Lampworkers have traditionally been a secretive bunch. Techniques have been jealously guarded for centuries, handed down only from father to son or from master to apprentice, and hidden from others. That is one of the reasons there are so few good books on lampworking. John Burton's GLASS, Hammesfahr and Stong's CREATIVE GLASSBLOWING, and Homer Hoyt's GLASSBLOWING are notable exceptions. Now there is another, Bandhu Scott Dunham's CONTEMPORARY LAMPWORKING.
Bandhu's book is the culmination of over ten year's work, started after a class that Bandhu took at Pilchuck in 1984, and finishing with self-publication this fall. In that time he has collected a remarkable amount of information and has done a creditable job of organizing it and making it readable. Some might say that he has tried to do too much with this book, attempting to cover everything from teaching basic techniques to an overview of modern-day lampworkers to extremely detailed chapters on such technical matters as chemical colorization and annealing cycles. But I believe that all of this information is interdependent and that Bandhu has handled the daunting task of presenting it to us admirably.
The book begins with an excellent historical brief that is largely missing from other books. I found this chapter to be fascinating and an effective way to introduce the reader to the contemporary scene. He follows this with a short chapter on the nature of glass itself and an introduction to how lampworkers fit into the overall scheme of things, and ends the section with a chapter on setting up a lampworking studio. All of this sets the stage for the next section which is devoted to basic lampworking techniques.
Bandhu's lessons are easy to follow if the reader is actually doing that, but I suspect that more readers will be simply reading for information, and with that in mind, these lessons are thankfully brief. As Bandhu himself says, "the techniques in my book are free-standing. I tried not to distract people with too many preconceived notions of what they should or should not do with the techniques." Still, I have seen some of these exercises before in previous books like Hoyt's and Hammersfahr's. There is not much new ground-breaking here. I also felt that the illustrations were a little too cartoonish and lacked the kind of precise detail that Hoyt's book in particular is renowned for.
But in the next chapters Bandhu starts to really stretch his wings and proceeds to cover technical matters to an extent that no book before him has done. The chapter on beads serves not only to demonstrate the use of another type of glass and another way of working it, but to give the often forgotten beadmakers equal stature to the more renowned vessel and sculptural lampworkers. I believe it is no accident that the first page of the chapter on advanced techniques features a photo of Brian Kerkvleit working on a bead. This chapter also covers some scientific techniques and so brings together all of the various factions of contemporary lampworking. The facing page from Brian's photo features a photo of master scientific glassblower Joe Luisi's famous "Hand with Trumpet", a masterpiece of technical and artistic excellence. It is clear that novelty lampworkers, beadmakers, artistic lampworkers, and scientific lampworkers alike can each take pride in their place in this book, and therein lies the real strength of Bandhu's effort.
For me, the main area of interest was in the technical sections. I found the chapter on annealing to be an invaluable resource that I will no doubt be referring to for the rest of my teaching and working career. It should be required reading for anyone who has ever believed that vermiculite is enough or who has ever touted the infamous '48-hour- rule'. He also takes the time to cover the relatively minor hazards involved with lampworking very thoroughly. The section on eye protection should be stamped on the foreheads of anyone who has ever subscribed to the ridiculous notion that didimiums are not really necessary or are a fashion no-no (you know who you are).
Throughout the book there are photographs of work by contemporary lampworkers, and these really give this book some pizazz. The addition of a section of color plates adds a pleasingly aesthetic finishing touch. In fact, with the exception of the technical sketches, Bandhu's use of graphics is nothing short of brilliant. Every one serves a purpose or helps to illustrate a point. There is even a back-handed salutation to his skateboarder roots on the preface page!
I also greatly enjoyed the many philosophical quotations from such illuminaries as Picasso, Van Gogh, John Burton, Einstein, Tolstoy, and Fellini to mention but a few. With these little snippets of wisdom, Bandhu shares with us in an unobtrusive way his own philosophy and attitude toward art and creativity without sounding pompous or self- congratulatory. In-context quotations are a powerful literary tool and Bandhu uses them masterfully throughout the book to make subtle points and to reinforce important ideas.
Bandhu does over-extend himself a bit with the chapter on photographing your own work. The primitive methods he describes should serve only to inform the reader of just how difficult it is to photograph glass well, especially if they actually try to do it themselves. There is a dangerous inference here that these methods are adequate substitutes for a professional. They are not. But just the fact that he points out how important it is to keep a photographic record of your work makes this chapter worthwhile.
There are a couple of things I wish he had dealt with in a bit more detail. Besides the weak technical illustrations, his coverage of certain related subjects such as iridizing, silvering, staining, and enameling consists mostly of references to other publications that deal with the subject in detail. While this is not altogether undesirable I feel that it undercuts his main goal of a single reference that contains information on all aspects of lampworking. There are other outright omissions such as the failure to even mention resist-sandblasting or the technique of graal in the section on abrasives. Perhaps he will deal with these subjects in future revisions.
