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Why did the artist Dale Chihuly decide to create an installation
of his work in Jerusalem? There are several reasons. As a young
man in the 1960s, he had traveled to the middle east and worked
on a kibbutz in Israel, an experience that profoundly changed
his attitude towards work (he found that he liked to work). Around
the same time he made a trip to Jordan to look at the extraordinary
ancient city of Petra, whose monumental scale and buildings carved
from the living rock impressed him deeply. So a return to the middle
east has been, for Chihuly, a trip back into his own past.
The only other place that had as profound an impact upon the
young artist was Venice, a city renowned for its canals but also
as a center for glassmaking. From the first time that he blew,
with his own breath, a tiny bubble of glass (alone in a little
studio in the basement of a house in Tacoma), Chihuly knew that
he wanted to work with glass as an artist - and as a magician, because
he has always found the ability of breath to give life to glass
to be magical. But then, all artists are magicians, aren't they?
In Venice, Chihuly observed teams making glass and quickly realized
that glassmaking is a communal art form (somewhat like a kibbutz?).
But it took him years and years to assemble all the elements for
creating glass with a skilled team: imagine the monumental creative
effort involved in assembling a symphony orchestra or in making
a feature film, and you gain some perspective on the project.
And also, imagine Chihuly as the conductor of the symphony (and
the composer of the music) or as the director of the film (and
its script writer) and you will gain an understanding of the
artist's role as leader of the team.
With his team, Chihuly created, in the late 1970s and throughout
the 1980s and early 1990s' extraordinary objects: nested sets of
glass Baskets inspired by Northwest American Indian baskets;
gossamer Seaforms the color of ocean sprays; Macchias, explorations
of every possible color combination; and Venetians, a series derived
from historical forms that have been described as "more Venetian
than Venetian glass itself."
Despite the success of these table top size sculptures, Chihuly
would never have returned to Jerusalem and attempted an installation
in a location as gigantic as the Tower of David Museum if not
for a fundamental change around 1992 in the way he constructed
his work. Although throughout his career he has produced large
scale installations (in ice, with sheets of flat glass, with
glass tendril forms, or with blown disks mounted on walls), it
was only in the 1990s that he pursued a way to produce blown
glass components that could be assembled into large sculptures,
which he first called Chandeliers.
The results of this exploration are the subject of this internet
presentation of Chihuly in the Light of Jerusalem 2000. They
range from a Yellow Chandelier at the entrance to the exhibition, to
a 40 foot plus tall Blue Tower with 2000 glass arms, to a Crystal
Mountain, perhaps the artists largest sculpture to date. Chihuly
has returned a gift of beautiful objects to the region that nurtured
him a young man.
IN THE
LIGHT OF JERUSALEM
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