SECTION TWO
Chapter 3
The Material, its Subjective Reading and Openness
I analyse the qualities of glass as a medium for artists and develop this analysis into an exposition of the romantic potential for glass to metaphorically open a conversation in its engagement with the artist and with the viewer.
3.1 Engaging Glass as Paradox or Metaphor
The rich history of glass makes it a material with considerable conceptual carrying capacity. Glass is an abundant source for metaphor and, in its relationship with light, it is potentially transcendental in its ambiguity. I elucidate how the conceptual carrying capacity of glass, its ambiguity and its relationship with light make it a material with a poetic potential well suited to a contemporary romanticism.
With glassmaking the aphorism ‘truth to material’ appears a paradox in what curator Juli Cho Bailer calls a “protean medium”.[1] However, whatever creative choices we impose upon it, glass remains demanding, dangerous and unforgiving in the processes of its making, and in a field that is strongly process-driven, the need to articulate a material-based aesthetic is always in evidence. With the primal essence of processes used to manipulate it, glass can be romanticised as a wild and exotic creature. Studio glassmakers often highlight these qualities when justifying glass as their chosen medium – qualities noted by Noris Ioannou when he writes: “Fractious and dangerous, enduring yet fragile, alluring in its glittering reflections, a barrier that protects yet permits the passage of light, a material that extends humanity’s endeavours – there is something about these paradoxical qualities of glass which engenders emotive responses”[2]. Yet in its narrative lies the paradox that glass is also a material of the mundane. This is raised in the cover note of Martha Drexler Lynn’s book, American Studio Glass 1960-1990, which poses the question, “can art be fashioned out of glass, or do the utilitarian associations embedded within the medium preclude it from being considered an art form?”
In spite of, or perhaps because of its material qualities artist Sergio Redegalli, who operates Cydonia Glass Studio, argues that, whatever its pretensions of being high art, much glass still remains no more than well-crafted (if beautiful) design pieces.[3] In this vein for most of its history the discipline of object glassmaking sat within decorative arts/design categories. But for fifty years that classification has been contested within studio glass, because to be limited to decoration or design can limit creative potential. At the end glass is one material among many, and practitioners in other fields show strong allegiance to their own specific materials. I return to the question: Why glass?
Magic and Mystical
Glassblower and one of the founding fathers of the contemporary studio glass movement, Marvin Lipofsky quotes his friend Chris Wilmarth as saying, “If it’s not magic, it’s merchandise”,[4] and magic is an element often associated with glass. Appearing in children’s fairy stories,[5] glass comes in forms ranging from talking mirrors to glass slippers, and in apparent contradiction to that aphorism ‘truth to material’ I posited glass, with its reflection, refraction, opacity and transparency, lends itself to a sleight of hand. For the magician, ‘craft’ is putting things together in empowering ways, and there is magic around working with glass, a material that to its practitioners can be in a great part alchemy.[6] Despite our sharing community, there are practitioners who hold tightly to their kiln programs and their technical processes as their secret art. But it is more than just technical process: glass, for all its chemistry, is a material of the affective domain. Once past those words that implicate process – words such as innovative and virtuosity – the affective domain is implied by the common use of descriptors such as beautiful, exquisite, seductive, ambiguous, paradoxic, magical, mysterious, symbolic, luminous, evocative, spectral, spiritual and even transcendent. The affective domain is also evident in our responses to the saturated colour or the luminosity of glass. The emotive words chosen to describe the glass object often credit the material with a persona subjectively bordering on the mystical.
The Fecundity of Glass
Of the virtues of glass as a medium for artists none is more advantageous than its versatility of use – in its versatility glass ranges from the mundane to the jewel. The use of glass may not be as ancient as bone, stone or ochre, but it has a presence as artefact going back to the third millennium BC in ancient Egypt and Syria,[7] and it travels through civilisations from that point in history as the great chameleon of all the hand-manipulated materials. Glass is the semiprecious jewel that is a small Roman cast mosaic vessel, and it is the technical mastery of the Lycurgus Cup or the Portland Vase. On that intimate scale it echoes the subtlety of fine polished stone and has the soft translucency of ivory or porcelain. When framed in large stone-laced windows, such as the stained glass in the Medieval La Sainte Chapelle, glass sublimely transmutes the sun’s rays through the splendid narratives of the Christian God. This is a striking example of the ability of glass to play with the “metaphysics of light”.[8] As a furnishing for God, pure gold may have been placed in the innermost holy places of the temple,[9] but through glass, light becomes the very presence of God.
