Chihuly in Nashville

Tom and I went to see the Dale Chihuly shows both at Cheekwood and at the Frist in Nashville.  We thought that the big, organic form glass pieces looked better outside in the landscape than in captivity inside the old post office.  Still, wherever you see them, they are amazing.  Tom called them "eye candy," and he meant that in a good way.

We weren't allowed to photograph inside the Frist Center, so all the photographs here are from the Cheekwood show.  First you go in the Botanic Hall, and you see the "Macchia."  Like most of Chihuly's work, the Macchiae seem to be abstractions of some sort of organic form, maybe a sea creature of some kind.  I have always loved the tropical plants in the atrium in the Botanic Hall, which themselves have amazing forms, so these glass plants or sea creatures seemed right at home there.

Later Tom pointed out that these "cups" couldn't be outside or they would accumulate water, and maybe even breed mosquitoes.  True.

Next you go behind the Botanic Hall and you see a tall "Saffron Tower," which probably looks better lit up at night.  (Cheekwood is open on Thursdays and Fridays at night, when all the glass is lit up.  I'm planning to go back and see it at night sometime.)  Next to the tower are the "Cattails," which look perfect in their garden setting.  Whoever sited them paid close attention to color harmonies.

I love the way the orange complements the purple foliage below.



After the cattails, you walk down an allee, and you see in the distance some blue pointy things that turn out to be more pieces in Chihuly's "Fiori" series.  I think "fiori" means flowers in Italian.  Chihuly studied glass-blowing in Venice, where glass-blowing reached a peak in the early Renaissance.

Up close, the blue and green spikes look like this:

Again, the color coordination is very good:

It's fortunate that Cheekwood has a Japanese garden, because Chihuly has some pieces that have a Japanese theme.  "Niijima Floats" is based on fishing floats used in Japan.

Sadly, you are not allowed to walk around in the Japanese gardens and get up close to the "floats."  You can look at them from a Japanese-style pavilion, though.

There are also "Bamboo Reeds" among the real bamboo, which I particularly liked, being aficianado of bamboo and a prolific grower of bamboo myself.  Bamboo forms are among the most subtle and beautiful of the plant world.

Then you progress to the three large koi ponds at Cheekwood.  Well, at least, when I was a little girl there were huge koi in these pools.  I seem to remember that we had to release one of our own overgrown goldfish into one of these ponds once.  Anyway, this summer they are home to an installation called "Walla Wallas," named after the onions from Chihuly's home state of Washington.  But these are onions that float.

Above the waterfall in the upper right, you can see a boat filled with heron-like figures of many colors.

One thing that's great about this show is how kid-friendly it is.  There were a lot of little kids in strollers and on foot running around Cheekwood ooh-ing and ah-ing at the brightly colored objects. Too bad you can't touch!  One little kid even pronounced the biggest piece on the front lawn to be "breath-taking."

Here it is, the piece de resistance, called "The Sun":

To me this piece resembled something you might see at a very ambitious birthday party, where the parents have hired a balloon artist to blow up a lot of balloons and twist them into funny shapes.  But it's glass!  And it's very big.  Chihuly wrote, of the inspiration for this piece:

"If you take a thousand blown pieces of a color, put them together, and then shoot light through them, that's going to be something to look at.  It's mysterious, defying gravity or seemingly out of place--like something you have never seen before."

I like Chihuly's idea that it's ok to make something that's just pure spectacle, pure intense color and light. Color and light are what visual experience is made of.  Why not push that to the limit?  Of course, in this piece, the elements of line and form are also "something to look at."  When I look at visual art, I want it to be "something to look at."  A lot of visual art of the last two or three decades has been more "something to think about," rather than something that's there for pure visual pleasure.  It's refreshing to be handed some pure visual pleasure, almost like a flavor.  "The Sun" looks delicious, like some kind of Dairy Queen extravaganza.  Or again, like a sea creature or tropical plant.  The huge boxwoods in front of Cheekwood (themselves something to look at) were a good foil for this big yellow flower.

Inside the big house, there were more marvels, but we weren't allowed to photograph.  Chihuly made some chandeliers for Cheekwood, and there's one in the spiral stairwell, and three in the glassed-in porch.  I hope they're there to stay.  The Swan Ball will never be the same again (not that I've ever been to it).   There was also a small exhibit of Chihuly's drawings.  Chihuly himself doesn't blow glass any more, due to a shoulder injury.  He works with "gaffers," strong guys who blow and tilt-a-whirl the glass into the shapes that he's drawn.  He works collaboratively with a large team of helpers.  You can see a very interesting film about the process in the courtyard gallery at the Frist Learning Center, next to the big house. (Don't ask me why so many things in Nashville are called The Frist Something or Other.  The same is true at Princeton.)

One thing I liked about the drawings, which were really paintings on paper, was that Chihuly used iridescent watercolor paints.  Go for the gusto!  Don't worry about being tacky!  Just do it!  Now I want to make a bunch of iridescent watercolor paintings. Again, Chihuly's design sense is kind of child-like and playful, uninhibited, in an admirable way.  As Picasso said, "Every child is an artist.  The problem is how to remain an artist when he grows up."  Answer:  use a lot of bright colors and sparkly things.  And then make it really big.

On to the grotto and the shell fountain, over beside the big house, near that spectacular wisteria arbor.  Here we find the blue marlins and yellow herons:

You can see Tom looking down over this scene in this picture:

Since Cheekwood is built on the top of a hill, the gardens around the house are terraced, in a lovely way.  Below this grotto is a reflection pool, and Chihuly placed an installation there called "Mille Fiori," or a thousand flowers.  Chihuly's mother was an avid gardener, and she remains an influence on him.

