LBK studio

Curiosities

2011-02-28T17:32:00.001-08:00

New Post

2011-02-28T17:18:00.000-08:00

Happy Summer

2010-07-31T16:32:00.001-07:00

2010-03-09T03:31:00.000-08:00

This is an Italian technique of making lots of tiny bubbles by pouring gasoline into the melt.

Pulegoso at the studio

2010-03-09T03:19:00.001-08:00

Holiday sales

2009-12-01T21:03:00.000-08:00

Come see us at these local Holiday sales.....

Craftland in Providence ( glass ornaments and Organic Cotton Shirts)

Foundry Show in Pawtucket ( glass )

RISD Sale at the Convention Center in Providence (glass- tumblers on sale and one of a kind mercury glass items- etc etc....)

new Toddler and Infant T-shirts / onesies

2009-08-11T18:48:00.000-07:00

Here are some images of the T shirts I made taken from my paintings. I will be selling them at the NYIGF this week. Stop by!
A special thanks to my models: Ruby Houle and my guy Fin Taylor!

images

2009-07-16T10:46:00.001-07:00

2009-06-29T09:46:00.000-07:00

Ok... so I am on the lookout for someone to work on my website. It needs some cleaning up and to be a bit more buyer friendly- though DJ Ryan did a great job with Paypal for me- I need to have it be easier so there are less emails/phone calls going back and forth. If you know of anyone....

New Paintings

2009-06-29T09:35:00.000-07:00

Mothers day Pins

2009-04-30T17:39:00.000-07:00

Just a little idea that popped into my head while freshly home from the hospital- silly but cute for Mother's Day. They are made of polymer clay and painted with permanent inks.

additional color shots

2009-04-30T17:35:00.000-07:00

Ive received many requests for additional images of the mixes for the Twist Series... so here are some- not all.

2009-04-25T04:57:00.000-07:00

Martha Stewart Magazine

2009-04-20T11:37:00.000-07:00

Great response for the tumblers in Martha... many thanks

If you are interested in ordering just do the paypal thing and then shoot me an email with the color requests. I know my website is confusing but I do hope to fix it soon....
Thanks!

ok... its been a while

2009-03-16T08:57:00.000-07:00

Until I get my paintings up on my website I decided to just put some up here...

2008-10-25T21:49:00.000-07:00

Ok so we've been busy....

2008-10-25T20:57:00.001-07:00

I know its been a while since I have written .... but we've been busy.
Here are some photos of an order we made for Barney's NY of our Murrini Vases.

NYIGF preview

2008-08-09T20:05:00.000-07:00

We have changed our booth to 6413- to the downstairs Handmade section. We decided to move in order to acquire a space that doubles our previous size!
Here is a bit of a preview of some of the latest items we will be showing....
Looking forward to seeing everyone!

Masters Thesis for Anthropology at Columbia

2008-06-03T16:21:00.000-07:00

Enduring Material, Obsolescent Craft

Viewing Murano Through the Materiality of Glass and the Souvenir

“Glass is the finest of all materials, the way it can be worked, the way it achieves it’s form, is unique among other materials. It metamorphoses from a viscose mass to a clear crystalline object. It is capricious and difficult; it is a material which lives many lives.”
-Timo Sarpaneva1

Entangled in the narrative of Murano, Italy is the perpetuation of the romance of glassmaking, along with a tradition that traces familial trees to the time before the glass factories moved to the island. Murano, a small island approximately a mile north of Venice, plays a significant role as a tourist destination to witness the spectacle of glassblowing. It is a place where local artisans carry on a craft tradition dating back to 1291AD, when glass furnaces were moved from the main island of Venice in order to protect the city from fire. During the sixteenth century and seventieth century centuries in the workshops on Murano, Venetian glassmakers produced luxurious objects for use and display that were modifiers of wealth and decadence. Consumers throughout Europe and in distant countries such as China imported Venetian glass and encouraged their regional glassmakers to imitate the Venetian products.

This thesis follows three distinct material glass objects produced by the glassmakers of Murano intended for tourist consumption, as the souvenir most associated with Venice arguably is the glass object. Beginning in the thirteenth-fourteenth centuries, I focus on the Rosary Bead, a religious token purchased by the pilgrim on way to the Holy Land. For the pilgrim, who is often referred to as “the original tourist”, travel was associated with the Western dynamic- as emerging from the closed societies of medieval times it was the Europeans that ventured out and discovered the world.2 The second object examined is the Serpent Goblet and its variations originally produced during the sixteenth-nineteenth centuries as it represents the height of Venetian glassblowing. Attached to these goblets were many superstitions and a mythology linked to alchemy and botanicals. A common souvenir of the Flaneur from the Grand Tour, these Venetian goblets can be found in various museum collections today. Lastly I discuss the flame worked glass Gondola: the foremost example of the mass tourist purchased Venetian souvenir. Within the past ten years it has arrived to the island as a Chinese import, bringing along with it economic/social tensions for the local glassmakers by replicating their culture through the replication of their craft. The first two types of material objects are used as a background for the modern day material object as a way to express changes that has occurred to the glassblowers of Murano. My discussion focuses the effects to the Murano glassmakers’ economic, cultural and social situations, along with how it has perhaps misled and perpetuated the tourists’ view of “romantic” Venice.
As a material, glass holds the ‘memory’ or imprint of the tool that touched it. By this I refer to the fact that during the process of glassmaking the skin of the glass object retains on its surface the recollection of the mark. This is an important metaphor for the tension between the artisan produced glass object and the placeholder of meaning for the tourist. Much had been documented on glass as a material, as well as, the glass objects produced and exported from the island of Murano. There exists many stratums of myths of the glassmakers and their glass; yet not much has been written on the glassmakers in regards to their relationship to the objects they create, their “commodified folklore” or their relationship to the tourists that come to view the spectacle of glassblowing.3 This thesis traverses between two different ways of viewing the Murano glass material object: the manner in which the materiality of glass is an active player in Murano and how the objects produced for the tourist market dictates meaning for the object; thus producing an index or nostalgia for the past. I argue that it is the returned traveler that assists in the ideological signification for the power of sympathetic magic by way of travel, sight and nostalgia. It is this power contained within the glass object that creates a tension of the duality between the impression of the memory of the artisan and the tourists’ index of the past within the formation of social relations and assigned myths.

The Materiality and Romance of Glass

“According to legend, a ship carrying merchants of nitre (natural soda) dropped anchor on the coast of Phoenicia, and the passengers spread along the beach to prepare dinner. As there were no rocks at hand to balance the cooking pots on, they used pieces of nitre from the cargo: alight and mixed with sand, they produced luminous rivulets of a foreign liquid: this is said to be the origin of glass. Thus did Pliny the Elder in Natural History; attribute the invention of glass to the Phoenicians, though nowadays it is known beyond doubt that this remarkable material was first produced in Mesopotamia.”4

Glass, chemically speaking, is a super cooled liquid material, which is formed basically from a fusion of silica (sand, flint or quartz) with an alkaline flux (potash, or soda) with the addition of lime to make the glass more durable.5 These ingredients are put into crucibles (pots of clay), placed into a furnace where they are heated to around 1100C where the ingredients fuse and become a molten liquid similar to the consistency of warmed honey. In effect the same glass recipe as that written on a cuneiform tablet of the seventh century B.C. is in use to this day. Glass has always held a poetic power, as it requires an intimacy and a prodigious degree of skill by the glassmaker as well as singular ingredients of which the material is composed. In certain myths glass is portrayed as a symbol of clarity, spiritual perfection, and at times a vehicle for revelation. Expressed as a metaphor for the plane between the visible and non-visible, the solid, yet transparent material seems somewhat mysterious. Possibly for this reason, the messengers from the Celtic underworld arrived by glass boats, symbolizing the spiritual intentions of their voyage. Furthermore, folktales speak of glass slippers, glass mountains, and glass palaces- much like the soul in which the fabled King Arthur dwells. In early China glass cicadas imitating jade were put on the tongues of the dead, as the cicada was a symbol of life after death. The glassmakers in Rome were given a prominent street in the exclusive part of the city where they could practice their art. In the Byzantine period (around 438 AD), the Thelodosian Code exempted glassmakers from taxation. In Renaissance Italy maestro glassblowers were sanctioned to marry into Venetian aristocracy. In Britain the highest in the land could be involved with glassmaking without the fear of losing prestige. And in contemporary society we are surrounded by glass whether it is the tempered windows we drive behind in our automobiles, the computer monitors we stare at or the cell phones in our pockets that contain fiber optics and glass microchips.
These narratives expressing the origins and cultural influences of glassblowing is an example of the enigmatic nature of the materiality of glass that for many continues to exist today. Craft objects themselves communicate social identity, and through craft objects artisans give material expression to ideas about roles, identities, and relationships. In Renaissance Venice we will see how ritual/ magic are linked with the glass object as a way to either insure success of the technical process or to imbue the objects with power. As the objects have power so must the artisans hold power through their creative processes.
Muranese glassblowers, as in the Aztec case described by Costin, envisioned themselves as heirs to a glorious, mythic past in which artisans were celebrated.6 Furthermore, similarly as with the Aztecs, the Venetians aristocracy associated themselves with the virtuosity of craft through patronage and lineage. The linkage between craft and nobility lies in the conjunction between power and prestige. The ability and power to create is to give life into a material, give it breath, spirit and to also make it functional and useful. The intensive labor and skill needed to produce Venetian glass enhances the value of the material and created social currency. The glass obtained their value through the skill of the production of the craft, as well as, the material of glass itself: as we will discuss with the glass material cristallo in Murano in the Renaissance. The intrinsic value of the rare material of cristallo and of the development of color red, along with the extrinsic value of the produced goods, elevated the artisans’ power and prestige in Renaissance society.

Generational Ties to Glassmaking

The Muranese glassblowers pride themselves on their 700 years of history and the position of renown associated with their glass making tradition. Benjamin speaks of in The Storyteller that the most constant version of storytelling is the one that least differs from mouth to mouth. He cites the trade structure of the Middle Ages being that, “If the peasants and seamen were past masters of storytelling, the artisan class was its university”. 8 Yet the glass masters of Venice differ in that they were not accomplished travelers relaying their stories, instead they were accomplished storytellers in the manner that they relayed their craft to their apprentices. The ‘storytelling’ of glassblowing is not verbal. Instead it is relayed from the maestro to the apprentice through keen observance and in turn mimicry. This ‘habitus’ provides the practical skills and disposition necessary to navigate within the hot shop, as it guides the choices of the individual without ever being strictly reducible to prescribed, formal rules. This embodied phenomena- such as the proper way to hold the glass blowing pipe or how to sit at the bench or even how to walk to the glory hole- is an acquired scheme of perception. These patterns Bourdieu describes this as dispositions, and are a result of the internalization of ethos or objective social structures through an experience of an individual or a group. Furthermore, habitus mediates between ‘objective’ structures of social relations and the individual ‘subjective’ behavior of actors.9 Maestro Simone Cenedese states, “In Murano we are born near the ovens. It’s a thing that comes to you like speaking and writing and walking. You become a glassworker.”10 This is similar to Heidegger referring to the shoemaker understanding himself through the creation of his things, his shoes.11
This notion of becoming has a twofold importance, as it is encompassed in learned behavior and in genetics. Tim Ingold declares five points of skill, his fourth point being tied to genetics, saying that as skilled practice cannot be reduced to a formula, a formula of skills cannot be passed from generation to generation.12 Ingold describes this as a fine-tuning of movements and, “through this process, each generation contributes to the next not by handing on a corpus of representations, or information in the strict sense, but rather by introducing novices into contexts which afford select opportunities for perception and action….” 13 This non-discursive knowledge operates beneath the level of the social ideology. Furthermore the agent develops these dispositions in response to the determining structures and external conditions they encounter.

