Heart of Glass
The New Northwest's distinguishing feature isn't
rain or money or coffee. It's Chihuly . Not "Dale Chihuly." Not "glass
art by Dale Chihuly." Chihuly is all you need to say, whether you're
talking about a particular glass piece ("a Chihuly") or evoking the movement,
the institution, the aesthetic, and the regional identity epitomized by the
Northwest's (and the glass world's) most famous artist. Not since Bernini
decked Rome with fountains, or at least not since the Wyeths became Maine's
official art family, has an artist so exemplified the spirit of a city or
region--and it took three generations of Wyeths. Chihuly's work doesn't say
anything outright about us, but he's the best mirror we've got for divining
what we've come to today.
A little background, with apologies to anyone who
lives here and already knows it all. Dale Chihuly is the artist/celebrity who
gets most of the credit for elevating glass blowing from one more craft to a
bona fide--and wildly popular and lucrative--art form. He grew up in Tacoma,
Seattle's soporific little-sister city, and headed first back East, and then to
Venice, to study in the emerging studio glass movement. In 1972, on a tree farm
north of Seattle, he founded the Pilchuck Glass School, which made that
movement an institution even as he turned it into an industry.
Try as we may, we can't
escape the glass Chihuly makes (or rather, has others make): the lurid
"Venetians," writhing "sea forms," and extravagant, candleless "chandeliers"
resembling giant wasps' nests or clusters of water-filled condoms. The loftiest
galleries and living rooms out here have their Chihuly bowls; the crasser
tourist galleries stock copycats. To gain "Seattle credibility," the apartment
set in the sitcom Frasier sprouted one. No new cultural palace or
festival shopping experience is complete without a Chihuly (click if you think
I'm exaggerating). Seattle's new symphony hall boasts two Chihuly
chandeliers.
Chihuly himself is just as much a fixture as his Chihulys,
especially in of the Seattle Times ' gossip column. (Sample: "While a
tour of the [Chihuly] studio is standard for celebrities, Bono did it one
better. He tried his hand ... at glass blowing.") The Seattle Opera
commissioned a set (in Mylar) from Chihuly. Only Leonardo da Vinci and King Tut
have topped the attendance record set by Chihuly at the Seattle Art Museum. The
first project Paul Allen picked for his new film company was a study of
artists' inspirations, including ... you guessed it. But the ultimate
confirmation of Chihuly's stature is the lottery hometown artists stage to mock
Seattle's star-struck provincialism and celebrity fawning: The winner gets to
"smash a Chihuly."
But Seattle still lags
behind its erstwhile rival Tacoma in Chihuly-mania. For Tacoma, glass is a last
chance at world stature. Its grandest landmark, the Neo-Baroque Union Station,
has been renovated and reopened as a Chihuly showcase, with the mother of all
chandeliers in its atrium and more big pieces scattered around. This is just
the warm-up to the International Glass Museum (originally the "Chihuly Glass
Center") being built on Tacoma's waterfront, reached by a 474-foot "Chihuly
Bridge of Glass." Tacoma's captains of industry and finance all ponied up for
it. As one of them told the Times , "Every downtown needs a niche."
Chihuly is the natural choice for Tacoma and not just
because he's a native son. His is the perfect art for boosters, wannabes, new
money, and self-conscious arrivistes . In other words, perfect for the
precociously wealthy, culturally callow New Northwest. Glass has the museum
seal of approval, but it's supremely and (as practiced by Chihuly) almost
purely decorative--blissfully unburdened with threatening, ambiguous, or other
meanings. "You don't have to be smart or art-historically sophisticated to
understand these," a Chihuly's assistant explains in one of several
documentaries on him by Seattle's public TV station. "They're merely
beautiful." Forget Sister Wendy and her gloomy paintings; glass, shimmering and
vacant, is the ideal TV art, a match for Riverdance and the tenors.
Glass also suits a money-drunk,
technology-intoxicated place like the Northwest. It's showy and luxurious, as
glittery as jewelry and a hundred times bigger. It's hard, slick and,
literally, edgy. At the same time, Chihuly taps an earlier, earthier ecotopic
sensibility. His forms evoke not only phalli and vaginas but sea squirts and
anemones--the marine biosphere that sustained the first Northwesterners, which
we still delude ourselves into thinking we're sustaining. His "baskets" mimic
Native American basketry outright. The implicit, if wishful, message: We can
have our machines and money and preserve the wild, unspoiled
Northwest.
But beautiful Chihulys
are just part of the Chihuly phenomenon. Chihuly himself is the main show. With
his rampant curls, bluff growl, black eye patch, and bright-colored pirate
shirts and scarves, he's the perfect foil to geek chic, a year-round version of
the "Seafair Pirates" who frolic at our big summer parade--the artist for the
new buccaneer capitalism, the jester who amuses (but never challenges) the
geeks. He reprises the Renaissance role of artist as courtier, standing like a
third senator onstage when President Clinton visits, partying on Paul Allen's
yacht with Robin Williams, Candice Bergen and, of course, Bill and Melinda
Gates. This year, when Gates hosted his annual CEO Summit, the world's most
celebrated gathering of tycoons, who provided the entertainment? The Vienna
Philharmonic and, with "an exhibition of glass-blowing art," Dale Chihuly.
Not that he blows glass himself, though he still says
things like this, from the 1994 book Chihuly Baskets : "Glass blowing is
a very spontaneous medium, and its suits me. ... I've been at it for thirty
years and am as infatuated as when I blew my first bubble." Chihuly hasn't
actually blown since 1976, when an auto accident cost him an eye and his depth
perception--and made his career. He acquired the trademark dashing eye patch,
without which he'd be just another chubby little guy with frizzy hair. And he
hired other people, including top Italian masters, to blow more glass than he
could alone--enough to make him the Christo of glass, decking Northwest streams
and (you've gotta admire the chutzpah) Venetian canals with bright globes and
tubes.
The Eye-Patched One has
gone far, and so has this town. How far? Consider the other time, 50 years ago,
that Seattle had a distinctive, defining artistic tradition--and not one but
two celebrity artists. Morris Graves, Mark Tobey, and others in the generation
later dubbed "Northwest visionaries" drank deep of both the drizzly, mossy
natural scene and of Asian art and philosophy. Tobey sketched spinach hawkers
and bums at the downtown Pike Place Public Market and was sometimes mistaken
for one. Graves hid out in the deep woods. Tobey painted calligraphic "white
paintings" and Graves bodhisattva birds, in delicate gouache and pastel--media
notably unsuited to large atriums. Today these seem as quaint as hand-bound
books or handwritten letters.
Chihuly succeeds because he's not a maker of art in
the usual sense; he's a coach, ringmaster, and impresario--and, above all, an
entrepreneur. No one expects entrepreneurs to do the production work. No one
argues anymore over whether Gates is really a techie or worries about Jeff
Bezos' literary taste. And no one cares whether Chihuly blows glass.
Like Seattle's software, bookselling, and coffee
tycoons, Chihuly has triumphed by marketing and branding the hell out of his
product, elevating it to something at once precious and ubiquitous. The
Northwest trick is not so much to create something out of nothing as making
something very large out of something small, and then repeating the process. A
hundred million PCs, a billion "personalized" book and CD sales, a zillion cups
of coffee ... or hundreds of chandeliers made of brittle blades of glass. Which
is, after all, just melted silicon.
