Delivered as the Strattman lecture, Adelaide GAS Conference, 9 May 2005

At this moment, Australia plays host to an international gathering of glass artists. It would seem remiss, then, not to mention one of Australia's most noticeable contributions to the international world of glass art. The Peter Carey novel Oscar and Lucinda used glass blowing as a key narrative element. The film, starring Kate Blanchett and Ralph Feines, presented Australian glass-blowing to the world-albeit as a historical recreation. Though historical fiction, it is a promising platform for some burning issues in contemporary glass art.

Lucinda in the glass factory

If we look at the actual content of Oscar and Lucinda, we find quite an interesting question about the business of what it is to be a glass artist. The story revolves around the acquisition of a glass factory by a young recent arrival to colonial Sydney.

For Carey, glass is where reality and fantasy intersect. Unlike the down to earth male world of glass-blowing, tied to the market for utilitarian objects, Lucinda Lepastrier dreamily engages with the fantastic world of glass. Her attention is drawn to the purely useless item-Prince Rupert's drop. Lucinda believes that 'glass is a thing in disguise, an actor, is not solid at all.[1] Glass is conducive to the realm of the fantastic that figures so strongly in Carey's fiction.

Contrary to expectations, Lucinda takes a great interest in the business of how glass is made. She insists on being part of factory life. It is here that she encounters the pre-eminent senior blower, Arthur Phelps.

But Lucinda's presence at the glassworks is not welcome. A delicate, and maybe even interfering female, is not a familiar presence. Phelps fears that she might distract the men from their labour. When Lucinda protests that she is the proprietor of the glassworks, Arthur Phelps complains, 'I know, mum, but it be our craft, mum, you see. It be our craft.'[2] The male technical pursuit proves surprisingly vulnerable to womanly presence.

A woman's artfulness

I'd like to reflect on this scene as an expression of the tension between the art and business of glass-a tension that is held in place by the relations between women and men. In the patriarchal values of the time, men labour at the practical business of skill and technique, while women stand back to entertain its place in the rarefied world of art. Of course, these days such a difference is archaic, though it may be suggested that the division of the sexes is part of the tradition of glass on which today's glass culture rests.

These days, the place of glass in the art world is still relatively problematic. While there are many successful glass artists, who display their works in specialist glass galleries, like Kirra Australia, it is rare to find glass in mainstream glass galleries. A way of unravelling this division is to consider the gendered nature of glass art.

Josiah McElheny

One artist who seems to have overcome this barrier is the American artist Josiah McElheny. McElheny has served his apprenticeship in glass-blowing and spent his time at the feet of the Venetian masters. While being beholden to the world of glass, McElheny has managed to break through into the contemporary art circuit, including the prestigious White Cube gallery in Hoxton Square, London.

Most of my reference to McElheny comes from the substantial catalogue to a retrospective at Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostella.[3] The exhibition contains a formidable range of work. It expresses not only technical excellence but also conceptual sophistication..

In the interview that has been published in the catalogue, McElheny does not disavow the craft basis of his work: 'The subject matter of my work assumes that the anonymous, artisanal, industrial activity of specific glass-factory cultures could be viewed as a complex, creative and meaning-generating activity.'[4] This seems an honest avowal of skill by contrast with the celebration of 'cleverness' by conceptual artists like Jeff Koons.

We can see here a new interest in skill that is emerging in the contemporary visual art scene. While celebrating conceptual play, it could be argued that visual art has always had a place for an unquestioned point of certainty. In recent times, this has been often what is considered indigenous, including customary forms of knowledge. We can see in McElheny's career the possibilities that skill itself could become a quasi-sacred element in the visual art arena.

Here McElheny promises to take craft to a new level. There have been a few craftspersons in the visual art world. In many cases, they fail to pave the way for others of their medium. The Turner Prize winner Grayson Perry uses his status as a potter as evidence of his idiosyncrasy. Would McElheny be any different?

Despite an extraordinary corpus of work, blessed by both skill and intellect, McElheny misses the chance to take craft seriously in its own terms. We can begin with cover of the catalogue. Rather than a glass work, it depicts a nostalgic image of an elegant woman walking through the factory. The text within identifies her as Ginette Gagneous, the wife of the master glass-blower Venini. According to the story, the Dior outfits worn by the boss's wife became an object of fascination for the blowers and led to new designs in glass, which McElheny reproduces in his exhibition.

McElheny celebrates this story as evidence of how artisans are able to express meaning about what inspires them. In this case, it is an unobtainable sex object associated with the world of bosses, rather than workers.

While the workers are more receptive to the female presence than the Australian character Arthur Phelps-as we might expect from Italians-Ginette is still seen as aloof from the dirty manual world of glass production. And rather than use glass production itself as the point of reference, the artisans conform to the ideals of their betters.

Other works reflect a similar aspirational structure. The exhibition is rich with allusions to works of creative genius, such as Renaissance painting and literature. As an example, one piece of work makes reference to a fresco that celebrates the miracle of St Anthony of Padua, when a glass fell from a balcony without smashing. The exhibition piece is quite plain-a simple drinking glass, made special by its connection to Renaissance Italian art. Like Venini's anonymous artisans, McElheny takes his inspiration from the world of betters, not his own experience.

