Catalogue: Metamophosis_HKBU.AVA_glass exhibition_catalogue

‘In my country we have a saying’, the Iranian Saman Kalantari says, ‘every man carries his luggage with him’. We gather experiences sweet and bitter and these make us into what we are. Rarely however do we meet someone who has already gone through such shocking phases in his life and possesses the ability to reshape them into high quality works of art as this ‘Persian’ as he prefers to call himself. Saman creates installations and works in glass often combined into one. The result always offers food for thought. It is the delicate network of emotional associations and reflections that surrounds the objects he places together that articulates the message. And subtle his art is indeed in spite of the weighty themes he chooses. Often he combines his works with quotations from the universal declarations of the rights of man. His own experiences thus mesh with the general and thus he tells tales that not merely give expression to his own private life story but transforms them into something of worth to all of us.

Saman Kalantari is a glass and video artist as well as a political refugee from Iran. In his youth he lived through the revolution of Ayatollah Khomeini and his family suffered the consequences of religious dissension in an absolutist state. From day to day Saman experienced the ambivalence of being shunned and locked out and at the same time being able to go and study English and create art. His choice for the English language was dictated by the desire to broaden his horizon and get into contact with the world outside. Working as a tourist guide would offer him this opportunity. Born in Shiraz and later on living close to the ruins of the ancient city of Persepolis he developed an interest in ancient ceramics and based his own artistic works, his vase-forms and bowls, on age old forms and patterns. He worked with a solitary old potter, assisting him and at the same time exhibiting his own creations. Iran was a strange place in those days. Islam forbids the creation of images but nonetheless in 2000 staged a national sculpture biennale. Saman was officially invited to participate and sent in two pieces. The Museum of Contemporary Art in Teheran exhibited them. Soon however the situation worsened. Saman became ever more aware of the strain this put on his personal life and the danger he was exposed to. Time to face the inevitability of leaving the country and unfortunately also his aging parents.

The bitterness of this farewell we can hardly imagine but Saman would not, as the saying goes, ‘go silently into the night’. Better to go out with a bang than with a whimper he thought. Therefore he staged a final exhibition of which the main work was a room covered from the inside with pictures of friends who had suffered from the persecution and had been arrested, disappeared, committed suicide or already fled the country. This he combined with personal letters he had written to them or received from them. Saman was standing at the door of the room and would let visitors of the art gallery into it for two minutes to see this grueling pageant of terror and persecution, then they had to leave again. It was Samans ultimate effort to leave all his memories behind.

Of course he would not officially be allowed to emigrate but, thanks to Iranian ambivalence again, 5000 euros bought him a visa. With almost no luggage he boarded the plane for Italy where he knew he had friends. Things would be different from now on and new horizons would open up for him so he thought.

Of course visions had been playing through his head of what it would be like to enter the free world he had dreamed about, but it turned out to be a bitter deception. He ended up being restricted in many ways just like in Iran. He was not allowed to work and bureaucratic regulations forbade his moving around freely. Sure he was a political refugee and there were European regulations for receiving people like that but welcome he was not and on top of this watched, checked and controlled all the time, feeling helpless and a captive like at home. The similarities with the way things went in Iran struck him and in his artwork he went looking for things the two countries have in common. This eventually inspired him to create the installation ‘fragile security of the state’ consisting of fused glass and video. We see a picture of a demonstrator in Teheran who raises his arms holding the blood stained T-shirt of a fellow demonstrator aloft. Not his active demonstrating got this man in jail, no act of his own, but the fact that a journalist took a photo of it and published it abroad. In the back of the picture we see the Iranian Flag which also happens to be the Italian, the same colors. Next to it Saman placed three pieces of glass. The bottom one was striped yellow an black, recalling Saman’s own ‘western’ T-shirt he used to walk around in arousing distrust and suspicion with the special police who consider this to be a gesture of disloyalty to the state and a threat to state security. The second piece of glass is striped black and white like a prison suit, and the third shows the stripes of the Italian/Iranian Flag with the registration number Saman received as a political refugee. Here several meanings are overlapping, the similarities are stunning and make you ponder what in the end the difference is and how fragile is freedom.