By the nineteenth century the industrial revolution provided its own gods and they were worshipped in the Crystal Palace which was constructed from materials of the new industrial age – cast iron and glass. As a rejection of the new age, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood picked up stained glass as a bearer of England’s historic narrative, and like twentieth century artists such as Picasso, Matisse and Chagall, exploited its colour. In the art nouveau of Tiffany and the bijou modern of Lalique, glass is the epitome of high-end decorative arts as objets d’art ornaments to building and body. Yet it makes a transition through the Art Deco of earlier Frank Lloyd Wright to become a major aesthetic element in the puritan functionalism of high modernist architecture (with international style edifices such as the Seagram Building) by exploiting the symbiotics of glass – transparency and visual weightlessness. Jean Baudrillard wrote, as “both the material used and the ideal to be achieved, glass is both ends and means”.[10]
Glass sits as the unseen yet functional protector in front of the seminal Renaissance paintings in the Louvre in Paris, where it reflects no taste, but overlays a subtle hint of danger as it whispers the harsh narrative of terrorism. At the same time glass forms the boundaries to Damien Hirst’s post modern The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where solid though invisible glass contains and restrains, yet at the same time reveals. Beyond the spectrum of the fine arts, as window, glass exemplifies the notion of inside/outside, while filling our domiciles with light as it protects us from the elements. Glass refects, or transmits pure light as a symbol of divinity while shattered glass might evoke the prophetic racist horror that was Kristallnacht. As lens for both telescope and microscope, glass was the portal to our scientific age, and as an hourglass it symbolises the passage of time and is a harbinger of our mortality. Commercially, glass gives substance to that enduringly iconic, yet mundane object of our age, the ubiquitous Coca Cola bottle, and here as narrative its form is both the container and the content. From Stone Age obsidian, through small Roman glass vessels and Gothic ecclesiastical windows to modernist curtain walls and Coca Cola bottles, glass is a trace of our cultural history. Glass in its multitudinous forms throughout time is fecund in reference, and as such glass functions in the artist’s armoury as a material rich in connotation.[11]
The Force of Binary Opposites
If there is mystery in glass it lies in its inherent paradox. Glass artists play with binary opposites – positive/negative, soft/hard, reveal/veil, permanent/impermanent, fluid/frozen. In glass the play of light on and through form and shape creates a tension between positive and negative by making negative forms concrete. Light, form and shape with the added dimension of colour, support the formalist potential of glass as a modernist material. It lends itself to the restraint and understatement of a minimalist aesthetic[12] as easily as it does to the flamboyant fluidity and colour of the Baroque. While the materiality of glass offers great possibilities, this same quality is also problematic in its tendency to dominate, and it can do this with all the chaotic force of the natural world. We shape glass by using the forces of heat, gravity and time. In enlisting these elemental forces, glass offers us the freshness of the uncontrollable unknown. Maurice Marinot, a Fauvist painter, who turned to glassmaking after being seduced by this material in 1911, glorified the imperfections of blown glass by allowing streaks and bubbles to document the movement of the thick molten flow of glass as it was given form.[13] With acid baths Marinot created deeply etched surfaces and betrayed his introverted fascination with the medium, and his glass contained the “dynamism of an abstract expressionist painting”.[14] More importantly chance made itself evident in Marcel Duchamp’s Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even. Here, in its accidental breakage, glass is intriguing. Facilitated by its fragility, glass introduces the unforeseen force of chance into the work in such a way that, in the first decades of the twentieth century, glass foreshadowed Post-modernism’s rejection of Platonism.
As a material glass accommodates numerous techniques used by artists to create their individual voices, but beauty and material dominance can overwhelm all but the strongest voice. International glass artist Ann Wolff is quoted as saying “as a material it is mean and ungiving. One has to do everything in one’s power as an artist to make it speak with one’s own voice”.[15] Yet, glass can be puerile, giving visual form to shallow objects of seductive prettiness that forsake any visceral connection as it sacrifices its objects to kitsch (both intended and unintended). Glass is attractive, and this can generate attacks by those who equate inherent beauty with superficiality. However, when it goes beyond superficial attractiveness, glass is a portal into something deeper.
