You've probably already decided if you're going to the Museum of Fine Arts to see "Chihuly: Through the Looking Glass," the big new exhibit of blown glass works from the studios of Dale Chihuly. Odds are either you love his beautiful and bizarre sculptures or you find them annoying in their overabundance, both individual and collective. People have strong feelings about Chihuly, as the reaction to Sebastian Smee's Globe review last month showed. Letter writers and online commenters split between those endorsing and those outraged by Smee's view of the exhibit as resembling "daily deliveries of unwanted flowers after a regretted one-night transgression."
Well, maybe. But I found myself walking back for seconds.
Smee wrote that he has "no quibbles with Chihuly’s factory-style operation, his terrific rate of production, or his immense popularity. None at all." The first two issues do bother me. Unless you're a conceptualist addressing the mass-produced, digitally distributed nature of our society, "factory-style" is not a term you want applied to your creations. Extruding mass quantities of purty things in assembly-line fashion belongs to the realm of craft or even commerce, not art. Chihuly is no longer hands-on with much of the work. He functions as sort of a guiding spirit here and in the myriad other places where Chihuly glass is displayed. Any three masters of fine art students ought to be able to produce reams of artspeak hashing out whether that's enough. I'll just say it troubles me and leave it at that.
People are also divided about the presentation of the exhibit, primarily in the shadowy, subterranean Ann and Graham Gund Gallery beneath the new MFA courtyard. Beautifully subtle lighting and staging flatter completely over-the-top presentation like the overstuffed "Ikebana Boat," above, and the 58-foot-long sea floor tableau (my interpretation) of "Mille Fiori," below.
Yes, it's tasteless at times and overabundant and even a little Disney. The way some people feel about that, you'd expect the next Chihuly exhibit to be in the bargain aisle at the Christmas Tree Shops. (A stroll through the exhibit gift shop says that's unlikely; small pieces of Chihuly glass on sale are in the four-figure price range.) But walking through the exhibit, I found myself seduced by the surfaces and reflections, the Seussian forms on that sea floor and the strange and beautiful qualities of light found in the depths of his "chandeliers," below. If there's deeper meaning to any of Chihuly's works, it's not apparent, but as Smee notes, not really needed. This is beauty for beauty's sake, overripe and sometimes goofy. Turns out, if this is wrong, I don't want to be right.
The one real bump in the presentation was the much-vaunted "Persian Ceiling," a small room where the glass ceiling supports a thick layer of scattered glass pieces - as if the "Ikebana Boat" had a glass bottom and you were looking up at it. Nice idea, perhaps, but badly executed. The room is small and claustrophobic and crowded. The only way to enjoy the ceiling without twisting onself into a pretzel is to lie down on the floor, which is not practical for most. And there are enough little gaps between the glass pieces that, looking up, I was repeatedly blinded by white spotlights that illuminate the work from above. It felt, at the time, like a morning-after reminder of the daylight outside, of the consequences of dallying here.
Image credits:
Top - Dale Chihuly
Palazzo di Loredana Balboni Chandelier (2011)
Monterrey, Mexico
Blown glass, steel
Courtesy of Chihuly Studio
9 x 7 x 7’
Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
© 2011 Chihuly Studio, all rights reserved
Dale Chihuly
Ikebana Boat (2008)
de Young Museum, San Francisco, California
6 x 16 x 7’
Photo by Teresa Nouri Rishel
© 2011 Chihuly Studio, all rights reserved
Bottom two images by me, all rights reserved.
