Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently (3 page)

Then comes the visual assault. Like falling down Alice’s rabbit hole, nothing seems straight. Tubes of color, in the form of glass bars, poke out from cubbyholes stuck to the wall. Every color of the rainbow imaginable is here, neatly organized into a cryptic cataloging scheme. On another wall hang enumerable organic shapes. Curlicues of glass in chartreuse, azure, vermilion, ebony flecked with gold, and colors for which there aren’t even names. The roaring furnaces are revealed to be gigantic boxes that are opened and closed by assistants wielding long poles that are gim-balled to the furnace doors. When the doors are open, the heat pushes everyone back six feet. You cannot even look at the source of the heat, for it is as bright as the sun, and a brilliant orange light that emerges from one of the glory holes burns a circular blue afterimage on your retina.

This is the Boathouse—the working studio and creative epicenter for the world’s preeminent and most iconoclastic glass artist, Dale Chihuly.

At age sixty-six, Chihuly has become synonymous with the studio glass art movement. His glass sculptures and large-scale installations, which have included the garden of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and a permanent installation in the ceiling of the Bellagio in Las Vegas, have become so popular that they verge on ubiquity. Millions of people have seen his work through television shows on PBS as well as the hundreds of exhibits that have occurred throughout the United States and the rest of the world. His studio continues to churn out thousands of pieces a year, and yet, they continue to fetch prices ranging from a few thousand dollars for a modest bowl, to $25,000 for a vase, to
well over $1 million for an installation like the one in the lobby of the Bellagio. In 1986, Chihuly became one of the few American artists to have a solo show at the Louvre. Not since Louis Tiffany has there been a force in glass like Chihuly.

Far from a starving artist, Chihuly has also mastered the business of art. Although the Chihuly operation has varied in size, it currently hovers around one hundred people. And with no limit to the prices the market has been willing to pay for Chihuly’s work, the artist has done well by all conventional standards of success. Indeed, few artists have achieved a level of financial success like Chihuly. Those inviting immediate comparison include Picasso, Warhol, and Hockney.

For all practical purposes, Chihuly invented the forms of glass sculpture that he is now associated with. His work has become iconic, even to the extent that he has copyrighted some of the forms. There have been lawsuits, of course, with the public airing of gripes from former collaborators and associates, and not all of the media attention has been favorable, but the public’s enthusiasm remains unflagging. Chihuly remains the prototypical example of the iconoclast: an individual who single-handedly tears down conventional notions of glass art and creates something entirely new in its place.

He also illustrates the first rule of iconoclasm:
he sees differently than other people.

Literally. For the first thing you notice about Chihuly is the prominent black patch over his left eye. It is anachronistic. Who wears an eye patch in the twenty-first century? Not since Moshe Dayan, the controversial chief of the Israeli Defense Forces and perhaps the last public figure to wear an eye patch, has anyone made it stylish. The most renowned eye patch wearers remain fictional characters: Bazooka Joe, Rooster Cogburn, Snake Plissken. But there it is, stuck to Chihuly’s fleshy face, like a badge of honor. He adjusts it with surprising frequency, seemingly uncomfortable with it even after thirty years. Maybe
it’s all for show. It makes no difference. The loss of sight in his eye was a defining moment for Chihuly in terms of both his art and his career. Certainly, it changed his perception. It also made him into an iconoclast.

A Different Perspective

Chihuly does not spend much time in the hotshop. Sometimes he goes in to direct his team, but mostly he conveys his visions through paintings splashed on large pieces of butcher paper. Several paintings, each of which fetches several thousand dollars for an original, are tacked to the walls above the furnaces. Some paintings are simply splashes of color in an unusual shape. Spirals and other organic forms are in abundance. Other paintings clearly convey a particular piece. One painting of a black vase is similar in form and color to the one being blown, but instead of gold feathers, it sprouts a psychedelic version of the Medusa’s head, with tangerine-colored snakes.

Although the team approach to glassblowing has been known to the Europeans for centuries, Chihuly didn’t really put it into full-blown action until an accident gave him no choice. While he was touring Great Britain in 1976, Chihuly’s car crashed, sending the artist through the windshield. The damage to his left eye was irreparable, and he has not had vision out of it ever since. Even while recovering from the accident, he continued to blow glass, at least until another accident sidelined him more or less for good.

“I always felt handicapped after I had my accident. I didn’t have any peripheral vision, which was kind of hard because you are close together. And I didn’t have any depth perception,” Chihuly says:

Chihuly’s story is striking because he did not become an iconoclast until he lost his eye. Although he was not consciously aware of it at the time, in retrospect even a casual observer of Chihuly’s work can see a marked change after the accident. In 1975, Chihuly was working and teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). He had established the glass department at RISD five years earlier and, in collaboration with James Carpenter, created some of the first glass installations. Chihuly spent his summers back in Washington teaching at the ecohippie glass school that he founded in Pilchuck. But at RISD, Chihuly was attempting to merge designs from Navajo blankets into glass sculpture. The glass forms were rather unremarkable, cylinders that looked like candle holders. Chihuly, however, had just learned a technique for transferring drawings into glass. He made small paintings that incorporated Navajo designs, and laid them flat on the marvering table. Taking the molten glass cylinders, he would roll the cylinders on top of the paintings until the glass picked up the design. Nor did he limit himself to Navajo paintings but included all sorts of drawings and whimsical doodles, such as French flags and caricatures of James Joyce.