While my cast work for this project, Drifting, is sharply defined as five external shapes, it is also visually ambiguous. This work is about glass, and its presentation is romantic. Internally nebulous forms visually unfold and continuously reconfigure as you move around the work. A shape-shifter, glass combines physical permanence with visual transience. As solid as rock, yet as fragile as ice, it is a stone-like material through which light can permeate. As a resolved form, its seductive play is made for the eye, not the hand. It does this by making the optical sensual, and in doing so it confuses the eye/intellect, hand/haptic divisions of art and object. While both ceramics and glass are versatile media, it is glass, as Dr Gerry King and George Aslanis agree, that has a special relationship with light. Clifford Rainey said, “It allows the eye to penetrate and enter the mass of the form … and arrest the physical with an inner light”.[16] It is seen to have a spiritual essence.[17] Glass displays both substance and transience. It balances our technical virtuosity with the uncontrollable forces of chance in a materiality unleashed by heat and time.
Ambiguity and the Transcendental
Jessica Loughlin’s works deal with infinite stillness in the landscape and in the mind. She is currently exploring the earthier visual readings of different elements that in superficial physical appearance are so similar that they are difficult to distinguish from each other. She is exploring patterns with the elements of water, cloud and salt, and her skill in using glass facilitates her experimentation in ambiguity. Ambiguity triggers uncertainty, and ambiguity engages us. Ambiguity opens glass to the aesthetics of Baudelaire and the symbolists, contemporaries of the first of the modern era’s great masters in glass.[18] These aesthetics create a psychological space for the, "potential of vagueness … a contradiction establishing itself between nerves and mind. The inconsistencies of glass can reveal the inconsistencies of the unconscious."[19]
The symbolists are the avant-garde of their day (1880-1890s) and they combine language and art as autonomous symbol systems with the power to affect aesthetic experience.[20] The symbolists are artists in a romantic tradition. Symbolism is central in all romantic thought.[21] Symbolism attempts to express what cannot be expressed literally. The symbolists are concerned with emotional experience. They move beyond representation into the felt response – reactions not explained by logical analysis. Their world is made uncertain by ambiguity, and ambiguity questions accepted understandings as it unwraps reality. It is self-evident that ambiguity cannot be easily read, so it forces us from complacency as we attempt to project meaning into an uncertain situation. My use of the term Romanticism is based on an aesthetic response, the dominance of the felt over the rational. Our psyche is exposed as we project our experience onto and into ambiguity in a creative recombination. Glass, in its ambiguity, is a material in which we can read our deepest stories.
Beyond our deepest stories the ambiguity of glass can open into the transcendental and the intangible void that offers us the sublime. Loughlin says she wants to feel “vastness, the hugeness of space” in her work, and to quote Gaston Bachelard, “vast is one of the most Baudelairian of words”, the word that marks most naturally the “infinity of intimate space” and “... we discover that immensity in the intimate domain that is an intensity of being …”[22] We are dealing with two infinite spaces – one external, one internal. When Loughlin cold works her pieces to blur edges, the white glass holds the light, and edges are softened to question where space starts or ends. Loughlin uses this to stimulate emotional reaction – she wants to feel. Loughlin might agree with Gaston Bachelard who writes “the mind sees and continues to see objects, while the spirit finds the nest of immensity in an object”.[23]
Through the ambiguity of glass, the world interrogates the artist, calling for his or her attention. In romantic terms, through this material, Maurice Merleau-Ponty might say a world calls itself into existence and demands that the artist, through their sensibility, give it substance.[24] Our reaction to glass is emotional and subjective, because the appearance of glass is as shifting, intangible and ambiguous as its natural companion, light. It is light that gives glass the ability to mutate its physical form depending on the time of day. In manifesting visual form through light, glass exhibits a transcendental quality, and in light and shadow there is indeed magic. This facilitates a dominance of the felt experience. Romanticism is the world filtered through the felt experiences of the individual. It is the “assertion of the primacy of the perceiver in the world he [or she] perceives”[25] – the primacy of inner world over outer.
The physicality of glass is available to Romanticism. Curator Brian Parkes states that, because of the nature of the material, it is not seen as compulsive if some glass artists passionately explore the formal qualities of colour as almost a religious experience.[26] As he says,
"… the work is about glass. Richard [Whiteley] may be talking about glassmakers doing something else these days, but wholly and fundamentally in my view, it is about what this stuff can do when you thicken it up, or thin it down and how the light moves through it as different shapes and how drop-dead amazing that is from a phenomenological point and the capacity with which one, in mastering that material, can manipulate that phenomenon. That is a perfectly good subject to play with. It is what Rothko did with colour."[27]
Glass makes itself available to light, and light in interaction with glass can present to us as ambiguity. The ambiguity of glass and light emotively engages us as phenomenon and enables us to experience the transcendental.
