Repost: On Other Blogs: Seattle cut-and-paster keeps tabs on glass scholarship

The homepage of the ABJ Seattle Glass Online blog that tracks critical writing about glass as compiled by Lauren Fujii.

UPDATED 10/17

On a one-person campaign to raise awareness of the critical discourse about a medium, Seattle blogger Lauren Fujii has set out to chronicle “the written historical record of glass” with her ABJ Seattle Glass Online blog. Updated sporadically with text excerpts quoted in their entirety from various sources, the texts are not linked back to their original location. Though they are sourced at the bottom in text, there is an absence of any copyright acknowledgment to speak of.

Intellectual property issues aside, the blog has a stated interest in the historical time frame spanning 1881 to the present. About once a week, Fujii posts excerpts from or entire articles on glass that have appeared in other publications, as well as news about glass-related happenings in the Northwest region. The significance of the year 1881 is unclear, but Fujii’s choice of content suggests a familiarity with, and deep interest in, the fundamental issues that frame contemporary glass work. In an emailed response to questions from GLASS, she explains that she became interested in glass after marrying a glassblower two years ago; as she says, “learning about glass became an in-depth process, leading first to respect and then to admiration.” She also writes in her brief profile that “I have a simple motive—to compile written opinion about glass art and glassblowing as a matter of historical record in order to do further research for my own writing.”

The ABJ Seattle Glass Online blog is a place to find out what’s new in terms of glass scholarship—as well as what’s old. Dense chunks of copied-and-pasted texts are occasionally broken up by Fujii’s commentary and direction. Because of this density, reading the blog can be a disorienting experience, though throughout one finds a thematic link in the crucial debates surrounding the medium in postings from both popular press and academic sources. She often aligns the scholarship she cites along specific threads, though these threads are presented as being self-evident—meaning that Fujii does not spell them out for readers. Instead, she uses titles such “1992 part two” or “2008 part five” for entries that appear one after the other on the page. They seem to be listed in the order of when Fujii discovered them. Though some were originally published years ago, others only very recently, they are posted consecutively. This is a fascinating approach, for it forces readers wade through the texts to make sense of their potential importance, becoming acquainted with the discourse in the process, as well as how older articles compare to newer ones.

Perhaps Fujii’s most interesting and polemical post to date came on May 4th of this year, when she called for a fuller integration of glass within contemporary art scholarship. “Does anyone have anything new or interesting to say about glass?” she begins. Presumably Fujii believes the answer is yes—but she goes on to pick out the most significant (and admittedly all-too-familiar) problems one encounters in writing about glass: puns, tired re-hashings of art versus craft, an over-emphasis on glass’s aesthetic appeal, and so on, all resulting in scholarship or criticism that is “like a pop song stuck on a loop.” It’s a great description, though Fujii doesn’t offer solutions to these systemic problems. It’s possible that her blog is an attempt to address them. (These are also problems that GLASS works to address, both in print and online.)

When asked what changes she would like to see in the way glass is discussed, Fujii replies, “What I love about glass blowing is the sweat and pain and pure concentration that goes into making a difficult piece…when I read an article about glass I want it to be like that. I want it to challenge me.” She continues, “While writers should take more risks, writers shouldn’t grasp for ideas. Not everything involving glass should be woven into glass scholarship, my recycling bin, for one, should stay out.” This second point is particularly noteworthy, for with a medium like glass, so materially pervasive in both art and life, it is perhaps too easy for writers to try to bring non-art objects into the discourse.

Esoteric though it may be, Fujii’s blog is still an interesting way to sample what has been and is being written about glass, and you are likely to stumble on something you hadn’t seen before, a testament to her research skills. It’s an ambitious project, and yet another manifestation of what Hal Foster has termed “an archival impulse.” To employ a metaphor Fujii might find annoying, the blog takes the large corpus of material that is contemporary glass scholarship and shatters it into tesserae, then re-assembles the information into a glittering, if bewildering, abstract mosaic. Check it out here.

–Analisa Coats Bacall

Editor’s Note: The original posting of this article on 10/5/2009 stated that Lauren Fujii did not respond to emailed questions. In fact, she had responded but this email was not noted due to technical problems with Gmail’s identifying of new emails. The GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet regrets the error, and the above posting has been adjusted to reflect Fujii’s responses.