After the accident, however, Chihuly’s work took on a decidedly asymmetric form. Working at Pilchuck in the summer of 1977 and learning to deal with the loss of depth perception, Chihuly describes his inspiration after seeing a Northwest Indian basket: “I wasn’t really
working on anything. And I saw these baskets, and I thought,
I want to make these baskets out of glass
.”

He tried a few different methods taken from standard glassblowing techniques, but none gave him the form he was looking for. “It didn’t take me too long to figure out that I could have the heat and gravity work for me to make these shapes.”

The baskets, although similar to the cylinders in their earthen tones, looked nothing like candle holders. Despite their name, they didn’t look much like baskets either. More like dinosaur eggs that had hatched and mutated into some organic form that seemed almost alive. It is no coincidence that Chihuly’s work departed from symmetry following the loss of vision in one eye.

For many people, the loss of vision in one eye devastates both the body and the psyche. After Sammy Davis Jr. lost his left eye in an automobile accident, he thought his vision would be half of what it used to be, but after the bandages were removed, he found that it was less than half, describing the sensation of having a wall built over his nose.
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But the brain adapts quickly, and Chihuly, like Davis, was soon able to work again. Although the brain does a surprisingly good job at compensating for the loss of vision in one eye, it is never quite the same. A great deal of depth perception returns, and slight movements of the head allow one eye to serve the function of two. The greater effect of losing an eye is the way in which the individual sees himself.

In glasswork, symmetry is prized above all else. Ever since the Venetians invented the craft in the thirteenth century, symmetry has been a measure of the skill of the glassblower and has served as a sort of status symbol. Even in the 1970s, when Chihuly was blowing, the worth of a glassblower was measured by the symmetry of his work. It was unthinkable to show work that departed from this standard. Asymmetric vases were the mark of rank beginners. So when Chihuly foisted his deformed baskets on the glass world, he thumbed his nose at centuries of glassmaking dogma.

For artists like Chihuly, the work is very much an extension of the body. Glass sculpture is a physical medium. The requirement of constant motion traditionally ensured that symmetric objects were the most highly prized. And yet, the one-eyed artist is a case study in asymmetry that he must confront in the mirror every morning. Humans do not like asymmetry as a general rule. When we look at someone’s face, we judge their beauty in large part according to how symmetric they are.
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For an artist, beauty reigns above all else. So even though Chihuly adapted to monocular vision, what makes him an iconoclast is his departure from traditional glassblowing into the realm of asymmetry. He found ways to make the asymmetric beautiful—a feat that most glass-blowers of the time thought impossible. In Chihuly’s case, it took a physical change to see differently. Although it may not be necessary to resort to such drastic means, his story provides the first lesson for iconoclasts. The iconoclast sees differently than everyone else.

Seeing Differently

We are visual animals. When we imagine something, it is most often a visual image that comes to mind. Where do these images come from? The eyes transmit raw information, but by the time you become aware of it, your brain has processed the information in so many ways that if a neuroscientist were to listen in on the neural signals propagating through your brain, she would have a hard time picking up anything resembling a picture. The first thing to realize is that vision is not the same as perception. Vision is the process by which photons enter the eye and are transformed into neural signals in the brain. Perception, on the other hand, is the much more complex process by which the brain interprets these signals. The end result is a mental image that reaches consciousness. The eye is not much more than an optical lens and an image detector (the retina). After that, what people’s brains do with the image is a rather individualistic process.

The Anatomy of Vision

Vision begins in the eye.
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The human eye is divided into two components: a lens system and a detector system. The outermost part of the eye, the cornea, collects incoming light rays and passes them through the lens. The lens takes the incoming light rays and focuses them onto the retina, which covers the inner surface of the rear of the eyeball. The lens functions in the same way as a camera lens, but unlike a camera lens, which is made from glass or plastic, the human lens is living tissue made up of cells that have elongated into very thin fibers. These fibers attach to muscles that surround the periphery of the lens. When the muscles contract, the lens flattens out, changing the focus point.

Light entering the eye is projected onto the retina, and it is here that the first transformation from physical image to mental image occurs. The light strikes a specialized type of nerve cell called a
photo-receptor
. These cells contain special pigments that absorb energy from incoming photons and convert this energy into an electrical impulse. There are two types of photoreceptors:
rods
and
cones
, which are named for their shapes under a microscope. The rods have a larger surface area and can detect a few photons at a time, which makes them ideally suited for night vision. The tip of a cone is much smaller and is less sensitive, but the cones are packed close together in the center of the retina. This tight packing makes them ideal for picking up fine details. The cones also contain three different pigments, and the relative concentration of these pigments in a particular cone determines the range of colors it responds to.

Until this point, the eye functions much like a digital camera. But unlike a camera’s detector, the photoreceptors in the retina are not spaced uniformly on a grid. Because the cones are packed densely near the center of the retina, and the rod spacing is sparse near the periphery, our ability to make out details of objects declines with distance from the center of vision. So even before the photoreceptors transmit
electrical signals to the brain, the image has been fractionated in a way that gives premium bandwidth to things that are in the center of the visual field. By constantly moving your eyes, however, you’re able to construct a mental image of your surroundings. Your brain can keep track of this mental image and fill in the gaps in vision by making guesses that are generally pretty good. There are circumstances, however, in which these guesses fail, and it is under these conditions that the brain makes incorrect assumptions about what it is seeing. It turns out that the ways in which the brain makes these assumptions are the same ways it makes it difficult to think like an iconoclast.