New York Botanical Garden
Glass installation at Enid Haupt Conservatory
Billed as the largest exhibition of Dale Chihuly's work in New York City to date, this cross-branded spectacle is the newest manifestation of his collaborations with botanical gardens that in the past have included Chicago's Garfield Park Conservatory (2001-2) and London's Kew Gardens (2004). At each of these locations, Chihuly's teams of project managers and fabricators have placed existing, altered and new pieces that fit the gardens' contexts.
The NYBG exhibition's many large-scale pieces transfix viewers with their unabashedly gorgeous colors, textures and luminosity. The installers used the light-transmitting properties of glass to great advantage, situating many sculptures inside the Haupt Conservatory (itself a feat of glass architecture) and other pieces out-of-doors and in reflecting pools. A few monumental sculptures are intended for night viewing. For instance, Neon Tower is a twenty-foot monolith of green tubing that looks shrub-like by day but is calculated for luminous presence in the evening. Through programmed spotlighting, glass works such as Rose Crystal Tower become monumental centerpieces of light architecture at night-time events.
Many sculptures are selected as complements to each location's specimens. For instance, the spiky forms of Desert Star relate to the euphorbes and other prickly plants of the Haupt Conservatory's Deserts of Africa Gallery and Rainforest Chandelier appears as a massing of exotic fruits hanging from the canopy of the Lowland Tropical Rain Forest Gallery. Others, such as the furled fronds of Fiddlehead Ferns in the Everett Children's Adventure Garden, delight by seeming to have grown in situ . Even colors that seem acid and artificial in glass are rendered "natural" when compared with similar tropical flowers. It is surprising to see glass in these contexts since their outdoor sitings or sheer mass conflict with common perceptions of this medium as non-structural and fragile.
For New Yorkers, seeing these works in the familiar environment of a venerable institution is comparable to the experience of Christo and Jeanne-Claude's The Gates (2005) installed last year in Central Park. Both interventions require exploration of space and reveal themselves across vast landscapes. This is not to say that the Chihuly exhibition has the unitary homogeneity of The Gates , but that the aesthetic and chromatic impacts of both lay in their interruptions of expectations, and opportunities to see these landscapes anew.
The installations can be appreciated as technological feats, especially considering the skill involved in fabricating pieces that are large-scale, "impossibly" long, or with complex textures; the engineering necessary for their placement is formidable. Given the impressive logistics, it is also tempting to contemplate this exhibition as a fiscal performance. With the pleasing forms, dazzling (if strident) colors and lack of critical edginess it is impossible to deny the popular appeal of "Gardens and Glass." Yet, the exhibition is far from being conceptually facile. The Chihuly effect is transformative--in his trademark abstract naturalism one is aware that one is looking at glass and nevertheless suspends this belief to appreciate the improbable organic forms. Offering natural similarities and contrasts, the botanical garden setting heightens the Chihulian metamorphosis.
William V. Ganis
Dale Chuhuly: Gardens and Glass: is on view at the New York Botanical Garden, Bronx, New York from June 25 - October 29, 2006.