Another installation expresses that same fragility of freedom. We see an expanding blue sky with little white clouds floating in it giving a feeling of unrestricted liberty of movement. Here the sky is not a limit but negates all barriers. Little paper planes fly in front of it spreading their wings one of them carrying the rays of the sun on top of it. Paper is very perishable and so is freedom. One blow may cripple it or smash it completely. One of the freely flying objects is a bird soaring, perhaps an eagle and another a ‘plane’ folded out of the cover of a letter, like the one children play with. This ‘letter-plane’ seems to express the free flight of thought but also to transmit messages and emotions over great distances. The work has no title but is accompanied by two quotations from the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man” saying; ‘Everybody has the right to move freely within a state and to choose his dwelling place’ and ‘Every man has the right to leave every country including his own and to return to his country” [nr. 13].

Freedom yes, however restricted in Europe, but Saman’s personal memories, his true luggage, the images and emotions he had tried to shake off with his last exhibition in Teheran would not leave him. In the end what haunted him had to be dealt with and being an artist this meant that he had to transform both the sweet images of a past long gone by and his nightmares into something transcending the personal plane. Art is not the ‘most personal expression of the most personal emotions’ if it were, no message would ever be able to reach another human being. Saman decided to investigate and express general themes embedded in his own experience. One truth he learned the hard way was that the family is the natural basis of society and has a right to be protected by the state and the society, another line from the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man but no theoretical ideal to Saman. He created another installation with glass, photo’s and several loose objects, a number of them collected in an old worn out wooden box.

A glass hand is clutching a grenade, we see a severed foot enveloped in rags a glass head with spectacles and a gagged mouth, a loose glass hand with two pointing fingers and then there is the box like a reliquary holding a baby photo a picture of a blindfolded man and several glass parts of faces and a glass hand. All fragments of a human life under threat of death and annihilation, some executed in transparent glass as to stress fragility and the intangible aspect of them, making it almost impossible to protect them. Other parts like remnants saved from the destruction and carefully sheltered and brought together in the box as if one tried to hold on to both sweet and bad memories that unfortunately are impossible to separate from each other. A message accessible to all but presented by someone who experienced the truth of it and through his great artistic talent knows how to make something we all know in theory into a direct and shocking fact we cannot evade or circumvent. The beauty of true art combined with a deep content we all too easily tend to forget or push far from of our thoughts.

Saman Kalantari is faced with the dilemma that the ‘luggage’ he carried with him from a far away land and that he wanted to leave behind turns out to be the very source from which his art springs, a well of inspiration that he needs to survive and to fully be what he really is, a citizen of two worlds. At the same time his artistic work is the only thing that enables him to occasionally bridge the gap between both and makes his life into a unity.

Not that his coming to Europe was only a flight from one captivity into the next. Saman sees the difference clearly, enjoys the prevailing freedom of expression even though when it comes to Islam this seems currently to be on the wane and gratefully acknowledges his debt to many good people that helped him. One thing Europe offered him was the possibility to go and study for two years at the glass-school Vetroricerca in Bolzano Italy. Here he refined his art and learned many new glass techniques that enabled him to better express himself and ‘unpack’ his luggage. In 2007 he graduated and today lives and works in the City of Bolzano. He is slowly building up his life again and partly works in a museum, partly devotes his time to his art. His conditions are still far from ideal and prevent him from working full time as an artist. Nonetheless he creates impressive pieces that are not easy to forget once you have seen them. He staged an exhibition with the title ‘Limoo-Shirin’ referring to those Persian lemons that initially taste sweet then turn very sour as it may be with memories and with his multi-layered works of art. Time has not dulled his experiences but has also taught him the relativity and oftentimes the vanity of things. An installation from 2007 expresses this in a very melancholy fashion. We see a small table decked with the picture and medals won by a fallen soldier. The photo shows him proudly wearing the decorations he has been awarded but at the same time it is evident that he has died and is no more. A last letter, a picture of his wife or beloved remain on the table that has been covered with the Iranian/ Italian flag and small candles burn in commemoration of his lost life. The medals, a number of ‘stars’ and the soldiers so called ‘dog-tag’ Saman made out of thin glass to stress the futility of it all, of war and the irony of much sacrifice and heroism in the service of questionable causes. It is a monument not only to a man who perished on the battlefield but also to the bitter uselessness of many human exploits. With this installation goes a text, again taken from the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man. It states that man’s education must be directed towards full unfolding of one’s potentialities and that this should contribute to respect for human rights, understanding, tolerance and friendship between all nations, racial groups and religions. A man like Saman Kalantari does not use such texts lightly. He knows what he is talking about and feels the gravity of what he is saying and quoting from first hand experience. This is what fuels his passionate endeavors in art, the medium most suitable to him to communicate with others and with the world. In recognition of his talent the Glass Company of Bulls Eye, awarded him a prize for young and upcoming talent. We will be hearing from him again and hope that the deepening and the development of his artistic potentialities will result is ever more excellent works of art.

