OF IT, BUT WITHOUT

by David Schunckel

I know, I know. I feel terrible that it’s at the violent expense of animals, but I’ve always loved the “two birds/one stone” metaphor. A picture of the idea of efficiency. Painted with words. And doing so in a spectacularly efficient word count. As an educator I often think about how many ways I can be effective in a single stroke of whatever learning experience I’m putting out there for students. Especially for newcomers to glass. Especially in a hot shop scenario. Especially right off the rip.

As we all might remember, those first few days (and weeks) in an introductory studio course experience are real baffling. Glass just seems so mysterious, so complicated, and so impossible for so, so long. From the beginner’s point of view, the idea of making anything with it in a way that feels creatively fulfilling anytime soon seems unrealistic.

If ever. In fact, I have students open up to me regularly in our first week together of their doubt when assigned their first major project upon having almost zero hot glass experience. “How, David? …just how?”

So, in an effort to get students to engage creatively with this seemingly impossible stuff in a way that makes good use of their inexperience AND to deepen their thinking about what makes glass be or do glassy things AND to dismantle any misconceptions about what young people think “good” art work is or isn’t AND to make the whole glass thing less intimidating in both theory and practice, I’ve created a first project designed to tick these many boxes. Simultaneously. It’s a project that asks the beginner to solve a glass-centric problem creatively through non-glass means and methods.

In a nutshell, the students are prompted to dwell in the attributes that define glass’s unique materiality and to translate one of those things through several small artful gestures to pick from a list of “creative” options. Options include such things as a sound piece that explores their chosen attribute through mouth sounds, or a painting made by translating their chosen attribute into a method of mark making, or a 3-minute video work that explores their chosen attribute through interpretive dance to name a few. It’s required to be thoughtful. It’s recommended to be fun. If the learning objectives strung with all those many ANDs a couple paragraphs above are the birds, then this first project is my stone. The spirit of informality, absurdity, and lightheartedness behind it gives each student permission to realize that skill is not a matter of what one can do with glass, but how one can think with it. Ultimately, that a lot of big, poetic, provocative, and meaningful things can be done with very little technical experience or know-how.

But this project idea also comes from a bigger observation of interesting moments in contemporary glass catching my attention about how media-specific relationships to material and process can transcend the media-specificity of our field; unique considerations of glass – and translations of its various capacities - in a kind of “glass work” generated through non-glass materials, means, and/or methodologies. I’m not coining any new phrases or ideas here, but this is an article hanging its conversational hat on a kind of making by glass practitioners that I wouldn’t consider “glass-based” as much as I would “glass-related.”

I’m not claiming to have discovered it, nor claiming to be some kind of authority on the matter. But this kind of glass-promptednon-glass-art-making phenomenon presents a uniquely abstracted relationship to material and process that is illustrating a new kind of mastery; a comprehensive skill set more about a proficiency in translation tactics than it is of technical prowess. And I’m loving it. Especially in the way that it opens up a broader understanding of how interconnected our relationship with glass can be to just about anything else, what those things can tell us about who we are, and how those observations can connect us to the bigger world we’re within. The following references are a small handful of artist projects out of many (many!) that help illustrate an “other” side of this glass making coin.

Etsuko Ichikawa and her practice of “Glass Pyrographs” is a great entry point into this kind of glass-prompted-non-glassart-making methodology. It’s a place where drawing, calligraphy, and bodily performance are all conjured at once, activated in a molten-reliant method of improvised image making. Sometimes by way of a hot glass bubble, sometimes by a hot mass of solid glass, Ichikawa places paper on the floor and follows some kind of unknown, graceful logic by sweeping and stalling her pipe or punty across her combustible canvas. The depth and density of each mark provides a broad palette of signed remembrance on the page. Sometimes with dark brown opacity, sometimes wispy with a light hazel translucent effect. But always a remarkably emotive, wordless association to writing (and the written word) that seems fully expressive without definitively saying anything in particular. Both articulate and ambiguous.

In an entirely different approach to glassrelated imaging practice, the poetry of Johanna Gluck’s “Triangulation” is told in a graphic that speaks of (and speaks with) meticulous discipline. Over time she has been tracking the routes and repetitions throughout the hot shop in her role as assistant, translating them in a uniquely ambiguous diagram extending from the specificity of her task(s). On her website, the piece offers a caption saying, “The length of each straight line is scaled paces between points to complete tasks, while nodes signify contact with the object during production.“ The resulting image is nothing short of glass studio cartography, a practice of map making that defines the spatial pathways in the shop during a day’s work. This glass-prompted-non-glass-artmaking methodology is a metaphysical kind. Not only a contemplation of one’s physical sense of place while at work, but a sense of creative place within the assisting of someone else’s work. A new kind of process-based thinking that blends contemporary craft’s value upon the skillful hand with a conceptually driven consideration of the hot shop assistant’s duty to skillfully lend one.

