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LENNIE BENNETTSand and potash turned molten. Science calls it glass. Like no one else, Dale Chihuly makes it art.
ST. PETERSBURG - "What do they taste like?" a young boy on a school tour asked as he gazed at a tumble of glass on the floor of the Museum of Fine Arts: bowls swirled with Popsicle colors, orbs glowing with the brightness of Gummies, tubes ridged and looping like multiflavored licorice sticks.
The question is both innocuous and profound. It gets to the heart of the debate about Dale Chihuly's celebrated glass creations, which will be seen at the museum in extravagant abundance when "Chihuly Across Florida: Masterworks in Glass" opens a week from today.
It's the kind of work that invites sensuous response - call it eye candy of a very high order. Argue whether it's art or craft all you like. But in the seductive colors and exaggerated forms massed into elaborate sculptures and installations are decades of experimentation and innovation that have shaped a 20th century genre called the studio glass movement.
Glass, a liquid of molten sand mixed with an alkaline substance such as soda or potash and then cooled to a solid state, probably originated about 5,000 years ago in Asia. For thousands of years, it has been prized for its ability to refract, reflect and transmit light and for its unique combination of strength and fragility, utility and decoration.
Beginning with the Mesopotamians, every known era in human history has examples of glass, beginning with beads meant as cheap versions of precious stones that progressed to small amulets made by coiling glass threads around clay forms or vases cast from molds. The discovery, probably by the Romans in the first century B.C., that the liquid could quickly, beautifully and economically be blown through a long, thin tube into a malleable orb introduced a new world of possibilities. Cut it, enamel it, infuse it with color, mirror it; glass has always been a willing partner in a marriage of materials.
Beginning in the 14th century, the most famous glassmakers were Venetians, isolated on the nearby island of Murano for fear that fires from the hot furnaces could destroy the city. Glass from Venice, as well as other European cities, became available to those who could afford it, but it was hardly a household fixture for common folks.
The Industrial Revolution changed that. Huge furnaces could melt large quantities of silica and mechanically pour it into hundreds of molds to mass-produce glasses, vases, bowls, decanters, pitchers.
Incredibly, during all those millennia, glass was never considered a medium for individual artistic expression. It was fundamentally utilitarian, requiring huge furnaces to melt the glass and teams of workmen to blow, shape and mold it. Even elite studios such as Waterford and Steuben that created expensive glass pieces used an assembly-line process in which a designer would pass along his sketches to glass workers. (Related story, Page 4E.)
Beginning in the late 1950s, Harvey Littleton, son of a Corning Glass physicist, thought blown glass could be the stuff of real art, conceived and created by the same pair of hands in a small studio. The problem was the furnaces, burning so hot they could incinerate a neighborhood, never mind a garage.
But a garage was Littleton's aspiration. In 1962, in a borrowed one on the campus of the Toledo Museum of Art, Littleton held a workshop using a small furnace he'd built. The quality of the "sculpture" was, by all accounts, dreadful and merited the term garage art. But Littleton, undaunted, hooked up with other true believers who had been experimenting with different formulas for glass and different designs for a furnace. Three months later, the group hosted a second, far more successful workshop. A year later, Littleton began teaching a class in creative glass-blowing at the University of Wisconsin.
So began the studio glass movement, and it grew exponentially within a few years. Among the first generation of Littleton students was an interior design major named Dale Chihuly, who was getting a master's of science degree at Wisconsin.
Chihuly didn't just buy into Littleton's philosophy that glass in the right hands could be art, he became obsessed with it. Understanding the science of glass gave him the confidence to test its physical limits, stretching it into impossibly elongated shapes that he then twisted and turned as if they were rubber bands. He lit up his glass with neon. He "painted" with glass, then fused the image to a blown vessel.
A trip to Venice in the late 1960s to study with the famed glassblowers of Murano, who rarely shared their knowledge with outsiders, was another revelation. There, Chihuly began to understand the value of a truly collaborative workshop where artists work in tandem. Without that insight, Chihuly never could have progressed to his monumental sculptures. He understood glass' potential to be performance art with the gaffers - those who blow the glass - as showmen. Chihuly added glamor to a medium that for thousands of years had been associated with sweatshop grime.
Losing his left eye in a car accident in 1976, devastating as it must have been, became a transforming experience professionally. "It made me a better manager," he has said in past interviews. He never blew glass again, instead gathering together a devoted cadre of artists and technicians to realize his designs for increasingly ambitious projects such as the Seaforms series, started in the 1980s, that imitated the forms of sea life and the shifting colors of the ocean.
Chihuly not only challenged the parameters of glass - how much could it be manipulated and into how large a shape? - he began to challenge how we respond to it. In arranging variously shaped glass components within a space, they interacted with each other, the space itself, and the light that they refract or reflect. It was a conceptualist approach to glass - a late 20th century approach - and truly original.
It has led to the large-scale installations that first appeared in 1994, the sculptures built from hundreds, sometimes thousands, of individually blown pieces of glass that dominate and define their environments.
All of the impulses, ideas and innovations that Chihuly has introduced during the past three decades are represented in the St. Petersburg show, and its companion installation at the Orlando Museum of Art.
His love of exaggeration and excess is most obvious in the chandelier mounted in a garden courtyard and the old wooden boat that occupies its own gallery, laden with swollen and distorted glass orbs and rods of many colors, calling to mind the old Mae West question: Can't too much of a good thing be wonderful? And it finds a monochromatic expression in the tower of clear glass tendrils that stretches 20 feet in the Museum of Fine Art's Great Hall.
Spheres from the "Niijima Floats" series, subtly and deeply colored and among the largest freeform orbs every blown, are technical virtuosities, sitting on shards of clear glass like planets coming to light on beds of rock salt.
Some of the vessels, especially those in the "Macchia" series, show the risks Chihuly was never afraid to take with color and his understanding of light as an integral property of glass.
This show, of course, is not an overview of the studio glass movement. There are several dozen contemporary practitioners employing different approaches to glass art who could hold their own against Chihuly. But he's still the greatest, the one who made glass popular with a mass audience, while maintaining a high aesthetic.
To most who see this show, such lofty intellectual issues will be unimportant.
What does it taste like, a little boy asks.
Sweet and easily consumed, yes, but with plenty of bite.
Art preview"Chihuly Across Florida: Masterworks in Glass" opens Jan. 18 at the Museum of Fine Arts, 255 Beach Drive NE in St. Petersburg, and the Orlando Museum of Art, 2416 N Mills Ave. The exhibitions run through May 30. Beginning Jan. 18, the Museum of Fine Arts' hours expand to 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday; 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Friday; and 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sunday. Admission is $12 for adults, $10 for seniors and college students, $5 for children ages 7-18 and free for children 6 and younger.
For more information, call 727 896-2667 or visit www.fine-arts.org For information about the Orlando Museum of Art, call (407) 896-4231 or visit www.OMArt.org For more on Dale Chihuly: www.chihuly.com