Frans Jeursen, Amsterdam

The lecture proper started with Harvey K Littleton’s chance visit to Erwin Eisch at his home in Frauenau in 1962, having just bought a weird glass jug from a shop in nearby Zwiesel, Bavaria. Erwin had recently made the jug whilst experimenting with hot glass in the family glass factory. This “happy accident” was the beginning of a life long friendship and a collaboration, which brought Europe into the view and is part of the studio glass movement history.

In 1964 Harvey invited Erwin to the famous Toledo workshop where an early studio glass furnace was set up. This early workshop would become of great importance to everything that followed in the studio glass movement. It brought together all the principal players that would take the message that you can make your own glass to the greater world.

Erwin’s blown work from this time has lost nothing of its originality and power: In his unique imaginative way, as a sculptor – but also a producer of traditional drinking glasses – he played with transforming familiar functional objects such as beer mugs into humorous male and female forms. Fighting against the doctrine of function, but also the aesthetic seduction of the materiality of glass he used black iridescent and opaque glass, moving on to more clearly abstract sensual sculptural forms. These actions were the prime starting points to clear the way for the studio glass movement: to define glass as an art material, uncompromisingly and beyond “applied art”, and to break down the preconception that glass was purely functional, – tableware.

Erwin then introduced his head series, an area of investigation in glass art that he has continued to the present day. The first series, now in the Corning Museum of Glass collection, was a tribute to Harvey K Littleton – the most famous of which with a speech bubble with Harvey saying “Technique is cheap!” – proclaims another message at the core of the studio glass movement. Despite the strong formative impact of this slogan on the movement it is still worth recalling in the technique fascinated movement of today. It not only stated that technique was not the value of a piece, but that the studio glass movement would share all of its knowledge freely.

Following the Littleton head Erwin showed subsequent series of heads, from Picasso, to Buddha, to the German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, to Erwin’s parents, and of course including Thomas S. Buechner. All of the mould-blown heads in Erwin’s various head series have some distortion, additions, or variations giving each head another aspect of the subject, and they are covered with enamel painted imagery and gilding and sometimes with imaginative wheel engravings. Each head is thus full of symbolism and fantasy, poetic allusion, many of which from our contemporary life. Especially with the heads from Picasso Erwin found a rich area to explore – illustrated for example with the “Net of Women”: “You can paint anything you like on Picasso”, as he said. Not only are the heads a way of artistic discussion with the figures and stories from Erwin’s biography and of our times, but the heads still start off arguing with the material: They use it, deny it, decorate and develop it on into artistic meaning beyond the ghetto of “glass art”. Erwin showed some of the steps of making a head, from the original clay model, to the mould making, to the glass blowing and decoratively playing with the hot blown glass.

From his glass portraits, as three-dimensionally modelled painting and decorating canvasses, Erwin went on to show his lifelong connection to painting. He was trained first as a glass engraver, following his father’s and forefathers’ glass decorating craft, but later he attended the Munich Art Academy where he studied painting and sculpture. Art, so he stated, especially painting and drawing, are essential to glass art. Erwin Eisch was a member of the influential art groups “Spur” and, together with his later to become wife Gretel, a member of “Radama”. In the late 1950s and early 1960s they participated in ground breaking group art activity, exhibitions and happenings.