Setting imagery to the side, the glass making process has also allowed some interesting moments in motion mapping practices translated into sound work.

Alex Rosenberg’s “Composition for a Glass Tumbler” incorporates a series of digital applications that are much more complicated than I’m capable of clearly addressing here, but merges the analog methods of the hot shop and technology in an unexpected way. Rosenberg pursues the creation of a humble, blown cylinder form in the hot shop and his movements are patched into a programming code; that code then translating Rosenberg’s actions into musical notes on a piano keyboard. The finished score of this translation lives as a record of the tumbler making process in audible form, sounding a lot less musical than expected and more like melodic chaos. When Rosenberg transcribes the score, the tumbler composition displays as an overwhelmingly elaborate tangle of notes and rests hectically living on an equally overwhelmingly large piece of sheet music. Rosenberg’s glass-promptednon-glass-art-making methodology is not only a fascinating sensorial swap between what we see him do and what we hear as a result, but also an exquisite interweaving of several ironies: the simple turned complex, the small made big, the logic of sequenced motions rendered crazy.

It isn’t unusual to speak about – or hear other onlookers speak about – the fluid hot shop movements between gaffer and assistant within the making moment as like watching choreography. Whether cliché or not, there is a known and unspoken satisfaction in taking audience to the glass blower whose body is elegantly in tune with the space of the studio, masterfully moving through the sequences of their making process within it. Bodies, tools, pipes, hands, and glass swept up in some kind of dynamic, synchronous billowing across the floor between furnace, bench, and glory hole for however long it takes to bring to life whatever it is that the gaffer and assistant are working towards. Andrew Bearnot leans into this parallel between glass blowing and dance in a stunning glass-promptednon-glass-art-making methodology that culminates in ballet performance. “Ballet Verrerie” is a project in the form of a dance company that has developed a series of abstracted movements informed by the poised, undulating, and rhythmic movements as seen by a maestro at work on the hot shop floor. These mesmerizing bodily gestures performed by the dance troupe demonstrate ways in which the culture of the hot glass studio can be as emotionally and poetically demanding for us to watch as it is physically for the artist to do.

One last example of a unique glassprompted-non-glass-art-making methodology lives in an exquisitely unusual place of material translation. At first, I am immediately drawn by Yixuan Pan’s urge to mine for unknown conceptual potential within glass remnants, residue, and waste discarded in a hot shop dumpster in “The It/其它 (an on-going translation project).” She picks various items from her small pile of glass foundlings and renders their physicality through highly unconventional conversion practices relating to either tactility, intangibility, the performative, and/or the digital. All of which ranging in degrees of dazzling absurdity. My favorite translation tactic in the bunch captures the likeness of a tongue-like solid glass shape that looks like it folded over on itself somehow (catalogued as “It 4”).

The long version of explaining its translation process seems unknown, yet reliant on technology somehow; the short of it is that this stray glass cullet thingy now exists in the form some kind of computer code. The identity of a random glass object visually represented by a very specific - yet unpredictable - string of seemingly infinite keyboard-based gibberish is equally random. It’s this dynamic between making the familiar strange while making the strange familiar is a delightfully weird logic working throughout this translation project.

Are these the only ways this “glass-related” art phenomenon thing lives? Nah. Is this an article with a hot take on a new kind of self-aware relationship to material and process within our field? Nope. In fact, as I wind this article down, I can’t help but recall a blog started as far back as 2007 called h o w i s t h i s g l a s s ? by Yuka Otani and Anjali Srinivasan; a cyber spot that was dedicated to cataloging artists and idiosyncratic art endeavors prompted by glass through unexpected art methods of thinking more broadly about what it is, how it is worked, and what more it can be in service of. But what’s referenced there in conjunction with what’s been referenced in this article is but the tip of the tip to the tip of this fascinating glass-prompted-nonglass-art-making iceberg. As I near the conclusion of this piece I find myself with no real sense of statement. No quippy resolve, no call for action, or philosophical cliffhanger. Just a continued urge to rethink how terms like skill and technique might no longer only be matters relating to what one can do with glass, but how one can evolve their thinking about it instead. In turn, these instances of broadening a media-specific practice enacted by a self-referential method of translating glass materiality and process through non-glass means and methods of art making is an exceptionally “other” side of the Studio Glass Movement coin.