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Viewed Through Venetian Glass: An Artform is Reimagined to Capture World in Crisis for Stunning Exhibition

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While Venice, a world-mecca for glass art, became a famous casualty of the pandemic, the fires of one of her most famous glass workshops stayed white hot.

In the belly of Adriano Berengo, the workshop’s boss, a determination ran equally hot throughout the pandemic; a determination to ensure his 36 master glass makers remained employed, a determination to continue to put on events, and a determination to continue to prove to the art world that glass is not just a medium for applied art, but contemporary art at its highest form of expression.

Studio Berengo’s famous exhibition, Glasstress, has arrived in Boca Raton Florida for a 9-month stay, in which pieces from 34 different artists seek to capture the challenges faced by Venice — and the world, in modern times.

Themes such as racial injustice, censorship, climate change, and oppressive governments characterize the pieces, which as well as featuring brand new ones, include a greatest hits collection from past Glasstress exhibitions from 2009 to 2017, during which Studio Berengo has seen it go to Beirut, Stockholm, New York City, and other cities.

The Container of Thinking, by Yin Xiuzhen, 2015. Photo credit: Published.

The Container of Thinking, by Yin Xiuzhen, 2015. Photo credit: Published.

Invisible Sisyphus, by Dustin Yellin, 2017. Photo credit: Francesco Allegretto. Published.

Invisible Sisyphus, by Dustin Yellin, 2017. Photo credit: Francesco Allegretto. Published.

Strike Twice (detail) by Jimmie Durham. Photo credit: Francesco Allegretto. Published.

Strike Twice (detail) by Jimmie Durham. Photo credit: Francesco Allegretto. Published.

“Glasstress has different meanings: the first meaning is that to invent history took me a lot of stress!” Berengo tells WaL. “Also, stress, when you make any piece of glass you develop inside the material a stress, which can be measured by the way”.

“When I started to do this job, this dream, I started to go into the art world, and the art world is very difficult because you see when you speak about glass in the art world they look at you with a certain suspicion”.

A true Venetian, Berengo maintains a workshop on Murano Island, birthplace of the centuries-old tradition of Venetian glassmaking, which was in part honored with the designation of Intangible World Heritage last year by UNESCO.

“Glass is still a material for applied art, for craft, or decoration, or in the best of situations for functionality— the chandelier, the lights,” says Berengo. “So to use glass for art, it’s been difficult for me. Well this has happened over 35 years ago, so this is one of the reasons I had a lot of stress; to impose to the art world that glass can be a wonderful material for contemporary art”.

PICTURED: The artist Ai Weiwei with his massive glass-blown sculpture "Blossom Chandelier," in Venice. The large-scale installation bursts with unexpected shapes emanating from white glass flowers to surprise the eye: menacing handcuffs, twitter bir…
PICTURED: The artist Ai Weiwei with his massive glass-blown sculpture “Blossom Chandelier,” in Venice. The large-scale installation bursts with unexpected shapes emanating from white glass flowers to surprise the eye: menacing handcuffs, Twitter birds, security cameras, and the artist’s own hands flashing his middle finger (his angry response to the Chinese government that imprisoned him). Photo credit: Karolina Sobel. Published.

A daunting task

Getting hundreds of extremely delicate pieces of art across the ocean, arranged in a 6,500 square feet indoor exhibition space, during an international pandemic when the two participating countries have both suffered more than most under the presence of COVID-19, has been understandably difficult.

On Wednesday, Berengo told WaL that four of his craftsmen, traveling to Boca Raton to help assemble the pieces, including the Blossom Chandelier pictured above, had their ESTA visas revoked even though they were entering the country for business.

“We need to provide a visa, according to which the visit has a national interest,” he said.

“From the very beginning the whole concept [was] full of challenges,” says Irvin Lippman, Director of the Boca Raton Museum of Art. “Turning this year Glasstress has a completely different meaning, I mean stress is part of the word that is underscored”.

“But when you see the works here installed at the museum, you realize that there’s an essential and enduring quality to these works, that as fragile as they are, they have this great beauty — perhaps the metaphor for our times”.

Wael Shawky, Cabaret Crusade The battle of Hattin, 1187, after Jean Colombe for Mamerot's manuscript Les pasages d'Otremer, approximately 1474 - photo credit Francesco Allegretto (1).png
“Only courageous and brave artists like to venture into glass”.
PICTURED: Glass Big Brother, by Song Dong, one of the works that remains in its crate. Photo credit: Published.
PICTURED: Glass Big Brother, by Song Dong, one of the works that remains in its crate. Photo credit: Published.

