Art On The Fringe Of (Studio) Glass

WALTER ZIMMERMAN FROM 1980 TO NOW

Urban Unit #3, Red. 18" x 15" x 12"

"I was trying to push my glass making further and further from the accepted 
realm of high technique...[the work was] less about glass 
(if it spoke of glass at all) and more about things of the flesh."                                                           -W. Zimmerman, 2014

Section Three, detail (glass)  2004. Firehouse Gallery, Burlington, VT.

When Walter Zimmerman engaged in this interview, I had no idea how much I would identify with his experience working on the edges of the Glass world. Overlooked at times, he speaks of rejection and ironic revival.  His resounding thoughts are those of many who work on the outskirts of their medium.  Zimmerman embodies the artist on a road that left Studio Glass, or was never there to begin with.

Now, as Glass becomes an integrated Art material,  Zimmerman's older work suddenly feels like it was always an obvious step toward the 21st Century.  His path is not a linear evolution from Glass to Art, rather, he was on a far away ledge from the start. With late-career recognition, Zimmerman leaves us with the ongoing question:


"what makes a work or idea become accepted by critics, collectors, and other artists?"

Journal (part of Installation below)

NOTE TO THE READER:
This 4-question article is a gift of historical humor and explanations of an artist's subconscious. Due to being a treasure to me personally, I decided to leave most answers in their entirety. I believe that it will be enjoyed, especially by those who have walked alone. If the reading requires too much time, scroll to the end for the best story of all!                                                   -S.R. Rockriver

QUESTION:
1. How has your work evolved over the years? In terms of your choosing, such as content, material, personal narrative, universal narrative, etc...

WALTER ZIMMERMAN:
"In terms of the evolution of my work, and specifically concerning changes in content, I don't feel there's been much change, if any at all.  My work has always sprung mainly from the collision of chance -- the discarded metal box in the dumpster, the knot of wire in the gutter -- and a kind of inner flash of intuition, that serves as the starting point for the adventure of making new work.  (Which, by the way, I avoid doing unless I absolutely must.  To goad myself into making any work at all, I find commitments which I feel obliged to honor, and use my early, guilt-ridden Presbyterian upbringing to propel me toward meeting my obligations.)Whatever content there may be springs from my interest in things non-artistic: insect life; economics; social phenomena; all guided, when the going gets murky, by references to my toxic childhood.

Journal  (detail below)

Journal
For Gallery: Click to Enlarge

A further, more recent development has been my shift from glass-centered sculptures, to larger, more figurative works, many of which I want to suspend in the viewing space, either from the ceiling, or from specially-constructed, industrial-looking wall-mounted braces.  This work sprang largely from a time constraint, although I'd explored the techniques over twenty years ago, when I was entertaining the idea of a career in Art Therapy.  I made some cardboard and plastic and yarn hanging objects that I intended to resemble the cocoons and chrysalides that moths and butterflies occupy during their metamorphosis.  In 2010, I was in a large group show at the Pritchard Gallery of the University of Idaho, in Moscow ID, and I had to be on site to install my work.   I was thrilled to be in this show, as the De La Torre brothers were the stars, and I got to go out drinking with them.  

Section Three, detail

But awaiting me back at home was a commitment to a three-person invitational at a well-known local community gallery.  And I had only time enough to make one of my labor-intensive glass-focused cart pieces, so I made a five-piece suite of larger versions of those old chrysalides -- one of them being longer than I am tall (6'2" without my work boots), and devised hanging brackets of black gas pipe.  The principle materials here were plastic sump pump hose, plastic drop cloths and trash bags of varying thicknesses, and a surface coat of amber shellac.  I've continued making such pieces ever since, and have also begun creating smaller, rectangular 'close-ups' of the hanging works -- almost in the spirit of diagnostic images, or illustrations for a medical text.  I thought about including my glass shapes in these figures, but decided that such a move was gratuitous, as the works clearly didn't need the burden of another material, however similar it might be, in form or surface quality.  I've continued with these works, as well as creating the occasional glass piece, as the new one I made for the Fellows' exhibit at the Wheaton Village Museum of American Glass.

