Summer 2010 / Issue 119
Something far smaller but similarly subversive happened in the history of Studio Glass when a small band of art students decided to challenge the status quo of the glass world in the mid-1990s. It all started at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, where students working with glass--and inspired by punk rock and the machine performance art of Survival Research Laboratories--took to the road to see what the next generation of glass artists was cooking up on college campuses. The membership of this group would vary in the early years, but eventually they became a performance-art troupe, settled on five core members, and christened themselves the B Team to set themselves apart from the so-called "A team" that seemed to have a lock on the gallery world.
Irreverent but highly rigorous in their practice, the B Team would help move glass into the contemporary art frame, attracting attention from major New York art museums and winning prestigious awards for their sophisticated choreography in the hot shop. A decade after they disbanded in 1998 to focus on running a furniture gallery and their individual art careers, the B Team has become relevant to a new generation of performance artists working with glass that has recently emerged to challenge the existing gallery system and continue the exploration of hot-shop performances.
GLASS is pleased to present the remarkable story of the B Team in the words of its founder, Zesty Meyers, and key members Jeff Zimmerman and Evan Snyderman.
Andrew Page: Let's start at the very beginning. Why was the B Team formed and when did it start?
Zesty Meyers: It started very simply, as a way to take stock of what was happening in the world of glass in 1991 and to give something back. As a student at Mass Art, I was looking at all those exhibition catalogs from the 1970s and 80s of the big shows of Chihuly, Dan Dailey, Howard Ben Tre, the artists you could say were the "A team." While we were familiar with the past successes, I wanted to go on the road and see what was happening at that moment in time. So we got permission from our teachers to visit ten schools with glass programs around the country. The membership changed every year in the beginning; it was never a constant. We eventually named ourselves the B Team because it felt like the "A team" had left no room in the gallery system for new people to come up. We wanted to help break down some of those barriers.
Page: So what were the performances at the schools like?
Jeff Zimmerman: A lot of the focus was getting the students to participate, for them to understand that we weren't the only ones performing--they should also be performing. We were trying to change the typical glass educational experience where someone shows up to do a demo while everyone sits and watches. One piece we'd start with a lot was called Fear Jar. We'd ask everyone to write down a fear they had on a piece of paper, then we'd blow a nice jar with a tricky lid, throw all the fears into this hot jar, seal it, and they'd burn. The idea was that the fears would be gone.
Meyers: One of the sadder things we would notice on tour was that students often had a follow-the-herd mentality, as if school can teach you how to get a job, or show you all you need to do to be successful as long as you just follow the rules. We wanted to motivate people, turn them into do-ers, and that is why we started to employ Dada games like Exquisite Corpse. A lot of these kids had never been challenged in these ways.
Page: Did you think of yourselves as anti-establishment?
Zimmerman: We were inspired not so much by being anti-establishment but by some of the things going on in art at the time, such as the performances of Survival Research Laboratories. We considered ourselves part of the small group within the glass educational world who had larger ambitions--we wanted to make sculpture and performance that would change things.
Meyers: We started to ask ourselves and our audiences, are we going to do it any better than it's already been done? We realized that these students really didn't know how to interact, and we were trying to show them that you could choose to become a rock star and show that by example. We would say that we're only here for two or three days, so let's try to do something none of us has ever done. We asked for their help to create something more than what we could do on our own. We wanted to get that buzz going and leave them with the inspiration to continue in that vein after we left.
Page: What did you see going on in art schools in the early 90s? What was the focus of most of the students you visited?
Zimmerman: A lot of kids were making Venetian goblets; they basically wanted to make things with aesthetics like grandma would like. We were like punk glass artists.
Evan Snyderman: You have to realize that we were always obsessed with technique, and though all of us had skills as glassblowers, we shared a similar desire to make individual sculpture. We worked independently, often in mixed media; it was just a meeting of the minds. We used technique as a means to an end.
Meyers: Our performances asked the question: Why shouldn't the 5,000-year-old history of glass be taken somewhere else? We were obsessed with technique, but we wanted to push it further and find out what we could do with it.