Metaphor
In pursuit of my argument – that my studio glass can be linked to a new Romanticism – I address the poetic, and propose that glass also has a strong and persistent history as a medium with the potential for metaphor. This is evident when curator Geoffrey Edwards writes:
"The intrinsic enigma of glass, as an extraordinarily chameleon-like substance created in fierce heat of the furnace from common and utterly unremarkable ingredients, accounts in part for the apparently universal obsession with glass metaphor and imagery. Glass has been employed, with no small degree of paradox, to signify transience as well as endurance, ambiguity and clarity, turmoil and tranquillity, purity and evil, deception and truthfulness, rarity and worthlessness. It may be that glass is the most universal of all ‘material’ sources of metaphor.[28] "
I speak of the fecundity of glass and in great part this lies in the conceptual richness of its history, which in turn provides a prolific ground for allusion and metaphor. Metaphor can also come from the physicality of the glassmaking process. These metaphors can expose what lies at the centre of our existence.
Conceiving the transience of physical expressions of our being, such as breath, artist/educator Gabriella Bisetto recreated these physical expressions as permanent objects in glass “with a poetry that belies the difficult industrial processes used”.[29] In her 2007 series The Shape of Breath Bisetto froze her breath in glass forms to make the literal into metaphor as she explored the landscapes of the human body in what Shaw Hendry called “poetic evocations of mortality”.[30] Bisetto uses a craft process to turn glass into objects presenting a still and poetic beauty that is deeply moving.
The transcendental qualities of glass, combined with its depth of metaphoric reference, holds rich potential for affective exploitation by the romantic artist, and the materiality of glass provides a deep resource for the generation of aesthetic experiences. Additionally, through ambiguity and paradox the viewer is presented with the poetic potential for multiple readings as is the case with the natural landscape.
[1] Bailer, Mining Glass, catalogue, Tacoma: Museum of Glass, 2007, 6.
[2] Noris Ioannou, Masters of Their Craft, Sydney: Craftsman House, 1997, 85.
[3] Sergio Redegalli, personal interview, 01/08/09, 4.
[4] Marvin Lipofsky, “Thank you Harvey … It’s Been 47 Great Years, Corning”, (Glass Art Society 39th Annual Conference, 2009), 13.
[5] Bailer, Mining Glass, 8.
[6] Tina Oldknow, “Art and Alchemy”, (lecture, Sydney College of the Arts, August 2010).
[7] This is ignoring naturally occurring obsidian utilised by mankind since the Stone Age.
[8] Janet Laurence, “Making Visible”. Keynote Lecture, Open House Ausglass 08 conference publication, Canberra: Australian Association of Glass Artists (Ausglass Inc), 2008, 10.
[9] Errey, Joppien, and O’Callaghan, ‘Robert Baines: Metal’, 23.
[10] Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects, trans. Benedict, James, London and New York: Verso, 1996, 41.
[11] Bailer, Mining Glass, 9.
[12] Margot Osborne, curator, Mind and Matter – Meditations on Immateriality, catalogue, Adelaide: Margot Osborne, 2010, 2.
[13] Penelope Hunter-Stiebel in catalogue by Robert Bell, “International Directions in Glass Art”, 16.
[14] Ibid,17.
[15] Dan Klein, ‘Breaking the Mould’, Craft Arts International no. 71, Sydney: Craft Arts Pty Ltd, 2007, 24.
[16] Lucy Lyon, moderator, “Implications of Transforming the Figure into Glass”, (panel, Conference Journal, GAS, 2007, 65).
[17] Lynn, American Studio Glass, 25.
[18] Cousins, Twentieth Century Glass, 42
[19] Dorra, Symbolist Art Theory, 5.
[20] Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory, 12.
[21] Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, 99.
[22] Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans., Maria Jolas, . Boston: Beacon Press, 1994, 190, 193.
[23] Ibid., 190.
[24] Smith, The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, 103.
[25] Alan Bullock and Stephen Trombley, The New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought, London: HarperCollins, 2000, 762.
[26] Brian Parkes, personal interview, 17/08/09, 6.
[27] Ibid., 5.
[28] Geoffrey Edwards, Art of Glass. Glass in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria. South Yarra: Macmillan, 1998, 13.
[29] Shaw Hendry, ‘The Shape of Breath’, Craft Arts International no. 73, Sydney: Craft Arts Pty Ltd, 2008, 58.
[30] Osborne, catalogue, 6.