But these are little issues. The positives far outweigh the negatives and Bandhu should feel gratified that this book is sure to become the standard by which all future books on lampworking will be measured. As Ginny Ruffner says in the Forward, "It's about time lampworkers had a book like this."
To obtain your copy of 'Contemporary Lampworking', contact:
The following is a transcript of a conversation that took place between myself and Einar De La Torre. Einar and his brother Jamex are two very talented artists who specialize in mixed-media pieces that incorporate elements that are lampworked, glassblown, painted and sculpted. Last April, they were scheduled to have a show at the San Jose Center for Latino Arts in San Jose, CA, but 24 hours after the opening, a religious zealot broke into the gallery and, using the security bar from the door like a bludgeon, damaged or destroyed all fifty pieces! He was apprehended and is presently in jail, but that is of little comfort to Einar and Jamex who lost over two year's work. I asked Einar to comment on this incident.
RM: Before we start, I'd like to ask how your class at Penland with Richard Ritter and Thurman Statom went?
EDT: I thought it went really well considering that nobody had any idea what we were going to do. Because of that we had to have a lot of meetings to keep the thing going in the right direction. But I believe the people at Penland were really happy with us because they were talking about having us back. Richard was happy because he also talked about having us back whether together with Thurman or independently because our work is about basically bit-working both in hot glass and in lampworking. It was really fun, it was just a lot more work than I ever imagined.
RM: That's what I discovered too during my two stints at Pilchuck. You know, I don't think I work that hard at home! It is so intense because you have all of these people who are expecting you to deliver for them.
EDT: They really are. They are hanging out looking at you for direction and in some ways it's frustrating because they very typically should ask you for things that are specific. I don't know, it's really a strange thing how that works out. Most of the teaching that we've done has always been workshops, hit and run. But two and a half weeks of being married to a place and to the students was really tough. It was also a lot of fun and, I don't know about every single person but I know that a lot of people in the class were very happy with it.
RM: Well, it is impossible to please everyone, but I have noticed that too that there is a huge difference between a three day workshop and a two week course. You really have to have a much broader agenda and you really sort of have to adapt as you go along to the changes as the students progress. It is sort of like a series of workshops.
EDT: Yeah, you also have to be willing to move something that may be scheduled because the students may be asking certain things of you and there's nothing wrong with that. We noticed that throughout the course, the students broke down into those that wanted assignments and those that didn't. That was another big problem because some people had a pretty good language and knew where they were going and needed our help more in terms of developing their artistic language. Then there were people who didn't have anything.
RM: You have to be willing to adjust your agenda to the broad spectrum of abilities and viewpoints that you get because you get everything from beginners to people who are professional artists and you have to deal with all of them. They don't really screen too well when they set up these classes.
EDT: Yeah we noticed that. Our class was supposed to be screened but at the end there were a few who didn't go through with their commitment so I think that Richard Ritter took on a couple of people who were complete beginners. We called them and told them that as long as they understood this class is not to teach people steps to doing anything. We had the bad luck of not having anybody who knew how to lampwork so, because we were both in the hot shop and the lampwork shop, we told them 'look we are not going to make a lampworker out of you in two weeks. This class is more about art than lampworking or blown glass or anything in particular. Why don't you let me know where you're going and I can maybe help you turn something out that you can be happy with'. That's a funny way to put it but this was not a technique oriented class.
RM: That's realistic for a class that's not technique oriented. Let's talk about this incident. When exactly did this happen?
EDT: The opening was actually scheduled for April 1st, which was a Saturday. Three days before that it was opened to the public. It was open all that day, Wednesday, we were just finished hanging. The following morning, Thursday morning, this guy broke in. This was downtown where it is kind of a no man's land at night. The guy made a racket but nobody heard it. They didn't have an alarm system. If I understand right it was a prostitute who called the cops! By then it was obviously way too late. He carried one of my pieces off with him. When we got there, we surveyed all of the breakage and we jumped into the cop car and they took us down a few blocks where they had this guy wrestled to the ground. One of my pieces was broken on the ground. Apparently he had tried to throw it at the Sergeant. It would have hurt him very much, it was a very heavy piece. It was a birdcage holder pedestal and instead of a birdcage it had a blown glass cross suspended there with barbed wire. It was a very heavy piece. So basically, we had to get there to identify the carcasses of the artwork in order to relate him directly to it.
RM: Did you lose every piece in the show?
EDT: Every single piece was damaged, just about all of them were completely lost. We could probably rescue to its original state or close about five of them, of fifty pieces.