Body as Tool/ Gender as Implement

This leads us to the notion of the “body as tool” and the gender differences in the labor of glassmaking. Mauss observed that technique does not solely depend upon the use of tools. Mauss uses the example of a dancer using his own body as an instrument asserting that the body is man’s first and purest technical object.14 Glassblowing is predominately a male space for various reasons. One example supporting this notion is the belief men have more strength in their lungs to force air into a piece of molten glass.15 It is the physical demands of glassblowing: lifting, blowing and working in the heat that is seen as a masculine task. Yet another reason is the close proximity to other glassblowers working together: as the “team” is made up of a gaffer (maestro), first assistant and subsequent second/ third and possibly additional assistants. The female glassmakers are relegated to tasks that are deemed “lighter”, although it also demanding a high degree of skill and talent. Women are the primary flame workers: they work solitary using a small torch at a table making smaller pieces of hand-manipulated glass. (Beads, gondolas, etc.) This technique is not exclusively female, there are men that are flame workers, and either owning their own studios creating art glass or men working in the same environment as the women but considered the maestros of the flame.
The narrative of tradition is further expressed by the representation of the male glassblower in the factory setting, involved in teamwork among other male glassblowers, while the female glassworker is sequestered to the second floor- not produced for the tourist spectacle. Venetian glassblowing is prized for its use of teamwork, specifically adapted tools and techniques. It is also regarded for the fact that for generations artisans have been passing down secrets of a highly skilled craft through apprenticeship, oral tradition and blood relations. Glassblowing remains in the conventional narrative a craft where only men have the adequate strength, and are able to work in the oppressive heat in such tiresome factory conditions. I question that because of these generational blood ties could it also be possible for the Muranese females to be genetically disposed to be as skilled glassblowers as their male counterparts. As a female outsider, one can infiltrate the factory floor for a few days, but it is quite doubtful that she or, even more seldom, a local female would remain part of the team in a true sense of comradery.
Interestingly, the female Muranese glassmakers seem to be marginalized, as they are not for public view. The glassmakers demonstrating for the tourists are always male, even if he is not working in a team, and is solo, not blowing the glass and only hand manipulating the molten pieces. This marginalization is important as the women seem to be either protected from becoming a spectacle in the eyes of the public, or because the glassmaking myth needs to be perpetuated as a strength that only men can perform.

ROSARY BEADS FROM THE THIRTEENTH-FOURTEENTH CENTURY

“ A tourist is half a pilgrim, if a pilgrim is half a tourist.”
-Victor Turner and Edith Turner16

During the middle Ages, much of Italy was controlled by the Holy Roman Empire, although Venice was one of several cities that were independent from both the Empire and the Church. Venice, founded in the fifth century due to people fleeing the Attila the Hun, became a staging area for the Crusades. At that time, shipbuilding was the primary industry and Venetian ships carried Crusaders to the Holy Land. It was during the first century AD that the Roman glass industry became fully established, leading to the prolific spread of glasshouses throughout the Empire. Venetian glass was already making a name for itself as the paragon for glassmaking, when the Doge Lorenzo Tiepolo in the late thirteenth century prohibited the export of potash, broken glass and sand from the island.17 This measure was taken to halt the dispersion to the rest of the world of the secret formulas and glass compositions produced exclusively in Venice. By the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries pilgrimages had become a pervasive trend assisted by a systemized and growing industry of religious lodgings and mass-produced handbooks. These pilgrimages would include a combination of religious fervor with the pleasure of viewing new cultures. By the fifteenth century there were established tours from Venice to the Holy Land and at this time Murano’s glass industry had staked a name for it self as an established tourist attraction. Tourists journeyed over to ‘pleasant Murano’ primarily to take in the air, which was believed to be softer and healthier than in Venice.18 The chance to see the manipulation and production of glass and to browse among the products on display made Murano a fixture on the Venetian circuit, and by the late sixteen hundreds Nicolas de Fer would declare, “Travelers always visit the Glass House at Mirano [sic].”19 It was due to the influx of pilgrims that the Venetian glassmakers realized they could sell their products to these groups, with the major seller being rosary beads as this was an easy item for the travelers to carry away. The rosary is a combination of prayer and mediation centered on sequences of reciting the Lord’s Prayer followed by ten recitations of the Hail Mary prayer. By 1482 approximately 100,000 individuals had joined the rosary confraternity. For the most part members used some kind of device for keeping track of their prayers, but even if only a portion of them used beads for counting, the result was an increase in demand for what was already, before the founding of the confraternity, an item of medieval “mass merchandise” and an exploding business.20
This sacred religious object was used for devotional and ornamental purposes, along with the imbued belief that they were amulets with the power to ward off evil. At this time, the religious values associated to glass beads could not be disconnected from their overseas trade. In Monasteries, monks were expected to pray daily in Latin, the liturgical language of the Roman Catholic Church. Yet in some monasteries, while meditating, lay brothers who did not understand Latin or who were illiterate were required to say the Lord's Prayer a certain number of times per day. Since there were 150 Psalms, this could number up to 150 times per day. To count these repetitions, they used beads strung upon a cord and this set of prayer beads became commonly known as a Paternoster, which is the Latin for "Our Father". Secular individuals adopted this practice as a form of popular worship. The Paternoster could be of various lengths, but was often made up of five decades of ten beads, which when performed three times made up 150 prayers. Other Paternosters, most notably those used by laypersons, may have had only had ten beads, and may have also been highly ornamented. As the Rosary (ring of flowers) incorporating the Hail Mary prayer became more common, it was often still referred to as a Paternoster.
These glass beads and rosaries were soon transformed to become secular ornaments along with becoming embellishments to garments and objects related to entirely different belief systems and rituals. They were often used as counters (or numeraries) in trade, or else, acquiring rarity value, they were removed from economic exchange cycles, to become familial property, only changing hands as a bride wealth, or in validating claims to royal and aristocratic standing. In economic exchange systems, these glass beads were used as barter in the African slave trade and in land parcel trade with the Native Americans of the North. It was due to the resilience and variety of color hue that Venetian beads proved particularly appropriate for decorating garments and objects. An interesting aside expressed by Sciama and Eicher, is that historians agree that some of the techniques by which glass beads, esp. the tiny ‘seed-beads’ were threaded, embroidered or woven into fabric followed the routes of colonial expansion.21
Pilgrims visiting Venice would kiss relics, believing the power of transference from a kiss could be stored in small items touched to the statuary. Pilgrims who did not have any jewelry purchased glass beads or rosary necklaces from nearby Venetian glassmakers, intrinsically adding the significance of the producers and that produced of Venice. These rosary beads acquired much of their power from having been in contact with the holy, while on the other hand, once brought home from Venice; they also became a sort of souvenir.

THE SERPENT GOBLET:
Power and Replication in the Sixteenth-Nineteenth Centuries

Though sixteenth century geographical expansion harmed Venice’s economy, the importance of its international exchanges is fully illustrated in the city’s iconography. The most expansive room in the Doge’s apartments, extending from the courtyard adjoining St Marks Square to the canal at its back, and was mainly used as a reception and audience room, is entirely decorated with maps, and includes two large globes of the earth and celestial spheres. In other words, the entire account of Renaissance geographical knowledge had the aim to show the full extent of Venetian power, the reach of the city’s competence and her embolden travelers.22
At present Venetian glassblowers, along with glassblowers throughout the world, persevere in the reproduction of the objects originated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a period marked as the zenith of glassmaking. Much of the creative and prestigious image of Venetian glass rests on the ascent of cristallo in the fifteenth century, which allowed the Renaissance masters to blow highly sophisticated and fragile objects using this new transparent glass formula. The Muranese were the only glass makers in Europe that held the secrets to producing a mirror, along with developing technologies to produce crystalline glass, smalto defined as enameled glass, gold (aventurine) glass, multicolored millefiori glass defined as millions of flowers, milk glass (lattimo) and imitation gemstones made of glass.
There seems to have been a tie of mythic ideals of glassmaking and to the alchemic material of glass itself, from the discovery of glass making techniques to the manual production of glass material. For instance, glass in the Venetian style originated with mysterious vessels made on this island of Murano, beginning in the fifteenth century and reaching technical heights in the seventieth century. It was during this time that elegant and fragile glass vessels produced by master glassmakers became fashionable throughout the world. It was this technical achievement that had been viewed as ‘a glorious revival’ of ancient colorless glass, which was praised by Pliny the Elder for its resemblance to rock crystal. Educated glass patrons during the Renaissance who were familiar with Pliny’s writings may have made the connection, but Venetians hardly sought their ancestry in ancient Rome. Instead, they placed great emphasis on creating a historical identity that would set them apart from other Italians and from other nations.” 23
Severe punishment, often resulting in death, was placed upon the glassblowers by the Venetian government if they left the Island of Murano. During the Renaissance, Venetian goblets were treasured throughout Europe by the social elite and were considered more valuable than precious metal vessels. This further supported the notion that the Venetians had powerful glass secrets, as it was the technical development of cristallo that was deeply rooted in alchemical experimentation. Salt and sand that turned into what appeared to be rock crystal was interpreted as belonging to the same science that was thought to have the possibility of turning base metal into gold. In the 1500’s, the Sienese metalworker Vannoccio Biringuccio still thought cristallo was born from the speculation of good alchemistic savants, through whose efforts it imitates the metals on one hand and the transparency and splendor of gems on the other. Antonio Neri, the first Venetian to publish a text comprised of drawings depicting examples of Venetian glass, equated glass with gold. In his treatise L’arte Vetraria, “ It hath fusion in the fire, and permanence in it, likewise as the perfect and shining metal of gold.” 24 Yet, it was the raw materials that were tied to these alchemic notions, and a limited availability to certain minerals and plants, as well as, a questioning of what exactly made up the cristallo, which added to the mystique of Venetian glass.
A recurring theme in Venetian glass history is the purported property of the cristallo breaking spontaneously whenever it came into contact with poison. This myth could have had its roots in the composition of glass itself as a key ingredient in glassmaking, alumen catinum, was also used for its diuretic effects and as an abortive medicine, but in larger quantities it could be deadly. The notion of the expulsion of the serpent, as represented in images of Saint John the Baptist, may have been based on a very practical application, in that the caustic smell of burning salicornia plants was known to drive away serpents and alumen catinum was sprinkled around the house to drive away vermin. A Dutch superstition originating in the seventeenth century believed that the breaking of a drinking glass announced someone’s death. In Italy, the deliberate breaking of a drinking glass at weddings and other occasions symbolized happiness. Another tale told was that Venetian glasses changed color when filled with a poisonous liquid. Or better yet, the superlative Venetian drinking glasses would shatter instantly when they came in contact with a single drop of poison. These notions seem to have originated from a story concerning Saint John the Evangelist portrayed in engravings by such artists as Jean Baptist Barbe (1578-1649) and Jacques Callot (1592-1635). The evangelist in the image is shown holding a poisoned Venetian style glass chalice with a snake in the glass, which represents the poisoned liquid. The engravings included relate the legend of how the priest of the temple of Diana in Ephesus gave John a poisoned cup to drink from as a test of his faith. John not only survived the test unharmed but also revived two men who had previously drunk from the cup. Deriving from the Middle Ages, the chalice has symbolized a representation of Christianity. Found in the frescos at the Monastery of Monte Oliveto Magiore near Siena, Benedict breaks a glass of poisoned wine by making the sign of the Cross.25 The appearance of the serpent symbol can be identified in the stems and applied decoration of Venetian glass commencing in the Renaissance but even more predominate in the Baroque period. It is believed that such a form may have begun in early Islamic glass styles as well as Christian symbolism. In the Venetian revival of the nineteenth century, this symbolism lost it’s meaning, expressing instead the serpents, along with other decorations, were retained as a symbol of the virtuosity of glassmaking in Venice.
Walter Benjamin’s discourse of ‘the aura’ is important to inject when discussing the serpent goblets of the Renaissance, as this is a time before the effects of mass industry of glassmaking. It is also a time before the secrets of Venetian glass were spread to the rest of the world, especially to foreign glassmakers attempting to replicate Venetian glass. The serpent goblets were so enigmatic that they became fetish objects, holders of sympathetic magic, composed of the secret glass material cristallo, the virtuoso skills of the glassblower and the mythic stories of the glass goblet. The commodity is imbued with the producers’ aura/energy/ personhood and thus becomes an extension of self. The object itself takes on sensuousness, desirability by the perceiver/tourist as it contains the imprint of the maker. This fetishlike quality can be affected by exchange value and by market price but the object itself still contains the makers imprint/aura. Additionally, the object becomes “authentic” only after the first copy is produced, with the reproductions being the aura that surrounds the original.
The production and reproduction of the serpent goblet occurred from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth century (and still in Modern day). The pilgrimages of the thirteenth- sixteenth centuries shifted from an emphasis of religious pursuit to one of a travelers’ ‘notion of departure’. Later, from the sixteenth-nineteenth centuries, travel again shifted from the scholastic approach, where as wealthy young men were educated by local teachers on the history of the region, to an opportunity to travel as an eyewitness observer. Commonly referred to as the “classical Grand Tour” consisted of emotionally neutral observation and collecting, and took place during the seventeenth century for primarily the sons of aristocracy and the gentry that traveled throughout Europe. It was during this time that travel became a marker of status. Yet, by the late eighteenth century sons of the professional middle class were able to afford this type of travel. By the nineteenth century the grand tour became the “Romantic Grand Tour” with the emergence of the focus on beauty and the sublime. The participants/ travelers of the Grand Tour are often referred to as Flaneurs or strollers. Though Urry speaks of Paris the same could be expressed for Venice, especially St. Marks Square, during the same period as it was also a city of ambiguity full of surprise and lacking boundaries. The anonymity of the crowd provided a refuge for the tourists who were able to move about unnoticed, observing and being observed, but rarely engaging the local people. Urry declares the flaneur to be the modern hero, as he was able to travel without obligations, to gaze, to be covert, and to remain in a liminal zone.26 The flaneur was a model for the twentieth century tourist in regards to how a place is viewed, recorded and dissimilated back home, as at this time new technologies of the gaze were produced. Important to note that the Flaneur was usually male and this further dictated how local women were scrutinized by the outsider and in which manner she was permitted in the public arenas.
In the second half of the nineteenth century Venice was producing glass replicating the style of the Renaissance with such virtuosity that collections had modern pieces masquerading as the older specimens. Susan Stewart states: “It is important to remember that the mechanical reproduction of art objects, the movement away from the authenticity of the original that in fact might be seen as creating the authenticity of the original, results in the susceptibility of art itself to this mode of exaggeration. As recent psychoanalytic work has told us, repetition, in fact, creates a reproduction which initiates the very aura of the real.”27 The collecting of the serpent goblets grew to be in vogue during the 19th century as tourism to Venice again reached a peak. The serpent goblet no longer held the same associations to Christian iconography or supernatural notions. Reproductions of the serpent goblet and derivatives of the goblet became an exercise of skill for the Muranese glassblowers and an expensive tourist artisan product/marker. The replicated serpent goblet as souvenir arose not out of use value or display value, but nostalgia value. Baudrillard states in Simulacra and Simulations,
“When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality; of second hand truths, objectivity and authenticity.”28 Thus it is this nostalgic value of the reproduced object that continues a narrative of the object – not only as a souvenir or replica but also of a cultural reproduction of a time past. As the artisan creates a simulacra or replica of the past object, so does the tourist join in creating a replica or simulacra of the cultural past and a narrative of this culture. It is this attained souvenir of the replica of the serpent goblet that increases value by way of a commodification of nostalgia through the past experience and the attaining of the object at a certain time/ space.
Replicas and adaptations that are made today both in and outside of Venice, are produced out of developing a skill for the glassblower, and as similar to the nineteenth century, the call for tourist arts. Again, this is an example of the nostalgia value of the reproduction being that it is not the same as the souvenir because it is a reproduced object heralding the skill of the past and the present of the producing glass artisan. These objects developed not as a use value but instead a continuation that develops as a narrative of the nostalgia value of the golden age of Venetian glass. Baudrillard further states: “ The fascination of handicraft derives from an object’s having passed through the hands of someone the marks of whose labour are still inscribed thereupon: we are fascinated by what has been created, and is therefore unique, because the moment of creation cannot be reproduced.”29 My declaration of nostalgia value derives from Baudrillard’s notion of use value and aesthetic value, meaning that the narrative of the original object is defined again by its adaptation. The serpent goblet is esteemed in regards to artisan virtuosity and nostalgia. The aura of the original, which in this instance the original is defined as the most virtuous example of the serpent goblet from the Renaissance, distinguishes it from the fake or the replica, and as a replica it supports it and creates the value of the original object; thus continuing to develop the biography of the original. An example of this is the Covered dragon-stemmed goblet made in the workshop of C.H.F. Muller, in Hamburg, Germany c.1880. This goblet was made famous originally as a masterpiece of its remarkable Venetian style, and again in 1978 when the goblet was exposed as a nineteenth-century fake. The serpent goblet is an example of a material object so symbolically dense with cultural meaning that the goblets continue to be attempted by glassblowers throughout the world and are coveted by collectors.