The museum opened last June and has stayed open ever since Florida’s reopening from the first round of lockdowns, and has even used the downtime to complete renovations. The exhibition began in late January and will run until September 5th, during which Lippman hopes to put up the uninstalled works when the Italian maestros are finally able to arrive.

“They have attempted twice to get several of their installers over here. They got as far as Rome and they were turned back, I don’t think anyone understands the reason; they had all of their papers,” explains Lippman.

“We have left the crates in the gallery to remind folks that these works are still to come, and there’s a big sign as you walk into the gallery to let people know that this is one of the impacts that COVID has brought”.

A unique collaboration

Despite their enormity, powerful message, and vibrant colors, there is a humble nature in the pieces — a reflection of the fact that the artists selected by Berengo dreamed and designed, but when it came time to craft the material, it was all down to the maestros in Studio Berengo.

“Glass is a fascinating material to me because it’s a mix between fragility, but at the same time you need the strength of the craftsmen,” says Prune Nourry, the artist behind the piece “River Woman” — an anatomical chart of veins and arteries that could just as easily be a river system when viewed from satellite.

“With glass there is no mold,” says Berengo, who picks the artists that participate in Glasstress. “You have to learn by making mistakes. So artists are afraid in a way. Only courageous and brave artists like to venture into glass”.

“When you go to important artists, that’s when the difficulty arises, because important artists are linked to galleries most of the time, and the more important they are the more difficult it is to take them away from their shelter. So to force them to come out of their secure reign is quite difficult, because you bring them into a territory in which they know very little”.

It was a sentiment echoed by the Museum Curator, who selected the works for both this rendition of Glasstress and the previous one in 2017, Kathleen Goncharov, who told World at Large: “My guiding principles in curating this exhibition were to not just choose the best recent work, but to include artists who really rose to the challenge”.

“The real interesting thing to work with Berengo is that you have such wide range of possibilities,” says Vik Muniz, another artist involved in Glasstress 2021. “Every time I’m here I walk in, and I leave after a day or two with ideas to do ten different new things”.

Berengo does this every two years, the traditional schedule of Glasstress; going out, finding successful artists willing to go outside their comfort zone, bringing them back to his workshop, and dazzling them with the potential of traditional Murano glass techniques for contemporary art installations.

PICTURED: Palimpsest, by Andrew Houston, from Glasstress 2021, reflecting the Venice flooding. Photo credit: Published.
PICTURED: Palimpsest, by Andrew Houston, from Glasstress 2021, reflecting the Venice flooding. Photo credit: Published.

Sign of the times

The themes of the pieces started out topically, and as the pandemic arrived, they seemed to become even more topical. The biggest theme of which was Studio Beregno and the Glasstress artists managing to continue to work through the pandemic.

One of the most expensive places in Italy, it was in February of last year when some Chinese tourists unknowingly arrived in Venice that an epidemic was created in the country. From there, a principal source of income for the region of Veneto, almost all €12 billion of it, dried up, and a city that for 400 years has been used to flocks of foreign tourists crowding the streets, went eerily quiet.

“I could develop projects nevertheless, so I was one of the lucky ones. I work with galleries in America, in Germany, in Belgium, in Austria, so I can survive somehow — it was not so bad for me,” says Berengo, who noted his home has become largely shuttered.

Then as usual, floods damaged the city, reflected in the poetry of Andrew Huston’s piece Palimpsest — a rubber wading boot, the kind worn every year by Venetians during high waters, or Aqua Alta, filled with oyster and mussel shells; a vision of the present and future of the great city if such global sea levels continue to rise unabated.

The pandemic loomed, and continues to loom, over the mental setting of this exhibition, wherein the phrase “non-essential” has become commonplace among government-mandated closures of businesses in both countries.

But Lippman and Berengo certainly feel there is no excuse for excluding art from our lives, the former pointing out that wide museum galleries couldn’t be better suited to social distancing measures, which the guests are very cognizant of; who overall are having an “overwhelmingly positive” response to the exhibition so far.

When asked if art should be considered an essential business, Berengo was less-reserved, responding in a tone wonderfully typical of Italians: “Art is, yeah. Is that the question?”

“I have 36 people on the payroll!” he adds. “It is double essential now… in my case making culture is also [a way] to fight against this damn pandemic, and the negative side of our lives now”.

“So I think culture is always a means to make you stronger, to make you aware that part of the difficulty of life is that you have to be ready; you have to go ahead and fight”. WaL

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Andy Corbley

Corbley@worldatlarge.news
https://www.worldatlarge.news
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