Return to contents page
Chapter 3
The Material, its Subjective Reading and Openness
I analyse the qualities of glass as a medium for artists and develop this analysis into an exposition of the romantic potential for glass to metaphorically open a conversation in its engagement with the artist and with the viewer.
3.1 Engaging Glass as Paradox or Metaphor
The rich history of glass makes it a material with considerable conceptual carrying capacity. Glass is an abundant source for metaphor and, in its relationship with light, it is potentially transcendental in its ambiguity. I elucidate how the conceptual carrying capacity of glass, its ambiguity and its relationship with light make it a material with a poetic potential well suited to a contemporary romanticism.
With glassmaking the aphorism ‘truth to material’ appears a paradox in what curator Juli Cho Bailer calls a “protean medium”.[1] However, whatever creative choices we impose upon it, glass remains demanding, dangerous and unforgiving in the processes of its making, and in a field that is strongly process-driven, the need to articulate a material-based aesthetic is always in evidence. With the primal essence of processes used to manipulate it, glass can be romanticised as a wild and exotic creature. Studio glassmakers often highlight these qualities when justifying glass as their chosen medium – qualities noted by Noris Ioannou when he writes: “Fractious and dangerous, enduring yet fragile, alluring in its glittering reflections, a barrier that protects yet permits the passage of light, a material that extends humanity’s endeavours – there is something about these paradoxical qualities of glass which engenders emotive responses”[2]. Yet in its narrative lies the paradox that glass is also a material of the mundane. This is raised in the cover note of Martha Drexler Lynn’s book, American Studio Glass 1960-1990, which poses the question, “can art be fashioned out of glass, or do the utilitarian associations embedded within the medium preclude it from being considered an art form?”
In spite of, or perhaps because of its material qualities artist Sergio Redegalli, who operates Cydonia Glass Studio, argues that, whatever its pretensions of being high art, much glass still remains no more than well-crafted (if beautiful) design pieces.[3] In this vein for most of its history the discipline of object glassmaking sat within decorative arts/design categories. But for fifty years that classification has been contested within studio glass, because to be limited to decoration or design can limit creative potential. At the end glass is one material among many, and practitioners in other fields show strong allegiance to their own specific materials. I return to the question: Why glass?
Magic and Mystical
Glassblower and one of the founding fathers of the contemporary studio glass movement, Marvin Lipofsky quotes his friend Chris Wilmarth as saying, “If it’s not magic, it’s merchandise”,[4] and magic is an element often associated with glass. Appearing in children’s fairy stories,[5] glass comes in forms ranging from talking mirrors to glass slippers, and in apparent contradiction to that aphorism ‘truth to material’ I posited glass, with its reflection, refraction, opacity and transparency, lends itself to a sleight of hand. For the magician, ‘craft’ is putting things together in empowering ways, and there is magic around working with glass, a material that to its practitioners can be in a great part alchemy.[6] Despite our sharing community, there are practitioners who hold tightly to their kiln programs and their technical processes as their secret art. But it is more than just technical process: glass, for all its chemistry, is a material of the affective domain. Once past those words that implicate process – words such as innovative and virtuosity – the affective domain is implied by the common use of descriptors such as beautiful, exquisite, seductive, ambiguous, paradoxic, magical, mysterious, symbolic, luminous, evocative, spectral, spiritual and even transcendent. The affective domain is also evident in our responses to the saturated colour or the luminosity of glass. The emotive words chosen to describe the glass object often credit the material with a persona subjectively bordering on the mystical.
The Fecundity of Glass
Of the virtues of glass as a medium for artists none is more advantageous than its versatility of use – in its versatility glass ranges from the mundane to the jewel. The use of glass may not be as ancient as bone, stone or ochre, but it has a presence as artefact going back to the third millennium BC in ancient Egypt and Syria,[7] and it travels through civilisations from that point in history as the great chameleon of all the hand-manipulated materials. Glass is the semiprecious jewel that is a small Roman cast mosaic vessel, and it is the technical mastery of the Lycurgus Cup or the Portland Vase. On that intimate scale it echoes the subtlety of fine polished stone and has the soft translucency of ivory or porcelain. When framed in large stone-laced windows, such as the stained glass in the Medieval La Sainte Chapelle, glass sublimely transmutes the sun’s rays through the splendid narratives of the Christian God. This is a striking example of the ability of glass to play with the “metaphysics of light”.[8] As a furnishing for God, pure gold may have been placed in the innermost holy places of the temple,[9] but through glass, light becomes the very presence of God.