The Flame worked Souvenir Imported from China
And the Impact of Mass Tourism on the local Market

“In the Venetian context, where experience and skill in different trades, such as building, glass blowing, weaving, restoration and carving are often upheld as among the best and most enduring traits of the local culture, the closeness between object and maker emerges with striking evidence. If therefore we ask why people are prepared to pay very high prices for slowly manufactured things, sometimes hardly superior to mass produced equivalents, we might answer in Maussian terms, that, compared with even the best industrialized products, handmade objects carry something of the spirit of the person who made them, or in Derrida’s words, who ‘gave [them] their time’ (Mauss 1950; Derrida 1991).”
-Sciama and Eicher30

A number of dualities exist between the historical and the modern, one being in terms of the authentic material object and the reproduced souvenir; another referring to a value based on the secrets of seventeenth century Murano techniques of the glassblower and international fame and fortune for the artistic glassblowers demonstrating their techniques today, like maestro Lino Tagliapietra. The question remains: can the Muranese dictate the reinventions within their own cultural traditions with the continued effects of mass tourism to the island, and how does the importing of Chinese forgeries affect the changes made in their market place and the characteristics of their products?

Mass Tourism and its influences in Murano

In 2000 more than sixty percent of Murano’s workforce were involved in someway in the production, supply, sales, or packing and shipping of glass. Approximately one third of the Muranese are self-employed, working generally as artisans or shopkeepers heading small concerns of five or fewer employees; the rest are employed at one of the twenty-seven industrial glassworks located on the island.31 The material objects of the Muranese serve utilitarian, social and cultural functions. Traditions are arguably altered by the present interpretations of them by the community. As Susan Terrio discusses in her text, Crafting the Culture and History of French Chocolate, authenticity in craft businesses and markets produced in a specific place can be maintained, reinvented and revived as they can be sold as such. This valuable commodity can be maintained by the support of asserted regional identity, a specific production and its producers. It is estimated that of the eighty or so furnaces on the island, sixty percent of the glass production is sold locally in the tourist market. As objects of curiosity, the Muranese have dictated how the world perceives their glass and its producers. The spectacle of glassblowing is a featured tour and promises tourists a chance to acquire glass trinkets for souvenirs, along with a view into the life as a glassblower and how the purchased objects are in fact made. This is where the clash exists in the mass produced object and the produced culture of the glassblower/Muranese.
In referring to Jean Baudrillard’s discussion of simulacra, as the Venetian glassblowers create reproductions of historical objects, correspondingly the public reproduces the mythic romance of the island and notions of Murano’s traditions into a simulacrum of itself. Murano is removed and reproduced through various narrative lenses and imagery; supplied by tourist brochures, guide books and popular culture. It is through these imitations that the more visited streets of Murano become a caricature of a ‘real’ Murano. It becomes a sort of “Baudrillardian Disneyland” to the tourist where the spectacle of gondolier and the spectacle of the glassblower are shrouded with the mythic romance of the pre-modern. The two-acre spot of Saint Mark’s Square is the tourist center of Venice, as at least twelve million visitors pass through and around it throughout the year.32 San Marco is the quintessential destination conjuring the image of Venice, as does the Grand Canal and the Gondolier passing under the “Bridge of Sighs.” Tourists head to Saint Mark’s Square not to see Venetians in their lives but to have stood in a well touristed spot and to say they were there, as the only others they will see are other tourists looking at other tourists. It can be argued that these modern day mass tourists cannot stroll through Saint Marks Square as the nineteenth century Englishman – the Flaneur- who sat in cafes and gazed around them with bewildered aloofness. For many tourists the seeking of an ‘authentic’ destination exists in the surrounding islands on the outskirts of Venice. Although a highly visited site, the island of Murano is ripe with ‘real’ Venetians laboring in their daily lives.
Daniel Boorstin (1961) describes tourism as one of the major “pseudo-events” that have accompanied modern times. He asserts that the modern tourist’s readiness to accept superficiality and perhaps even their performance to fakery and contrived experiences over “genuine” travel experiences. The mass tourist accepts the banal: thus encouraging it. Furthermore Ritzer and Liska (1997) argue that modern tourism and its post-modern expressions are shaped by a process of “McDisneyization” by way tourists are encouraged to seek travel experiences that are merely reflections of their dehumanized, superficial and inauthentic lives. Smith (1989) discusses the impact tourists have on the communities they visit. Smith says that the high-end tourists generate a lesser impact, while their local hosts regard the lower-end tourists least favorably. Urry (1992) discusses how the tourist regards their hosts giving five types of gazing, number two being ‘spectaterial’: meaning that they engage in community activities with other tourist having brief encounters, glancing at sights and collecting signs/ souvenirs of the place visited. Zukin (1991) cites the Disney experience as an example of a new culture of consumption in which visitors are lured into thinking of consuming the world’s things and images as a necessary condition of participation in modern society.
In Murano we see a commodification of nostalgia; for the tourist who purchases the souvenir and for the glassblower who strives to return to the heyday of seventeenth century Murano when a maestro glassblower was so respected that he was able to throw off the reigns of marginalization and was sanctioned to marry a daughter of a Venetian aristocrat. As Susan Stewart takes from Baudrillard in terms of use value being replaced by aesthetic value in referring to the object, I believe that this is a case where aesthetic value is replaced by the nostalgia value of the object. In this version of the simulacrum of modernity we turn to a lost reality, a place of nostalgia, an illusion of an everlasting, static tradition. I believe that it is this endorsement of nostalgia that is then transferred to the produced and valued object. This willed nostalgia contribute both a perceived national identity for the glassmaker and influences consumerist nostalgia for the tourist, where an impact is continued by the globalization of the replica.
Michael Herzfeld names structural nostalgia as a, “ …collective representation of an Edenic order- a time before time- in which the balanced perfection of social relations has not yet suffered the decay that affects everything human.”33 Though Herzfeld uses structural nostalgia to refer to the nation-state, I propose that it might be transferred to the narrative of the artisan. It may be through the corrosion of skill that occurs through the adaptation and infiltration of the replication of Venetian glassblowing on a global level that this nostalgia takes place. Beginning in the seventeenth century to the present day, as skills and techniques assimilated globally, a lack of necessity for Venetian glass has occurred and consequently created the nostalgia object. Another sort of value has been created due to this idea of structured nostalgia of Venetian glass through the globally mass produced replica and the creation of the nostalgia object.
The spectacle of glassblowing may add to this nostalgia value in the sense that the tourist creates a photograph of the glassblower with the exposure of his ‘body as tool’ and an attainment of the souvenir artifact of the perceived soon obsolete craft. As it has been said, in order for a tourist destination to be created the place itself must have a definition of itself. For in fact the local Muranese community does define it’s authentic representations of their cultural lives and how they are represented in the world. For MacCannell there seems to be a sense of irony that the tourists are fascinated in the authentic lives of others while, at the same time, that they have lost their attachments to their daily lives.34 Urry declares this as a fascination of others people’s work bound up with the postmodern destruction of boundaries, especially between the ‘front and the backstage of peoples’ lives. The long history of tourism to Murano is fascinating, as tourists have been allowed a defined view into the Muranese world of glassmaking while the Muranese, in the past, had little permission to enter the outside world, for fear of relinquishing the secrets of the island.
Tourists place Murano and its glass as second only to gondoliers as essential to and emblematic of their Venetian experience. Davis and Marvin believe that this is perhaps why so many tourists combine the two metonyms in one: they come back from their Venetian visit with a miniature glass gondola.35 Mass tourism to Murano and the mass production of the tourist object is rooted in the ideas of Eden that existed for Murano in the their technical brilliantine halcyon days of the Renaissance. In accord to the views of Venice by the Grand Tourists of the seventeenth-nineteenth centuries, the modern day tourists also see Venice as ‘dreamlike’, ‘romantic’ and ‘ an anti-modern fantasy land.’ It was during the nineteenth century the city almost lost its draw as the glassblowing process became established throughout the rest of Europe, along with the impact of the age of machinery. Yet in the nineteenth century Renaissance styles of glass making were revived in Murano. In the mid 1800s Antonio Salviati (1816-1900) incorporated the old color techniques and began a large-scale commercial production of glass in traditional styles. Salviati recreated forms in gaudy color and over elaborate, sentimental works. Most of the other Muranese glassmakers followed his lead in making pastiches of sixteenth-seventeenth century Venetian glass, aimed primarily at the tourist market. Salviati is also known for a smaller, higher-end production of simpler shapes and use of clear colors in straightforward copies of the old classic color techniques of Renaissance Venice. It was after World War I that Functionalist ideas gave a new stimulus to the tradition of Venetian glass making and a truly modern style emerged credited to not only Salviati, but to Paolo Venini and Ercole Barovier. The nineteenth century has been referred to as the “Golden Age of Glass” for it added new techniques to the glassmaker’s repertoire. This sudden burst of activity can be attributed to a few factors, one being the impact of the Industrial Revolution. For it was not since the Italian Renaissance had there been such a surge of new ideas in glass, such as pearl satin glass, iridescent glass, and pressed glass using machinery and the aid of molds. Yet most of the success existed in the demand of trinkets for the home by the middle class, as at this time tourists made a come back as well. The Muranese glassblowers produced knick-knacks for the tourist trade: glass with embossed Lions of Saint Marks, Rialto Bridges, Gondoliers, perfume bottles and paperweights that still are for sale today in Murano and throughout Venice. As Stewart states the following: “The souvenir speaks to a context of origin through a language of language, for it is not an object arising out of need or use value; it is an object arising out of the necessarily insatiable demands of nostalgia.”36 Even though there are the tourists that can afford the expensive art glass of Murano, the majority of tourists who are connoisseurs in this field are minimal. The mass tourists purchase the glass objects, though often classified as kitsch, become dislocated from their original context and develop into exotic objects. It can be said that these products have little use value and have a focus of display value. Yet it is this display value that exists less in the quality of the glass object itself than in the relationship between the tourist and souvenir. Its Benjaminian auratic quality derives more from the object’s history, its narrative power, than from any present consumption of it.
There has been much discussion of tourism and the authentic experience, especially in regards to performance, which includes the preoccupation of anthropologist’s distaste of the token performance by trussed up locals reenacting presubscribed notions of the real. For example, MacCannell asserts that modern cultures are so dissatisfied with their own cultures that they seek authentic experiences elsewhere. The tourists’ journey is a sort of nostalgic experience based on the premise that life was more real before the emergence of industrial capitalism. He goes on to suggest that the tourists’ goal is to get ‘behind the stage’ that is provided for them and find something real to experience. This I would say is the longing to flee to the real. Bruner contends that the search for authenticity by MacCannell and Handler may be a result of contemporary academics projecting their notions and longings onto tourists.37 Yet, a question asked by Chambers remains, whether or not local traditions, such community festivals, become any less authentic when they begin to involve tourists.38 Chambers believes the answer lies in the dealings with the notions authenticity and tradition. Chambers concludes that the Marxist interpretation, such as MacCannell’s, presuppose that capitalistic ideologies have deprived modern and modernizing peoples from any claim to authenticity, to realness, and ultimately to the control over the modes of production that provide them with at least the possibility of autonomous social action. Yet, in regards to the authentic experience in tourists visiting Murano and viewing glassmaking, I believe there was never full access by tourists to the studios where many of the secrets were long held. The common tourist never could enter certain studios where secrets were always kept and techniques were always kept secret. The glass studio always defined the view made available to tourists since the beginning of tourism to Murano. From the beginning the display/ performance was kept short, fast moving and magical- i.e. turning a molten glob of glass into a horse- in order to keep the tourists attention and to quickly move them along to the adjacent shop. The question exists, how real is this? I would say very much so, but if one thinks they are seeing the true workings of a glass studio, with teams and products being made- quotas filled etc, then they are misled. The tourist site usually consists of a solo male glassmaker making a rudimentary horse, in a clean environment with bench seating. The true workplace is in vast contrast as it is noisy, dirty, smoky, dusty, full of sweaty men, with the alternating of stagnate and exciting energy and often times raucous behavior. On a part of the wall hang posters and calendars of semi-clad and nude women, along with drawings and photos of the day’s production assignments. There are espresso breaks, visiting maestros, and other fellow glassblowers. This is a place tourists are not privy to and in the most exclusive studios (Venini) no one is allowed access without prior invitation or friends with the maestros themselves.

