The House That Del Built

The Intellectual Musings of an Improv Wonk.

Objects of Art

As this is being posted, I am conducting my final preparations for my first ever big-girl grown-up trip to Europe—Italy, to be exact. I tell you this firstly because it means that there won’t be a blog post next week. Sure, I could queue one up, but there’s something weird to me about an improv blog post I wrote two weeks ago suddenly popping up in the virtual universe while I’m on a very real gondola in Venice.

Venice, incidentally, is what I’d like to talk about today. But wait, we have to free associate our way there: you see, the first time I saw a Dale Chihuly sculpture was in Las Vegas. It was at the Bellagio, but, you know, that’s sorta like the Venetian, in that it is in Las Vegas and opulent and is just the kind of place that would have this on the ceiling in the entryway:

Anyway, this past week I went to the Chihuly exhibit at the MFA in Boston. If you’ve never seen a Chihuly piece, they’re these huge, brightly colored organic-shaped glass sculpture installations. Some look like reeds, some look like flowers, some look like the ocean floor filled with mollusks and jellyfish and seaweed. They’re all interesting, and many are downright breathtaking.

The particular installation pictured below looked, to me, like that first scene in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory when Gene Wilder first opens the doors to his magical world (notice it’s on a boat—Venice, again):

Then I read the following explanation by Chihuly himself regarding the genesis of the concept for the piece:

This all came about because when we were in Finland the first time in 1995, I got the idea of throwing some of the glass in the river, and I wanted to see how easily the glass would break or if it did break. And so I got up on a bridge and started throwing…and the glass—well, maybe one or two broke out of 100, but we needed to get the glass back, so I had the Finnish teenagers that were helping us get in their boats and go get the glass and bring it back, and then I would get to throw it in the river again…As the boats came up full of glass, I just loved the way they looked…So that was how this piece started.

My experience upon both seeing this piece and reading the back story behind it was profound. And, yes (here it comes), I think it has to do directly with what I love about improvisation. Bear with me:

First I was struck by the willingness on Chihuly’s part to take his objects of art and chuck them into the river, as though the pieces weren’t really finished works of art at all but merely a stage in the process of art-making. It was as though, until the moment he chose to potentially destroy them, they had not reached their full artistic potential.

And then, of course, there’s the genius behind his recognition that the art wasn’t in the objects themselves, but in the way in which they became part of a story. The piece Chihuly created is not so much a showcase of forms, but a revelation of a moment in time, and the forms simply capture that in some sort of crystalline purity.

Ah, yes…improv. The willingness to enter a blank stage, to break and be broken, to let the art occur between you and your scene partner; between the two of you and the audience; between the two of you, the audience, and the spontaneous playing out of your actions and feelings and thoughts in real time.

In one way I felt cheap when I first considered that Chihuly’s “improvisation” could be considered anything like what I do on stage every night. After all, he is a master artisan—his technical expertise alone, even without the added layer of artistic conceptualization, reveals an amazing depth of skill and technique and knowledge of his materials. (Incidentally, it is of note here that although Chihuly is, in fact, a master at glass-blowing and glass art, injuries he suffered years ago that left him blind in one eye and incapacitated in one shoulder have led him to assemble a team of brilliant glass-makers in their own right who carry out his artistic vision.) Basically, this level of technical prowess is something to which I as an improviser can’t ever possibly lay claim. No Harold I ever do could ever be as perfectly executed—certainly not as permanent—as a single piece of expertly blown glass.

But then I went and looked at the piece again. In fact, I actually turned around halfway through the exhibit and pushed back through the crowd to look at the piece, and to read Chihuly’s description of its genesis. I looked at the wooden boat, the delicate and confection-colored glass pieces piled haphazardly inside like candy in a dish or toys in a bin.  And I saw the beauty that was discovered when the artist stopped thinking of his creation as art and started thinking of it as experimentation—as play.

Now, as improvisers, we don’t have to create the individual components of our art the way Chihuly does, because for Chihuly to achieve his artistic vision, he needs to create thousands of these blown pieces of glass, in all shapes and sizes and colors. But suddenly that distinction hardly seemed to matter to me. It struck me that this distinction was simply one of artistic necessity, not one of quality or value. In other words, Chihuly’s artistic vision required that he first create objects not available in nature. But there are many artists, for example, who create sculptures out of “found objects,” and many of these artists create work of great beauty and significance. So if the materials of my art are already available in the world in which I live, should I beat myself up for not having created them myself?

Yes, the improviser’s raw materials are the real and already present stuff of everyday life: the characters, the relationships, the real and shocking and funny ways we act and think and speak every day. And yes, these raw materials exist in the world already. But it still takes a skilled artist to arrange them in a way that is satisfying. Why is it that we can instantly differentiate a performer we love from one that makes us cringe? Even, sometimes, when we see them perform similar scenes? Because the true artist has the skill and technique to arrange the raw material of the content into a surprisingly familiar, jarringly pleasing sight—in short: to elevate the material to the level of art. And, of course, he has to be willing to take all that raw material and throw it off the side of the boat, and trust that when he fishes it out again, not only will it still be art, but the process will have transformed it into something new and exciting and worthwhile.

And you know what? For every discovery like this one, I’m sure Chihuly had a hundred experiments that just came out looking like a mess: melted and broken glasses everywhere, burnt skin and spilled paint. One of the hardest things for an improviser to accept is that—regardless of how much you rehearse and hone your craft—some of your experiments will go awry, and sometimes they will go awry on stage in front of an audience. But if we accept and embrace that as part of the art form, and don’t expect or even need or want ourselves to produce a pristine and polished work or art every time, we might just end up making something beautiful sometimes.

  1. thehousethatdelbuilt posted this