“You just go on your nerve.”

-Frank O’Hara

John D’Agostino, Corinthians, 2010.

WORDS BY: John D’Agostino
WORKS: www.EmpireofGlass.com

John D’Agostino, Loadstone Virtue, 2010.

Dreams of A Dark Abyss

The dreams of a dark abyss are a chosen hardship, like a poem.

 To enter into such a place is to engage in a poetic kind of thinking. Because the clear demarcations and road signs are all gone, only an imaginative, strenuous and curious state of mind will suffice to traverse the way. An idea of rigor pervades all poetic thinking.

Rigor is a measure of a content’s quality. It is the experience of “hard things” that are engaging and rewarding. But it is more than just a question of simply challenging or difficult content. Rather, rigorous content is personally and emotionally challenging. So too is poetry.

Poetry, as a relentless, mutli-faceted and demanding medium, has much in common with the traditions of the visual arts, most especially that of abstraction. Both abstraction and poetry are complex, ambiguous and provocative. Both have high expectations, and impossible personal standards. In both, the subject learns to “read” the poem/picture as he experiences it. The learner accepts some responsibility for his learning, and he must work to understand it. To not only elaborate on the material’s ever present suggestions, but sometimes even to add his own content to it. To complete it.

Rigor mortis, literally translated, is the stiffness of the body after death. It signifies a kind of severity, an exhaustive, point of no return, if you will. Both poetry and abstraction are similarly severe and extreme forms of their respective domains. However, perhaps ‘rigor vitae’ may be more appropriate here, as both disclipines engage a re-vivifying and re-enegergizing state of mind. The reader/viewer accepts the challenge to decode and understand the mysterious work laid before him, and is more alive for the effort.

The poetic image revels in its illusory nature. It exults in the impossible. A poetry of the impossible is a release from the constriction of normal things, an attempt to smash through the construction of the literal world. The poet’s use of words is quite different, just as the artist’s use of his imagery is different. The words are the same, the paint or ink or charcoal may be the same, but their values are different. Poeticization changes the value of well known things. They become musicalized, irretrievably transformed. The poet loves his words for their strangeness and mystery, not just for their obvious meanings.

The phenomenon of the poetic image is the phenomena of freedom. Excercise is often described as “rigorous,” and perhaps this is apt, since the rigorous image is similarly an excercise of the imagination. Mental muscles are flexed, stretched and tested. Freedom is not merely given, it must be exercised. Great images are often a blend of memory and legend. They have a history, and a pre-history. Poetic imagery engages this history, by summoning and evoking the history of images within each viewer, who must rely on the entire wealth of his mental records just to make sense of it.

Poetry, in guise as either word or image, retains a greater competition of surprises than perhaps any other discipline. It implies the decision to change the function of language, just as abstraction seeks to change the function of the literal, representational or identifiable image. What is found in either realm is that which is often passed over in daily life: the miraculous, the unknown, the undreamt of.

In the dead linen in cupboards

I seek the supernatural

- Joseph Rouffange

John D’Agostino, Entropy’s Blade, 2010.

Poetic images revel in Chinese whispers and communication breakdowns. What gets lost in the translation from person to person is often the most interesting. Imposing new meanings, misusing words, or using them for other purposes, maybe even cross purposes – is the metier of poetry. It sees the world as an iceberg: there is more below the surface of the water than above. These are not words or pictures, but maybe, ghosts.

