The Essential New Art Examiner

Reflections on Glass

J anet K oplos Reflections on Glass Summer 1980 Studio glass is still in its literal adolescence, having only escaped from the confines of the factory after Harvey Littleton’s pair of workshops at the Toledo Museum of Art in 1962. Before that, there had been utilitarian glass, decorative glass and so-called “art glass”—all produced by skilled factory workers according to a designer’s specifications. Littleton , then a professor of art at the University of Wisconsin, saw glass as a field for artistic expression, but that expression was dependent upon a complicated technology which had to be adapted to the needs of an artist working alone. Littleton had developed the rudiments of a small furnace suitable for a studio rather than factory use. But the first workshop was still nearly stumped by technical problems in melting the glass. Dominick Labino, then vice-president for research for Johns-Manville Fiber Glass in Toledo, contributed pre-formulated glass “marbles,” which would melt evenly at temperatures Littleton’s small furnaces could achieve. There, after 4,000 years of utilitarian production, were the materials and the techniques. What had to follow were the ideas that would justify contemporary labors in the ancient medium—the ideas that would make it art. From this beginning, the balance between technique and concepts has been the major problem of studio glass. The tradition of using glass for function or decoration had been pulled in a new direction when Louis Comfort Tiffany produced his first “art glass.” He found the material ideally suited to the curving, languid lines of Art Nouveau. Organic forms, resulting from gravity and the rotation of the blowpipe, come easily to blown glass. Yet, other art glass resulted 104   T h e E s s e n t i a l N ew A rt E xaminer from different and completely contradictory properties of the material, such as the sharp and prismatic character of cut glass. Glass is an abstract material, and represents many dichotomies of character: besides organic or prismatic it can also be opaque or transparent , highly colored or colorless, fragile or shatterproof, ductile or rigid and so on. This abstractness allows the artist working in this material an extraordinary leeway. The exploration of this freedom, the search for form, dominates the studio glass movement today. Of course, the production of beautiful objects in the decorative tradition continues. Art Nouveau and gem-faceted styles sell as well as ever and have become , in fact, almost a trap for the movement. So lovely, so popular, so much easier than breaking new ground, these objects—in every glass exhibition —demonstrate that Littleton’s dictum, “Technique is cheap,” has not found universal understanding. And they demonstrate the widening rift within the medium between traditional artisanry which concentrates on execution and artwork (whether functional or nonfunctional) which concentrates on the expression of ideas. The studio movement is concerned with finding new imagery, expanding the limits. Indeed, current work is so varied in character that the mere fact that all these objects use glass as a basic material is becoming increasingly insufficient as grounds for comparison and exhibition. Glass is no longer any one thing. As it approaches maturity as an art medium, it has become a medium and a vehicle for the expression of an artist’s ideas rather than an end in itself. Large-scale exhibitions, such as the recent 8th Annual National Invitational Glass Exhibition at Habatat Galleries in Detroit (500 works by 92 American artists), and the Corning Museum of Glass’s New Glass: A Worldwide Survey (273 objects by 196 entrants from 28 countries) demonstrate the increasingly divergent groupings, expanding outward like some supernova, into separate systems of work that would be better served by thematic and contextual shows. Glass has simply outgrown the confining expectations of its name. A separation has always existed between stained glass and blown glass, in history, purpose, esthetics and technique. There is some crossing of the breach, however. Many stained glass artists are developing greaterthan -traditional relief, and much interesting work by glassblowers is very flat, although glassblowers have avoided the selection-and-assembly approach of stained glass. J A N E T K O P L O S    Reflections on Glass   105 The blown glass field is so evolving, so open, that any list of significant work includes not just some, of the “old masters” of the movement, (those whose pioneering involvement...