By the nineteenth century the industrial revolution provided its own gods and they were worshipped in the Crystal Palace which was constructed from materials of the new industrial age – cast iron and glass. As a rejection of the new age, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood picked up stained glass as a bearer of England’s historic narrative, and like twentieth century artists such as Picasso, Matisse and Chagall, exploited its colour. In the art nouveau of Tiffany and the bijou modern of Lalique, glass is the epitome of high-end decorative arts as objets d’art ornaments to building and body. Yet it makes a transition through the Art Deco of earlier Frank Lloyd Wright to become a major aesthetic element in the puritan functionalism of high modernist architecture (with international style edifices such as the Seagram Building) by exploiting the symbiotics of glass – transparency and visual weightlessness. Jean Baudrillard wrote, as “both the material used and the ideal to be achieved, glass is both ends and means”.[10]
Glass sits as the unseen yet functional protector in front of the seminal Renaissance paintings in the Louvre in Paris, where it reflects no taste, but overlays a subtle hint of danger as it whispers the harsh narrative of terrorism. At the same time glass forms the boundaries to Damien Hirst’s post modern The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where solid though invisible glass contains and restrains, yet at the same time reveals. Beyond the spectrum of the fine arts, as window, glass exemplifies the notion of inside/outside, while filling our domiciles with light as it protects us from the elements. Glass refects, or transmits pure light as a symbol of divinity while shattered glass might evoke the prophetic racist horror that was Kristallnacht. As lens for both telescope and microscope, glass was the portal to our scientific age, and as an hourglass it symbolises the passage of time and is a harbinger of our mortality. Commercially, glass gives substance to that enduringly iconic, yet mundane object of our age, the ubiquitous Coca Cola bottle, and here as narrative its form is both the container and the content. From Stone Age obsidian, through small Roman glass vessels and Gothic ecclesiastical windows to modernist curtain walls and Coca Cola bottles, glass is a trace of our cultural history. Glass in its multitudinous forms throughout time is fecund in reference, and as such glass functions in the artist’s armoury as a material rich in connotation.[11]
The Force of Binary Opposites
If there is mystery in glass it lies in its inherent paradox. Glass artists play with binary opposites – positive/negative, soft/hard, reveal/veil, permanent/impermanent, fluid/frozen. In glass the play of light on and through form and shape creates a tension between positive and negative by making negative forms concrete. Light, form and shape with the added dimension of colour, support the formalist potential of glass as a modernist material. It lends itself to the restraint and understatement of a minimalist aesthetic[12] as easily as it does to the flamboyant fluidity and colour of the Baroque. While the materiality of glass offers great possibilities, this same quality is also problematic in its tendency to dominate, and it can do this with all the chaotic force of the natural world. We shape glass by using the forces of heat, gravity and time. In enlisting these elemental forces, glass offers us the freshness of the uncontrollable unknown. Maurice Marinot, a Fauvist painter, who turned to glassmaking after being seduced by this material in 1911, glorified the imperfections of blown glass by allowing streaks and bubbles to document the movement of the thick molten flow of glass as it was given form.[13] With acid baths Marinot created deeply etched surfaces and betrayed his introverted fascination with the medium, and his glass contained the “dynamism of an abstract expressionist painting”.[14] More importantly chance made itself evident in Marcel Duchamp’s Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even. Here, in its accidental breakage, glass is intriguing. Facilitated by its fragility, glass introduces the unforeseen force of chance into the work in such a way that, in the first decades of the twentieth century, glass foreshadowed Post-modernism’s rejection of Platonism.
As a material glass accommodates numerous techniques used by artists to create their individual voices, but beauty and material dominance can overwhelm all but the strongest voice. International glass artist Ann Wolff is quoted as saying “as a material it is mean and ungiving. One has to do everything in one’s power as an artist to make it speak with one’s own voice”.[15] Yet, glass can be puerile, giving visual form to shallow objects of seductive prettiness that forsake any visceral connection as it sacrifices its objects to kitsch (both intended and unintended). Glass is attractive, and this can generate attacks by those who equate inherent beauty with superficiality. However, when it goes beyond superficial attractiveness, glass is a portal into something deeper.
