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Tuesday, April 18, 2006

Stop Worrying and Love the Factory, Or, No She Di’in’t

Posted by on April 18 at 7:30 AM

OK, then, fine. If Regina Hackett is determined to pick a fight with me, a fight she will get.

Let it first be said that I’ve been a big Regina fan. Her work as art critic for the P-I always demonstrates her completely poetic imagination, and I’ve loved reading her, and talking to her.

We appear, however, to have arrived at a serious fucking impasse.

Her story in today’s P-I, titled Chihuly victim of his own success? takes pains to refute directly a story I wrote two months ago about the issue of Chihuly’s authorship in the context of a copyright lawsuit he has filed against one of his star glassblowers (Glass Houses, Feb. 16).

Regina’s claim is that the real art world loves Dale, and it’s only provincial idiots like me who “bash” him, because we are of small minds, small hearts (the guy has aching feet and bipolar disorder, after all!), and we slept through art history class.

Oh, and that I specifically am an inspiration to criminals. Regina transforms a joke I made in an interview on this web site about Chihuly’s bulletproof rock-candy sculptures into a spot worthy of local television news:

… Graves invited those who share her negative view (“terrible”) of his supposedly bulletproof Bridge of Glass in Tacoma to express their displeasure by shooting at it.

With a gun.

There are a lot of separate issues here (um, I didn’t mention a gun, but I agree with you, Regina, it works better for dramatic effect to include a firearm, and I should have), but the most enduring issue, I think, is the one about whether an artist’s production methods are relevant to a discussion of the artist’s work and worth.

Regina tackles this two ways in her story. First, she goes about establishing Chihuly’s total credibility in the art world. To do this, she actually lists the people who like him: “art critics such as Arthur Danto ad Donald Kuspit, and artists such as Jeff Koons, David Hockney, Kiki Smith, and John Torreano.” Everyone else falls under the category “Those who have never taken glass seriously.”

Um, when you have to list people who take an artist seriously, that’s just sad.

Regina then describes how three British critics went ga-ga over a 2001 Chihuly show in London. This tidbit is interesting, because it goes directly to how powerfully Dale’s work relies on context, which is something I mentioned in my piece. Henry Geldzahler, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, had it exactly right in 1993 when he praised Chihuly’s work as a form of Manifest Destiny: “American in its apparent vulgarity, its brazenness and its fearlessness to move farther out west even if there is no further west to move to.” You don’t think that plays differently in the Motherland than in Florida, Utah, and Seattle? Of course it does. And it should.

But it sure as hell doesn’t establish Chihuly’s credibility in the art world. The art world is absolutely ambivalent about Dale Chihuly.

How about this: Liz Brown, chief curator at the Henry Art Gallery, is the sole museum source Regina used to prop up Dale in her story.

I called the Henry, Seattle’s only contemporary art museum earlier today, to confirm something I suspected.

The Henry Art Gallery, the contemporary art museum in the city where Dale Chihuly lives, has never, ever, had a solo show of Dale Chihuly.

Seems to me that is worth a story. (And Regina, if your answer is that the Henry has an unfair bias against glass, maybe we should start talking about the relationship between that bias and the problem of craft and physical authorship.)

Brown tells Regina that she is “amazed” that anyone could question Chihuly’s authorship. Regina then trods out the usual litany of art-historical references to establish that production is a dead issue, and that nobody cares how you make your art—at least the people who matter don’t care, because Warhol (who Chihuly is like “in many ways”—yeah, except he has absolutely no intellectual basis for his work) taught all the little children to stop worrying and love the factory.

Throughout art history, artists have used assistants, sometimes liberally, but in the 20th century artists directly challenged the idea that art is more valuable as a hands-on operation.

From Marcel Duchamp to Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, Lawrence Weiner and Robert Gober, artists say that hands-on production is a choice, not an imperative.

Oh, Christ. Of course it’s a choice, and how an artist chooses can mean something. When Chihuly, who doesn’t blow glass in the first place, starts cranking out works at a rate impossible for any single person to view, let alone oversee, his market might love it, but it causes me some anxiety. When is an art factory just a factory? When do these inflections enter the work of art itself? And when they do, how can they not influence an estimation of that artist’s contributions?

