provide limited on-going aesthetic engagement for the viewer, but the artist’s ability to flow with process and to creatively adapt skills within and beyond existing conceptual boundaries opens technique to greater possibilities. With glass, the skilled process[29] produces the work that is the desirable object, the “product of ideas and representation of the thing”.[30] That is, skill is the means that enables production of the object. The object as a self-contained thing can provoke our desire, but as the representation of an idea the object is conceptually expanded as a potential event stimulating on-going engagement through interpreted meaning. Both the object and any possibility of its interpretation by the viewer exist because of technique directed by artistic sensibility acting on insentient matter – that is, they exist because of skill.
Material
Materiality lies at the heart of studio glass. Even though as glassmakers we may be driven by ideas beyond the technical concerns of glass, many of us think in glass and its processes. This does not mean we deny the importance of concept, but identifying ourselves with glass and technical process leads to the confusion of the art/craft debate. Skill evidenced in the manipulation of a material lies at the heart of the craft narrative.
In glasswork the reference to a ‘jewel-like’ quality is common. It is often a cursory attraction that engages a viewer with a glass object. The inherent beauty of glass leaves studio glass practitioners open to criticism that they rely on visual seduction rather than content. Viewers look at a glasswork and feel confident in saying the work is beautiful, or it is not. If what they see is functional they do not have to ask the glasswork’s purpose before they feel they understand it. Unlike much contemporary art a response is quick, and it is easy. “I like it, because it is pleasing in appearance”, or “I do not like it, because it looks poorly made”. The viewer feels informed, but it is superficial response. Without reference to history, culture or contemporary dialogues, viewers feel the glass object is immediately accessible in terms of form, colour, texture, or demonstrated skill. The demonstration of skill in a beautiful medium is a safe-haven for those uninitiated in wider contemporary art practice.
Like many I am attracted to glass because it is seductive, but what it offers runs much deeper than superficiality. Glass is our chosen material and with it we create the visual poetry of our practice. Glass gives sound to our voice. Working with a focus on material does not proscribe the conceptual. New York interdisciplinary conceptual artist Paul Lamarre champions his love of materials, describing their sensuous nature is part of the “joy of being human”.[31] Artists whose practice is based in materiality still work through conceptual frameworks that evolve over years. To create something that resonates experientially, we need to work through a strong understanding of the materials that are being used. Accepting all that, the fact is, studio glass binds itself to one material. We chose to be glass artists, and the answer to our meaningful contemporary art practice lies within the nature of glass itself, and in the processes we use to exploit that nature.
Object
In Australian studio glass the practice of object making generates dazzlingly beautiful objects produced by a growing cohort of skilled makers. Many of these objects can be described as high-end ‘decorative’ art,[32] falling into what artist Cedar Prest calls “the cult of the object”, which she says thrives in high pricing specialist galleries. Prest feels Australia has followed this American trend, which she says comes with “the cult of names and a commercial pecking order”.[33] A cult of names is evidence of a market driven by the power of applied narratives. Narratives spin around artists’ names and related histories. Such narratives encase the work enhancing the market value of these objects for collectors.
An object may be appreciated as ornamental, and it is strong praise to call an object beautiful. Martin Beaver noted that with the 2009 Ranamok Glass Prize, although the winner was “a really interesting conceptual-based work”,[34] it was, as he put it, the ‘beautiful’ pieces that captivated the public. The significance of material beauty in studio glass is a natural outcome of the qualities of glass as a material. A decorative glass object may be desirable for the pleasure offered by its formal beauty, the configuration of sensuous material giving it form,[35] but that does not make it contemporary art. Beauty is a contentious concept in the contemporary art context, where it can be perceived as a connoisseurial and authoritarian framing device. In our pluralist society beauty is in the eye of the beholder. It is superficial to call a work art solely because its formal beauty engages my emotion and intellect as pleasure. The seduction of beauty is more justifiable if I defer to romanticism seeking beauty in some inner essence of form that reveals a truth, which moves me, and which shapes my vision of the world. This judgement goes beyond who made the object, or why it was made. I am strongly affected by the object, and that runs deeper than any attraction I might have to an object’s superficial prettiness.