While my cast work for this project, Drifting, is sharply defined as five external shapes, it is also visually ambiguous. This work is about glass, and its presentation is romantic. Internally nebulous forms visually unfold and continuously reconfigure as you move around the work. A shape-shifter, glass combines physical permanence with visual transience. As solid as rock, yet as fragile as ice, it is a stone-like material through which light can permeate. As a resolved form, its seductive play is made for the eye, not the hand. It does this by making the optical sensual, and in doing so it confuses the eye/intellect, hand/haptic divisions of art and object. While both ceramics and glass are versatile media, it is glass, as Dr Gerry King and George Aslanis agree, that has a special relationship with light. Clifford Rainey said, “It allows the eye to penetrate and enter the mass of the form … and arrest the physical with an inner light”.[16] It is seen to have a spiritual essence.[17] Glass displays both substance and transience. It balances our technical virtuosity with the uncontrollable forces of chance in a materiality unleashed by heat and time.
Ambiguity and the Transcendental
Jessica Loughlin’s works deal with infinite stillness in the landscape and in the mind. She is currently exploring the earthier visual readings of different elements that in superficial physical appearance are so similar that they are difficult to distinguish from each other. She is exploring patterns with the elements of water, cloud and salt, and her skill in using glass facilitates her experimentation in ambiguity. Ambiguity triggers uncertainty, and ambiguity engages us. Ambiguity opens glass to the aesthetics of Baudelaire and the symbolists, contemporaries of the first of the modern era’s great masters in glass.[18] These aesthetics create a psychological space for the, "potential of vagueness … a contradiction establishing itself between nerves and mind. The inconsistencies of glass can reveal the inconsistencies of the unconscious."[19]
The symbolists are the avant-garde of their day (1880-1890s) and they combine language and art as autonomous symbol systems with the power to affect aesthetic experience.[20] The symbolists are artists in a romantic tradition. Symbolism is central in all romantic thought.[21] Symbolism attempts to express what cannot be expressed literally. The symbolists are concerned with emotional experience. They move beyond representation into the felt response – reactions not explained by logical analysis. Their world is made uncertain by ambiguity, and ambiguity questions accepted understandings as it unwraps reality. It is self-evident that ambiguity cannot be easily read, so it forces us from complacency as we attempt to project meaning into an uncertain situation. My use of the term Romanticism is based on an aesthetic response, the dominance of the felt over the rational. Our psyche is exposed as we project our experience onto and into ambiguity in a creative recombination. Glass, in its ambiguity, is a material in which we can read our deepest stories.
Beyond our deepest stories the ambiguity of glass can open into the transcendental and the intangible void that offers us the sublime. Loughlin says she wants to feel “vastness, the hugeness of space” in her work, and to quote Gaston Bachelard, “vast is one of the most Baudelairian of words”, the word that marks most naturally the “infinity of intimate space” and “... we discover that immensity in the intimate domain that is an intensity of being …”[22] We are dealing with two infinite spaces – one external, one internal. When Loughlin cold works her pieces to blur edges, the white glass holds the light, and edges are softened to question where space starts or ends. Loughlin uses this to stimulate emotional reaction – she wants to feel. Loughlin might agree with Gaston Bachelard who writes “the mind sees and continues to see objects, while the spirit finds the nest of immensity in an object”.[23]
Through the ambiguity of glass, the world interrogates the artist, calling for his or her attention. In romantic terms, through this material, Maurice Merleau-Ponty might say a world calls itself into existence and demands that the artist, through their sensibility, give it substance.[24] Our reaction to glass is emotional and subjective, because the appearance of glass is as shifting, intangible and ambiguous as its natural companion, light. It is light that gives glass the ability to mutate its physical form depending on the time of day. In manifesting visual form through light, glass exhibits a transcendental quality, and in light and shadow there is indeed magic. This facilitates a dominance of the felt experience. Romanticism is the world filtered through the felt experiences of the individual. It is the “assertion of the primacy of the perceiver in the world he [or she] perceives”[25] – the primacy of inner world over outer.
The physicality of glass is available to Romanticism. Curator Brian Parkes states that, because of the nature of the material, it is not seen as compulsive if some glass artists passionately explore the formal qualities of colour as almost a religious experience.[26] As he says,
"… the work is about glass. Richard [Whiteley] may be talking about glassmakers doing something else these days, but wholly and fundamentally in my view, it is about what this stuff can do when you thicken it up, or thin it down and how the light moves through it as different shapes and how drop-dead amazing that is from a phenomenological point and the capacity with which one, in mastering that material, can manipulate that phenomenon. That is a perfectly good subject to play with. It is what Rothko did with colour."[27]
Glass makes itself available to light, and light in interaction with glass can present to us as ambiguity. The ambiguity of glass and light emotively engages us as phenomenon and enables us to experience the transcendental.
