Heart of Glass

Back in 1967, Czech film director Miloš Forman made a movie about a group of firemen in a small Bohemian town. The film, called The Firemen's Ball, was ostensibly a comedy about the chaos that ensues when an incompetently planned, badly organized firemen's ball and award ceremony goes hilariously awry. Although Forman claimed that the movie had no hidden meanings or subversive messages, the repressive Communist government of what was then Czechoslovakia was not amused. They saw the film for what it was, a work of political allegory and a scathing indictment of their threadbare, shabby, centrally planned society. After a brief, three-week run in the theaters during the short-lived "Prague spring," The Firemen's Ball was "banned forever" by the government after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and ensuing Soviet-led crackdown on free expression in 1968.

At precisely the same time, and under the same authoritarian regime, another artist was finding ways to circumvent government censorship and express himself in whatever way he could. That artist was Václav Cigler, and he chose the medium of glass.

"He was living under a repressive regime. He had to find a way to express himself and not get caught, not get censored. The choice of material, glass, was based upon the fact that it was always used for decorative purposes. It would not attract the attention of the censors. It did not seem politicized in any way. And then the style, in this completely pared down way, was the perfect medium because it didn't in itself reveal anything. But then he, very brilliantly, filled it with content because all this work is about reflection. Reflection in many ways, in many uses of the word, but reflection in the sense that the individual is reflected in the work and in a sense completes the work. Here he could talk about those classic issues of the collective and the individual in a way that did not seem to have specific political content. "Kind of brilliant," says art historian Steven Henry Madoff.

Madoff, 55—and no relation to the infamous financier Bernard Madoff—is the curator of "Light and Space in the Garden of Reason," a major exhibition of Václav Cigler's works, currently on display at the Litvak Gallery in Tel Aviv. He says, "This is all recent work. It's incredible — we're talking about an 81 year old man. And this is the largest show of his works in his 50 year career. There are more than 50 objects in it. It's an enormous show."

Madoff was initially attracted to Cigler's oeuvre through his own interest and expertise in the American minimalist school of art. "But while the look of Václav's art is minimalist, there's a complete difference in the content and the way he approached minimalism. Because he was under a communist regime," Madoff explains. "The American minimalist movement was started as a reaction to abstract expressionism. Instead of all that angst and soul-baring, they wanted to make an art that was just about the materials themselves, pare it down, be modernist in a way not about the self. Václav, on the other hand, created this style independently. He didn't know about the American minimalists. He didn't have access to new ideas and movements happening abroad. In effect, he invented his own minimalism."

Madoff, one of Cigler's most devoted admirers, acknowledges and laments the fact that the artist is not well known. Even among those aware of glass artists, Cigler has achieved nothing like the fame of American glass artist Dale Chihuly, who is known throughout the world. Madoff says, "Cigler is a very famous artist in Prague. In New York, no one has ever heard of him. But they should, and they will." Madoff has assumed the personal mission of making the Czech artist better known.

The current show is a definite step in the right direction. Entering the exhibition with Madoff and Orit Ephrat-Moscovitz, the Litvak Gallery's executive director, we are immediately confronted by something that looks like a well. Called "Spring No. 1", it is nothing less than a round tank filled with clear water, with glass mirrors set at the bottom of the tank. The mirrors reflect the face of the viewer. Madoff says, "You can see that what is really important to Václav Cigler is the relationship between man and nature. This is, in a sense, both sculpture and image. The image is the way we are immersed in the water, immersed in nature. His point of view is that he wants to show the harmony, not the fight, between man and nature."

But the most important point is that it is our faces which are reflected by the mirrors when we look into the water. It illustrates a motif that runs through most of the works in the exhibition. As Madoff reminds us once again, "It gets back to what I talked about before, the collective and the individual. He's always reflecting you. You are what completes the work."

Madoff and Ephrat-Moscovitz then show us how some of the different items of the exhibition coordinate with each other—communicate with one another with prisms and mirrors—to produce almost magical effects. "The prisms in this piece relate to the prisms in that piece over there," says Ephrat-Moscovitz, as she directs us to stand in a certain place behind one of the glass installations. We stand at one, while Ephrat-Moscovitz positions herself behind another, way across the room. We are able to see her in the installation at which we are standing, with the added effect that she appears to be standing several meters below us. We exchange positions and there she is again, reflected in the installation at which we are standing now, looking as though she is several meters above us.

Then she and Madoff stand behind a three-quarter clear glass sphere. We see their faces — and only their faces — reflected on a lower part of the piece, but their positions are reversed. We are then shown one or two prisms in which our own faces suddenly, and almost unaccountably, appear. In one piece they appear right side up and in another, upside down. "One of the things about Cigler is that he's constantly making variations on a theme, in that musical sense. There's always the sense of the geometric, but also a playfulness in the works. The playfulness is such that we're talking about an abstract minimalist show that kids will love."

Not only will kids love Cigler's work, but his brilliant tricks with prisms and mirrors are likely to bring out the kid in even the most jaded adult. Wandering around the exhibition, one simply finds himself saying, over and over again, "This is sooooo cool!"

Madoff says, "There's a huge amount of coordination and harmony and thinking that is taking place in Cigler's art all the time. And our job was to curate it so that you'd 'get it' and you'd see the way he makes the different pieces communicate with each other."

So how exactly does Cigler make the different pieces communicate with each other? Madoff replies simply, "He understands so much about the materials because he's been doing this for literally half a century. I wanted to spend some time around an old artist because I'm around young artists all the time. I wondered what it would be like to be with someone who is 81, and who has been doing this for decades. And the thing is that his mind is just as lively as that of a 28 year old. He's so smart and so full of life and so full of creative energy."

In addition to the pieces that coordinate and communicate, other pieces in the exhibition delight the viewer with their own kinds of magic. These include a perfectly clear egg made of optical glass, designed to reflect different things, in different positions, in different sections of the egg. Optical glass, we are informed, is the purest and clearest type of glass in existence. Next to that stands a glass egg tinted yellow that reflects nothing, but captures light inside it and plays with it as we view it from different angles. Blue and clear pyramids appear, each with smaller reflected pyramids embedded within. One whole wall of the gallery is needed to display an enormous optical glass Star of David. Commissioned specifically for this exhibition, it is purportedly the largest work of art ever undertaken in optical glass. There is a portion of the gallery which is set aside as a "light box," with everything on display there designed to play with light in different ways. And within the light box is a darkened, almost cave-like room, filled with spheres of glass that look like they contain entire constellations and galaxies within them.

We encounter the pièce de résistance, however, as we step outside onto a large veranda to come face to face with Václav Cigler himself, on hand at the Litvak Gallery during the early days of the exhibition. Alone and away from his interpreter, he smiles and bids us silently to join him behind what appears to be a long horizontal prism. We bend slightly to peer into a space in the prism that at first seems too narrow to be able to reveal anything. We smile in wonder, however, as we see an entire world of Tel Aviv buildings somehow shown in the glass—not only reflected, but enlivened with additional color. Cigler sees our smile and smiles back, with an almost childlike look that acknowledges our shared enjoyment of a little moment of magic in the midst of a hot Tel Aviv afternoon.

"It's not just the glass," Madoff says later. It's Cigler's extraordinary artistry and technical genius." That and a bit of wizardry.

"Light and Space in the Garden of Reason" is showing until September 30 at the Litvak Gallery, Museum Tower, 4 Berkovitz Street, Tel Aviv. Call 03 695 9496 for further details.