If we wish a glasswork to be more than the delivered distraction of possession, investment, or amusement – if it is to be deeply aesthetically affective (and so available to emotionally shift its viewer’s perspective) – then the object should demand more of our engagement than admiration. The studio glass object is not an object in nature, but something a person made for the purpose of affecting our response. The world abounds in objects, and against this abundance art practitioners place triggers in the objects they make to generate on-going engagement. The potential power of these triggers is indicated when Karen Chambers writes, “the answer lies hidden, always, in the object itself. It touches you in a way you cannot ignore”.[36] Through such triggers an object is redefined, from the “static and final … finished product …”[37] – American artist Robert Morris’s ‘icon-object’ – to become a continually reforming dynamic event.
Klaus Moje is a consummate glass object maker of international status, but object is his secondary concern. Like a painter, he works from the plane, not from the final form, and he adds the volume of an object for presentation.[38] Moje’s object acts as his means for presenting planes of colour to the viewer, but the object he makes is more than a platform for presenting design. The object holds evidence of the different stages through which he worked. Artist Anne Dybka argued passionately for the permanence of the artwork/object as tangible evidence of a spiritual thread running through generations. In studio glass that spiritual thread is spun from our technical and conceptual ancestry. Here two fields provide powerful triggers for an object’s connection with a viewer. One field lies in visual form, and the other in narrative.
Owner and director of Narek Galleries, Karen O’Clery looks for an experience beyond the context of an object’s immediate presentation (when, as she stated, the object “has that timeless quality”).[39] Formal elements deliver that experience. The object’s form releases it from a specific situation. The work’s formal elements are continually available as an affective stimulus as they present to the viewer. At the core of O’Clery’s comment is the autonomy of visual form, and that form is available to the subjective intuition of any viewer. Visual form stimulating the subjective intuition of the viewer moves an object into art as a symbol system linked to aesthetic experience and artistic insight. The viewer’s potential engagement is extended beyond a tangible boundary within a single context. In the second field the narratives generated by the object become intrinsic to the experience the object offers to the viewer. Narratives surround the object as context and history, and they are interpreted as the object. Each viewer holds the potential to regenerate narratives in every act of viewing the object. Form and narrative empower the object as it becomes an event affecting the viewer’s response to the world. The power of this response introduces the quality of depth. An object that is inexhaustible is profound.
Design
Beyond the individual hands-on maker, glass has a strong tradition in team production through the division of skills. As was the case with glassmakers for centuries, today’s glassmakers often work in partnership to produce work. They delegate production roles to maximise efficiency. The practitioner’s role can move into that of designer, and well-known contemporary glassmakers use the technical skills of others to realise their designs. Historian and author Garth Clark argues that craft should seek alliance with design.[40] As production or commission work, design is an operational means within glassmaking.[41] The prominence of design is evident in the focus of the JamFactory, a major player in creative glass in Australia. Officially called the JamFactory Craft and Design Centre, it carries historic links to design education going back into the mid-nineteenth century.[42] Design is central to of Mark Cousins’ book Twentieth Century Glass, and that book culminates with interpretations of new design of the 1980s appealing to the senses, rather than the intellect.[43] And in 1994 Jenny Zimmer[44] (writing of the Glass Triennial as a reflection of the previous six years for Australian studio glass) uses the term ‘design’ as if it is unquestioningly associated with glass.
Design implies precognition, and that precognition is aimed at function utilising ‘pertinence and prescience’[45] in a fitness for purpose. Function often determines the context of our engagement with a work. Generally, function is the easiest of contexts to read and the easiest to close and disengage. As part of the practical world, design pushes against the resistance of an idea utilizing problem solving to reach a solution. This separates its methodology from art. Design is a process that seeks termination in resolution, where art opens into poetry through aesthetic interpretation. Where design resolves in function, art begins in engagement. As a future direction for studio glassmakers design is a natural career option, because it continues the studio glass movement’s commitment to technical process. Design is a natural path to follow if you are a glassmaker raised in a culture of technical and functional problem solving.
Whether or not the term designer is applied to his or her practice, the essence of design can still be integral to the work of a maker. Design can engage as efficient function or as formal arrangement and then be dismissed, even if it is aesthetically pleasing. But again, as with skill, design is activated in praxis, where it operates as means rather than end. Artist Judi Elliott has always been interested in design.[46] The formal elements of her work are embodied by the creative journey she took with material through technique. A creator of beautiful ceramic forms in her youth, she now works like a painter, layering and cutting back fused glass to reveal opaque colour.