Page: How did your demos or performances relate to the work being done in glass at the time, or to what was being taught by your instructors at art school?
Snyderman: Most glass sculpture really seemed over-the-top to us at that time, almost always exploiting the beauty of the finished object. We wanted to explore the beauty of the raw material, and we thought it was most impressive when you're making the glass at the furnace. Once it's done, it almost seemed dead in comparison.
Meyers: We started keeping a lot of notebooks with artistic manifestos. I still have these notebooks, and if you look through them, you'll see we wrote about things like "experimentation ... pushing limits ... appropriation of objects ... economics." We were sure we were never going to be accepted into the gallery system, but we did start to have exhibitions, including one at the Robert Lehman Gallery at UrbanGlass.
Zimmerman: Our UrbanGlass installation, which we called Five Senses, was in some ways a performance because it was so interactive with the public, with each piece relating to one of the human senses. But we were always conceptually based. At the end of a demo, you still have a vase. We always started with an intention to accomplish more than that.
Page: Were you always doing installations as well as performance, or is that something that came later?
Zimmerman: There were really two stages to the group. The first was a touring group of students who were visiting artists to glass programs at universities around the U.S. Then there was a second stage, after graduating from art school, when we became a New York-based performance-art group.
Snyderman: In 1995, we started doing performances at UrbanGlass. We had moved there and were teaching there, and we found the space so incredible, we had an immediate desire to find a way to use it as a theater.
Meyers: We thought of ourselves in the beginning as educating renegades. Our approach was not politically correct; we wanted to wake students up, and we were very inspired by our surroundings. By the time we moved to New York, we had become a nonprofit and were a lot more established. We applied for and got grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, and lots of individual donors, many of whom were art collectors who liked our performances.
Page: How was the B Team organized? Was there a leader or a director?
Meyers: There wasn't a hierarchy. We used to say there's no "I" in team.
Zimmerman: There were no divisions of labor and ideas. We'd try to do anything we came up with and often bit off more than we could chew. But it was never, "You do this, you do that." We agreed on the goal and somehow found the way to get it done. We would also sell the video and T-shirts when we did our demos, and later, as the B Team, the videos became even more highly produced. I've heard that these videos are still watched at many of the universities we visited.
Page: What were some of the highlights of the B Team's performances in the mid-90s?
Snyderman: We were invited down to the Fringe Festival, a theater festival in Philadelphia. It was incredibly hot weather, and we spent one week dreaming up the various scenarios that became the Tricks video and later would figure into the Spontaneous Combustion performances.
Meyers: The biggest thing we did was Spontaneous Combustion 1 and 2, both of which we performed at UrbanGlass and the New Museum of Art in Manhattan. The craft world did not come to these performances, but the art world was there. It was curators from the Museum of Modern Art, Kiki Smith, Dan Cameron. The event was picked up by Simon Says, a super underground art newspaper of what was happening in New York, and that helped to bring some of the biggest names in contemporary art. So many major figures in the art world were clamoring to get in to our last performance that we started an hour late. We won a Bessie Dance Award for Spontaneous Combustion 2.
Page: What was that performance like? It seems like the high-water mark for the B Team.
Snyderman: The first part was this methodical buildup. We had these massive scrims set up. They were backlit so that we were these giant shadow figures making glass mannequin heads which we dropped into this fish tank in front of the audience where they would bubble and explode. The audience didn't know it, but we had a team of 40 people working behind the scenes so we could produce so many heads, one after the other.
Zimmerman: We had mounted 20 television sets along the walls to show it from different angles. We had a live DJ who was responding to the action with the timing of the music. He slowly brought the level of the music to a crescendo, ambient music. We created this visual and musical expression of the factory mentality, making the same thing in pink and blue and yellow colors.
Snyderman: Then, as it builds, this repetitive factory kind of work, it starts to rain light bulbs. The scrim drops, and the rain of light bulbs intensifies--they were being dropped from the upper deck above the furnaces. With the opening of the scrim, the performance completely breaks free of the monotonous opening, and there is this level of insanity, like a three-ring circus. One of us comes out with a hot glass target, and we start shooting gobs of hot glass at it. Kelly Lamb comes out with rubber shoes and dances on molten glass and swings out over the audience with flaming feet. Then we had the steel umbrella where we poured molten glass down, and it cooled as it fell.