RM: Of fifty pieces! That is a staggering loss!
EDT: It was just about all of our recent work and some older work too. It left us with not even a small show worth of work left. We didn't even have that much. We have been grabbing old broken parts that could work for something else and putting new pieces into them and the blown glass part that was broken we'd just replace that. But generally when we do that the piece takes on a completely new life. It's a different piece. In some ways it's like the frame and the mat, but the drawing is different, to put it into context.
RM: How long had you and Jamex spent preparing for this show?
EDT: In terms of the work represented, it was basically the last year and a half, maybe two year's worth of work. Not every single piece we had done in that time, there were a few pieces we decided to keep because they were promised to another gallery or they were in another gallery. When you consider some of the older pieces that were in there, it was probably two year's worth of work.
RM: Two years!
EDT: And that is two people, because there was my work, there was his work and, out of the whole show there was probably seven or eight pieces that were collaborative. It really put a dent in it. I'm behind it now, but when we do a slide lecture and we're showing some of these it bugs us a little bit. Because we go through the whole thing all over and say, God, you know...
RM: It's a tremendous loss, and it doesn't go away overnight. Did the gallery carry any kind of insurance?
EDT: They had a limit on the insurance that they carried. They had a $50,000 limit. The amount of work there was $120,000. The insurance, all of that is settled, but they didn't cover it all, especially since it was a non-profit gallery and we were supposed to get 80% of the sales there. And there were actually some sales already lined up, which really bugs me because I would much rather have these pieces be in a collection than in just slides.
RM: I don't know how you could ever deal with something like this, but I guess you just deal with it and move on. Did the assailant give any reason for what he did? Was this just a drunk vandal or did he have purpose?
EDT: Well, he was a neo-christian or whatever, I don't know what you could call him. His agenda was that he felt that what he saw in the window... and it was just a door with a window, the rest of the gallery doesn't have windows, it is just an entryway... one of the pieces he saw was of a mexican wrestler's head on a chopping block and instead of arms he's got hatchets. If anything I think it is more of a humorous piece but he interpreted it as a human sacrifice, in a negative way. The piece was named "The Sore Loser". We're talking about a guy who can't stand losing and about machismo and making fun of a lot of issues. Inside of the trunk... the chopping block that his head is on that was made out of blown glass... inside of the block we cut out a little section and we put a pyrex lampworked human heart in there, just thumping away feeding the frenzy that this guy is in. It is one of the pieces that I think set him off because of the statements he made. The strongest piece in the show that could be interpreted as controversial was actually not damaged that much, and that was a blown glass crucified dog with lampworked detail. Some people would have interpreted that a lot stronger, but again we were more tongue-in-cheek than anything else. Although we are making harsh criticisms as far as society and religion, it's done in a humorous way. We believe that should be part of it.
RM: I find this whole affair very disturbing. I see a parallel between what happens at abortion clinics where you have people who morally believe that abortion is wrong and then on the far edge you have this extremist with a gun. I sort of see a similar situation where this guy was the extremist while in the mainstream we have politicians and media personalities that, with their words, are doing the same thing. Do you think that this incident might have been encouraged by the present social climate that is sort of anti- controversial art? Do you think that had anything to do with it?
EDT: I think it does in the bigger scheme of things, maybe not directly but definitely indirectly. It is difficult to say directly because you need to have proof and links and that's not my job, but I think indirectly it does. There is a climate of intolerance out there and to ignore that is perhaps the mistake that we have been making as a society so there is a collective fault. The way we view it is that this is not so much about what happened to us and our work, it's more about what happened in the community that we allowed to happen. It's about the greater artist community that's out there and how much are people willing to take and at what point it gets to be too much. Those are bigger and greater issues than this incident but they relate to it I think.
RM: I definitely agree with you. Speaking of the community, what kind of reaction did you have from the community around you. I'm sure there is a certain amount of shame that something like this could happen in San Jose.
EDT: Yeah, well we didn't make it to the actual opening reception because the work was gone by that Saturday. What we started to do was to sweep up all the broken fragments of the work. We had photocopies done from the slides, we put the photocopy on the wall where the piece was and then all the broken shards were swept up underneath it. And they basically held a rally and the rally was local galleries and art organizations all rallying to the cause of the one-man censureship. Because he basically censured us quite effectively! He made sure nobody else saw that show.
RM: Absolutely. That is censureship in its purest form!