McElheny's work has many qualities that make it worth looking at closely. But rather than immerse himself in the production of glass itself as a creative source, he rather casts his gaze beyond. He positions glass as a footnote to the history of art.

Is there any other way? To make it in the contemporary art circuit, can a glass artist do anything else than make of it an exotic fetish? Will it only admit a Dale Chihuly, the conductor of the wondrous glass symphony rather than the artist whose creative is borne from labour? Is there an alternative way for glass to engage with visual art?

Nowadays, of course, women are no longer on the fringes of the hot shop, distracting the male blowers. This is particularly so in Australia, where a generation of women have taken to glass as a language for creative expression. To focus on a female glass artist now does not necessarily subscribe to an essentialist understanding of gender, as though simply being a woman gave an artist a privileged artistic sensibility. It is rather from the initial gender orientation in glass that sets the scene for an alternative perspective to come from its excluded member.

Maureen Williams

At this point, it is possible to select any number of Australian female glass artists, many of whom are forging a new language for landscape in glass. I chose the Victorian artist Maureen Williams as someone whose work is the closest to a traditional painting practice.

Williams has always been interested in the elemental nature of pictorial space. A line is enough to make a horizon, and a shape a person. This comes of an artistic eye that views the world abstractly. It is an eye that looks over the land from a plane and sees pattern.

In a series of images over the past ten years, we can see a steady journey in glass through landscape. Beginning in 1996 with the Transition Series, Williams creates a cylindrical white canvas on which she paints vertical rock-like shapes. There is relatively little sign of landscape, though the forms are clearly drawn from nature. The accompanying empty shapes lend the work a formalist quality that emphasizes their status as drawings.

	In the following year, Williams began to introduce more easily identifiable landscape elements. Note in Clouded Figures 2 (1997) how the empty rock shape seems to have evolved into a human figure. The rocks themselves have an elemental relationship to the earth, as though floating in another dimension.
	In Clouded Figure 4 (1997) the rocks are transformed into clouds. They move from horizontal to vertical, linking earth and sky.

Two years later, in Interaction 6 (1999), the human figure seems to have disappeared from the scene and the rocks have gathered in identifiable groups. In the absence of a hero figure, we are drawn to identify with the conviviality or epic resoluteness of rock shapes. The sky has lost its emptiness and is more heavily worked than the ground.

The next Interaction 7 (2000) further contrasts the solo and group rock shapes. The smaller rocks gather in the foreground almost like tourists beholding the monumental forms beyond. In this vessel, Williams seems to be attempting a particularly graphic representation of landscape, evoking the South Australian landscapes such as Port Pirie where she grew up.

	My Trapped Journey (2000) adds a new dimension into the landscape with valley-like forms that hold rocks. This piece gives a sense of the slow movement of earth over time.
	In the following, Suspended Journey 6 (2001) these cleft shapes evolve into more organic forms emphasising a play of constraint and freedom.
	Journeying in Parallel (2001) creates a more readable picture placing the groups of rocks in a frame, evoking not only the landscape but also the act of viewing in the landscape, particularly as tourists.
	In Clouded Figure (2001) the trapped rocks are reconstructed back into the human form. The horizon has vanished and is replaced by a striated texture. The figure seems obviously constrained by a frame. Is this the idea of a landscape in the round trying to escape the frame of painting?
	In Obscured Landscape 4 and 6 (2003) the figure has disappeared altogether. Instead, the glass canvas is completely covered by grid like forms evoking settlement.
	Incognito 1 and 2 (2003) reintroduce the figure into the landscape. Incognito 1 is quite subtle: the human outline is just distinguishable from the farmland grid.  In Incognito 2, the figure is framed within a familiar window-like form with more painterly background.
	While her works involve a subtle play between form and figure, there are accompanied by quite extraordinary technical developments. Altered landscape 5 (2004) is a good example of the way Williams is able to include the brushstroke in her work. This is a painterliness that goes to the core of glass, rather than lie on top as a surface treatment.
	Sense of place seems the primary quest in Williams' work. She is naturally drawn to Central Australia, where the relative absence of development has left the land relatively exposed. Her recent body of work is inspired by her experience on the Larapinta trail through the McDonald ranges near Alice Springs.

Her Larapinta (2005) series of glass makes it quite abstract with almond-like shapes referencing the human form, though no longer with any heroic status, more like the rock forms of the early works. Finally, in the Larapinta series, the works themselves turn into literal rocks. It is as though Williams' art has become the very thing it once depicted.

It is tempting to ascribe a linear development to Williams work. Certainly there seems to be a development from literal representation of landscape to the thing itself with the rock-like forms. But the disappearance and re-appearance of the figure in her landscapes seems like a continual play that she engages in. This oscillation highlights the fragility of self in land, particularly a land as archaic as Australia.