Note: works in this article that feature Glass:  URBAN UNIT- SECTION THREE- CART, RED

Section Three, detail

Material changes…   Having lived in apartments for my entire adult life, I had never even seen a dry-wall screw before 1992!  At the same time, I was trying to push my glass making further and further from the accepted realm of high technique and the search for perfection, and deeper into a use of the material that spoke less about glass (if it spoke of glass at all) and more about things of the flesh.  Now, I tend to buy unused industrial materials, as my construction vocabulary has sharpened, and I don't have time to wait for a length of copper tubing to show up by the side of the road. 

Perhaps more importantly, since I left my college teaching position, and have lost a reliable and affordable access to a hot glass facility, I have been using non-glass materials, such as plastics, which I treat with a heat gun, using heat to shrink my work, instead of inflating it.  But I think that the impact of glass is undeniable, even in work using such radically different materials.  Transparency, layering of 'events', accumulation of material, and a sense of vulnerability remain crucial factors in my current work.

Journal

Personal narrative…  Let me tell you two seemingly unrelated little stories.  In undergraduate school, I discovered theater.  One of my teachers was a grad student -- Rosie Pickering.  Because she was also working on her MFA, she was in a lot of plays.  In her performance in The Three Sisters, when the lights came up, she was found in her bedroom, crying disconsolately.  Every night.  During a class, another student asked how Rosie managed to be so consistently heart-broken, night after night.  She said that there was a particular emotional place she could access, that never failed to bring her to tears.  When the student went on to ask what that place was, Rosie said that she would not reveal this, because of her conviction that sharing this intimate knowledge would erase the power this place had for her.  

Neva, detail. Entire: 38" x  34"

When I was working on my own MFA in glassblowing, I had a critique with an adjunct in the Foundations Department, Pam Blum.  She was a brilliant intellect, and I was actually a little frightened of having her look at my work.  When she was able to visit my studio, I'd already begun dismantling an installation I'd made, as an end-of-semester project.  Rather than focusing only on the intact work still on the walls, she began responding to the entire visual array in front of her -- including the traces of work I'd already taken down.  Holes left by cup hooks, on which I'd built a set of cocoon-like sketches, in which my glass objects were hidden.  I was astonished at her openness to addressing what was right in front of her, instead of what she was 'supposed' to look at.  But I felt guilty, and over a cheeseburger, I confessed that, for the most part, I didn't really 'know' what I was doing, at least in the terms I felt she would understand.  She seemed unphased.  'Oh,' she said, 'not knowing is always better than knowing.  But when not knowing doesn't work, you'd better know.'  I call this The Pam Blum Dictum.

So.  If my work has a narrative, it's usually something almost hallucinatory -- as when I was working on my piece 'Safety Yellow', and for some reason I found myself thinking of what it would be like, if I were a newly defunded medical researcher, working in a Southeast Asian jungle during the rainy season, and trying desperately to find a cure for malaria.  (When, in fact, I was building the piece as a formal variation of '600-D', the work hidden somewhere in the basement of the Renwick...)  Another work seemed to crystalize itself when, after my partner complained about the bottles I'd let accumulate beside our kitchen sink, I began putting the bottles in a wine box, so it would be easier to get them all to the dumpster.  By the time I'd inserted perhaps three of the seven or eight glass wine bottles into the egg-crate innards of the box, the basic vision for 'One Doesn't' coalesced.  And as I began working to transform that cardboard box -- which is still the physical basis for the piece, although it's been completely covered with aluminum sheeting -- I somehow started thinking about a recent news article, revealing the new prison practice, of having inmates work, at maybe a quarter per hour, on profit-making products for the prison administrations.  It's unclear to me, whether this tangential idea actually had any impact on the work, but it was on my mind as I kept working. 

Due Process (suspended hospital gurney)

When I work, then, I begin with an intuitive flash.  And, when inspiration -- or Pm Blum's 'not knowing' -- flags, I go to my reliable source of inner clarity -- a place that can, unfailingly, help me back to clarity.  In my case, unlike Rosie's, I can safely reveal that my 'tool for knowing' is my family.  A number of my pieces are, for me, family portraits -- but I never talk about this with viewers, as I'm far less interested in telling a specific story, and much more interested in creating work which will, I hope, radiate meaning, and will provide viewers with a catalyst for their own imaginings.

