At the beginning of one of his many videos, the artist is exhorting a group of assistants. “This is important,” he says, with a cheerleader’s enthusiasm. “Make ’em as big as we can — the bigger the better.”
Dale Chihuly will never be accused of not thinking big. His Fiore di Como, a 2,000-piece assemblage of blown-glass flowers, covers the 2,000-sqare-foot ceiling of the lobby of Steve Wynn’s extravagant Bellagio Hotel and Casino on the Las Vegas Strip. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London commissioned a 30-foot high Chihuly chandelier for its rotunda. And an entire city became the installation space for Chihuly Over Venice. This 1998 project not only brought together five tons of chandeliers from major glassworking regions — his own Seattle, Finland, Ireland, Mexico, and Venice itself — to hang over the famous canals, it served as the subject of a documentary which became the first program broadcast by PBS in HD format.
“I don’t know why I work so large,” Chihuly says. “I very often push a series to its maximum size. I think sometimes that I do it just to keep the blowers at the very edge of their technical ability, to keep the tension high, make it exciting — to make it so that we don’t know whether it’s gonna break or not break.”
This enforced condition of uncertainty is not, in his view, a liability. “If you know exactly what you’re doing, and you can make it every time, it’s not going to be interesting,” he avers. “It has to have this tension if the pieces are going to be good.”
Chihuly isn’t just an artist, he’s an industry. More on that in a minute.
He was raised in wartime Tacoma, Washington, where, he says, his family lived in a not very large house in an unremarkable neighborhood, but his mother kept an extensive garden, which he concedes might have influenced his subconscious, though he admits to not knowing much about plants.
It’s mostly the shapes of nature, the abtract forms of the forest, the desert, the ocean and its creatures, that seem to have most influenced his work. Not everything is huge or extravagant — even his largest pieces are assemblages of smaller forms either attached or intertwined — but quantity does matter: in his installation Gardens & Glass, for example, now at the Phipps Conservatory in Pittsburgh, multiple forms of glass echo the multiple stems, leaves, and flowers of the plants among which they are placed. As with the plants, every piece is unique, but it shares a shape and color with others of its kind.
In the late 1960s Chihuly received a Master of Science degree in glassblowing from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a Master of Fine Arts degree in sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design. This double-degree phenomenon illustrates the dichotomy that still exists in the minds of many between glassblowing — a craft practiced by artisans — and sculpture — an art practiced by artists. From the start, Chihuly was eager to obliterate this distinction, and, having won a Fulbright Fellowship, he became the first American to work in the Venini Fabrica on the island of Murano in the Venetian Lagoon, since 1291 the center of European glass production. Upon his return to the US in 1971, he and other glass artists, as they now called themselves, founded the Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, Washington, to further the enterprise of glass sculpture in America.
In 1976, he was involved in an automobile accident that blinded his left eye, robbing him of depth perception, which, according to one version of his biography, put an end to his glassblowing career; another version says it was a dislocated shoulder from a bodysurfing mishap in 1979 that made it physically impossible for him to handle molten glass.
Today, Chihuly’s “studio” is really a factory in a 25,000-square-foot converted boathouse, where he supervises dozens of blowers and assistants, led by a master, or gaffer, all of whom together actually fashion the glass works that Chihuly designs, usually on paper, but sometimes only with spoken words and gestures. And he often asks for their suggestions, which he often accepts. “I don’t like to get down in their face and tell them what to do,” he says. “And then the next day, I may change my mind.” The sensibility of the work seems to be, to quote one blower, “I didn’t make this, I helped it make itself.”
Is there a problem with this? An artist who doesn’t actually create, or execute, or perform, his own work? Wasn’t it the same with the later Rubens, Dali, Warhol? Another vexed question, one that Chihuly doesn’t seem much interested in. His job is to come up with the ideas, which he then communicates to his artisans; their job is to give his ideas concrete form in glass.
What no one will deny Dale Chihuly is credit for building and maintaining — at a high level of effectiveness — a multimillion-dollar business empire, Chihuly Inc. “Dale Chihuly is the most successful Northwest artist in history,” writes Jen Graves in The Stranger, a Seattle weekly, “The Queen of England owns his glass. So do Bill Clinton, Elton John, Mick Jagger, Bill Gates, and 225 museums in 40 states and 22 foreign countries.”
One detects a note of sarcasm here. “Since 1993,” chime in Sheila Farr and Susan Kelleher of the Seattle Times, “Chihuly has self-published more than 20 lavish coffee-table books about himself and has expanded into production of videos about his work, prints, T-shirts, postcards, calendars, carry-on totes and glass collectibles. Chihuly’s ‘documentaries’ — broadcast repeatedly on public television with sales promotions of his books and artwork — are essentially infomercials.”
None of this, of course, says much about the effect the work has on an individual viewer. I visited the Gardens & Glass show last weekend in Pittsburgh, and was delighted by the idea as much as by the execution. “Glass forms make people look at the forms of the plants differently,” Chihuly says of this exhibition, and I felt that as well. The overall effect was very peaceful: the lushness and density of the greenery provided a setting that balanced the vibrant, often outrageous hues of the glass pieces, invoking a contemplative mood.
“In museums you go from gallery to gallery to gallery, and you know something’s going to be there,” Chihuly says. “Here, when you come upon something, it’s more of a surprise, but also… it seems meant to be here.”
That was my experience. Whatever the stories about the man, the artist, the entrepreneur — the work speaks for itself. You really ought to see it. Happily, there are lots of places you can do that!