Up to today drawing is a daily activity for Erwin producing water colour images which range from political statements to whimsical figures; very often he develops his themes in series. The statement “Heaven/Sky begins on Earth” is of especial importance in Erwin’s later artwork; it takes the simple starting point of children’s’ drawings to state a “framework” of human life, of what is Up and what Below, and of all the meanings and “in-betweens” that arise herein. This motto very much followed his other guiding idea of the relationship between two people, and of touching, the hand: and always, for him, there is no difference between what matters in art and what matters in real life.

Both his background as a painter, and as a sculptor, characterise his large scale installations, where glass is used in original and sometimes shocking ways. Erwin started with his humorous garden show installation from the 1960´ss “The Fountain of Youth” that squeezes a couple through a humorous bathroom and washing machine processing, and he spoke about our society’s irrational need for over-cleanliness and longing for eternal youth. This installation was – true to the times of pop art and of art happenings – followed by Erwin’s lasting 1972 installation “Narcissus”, which with its self-loving, paralysed figure in silvered glass is now prominently displayed in the new Frauenau Glass Museum. Thirdly, Erwin presented his large scale installation “Sixteen Heads and the Space in Between” (1998-1999), which is to be found in the Corning Incorporated Headquarters building. This impressive installation includes eight pairs of heads with canvas paintings and other elements, and condenses the qualities and messages of his later work in the theme of relationships, the tension between men and women – and, again, all the space and meaning “in-between”.

Of course, it was Erwin’s special desire to pay a special tribute to Tom Buechner, showing several heads in the “Tom” series, including “Do good work”: Tom’s guiding sentence that is well engrained in his many students in classical painting from his twenty summers of teaching in the “Bild-Werk Frauenau” summer academy. This very special connection to Erwin and to Frauenau is, amongst others, documented in the naming of the main academy building “Toms Hall”. The image of Erwin and Tom painting together, classical and from free imagination, demonstrated a fruitful artistic tension that has not only shaped Bild-Werk Frauenau and many artists, but, apart from that, seemed an experiment attempted with amusing outcomes.

Erwin paid tribute and told stories about many old friends from the world wide studio glass community – in the short overview it was amazing to see to what extent the village of Frauenau, from the early 1960s to the present, has become a studio glass meeting point and a focus of inspiration and creativity. Photographs of friends in his kitchen and in and around Frauenau started off with his European studio glass co-founders Sam Herman and Sybren Valkema and went on to include longstanding friends like Marvin Lipovsky, Carl Betz, Jiří Harcuba, David Hopper, Masahiro Hachida (with whom Erwin collaborated on work in ceramic and paper in Japan), Stephen Paul Day, Therman Statom and many others. The names and encounters span from his first German studio furnace in the basement of the Eisch factory that was with its shiny metal wings a focus of local and global inspiration in the 1960s and 1970s, to today’s studio glass centre in Frauenau: Erwin gave some atmospheric insight into Bild-Werk Frauenau, the international summer school for glass, painting, sculpture and much more that he co-founded twenty years ago and that stands so much for artistic imagination and togetherness in Erwin’s sense. Also, there was an outlook to Erwin’s creative spirit and influence in his own region with its vivid glass art scene, by giving views of other artists work from Frauenau, including the massive glass Ark by his son in law Ronald Fischer, and work by his wife Gretel Eisch. The new Glass Museum Frauenau was shown with its extraordinary, imaginative way of staging local, European and global history and art through glass. Erwin concluded with an invitation to all to come to Frauenau and to experience Bild-Werk Frauenau and the rich glass scene there.

“Happy Accidents” was the title of Erwin’s lecture. It refers as much to the chance and joy of meetings in his life as it does to the ability of allowing chance to determine a trail of glass onto a glass head or the meaning of a brushstroke. It has characterised the life and work of Erwin Eisch.

His lecture was to a jam-packed hall, and received a standing ovation.

The glass artists of the West Midlands and of Bavaria stood up very well on the International stage. And the resulting pride and confidence makes a good base for developing their reputations everywhere. This is perhaps the best outcome of the project.