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LENNIE BENNETTThe debate over whether Dale Chihuly is craftsman or artist is academic. It's the spectacle that counts.
ST. PETERSBURG - To those art purists who sniff that Dale Chihuly is a fine craftsman but no artist, I say: Get over it.
Craft or art, art or craft. . . . The debate about Chihuly's work is specious because it misses the point of what he has done for decades, which is to take a medium and explore it to its outer limits both formally and conceptually. That's art. And to master the medium technically in producing works that convey a vision of form and concept. That's craft.
And Chihuly is probably the greatest interpreter of his medium - blown glass - in the world.
It both helps and hurts that glass as an art genre is so new - a mere four decades or so old - even though glass has been around for about 5,000 years and blown glass for about 2,000. So Chihuly and his peers, the first generation of 20th century studio glass artists, have had the historical tradition of techniques, which haven't changed all that much, but no aesthetic tradition. They've pretty much invented it over the past 30 years. He may no longer be among the very best glass artists in the world - so many artists are doing astonishingly good work in the medium these days - but no one has elevated it more spectacularly than Dale Chihuly.
And that's what a Chihuly show is, a spectacle. "Chihuly Across Florida: Masterworks in Glass" opens Sunday at the Museum of Fine Arts and deserves its blockbuster billing. It's a grand survey of Chihuly's exploration of glass as an expressive form, as a thing itself needing no functional or narrative justification and context.
The show falls into two basic categories: multipiece sculptures and installations, and individual vessels from various series.
The individual vessels best demonstrate Chihuly's craft. One gallery is devoted to examples from the "Macchia" series, the Italian word for spot, named for the vibrant color combinations applied to their surfaces like experimental palettes. Their nonsymmetrical forms are classic Chihuly, in which the glass is allowed to droop and spread. Chihuly has said that their inspiration came when he "woke up one morning and said, "I'm going to use all 300 colors (the number of different colored glass rods he works with) in as many possible variations and combinations as I can.' "
The vessels typically are lined with one color and covered by a contrasting color, then embellished with "spots" of more color and finished with a bright lip wrap. Like most of Chihuly's vessels, they have varying degrees of translucence. A vessel seen from several angles will sometimes reflect light from its glowing surface, sometimes refract it, creating patterned shadows.
The importance of light and shadow in this exhibition cannot be overstated. The most obvious light-dependent work is Persian Pergola, a small, windowless gallery with a clear ceiling lined with hundreds of glass objects. Downlighting from the ceiling, the only light source, creates a technicolor glow, like being inside a kaleidoscope. As beautiful as the ceiling is, another example from the "Persians" series, the Persian Wall, is a better work of installation art perhaps because it allows us a more complex response. Large open vessels in deep red tones with different surface effects roam across a wall and around a corner. Lights cast deep, patterned shadows through them onto the wall, broadening the size of the installation with a visual echo.
It's an example of Chihuly's aesthetic, which is to use glass not just sculpturally but to elicit a response from the viewer and the space it inhabits.
It's a conceptual approach, and can be seen in an installation such as the Persian Wall and in his use of vessels within vessels in some of the examples from the "Baskets" series.
The baskets and vessels named "Soft Containers," grouped in another gallery, are more illustrations of Chihuly's love of letting gravity do its work on the glass while it's still hot, slumped and crouched and randomly proportioned. Some are more about technique - a glass "painting" that is transferred onto a surface further decorated with hundreds of glass threads is a real virtuoso piece. Others are more subtle, groupings of monochromatic vessels with simple, elegant lips, nesting inside and alongside each other, studies in spatial relationships.
And as accomplished as Chihuly's work is, its genius lies in those environments he creates. They're harder to pull off in natural lighting, as in the museum's garden installations that feature tall reeds, spikes and botanical forms "planted" in courtyard beds among the real things. But they work.
In a bed of small palms and ginger, green glass reeds are almost invisible in their blending. It reminds me of something poet Richard Wilbur wrote about the power and deceptiveness of visual perception: "A mantis arranged on a leaf grows into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves any greenness is deeper than anyone knows." But not so fast, the art seems to say, jolting our sightlines in other beds with red reeds shooting up and over the plants and big, vitreous blossoms and pods that make no pretense of natural effect but boldly proclaim themselves as works of imagination.
The work is so seductively lovely, so sensual, that we can easily miss its subversiveness.
A criticism sometimes advanced is that Chihuly no longer blows the glass that bears his name, not since a car accident in 1976 claimed an eye, robbing him of the visual perspective needed to be a gaffer, or master glass blower. Sculptors, printmakers, even painters through history have created within a workshop environment in which other artists and craftsmen are valued members of a collaborative process. So it is with Chihuly.
His work has become richer through creative partnerships with other master glass blowers such as Lino Tagliapietra and with the young gaffers and colorists whom he has trained and encouraged to experiment. That he still pulls the strings and guides the process is evident in the unifying ideas in the museum show.
Does Dale Chihuly have the profundity of Velazquez or Vermeer or Van Gogh? No, and I'm not sure any studio glass art does. I also question Chihuly's direction these days. Most of the works here are variations of themes he's been creating for years. There's a fine line between derivation, which is about the poverty of new ideas, and reiteration, which is returning to the same sources to perfect them. But even if Chihuly's best work is in the past, his contribution to a new medium has earned him a place in art history.
- Lennie Bennett can be reached at 727 893-8293 or lennie@sptimes.com
REVIEW
"Chihuly Across Florida: Masterworks in Glass" opens Sunday at the Museum of Fine Arts, 255 Beach Drive NE in St. Petersburg, and continues through May 30. Beginning Sunday, hours are 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. The museum will be open on Monday to members only beginning Jan. 26. Admission is $12 for adults, $10 for seniors and college students, $5 for children ages 7 to 18 and free for children 6 and younger. For more information, call 727 896-2667 or visit www.fine-arts.org
Also part of "Chihuly Across Florida" is an exhibition of different works at the Orlando Museum of Art, opening Sunday. For information, call 407 896-4231 or visit www.OMArt.org
A guided tour online
Visit www.sptimes.com/glass for a minitour of the exhibit, a time-lapse photography look at how the clear glass tower was constructed plus more coverage of the event.