Myers: Everything built to this intense level, and the audience didn't realize at first that it was over. At the peak of it, we just slipped away. People didn't want it to be over; they wanted more. They came up and started breaking pieces of glass off where it had cooled after being poured over the umbrella to take home with them.
Snyderman: There were only three performances at UrbanGlass. It took so much effort, months and months of effort. There were 40 people behind the scenes that we needed to make it happen, and it cost tens of thousands of dollars for a 20- or 30-minute performance.
Page: The B Team broke up shortly after that performance. Why?
Meyers: We knew we had done something that no one had ever seen. We knew we had ripped something apart. The goal wasn't to be the Sex Pistols. We wanted to do something great with the material. But it became way too much. After Spontaneous Combustion's huge turnout, we were raising real money. Everyone wanted to do something with us. One of the things I didn't want in my own personal life was money. I wanted to bridge the gaps between craft and fine art, performance and fine art. Once it succeeded, I didn't want it to become something known and famous. I was done. I wanted to stop. I was fine with it going on without me, but my focus became a gallery we had already started by selling furniture at a flea market. We decided to open a gallery space in Williamsburg and later we moved to Tribeca, where R 20th Century is today.
Page: Did the B Team help you in your decision to start the gallery?
Meyers: The B Team helped me to have the guts; it taught me how to face fear, how to take that first step. It's still scary.
Page: What advice do you have for the new crop of artists working in glass performance?
Meyers: Following the herd is the sure way to mediocrity. You can't teach someone that; it's an individual thing. But I would ask this question: If this material of glass can do anything, why aren't people experimenting a lot more with it? They're already pushing glass to new limits in industry; why isn't it being used in the arts to similarly push the boundaries of what it can do? This is the question we asked ourselves every day.
The B Team Chronology
1991
Not yet named the "B Team," Mass Art student Zesty Meyers with fellow students Mike Weldon, Ian Lewis, and James Mongrain set out on "The Massachusetts College of Art Student Glass Tour" with stops at ten university glass programs, including the University of Illinois at Champain-Urbana, and Kent State, Ohio.
1992
Meyers, with new members Chuck Vinetta, Thor Bueno, and Kait Rhodes (RISD) continues to visit college campuses, changing the group's name to the B team in the summer.
1993
The B Team makes two tours of the Midwest. Meyers and Bueno stay on but Deborah Czeresko and Clay Logan replace Vinetta and Rhodes.
1994
After graduating from MassArt, Meyers moves the B Team to Boston. Jeff Zimmerman joins the group, and Sarah Chase replaces Czeresko. Group performs at venues in Kentucky and Montreal, and makes first appearance at UrbanGlass in Brooklyn, New York.
1995
Meyers relocates the B Team to New York City, Clay Logan rejoins the group which performs at the Detroit Institute of Art. The B Team exhibition "Five Senses" opens at the Robert Lehman Gallery at UrbanGlass. The group is awarded a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award.
1996
Evan Snyderman joins the B Team when Zimmerman moves to France for a year, Kelly Lamb replaces Sarah Chase. The group performs Spontaneous Combustion I, a multi-media performance at UrbanGlass.
1997
Zimmerman returns to the B Team replacing Clay Logan. The group begins to tour more widely with performances at the Fringe Festival in Philadelphia, the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, and debuts Spontaneous Combustion II to packed crowds at UrbanGlass. Installations at the Islip Art Museum on Long Island, New York, and at nonprofit gallery space Grand Arts in Kansas City mark an increase in exhibitions.
1998
The B Team is based in New York. Spontaneous Combustion II wins a New York Dance and Performance Awards, better-known as a Bessie Award, for the category of Performance Installation and New Media. The B Team is invited to perform in Japan and delivers a lecture in Tokyo. At the peak of their success, the group decides to disband to pursue other interests.