Gaston Bachelard felt that the poetic image has a dynamic uniquely its own. That it is fundamentally variational. To read or see the poetic is to daydream. As J.P. Jouve called it, “thought enamored of the unknown.” All of Bachelard’s work, and not just his seminal The Poetics of Spaces, is in fact an eloquent and daring defense of poetry itself, which has had its many detractors, and may never win popularity contests. Surrealist Andre Breton called this animosity to the poetic the “hate of the marvelous” – arguing that the hostility towards such works was motivated more by fear and misunderstanding than by righteous contempt. This text first appeared as part of the paper The Abyss Gazes Also: The Pains and Pleasures of Seeing in the Dark by John D’Agostino, 2012.
View the full paper online here.
Purchase Hardcopy here. Daydreaming is important. It is not just lazyness. It is sophisticated, three dimensional investigation. What the poet does is essentially create a trap for dreamers. As for me, Bachelard says, “I let myself be caught.”   •

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Skeleton & Flesh (2012)

New Works from Empire of Glass

John D’Agostino, Spring Torrents, 2012 (in progress). 4 panels, approx 10×20 feet.

John D’Agostino, The Hammer of Los, 2012 (in progress). 4 panels, approx 10×20 feet.

John D’Agostino, Summit & Flower, 2012 (in progress). Diptych: approx. 60×96″

Works currently in progress for 2012′s body of work include a number of new sizes, including diptych, triptych, square and more.

For more information on these new works, please contact the artist or visit:

www.EmpireofGlass.com

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WORDS BY:   John D’Agostino
WORKS:    www.EmpireofGlass.com
One of America’s most acclaimed artists, Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933) embraced virtually every artistic medium, from stained glass windows, lamps and mosaics, to pottery, metalwork, interiors and enamels.
 

Louis Comfort Tiffany, Fish Panel, ca. 1906. Provenance: Vito D’Agostino

Louis Comfort Tiffany, Gould Landscape Window, 1910. Provenance: Miss Helen Gould, Vito D’Agostino.

Tiffany asked why so many of us made such little use of our eyes, and why we so obstinately refrained from using color in architecture, clothing and elsewhere, when nature so clearly indicated its mastership. He referred to this as the “sovereign importance of color” – and set out to rectify the situation in a relentless “quest for beauty.”

The elder son of Charles Lewis Tiffany, founder of the famed Tiffany and Company jewelry store, the young Louis began his career as a painter, working under George Inness (1825–1894). Early notable designs of his included the redecoration of The White House for President Chester A. Arthur in 1881. At the World’s Fair in 1893 in Chicago, over a million visitors waited in line to see his ornate Byzantine Chapel, and at the Paris Universal 1900, Tiffany won the grand prize, a gold medal, and the Légion d’honneur. Internationally recognized as one of the greatest forces of Art Nouveau, Tiffany’s work would still fall completely out of fashion by the 1920’s.

Tiffany used the medium of glass to challenge the pre-eminence of painting. In glass, Tiffany found a medium of endless possibilities that expressed his love of light and color. He felt that no painting could capture its brilliance, at one point creating stained glass windows based on well known artists such as Toulouse-Lautrec to prove the point home. He could suggest a myriad of natural surfaces, from hard stone, primal magma and volcanic rock, to the sensuous, iridescent surfaces of winged creatures like butterflies, dragonflies and peacocks. Claiming a palette of some 5000 colors, Tiffany had an incredible array of different kinds of favrile glass to work with, from lava (volcanic) glass, to cypriote glass, to drapery glass and ripple glass, just to name a few.

Tiffany began experimenting with glass about 1875 in Brooklyn. He was inspired by ancient Roman, Greek and Egyptian glass, that, when dug up hundreds of years later, were imbued with an incredible iridescent quality, due to the ores and oxides of the earth seeping in. Frustrated with the limited palette of the glass of the time, he turned to making his own opalescent glass, with the colors fused inside in molten form. This was in stark contrast to the predominant method since the Middle Ages, which was the staining of colorless glass. Using a witch’s brew of secret recipes including metallic oxides, chromium, silver, gold and even uranium, Tiffany called his trademark glass favrile, after the Old English word fabrile (hand-wrought), a signification meant to reflect the hand-made quality of his glass. It cannot be duplicated even today. Quite simply, it is the finest glass ever made.