The Globally Produced Venetian Glass Gondola

“One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition.” -Benjamin39

The third and final installment of the material glass object we will discuss is the flame worked glass gondola. Flame working, also referred to as lampworking, is a technique using a torch while seated at a table and working with solid rods or hollow tubes of glass. This miniature glass boat fits in the palm of a small person’s hand and is often composed of a seated couple with a standing gondolier behind them holding an oar. At one time these were exclusively executed in Murano in small factories made up of primarily female employees. In the past ten years or so for the Muranese retail outlets, a shift was made from the value of local manufacturing to a market value. Today many of these are imported from China due to less expensive labor and lower costs, as it is cheaper for the Muranese to import the completed product rather than import raw materials, produce the glass, and employ their workers. Even though glass blowing in China does not have as rich of a history as in Venice or in the Middle East, as glassblowing only reached China some five centuries after it was discovered in the Near East, they quickly became advanced in the art of simulating precious and semi precious stones. For example Taft maintains that it wasn’t until the late 17th century when glass production was organized on a larger scale, vessels and objects were unpretentious, and little attempt was made in the exploration of decorative techniques. The Chinese seem to have relied rather on the import of glass from the Roman Empire, Sasanian Persia and the Islamic world.40
Despite the profits that can be generated by importing Chinese made Muranese inspired glassware, many glass furnaces continue to stay open playing a central role in the tourist experience of Murano. The tourist comes to Murano to see the spectacle of glassblowing and to purchase the glass souvenir. Yet, when the tourist purchases the imported object, no longer representing the particular domestic traditions: she is buying a replica of the culture and conventions of tourism. Because of the evolution of the technical process and dissimilation of this knowledge from Murano, it is possible to reduce the dissimilarities of the locally based product and the imported forgeries/ replicas/ products. I think that the Chinese artisans do not believe they are making forgeries of Venetian glass gondolas, I would say that they are merely vying for a share in a market where there is a need for cheaper goods in the style of the Muranese glass. The effects of these globally produced tourist objects on the local Muranese economy and its cultural traditions must be looked into further, as this brings up an issue asking: does the object made outside the culture it represents affect how the object is regarded and thus how the culture is regarded?
This focus on production refers to Marx’s distinction between the product of the “non-alienated” and “alienated” labor. “Non-alienated” labor can be expressed as the producer seeing her self in the product, while “alienated” labor is just the opposite, the producer does not recognize herself in the product. Although Marx used these terms to describe the dissimilarities between the non-industrial worker and the industrial worker, I believe we can transfer it to the maker who recognizes herself in the product due to its cultural ties and the maker who does not recognize herself in the product due to the lack of connection to the culture the product represents. In addition, Marx states: “A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour.”41 The object retains its mystery due to the fact that an artisan engaging his intellect, spirit and body fabricated it.
Yet, when an object is produced without the history it is mimicking- the aura of the past- then the object itself becomes merely an example of use-value. The Chinese made gondola, though using similar tools, is produced in a factory setting not ensconced in the same history, culture with the artisans lacking Murano in their blood. For the Muranese glassmaker these alienated objects made in China lack in density, meaning they lack in cultural meaning.
Let us turn again to the materiality of glass and index the glass object within it. Taking from Alfred Gell, “It is often the case that art objects are regarded as transcending the technical schemas of their creators, as well as those of mere spectators, as when the art object is considered to arise, not from the activities of the individual physically responsible for it, but from the divine inspiration or ancestral spirit with which he is filled.”42 Transference happens from the artisan to the object by way of the glassblower’s sweat, his hand manipulation and the ritualization of glassblowing itself. In Medieval and Renaissance Venice the creation of the glass material and the manipulation of glass by the glassblower was viewed as otherworldly with leanings towards sympathetic magic. Even though today glassblowing is not viewed as sorcery, tourists visiting a Murano glass demonstration can be overheard declaring to their fellow viewers, “wasn’t that just magical?” These previous statements are significant due to the fact that, throughout the world, artisans are often treated as the last storytellers of tradition. It is in terms of facing modernity for the artisan that Herzfeld states, “In effect, artisans face a chilling choice among accepting their role as the picturesque bearers of an obsolescent tradition, becoming merchants in a rat race that most of them are destined to lose, or joining an international labor force in which the price of modernity s to lose one’s identity as a skilled and individual personality.”43

Conclusion

“With good reason postmodernism has relentlessly instructed us that reality is artifice yet, so it seems to me, not enough surprise has been expressed as to how we nevertheless get on with living, pretending- thanks to the mimetic faculty- that we live facts, not fictions.”
-Taussig44

This resonates as simply stated: we all live in different worlds, not only different cultures, and within each culture our individual worlds are real, really constructed and authentic to ourselves. For the Muranese glassmaker, the world he lives in is linked but separate from the tourist. He lives his life authentically, fully and aware of his bond to the past, his heritage, and the present- the workings of daily life and to the future- that he actively takes part in a continuing tradition. For the tourist, she is truly traveling, even if by mass, to see this way of life and for a short time to find her place among it. Modern tourism is a kind of nostalgic sojourn of the routes and byways of colonial expansion. As Baudrillard states, “traveling as a tourist always involves going in search of lost time.”45 It is through the tourist’s gaze and consumption of glass souvenirs, even if not produced on the island, that their lives intersect with the Muranese glassmaker and support the tradition of glassblowing. For it is the returned traveler that purports the ideology of sympathetic magic through the power of the fetishized souvenir gondola in her hand- the power of travel, sight and nostalgia. Although the glass object once obtained by the tourist becomes the souvenir, it no longer represents the lived experience of the glassmaker, but the experience of the tourist. It is this alchemic coalescence of opposites that the Muranese glassmaker has appropriated throughout his history.

GLASS TERMINOLOGY

Aventurine (from the French aventure, “chance”) : Translucent glass with the sparkling
inclusions of gold, copper or chromic oxide, first made in Venice in the 15th century.
aventurine glass mimics the mineral of the same name, a variety of quartz flecked
with mica.

Blowing: The technique of forming an object by inflating a gob of molten glass affixed
on the end of a blowpipe. The blower puts air through the tube, inflating the gob,
which is then manipulated into a form by swinging it, rolling it or shaping it with
tools.

Blowpipe: An iron tube, approximately five feet long, for blowing glass.

Cane: A thin rod consisting of groups of rods which may be bundled together.

Cold-working: The collective term for many of the techniques used to alter or decorate
glass when it’s cold.

Cristallo (from the Italian, “crystal”): A term first coined in Venice in the 14th century
to describe glass that bears a resemblance to colorless rock crystal.

Dragon-stem goblet: A type of goblet with the stem in the form of a dragon with a
tortuous body, outspread wings, open jaws, and a crest. Known in Italian as vetri
a serpenti, dragon-stemmed goblets were first made in the 17th century. They were
imitated in the Netherlands by producers of facon de Venise glass.

Facon de Venise: Glass made in imitation of Venetian products, at centers other than
Venice itself. This was popular in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Flame working: The technique of forming objects from rods or tubes of glass that when
heated in a flame become soft and can be manipulated into a form. Originally, the
source of the flame was an oil or paraffin lamp used in unison with foot-powered
bellows. Also referred to as Flame working, gas-fueled torches are now used.

Furnace: An enclosed structure for the production and function of heat. In
glassmaking, furnaces are used for melting the glass, holding the pots in which the
glass is melted in and at times reheating partly formed parts on a blowpipe.

Gaffer (from the English, a derivative of “grandfather”): The master glassmaker in
Charge of a bench, team or other glass workers.

Glory hole: A hole similar to the furnace used when reheating glass around 1000C.

Latticino (from the Italian latte, meaning “milk”): A term formerly used to describe
objects using glass canes.

Lattimo (from the Italian latte, meaning “milk”): White glass usually opacified by tin
Oxide or arsenic.

Murrini, murrina, murrino (from the Latin murra, a stone from which costly vessels
Were made): Small bits of glass that when combined in an object form a specific
Pattern.

Studio glass: A term popularized in the 1960s for unique or limited edition objects made
in the studio rather than the factory.

Reticello (from the Italian, meaning “glass with a small network): A type of blown
Glass made with canes laid crisscross forming a net-like pattern.

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Winston-Allen, Anne. 1997. Stories of the Rose: The Making if the Rosary in the Middle Ages. University Park: Pennsylvania State University.
Zerwick, Chloe.1990. A Short History of Glass. New York: Harry N. Abrams and The
Corning Museum of Glass.
Zukin, Sharon. 1991. Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World. Berkeley:
University of California Press.