Regina may have swallowed art history whole, but I think issues of authorship and craft in art are constantly in flux. A recent story in ArtNews explored leading painters’ own anxieties about working from photographs. It is widely accepted practice, but it is also something each artist handles consciously (unlike Chihuly’s unconscious use of assistants). The story is responding at least in part to Damien Hirst’s 2005 prank of showing paintings that he fully admits are beyond his capabilities and made entirely by assistants as copies of newspaper and magazine images. Appropriation art is old news, and Hirst is being derivative. But he’s also mocking the very real taboo against taking traditional ideas of craft and authorship into account in the art world. Unseating production’s primary role is the golden discovery of the 20th century, but by now it’s just a hegemony with about as much need for a defender as a grizzly bear. The fact is, the ways that production can enter into a work as an aspect of context are fascinating, and to ignore them is to be some kind of fundamentalist. Anyone who seriously claims that both Dale Chihuly’s inability as a glassblower and his mass production methods are utterly unrelated to the final work sitting in your living room or your museum (or NOT sitting in your museum, as the Henry case may be) has some explaining to do. Those factors may not mean everything about every one of his works, and they may mean different things about different works (huge installations made of hundreds of parts versus paintings on paper versus small sculptures). I never claimed Chihuly wasn’t an artist. I said he wasn’t a great glass artist, and he isn’t. A great glass artist, I believe—horror!—would know how to do complicated things with glass. I called Chihuly “a glass celebrity.” I should have added that he is a mediocre installation artist.

You want hegemony? Nowhere is it more obvious than in this belligerent quote in the ArtNews story from Chrissie Iles, the super-powerful curator who co-organized the Whitney Biennial: “There is an ultraconservative definition of what art is, and it comes from a romanticized view of how paintings are made. If you’ve painted something that’s copied from something else, or had someone do it for you, or if you’ve involved a projection, then it’s not art. That’s very ignorant. The only thing that has a relationship to value is quality.ā€¯

Right. Contemporary art museums and leading contemporary dealers are ultraconservative. They just refuse to touch anything that isn’t made by a single guy in a garret. Uh-huh. I do agree that the current popularity of figurative painting is bound to raise questions again, some of which will be stupid. But I hope the answers from all of us—artists, curators, dealers, and critics—come back complicated every time. These issues are far from dead, and to my mind, they’re a hell of a lot more interesting than whether Dale Chihuly has pig shit on his shoe, or whether he thinks about glass while he’s swimming in his pool.

In fact, I might just write about them for The Stranger.


CommentsRSS icon

Wow. The PI and Regina Hackett seem like tools for a PR firm. At least, that's what I thought when I saw the article.


Thanks for the elaboration. I read and enjoyed the previous article, but it's main point never seemed so explicitly stated. You were clearly far to aware of the problems of factory authorship to actually be saying, "He doesn't blow his own glass -- he's not an artist!" But that's what the previous came out as, at least read quickly. These two sentences make all the difference:

"[Factory production] is widely accepted practice, but it is also something each artist handles consciously (unlike Chihulyā€™s unconscious use of assistants)."

"The fact is, the ways that production can enter into a work as an aspect of context are fascinating, and to ignore them is to be some kind of fundamentalist."

I have to wonder why you keep harping on the fact that Chihuly can't blow his own glass, though. You have to mention it, but you seem cheap every time since it's not like Chihuly's choosing not to blow glass -- he physically can't.

Dale Chihuly, Painter of Glass (TM). I look forward to Chihuly/Kinkade DoubleTake.

Jen Graves, you are a genius.

bring me the name of Dale's PR firm!

jen jen jen, get over yourself. and use the extended entry format in the future.
now where is my ear?

Well said, Jen.

Right on, Jen. Chihuly's stuff looks like frozen vomit or the inside of a urethra. It's banal, garish, and repulsive. It's exemplary of a whole class of middlebrow "investment art" that, as Hackett points out, sits on the coffee tables of thousands of nimrods with money but no taste. If every piece of it got shot to smithereens I'd be happy.

And the Hackett "gun" thing was just weird. I think P-I writers are under explicit orders to "get edgy".

Only serious jazz musicians understand the genius of Kenny G. The rest of you Philistines...

What a relief!

With Josh gone, who is going to fill in as the self-absorbed Stranger scribe?

Well, Jen, you write well, but don't sink to Josh's all of mirrors. Let the other media do their thing. Quality wins out.

Let Josh apply for that job in NYC.

To paraphrase Bug's Bunny, does "this mean war?"

Jen - you really are at home in the Stranger.

Self important, prattle.

