Is there depth to Dale Chihuly’s ‘ big’ art? Critics say no, but public says yes.
CRITICAL CONTEMPT FOR DALE CHIHULY’S GLASS-BLOWING IS ONLY MATCHED BY THE PUBLIC ADORATION IT ALSO RECEIVES
The word that came up most on my tour of Dale Chihuly’s Seattle operation – as much in my own mind as from the press liaisons who led me around – was “big.”
The waterfront boathouse that houses his glass- blowing ovens is big, with ample room for a big wall of coloured rods his team uses to tint the glass, a very big table made of a plank of uncut sequoia, a four-car garage that only holds two classics and even a private swimming pool. The nondescript industrial warehouse where his installations are conceived and created is big, with a pair of massive staging rooms and reams of welded armatures to hold his great glass flowers and twisty chandeliers. His permanent hometown display, Chihuly Gardens and Glass, at the foot of the Space Needle, is big, housing parts of all the key works of his 50- year career both indoors and out.
It’s when you describe his work in such terms that things go a bit pear- shaped, or askeworange-glass- basket shaped. When I asked members of his team how they had seen his work develop, that was the answer: over the years, everything — his operation, his installations, even the individual pieces themselves — has gotten bigger. His career has been one very long “big period.”
For anyone who hasn’t seen them — or, as is more likely, has seen them but didn’t know who made them — Chihuly makes ( or, maybe more accurately, oversees the making of ) sculptures of glass, in colours so vivid a blacklight poster would ask them to calm down.
His most famous works are his chandeliers, which look like beings from a non- Euclidean dimension trying to rip into the fabric of our world, and which once hung over the canals of Venice. He also makes the aforementioned “baskets” ( orange, droopy and modelled on Seattle- area indigenous handiwork), “seaforms” ( like someone preserved the flora from the “Yellow Submarine” video) and “persians” (flowery bulbs, often arranged together en masse and suspended from a ceiling), among others.
As a professional whose job it is to discern deeper meaning in artistic products, and who has spent months looking at Chihulys, both in person and online, I am at a loss to offer themes much deeper than “big,” other than maybe “colourful.”
There is certainly some kind of fascination with the natural world: a lot of Chihuly’s work looks like an expressionist take on plant life, which is only emphasized when they’re placed among actual plants, which they often are: the garden part of his Seattle exhibition feels distinctly like walking into a Dr. Seuss page.
I am not alone in being bemused by the appeal of this particular brand of art, assuming that you are willing to call it art, which not everyone is. An informal poll of my artistically inclined friends drew a roundly negative reaction. “The Thomas Kinkade of glass,” one of them said, which it turns out is a quote from a review. Depending on the irritability of the writer, critical reactions tend to vary from benign contempt to apocalyptic seal-breaking: “Everything meretricious in contemporary art,” said one San Francisco critic when an exhibition opened there. “The history of art is a history of ideas, not just of valuable property. Chihuly has no place in it.”
Of course, if expert opinion mattered to the average viewer, Chihuly would not have a boat house. Critical contempt, as is often the case, is matched by public adoration: virtually any museum that hosts a Chihuly exhibition issues a press release bragging about record attendance shortly thereafter. When I spoke to officials at the Royal Ontario Museum, where his latest exhibit opens this weekend, they pointed to Chihuly’s ability to draw a crowd as part of their strategy to broaden what people expect when it comes to the museum.
The tendency among critics and artists is to dismiss popular opinion, usually with undisguised glee, but that doesn’t really explain the gulf. A lot of our popular art forms have recently undergone rearguard actions against this sort of kneejerk snobbery — there’s depth in these glossy commercial art products, say bespectacled, unkempt music critics and four million websites with “nerd” in their title — though “poptimism” has yet to make much of an inroad to the art world. Which isn’t to say they’re wrong about Chihuly, just that they (we, if I’m being fair) don’t always try particularly hard.
Certainly some of the contempt stems from ideas that are either misguided or a little esoteric. There is an underlying sense that glass blowing is more craft than art, which is myopic, although not always helped by Chihuly’s endless repetition of styles. There is also an undisguised dismissal of Chihuly’s process, which like a lot of artists of his commercial stature is more foreman than creator. Owing to injury, he has actually been physically unable to blow glass since 1979, and though he showily shaped a piece of one of his baskets, fresh out the oven, during my tour, the sheer size of his creative team, output and extra- artistic commitments are sufficient to suggest his usual involvement is more a nod of approval.
Even if the public rarely seems to care, that is a thornier issue, especially if we wilfully ignore that he had to be successful enough on his own to be able to hire a team ( one of his most charming employees, now in charge of arranging the pieces that make up the exhibits, was Chihuly’s contemporary in Seattle’s glass-blowing scene).
Still, Chihuly as foreman kind of points to the most salient issue here, which is the artist’s perceived lack of ideas — or, perhaps more succinctly, his inability or unwillingness to say anything other than “look at this nice/ interesting/ beautiful thing.” Essentially, this is the divide between the rarified and popular worlds: experts demand an intensity of meaning, where the crowd is perfectly happy to be awed, intrigued or maybe just briefly amused by what they’re looking at.
Not that this is nearly that perfect binary. Whatever meanings art historians and critics are finding in classical art, it would seem absurd to argue that most of us see anything other than impressive craftsmanship: that smile is painted so beguilingly, that rock looks so much like flowing curly human hair. Maybe then it’s just a question of depth: something that is both striking and conveying some deeper conception of the world. Even here, though, it’s not entirely fair to dismiss Chihuly.
There is a significant strain of thought, the Modernist critique, that holds pure art to be about the interplay of the building blocks, the shapes and colours and materials of art. At its height, in the middle of the 20th century, this was the bleeding edge of esoteric art theory — think of those abstract bronze sculptures you see on university campuses, or a Rothko or a Pollock, though I’m probably oversimplifying those slightly.
It is impossible to look at a Chihuly and not be confronted by its riotous interplay of shapes and colours; the spirals and bulbs and twists of his chandeliers arguably do for glass what a patient Renaissance Italian did for marble. The only hint of political point is considering the vast capitalist architecture that makes this possible, but all of his pieces are certainly a way of considering forms, even if that’s not always a viewer’s intent. Chihuly has perhaps not developed these ideas as deeply or broadly as you’d like, but it’s not fair to say he doesn’t have them.
The obvious riposte is that these ideas are, at best, about 70 years old. He is painting water lilies while everyone else is doing sweeping, chaotic drips. And there is something to that: particularly once you have flipped a urinal and called it a water fountain, the progression of both capital- and little- a art is one of ideas. Some of those are ideas of form — think about how narratively complex a “good” TV show has to be these days — some of them are ideas about the world around them, but generally speaking the ones that tend to last, the ones we revere, are the ones that introduce ideas we had never considered before, or at least had never put in such perfect terms.
You are probably a little better suited to judge those if you have spent some of your life exploring a wide range of them, but then again, life is short, and when you get right down to it an idea that speaks to you, wherever it fits into the grand scheme of things, is all you’re ever going to much care about anyway. That is not a particularly grand idea, but life rarely gets the careful thought art does.
All of which is to say: the ROM has a Chihuly show coming. I would bet that it is going to be big.