TRANSPARENT DESTINY 09/17/08

Words  ::  Lana Bortolot // Images  ::  Corning Museum, Heller Gallery

As with all good things, there comes a time when “what’s old is new again,” and right now in the contemporary art scene, the hot new/old thing is glass. This most ancient of man-made materials has never really left the scene—it has long enjoyed periods of prestige as fine crystal and as decorative objet. But as function has made way for form, and that’s been nudged out of the way by concept, there rages—yes, rages!—a great debate about glass as art or craft that has kept the market going strong.You can lay the initial blame on the studio movement of the 1960s, when the production of glass moved out of the factory and into the studio. For the first time, glass was considered as something more than a vessel: it was a material that defined the output, or as artists say about this, “the glass knows what it wants to do.” Working within those alchemic demands, artists explored and exploited color and transparency and form with little attention paid to function.
But, was it craft or concept?
“It was a time of merging craft with industry,” says Tina Oldknow, contemporary glass curator at the Corning Museum of Glass in upstate New York. “This was a time of increasing the size and complexity of objects because of new casting and glass-blowing techniques.”
OK. So, craft, we say. But to wit: Czech artists working at that time took it further, using the material as an expression of political times, creating an underground art movement that influenced a new generation of sculptural glass artists who are still represented and collected today.
“Mid-century Czech glass is widely respected for its originality and innovation,” said Oldknow. “Czech artists used glass as a medium of abstract expression when the Communist government did not allow abstraction in the arts.”
Glassworks from behind the Iron Curtain, an aesthetic pioneered by the husband and wife team of Stanislav Libensky and Jaroslava Brychtova, were among the first to explore ideas of volume and positive and negative space, as well as glass’s more familiar properties of light and color. The work is abstract, somber—as though it can’t escape its own history, but it reflects the philosophy of Josef Kaplicky, professor at the esteemed Prague Academy of Applied Arts: “Abstraction in art is like an egg. The geometric shape on the outside is enlivened by the warm and mysterious life inside it.”
It’s a philosophy that Douglas Heller, owner of the Heller Gallery in Manhattan, a premier dealer in glass, echoes half a century later.

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