The way the forms reflect themselves in the water adds to the pleasure of looking at and photographing these pieces.  The many new forms created by the reflections and the sky and the clouds remind me of Monet's water lily paintings.  I really wanted to come back and spend a day at Cheekwood drawing some of the installations.

Walking back to the parking lot, you pass another little pond that DOES have a waterlily in it!

In the background you see the "Blue Polyvitro Crystals."

Finally, there's a piece that is pink, a color not seen in the other pieces.  This glass also has some iridescent colors in it:

It reminded me of Victorian glass Christmas tree ornaments, only really big.

This show is really worth seeing.  Take a child and a picnic, a camera and some Prismacolor pencils and paper, and enjoy the eye candy.

William Christenberry

Yesterday I went to see a show at the Cheekwood Museum of Art in Nashville that was a retrospective of the work of Willim Christenberry. Christenberry is a painter, sculptor, and photographer from Alabama, and his work is about rural Alabama and his memories of growing up there as a child.

Christenberry began as an abstract expressionist painter, and there were a few paintings in the show. He moved away from pure abstraction in the 1960s and began to make a kind of landscape painting about the subject that would obsess him for the next forty years: the house in the rural landscape. These houses are often abandoned farm houses, often derelict, and sometimes disappearing back into the woods of which they were made, over-run with kudzu vines. The houses in his paintings are pretty abstract, though, and it's hard to tell exactly what kinds of houses they are.



When you enter the Cheekwood show, the first thing you see are tall sculptures: white pointy steeple-like things that are vaguely menacing, but also rather like church steeples, arranged in a kind of installation. Christenberry calls these "dream houses." In the late seventies, after the theft of a body of work about the Ku Klux Klan, Christenberry had a vision in a dream of a tall, pointy house with no windows or doors, covered with signs like some of the old grocery stores in his photographs. This image has recurred in his work ever since. The tall white dream houses seem to evoke all the themes of his work: old buildings; the hooded head of the Klansman; and even the trees that surround the abandoned houses he loves to photograph. The lack of windows and doors seems to indicate a kind of blindness: the buildings have no "eyes" to see out of, and the viewer can't see into them. Perhaps this indicates a certain mystery, or a secret, about the Alabama landscape and its history.






Christenberry started photographing with a small Brownie camera that had been in his family. But Lee Friedlander persuaded him to try photographing with larger view cameras. He uses both a 4x5 camera and the 8x10 camera to shoot his color landscape images. But Christenberry uses the larger cameras in the same way that he uses the Brownie camera: he doesn't use the tilts and swings, or even the rise and fall of the front standard very much. His photographs have the very four-square look of the buildings themselves: they are simple, matter-of-fact, nothing fancy, but despite the surface simplicity, they contain a weird pathos and a kind of menacing tension.

After photographing some of these rural buildings for years, repeatedly going back to the same spot to rephotograph the building and record its changes, Christenberry started making "sculptures" of these buildings. They seem to the viewer like models of the buildings, although he insists that they are not literal models, because he often creates them from imagination as well as from reference photographs. But they looked like pretty meticulous models to me. At first I didn't understand why Christenberry felt compelled to make a model of the green warehouse that he had photographed yearly for 20 years. What did the model do that the 20 photographs, arrayed in a grid, did not already convey? Then I realized that the point of the photographs--that the warehouse is gradually decaying, being overgrown by vines and trees--is offset somewhat by the model, and that there is no inconsistency in this: human artifacts like warehouses are transient, and nature wins in the end, but art is a way to make something permanent out of all the flux. In the end, when the real warehouse is gone, the model will be a "dream house," a work of memory and imagination. On one of the wall panels in the show, there is a quote by Faulkner about this: "The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life."


The models may also have something to do with Christenberry's love of actual objects, as opposed to images of objects. Some of the most powerful pieces in the show are made from objects he has collected. There is a collection of nearly identical Tops Snuff signs, in various stages of decay. The wall panel noted that it was sort of like Warhol's soup cans, only the opposite. I guess that means that Christenberry did not make an image of a soup can label; he took commercial signs and made an image out of the actual signs. In that respect, he is working more like Rauschenberg in this piece.

In another piece involving found objects or "ready-mades," he framed the pages of a calendar that belonged to his grandfather. His grandfather had a 1947 calendar, advertising various patent medicines, hanging by his bed. Over the years, he penciled onto the calendar important dates in the family's history: the date of his mother's birth in the 19th century; the date of his son's death; the date a tree fell down in the front yard. It is a bit like the ledger books that the McCaslin family keeps in Faulkner's Go Down, Moses. The juxtaposition of the very personal family history with the artifacts of early consumer culture is somehow moving. One is exhorted by the calendar to take "Black Draught Laxative," on the same page that a marriage, a birth, or a death in the family is recorded.

This piece--the framed collection of 12 calendar pages, juxtaposed with the grandfather's handmade walking cane--turns both Warhol and Rauschenberg on their heads in a very Southern way: here we have Pop art, sort of (the advertising); we have a combine, sort of (the calendar pages plus the cane). But the impersonality and slickness of Pop art and the surrealistic humor of Rauschenberg's combines have been transmogrified into something that's both more serious and less "arty" than Pop art or postmodernist art: the piece is like a magical totem, something ancient, more like folk art than fine art, a piece of a person's family history that goes back a hundred years. It has almost nothing to do with Duchamp, it seems to me. Something that seems at first like an object on the wall of a Cracker Barrel restaurant, once one examines the tiny penciled-in narrative in the squares on the calendar, becomes more like an ancient book or epic poem.