ENDNOTES

Enduring Material, Obsolescent Craft

Viewing Murano Through the Materiality of Glass and the Souvenir

Laura Kramer

Masters Thesis

May 2008

“Glass is the finest of all materials, the way it can be worked, the way it achieves it’s form, is unique among other materials. It metamorphoses from a viscose mass to a clear crystalline object. It is capricious and difficult; it is a material which lives many lives.”
-Timo Sarpaneva1

Entangled in the narrative of Murano, Italy is the perpetuation of the romance of glassmaking, along with a tradition that traces familial trees to the time before the glass factories moved to the island. Murano, a small island approximately a mile north of Venice, plays a significant role as a tourist destination to witness the spectacle of glassblowing. It is a place where local artisans carry on a craft tradition dating back to 1291AD, when glass furnaces were moved from the main island of Venice in order to protect the city from fire. During the sixteenth century and seventieth century centuries in the workshops on Murano, Venetian glassmakers produced luxurious objects for use and display that were modifiers of wealth and decadence. Consumers throughout Europe and in distant countries such as China imported Venetian glass and encouraged their regional glassmakers to imitate the Venetian products.

This thesis follows three distinct material glass objects produced by the glassmakers of Murano intended for tourist consumption, as the souvenir most associated with Venice arguably is the glass object. Beginning in the thirteenth-fourteenth centuries, I focus on the Rosary Bead, a religious token purchased by the pilgrim on way to the Holy Land. For the pilgrim, who is often referred to as “the original tourist”, travel was associated with the Western dynamic- as emerging from the closed societies of medieval times it was the Europeans that ventured out and discovered the world.2 The second object examined is the Serpent Goblet and its variations originally produced during the sixteenth-nineteenth centuries as it represents the height of Venetian glassblowing. Attached to these goblets were many superstitions and a mythology linked to alchemy and botanicals. A common souvenir of the Flaneur from the Grand Tour, these Venetian goblets can be found in various museum collections today. Lastly I discuss the flame worked glass Gondola: the foremost example of the mass tourist purchased Venetian souvenir. Within the past ten years it has arrived to the island as a Chinese import, bringing along with it economic/social tensions for the local glassmakers by replicating their culture through the replication of their craft. The first two types of material objects are used as a background for the modern day material object as a way to express changes that has occurred to the glassblowers of Murano. My discussion focuses the effects to the Murano glassmakers’ economic, cultural and social situations, along with how it has perhaps misled and perpetuated the tourists’ view of “romantic” Venice.
As a material, glass holds the ‘memory’ or imprint of the tool that touched it. By this I refer to the fact that during the process of glassmaking the skin of the glass object retains on its surface the recollection of the mark. This is an important metaphor for the tension between the artisan produced glass object and the placeholder of meaning for the tourist. Much had been documented on glass as a material, as well as, the glass objects produced and exported from the island of Murano. There exists many stratums of myths of the glassmakers and their glass; yet not much has been written on the glassmakers in regards to their relationship to the objects they create, their “commodified folklore” or their relationship to the tourists that come to view the spectacle of glassblowing.3 This thesis traverses between two different ways of viewing the Murano glass material object: the manner in which the materiality of glass is an active player in Murano and how the objects produced for the tourist market dictates meaning for the object; thus producing an index or nostalgia for the past. I argue that it is the returned traveler that assists in the ideological signification for the power of sympathetic magic by way of travel, sight and nostalgia. It is this power contained within the glass object that creates a tension of the duality between the impression of the memory of the artisan and the tourists’ index of the past within the formation of social relations and assigned myths.

The Materiality and Romance of Glass

“According to legend, a ship carrying merchants of nitre (natural soda) dropped anchor on the coast of Phoenicia, and the passengers spread along the beach to prepare dinner. As there were no rocks at hand to balance the cooking pots on, they used pieces of nitre from the cargo: alight and mixed with sand, they produced luminous rivulets of a foreign liquid: this is said to be the origin of glass. Thus did Pliny the Elder in Natural History; attribute the invention of glass to the Phoenicians, though nowadays it is known beyond doubt that this remarkable material was first produced in Mesopotamia.”4

Glass, chemically speaking, is a super cooled liquid material, which is formed basically from a fusion of silica (sand, flint or quartz) with an alkaline flux (potash, or soda) with the addition of lime to make the glass more durable.5 These ingredients are put into crucibles (pots of clay), placed into a furnace where they are heated to around 1100C where the ingredients fuse and become a molten liquid similar to the consistency of warmed honey. In effect the same glass recipe as that written on a cuneiform tablet of the seventh century B.C. is in use to this day. Glass has always held a poetic power, as it requires an intimacy and a prodigious degree of skill by the glassmaker as well as singular ingredients of which the material is composed. In certain myths glass is portrayed as a symbol of clarity, spiritual perfection, and at times a vehicle for revelation. Expressed as a metaphor for the plane between the visible and non-visible, the solid, yet transparent material seems somewhat mysterious. Possibly for this reason, the messengers from the Celtic underworld arrived by glass boats, symbolizing the spiritual intentions of their voyage. Furthermore, folktales speak of glass slippers, glass mountains, and glass palaces- much like the soul in which the fabled King Arthur dwells. In early China glass cicadas imitating jade were put on the tongues of the dead, as the cicada was a symbol of life after death. The glassmakers in Rome were given a prominent street in the exclusive part of the city where they could practice their art. In the Byzantine period (around 438 AD), the Thelodosian Code exempted glassmakers from taxation. In Renaissance Italy maestro glassblowers were sanctioned to marry into Venetian aristocracy. In Britain the highest in the land could be involved with glassmaking without the fear of losing prestige. And in contemporary society we are surrounded by glass whether it is the tempered windows we drive behind in our automobiles, the computer monitors we stare at or the cell phones in our pockets that contain fiber optics and glass microchips.
These narratives expressing the origins and cultural influences of glassblowing is an example of the enigmatic nature of the materiality of glass that for many continues to exist today. Craft objects themselves communicate social identity, and through craft objects artisans give material expression to ideas about roles, identities, and relationships. In Renaissance Venice we will see how ritual/ magic are linked with the glass object as a way to either insure success of the technical process or to imbue the objects with power. As the objects have power so must the artisans hold power through their creative processes.
Muranese glassblowers, as in the Aztec case described by Costin, envisioned themselves as heirs to a glorious, mythic past in which artisans were celebrated.6 Furthermore, similarly as with the Aztecs, the Venetians aristocracy associated themselves with the virtuosity of craft through patronage and lineage. The linkage between craft and nobility lies in the conjunction between power and prestige. The ability and power to create is to give life into a material, give it breath, spirit and to also make it functional and useful. The intensive labor and skill needed to produce Venetian glass enhances the value of the material and created social currency. The glass obtained their value through the skill of the production of the craft, as well as, the material of glass itself: as we will discuss with the glass material cristallo in Murano in the Renaissance. The intrinsic value of the rare material of cristallo and of the development of color red, along with the extrinsic value of the produced goods, elevated the artisans’ power and prestige in Renaissance society.

Generational Ties to Glassmaking

The Muranese glassblowers pride themselves on their 700 years of history and the position of renown associated with their glass making tradition. Benjamin speaks of in The Storyteller that the most constant version of storytelling is the one that least differs from mouth to mouth. He cites the trade structure of the Middle Ages being that, “If the peasants and seamen were past masters of storytelling, the artisan class was its university”. 8 Yet the glass masters of Venice differ in that they were not accomplished travelers relaying their stories, instead they were accomplished storytellers in the manner that they relayed their craft to their apprentices. The ‘storytelling’ of glassblowing is not verbal. Instead it is relayed from the maestro to the apprentice through keen observance and in turn mimicry. This ‘habitus’ provides the practical skills and disposition necessary to navigate within the hot shop, as it guides the choices of the individual without ever being strictly reducible to prescribed, formal rules. This embodied phenomena- such as the proper way to hold the glass blowing pipe or how to sit at the bench or even how to walk to the glory hole- is an acquired scheme of perception. These patterns Bourdieu describes this as dispositions, and are a result of the internalization of ethos or objective social structures through an experience of an individual or a group. Furthermore, habitus mediates between ‘objective’ structures of social relations and the individual ‘subjective’ behavior of actors.9 Maestro Simone Cenedese states, “In Murano we are born near the ovens. It’s a thing that comes to you like speaking and writing and walking. You become a glassworker.”10 This is similar to Heidegger referring to the shoemaker understanding himself through the creation of his things, his shoes.11
This notion of becoming has a twofold importance, as it is encompassed in learned behavior and in genetics. Tim Ingold declares five points of skill, his fourth point being tied to genetics, saying that as skilled practice cannot be reduced to a formula, a formula of skills cannot be passed from generation to generation.12 Ingold describes this as a fine-tuning of movements and, “through this process, each generation contributes to the next not by handing on a corpus of representations, or information in the strict sense, but rather by introducing novices into contexts which afford select opportunities for perception and action….” 13 This non-discursive knowledge operates beneath the level of the social ideology. Furthermore the agent develops these dispositions in response to the determining structures and external conditions they encounter.

Body as Tool/ Gender as Implement

This leads us to the notion of the “body as tool” and the gender differences in the labor of glassmaking. Mauss observed that technique does not solely depend upon the use of tools. Mauss uses the example of a dancer using his own body as an instrument asserting that the body is man’s first and purest technical object.14 Glassblowing is predominately a male space for various reasons. One example supporting this notion is the belief men have more strength in their lungs to force air into a piece of molten glass.15 It is the physical demands of glassblowing: lifting, blowing and working in the heat that is seen as a masculine task. Yet another reason is the close proximity to other glassblowers working together: as the “team” is made up of a gaffer (maestro), first assistant and subsequent second/ third and possibly additional assistants. The female glassmakers are relegated to tasks that are deemed “lighter”, although it also demanding a high degree of skill and talent. Women are the primary flame workers: they work solitary using a small torch at a table making smaller pieces of hand-manipulated glass. (Beads, gondolas, etc.) This technique is not exclusively female, there are men that are flame workers, and either owning their own studios creating art glass or men working in the same environment as the women but considered the maestros of the flame.
The narrative of tradition is further expressed by the representation of the male glassblower in the factory setting, involved in teamwork among other male glassblowers, while the female glassworker is sequestered to the second floor- not produced for the tourist spectacle. Venetian glassblowing is prized for its use of teamwork, specifically adapted tools and techniques. It is also regarded for the fact that for generations artisans have been passing down secrets of a highly skilled craft through apprenticeship, oral tradition and blood relations. Glassblowing remains in the conventional narrative a craft where only men have the adequate strength, and are able to work in the oppressive heat in such tiresome factory conditions. I question that because of these generational blood ties could it also be possible for the Muranese females to be genetically disposed to be as skilled glassblowers as their male counterparts. As a female outsider, one can infiltrate the factory floor for a few days, but it is quite doubtful that she or, even more seldom, a local female would remain part of the team in a true sense of comradery.
Interestingly, the female Muranese glassmakers seem to be marginalized, as they are not for public view. The glassmakers demonstrating for the tourists are always male, even if he is not working in a team, and is solo, not blowing the glass and only hand manipulating the molten pieces. This marginalization is important as the women seem to be either protected from becoming a spectacle in the eyes of the public, or because the glassmaking myth needs to be perpetuated as a strength that only men can perform.

