GLASS ACT

As the Venice Biennale enters its final weeks, and with the disappointment and controversy surrounding this year’s American Pavilion still lingering, it seems a worthwhile exercise to consider which concurrent presentations in the city might better reflect aspects of the contemporary American experience. There is of course Helter Skelter, Nancy Spector’s Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince exhibition at Fondazione Prada, which pairs the two master manipulators of the found image to startling effect. The two-person exhibition reflects a tension, both aesthetic and philosophical, that vibrates through almost every facet of contemporary American society.

Another, perhaps more straightforward presentation in Venice this year represents a different set of prominent, if contestable, American values. CHIHULY: Venice 2026, a presentation of three monumental sculptures by Seattle-based artist Dale Chihuly, exemplifies an American fixation with grand scale and bold expression, even at the risk of excess. It also reveals a simultaneous collaboration with, and rejection of, nature, alongside an insistence on pursuing a singular, sometimes controversial vision of beauty and perfection.

CHIHULY: Venice 2026 is a sequel to the artist’s last major presentation in the city, Chihuly Over Venice, in 1996. For an artist whose career has been defined by glass, Venice — with centuries of glassmaking history centered on Murano — is hardly a neutral setting. Developed across 1995 and 1996, that earlier project involved teams of glassmakers working in Finland, Ireland, Mexico, Italy, and the United States, culminating in the installation of 14 “chandeliers” around Venice. By then, Chihuly was already a major figure in contemporary glass. He had established the glass program at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he taught for 11 years, and in 1971 co-founded the Pilchuck Glass School in Washington (with Anne Gould Hauberg and John Hauberg). Now 85, he stands as one of the medium’s defining American artists. An artist who works on such a scale could never truly be said to embrace the philosophy “less is more,” but CHIHULY: Venice 2026 reveals a more concentrated and deliberate approach, shaped by more than five decades of practice and creative maturation.

Pieces like Gold Tower, Blue Tower, and End of Day wriggle into the Venice sky like infectious spires, constructed from thousands of handblown glass tendrils made in Seattle, shipped overseas, and painstakingly assembled over the course of two weeks in Venice. Gold Tower, which stands 32 feet high in the 16th-century garden adjoining Palazzo Franchetti, evokes a sunbeam, curling beautifully but malignantly toward its prey. You can look, but not directly, and you certainly can’t touch. Each individually blown spiral is hooked, one by one, onto a metal armature in Chihuly’s Washington studio before being taken apart for shipment and reassembled on site. Considering the process required to produce these works, you come to understand Chihuly’s practice as a kind of endurance art. Its interest lies in the making. Visually, the works are abrupt; awe-inspiring, but only insofar as we cannot conceive of how they were made, or how they remain standing, perpetually untouched and frighteningly fragile.

Blue Tower stands over 26 feet high in a private courtyard visible across the canal from its gold sister. End of Day is the smallest piece Chihuly created for the presentation, at just under 20 feet. This fixation with size is perhaps Chihuly’s most visibly American quality. Another is his desire for both his own work and the wider practice of glassblowing to be accessible and shared democratically, as evidenced by his dedication to glass education. But that appreciation for the common is also visible in his deeply uncommon work. A Hobby Lobby devotee from Middle America might see boatfuls of Christmas ornaments; a scientist might see a DNA sequence; an engineer might see an impressive technical feat; an art collector might see the artist whose work hangs over the entrance to the Victoria and Albert Museum, or remember that his chandeliers fetched nearly $200,000 at auction in the early 2000s.

Perhaps what is most interesting in his work is the simultaneous fascination and repulsion it can inspire. Chihuly’s chandeliers have a heavenly quality, but less fluffy clouds and more the many-eyed, many-limbed angels of the Book of Revelation. As Venice transitions from late summer into fall, the sculptures still on view writhe as well as they dance; they are both gorgeous and monstrous, shocking and, several decades in, monotonous. Audacious the work will always be, marrying the physical exertion required in its production with the joy Chihuly intends as its impact.