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The Curator's Symposium
originally published in GASNews, November/December 2001

            This past May I was invited to attend the annual Curator’s Symposium at Pilchuck Glass School, both as participant—although I have curated nothing beyond my own CD collection—and as a journalist. The real curators and critics that were present were drawn from considerably varied backgrounds, but everybody had scholarly credentials in the history of Western art (making for at least one amusing moment when one of the curators fumbled for the name of a reasonably obscure Renaissance painter and five others simultaneously blurted it out), and everybody wrote professionally for publication.
            At times the discussion, especially the jargon- and reference-laden shoptalk of people who write about art for a living, resisted all of my efforts to unravel it.  My scribbled notes from our meetings are enigmatic and bewildering. This is as it should be; after all, no one expected the curators to make anything other than a dumpy shot glass during a thirty-minute “hands-on” session at the furnace. But what also struck me at those times was the yawning chasm that, sadly, separates these two camps—people who make stuff, and people who create a context for understanding that stuff—and that accounts for the misunderstanding and persistent ignorance that plagues us both.
            The curator’s world is circumscribed by the museum, which embodies several ideas about the hierarchy of objects but most emphatically the idea of the best objects. If most of the discussion was about the difficulty of developing critical discourse, attracting scholarship, manipulating informed consensus, and courting museum curators, the assumption is that people who make glass aspire to do just that. That may describe the upper crust of the glass world, but most of the people that I know—most of the people who attend summer workshops, who do shows, who work in studios, who make things out of glass every day, who really ARE the Studio Glass movement—are working on a different level and towards different goals.
            The curators are, almost by definition, uninterested in and/or unaware of 99% of these artists. The other ongoing activity on campus at that time was the  annual production of large, colorful vessels that would be used and sold as centerpieces at the school’s big fall fundraising auction. These were being made by an ad hoc group of glassblowers known as the Poleturners. Throughout the symposium, there was a disturbing disconnect between the artists and the curators on nearly every level. The issue of language that was being so nimbly debated was alienating to the workers whose efforts that language was attempting to describe.  From everything I was able to gather from talking to both groups, the Poleturners had only a dim understanding and faint interest in what was being discussed, and the curators had little regard for the objects or process that was consuming the blowers.
            At one point there was a slide presentation that reviewed work made by artists-in-residence at Pilchuck in collaboration with the school’s gaffers. There was a good bit of name-dropping, but the roster itself wasn’t the most impressive aspect. The work itself was ambitious and innovative, wide-ranging in its form and content, having little or nothing to do with the history of glass either as an architectural medium or as a vessel. The images were striking, too, with many of the objects captured as works in progress by the session photographer, with a sweaty but confident glassblower wrestling a blob as the artist peered over the gaffer’s shoulder.
           I was watching the slides and thinking about a previous conversation that had risen briefly about the value of technique and technical skills. Technique was not dismissed as cheap, but emphatically relegated to a supporting role. As I watched a progression of slides that showed gaffers and AIRs, it occurred to me that, nearly forty years later, the Studio Glass movement had come full circle from its earliest beginnings. Instead of scaling down industrial technology to put the material into an artist’s hands so that the artist could have an essential confrontation with the material, we have succeeded in recreating a factory setting where the artist designs and the craftsman makes. The names that the curators were responding to—Kiki Smith, Dennis Oppenheim, Donald Lipski, Jim Dine—had their experience with glass mediated by workers to whom technique was not incidental. Their skills were in service to an idea and that idea—along with the name attached to it—was what commanded the attention of this group.
            According to Neal Watson, recently hired as chief curator of the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, “Glass is a material not unlike oil paint or bronze or clay. Eventually it will just be sculpture, not ‘glass art.’” If the discussions during the symposium seemed to be dominated by a yearning for assimilation, by the assumption that at the end of the road lies a brave new world of undifferentiated Art, then what is the role of a school that specializes in–even fetishizes–glass? By extension, what is the role of a Glass Art Society? A Studio Glass movement? The success of the curators’ agenda may ultimately be measured by the disappearance of such media-specific institutions.
            I had to leave before the last night’s party. Everybody said it was a big success,  and that the writers talked to the glassblowers, and everybody had a good time, and I was glad to hear of it. In the cloistered remove of the Pilchuck campus, people can often find the common ground that was previously unknown to them. Pilchuck has the special ability to create community—which is really one of the things that it does best—and perhaps for one night that happened again and, instead of discourse, the two groups simply talked to one another.

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