Burning Down the House
by Andrew Page
Dada in the early 20th century and Fluxus in the 1960s and 70s challenged the existing order in galleries and museums with their anti-art movements, which stressed noncommercial performances or "happenings" as alternatives to elitist gallery exhibitions. The effort to free art from being a pursuit only for the wealthy shocked but ultimately re-energized modern art and helped to liberalize the materials and subject matter deemed appropriate.
by Andrew Page
Something far smaller but similarly subversive happened in the history of Studio Glass when a small band of art students decided to challenge the status quo of the glass world in the mid-1990s. It all started at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, where students working with glass--and inspired by punk rock and the machine performance art of Survival Research Laboratories--took to the road to see what the next generation of glass artists was cooking up on college campuses. The membership of this group would vary in the early years, but eventually they became a performance-art troupe, settled on five core members, and christened themselves the B Team to set themselves apart from the so-called "A team" that seemed to have a lock on the gallery world.
Irreverent but highly rigorous in their practice, the B Team would help move glass into the contemporary art frame, attracting attention from major New York art museums and winning prestigious awards for their sophisticated choreography in the hot shop. A decade after they disbanded in 1998 to focus on running a furniture gallery and their individual art careers, the B Team has become relevant to a new generation of performance artists working with glass that has recently emerged to challenge the existing gallery system and continue the exploration of hot-shop performances.
GLASS is pleased to present the remarkable story of the B Team in the words of its founder, Zesty Meyers, and key members Jeff Zimmerman and Evan Snyderman.
Andrew Page: Let's start at the very beginning. Why was the B Team formed and when did it start?
Zesty Meyers: It started very simply, as a way to take stock of what was happening in the world of glass in 1991 and to give something back. As a student at Mass Art, I was looking at all those exhibition catalogs from the 1970s and 80s of the big shows of Chihuly, Dan Dailey, Howard Ben Tre, the artists you could say were the "A team." While we were familiar with the past successes, I wanted to go on the road and see what was happening at that moment in time. So we got permission from our teachers to visit ten schools with glass programs around the country. The membership changed every year in the beginning; it was never a constant. We eventually named ourselves the B Team because it felt like the "A team" had left no room in the gallery system for new people to come up. We wanted to help break down some of those barriers.
Page: So what were the performances at the schools like?
Jeff Zimmerman: A lot of the focus was getting the students to participate, for them to understand that we weren't the only ones performing--they should also be performing. We were trying to change the typical glass educational experience where someone shows up to do a demo while everyone sits and watches. One piece we'd start with a lot was called Fear Jar. We'd ask everyone to write down a fear they had on a piece of paper, then we'd blow a nice jar with a tricky lid, throw all the fears into this hot jar, seal it, and they'd burn. The idea was that the fears would be gone.
Meyers: One of the sadder things we would notice on tour was that students often had a follow-the-herd mentality, as if school can teach you how to get a job, or show you all you need to do to be successful as long as you just follow the rules. We wanted to motivate people, turn them into do-ers, and that is why we started to employ Dada games like Exquisite Corpse. A lot of these kids had never been challenged in these ways.
Page: Did you think of yourselves as anti-establishment?
Zimmerman: We were inspired not so much by being anti-establishment but by some of the things going on in art at the time, such as the performances of Survival Research Laboratories. We considered ourselves part of the small group within the glass educational world who had larger ambitions--we wanted to make sculpture and performance that would change things.
Meyers: We started to ask ourselves and our audiences, are we going to do it any better than it's already been done? We realized that these students really didn't know how to interact, and we were trying to show them that you could choose to become a rock star and show that by example. We would say that we're only here for two or three days, so let's try to do something none of us has ever done. We asked for their help to create something more than what we could do on our own. We wanted to get that buzz going and leave them with the inspiration to continue in that vein after we left.
Page: What did you see going on in art schools in the early 90s? What was the focus of most of the students you visited?
Zimmerman: A lot of kids were making Venetian goblets; they basically wanted to make things with aesthetics like grandma would like. We were like punk glass artists.
Evan Snyderman: You have to realize that we were always obsessed with technique, and though all of us had skills as glassblowers, we shared a similar desire to make individual sculpture. We worked independently, often in mixed media; it was just a meeting of the minds. We used technique as a means to an end.