Which brings us to universal narrative.  And as much as it makes me flinch to admit to the creation of didactic, programmatic or tendentious sculpture, there is a consistent set of concerns underpinning my work -- besides the general retelling of my life with my toxic family of origin, that is -- inform my material and formal creative choices.  

Section Three, detail

If the perfect piece of glass, behind a protective barrier, or secure on a pristine pedestal, is the ideal, what am I worth, broken human that I am?  What good am I, if I've been wounded, or am imperfect, or headed irrevocably in the wrong direction?  What do my vulnerabilities look like, and how do they change the way others see me and/or themselves?  These, I feel, are questions that few artists working in glass come anywhere close to addressing.   And are certainly not subjects many collectors seem interested in keeping around their houses, or at least out in plain sight."

QUESTION:
2. What is the relationship between the narrative and treatment of materials?

WALTER ZIMERMAN:
"I choose materials that have, in general, no special intrinsic or social value: industrial parts, found objects of dubious history, blown glass shapes that are deliberately unlovely and look unclean.  Plastics and rubber help evoke physicality, fleshiness and a certain emotional numbness. 

 I generally put layer after layer of unattractive paints and shellac onto the support structures built, most often, of copper plumbing pipe (it's so easy to sweat solder, and that's probably the most sophisticated process I use, aside from the glassblowing, of course), but lately, also black iron gas pipe. 

Individual Piece From 21-section assembly
 (each 18" x 12" x 10"): 

JOURNAL: 21 DAYS LEVEL FOUR.

My urge here is to create the visual equivalent of the passage of time -- it's amazing how easy it is to convey time, by building up thick layers of sloppy paint.  I also prefer that things look sloppy and indifferently done, when they're not rigidly controlled and reeking of the clinic and the research lab.  

Layers: Section Three

And after the initial gathers of glass -- which I treat as though I were planning to make a lovely vase -- I put the piece through a set of layerings and water quenchings, which give the brand-new, 45-minute-old piece of glass the convincing air of something just unearthed from a centuries-long burial.  

And, because I don't want the viewer to feel too comfortable with, or protected from a piece that might seem to have come from some distant past that is no longer a threat, I try always to include one element that looks especially clean or new or relatively unimpacted by the trauma apparently suffered by everything else in the piece."

Journal

QUESTION:

3. What growth have you seen in Art from the early1990's until now?

WALTER ZIMMERMAN:
"To be brutally honest (sorry for the change in type size here -- the computer raises its inexplicably tyrannical head yet again…) I don't really pay much attention to what is referred to as 'the contemporary art world'.  Ben Shahn is credited with this: If I go to an art show opening, and the work is bad, I'm angry with myself because I'm not back in my studio, working.  If I go to an art show opening, and the work is wonderful, I'm angry with myself because I'm not back in my studio working.  I find most of the galleries in New York to be a reliable source for a potent atmospheric combination of intimidation and condescending indifference.   Which is made all the more galling, when the work on display is so very very poor, and in place for God only knows what reason.  From the occasional contact I have with other artists I respect, I am not alone in these reactions.

As for the term 'growth', I think that in itself is a loaded term, implying a linear, coherent, progressive development in a field where, it seems to me, there isn't much indication of a common cohesive thrust, or a shared set of standards.  This may not be unique in art history, which only looks logical and progressive, because hindsight is always 20/20. 

Bone of My Bone, 60" x 36" x 18" Amos Eno, Brooklyn, NY.

That said, I do think that, as far as contemporary glass and artists working with glass today, there has been more of a trend toward mixed-media work, and the creation of objects and installations which fall outside the classic 'thin is good, delicate is the goal, more dolphins please' purview.  (And I wouldn't be so frank here, if I didn't sincerely feel so irrelevant to, and marginalized by, so many of my fellow artists working in glass.  I suspect that, pleasant though I can be socially, I'm still considered to be something of an insignificant art joke)  When I was still actively teaching, as a full-time college professor, struggling in an impoverished imitation glass facility to help my students realize their ideas, I was consistently amazed and gratified by the diversity and imaginativeness of the work these glass novices were producing.  But, as so many of us know, within two years of graduation, most former art students aren't working in anything resembling an art career.  It is interesting to watch post academic careers...I so hope I'm wrong, with regard to the societal shuffling aside of these young energies."  

