Art
“CONTEMPORARY WORKS IN GLASS”
Through Jan. 21 at Ruby Green
“MURANO”
Glass from the Olnick Spanu Collection
Through Jan. 29 at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts
The distinction between “craft” and “fine art” is one of those slippery terminological dividing lines that gives way as soon as you poke it. One difference is that the crafts are organized around materials and the techniques of working them. Those materials carry with them concrete associations, which become part of the medium’s aesthetic first principles. Among the crafts, glass may have some of the stronger associations: it’s transparent; its surface is smooth; it breaks easily; broken glass cuts the skin. An artist working with this material has these associations available, to play up or overturn.
Two shows in Nashville feature master artists working in glass. Ruby Green has a group of 12 glass artists selected by local artists Dona Berotti and Robert McClurg; the Frist Center hosts the large collection of glass from workshops in Venice assembled by collectors Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu. The first group hews more closely to the fine arts model: individual artist-fabricators creating sculptural objects. The pieces at the Frist Center come from a more traditional crafts practice: designers and artisans collaborating to produce inventive variations on vessel forms.
The artists at Ruby Green play with the terms of their materials, as in Greg Nangle’s small surrealist statements. “The Day You Spilled Your Guts to Me Over a Cup of Coffee” is a plain bronze cup lying on its side, with a thick, viscous pool of clear glass spilling out of it onto the pedestal. In addition to making use of glass’s transparency, the composition acknowledges the material’s formation. Glass spends a critical part of its life as a liquid, and even when cooled, it occupies a physical state (vitreous) that has elements of a solid and a liquid.
Innovations in Glass Vessels designed by Carlo Scarpa, 1934-36
Curtiss Brock, head of the glass program at the Appalachian Center for Craft in Smithville, makes use of glass’s transparency and translucency to create some of the show’s most immediately appealing work. In “Organelle” and “Solar Wind,” he embedded vibrantly colored elements into a base of clear glass. Arranged concentrically, the colored bits—a spiral of thin white rods, a basket of gold leaf foil, wisps of black smoky material—all seem to lie within a preternaturally clear pool of water, preserved and enhanced.
Cassandra Chambers emphasizes the fragility of glass. Her “Apron Strings” consists of a cloth apron hung from the ceiling in such a way as to form a basket, inside of which lie milky shards of glass shaped like broken eggshells. This is the familiar image of a farm wife collecting eggs in her apron, but subverted by presenting the eggs in a pristine state of brokenness. The glass pieces seem extremely fragile, and you can imagine that they might break a little more each time the piece is exhibited or moved. These eggs represent a process of entropy rather than growth. Chambers associates her work with critical moments contained within “a memory such as a christening or a rape.” The shattered glass represents the loss that follows such an incident, a previous ovoid form implied by the fragments but now irrevocably lost.
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In contrast to the fragility of Chambers’ eggshells, Hank Adams’ works look bulky and strong. “Inside Outside” has elements that resemble the insulators on electrical transformers, and “Bomb Cluster” is composed of a multitude of bomb shapes—grenades, landmines, sticks of dynamite—fabricated from translucent, industrial-looking glass, equipped with short copper fuses and joined by wire brackets. The individual pieces accrete into one big form in a vaguely bomb-like shape. The work represents what the term “cluster bomb” may bring to mind, a cartoonish version of a lethal reality. It also offers both a neutralized version of the weapon (colorless and lacking explosive elements) and something dangerous in its own right, since the glass could break into thousands of shards.
Functional Forms Brent Cole, “Buoys”
The exhibit includes a variety of uses for glass, such as paintings done on and under glass by Atsuko Tajima (in which the glass gives the colors heightened vibrancy), wire sculptures of birds with glass heads by Jessica Bohus, and Brent Cole’s sculptures of buoys, one group at life size and others in miniature as part of a diorama. Most of the artists do not work with traditional functional forms, with the exception of two lamps by Brock and two vessels by Becky Wehmer. Wehmer trained as a ceramicist, and she has created two ovoid vases displayed lying on their sides. The pieces are encrusted with a powdery white substance, which is baking soda applied while the glass is hot. The baking soda acts as a caustic and eats away at the surface even after the glass cools. Glass seems permanent, but it changes over time, like ancient glass that takes on iridescent colors. Wehmer’s surface treatment highlights and accelerates the changeableness of glass and makes it something more organic. The resulting textures are soft, delicate and varied.
Over at the Frist, traditional vessel forms prevail in a dazzling array of colors and shapes. Murano is an island in the Venice Lagoon where most of Venice’s illustrious glass workshops are located. Glass in Venice experienced an aesthetic renaissance early in the 20th century, when some studios started to experiment with form, color and glass recipes. The inventiveness that followed is almost overwhelming. A large part of the exhibit is dedicated to pieces designed by Carlo Scarpa, an artist who had a plethora of ideas that he expressed in many varieties of surface treatments, colors, degrees of opacity and texture. The collection includes representatives from successive generations of Murano designers, ending more or less in the present with pieces as recent as 2002.
These glass objects bring us to another one of those terminological niceties, this time the difference between art and design. The work of the Murano workshops was intended for a consumer market, albeit high-end, for decorative objects. While the works are one-of-a-kind, many are presented as representatives of a type, not unique objects. Most pieces in the show have descriptions rather than titles. It’s not denigrating to identify Murano glass as “design”; it merely indicates a perceptible difference in intentions. The artists at Ruby Green put out artworks that invite interpretation of themes and ideas beyond appreciation of their shapes, colors and textures. The Murano pieces tend to encourage viewers to concentrate on these latter aspects.
One of the contemporary artists in the Olnick Spanu collection, Yoichi Ohira, designed a series of four small-mouthed bottles titled “The First, Second, Third and Fourth Phases of the Moon.” He uses an opaque milky glass similar to some of Scarpa’s pieces that progresses in tone from a dark charcoal color to ghostly gray. The bottles move through a gentle arc in size and have a subtle spherical shape implicit in their upper half. The set makes a lovely depiction of the effects of lunar light and captures some of its ineffable qualities. A work like this suggests a convergence between the ambitions of the commercial workshops and the artists operating within the economy of universities, art centers and museums. And it goes to show that terminological differences don’t help all that much when it comes to understanding and appreciating the objects we encounter.