Meyers: Our performances asked the question: Why shouldn't the 5,000-year-old history of glass be taken somewhere else? We were obsessed with technique, but we wanted to push it further and find out what we could do with it.
Page: How did your demos or performances relate to the work being done in glass at the time, or to what was being taught by your instructors at art school?
Snyderman: Most glass sculpture really seemed over-the-top to us at that time, almost always exploiting the beauty of the finished object. We wanted to explore the beauty of the raw material, and we thought it was most impressive when you're making the glass at the furnace. Once it's done, it almost seemed dead in comparison.
Meyers: We started keeping a lot of notebooks with artistic manifestos. I still have these notebooks, and if you look through them, you'll see we wrote about things like "experimentation ... pushing limits ... appropriation of objects ... economics." We were sure we were never going to be accepted into the gallery system, but we did start to have exhibitions, including one at the Robert Lehman Gallery at UrbanGlass.
Zimmerman: Our UrbanGlass installation, which we called Five Senses, was in some ways a performance because it was so interactive with the public, with each piece relating to one of the human senses. But we were always conceptually based. At the end of a demo, you still have a vase. We always started with an intention to accomplish more than that.
Page: Were you always doing installations as well as performance, or is that something that came later?
Zimmerman: There were really two stages to the group. The first was a touring group of students who were visiting artists to glass programs at universities around the U.S. Then there was a second stage, after graduating from art school, when we became a New York-based performance-art group.
Snyderman: In 1995, we started doing performances at UrbanGlass. We had moved there and were teaching there, and we found the space so incredible, we had an immediate desire to find a way to use it as a theater.
Meyers: We thought of ourselves in the beginning as educating renegades. Our approach was not politically correct; we wanted to wake students up, and we were very inspired by our surroundings. By the time we moved to New York, we had become a nonprofit and were a lot more established. We applied for and got grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, and lots of individual donors, many of whom were art collectors who liked our performances.
Page: How was the B Team organized? Was there a leader or a director?
Meyers: There wasn't a hierarchy. We used to say there's no "I" in team.
Zimmerman: There were no divisions of labor and ideas. We'd try to do anything we came up with and often bit off more than we could chew. But it was never, "You do this, you do that." We agreed on the goal and somehow found the way to get it done. We would also sell the video and T-shirts when we did our demos, and later, as the B Team, the videos became even more highly produced. I've heard that these videos are still watched at many of the universities we visited.
Page: What were some of the highlights of the B Team's performances in the mid-90s?
Snyderman: We were invited down to the Fringe Festival, a theater festival in Philadelphia. It was incredibly hot weather, and we spent one week dreaming up the various scenarios that became the Tricks video and later would figure into the Spontaneous Combustion performances.
Meyers: The biggest thing we did was Spontaneous Combustion 1 and 2, both of which we performed at UrbanGlass and the New Museum of Art in Manhattan. The craft world did not come to these performances, but the art world was there. It was curators from the Museum of Modern Art, Kiki Smith, Dan Cameron. The event was picked up by Simon Says, a super underground art newspaper of what was happening in New York, and that helped to bring some of the biggest names in contemporary art. So many major figures in the art world were clamoring to get in to our last performance that we started an hour late. We won a Bessie Dance Award for Spontaneous Combustion 2.
Page: What was that performance like? It seems like the high-water mark for the B Team.
Snyderman: The first part was this methodical buildup. We had these massive scrims set up. They were backlit so that we were these giant shadow figures making glass mannequin heads which we dropped into this fish tank in front of the audience where they would bubble and explode. The audience didn't know it, but we had a team of 40 people working behind the scenes so we could produce so many heads, one after the other.
Zimmerman: We had mounted 20 television sets along the walls to show it from different angles. We had a live DJ who was responding to the action with the timing of the music. He slowly brought the level of the music to a crescendo, ambient music. We created this visual and musical expression of the factory mentality, making the same thing in pink and blue and yellow colors.