An internationally recognised Australian glassmaker, Elliott always sees herself as an artist, whatever her medium. Her work exhibits mastery of the formal elements of design in her work, but it is more than that. Although appearing to be the antithesis of an international contemporary artist like Silvia Levenson,[47] Elliott’s work is still a deeply bedded and subtle narrative of self and space.[48] What at first may appear to be stylish formal abstraction, at a deeper level is metaphor for the body protected and encased. Strata are revealed as the surface is penetrated, and formal design is exposed as a fascinating means of engaging human identity. With these insights, material, technique, subject and design may be seen to combine as form in a romantic layering of narratives that create a work with the potential to expose a great deal of its maker.
Intention
Design as a process carries the maker’s intention through to fruition, but does a maker’s intention assist us in appropriately labelling a glasswork as contemporary art practice? According to Donald Preziosi, “... the most pervasive theory of the art object … was its conception as a medium of expression … a vehicle by means of which intentions, values, attitudes, ideas, political or other messages, or the emotional state(s) of the maker … were conveyed”[49].
As a theory intentionality is compatible with studio glass being seen as unique works, which are made by independent artists. However, the artwork as a form realising an artist’s specific intention in its engagement with its viewers assumes one can predetermine and constrict engagement in a way that is, in reality, improbable. To assume a work will be contained by one intention behind its making is to limit its poetic potential; that is, the open potential for making meaning. The work will exist as an entity removed from its maker, and may be interpreted in ways that the maker may never have considered.
Beyond aesthetic triggers implanted by a maker, the artist’s intent may or may not attach to the work. If the intent is obvious in the work, then the work tells: it becomes didactic. A moral agenda sits upon many Romantic works, and allegory is the frequent approach to its subject matter, but the artwork as a sermon can bring closure and end engagement. In our language as visual artists we use form and symbol to express what words cannot render. Once subject and meaning are fused as visual forms within a glasswork it is then free to draw experiences from the centre of the viewer’s being. The result is the glasswork’s presumptive semantic carrying capacity,[50] with its potential for multiple interpretations facilitating relevant and deep engagement with its viewer. This deep engagement is a mark of great art.
Aesthetic Experience: Beyond Skill and the Object
Artist Jessica Loughlin is respected for her technical skill, and is rigorous in the application of her technique, but she told me she regards her work as failing if technique is what she sees when she looks at her work.[51] As well as technical skill, Loughlin demonstrates sensitivity in her use of material, but her work is about more than glass. Her skill and the materiality of glass are seamlessly integrated into form and subject matter to create the event that is the viewer’s experience of the work, and if that experience is open to emotionally engage the viewer, then the work legitimately demands recognition as something beyond its craft.
Aesthetic response can subsume technique. In fact, technique at its best is invisible, as Dr Gerry King said, “technique can be hidden under excellence”.[52] Rather than discount our craft, our craft takes on active relevance as it facilitates the viewer’s engagement. Richard Whiteley stated, understanding the process and having dialogue with the material can be a sculptural process without denying their connections to traditional notions of craft,[53] that is craft as the maker’s skill and sensibility brought into action on a material. Indeed this action opens the path to something greater.
Curator Brian Parkes feels that if glassmakers wish to be involved in broader contemporary art dialogues, a path may be through work that is transcendent – that is, by having something in the work that is compelling.[54] A work can be compelling in a number of ways. Even confined within a craft and its material, execution of skill can be exquisite in its refinement, and the revelation of material can be profound as affect on the maker and the viewer. It is at this point the division of craft from art dissolves, for skill and material are pillars of American Clement Greenberg’s critiques. Skill and material are dominant elements in Greenberg’s pursuit of the pure forms of the absolute,[55] and through formalism provide contemporary glass-making’s strongest link to Modernism.[56] In the Greenberg essay (‘Art & Culture’ 6-7) painting masters of the Modern period are named as deriving inspiration from their medium (as would a craftsperson). In this they are restrained within the disciplines and processes of their art (as is a craftsperson). This way they evolved the forms that articulated their ideas. Operating within the constraints of their craft, their gesture guided by their artistic sensibility, they expressed ideas through their medium.
A Clear and Appropriate Distinction
Teacher and artist George Aslanis says, he does not believe in hierarchy. He does not believe in the conceptual or cultural divisions that distinguish high art / low art – he believes in differences. He believes in clear and appropriate distinction being made between areas.[57] A label carries semantic power (in narratives it attaches to an object or practice). There are infrastructures, communities, associations, publications and worldviews associated with, for example, contemporary art, craft, decorative arts, production, or design. It does not mean a practitioner must confine his or her practice within a singular field, but when operating within the selected area, each label forms, as well as reveals, attitudes and suggests approaches. Each points to a methodology through which a practice may find its direction. Each label delivers its methods and processes. These labels also carry curatorial implications, because they project inferences. These labels create expectations, and significantly each label provides a context, which determines criteria with which the effectiveness of any specific endeavour is critically assessed. The conceptual force of a label creates its own parameters. These labels provide contexts for critical engagement, or as readily lead to our disengagement.