ROSARY BEADS FROM THE THIRTEENTH-FOURTEENTH CENTURY

“ A tourist is half a pilgrim, if a pilgrim is half a tourist.”
-Victor Turner and Edith Turner16

During the middle Ages, much of Italy was controlled by the Holy Roman Empire, although Venice was one of several cities that were independent from both the Empire and the Church. Venice, founded in the fifth century due to people fleeing the Attila the Hun, became a staging area for the Crusades. At that time, shipbuilding was the primary industry and Venetian ships carried Crusaders to the Holy Land. It was during the first century AD that the Roman glass industry became fully established, leading to the prolific spread of glasshouses throughout the Empire. Venetian glass was already making a name for itself as the paragon for glassmaking, when the Doge Lorenzo Tiepolo in the late thirteenth century prohibited the export of potash, broken glass and sand from the island.17 This measure was taken to halt the dispersion to the rest of the world of the secret formulas and glass compositions produced exclusively in Venice. By the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries pilgrimages had become a pervasive trend assisted by a systemized and growing industry of religious lodgings and mass-produced handbooks. These pilgrimages would include a combination of religious fervor with the pleasure of viewing new cultures. By the fifteenth century there were established tours from Venice to the Holy Land and at this time Murano’s glass industry had staked a name for it self as an established tourist attraction. Tourists journeyed over to ‘pleasant Murano’ primarily to take in the air, which was believed to be softer and healthier than in Venice.18 The chance to see the manipulation and production of glass and to browse among the products on display made Murano a fixture on the Venetian circuit, and by the late sixteen hundreds Nicolas de Fer would declare, “Travelers always visit the Glass House at Mirano [sic].”19 It was due to the influx of pilgrims that the Venetian glassmakers realized they could sell their products to these groups, with the major seller being rosary beads as this was an easy item for the travelers to carry away. The rosary is a combination of prayer and mediation centered on sequences of reciting the Lord’s Prayer followed by ten recitations of the Hail Mary prayer. By 1482 approximately 100,000 individuals had joined the rosary confraternity. For the most part members used some kind of device for keeping track of their prayers, but even if only a portion of them used beads for counting, the result was an increase in demand for what was already, before the founding of the confraternity, an item of medieval “mass merchandise” and an exploding business.20
This sacred religious object was used for devotional and ornamental purposes, along with the imbued belief that they were amulets with the power to ward off evil. At this time, the religious values associated to glass beads could not be disconnected from their overseas trade. In Monasteries, monks were expected to pray daily in Latin, the liturgical language of the Roman Catholic Church. Yet in some monasteries, while meditating, lay brothers who did not understand Latin or who were illiterate were required to say the Lord's Prayer a certain number of times per day. Since there were 150 Psalms, this could number up to 150 times per day. To count these repetitions, they used beads strung upon a cord and this set of prayer beads became commonly known as a Paternoster, which is the Latin for "Our Father". Secular individuals adopted this practice as a form of popular worship. The Paternoster could be of various lengths, but was often made up of five decades of ten beads, which when performed three times made up 150 prayers. Other Paternosters, most notably those used by laypersons, may have had only had ten beads, and may have also been highly ornamented. As the Rosary (ring of flowers) incorporating the Hail Mary prayer became more common, it was often still referred to as a Paternoster.
These glass beads and rosaries were soon transformed to become secular ornaments along with becoming embellishments to garments and objects related to entirely different belief systems and rituals. They were often used as counters (or numeraries) in trade, or else, acquiring rarity value, they were removed from economic exchange cycles, to become familial property, only changing hands as a bride wealth, or in validating claims to royal and aristocratic standing. In economic exchange systems, these glass beads were used as barter in the African slave trade and in land parcel trade with the Native Americans of the North. It was due to the resilience and variety of color hue that Venetian beads proved particularly appropriate for decorating garments and objects. An interesting aside expressed by Sciama and Eicher, is that historians agree that some of the techniques by which glass beads, esp. the tiny ‘seed-beads’ were threaded, embroidered or woven into fabric followed the routes of colonial expansion.21
Pilgrims visiting Venice would kiss relics, believing the power of transference from a kiss could be stored in small items touched to the statuary. Pilgrims who did not have any jewelry purchased glass beads or rosary necklaces from nearby Venetian glassmakers, intrinsically adding the significance of the producers and that produced of Venice. These rosary beads acquired much of their power from having been in contact with the holy, while on the other hand, once brought home from Venice; they also became a sort of souvenir.

THE SERPENT GOBLET:
Power and Replication in the Sixteenth-Nineteenth Centuries

Though sixteenth century geographical expansion harmed Venice’s economy, the importance of its international exchanges is fully illustrated in the city’s iconography. The most expansive room in the Doge’s apartments, extending from the courtyard adjoining St Marks Square to the canal at its back, and was mainly used as a reception and audience room, is entirely decorated with maps, and includes two large globes of the earth and celestial spheres. In other words, the entire account of Renaissance geographical knowledge had the aim to show the full extent of Venetian power, the reach of the city’s competence and her embolden travelers.22
At present Venetian glassblowers, along with glassblowers throughout the world, persevere in the reproduction of the objects originated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a period marked as the zenith of glassmaking. Much of the creative and prestigious image of Venetian glass rests on the ascent of cristallo in the fifteenth century, which allowed the Renaissance masters to blow highly sophisticated and fragile objects using this new transparent glass formula. The Muranese were the only glass makers in Europe that held the secrets to producing a mirror, along with developing technologies to produce crystalline glass, smalto defined as enameled glass, gold (aventurine) glass, multicolored millefiori glass defined as millions of flowers, milk glass (lattimo) and imitation gemstones made of glass.
There seems to have been a tie of mythic ideals of glassmaking and to the alchemic material of glass itself, from the discovery of glass making techniques to the manual production of glass material. For instance, glass in the Venetian style originated with mysterious vessels made on this island of Murano, beginning in the fifteenth century and reaching technical heights in the seventieth century. It was during this time that elegant and fragile glass vessels produced by master glassmakers became fashionable throughout the world. It was this technical achievement that had been viewed as ‘a glorious revival’ of ancient colorless glass, which was praised by Pliny the Elder for its resemblance to rock crystal. Educated glass patrons during the Renaissance who were familiar with Pliny’s writings may have made the connection, but Venetians hardly sought their ancestry in ancient Rome. Instead, they placed great emphasis on creating a historical identity that would set them apart from other Italians and from other nations.” 23
Severe punishment, often resulting in death, was placed upon the glassblowers by the Venetian government if they left the Island of Murano. During the Renaissance, Venetian goblets were treasured throughout Europe by the social elite and were considered more valuable than precious metal vessels. This further supported the notion that the Venetians had powerful glass secrets, as it was the technical development of cristallo that was deeply rooted in alchemical experimentation. Salt and sand that turned into what appeared to be rock crystal was interpreted as belonging to the same science that was thought to have the possibility of turning base metal into gold. In the 1500’s, the Sienese metalworker Vannoccio Biringuccio still thought cristallo was born from the speculation of good alchemistic savants, through whose efforts it imitates the metals on one hand and the transparency and splendor of gems on the other. Antonio Neri, the first Venetian to publish a text comprised of drawings depicting examples of Venetian glass, equated glass with gold. In his treatise L’arte Vetraria, “ It hath fusion in the fire, and permanence in it, likewise as the perfect and shining metal of gold.” 24 Yet, it was the raw materials that were tied to these alchemic notions, and a limited availability to certain minerals and plants, as well as, a questioning of what exactly made up the cristallo, which added to the mystique of Venetian glass.
A recurring theme in Venetian glass history is the purported property of the cristallo breaking spontaneously whenever it came into contact with poison. This myth could have had its roots in the composition of glass itself as a key ingredient in glassmaking, alumen catinum, was also used for its diuretic effects and as an abortive medicine, but in larger quantities it could be deadly. The notion of the expulsion of the serpent, as represented in images of Saint John the Baptist, may have been based on a very practical application, in that the caustic smell of burning salicornia plants was known to drive away serpents and alumen catinum was sprinkled around the house to drive away vermin. A Dutch superstition originating in the seventeenth century believed that the breaking of a drinking glass announced someone’s death. In Italy, the deliberate breaking of a drinking glass at weddings and other occasions symbolized happiness. Another tale told was that Venetian glasses changed color when filled with a poisonous liquid. Or better yet, the superlative Venetian drinking glasses would shatter instantly when they came in contact with a single drop of poison. These notions seem to have originated from a story concerning Saint John the Evangelist portrayed in engravings by such artists as Jean Baptist Barbe (1578-1649) and Jacques Callot (1592-1635). The evangelist in the image is shown holding a poisoned Venetian style glass chalice with a snake in the glass, which represents the poisoned liquid. The engravings included relate the legend of how the priest of the temple of Diana in Ephesus gave John a poisoned cup to drink from as a test of his faith. John not only survived the test unharmed but also revived two men who had previously drunk from the cup. Deriving from the Middle Ages, the chalice has symbolized a representation of Christianity. Found in the frescos at the Monastery of Monte Oliveto Magiore near Siena, Benedict breaks a glass of poisoned wine by making the sign of the Cross.25 The appearance of the serpent symbol can be identified in the stems and applied decoration of Venetian glass commencing in the Renaissance but even more predominate in the Baroque period. It is believed that such a form may have begun in early Islamic glass styles as well as Christian symbolism. In the Venetian revival of the nineteenth century, this symbolism lost it’s meaning, expressing instead the serpents, along with other decorations, were retained as a symbol of the virtuosity of glassmaking in Venice.
Walter Benjamin’s discourse of ‘the aura’ is important to inject when discussing the serpent goblets of the Renaissance, as this is a time before the effects of mass industry of glassmaking. It is also a time before the secrets of Venetian glass were spread to the rest of the world, especially to foreign glassmakers attempting to replicate Venetian glass. The serpent goblets were so enigmatic that they became fetish objects, holders of sympathetic magic, composed of the secret glass material cristallo, the virtuoso skills of the glassblower and the mythic stories of the glass goblet. The commodity is imbued with the producers’ aura/energy/ personhood and thus becomes an extension of self. The object itself takes on sensuousness, desirability by the perceiver/tourist as it contains the imprint of the maker. This fetishlike quality can be affected by exchange value and by market price but the object itself still contains the makers imprint/aura. Additionally, the object becomes “authentic” only after the first copy is produced, with the reproductions being the aura that surrounds the original.
The production and reproduction of the serpent goblet occurred from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth century (and still in Modern day). The pilgrimages of the thirteenth- sixteenth centuries shifted from an emphasis of religious pursuit to one of a travelers’ ‘notion of departure’. Later, from the sixteenth-nineteenth centuries, travel again shifted from the scholastic approach, where as wealthy young men were educated by local teachers on the history of the region, to an opportunity to travel as an eyewitness observer. Commonly referred to as the “classical Grand Tour” consisted of emotionally neutral observation and collecting, and took place during the seventeenth century for primarily the sons of aristocracy and the gentry that traveled throughout Europe. It was during this time that travel became a marker of status. Yet, by the late eighteenth century sons of the professional middle class were able to afford this type of travel. By the nineteenth century the grand tour became the “Romantic Grand Tour” with the emergence of the focus on beauty and the sublime. The participants/ travelers of the Grand Tour are often referred to as Flaneurs or strollers. Though Urry speaks of Paris the same could be expressed for Venice, especially St. Marks Square, during the same period as it was also a city of ambiguity full of surprise and lacking boundaries. The anonymity of the crowd provided a refuge for the tourists who were able to move about unnoticed, observing and being observed, but rarely engaging the local people. Urry declares the flaneur to be the modern hero, as he was able to travel without obligations, to gaze, to be covert, and to remain in a liminal zone.26 The flaneur was a model for the twentieth century tourist in regards to how a place is viewed, recorded and dissimilated back home, as at this time new technologies of the gaze were produced. Important to note that the Flaneur was usually male and this further dictated how local women were scrutinized by the outsider and in which manner she was permitted in the public arenas.
In the second half of the nineteenth century Venice was producing glass replicating the style of the Renaissance with such virtuosity that collections had modern pieces masquerading as the older specimens. Susan Stewart states: “It is important to remember that the mechanical reproduction of art objects, the movement away from the authenticity of the original that in fact might be seen as creating the authenticity of the original, results in the susceptibility of art itself to this mode of exaggeration. As recent psychoanalytic work has told us, repetition, in fact, creates a reproduction which initiates the very aura of the real.”27 The collecting of the serpent goblets grew to be in vogue during the 19th century as tourism to Venice again reached a peak. The serpent goblet no longer held the same associations to Christian iconography or supernatural notions. Reproductions of the serpent goblet and derivatives of the goblet became an exercise of skill for the Muranese glassblowers and an expensive tourist artisan product/marker. The replicated serpent goblet as souvenir arose not out of use value or display value, but nostalgia value. Baudrillard states in Simulacra and Simulations,
“When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality; of second hand truths, objectivity and authenticity.”28 Thus it is this nostalgic value of the reproduced object that continues a narrative of the object – not only as a souvenir or replica but also of a cultural reproduction of a time past. As the artisan creates a simulacra or replica of the past object, so does the tourist join in creating a replica or simulacra of the cultural past and a narrative of this culture. It is this attained souvenir of the replica of the serpent goblet that increases value by way of a commodification of nostalgia through the past experience and the attaining of the object at a certain time/ space.
Replicas and adaptations that are made today both in and outside of Venice, are produced out of developing a skill for the glassblower, and as similar to the nineteenth century, the call for tourist arts. Again, this is an example of the nostalgia value of the reproduction being that it is not the same as the souvenir because it is a reproduced object heralding the skill of the past and the present of the producing glass artisan. These objects developed not as a use value but instead a continuation that develops as a narrative of the nostalgia value of the golden age of Venetian glass. Baudrillard further states: “ The fascination of handicraft derives from an object’s having passed through the hands of someone the marks of whose labour are still inscribed thereupon: we are fascinated by what has been created, and is therefore unique, because the moment of creation cannot be reproduced.”29 My declaration of nostalgia value derives from Baudrillard’s notion of use value and aesthetic value, meaning that the narrative of the original object is defined again by its adaptation. The serpent goblet is esteemed in regards to artisan virtuosity and nostalgia. The aura of the original, which in this instance the original is defined as the most virtuous example of the serpent goblet from the Renaissance, distinguishes it from the fake or the replica, and as a replica it supports it and creates the value of the original object; thus continuing to develop the biography of the original. An example of this is the Covered dragon-stemmed goblet made in the workshop of C.H.F. Muller, in Hamburg, Germany c.1880. This goblet was made famous originally as a masterpiece of its remarkable Venetian style, and again in 1978 when the goblet was exposed as a nineteenth-century fake. The serpent goblet is an example of a material object so symbolically dense with cultural meaning that the goblets continue to be attempted by glassblowers throughout the world and are coveted by collectors.