... The topic of this article hit on a deeper life note here, at the end of our interview...this was part of a private conversation we agreed to print...

QUESTION:
Do you think that your approach was overlooked due to a slanted view of Glass at the time?
(For instance, I personally found that my work once was way too radical, dirty, aged, natural, raw, and not glassy enough...It now it seems to have contributed to a generation that is quickly evolving.)

WALTER ZIMMERMAN:
"Another aside, vis a vis the level at which my work seems to have settled, in the eyes of the collecting population: for several years, I faithfully offered a small, tightly-made piece of my work for the annual fundraising auction for UrbanGlass.  The first piece was actually bought.  After that, my work -- always relegated to the silent auction --  generated not a single bid.  Until finally, the folks in charge of the annual fundraiser contacted me and asked that I not contribute work any more, as they were tired of paying the return postage.  How flattering is that?"

And this, in spite of critical attention, consistent exhibition activity, visible presence as a board member of CGCA, and the bare fact that Dale Chihuly himself bought $15,000 worth of my work, to make it possible for me to produce a catalog, for the little solo show I had at the Everson Museum, in 1997.  One of the pieces he bought -- a work from my MFA exhibit, by the way, was donated, under his name, to the Renwick --

Cart, Red. detail, 2002. 62"  x 22" x 12".

Further, to update things, Sculpture Magazine published, relatively recently, 'A Sculpture Reader;  Contemporary Sculpture Since 1980'  Along with reviews of Martin Puryear, Anne Hamilton, Tony Oursler, etc. etc, is an essay on my work.  If I'm not mistaken, I'm the only artist in the book who works with glass.  What, one wonders, does it take, to establish one's artistic credentials, vis a vis the museum and collecting communities?"

Addendum:

Just as our time came to a close,  I was not sure that Mr. Zimmerman had said everything could about his view on materials and content. As is clear by the work, he is deeply engaged in a process in which he creates his own language. The topic of technique and material came up in the Glass Secessionism Facebook Group.

This is what Zimmerman had to say:

"Well, as a glass artist whose work is frequently mistaken for some other materials (though no one ever specifies just what these other materials might be) I would say that there are many techniques. Many techniques focus on the dexterity of the artists themselves, and produce objects which are immediately appealing to, and reassuring of, commonly-accepted cultural values and go. My techniques produce results that aren't pretty, and don't have dolphins all over the place. My techniques focus more on glass's incomparable capacity for evoking tensions and surface conditions native to the human experience. My techniques, and the works made by those techniques, challenge viewers, by providing an opportunity to examine those viewers' biases about beauty and function. One underlying question my unlovely, encrusted mounds of glass objects brings up is this: can you only love or respect that which is perfect, which is precious, and which is immediately pleasant to look at? If this is so, what are you going to do when the one you love most isn't perfect, or usefully productive, or beautiful anymore? This question, rarely answered, at least in my experience, is not an idle one -- and I feel that without access to, and use of my particular version of technique, asking this poignant, inescapable core human question, through the use of glass and its silent physical eloquence, would be impossible.    

FINAL NOTES
Walter Zimmerman has a personal narrative that manifests through his and our subconscious. His work undergoes tremendous stress and pressure as it becomes a reflection of a private psyche. The works are journals of struggle, survival, protection, anguish, and age. Each piece echoes of Zimmerman's voice and time intensive revisions. Unearthed after enduring treatments, these works live to tell the story of their birth,  torture, and recovery.

Zimmerman at Amos Eno, 2014. VISION/REVISION, solo exhibition.

Materials for Journal Pieces: backing supports of homasote board, 18" x 12". Understructures of plastic shopping bags, stuffing from old quilts, crushed (and rinsed) half gallon plastic milk jugs, knots of sump pump hose.

        

    -WALTER ZIMMERMAN,  2014 interview conducted by S.R. Rockriver