When curator Megan Bottari writes that intellectual affectation can “sit like stigmata on glass”,[58] I deduce that somehow inappropriate labels are being applied to glassworks. The wrong label holds two dangers for our engagement with object and practice. First, if misused by the maker, the narratives carried by the wrong label set the maker up for failure for their work will be received and engaged within an inappropriate context. Second, if an audience incorrectly attaches a narrative (pejorative or not) to a work before they engage with the work, the engagement is misdirected. Such engagement can end before it begins, and the work is denied opportunity.
Author Hugh Honour writing on Romanticism, quotes Paul Valéry as saying, “Nobody can get drunk or quench his thirst on labels”.[59] This indicates the primacy of aesthetic engagement in Romanticism. A label is not the experience, but it is a guide as to its nature. Perhaps it is not so much the label ‘artist’ that glass practitioners want as much as no label at all. A passionate individualist finds being placed in any ‘norm’ antipathetic. This reaction to labelling is essentially a romantic trait.
If the material and technical process labels associated with studio glass do provide a guide toward contemporary fine art practice, one guide might follow the following steps. Studio glass is centred on material and technical process. Its platform is the glass object. Material and technical process will transmit the craft narrative, and that acts most energetically to give context to the reading of the glasswork. However, an artist’s interaction with material through his or her developed skills can give craft an individual voice. Uniting individual voice and concept in the exploitation of the materiality of glass and its intrinsic processes can subsume the force of the craft narrative by making a glasswork transcendent.
[1] Mark Cousins, Twentieth Century Glass, London: New Burlington Books, 1989, 8.
[2] Australian Association of Glass Artists
[3] Susanne K. Frantz, Contemporary Glass, New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1989, 46.
[4]Kirstie Rea, personal interview, 19/03/09, 1.
[5] Vicky Halper, “Makers and Designers: Collisions and Intersections”, (lecture, Sydney: COFA, April 2011). The American curator, writer and historian Vicki Halper commented that in the United States, ‘maker’ is now an accepted euphemism for craftsperson.
[6]Richard Whiteley, personal interview, 10/12/09, 1.
[7] Marvin Lipofsky, question time response from the floor to Bruce Metcalf’s critical analysis at American Glass Art Society Conference, 2009.
[8] Garth Clark, “How Envy Killed the Crafts Movement.” Lecture, Portland: Museum of Contemporary Craft and Northwest College of Art, 2008.
[9] University of Wisconsin, Alfred University, University of Iowa, Sydney College of the Arts, Monash University, Australian National University, University of South Australia, Charles Sturt University, Curtin University of Technology.
[10] Glenn Adamson, Thinking Through Craft, Oxford: Berg, 2007, 139.
[11] Grace Cochrane. ‘Crafts in the Eighties. A discussion paper’ Ausglass Magazine, winter ed. 1989.
[12] A point supported by Bruce Metcalf, “The Art Glass Conundrum” Strattman Lecture, 39th Annual Conference Journal, Corning: Glass Art Society, 2009, 20 and Martha Drexler Lynn, American Studio Glass 1960 – 1990: An Interpretive Study, New York and Manchester: Hudson Hills Press, 2004, 107.
[13] Denise Higgins, personal interview, 12/12/09, 8.
[14] Hot glass is furnace glass manipulated at around 1100c, often as blown glass. The hot shop is the furnace area for hot glass manipulation.
[15] Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, Art in Theory. 1900 – 2000, Melbourne: Blackwell, 2003,851.
[16] Bruce Metcalf, “The Art Glass Conundrum”, 27.
[17] Roberta Smith, ‘Why Craft was Never a Four-Letter Word’. New York Times Art Review, April 18, 2009, C5.
[18] David R. McFadden, “Museum of Arts and Design”, (public talk, Sydney: COFA and Object, 2010).
[19] Juli Cho Bailer, “Intersections – Applying peripheral vision to a focused practice.” (Keynote address, Peripheral Vision, The 15th Biennial Ausglass Conference, Sydney: Ausglass, 2011).
[20] Paddy Robinson, personal interview, 09/11/10, 2.
[21] Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1973, xiii.