  “Infinite, endless labor makes the masterpiece. Color is to the eye as music is to the ear.”
-Louis Comfort Tiffany

This text first appeared as part of the paper The Strength to Dream: How Remnants of the Past Illustrate a Legacy of the Representation of Vision by John D’Agostino, published in ArtForum’s Art&Education Papers Archive, 2010.

View the full paper online here.
Purchase Hardcopy here.

An eccentric, autocratic perfectionist, Tiffany was notorious for walking down the production lines of Tiffany Studios with his cane, smashing anything he found to be unacceptable. Stories exist of craftsman actually scurrying to hide works from him in the fear that he would destroy them. “Mother Nature is the best designer” he said, and he set out to summon up the kingdom of nature, in all its glory. Using sophisticated abstract forms derived from nature as the material for his Art Nouveau motifs, historians like Robert Koch would later dub him the grandfather of Abstract Expressionism, a narrative confirmed by my father, artist John E. D’Agostino (born 1941), whose original inspiration for the abstract was not any of the expected originators of the movement, but Tiffany himself.

While Tiffany’s work would suffer from the vagaries of taste and fashion, the uniqueness of his oeuvre today is unquestionable. Perhaps the lowest moment was in 1936, when salvage dealers were smashing Tiffany’s celebrated lamps against the curbs, just so they could melt down the intricate bronze and lead frames holding the glass for scrap metal. For the artists of Art Nouveau, the lotus, a motif Tiffany would use again and again, appropriately, symbolized rebirth. For art lovers like my grandfather Vito D’Agostino, it was just a matter of time. Tiffany’s reputation would plummet from international renown to obscurity and disfavor, but only to rise yet even stronger once again.    •

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WORDS BY:     John D’Agostino
WORKS:      www.EmpireofGlass.com

  “The sun is God.”   – J.M.W. Turner

Joseph Mallord William Turner, The Slave Ship: Slavers Throwing Overboard The Dead & Dying, 1840. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

This text first appeared as part of the paper The Strength to Dream: How Remnants of the Past Illustrate a Legacy of the Representation of Vision by John D’Agostino, published in ArtForum’s Art&Education Papers Archive, 2010.

View the full paper online here.
Purchase Hardcopy here.

Take Turner’s The Slave Ship: Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying (1840). The picture is a maelstrom of blood, light, retribution and redemption. The picture was inspired by the real horrors of the slave trade, and would became a rallying cry for the abolitionist movement. Slave ship captains would throw men, women and children overboard to waiting sharks when the ship’s human cargo was dying faster than anticipated. They were insured for “losses at sea” but not “dead on arrival.” Turner’s vision is a horrific tour de force of visual havoc: chained legs and arms flailing in a watery deluge of bloody light and apocalypse. Turner’s critic and main champion, John Ruskin eventually sold the painting. He said it was just too painful to look at every day in his dining room.

Not quite gentlemanly British art, this was. Some artists, like Delacroix, disapproved of Turner’s methods: his filthy hands and dirty fingernails (one which he kept long on purpose to paint with like a “claw”), that bore the marks of a painter who quite literally was unafraid to wallow in the muck. One story goes that a young apprentice who came to Turner was cruelly turned away, when his lily-white, clean hands were demanded for inspection. “You’re no artist!” Turner angrily proclaimed.

Turner’s scenes were not so much scenes, as much as regions of the imagination. Light was his chief protagonist, no longer relegated to being some bit player in the chorus. His figures, in contrast, were often puny little creatures, engulfed in it all. The originator, the sun, was for Turner, the living core of all of nature. Passersby were often frightened by how Turner would stare endlessly into the sun, fearing for his eyesight. Didn’t it hurt? No, he said, not any more than like looking into a candle. As the apocryphal story goes, Turner’s dying words on his deathbed were: “The sun is god.”

Turner realized that the sublime was a verb, as in, to sublime – to elevate, to raise upward. His imagery does not come from the eye. It comes from inside the eye.

Painting from behind the eyeball, as it were.  •

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