Exhibitions 3
Glass, Space and Light (Crafts Council, 44A Pentonville Road, N1, till 30 November, then touring)
Dangerous stuff
Alan Powers
Glass is a material which creates a par- ticular kind of excitement, whether it is held in the hand or raised into a building. This excitement has been felt at different times in the development of architecture, from the stained glass which seemed to the mediaeval Scholastics to be a metaphor of divine illumination, to the palm houses and covered shopping arcades of the Regency, and then, after a long period of stasis, the strange combination of the technical and the spiritual in the early Modern move- ment.
A visionary book, Glasarchitektur by Paul Scheerbart (only ever translated into English in brief excerpts), proclaimed a see-through world in 1914, where physical transparency becomes a spiritual and moral accompaniment to the liberation of the spirit. This excitement` was transmitted from Germany to England at the end of the 1920s, most particularly through the work of a young Australian, Raymond McGrath, for a highly eccentric Cambridge don, Mansfield Forbes, who used glass and other shimmering materials to transform the ground floor of a Victorian house, now the home of the composer and Spectator contributor Robin Holloway. As a patron concerned with mythological symbolism (the house was named Finella after a leg- endary queen of Scotland who was sup- posed to have invented glass and died `Global warming ha's certainly put a new spin on Wagner.' falling down a waterfall) Forbes induced a kind of magic into glass that raised it above the level of functionalism, something that echoed however brassily through Thirties super-cinemas and the Lyons Corner Houses designed by Oliver Bernard, father of the late lamented Jeffrey.
Like so many things in the 1960s, glass lost its magic. In Jacques Tati's film Play- time, 1969, the modern `Tativille' of smooth reflective skyscrapers has to be disrupted in order that humanity can survive, its trans- parency revealing only a banality of indus- trial life. In the same era, David Jones, mingling Ezekiel and science fiction in a vision of modernity, found 'the glazed work unrefined and the terrible crystal a stage- paste'. Glass is dangerous stuff, therefore. It can mould itself to metaphorical shapes and conditions, but, like Hans Andersen's Snow Queen, it has the power to shatter and chill the heart.
In the 1990s we are in a new period of glassy activity. Glass has developed techni- cally to new levels of strength and decora- tive subtlety. It no longer represents just window or cladding, but can also be used in structure and insulation. In all its roles it can be the vehicle for the artist, whether working in mechanically produced texture or tone, variable in different lights,' or the more traditional arts of design in respect of glass: engraving, painting and staining. Aspects of these are illustrated in the exhi- bition Glass, Space and Light, featuring work by 11 artists, one of whom, Alexander Beleschenko, has curated the exhibition with Tim Macfarlane, a structural engineer. It is a welcome excursion by the Crafts Council directly into the realm of architec- ture, almost without architects being involved, apart from the exhibition design- er Diane Lewis from New York and a con- tribution to the catalogue from our own Richard MacCormac.
The form of the exhibition wrestles with the rather intractable space in the Crafts Council's galleries, scoring points by forcibly linking the front and rear galleries with a low-ceilinged walkway, and opening up an uncommon amount of light and space without a great deal of glass in the main rooms which most curators tend to crowd with objects. This is an exhibition for the well-motivated, where a reading of the catalogue is essential, for the objects them- selves do not create the sensation that the same techniques could achieve when fully applied in context. To see Danny Lane's technique of piling up cut slabs of glass into green columns, try the new Glass gal- leries at the V&A or his work in a different technique at the TAD Centre, Middles- brough. For Alexander Beleschenko's sub- tle screens of alternating mirror and clear glass, go to MacCormac's Garden Quad at St John's, Oxford, or the International Conference Centre in Birmingham.
The most immediately appealing pieces are, not surprisingly, those which look best in detail close to, like Daniela Granzin's milky cast glass tubes or Douglas Hogg's stained glass, traditional in technique if not in content. Lane is one of the artists inter- ested in the way that glass breaks, another is Deborah Thomas who accidentally start- ed making magical but rather dangerous- looking chandeliers out of broken shards. This exhibition may not spell the message out in the most obvious way, but the stage- paste seems on the point of turning into real jewels.
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