[22] Dr Gerry King, personal interview, 20/10/09, 10. See also Lynn, American Studio Glass, ‘Craft items, represented as part of a European avant-garde aesthetic, were touted through the modernist Good Design exhibitions held during the 1950s at the trendsetting Museum of Modern Art in New York’, 26.
[23] Glen Adamson, Thinking Through Craft, 9-21.
[24] Metcalf, “The Art Glass Conundrum”, 22.
[25] Deirdre Feeney, personal interview, 13/10/09, 1.
[26] Richard Whiteley, personal interview, 10/12/09, 2.
[27] Andy Plummer, personal interview, 27/04/09, 3.
[28] Klaus Moje, ‘Technique and Skill: It’s Use, Development and Importance in Contemporary Glass’, Ausglass Post Conference ed. 1991, 34.
[29] Adamson, Thinking Through Craft, 3.
[30] Lorraine Daston, ed., Things That Talk, Object Lessons from Art and Science, New York: Zone Books, 2004, quoting Martin Heidegger, 16.
[31] Paul Lamarre, and Melissa Wolfe, “EIDIA”, (Forum presentation Sydney: Sydney College of the Arts, April 201).
[32] Metcalf, ”The Art Glass Conundrum”, 24.
[33] Cedar Prest, personal interview, 11/01/10, 4.
[34] Martin Beaver, personal interview, 11/12/09, 6.
[35] T.M. Knox, Hegel’s Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art. Volume 1, Oxford: Claredon Press, 1975, 70.
[36] Karen S. Chambers, ‘Glass in the Environment’, Craft Arts International no. 62, Sydney: Craft Arts Pty Ltd, 2004, 71.
[37] Robert Morris, Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris, Cambridge: The MIT Pfres 1995. 68.
[38] Klaus Moje, personal interview, 20/02/10, 1.
[39] Karen O’Clery, personal interview, 08/03/10, 5.
[40] Clark, “How Envy Killed the Crafts Movement”.
[41] Mark Cousins,Twentieth Century Glass, London: Sandstone Books, 1995. As a glassmaker René Lalique was recognised as the consummate designer of his age and honoured as such with a major retrospective exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris in 1933. 64-65. The homogeneity of design generated by the Art Deco Movement and enabled by the processes championed by the likes of Lalique eased the birth of the modern movement. 70.
[42] John Neylon, ‘Gerry King and Graduates’, Craft Arts International no. 37, Sydney: Craft Arts Pty Ltd, 1996,100.
[43] Cousins, Twentieth Century Glass, 108-109.
[44] Jenny Zimmer, ‘The Cutting Edge’, Craft Arts International no. 32, Sydney: Craft Arts Pty Ltd, 1995, 93.
[45] Ted Snell, “Good Design. Prospects for Contemporary Jewellery and Object Making”, (keynote lecture, JMGA conference, Perth 2010).
[46] Judi Elliott, personal interview, 11/12/09, 5.
[47] Paola Tognon, Martina Corgnati and Manuela Gandini, ‘Narratives of Paradox’, Craft Arts International no. 61, Sydney: Craft Arts Pty Ltd, 2004, 53-58.
[48] Dick Aitken, ‘People in Glass Houses’, Crafts Arts International no. 47, Sydney: Craft Arts Pty Ltd, 1990, 66-70. See also Judi Elliott, `To Buckle on One’s Armour’, Ranamok catalogue. Ranamok Glass Prize, 2005, 42,
[49] Donald Preziosi, The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. 9.
[50] Ibid.
[51] Jessica Loughlin, personal interview, 19/10/09, 2.
[52] Dr Gerry King, personal interview, 20/10/09, 3.
[53] Richard Whiteley, personal interview, 08/04/06, 4.
[54] Brian Parkes, personal interview, 17/08/09, 9.
[55] Clement Greenberg ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ first published in Partisan Review, New York, VI, no. 5, Fall 1939, 34-49, reprinted in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, Art in Theory, 541.
[56] Well before this, Christopher Dresser (See Mark Cousins, Twentieth Century Glass, London: Sandstone Books, 1995, 70-71) set down the aesthetics of functionalism as requirements for the design and manufacture of glass in his Principles of Decorative Design (1873), prefiguring the Bauhaus by fifty years.
[57] George Aslanis, personal interview, 17/07/09, 2.
[58] Megan Bottari, ‘Intrinsic Elements … It Goes Without Saying’, Craft Arts International no. 74, Sydney: Craft Arts Pty Ltd, 2008, 107. This specific reference concerned tertiary education programs.
[59] Hugh Honour, Romanticism, New York: Westview Press, 1979, 23.
Return to contents page