Beyond the Office: Exploring Our Not So Familiar Surroundings By: Reinhard Breckner

Glass is something we generally associate with windows of offices and homes, with storefronts and display cases, with windshields, with eyeglasses and of course with daily bottles, jars and drinking receptacles.  If we take an additional cerebral step, you and I would most likely start thinking about all the cheap vases, candy jars and mugs we have either received at any of nine hundred and ninety nine functions, conferences, vendor exhibits or meetings with prospective suppliers, or given away at any of the same interminable number of firm marketing events and meetings with prospective clients.  If we ever had small children, we may also be haunted by memories of terrifying walks through expensive stores where perilously stacked glass objects seemed to emit silent screams of terror when rapidly approached by that rambunctious 3 year old recklessly negotiating the aisles of fragility.  Finally, if we can disassociate ourselves for just a moment from our working environment, we may think of some objet d’arte made of glass we may have been given by someone special or seen in an art gallery.

The odds of the majority of us spending a great deal of time contemplating glass beyond the circumstances sampled above are probably rather low.  So if you have not done so already, you may want to take the two hours or so necessary to absorb this wondrous exhibit and visit the Atlanta Botanical Garden’s Chihuly in the Garden, running through October 31 of this year.  Glass will undoubtedly take on an entirely different meaning in your worldview.  You will be overwhelmed by it while simultaneously forgetting about it altogether.  You will want to touch it and caress it and at the same time remain at a distance and genuflect before it in awe.  In the end, even if you will find that looking at blown glass in the midst of exotic plants neither enriched your life nor darkened your daily outlook on things, you will at least have spent some time away from the [glass] towers surrounding your office and the electronic [glass] tube of your living room. 

I will bypass an introduction of the artist, Dale Chihuly, and urge you to read about his life and art at your leisure (http://www.chihuly.com).  In the following, I shall recount a few of my own impressions of the exhibit itself.   I share them hoping that they will encourage you to visit our city’s Botanical Garden and be pleasantly surprised at the treasure chest of aesthetic delicacies it has to offer.

The Botanical Garden advertises Chihuly’s blown glass exhibit as “a unique intersection of nature and art” (http://www.atlantabotanicalgarden.org/chihuly/overview.htm).  Statements about nature and art intersecting in some fashion are rather common and can generally be applied to anything from someone’s tastefully landscaped front yard, to a magnificent stallion’s graceful leap over an obstacle during a steeplechase, or to a building’s strategically placed skylight allowing the sunlight to flood the interior of a hall, every one of these unique in their own way.  When thinking about an intersection, one generally envisions two entities coming together, reaching a point of commonality and then departing again from each other.  Whether this sequence of separate-together-separate is temporal, spatial or both, an intersection signifies a limited locus of togetherness preceded and followed by detachment.

What Chihuly attains with his blown glass sculptures in the botanical setting is the effacement of the intersection per se, the eradication of One by its immersion into the Other.  There is no longer nature AND art as distinct mediums artificially brought together, but rather there is simply the confluence of the two into a happening in which one draws its identity merely from its absorption into the other.  Chihuly merges the sequence of separation-union-separation into a singular event where separation is indefinitely suspended, as in the passionate embrace of two lovers.  In fact, the entire exhibit can be viewed as a metaphor of two lovers’ union.

The carefully cultivated plants and flowers wrap around the exquisite blown glass sculptures as though the reason for their own being were these very sculptures.  And the latter find themselves in the middle of their organic world as if glass were the most natural growth from fertile soil.  Plant and glass sculpture do not look the same, and you never mistake one for the other, but you can no longer imagine one without the other.  In the moment of their passionate aspiration to become inseparable, their own unique beauty is never erased.  On the contrary, the malleable fluidity and vibrant colors of the blown glass become all the more pronounced when lost in the ocean of nature.  And the delicate petals of rare orchids amidst the luscious green of over-sized tropical foliage absorb the sculpted glass as though it were welcomed rain on a dry, hot day.

The exhibit is vast and spreads throughout the various parts of the Botanical Garden.  As you walk the in Garden’s paths, you encounter the glass sculptures with pleasant surprise and you feel as though that same surprise overtook the natural settings when the sculptures were first placed in them and remained imprinted on both glass and nature as witness of their joyful encounter.  One cannot help but suspect that, when the exhibit will be dismantled at the end of October, the glass will bend in sorrow and the flowers and plants will wilt in anguish.  Their pulling apart will mark the ephemeral nature of all suspensions of separation and the return to the cold reality of differences never being able to co-exist indefinitely.

Next time you think that glass is just very hot sand, remember that glass has feelings too.  If you don’t believe it, go see Chihuly in the Garden.

Editor: Todd A. Wiggins (twiggins@cpmas.com) (This publication is the property of the Atlanta Association of Legal Administrators. Reproduction or reprint without prior permission is strictly prohibited. Click here to request reprint permission.)

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