In this regard, William's journey as an artist has parallels with other s semi-landscape painters, such as Fred Williams or Peter Booth. Most of her influences are painters. She defers to Giotto, Arthur Streeton, Margaret Preston, Lucian Freud, Max Beckman and Philip Guston. So what sense does it make for Williams to work in glass rather than paint? Painterliness is certainly a key element in Williams' technique, though she maintains faith in the materiality of her own medium of glass.

Williams' method is distinctive. She begins cutting lines into a blank with a diamond wheel. These lines provide the basic rhythm of the piece. Paint is embedded into the lines. It is then sanded back and a number of layers are painted over the top. She describes this as the 'understructure'.

For Williams the surface brush strokes that appear in her work are quite important. It is critical that the works have a 'painterly' quality, which Williams associates with depth. Painterliness counterbalances the naturally translucent quality of glass.

Painterliness is an interesting quality to associate with glass. The allusion to the brush seems contrary to the essence of hot glass, being a medium that resists the organic. Painterliness suggests an opacity that is the opposite of the glowing transparency of glass.

The brush is something we associate closely with the hand of the individual artist. It is the instrument that elects the painter into the fine arts, alongside the pen of the writer and the baton of the conductor. Henry James could thus write about 'his brother of the brush.'[5]

The material arts are more haptic in nature, involving the body as a whole. Blowing glass, throwing ceramic vessels, weaving a tapestry or hammering out a ring-these activities require the weight of the body to be successful.

In the case of Maureen Williams, painterliness draws our attention to the differences between her work and painting. Rather than render the world on a flat linear plane, she adopts a cylindrical format. Williams claims that her choice is medium is more from a deficit on her part. She says:

I find it hard to paint two-dimensionally because I don't know what to do with the edges. I'm used to going around. When I hit the edge, I don't know how to deal with it.

While this might explain the choice to work on a circular medium, the choice of glass rather than ceramics or metal still remains a mystery.

To understand more fully what is happening in Williams' work, we need to consider the basic elements of the pictorial frame. In the case of painting, the frame gives its content a clear sense of beginning and end. Beginning and end are the basics elements of any narrative structure. It is what Frank Kermode calls 'that concordance of beginning, middle, and end which is the essence of our explanatory fictions'[6]

As a framed structure, painting is very much a window onto the world, one which is contained by our own needs. This window has metamorphosed into today's screen, which with the growing popularity of plasma technology is increasingly replacing the window that once looked out on our now non-existent gardens.

It could be argued that the increasing saturation of images in contemporary life is reducing the potency of painting. We spend increasingly large amounts of our work and play looking at screens. Advertising is finding way of moving images beyond billboards and wrapping them around cars and buses. We no longer need to find a painting in order to cast a window on the world-the world itself is a window. Painting is no mostly a window onto a past world of Dutch masters and early modernists.

This leads me to the other element of Williams' work that distinguishes itself from painting. Traditionally, painting is produced on an opaque canvas and thus dependent on reflective light. Williams' paintings, by contrast, are applied to a translucent white glass canvas. As a result, when lit above, her landscapes glow.

All this leads me to the proposition that it is a glass artist like Maureen Williams who is the best bet for the continuity of painting as a contemporary romantic quest, rather than a nostalgic concern.

First, it meets the expectation of our eyes to ascribe value to radiant rather than reflective light. Second, it recovers the artistic meaning of that space by taking it into the round. The proliferation of screens in our own lives means that they are increasingly portals of distraction rather than windows of reflection.

Williams' journey as an artist harkens back to the romantic quests of painters to capture the essence of their world. By taking this journey into the radiant three-dimensional world of glass, she grants this quest a relevance that is otherwise missing. Glass is the future of painting.

Pipaluk Lake

At this point, I'd like to take a brief detour to another woman glass artist, though one perhaps less familiar to Australian audiences. Pipaluk Lake is a Danish glass artist whose principal material is readymade window glass.

Lake's work seems almost the antithesis of skill. She appears to simply drape window glass over metal wire and allow it to collapse. Her works remind us of the chaos in films by fellow Dane Lars von Trier, which enable the spontaneous energy of acting to emerge unmediated by the technologies of filmmaking.

Her pieces are uncomfortable works to look at initially. They abound in jagged edges. She often adds acids and salts to create metallic stains. It is an almost apocalyptic art. Through a kind of alchemy, the very medium that we view the world-the window-has been transformed into a monster. So used to the spectacle of disaster emanating from our screens, it seems the only disaster left to truly shock us is the destruction of the screen itself.

Where to now?

Returning to Australia, nature seems to be a continuing source of inspiration for glass artists, particularly women like Jessica Loughlin and Kirstie Rae. Not exclusively female, male artists like Marcus Dillon, Bob Knottenbelt seek a fascination for nature in their work.

I think we have enough survey exhibitions. We need a major thematic exhibition of contemporary Australian art in one of the state galleries to bring glass art into the institutionalised history of art. Williams work demonstrates that glass need not be a mere footnote on the history of painting. Glass may be its future.

Notes

This lecture is dedicated to the memory of Australian artist Neil Roberts