Vol 12 No. 40, Jun 19 - Jun 25 2003
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GLASS MY ASS Emily Hall Tries to Overcome Her Loathing of Glass Trinkets by Emily Hall Pilchuck Glass School Exhibition Center on Contemporary Art, 728-1980. Through July 18. Gas, Cash or Glass Roq la Rue, 374-8977. Through July 3. This Is Not Art Glass SOIL Gallery, 264-8061. Through June 29. For a city known for glass art, there are lots of art people around here who fucking hate it. This, I feel, is understandable--not unlike a colonized state's ardent distrust of the colonizer. To much of the civilized world, glass in Seattle eclipses all other art. So much so that for the authentic Seattle touch, the set of the television show Frasier features a Chihuly sculpture. But the disdain for glass is not just sour grapes; it also has something to do with how easy glass is. Much has been made of the roots of the studio glass movement, in which glass transcended craft and became art, but it often seems that this is simply a case of the rigorousness of method being confused with complexity of thought. (It's true that glass blowing is intense, and fun to watch. Institutions like Tacoma's Museum of Glass have turned the hot shop into a performance arena, as important as the galleries.) There is a sentimentality that attaches itself to glass, the kind of thing that is approached by earthy "lyrical" writing, of the fused-in-fire and born-of-breath sort. Glass is also pretty; and pretty plus sentimental almost never makes interesting (let alone great) art. The great glass artists seem to be artists who happen to work in glass, like Josiah McElheny--artists who tend to think carefully about why one medium is used instead of another (the opposite is a case of nursing too-reverent feelings about any one medium in particular). In three unusual glass shows--put out in conjunction with thousands of people arriving for the Glass Art Society conference in town this month--there's a little rebellious streak, distinctly anti-reverent, that bodes pretty well for leveraging glass out of its decorative rut. Oddly enough, some of that work is in a Pilchuck School exhibition; Pilchuck, of course, was cofounded by Dale Chihuly, but it seems that artists are managing to think around him. Stuart Keeler's stacked pile of wood pallets topped with a cast-glass pallet has an ugly-duckling quality: ugly because it's useless compared to the others; swanlike because it's an unexpected object of contemplation. A series of glass bells by Timothy Ringsmuth contain Victorian-style hair sculptures, twisted into loosely botanical shapes; glass, of course, is a protective medium for living things as well as for memento mori. The bells and the crystal pedestals are also handmade, perhaps as much a part of an intricate mourning process, as the elaborately twined hair. Mark Zirpel's sculpture fills a set of rubber lungs inside a delicately notched glass container. The mechanism wheezes and growls like an old steam engine, and its parts look old-fashioned and unreliable; the theme of body as delicate container has been examined before, but here it acquires a sideshow, slightly oompah air that is not unwelcome. Roq la Rue's Kirsten Anderson has filled her gallery with work that both flaunts and subverts the clichés of glass--partly by showing work that is very Roq-la-Rue-style, all made of glass. Glass flames, impossible glass high-heeled shoes (like stripper shoes, or court shoes in the time of the Sun King), glass marshmallow Peeps.... I loved Bill Akers' Calamari Chandelier, which is as snaky, creepy, and marine as the Chihuly seaforms are idealized, artsy, and overpretty. In This Is Not Art Glass, curators Helen Curtis and Jessica Balsam take a more pointed tack, with work that deliberately tests received notions of glass art. Marc Dombrosky highlights the precariousness and silliness of glass in an unsteady assemblage of thrift-store cups--funny, but with unexpected stature. The delicate-body theme is explored in Ilasahai Prouty's hanging cluster of glass bones, string, and medical tubing. Much of the work in Not Art Glass refers to the ruts that glass finds itself in--precious container, decorative object--and posits an alternative kind of art, in which the fetish aura around the object is cleared away in favor of the object itself. It doesn't always work, but at least there are artists asking the right question, which in this case is not how glass, but why?

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