Rainbow of subjectivity

When the flush of a newborn sun fell first on Eden's green and gold,

Our father Adam sat under the Tree and scratched with a stick in the mould;

And the first rude sketch that the world had seen was joy to his mighty heart,

Till the Devil whispered behind the leaves: "It's pretty, but is it Art?"

-- Rudyard Kipling, "The Conundrum of the Workshops"

It is unfair to expect, and maybe unfair even to ask, the artist to explain himself. For art, if it exists, transcends language and renders it redundant. Art evades language and plunges directly into our senses, rubbing hard against the inexpressible and inchoate, relating the world's bitter awe. Art is largely about the inadequacy of our comprehension; it is a thimble to bail the sea.

And Dale Chihuly is no help.

He's cordial and patient and willing to affirm all his biological details and to describe the way he works -- more like a movie director, or a general contractor, than the lone and hungry stereotype we garret away in the lonely tower of our imagination -- but when you try to get down to what he's doing, what he thinks he's doing, you can hear the shrug over the phone.

"I really try to -- when I'm making installations -- to make something that feels right in the room. The inspiration comes a lot from the architecture," he says. "But for the most part, I'm just trying to make something I think looks really beautiful."

And so maybe you can save that theory about how his Seaforms might somehow be in dialogue with Georgia O'Keeffe's flowers. They look like shells or jellyfish, but they aren't representational; they have no direct organic analogue. They are "just" beautiful vessels, simultaneously diaphanous, saturated and even potentially utile, and their form flows naturally from the character of their material. They aren't political or punny, they don't strive to be clever or to comment on anything beyond their own luminous surfaces.

At this point in Chihuly's career, he doesn't much care whether you call him an artist, or a craftsman, or a designer, or a humble glazier. It was more important to be considered an artist -- one, as the news releases say, "credited with revolutionizing the Studio Glass movement -- and elevating the perception of the glass medium from the realm of craft to fine art" -- back in the day when he was trying to get the attention of galleries and collectors and the people who go to museums and chatter about these sorts of things.

He started out in Tacoma, Wash., an indifferent student drawn to architecture and interior design. In one of his classes, he was assigned a project that required him to weave something from unusual materials.

"One night I decided I would melt some glass between four bricks and I took a pipe -- not a blow pipe, just a regular house pipe -- and gathered up some glass at the end of it and blew a bubble," he says. He considered the honeyed blob at the end of the pipe, and "from that moment on, I wanted to be a glass blower."

Now he's a singular presence -- a brand -- one of the most famous, prolific and commercially successful producers of beauty in the world, an entrepreneur who employs hundreds of artists and craftsmen in factories and warehouses that produce thousands of pieces a year. Chihuly isn't just a maker of beautiful objects, he's also a canny business intelligence and unrepentant self-promoter who has courted celebrity collectors including Bono and Hillary Clinton, who has publicly expressed her admiration for Chihuly's work on a number of occasions.

He doesn't have to worry about the sort of snotty sensibility that wonders if his works might be too pretty and accessible to withstand serious consideration.

He long ago rendered questions about whether his work was art or craft superfluous. What's important is not what the critics say -- though most of them credit Chihuly's aesthetic vision -- but how people receive the work. Just look at it.

Just looking ...

You'll have the chance at the Clinton Presidential Center, where some of his work is being exhibited until Jan. 5.

The works include an installation of 200 spiky red and orange glass reeds in the fountain outside the main entrance; a 24-by-24-foot installation from his Mille Fiori ("thousand flowers") series comprising more than 500 separate pieces of blown glass of various sizes that, taken together, seem to form an undersea garden; 18 of his famous Seaforms accompanied by study sketches made by the artist; and a blue and gray tower that consists of more than 750 separate pieces of glass.

You can judge for yourself, you can consider the fact that the man who signs his name to the work didn't blow a single piece of glass in the exhibit if you want. But Rembrandt had his pupils and assistants, and Warhol and Jeff Koons combined commercialism with fine art. (But there's also Thomas Kinkade, the late "painter of light" whose kitschy, cloying work invites comparison with jazz lightweight Kenny G.)

While most of the stories published about Chihuly suggest that he lost the ability to blow glass after his 1976 car accident (which cost him an eye and his depth perception and left him with a dashing, piratical eye patch) and an injury suffered while bodysurfing in 1979 (which cost him some physical strength that's vital when you're handling glass objects up to 4 feet or more in length), he acknowledges that though he can still blow glass -- "it's been a couple of years since I did it, but I can do it" -- but chooses not to. Instead, he makes sketches and supervises his teams, which can involve up to 18 artisans. He says he is better able to envision and direct the piece this way, that he has a better point of view than the head glass blower.

Still, he's involved with the romance of his medium, which is one of the cheapest -- glass is made of sand and fire -- and most enduring materials. It's not unusual to find glass vessels 5,000 years old, still perfectly suitable for their designed tasks. But it's also fragile -- glass shatters and cracks. It refracts and gathers light. It's not hard to see it as a metaphor for, among other things, the human psyche.

Chihuly's latest work feels like a sensualization of the natural world; his forms gleam and glow and gather together on their Plexiglas strand like strange sheer undersea creatures. They seem to pile up randomly. Chihuly has said that the arrangements are often casual, and that if the pieces are good then there's practically no way to group them awkwardly. His installations don't look precisely arranged because they're not.

The individual pieces are also realized in a somewhat offhand manner, in part because glassblowing is an inexact science that happens quickly, and the artist has only a certain degree of control over the unpredictable medium. As prolific as he is, Chihuly says he discards more pieces than he uses, sometimes because of flaws in the glass and sometimes because the pieces simply don't fit with what he's trying to accomplish in a particular work. But there's always an element of serendipity attached to the process.

"I believe if you're doing it, things just happen," he says.

This lack of pretense might seem refreshing or disingenuous, depending on your expectations. But it really doesn't matter. You should always trust the art more than the artist.

Still the devil whispers

But is it art?

I don't think it matters, as it is marvelous to look at and is evocative of all sorts of feelings, some darker and more complicated than those aroused by tumbling puppies and bloody sunsets. I like Chihuly's work -- the cheek and drama of it as well as the swelling, mesmerizing color -- and I can't imagine anything better to adorn the ceiling of a casino. It cannot quite be dismissed as eye candy.

And Chihuly's methods -- team production and aggressive marketing -- can be seen as part of what he does. To a degree, he's a popular performance artist, like Madonna in the late 1980s and early '90s, whose "art" is actually a lesser included component of the larger work, his raffish public persona.

It's disarming that Chihuly seems to hold no ambition beyond making beautiful objects -- and a whole lot of money. That marks him as a particular American type, the no-nonsense capitalist, the dynamic, tireless producer.

He belongs in a museum.

Email:

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

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Style on 06/01/2014