You would not know genius if it was staring you in the face.

"In fact, I might just write about them for The Stranger."

Please do.

"In fact, I might just write about them for The Stranger."

and do it naked so you can draw more attention to yourself...just like in high school.

Vincent Van Gogh, Urba, and Filling in For Josh Feit -

Don't you all have an "Underappreciated Geniuses Who Waste Their Potential on the Noble and Yet Vainglorious Art of Alternative Newspaper Webblog Critique" convention to get to?

Chihuly is so uninteresting. I have never gotten the hype. There are so many exciting and interesting glass artists around, but he isn't one of them. Until reading the PI article today I didn't realize he hasn't blown glass since 1976. Weird.

Oh my, bad manners to have ones own thoughts.

Ah, and to think against the grain of the self proclaimed all knowing critic of genius.

Ah, so shockingly brazen.

We should all retreat to an island for the _____________......convention among the self proclaimed unconventional. How quaint.

And of course, art of all things, would be best beaconed in these pages.

The fact the lady writer doesn't get the lake moment makes her a rube on the topic of glass.

Dale?

Is that you?

I am standing at my desk giving a standing O.

You nailed it all in two words: "glass celebrity."

Don't back down, Jen.

Jane - I woud not know the fellow if he was standing alone naked in a field.

His work is astonishing for me. I love glass, have blown a bit, collected for years in many versions......and I think he is a genius.....but in Seattle we always look to another place for the validation some need so badly.

The rest - all the posing theories - is the babble of the semi educated, quasi literate.

Of course, in this town, it is oh so daring to contend your own mind and
eyes are all you need for your conclusions about any art.

I don't get the hype around dale's work either just like I don't get why the baby rockstars at the stranger are always hyping themselves like it was high school pep rally or an auto-erotica film festival.

Jen, you lost me as soon as you tried to make the distinction of not using the word "gun" - how did you propose that someone excercise your suggestion of using bullets? ( not that I think it's such a bad suggestion)...

Art is subjective. I've always been bothered by the fact that when people disagree over a piece, one side always assumes their they're the smarter, more educated in the ways of art side, and therefore they make better decisions than the imbecile with whom they're speaking. That goes against art itself.

I'm an artist. I've had my work praised and ripped apart, often in the same show. Do I sit there and exclaim, "Well! Those who don't like it obviously are behind in their art!" No, that would be silly and disparaging to the art world. I may think that my work's the cat's meow, and believe that other people will too, however, it would be awful to call people unqualified for decision making merely if they disagree with me. I may contend that they don't know the amount of effort that I put into any given piece, that they may have missed the point about it, that they don't recognize the beating genius, that references were lost on them, but that doesn't make their point any less valid than mine. It doesn't mean that they're ignorant ruffians with no taste. It just means that I don't draw the same conclusions from the same piece as they do.

I studied art history for many years. I have the background to delve into the whys and hows of the art world. There are movements throughout history for which I don't care, just as there are movements that I love. I hardly expect everyone to agree with my views, and I adore having conversations discussing various opinions on a number of works. My dislike of something doesn't make the artist any less of an artist, it just means that their work doesn't speak to me. Am I stupid for that? Am I not allowed to feel a certain way about a certain piece? Should I just allow other people to tell me where I ought to stand on a work?

I support artist discussion, even heated. I just fail to see how anyone could support self-righteous and weak prattle such as to be found in this comment thread. People's lack of artistic background may, and many times ought to, keep them from getting a job in the art world, but it should hardly be a qualifying factor in having thoughts and feelings towards, or because of, a body of work.

Yes, I guess it is all about you Jen.

I'm sorry, but I only have one slot on my payroll for a local art critic.

I admit, I should give more credit to my assistants, the way Tiffany did to his - and if injury hadn't prevented me from blowing my own glass, maybe I would.

But you know, Jen, nothing exceeeds like excess. And who's the most Rabelaisian glass artist of all time? Me.

There's an art to that to - the art of self creation on a colossal stage, aided and abetted by a cast of thousands. Which of my assistants would be capable of that?

The world exults my cornucopia. A few piddling naysayers in the Northwest try, ineffectually, to rain on my parade.

What charity should I write the check to? The Relief Fund for Underpaid, Self-Appointed Custodians of Absolute Artistic Integrity?

erratum: "The world exults *in* my cornucopia."

And yes, I am on Dale's payroll - as his ghostwriter.

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