Metaphor
In pursuit of my argument – that my studio glass can be linked to a new Romanticism – I address the poetic, and propose that glass also has a strong and persistent history as a medium with the potential for metaphor. This is evident when curator Geoffrey Edwards writes:
"The intrinsic enigma of glass, as an extraordinarily chameleon-like substance created in fierce heat of the furnace from common and utterly unremarkable ingredients, accounts in part for the apparently universal obsession with glass metaphor and imagery. Glass has been employed, with no small degree of paradox, to signify transience as well as endurance, ambiguity and clarity, turmoil and tranquillity, purity and evil, deception and truthfulness, rarity and worthlessness. It may be that glass is the most universal of all ‘material’ sources of metaphor.[28] "
I speak of the fecundity of glass and in great part this lies in the conceptual richness of its history, which in turn provides a prolific ground for allusion and metaphor. Metaphor can also come from the physicality of the glassmaking process. These metaphors can expose what lies at the centre of our existence.
Conceiving the transience of physical expressions of our being, such as breath, artist/educator Gabriella Bisetto recreated these physical expressions as permanent objects in glass “with a poetry that belies the difficult industrial processes used”.[29] In her 2007 series The Shape of Breath Bisetto froze her breath in glass forms to make the literal into metaphor as she explored the landscapes of the human body in what Shaw Hendry called “poetic evocations of mortality”.[30] Bisetto uses a craft process to turn glass into objects presenting a still and poetic beauty that is deeply moving.
The transcendental qualities of glass, combined with its depth of metaphoric reference, holds rich potential for affective exploitation by the romantic artist, and the materiality of glass provides a deep resource for the generation of aesthetic experiences. Additionally, through ambiguity and paradox the viewer is presented with the poetic potential for multiple readings as is the case with the natural landscape.
[1] Bailer, Mining Glass, catalogue, Tacoma: Museum of Glass, 2007, 6.
[2] Noris Ioannou, Masters of Their Craft, Sydney: Craftsman House, 1997, 85.
[3] Sergio Redegalli, personal interview, 01/08/09, 4.
[4] Marvin Lipofsky, “Thank you Harvey … It’s Been 47 Great Years, Corning”, (Glass Art Society 39th Annual Conference, 2009), 13.
[5] Bailer, Mining Glass, 8.
[6] Tina Oldknow, “Art and Alchemy”, (lecture, Sydney College of the Arts, August 2010).
[7] This is ignoring naturally occurring obsidian utilised by mankind since the Stone Age.
[8] Janet Laurence, “Making Visible”. Keynote Lecture, Open House Ausglass 08 conference publication, Canberra: Australian Association of Glass Artists (Ausglass Inc), 2008, 10.
[9] Errey, Joppien, and O’Callaghan, ‘Robert Baines: Metal’, 23.
[10] Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects, trans. Benedict, James, London and New York: Verso, 1996, 41.
[11] Bailer, Mining Glass, 9.
[12] Margot Osborne, curator, Mind and Matter – Meditations on Immateriality, catalogue, Adelaide: Margot Osborne, 2010, 2.
[13] Penelope Hunter-Stiebel in catalogue by Robert Bell, “International Directions in Glass Art”, 16.
[14] Ibid,17.
[15] Dan Klein, ‘Breaking the Mould’, Craft Arts International no. 71, Sydney: Craft Arts Pty Ltd, 2007, 24.
[16] Lucy Lyon, moderator, “Implications of Transforming the Figure into Glass”, (panel, Conference Journal, GAS, 2007, 65).
[17] Lynn, American Studio Glass, 25.
[18] Cousins, Twentieth Century Glass, 42
[19] Dorra, Symbolist Art Theory, 5.
[20] Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory, 12.
[21] Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, 99.
[22] Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans., Maria Jolas, . Boston: Beacon Press, 1994, 190, 193.
[23] Ibid., 190.
[24] Smith, The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, 103.
[25] Alan Bullock and Stephen Trombley, The New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought, London: HarperCollins, 2000, 762.
[26] Brian Parkes, personal interview, 17/08/09, 6.
[27] Ibid., 5.
[28] Geoffrey Edwards, Art of Glass. Glass in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria. South Yarra: Macmillan, 1998, 13.
[29] Shaw Hendry, ‘The Shape of Breath’, Craft Arts International no. 73, Sydney: Craft Arts Pty Ltd, 2008, 58.
[30] Osborne, catalogue, 6.
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