A sampling of the glass pumpkins on display (or for sale) at this year's Great Glass Pumpkin Patch event at the Bay Area Glass Institute
Watching “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” on television used to be a childhood October ritual, depending on one’s age. Now the great pumpkin has come to the Corning Museum of Glass in a very literal sense, with its exhibition of the “world’s largest” blown-glass pumpkin, a cheery, mottled monster with a circumference of more than eight feet. Continuing the theme is this year’s Great Glass Pumpkin Patch at the Bay Area Glass Institute (BAGI), a large-scale installation of glass pumpkins produced by 45 artists, the fourteenth such installation in as many years. While these proliferating glass pumpkin events (for other examples, see here, here, and here) present themselves as family-friendly means to get into the spirit of autumn and learn more about the process of glass-blowing, they also open up interesting discussions about the iconography of the pumpkin as an object—and why glass is such an interesting material from which to fashion it.
Exploring the pumpkin’s connection with Halloween is perhaps the best place to start a discussion. What does one usually do with a pumpkin (an actual one, not one made of glass)? Carve it—by using a knife, which makes it a potentially dangerous form of image-making. Prof. Cindy Dell Clark of Penn State has argued* that Halloween involves issues of power, since adults control the sorts of experiences and emotions children will associate with the holiday—such as supervising knife use during pumpkin-carving. Glass-making also offers a potential for danger and too requires adult supervision; as a result, when viewers encounter public glass-blowing demonstrations at the BAGI Pumpkin Patch, for example, the ritual of shaping the pumpkin continues to evoke associations of adult control and danger. As symbols, the seemingly fragile glass pumpkins that one event touts as potential “heirlooms” hardly seem scary, but when we think about how these symbols are made, a degree of fear or intuitive recognition of danger enters the dialogue.
Interestingly, the pumpkin motif has long been one employed by Yayoi Kusama, the fascinating Japanese artist whose multi-media work often deals with themes of transformation. What does the pumpkin mean, or become, for her? According to the website of the Gagosian Gallery, where Kusama showed earlier this year, the pumpkin is an analog for the artist herself, “a kind of alter-ego or self-portrait.” There are also examples from popular culture that implicate the pumpkin as a symbol of transformation or otherness—the pumpkin that magically changes into a carriage in the fairy tale of Cinderella, the pumpkin that stands in for the missing head of Washington Irving’s Headless Horseman. And arguably, it is ultimately glass’s transformative potential that makes it such a captivating medium. If the pumpkin as a symbol signifies transformation, is there a more appropriate material in which to represent the form?
The BAGI Great Glass Pumpkin Patch event will take place throughout this weekend, ending October 4th, and the exhibition at the Corning Museum of Glass will continue through mid-November. If you have the chance to visit either of these events or one near you, you might think about what the glass pumpkin can mean beyond being simply a marker of the season.
*Cindy Dell Clark, “Tricks of Festival: Children, Enculturation, and American Halloween,” in Ethos, Vol. 33 No. 2 (June 2005), pp. 198-9.
–Analisa Coats Bacall
