JAY MUSLER, Vertigo, April 24 - May 15, 2004

J AY M U S L E R

J AY M U S L E R Vertigo April 24th - May 15th, 2004 essay by JAMES YOOD

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FRONT AND BACK DETAIL: Breezy 2004 9.25” x 6.5” x 3.5”

Glass and Oil Paint

Parachute 2004 9.25” x 8” x 3.5” Glass and Oil Paint

Charmed 2003 9.25” x 4.5” x 4.5” Glass and Oil Paint

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Nothing 2004 6.5” x 12” x 3” Glass and Oil Paint

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J AY M U S L E R It must be wonderful to be Jay Musler today. Never has his imagination seemed so completely free and rich, never has his mind culled forward such remarkable fantasies. He is in the midst of an incredible flow of imagery, with one delightful, delicate, beautiful, wistful, poignant, and evocative piece following another, each one more surprising than the last, each one an aperture into an enchanting world of his very own making. It’s a place where the dictates of our own world only grudgingly apply, a topsy-turvy place where curiously organic elements come together in odd contexts, a place where objects seem to carry specific meanings at which we can only guess. And it’s a very adorned world; Musler likes things here to hang from one another, dangling off some central support like the charms they are, as if these vessel/plants grow specifically for that purpose, to accept another bauble in their midst.

The connection of a vessel shape to an organic form is an honored tradition in the history of glass, and there are moments here when things such as tulip vases from a century ago are evoked. But these! It is as if we’re seeing something like Tiffany interpreted through Harry Potter, Musler’s elements—we really should call them characters—huddle together in compositions of great tenderness, little vignettes that suggest a narrative we can’t fully decode. Take, for example, Slinky. Is this a courtship between two vessels, the potbellied (male?) earnestly declaring its love for the slender and willowy (female)? The linked chain that connects these two together seems the tie that binds, and Musler somehow makes you hope that everything will work out all right for

these two, that love will abide. (Anyone else see a suggestion of Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Wedding here?) Musler’s elements are never human but always are humane, in some parallel

universe where our hopes and fears and desires find full play.

Can Nothing successfully be decoded? It looks like Sydney Carton in the tumbril being led to the guillotine through the streets of Paris, that is, if Sydney Carton was some whimsical whitish glob. It has every bit of the drama of a scene in Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, the sense of the outrage of imprisonment and public humiliation, and even if this reading is askew it speaks to the suggestive nature of Musler’s endeavor, that here some playlets fundamental to the human condition are enacted for our varied responses.

“He is in the midst of an incredible flow of imagery, with one delightful, delicate, beautiful, wistful, poignant, and evocative piece following another, each one more surprising than the last, each one an aperture into an enchanting world of his very own making.”

There is much here that is dreamy and ambiguous too, works such as Breezy and Parachute appear more relaxed and amiable, inventories of the little glass stuff that is always dear to Musler’s heart. These two pieces seem akin to plants bent at their apex by the heavy loads hanging from their limbs, with little cages or bags of great delicacy. There’s sheer delight in imagination here, in bringing a lot of allusive elements together in generous implication. Musler has always been an artist of exquisite detail, of creating little intimate passages of tweaked glass that somehow accrete into larger compositions. Here those little passages retain their own character, bits of pictorial incident that now get a chance to breathe and claim center stage. And claim it they do; like most declarations of freedom this is all becomes of the most valuable sort.

JAMES YOOD James Yood teaches art history at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and writes regularly for GLASS and American Craft magazines.

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Slinky 2003 8.5” x 9” x 3.5” Glass and Oil Paint

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Parachute 2004 9.25” x 8” x 3.5” Glass and Oil Paint

“There’s sheer delight in imagination here, in bringing a lot of allusive elements together in generous implication.”

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“The connection of a vessel shape to an organic form is an honored tradition in the history of glass, and there are moments here when things such as tulip vases from a century ago are evoked.�

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LEFT Breezy 2004 9.25” x 6.5” x 3.5”

Glass and Oil Paint RIGHT Picking 2004 10” x 6” x 4”

Glass and Oil Paint

“Musler likes things here to hang from one another, dangling off some central support like the charms they are, as if these vessel/plants grow specifically for that purpose, to accept another bauble in their midst.”

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Vertigo 2004 8.5” x 6.5” x 3” Glass and Oil Paint

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J AY M U S L E R Born: 1949 Sacramento, California

Selected Collections

Awards and Grants

The American Craft Museum, New York, New York

California Arts Council, Artist Fellowship, Visual Arts Honorary Prize, “World Glass Now ‘88,” Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art, Sapporo, Japan 1982-83 National Endowment of the Arts Crafts Fellowship Grant, Washington D.C. 1982 Honorary Prize, “World Glass Now ‘88,” Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art, Sapporo, Japan

The Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York

1990 1988

Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, Michigan Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art, Sapporo, Japan Honolulu Academy of Art, Honolulu, Hawaii JB Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky Kitano Museum, Tokyo, Japan Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California

Selected Publications 1997 1996 1995 1992 1991 1991 1989

1989 1979

Stuhr, Joanne. “¡CáLIDO!: Contemporary Warm Glass,” Exhibition Catalog, Tuson Museum of Art, p 69.

Layton, Peter. “Glass Art,” England, p183.

Porges, MAria. “Jay Musler” Glass and Art Magazine No.9, front cover, pp.35-49.

Marks, Ben. “The Brinkmanship of Jay Musler.”

Glass Magazine. Fall, front cover, pp.20-27.

“New Glass Review 12,” New York: The Corning Museum of Glass.

“World Glass Now ’91,” Sapporo, Japan: Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art, pp. 100-101, 230.

Frantz, Susanne K. “Contemporary Glass: A World Survey from the Corning Museum of Glass,” New York: Harry N. Abrams, cover photograph pp.171, 218.

Lippiner, Rosemarie. “Expression in Glass II,” Basel, Switzerland: Musee des Arts Decoratifs, pp. XV, 26.

“New Glass: A World Survey,” New York: The Corning Museum of Glass, p166.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco, California Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin Musee de Design et D’Arts Appliques Contemporains, Lausanne, Switzerland The Oakland Museum, Oakland, California Renwick Gallery of American Art, the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC The Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio United States Embassy, Istanbul United States Embassy, Moscow, Russia Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri Wheaton Village Museum of American Glass, Millville, New Jersey

photo credit: Sibila Savage

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