Glass Exposed
Vanessa Garcia
Art completes what nature cannot bring to finish…
-Aristotle
You’re in Venice. It’s 1292–the Grand Council has decreed that all glass-making houses are to be confined to the island of Murano. Only the Italians are to know the secrets of glass…In fact, Venetian glass makers are forbidden, by punishment of death, to leave Venice or to even teach their trade to foreigners.
Fast forward to Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, Miami, 2006–where glass has made the journey from secrecy to craft to art, and where glass artist Dale Chihuly has introduced it to the tropics, placing it before the public for all to see.
This bridge between Venice and Miami, however, was many years in the making. Its building began in 1962, when Harvey Littleton started teaching glass blowing at the University of Wisconsin, shattering the Venetian monopoly over glass. Littleton, who had traveled to Italy, passed the alchemy to his pupil: Dale Chihuly.
Dale Chihuly went on to become one of the world’s most renowned artists working in glass–revolutionizing the form, and bringing it even further out in the open. Collected in over 200 museums worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Palais du Louvre and the Corning Museum of Glass, he is also the recipient of eight honorary doctoral degrees, and awards such as the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant, a Fullbright Fellowship and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships.
Now, and all through the month of May, Chihuly brings his luminous gifts to Miami’s Fairchild Tropical Gardens. The exhibit, which entwines Chihuly’s art with Fairchild’s tropical foliage, is estimated to bring an economic impact of $30 to $40 million to South Florida. A project of this size is a first for Fairchild.
"It was hard work but when I stand by the visitor’s center and see how people are over-taken, astonished, with their mouths open near [Chihuly’s] Red and Citron Tower, I feel like it was all worth it," says Paula Fernandez de los Muros, public relations Coordinator at Fairchild.
Throughout Fairchild’s 83 acres, red and yellow glass reeds mingle with the grass and arid plants. Glass hornets buzz through and hang in chandeliers from oak trees. Blue herons dip their heads in lily pools, while glass onions drift on lakes.
"The show took two weeks to install," says Fernandez de los Muros. Chihuly, who lives in Seattle Washington, a city that can now laud more glass blowers than Venice, sent a team of his collaborators down to the Garden to install the work they had created up in Washington.
Chihuly, who has done similar exhibitions abroad–such as recent exhibition at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in the UK–has perfected a system of installation for these shows. The glass is blown in his studios and then pieced together in what he calls the "mock-up" area of his Seattle studios. The work, which is made up of thousands of parts, is then taken apart and reassembled by the team elsewhere.
Chihuly begins his pieces with a vision of what he wants in terms of color, shape and size, he explains. Many times, he even creates Jackson Pollock-like drawings to portray what he wants to get across in the glass work. However, he gives his team of experts leeway during the reassembling process of the installations, therefore making the once-cloistered, solitary process of glass-making a collaborative effort.
In the conservatory series, Fairchild’s among these, the collaborative process expands to include nature as a collaborator, much like in the ancient art of Ikebana. Ikebana, after which Chihuly names many of his glass sculptures, is the Japanese art of flower arranging–an art form, centuries old, and which, by definition, tries to represent the elements of sky, earth, and humanity all at once.
If you ask Dale Chihuly what he sees his role in contemporary art to be he’ll tell you that nobody else is going into conservatories as he is, literally mingling art with nature.
"Maybe I’ll be known as the guy who worked in greenhouses," says Chihuly over the phone during an interview, lightly laughing. He talks about his past show at Kew Gardens and his upcoming shows at the New York botanic gardens and another in St Louis. All together, he plans to have done seven large shows like Fairchild’s, in seven different gardens.
In the introduction to the book Chihuly: Form From Fire, Walter Darby Bannard of the University of Miami, says the following: "There is a popular misconception that great modernist art always makes a radical break with the past. In fact, very good new art more often breaks with the present by going back to the past (radical is from the Greek "radix" or "root)." Chihuly does not only take the tradition of glass blowing to the next level, but he takes it full circle back to nature. "I want my work to look like it just happened, as if it was made by nature," he explains.
There are moments at Fairchild when you’ll have to look twice, when a mercury-colored reed will glint with sun and make you think its roots are deep beneath the ground. And like this reed there are tumbleweeds and towers… surprises lurking around every corner of Fairchild’s meandering grounds. Here are just a few examples:
The Walla Wallas
On the grounds of Fairchild, there is a Glade Lake, where there float Walla Wallas, or glass onions. Blues, greens and yellows, swimming softly, catching light.
Walla Walla is a city in Washington. Its name, of Indian origin, means many waters. The city is known for its agriculture, including its vineyards and, you guessed it, its sweet onions. Every May in Walla Walla there is also a balloon stampede, in which hot air balloons take to the sky in pouches of air and color. One look towards Glade Lake, and you can see all of this reflected in Chihuly’s floating onion cities.
Niijima Floats
Amid the lily pads on Fairchild’s Victoria Amazon Pool there are the Niijima floats. Niijima is an island off the coast of Japan, part of the seven Izu Islands, once considered far enough from Japan to banish political criminals and exiles. It is 23 square kilometers of seaside town where there lay a grainy, rough stone called kogaseki made up of tiny quartz crystals, and used to make glass. Geologically, it is one of two places in the world that produce such sand. It was here, on this island, that Chihuly was inspired to create the first of his Niijima floats–enormous full spheres that broke from the tradition of blowing glass into "container" forms.
Looking at the floats at Fairchild, you find swirls and golds that encompass and spot the spheres, making something magical of the nearby lily pads. When Henry Geldzahler, curator of the Metropolitan Museum of art asked Chihuly what artist he felt closest to he responded: "Houdini." That response is fully manifest in the Floats at Fairchild.
End of the Day Tower
In the Conservatory there is a multi-colored glass tower that exudes pure joy but which nevertheless, has a historical footing. "A long time ago in glass factories," explains Chihuly, "workers would throw the remains of the day into the furnace and blow a piece." The end result was always something very colorful. Today, museums around the world exhibit "end of the day pieces," which sometimes merely mean that they are "multi-colored."
Blue Polyvitro Rocks
These are Chihuly’s favorites at the show. Like the Walla Wallas, the blue rocks float on a lake. The rocks, however, are made of a polymer or plastic which veers from the glass materials Chihuly regularly uses. Chihuly explains that he has not shown these very often and that it is perhaps because of this innovation that he favors them. However, he adds to this that, as he was at Fairchild, looking out on them on Pandanus Lake, where the blue rocks peer out of the water, he "saw the sun going through those pieces in a very beautiful way," and this much is true on most Florida days…