The Flame worked Souvenir Imported from China
And the Impact of Mass Tourism on the local Market

“In the Venetian context, where experience and skill in different trades, such as building, glass blowing, weaving, restoration and carving are often upheld as among the best and most enduring traits of the local culture, the closeness between object and maker emerges with striking evidence. If therefore we ask why people are prepared to pay very high prices for slowly manufactured things, sometimes hardly superior to mass produced equivalents, we might answer in Maussian terms, that, compared with even the best industrialized products, handmade objects carry something of the spirit of the person who made them, or in Derrida’s words, who ‘gave [them] their time’ (Mauss 1950; Derrida 1991).”
-Sciama and Eicher30

A number of dualities exist between the historical and the modern, one being in terms of the authentic material object and the reproduced souvenir; another referring to a value based on the secrets of seventeenth century Murano techniques of the glassblower and international fame and fortune for the artistic glassblowers demonstrating their techniques today, like maestro Lino Tagliapietra. The question remains: can the Muranese dictate the reinventions within their own cultural traditions with the continued effects of mass tourism to the island, and how does the importing of Chinese forgeries affect the changes made in their market place and the characteristics of their products?

Mass Tourism and its influences in Murano

In 2000 more than sixty percent of Murano’s workforce were involved in someway in the production, supply, sales, or packing and shipping of glass. Approximately one third of the Muranese are self-employed, working generally as artisans or shopkeepers heading small concerns of five or fewer employees; the rest are employed at one of the twenty-seven industrial glassworks located on the island.31 The material objects of the Muranese serve utilitarian, social and cultural functions. Traditions are arguably altered by the present interpretations of them by the community. As Susan Terrio discusses in her text, Crafting the Culture and History of French Chocolate, authenticity in craft businesses and markets produced in a specific place can be maintained, reinvented and revived as they can be sold as such. This valuable commodity can be maintained by the support of asserted regional identity, a specific production and its producers. It is estimated that of the eighty or so furnaces on the island, sixty percent of the glass production is sold locally in the tourist market. As objects of curiosity, the Muranese have dictated how the world perceives their glass and its producers. The spectacle of glassblowing is a featured tour and promises tourists a chance to acquire glass trinkets for souvenirs, along with a view into the life as a glassblower and how the purchased objects are in fact made. This is where the clash exists in the mass produced object and the produced culture of the glassblower/Muranese.
In referring to Jean Baudrillard’s discussion of simulacra, as the Venetian glassblowers create reproductions of historical objects, correspondingly the public reproduces the mythic romance of the island and notions of Murano’s traditions into a simulacrum of itself. Murano is removed and reproduced through various narrative lenses and imagery; supplied by tourist brochures, guide books and popular culture. It is through these imitations that the more visited streets of Murano become a caricature of a ‘real’ Murano. It becomes a sort of “Baudrillardian Disneyland” to the tourist where the spectacle of gondolier and the spectacle of the glassblower are shrouded with the mythic romance of the pre-modern. The two-acre spot of Saint Mark’s Square is the tourist center of Venice, as at least twelve million visitors pass through and around it throughout the year.32 San Marco is the quintessential destination conjuring the image of Venice, as does the Grand Canal and the Gondolier passing under the “Bridge of Sighs.” Tourists head to Saint Mark’s Square not to see Venetians in their lives but to have stood in a well touristed spot and to say they were there, as the only others they will see are other tourists looking at other tourists. It can be argued that these modern day mass tourists cannot stroll through Saint Marks Square as the nineteenth century Englishman – the Flaneur- who sat in cafes and gazed around them with bewildered aloofness. For many tourists the seeking of an ‘authentic’ destination exists in the surrounding islands on the outskirts of Venice. Although a highly visited site, the island of Murano is ripe with ‘real’ Venetians laboring in their daily lives.
Daniel Boorstin (1961) describes tourism as one of the major “pseudo-events” that have accompanied modern times. He asserts that the modern tourist’s readiness to accept superficiality and perhaps even their performance to fakery and contrived experiences over “genuine” travel experiences. The mass tourist accepts the banal: thus encouraging it. Furthermore Ritzer and Liska (1997) argue that modern tourism and its post-modern expressions are shaped by a process of “McDisneyization” by way tourists are encouraged to seek travel experiences that are merely reflections of their dehumanized, superficial and inauthentic lives. Smith (1989) discusses the impact tourists have on the communities they visit. Smith says that the high-end tourists generate a lesser impact, while their local hosts regard the lower-end tourists least favorably. Urry (1992) discusses how the tourist regards their hosts giving five types of gazing, number two being ‘spectaterial’: meaning that they engage in community activities with other tourist having brief encounters, glancing at sights and collecting signs/ souvenirs of the place visited. Zukin (1991) cites the Disney experience as an example of a new culture of consumption in which visitors are lured into thinking of consuming the world’s things and images as a necessary condition of participation in modern society.
In Murano we see a commodification of nostalgia; for the tourist who purchases the souvenir and for the glassblower who strives to return to the heyday of seventeenth century Murano when a maestro glassblower was so respected that he was able to throw off the reigns of marginalization and was sanctioned to marry a daughter of a Venetian aristocrat. As Susan Stewart takes from Baudrillard in terms of use value being replaced by aesthetic value in referring to the object, I believe that this is a case where aesthetic value is replaced by the nostalgia value of the object. In this version of the simulacrum of modernity we turn to a lost reality, a place of nostalgia, an illusion of an everlasting, static tradition. I believe that it is this endorsement of nostalgia that is then transferred to the produced and valued object. This willed nostalgia contribute both a perceived national identity for the glassmaker and influences consumerist nostalgia for the tourist, where an impact is continued by the globalization of the replica.
Michael Herzfeld names structural nostalgia as a, “ …collective representation of an Edenic order- a time before time- in which the balanced perfection of social relations has not yet suffered the decay that affects everything human.”33 Though Herzfeld uses structural nostalgia to refer to the nation-state, I propose that it might be transferred to the narrative of the artisan. It may be through the corrosion of skill that occurs through the adaptation and infiltration of the replication of Venetian glassblowing on a global level that this nostalgia takes place. Beginning in the seventeenth century to the present day, as skills and techniques assimilated globally, a lack of necessity for Venetian glass has occurred and consequently created the nostalgia object. Another sort of value has been created due to this idea of structured nostalgia of Venetian glass through the globally mass produced replica and the creation of the nostalgia object.
The spectacle of glassblowing may add to this nostalgia value in the sense that the tourist creates a photograph of the glassblower with the exposure of his ‘body as tool’ and an attainment of the souvenir artifact of the perceived soon obsolete craft. As it has been said, in order for a tourist destination to be created the place itself must have a definition of itself. For in fact the local Muranese community does define it’s authentic representations of their cultural lives and how they are represented in the world. For MacCannell there seems to be a sense of irony that the tourists are fascinated in the authentic lives of others while, at the same time, that they have lost their attachments to their daily lives.34 Urry declares this as a fascination of others people’s work bound up with the postmodern destruction of boundaries, especially between the ‘front and the backstage of peoples’ lives. The long history of tourism to Murano is fascinating, as tourists have been allowed a defined view into the Muranese world of glassmaking while the Muranese, in the past, had little permission to enter the outside world, for fear of relinquishing the secrets of the island.
Tourists place Murano and its glass as second only to gondoliers as essential to and emblematic of their Venetian experience. Davis and Marvin believe that this is perhaps why so many tourists combine the two metonyms in one: they come back from their Venetian visit with a miniature glass gondola.35 Mass tourism to Murano and the mass production of the tourist object is rooted in the ideas of Eden that existed for Murano in the their technical brilliantine halcyon days of the Renaissance. In accord to the views of Venice by the Grand Tourists of the seventeenth-nineteenth centuries, the modern day tourists also see Venice as ‘dreamlike’, ‘romantic’ and ‘ an anti-modern fantasy land.’ It was during the nineteenth century the city almost lost its draw as the glassblowing process became established throughout the rest of Europe, along with the impact of the age of machinery. Yet in the nineteenth century Renaissance styles of glass making were revived in Murano. In the mid 1800s Antonio Salviati (1816-1900) incorporated the old color techniques and began a large-scale commercial production of glass in traditional styles. Salviati recreated forms in gaudy color and over elaborate, sentimental works. Most of the other Muranese glassmakers followed his lead in making pastiches of sixteenth-seventeenth century Venetian glass, aimed primarily at the tourist market. Salviati is also known for a smaller, higher-end production of simpler shapes and use of clear colors in straightforward copies of the old classic color techniques of Renaissance Venice. It was after World War I that Functionalist ideas gave a new stimulus to the tradition of Venetian glass making and a truly modern style emerged credited to not only Salviati, but to Paolo Venini and Ercole Barovier. The nineteenth century has been referred to as the “Golden Age of Glass” for it added new techniques to the glassmaker’s repertoire. This sudden burst of activity can be attributed to a few factors, one being the impact of the Industrial Revolution. For it was not since the Italian Renaissance had there been such a surge of new ideas in glass, such as pearl satin glass, iridescent glass, and pressed glass using machinery and the aid of molds. Yet most of the success existed in the demand of trinkets for the home by the middle class, as at this time tourists made a come back as well. The Muranese glassblowers produced knick-knacks for the tourist trade: glass with embossed Lions of Saint Marks, Rialto Bridges, Gondoliers, perfume bottles and paperweights that still are for sale today in Murano and throughout Venice. As Stewart states the following: “The souvenir speaks to a context of origin through a language of language, for it is not an object arising out of need or use value; it is an object arising out of the necessarily insatiable demands of nostalgia.”36 Even though there are the tourists that can afford the expensive art glass of Murano, the majority of tourists who are connoisseurs in this field are minimal. The mass tourists purchase the glass objects, though often classified as kitsch, become dislocated from their original context and develop into exotic objects. It can be said that these products have little use value and have a focus of display value. Yet it is this display value that exists less in the quality of the glass object itself than in the relationship between the tourist and souvenir. Its Benjaminian auratic quality derives more from the object’s history, its narrative power, than from any present consumption of it.
There has been much discussion of tourism and the authentic experience, especially in regards to performance, which includes the preoccupation of anthropologist’s distaste of the token performance by trussed up locals reenacting presubscribed notions of the real. For example, MacCannell asserts that modern cultures are so dissatisfied with their own cultures that they seek authentic experiences elsewhere. The tourists’ journey is a sort of nostalgic experience based on the premise that life was more real before the emergence of industrial capitalism. He goes on to suggest that the tourists’ goal is to get ‘behind the stage’ that is provided for them and find something real to experience. This I would say is the longing to flee to the real. Bruner contends that the search for authenticity by MacCannell and Handler may be a result of contemporary academics projecting their notions and longings onto tourists.37 Yet, a question asked by Chambers remains, whether or not local traditions, such community festivals, become any less authentic when they begin to involve tourists.38 Chambers believes the answer lies in the dealings with the notions authenticity and tradition. Chambers concludes that the Marxist interpretation, such as MacCannell’s, presuppose that capitalistic ideologies have deprived modern and modernizing peoples from any claim to authenticity, to realness, and ultimately to the control over the modes of production that provide them with at least the possibility of autonomous social action. Yet, in regards to the authentic experience in tourists visiting Murano and viewing glassmaking, I believe there was never full access by tourists to the studios where many of the secrets were long held. The common tourist never could enter certain studios where secrets were always kept and techniques were always kept secret. The glass studio always defined the view made available to tourists since the beginning of tourism to Murano. From the beginning the display/ performance was kept short, fast moving and magical- i.e. turning a molten glob of glass into a horse- in order to keep the tourists attention and to quickly move them along to the adjacent shop. The question exists, how real is this? I would say very much so, but if one thinks they are seeing the true workings of a glass studio, with teams and products being made- quotas filled etc, then they are misled. The tourist site usually consists of a solo male glassmaker making a rudimentary horse, in a clean environment with bench seating. The true workplace is in vast contrast as it is noisy, dirty, smoky, dusty, full of sweaty men, with the alternating of stagnate and exciting energy and often times raucous behavior. On a part of the wall hang posters and calendars of semi-clad and nude women, along with drawings and photos of the day’s production assignments. There are espresso breaks, visiting maestros, and other fellow glassblowers. This is a place tourists are not privy to and in the most exclusive studios (Venini) no one is allowed access without prior invitation or friends with the maestros themselves.

