Glass artist Dale Chihuly plays with fire and the audacity of beauty

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Chihuly on Fire
by Henry Adams (author) and Dale Chihuly (artist)
Chihuly Workshop
2016, 212 pages, 9.3 x 12.1 x 0.9 inches
$40 Buy a copy on Amazon

For several decades now, art critics and casual admirers alike have talked about Dale Chihulys art in terms of its forms. Indeed, the artist himself organizes his work largely by their physical shapes, as does his latest self-published coffee-table book, Chihuly on Fire, whose chapter titles range from Baskets and Sea Forms to Jerusalem Cylinders and Rotolo. But thumbing the pages of this sumptuous, hardcover volume, and reading the biographical essay by art-history professor Henry Adams, one is struck by the importance of color to Chihulys work.

The shift to color began in 1981, when Chihuly and his team of gaffers and assistants produced the first of what would become known as the Macchia series. These often enormous vessels, whose sides were usually folded and deformed, featured solid-color interiors, lip wraps in contrasting hues, and thousands of jimmies of pure crushed colored glass, usually set against a background of white glass clouds.

Even in his early days, Chihulys ambitions for his chosen medium seemed larger than the modest network of glass-art galleries around the country would have the wherewithal to support. By the time his Macchia pieces came along, the so-called craft arts, of which glass art was but one, were allowed to be exuberant and even a bit zany, but they were ultimately expected to exhibit good table manners, to sit uncomplainingly at the kids table of the art world. Gloriously and unapologetically garish, Chihulys Macchia pieces were a grinning, joyful, and emphatic fuck you to all of that. With the Macchia, Chihuly finally shook off the cobwebs of craft, not so much because the pieces pushed the boundaries of technique to ludicrous places although they certainly did that but because they pushed what was possible, and politic, with color.

Today, technique remains central to Chihulys work, while his teams of artisans have become ever-more adept, as the 2013 photo in Chihuly on Fire of two assistants in helmeted, fireproof space suits preparing to catch a still-glowing piece dramatically shows. To be clear, its okay to be impressed by that sort of thing, to get sucked into the spectacle that is Chihuly. After all, lots of artists have made careers of astounding viewers with physical spectacle, as anyone who has walked within the rusty, leaning walls of a curving Richard Serra can attest. In a way, though, Chihuly takes the greater aesthetic risk by being brash enough to demand that his creations are also, well, beautiful. For that, color rather than form has been his most capable collaborator.