EDT: Yeah, it's gone! We will show in that gallery next year. They now have a very sophisticated alarm system, roll-up steel doors, the whole thing out of this. That is the sad thing that some good things come out of bad things. They got more recognition that they needed in the community. There was a lot of community organization. I think the people were terrific. We have a lot of very very close friends there now because of what happened too. So I have no problem with going back there and showing there again next year. In fact we will probably schedule that soon, in the next month or two. So it all boils down to the community response. We tried desperately to get away from it being focused on us and more focused on how it could happen to you if your work was interpreted by this guy this way. There's a lot of work out there and we're not the only people who are dealing with controversial items, there's plenty of people doing that. I am not going to say that is encouraging, in some ways it's worse because it could have happened to other people and it could have been another city and it could have been another madman. I think there is a lot of it out there. Again, like the abortion clinic shooting, the guy that shot the doctor is a hero and he knows it in his heart that he did it for the people who are radical anti-abortionists. If you're against it, it's fine, but it's the old two wrongs making a right, how does that work?
RM: Exactly. Do you mind my asking, do you think that the trauma of this event will have any kind of effect on your work in the future?
EDT: Oh, I think that the work that we've done since, and we've been really hard at work because we've needed it. Immediately afterwards we had a show in September that we needed some work for at a fairly good gallery in New York City, the Monique Molton Gallery. She had chosen pieces that were out of that show. She had seen our show in Santa Monica and she chose pieces that were actually going to be in this show. All of a sudden we had to go crazy and do the work. It has changed our work because we're angry about what happened. We also felt that we had to make our message even stronger. Of course the opposite happens in response to censureship in that you organize yourself into being louder and clearer so I think the work is better work because of that. Now I don't recommend an experience like this to make better work, I don't think you need to have that experience to grow but unfortunately the biggest noticeable steps in growing are very often out of grief and negative situations.
RM: That's definitely true. Artists draw on their personal experiences for their viewpoints and their means of expressing it.
EDT: Exactly, in fact some artists more that others can be very autobiographical and to escape that completely, I think for me would be impossible anyway.
RM: Do you have any other comments that you would like to make before we end this?
EDT: No, other than I'm glad you're interested in writing something about it. I think that, again, that not being about me but being about how people perceive this if it happened to you in your community and anywhere in the world for that matter. It's about the freedom to express yourself. I think that on that level it's an important story.
RM: That was exactly how I felt about it when I first heard about this. I felt like this is an important incident. It's a tragedy but it's also very important. Everyone needs to hear bout this. Everyone needs to be aware that this is the danger of censureship. This is what can happen in a society where there is intolerance for ideas. That is something that cuts to the bone of every artist. No one likes to have a gag put on them and I think everybody fears that.
EDT: These are really difficult issues because... and that's the harder issue here and the reason it needs to be talked about... and that is that this guy is an unstable person walking around on the street. If he refuses medication he needs to be put away. Now, obviously that's a really difficult thing because there's not enough money to put him away. Obviously that's a big issue and I got very angry over that, the fact that there's no money to put away people who are potentially very violent. This guy showed a lot of violence in how he broke the artwork and I am sure that if I tried to stop him he would show violence at me just like he showed violence at the police. So he could actually hurt or kill somebody when he was in this little rage of his. Now, if we don't have money to treat him are we willing to take this sort of action? This society is a little too interested in just locking people away and forgetting about it. But the problem is that a lot of the people who are homeless are that way because they need help and treatment. So, in some ways, we angered some people in San Jose when we said that this guy needs help, he needs treatment, because they wanted to be upset at him. To me it's like that's part of the whole thing that he's just this martyr and we're a martyr and he's a martyr and there's this whole thing about martyrs now. Let's talk about responsibility as a society! I am not interested in being a martyr. This guy might be interested in being a martyr, but by letting him be one its like giving a terrorist publicity.
RM: That's right. You're legitimizing his actions.
EDT: So it's a really complex issue and I have no idea how to begin to deal with that.
RM: Is he safely incarcerated now?
EDT: Yeah. I think he got like thirty-two months. And they're talking about compensation but this guy is completely unemployable because he needs drug therapy and he refuses it. If anything, he's been busted before for illicit drug use, which I was sure he was on but apparently they tested him and he was not.
RM: I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me. This is going to be fascination reading for a lot of people because the vast majority of people have not heard this story and it needs to be told again and again. There is a strong lesson to be learned here.
EDT: Thank you for showing interest. Like I said, in terms of the story, I am interested in people thinking about that and the art and how does that relate to the art. And there's other ramifications politically, but that's just the angle that we as artists are interested in. So thank you very much.
RM: Let's talk again sometime, OK?
EDT: OK.
Well, that about does it for this issue. Next time I am going to cover some exciting new materials that are recently or soon to be available to lampworkers, particularly some new kinds of glass! And there will be an updated report on Chemolene. If you want to write to me, you can contact me by snail-mail at 265 Rita Blvd., Melbourne Beach, FL 32951, or via email at ram@iu.net or on compuserve at 71042,751. Finally, if you are an internet surfer, check out my home page at http://www.websharx.com/~kahuna.