The Globally Produced Venetian Glass Gondola

“One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition.” -Benjamin39

The third and final installment of the material glass object we will discuss is the flame worked glass gondola. Flame working, also referred to as lampworking, is a technique using a torch while seated at a table and working with solid rods or hollow tubes of glass. This miniature glass boat fits in the palm of a small person’s hand and is often composed of a seated couple with a standing gondolier behind them holding an oar. At one time these were exclusively executed in Murano in small factories made up of primarily female employees. In the past ten years or so for the Muranese retail outlets, a shift was made from the value of local manufacturing to a market value. Today many of these are imported from China due to less expensive labor and lower costs, as it is cheaper for the Muranese to import the completed product rather than import raw materials, produce the glass, and employ their workers. Even though glass blowing in China does not have as rich of a history as in Venice or in the Middle East, as glassblowing only reached China some five centuries after it was discovered in the Near East, they quickly became advanced in the art of simulating precious and semi precious stones. For example Taft maintains that it wasn’t until the late 17th century when glass production was organized on a larger scale, vessels and objects were unpretentious, and little attempt was made in the exploration of decorative techniques. The Chinese seem to have relied rather on the import of glass from the Roman Empire, Sasanian Persia and the Islamic world.40
Despite the profits that can be generated by importing Chinese made Muranese inspired glassware, many glass furnaces continue to stay open playing a central role in the tourist experience of Murano. The tourist comes to Murano to see the spectacle of glassblowing and to purchase the glass souvenir. Yet, when the tourist purchases the imported object, no longer representing the particular domestic traditions: she is buying a replica of the culture and conventions of tourism. Because of the evolution of the technical process and dissimilation of this knowledge from Murano, it is possible to reduce the dissimilarities of the locally based product and the imported forgeries/ replicas/ products. I think that the Chinese artisans do not believe they are making forgeries of Venetian glass gondolas, I would say that they are merely vying for a share in a market where there is a need for cheaper goods in the style of the Muranese glass. The effects of these globally produced tourist objects on the local Muranese economy and its cultural traditions must be looked into further, as this brings up an issue asking: does the object made outside the culture it represents affect how the object is regarded and thus how the culture is regarded?
This focus on production refers to Marx’s distinction between the product of the “non-alienated” and “alienated” labor. “Non-alienated” labor can be expressed as the producer seeing her self in the product, while “alienated” labor is just the opposite, the producer does not recognize herself in the product. Although Marx used these terms to describe the dissimilarities between the non-industrial worker and the industrial worker, I believe we can transfer it to the maker who recognizes herself in the product due to its cultural ties and the maker who does not recognize herself in the product due to the lack of connection to the culture the product represents. In addition, Marx states: “A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour.”41 The object retains its mystery due to the fact that an artisan engaging his intellect, spirit and body fabricated it.
Yet, when an object is produced without the history it is mimicking- the aura of the past- then the object itself becomes merely an example of use-value. The Chinese made gondola, though using similar tools, is produced in a factory setting not ensconced in the same history, culture with the artisans lacking Murano in their blood. For the Muranese glassmaker these alienated objects made in China lack in density, meaning they lack in cultural meaning.
Let us turn again to the materiality of glass and index the glass object within it. Taking from Alfred Gell, “It is often the case that art objects are regarded as transcending the technical schemas of their creators, as well as those of mere spectators, as when the art object is considered to arise, not from the activities of the individual physically responsible for it, but from the divine inspiration or ancestral spirit with which he is filled.”42 Transference happens from the artisan to the object by way of the glassblower’s sweat, his hand manipulation and the ritualization of glassblowing itself. In Medieval and Renaissance Venice the creation of the glass material and the manipulation of glass by the glassblower was viewed as otherworldly with leanings towards sympathetic magic. Even though today glassblowing is not viewed as sorcery, tourists visiting a Murano glass demonstration can be overheard declaring to their fellow viewers, “wasn’t that just magical?” These previous statements are significant due to the fact that, throughout the world, artisans are often treated as the last storytellers of tradition. It is in terms of facing modernity for the artisan that Herzfeld states, “In effect, artisans face a chilling choice among accepting their role as the picturesque bearers of an obsolescent tradition, becoming merchants in a rat race that most of them are destined to lose, or joining an international labor force in which the price of modernity s to lose one’s identity as a skilled and individual personality.”43

Conclusion

“With good reason postmodernism has relentlessly instructed us that reality is artifice yet, so it seems to me, not enough surprise has been expressed as to how we nevertheless get on with living, pretending- thanks to the mimetic faculty- that we live facts, not fictions.”
-Taussig44

This resonates as simply stated: we all live in different worlds, not only different cultures, and within each culture our individual worlds are real, really constructed and authentic to ourselves. For the Muranese glassmaker, the world he lives in is linked but separate from the tourist. He lives his life authentically, fully and aware of his bond to the past, his heritage, and the present- the workings of daily life and to the future- that he actively takes part in a continuing tradition. For the tourist, she is truly traveling, even if by mass, to see this way of life and for a short time to find her place among it. Modern tourism is a kind of nostalgic sojourn of the routes and byways of colonial expansion. As Baudrillard states, “traveling as a tourist always involves going in search of lost time.”45 It is through the tourist’s gaze and consumption of glass souvenirs, even if not produced on the island, that their lives intersect with the Muranese glassmaker and support the tradition of glassblowing. For it is the returned traveler that purports the ideology of sympathetic magic through the power of the fetishized souvenir gondola in her hand- the power of travel, sight and nostalgia. Although the glass object once obtained by the tourist becomes the souvenir, it no longer represents the lived experience of the glassmaker, but the experience of the tourist. It is this alchemic coalescence of opposites that the Muranese glassmaker has appropriated throughout his history.

GLASS TERMINOLOGY

Aventurine (from the French aventure, “chance”) : Translucent glass with the sparkling
inclusions of gold, copper or chromic oxide, first made in Venice in the 15th century.
aventurine glass mimics the mineral of the same name, a variety of quartz flecked
with mica.

Blowing: The technique of forming an object by inflating a gob of molten glass affixed
on the end of a blowpipe. The blower puts air through the tube, inflating the gob,
which is then manipulated into a form by swinging it, rolling it or shaping it with
tools.

Blowpipe: An iron tube, approximately five feet long, for blowing glass.

Cane: A thin rod consisting of groups of rods which may be bundled together.

Cold-working: The collective term for many of the techniques used to alter or decorate
glass when it’s cold.

Cristallo (from the Italian, “crystal”): A term first coined in Venice in the 14th century
to describe glass that bears a resemblance to colorless rock crystal.

Dragon-stem goblet: A type of goblet with the stem in the form of a dragon with a
tortuous body, outspread wings, open jaws, and a crest. Known in Italian as vetri
a serpenti, dragon-stemmed goblets were first made in the 17th century. They were
imitated in the Netherlands by producers of facon de Venise glass.

Facon de Venise: Glass made in imitation of Venetian products, at centers other than
Venice itself. This was popular in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Flame working: The technique of forming objects from rods or tubes of glass that when
heated in a flame become soft and can be manipulated into a form. Originally, the
source of the flame was an oil or paraffin lamp used in unison with foot-powered
bellows. Also referred to as Flame working, gas-fueled torches are now used.

Furnace: An enclosed structure for the production and function of heat. In
glassmaking, furnaces are used for melting the glass, holding the pots in which the
glass is melted in and at times reheating partly formed parts on a blowpipe.

Gaffer (from the English, a derivative of “grandfather”): The master glassmaker in
Charge of a bench, team or other glass workers.

Glory hole: A hole similar to the furnace used when reheating glass around 1000C.

Latticino (from the Italian latte, meaning “milk”): A term formerly used to describe
objects using glass canes.

Lattimo (from the Italian latte, meaning “milk”): White glass usually opacified by tin
Oxide or arsenic.

Murrini, murrina, murrino (from the Latin murra, a stone from which costly vessels
Were made): Small bits of glass that when combined in an object form a specific
Pattern.

Studio glass: A term popularized in the 1960s for unique or limited edition objects made
in the studio rather than the factory.

Reticello (from the Italian, meaning “glass with a small network): A type of blown
Glass made with canes laid crisscross forming a net-like pattern.

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ENDNOTES

Some Spring colors and special orders

2008-05-16T16:23:00.000-07:00

Thanks for all the response and support

2008-05-16T16:20:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to say a thanks to everyone who contacted me about the last post and sent along their support.

appropriation, copy, theft

2008-04-25T08:58:00.000-07:00

To paraphrase Websters Dictionary:

Appropriation ( The act of appropriating ) to take possession of without permission.
Copy an imitation, reproduction of an original; to imitate.
theft an act or instance of stealing

Walter Benjamin believed that the modern age ushered in a "retooling" of the mimetic faculty and by imitating we are attempting to acquire the aura of the original or at least the attempt to get it within close range.

The copy, the authentic and the language that adheres to this dialogue has been a hot topic for some time. To get a background of this check out Wikipedia or other search engines as I don't feel the desire to ramble on this now.

As a craft, glassblowing has always anchored itself to the copy. The apprentice attempts to copy the master, the master respectfully copies the past.

The reason I am reviewing these notions is due to a theft that was committed to LBK studio not too long ago by a store where we sold our Chalkboard Vases. The store located in St. Louis by the name of UMA was a great customer of ours for quite some time. They even had a feature on the Blog Daily Candy with our Chalkboard Vases. We sold many through them and in turn had a symbiotic relationship with the store and I with the owner- Mike. (I even sent him a Holiday Gift) Through Daily Candy we were picked up by many many other blogs and websites. It wasn't long though that Mike grew tired of having to order these through LBK studio. In December he threatened me that he would get a local glassblower to make them instead of us!!! Yes, its astounding the shear audacity of it all. ( Shear as it truly cuts through me) I told him this was illegal as there is such a thing as Intellectual Property and Copyright. He got nervous and denied that he ever said/ or emailed this statement and purchased additional Vases from me, and like an idiot I continued to do business with him. He then told me he looked forward to seeing me at the NYIGF and would purchase other products for his other "store" the Dot Spot. I never saw him in NYC and so I emailed him- never heard back. I then employed a friend to email him with a request of Chalkboard Vases, so undercover, and he told her that LBK studio used to make them for him, but he now has someone else do them AND he could give her 20% discount!!
Chris, my usually silent partner, became instantly furious and called UMA/Mike up and expressed to Mike the illegal actions and our pursuit of Legal council. Mike grew frightened and agitated - spewing bazaar statements and yelling into the phone- loud enough that I took my 21 month old out of ear shot. Eventually Chris made it understood that what he did wasn't only tacky, underhanded, and despicable - it was theft! He was stealing our idea, my idea- making my Vases and besides all of this, he was taking food from our baby's mouth.
Mike, not a designer, or an artist, but a store owner just happened to stumble upon my materialized idea in my booth in the Handmade section at the NYIGF. He then had the audacity to believe that he deserved all of the money from the sales of these items. The disregard for us as artisans is blinding. Any crafts people or designers/manufacturers reading this beware of UMA and Mike- they did it to us - why not you?

Chalkboard Vases in black and colors

2008-04-14T16:22:00.001-07:00

2008-04-14T16:20:00.001-07:00

evolve

2008-04-03T17:05:00.000-07:00

So I have already begun to alter LBK's 3 line mantra of what this blog will be about.
Yes it will still be about the happenings at LBK and it will still include rantings ( I have some pent up rantings to explode your way) but we will focus on material culture. As I am just about to complete the final draft of my thesis - on 3 material glass objects- I have rekindled a desire to discuss the thingness in our lives.

"Clearly things make people, and people who are made by those things go on to make other things." - Christopher Pinney (Materiality p257)

" ...things create bonds between souls, for the thing itself has a soul, is part of the soul." -Mauss

still working out the kinks

2008-03-27T16:53:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I thought I could do this without any hair pulling but Its getting painful.
Ive received a few emails and phone calls telling me that they posted comments... but where are they??
So instead of writing my first real blog I am wasting my time trying to figure out where the comments have evaporated to...

2008-03-26T19:43:00.001-07:00

2008-03-26T19:29:00.001-07:00

welcome

2008-03-26T19:20:00.000-07:00

Welcome to LBK studio's blog!

This blog will feature:
happenings at LBK studio
influences, ideas and inspiration
rantings