For me, there is profound separation between the elements of the world I encounter, those that express in the cinematic vocabulary and those that do not.
Movies. They change everything because they grow a vocabulary of abstraction. That vocabulary saturates our imagination and gives us new tools (or perhaps constraints) in the way we assemble the world to present to ourselves — and incidentally others.
In this stew is art. Some of the art uses and extends the cinematic memes. Some of that matters because the artist so deeply understands me that he can speak to me and some matters merely because it can speak not to me, but to the way I think.
Chihuly is that latter. His glass art is cinematic, created in a context of graphic expression that is thoroughly modern, depending on our ability to think of motion, light, emotion and desire in the same context. All of our comprehension of form is informed by cinema now, and most of the new vision.
So when I experience Chuhily's work, especially the assemblies, I teeter on boundaries between what is known and not, what is seen and not, where I want to be and am not. Its about frozen desire, a frozen phase shift into an unknown future.
Part of that experience is the knowledge of how these are made: that there is some hot pool of molten goo into which someone breathes and touches. We know that there is a spontaneous choreography of a team that responds to all sorts of things: the somewhat unpredictable emergence of form, the expected appreciation they are guessing at and the sheer avoidance of serious harm. We know this dance of the team surrounds the dance frozen in the glass.
So it is a sort of church, to encounter this in a film. What we have here is a documentary which is simply a film of a week of glass creation. These are centered on Chihuly the man. We have the master musicians, superstars who have passed through his world and gone on to celebrity and who come back for a reunion. These folks are leaving their own art territories to revisit his.
We have the existing team that is part of the place. They have their own fluid choreography based on long familiarity and years of experience with the forms. Different forms are the focus on different days, and morning or afternoon sessions. And we have the man, Chihuly.
The forms are marvelous of course. My own preference is for the less decorated objects. The "Persians" and "Venetians" do not interest me at all. Its the baskets, seaforms and huge assemblies that touch me. Nothing they do here is as good as what you can actually see in various places around the world in real life. But seeing the process makes those real life experiences with the static objects much deeper. So I will recommend this highly. Very highly.
The odd thing, the black spot in fact, is the presence of the artist. Here, he is not active. We see him doing some drawings, crude and largely irrelevant. We see him on the side, not directing, not creating at all. Its as if he was already dead and simply observing a celebratory funeral. Very sad: no flow now from him. The glass is cold.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.
Movies. They change everything because they grow a vocabulary of abstraction. That vocabulary saturates our imagination and gives us new tools (or perhaps constraints) in the way we assemble the world to present to ourselves — and incidentally others.
In this stew is art. Some of the art uses and extends the cinematic memes. Some of that matters because the artist so deeply understands me that he can speak to me and some matters merely because it can speak not to me, but to the way I think.
Chihuly is that latter. His glass art is cinematic, created in a context of graphic expression that is thoroughly modern, depending on our ability to think of motion, light, emotion and desire in the same context. All of our comprehension of form is informed by cinema now, and most of the new vision.
So when I experience Chuhily's work, especially the assemblies, I teeter on boundaries between what is known and not, what is seen and not, where I want to be and am not. Its about frozen desire, a frozen phase shift into an unknown future.
Part of that experience is the knowledge of how these are made: that there is some hot pool of molten goo into which someone breathes and touches. We know that there is a spontaneous choreography of a team that responds to all sorts of things: the somewhat unpredictable emergence of form, the expected appreciation they are guessing at and the sheer avoidance of serious harm. We know this dance of the team surrounds the dance frozen in the glass.
So it is a sort of church, to encounter this in a film. What we have here is a documentary which is simply a film of a week of glass creation. These are centered on Chihuly the man. We have the master musicians, superstars who have passed through his world and gone on to celebrity and who come back for a reunion. These folks are leaving their own art territories to revisit his.
We have the existing team that is part of the place. They have their own fluid choreography based on long familiarity and years of experience with the forms. Different forms are the focus on different days, and morning or afternoon sessions. And we have the man, Chihuly.
The forms are marvelous of course. My own preference is for the less decorated objects. The "Persians" and "Venetians" do not interest me at all. Its the baskets, seaforms and huge assemblies that touch me. Nothing they do here is as good as what you can actually see in various places around the world in real life. But seeing the process makes those real life experiences with the static objects much deeper. So I will recommend this highly. Very highly.
The odd thing, the black spot in fact, is the presence of the artist. Here, he is not active. We see him doing some drawings, crude and largely irrelevant. We see him on the side, not directing, not creating at all. Its as if he was already dead and simply observing a celebratory funeral. Very sad: no flow now from him. The glass is cold.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.
