Beth Lipman’s dazzling glass

Beth Lipman’s virtuoso exuberance in glass overwhelms the eye in the first glance at Laid Table (Still Life with Metal Pitcher).

A carnival of translucent and transparent representations of urns, pitchers, floral arrangements, fruit baskets, puddles of spilled liquid, wine glasses and even napkins crowd onto and overhang a very large, solid table in dark, heavy wood. Lipman has blown or molded every bit of it and staged it as a shining riot.

This exuberant work celebrates virtuosity with the medium and the medium’s dazzling ways with light. The surface of the piece glows with antic joy.

But the silver cloud has a dark lining. The flowers wilt. An exquisite arrangement of fruit has fallen over. Some of the vessels and glasses are cracked or even smashed. Shards abound on the table; one has even fallen to the floor.

Lipman has not set up a delectable feast after all. Still Life is the detritus of a party, the wasted food, dirty dishes and broken wine glasses hastily bused and haphazardly placed.

This is a Dutch still life with an ironic Zen twist. Where those 17th and 18th-century painters celebrated new middle-class abundance with their intense scrutiny of fish and fruit and flowers, Lipman points out the hollowness of overabundance.

The irony lies not only in the decay she portrays in the wilting flowers, discarded food and broken tableware. The piece illustrates the old Buddhist idea of the Great Emptiness, the idea that the outward forms of things are temporary illusions. We can see right through Lipman’s beautifully wrought things, to the emptiness within.

Laid Table, in addition to everything else it is, is a wonderful Zen joke in which an apple is not an apple and a flower is not a flower. But is a wine glass still a wine glass?