Snyderman: Then, as it builds, this repetitive factory kind of work, it starts to rain light bulbs. The scrim drops, and the rain of light bulbs intensifies--they were being dropped from the upper deck above the furnaces. With the opening of the scrim, the performance completely breaks free of the monotonous opening, and there is this level of insanity, like a three-ring circus. One of us comes out with a hot glass target, and we start shooting gobs of hot glass at it. Kelly Lamb comes out with rubber shoes and dances on molten glass and swings out over the audience with flaming feet. Then we had the steel umbrella where we poured molten glass down, and it cooled as it fell.
Myers: Everything built to this intense level, and the audience didn't realize at first that it was over. At the peak of it, we just slipped away. People didn't want it to be over; they wanted more. They came up and started breaking pieces of glass off where it had cooled after being poured over the umbrella to take home with them.
Snyderman: There were only three performances at UrbanGlass. It took so much effort, months and months of effort. There were 40 people behind the scenes that we needed to make it happen, and it cost tens of thousands of dollars for a 20- or 30-minute performance.
Page: The B Team broke up shortly after that performance. Why?
Meyers: We knew we had done something that no one had ever seen. We knew we had ripped something apart. The goal wasn't to be the Sex Pistols. We wanted to do something great with the material. But it became way too much. After Spontaneous Combustion's huge turnout, we were raising real money. Everyone wanted to do something with us. One of the things I didn't want in my own personal life was money. I wanted to bridge the gaps between craft and fine art, performance and fine art. Once it succeeded, I didn't want it to become something known and famous. I was done. I wanted to stop. I was fine with it going on without me, but my focus became a gallery we had already started by selling furniture at a flea market. We decided to open a gallery space in Williamsburg and later we moved to Tribeca, where R 20th Century is today.
Page: Did the B Team help you in your decision to start the gallery?
Meyers: The B Team helped me to have the guts; it taught me how to face fear, how to take that first step. It's still scary.
Page: What advice do you have for the new crop of artists working in glass performance?
Meyers: Following the herd is the sure way to mediocrity. You can't teach someone that; it's an individual thing. But I would ask this question: If this material of glass can do anything, why aren't people experimenting a lot more with it? They're already pushing glass to new limits in industry; why isn't it being used in the arts to similarly push the boundaries of what it can do? This is the question we asked ourselves every day.
Not yet named the "B Team," Mass Art student Zesty Meyers with fellow students Mike Weldon, Ian Lewis, and James Mongrain set out on "The Massachusetts College of Art Student Glass Tour" with stops at ten university glass programs, including the University of Illinois at Champain-Urbana, and Kent State, Ohio.
Meyers, with new members Chuck Vinetta, Thor Bueno, and Kait Rhodes (RISD) continues to visit college campuses, changing the group's name to the B team in the summer.
The B Team makes two tours of the Midwest. Meyers and Bueno stay on but Deborah Czeresko and Clay Logan replace Vinetta and Rhodes.
After graduating from MassArt, Meyers moves the B Team to Boston. Jeff Zimmerman joins the group, and Sarah Chase replaces Czeresko. Group performs at venues in Kentucky and Montreal, and makes first appearance at UrbanGlass in Brooklyn, New York.
Meyers relocates the B Team to New York City, Clay Logan rejoins the group which performs at the Detroit Institute of Art. The B Team exhibition "Five Senses" opens at the Robert Lehman Gallery at UrbanGlass. The group is awarded a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award.
Evan Snyderman joins the B Team when Zimmerman moves to France for a year, Kelly Lamb replaces Sarah Chase. The group performs Spontaneous Combustion I, a multi-media performance at UrbanGlass.
Zimmerman returns to the B Team replacing Clay Logan. The group begins to tour more widely with performances at the Fringe Festival in Philadelphia, the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, and debuts Spontaneous Combustion II to packed crowds at UrbanGlass. Installations at the Islip Art Museum on Long Island, New York, and at nonprofit gallery space Grand Arts in Kansas City mark an increase in exhibitions.
The B Team is based in New York. Spontaneous Combustion II wins a New York Dance and Performance Awards, better-known as a Bessie Award, for the category of Performance Installation and New Media. The B Team is invited to perform in Japan and delivers a lecture in Tokyo. At the peak of their success, the group decides to disband to pursue other interests.