New Directions in Ceramics: From Spectacle to Trace

Frontispiece. Linda Sormin, Rift (2009), detail, see Figure 74. IMAGE COURTESY OF MIDDLESBROUGH INSTITUTE OF MODERN ART (mima).

Contents

Acknowledgements

INTRODUCTION: Ceramics in critical context

1PERFORMANCE

2INSTALLATION

3RAW CLAY

4FIGURATION

Epilogue

Bibliography

Conor Wilson, Cranbrook Bag 3 + Wood Mallet (2013), see Figure 63. PHOTO: CONOR WILSON.

Phoebe Cummings, view of V&A residency studio (2010), see Figure 2. PHOTO: SYLVAIN DELEU.

INTRODUCTION

Ceramics in critical context

Discourse about a work is not a mere accompaniment, intended to assist its perception and appreciation, but a stage in the production of the work, its meaning and value.

Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production

The discourses of art and craft are becoming entangled and nowhere is this more evident than in contemporary ceramics practice. This book responds to the zeitgeist: the central focus is a range of strikingly exploratory works – the ‘new directions’ of the title – whose uninhibited disrespect for the categorization of cultural forms challenges the status quo. Their thought-provoking nature prompts searching questions about the discipline of ceramics and calls for some preliminary consideration of the intellectual environment within which they have emerged. This is necessarily a partial view, intended to convey a flavour of current debates at a time when much about the character of ceramics practice is in a state of flux.

In thinking and writing about ceramics today, one must immediately acknowledge the transformations that are taking place in the wider craft world. In recent years craft has been reimagined: at conferences, in texts, in groundbreaking exhibitions and not least in the studio. Craft has been construed as ‘a short word that has been stretched ... almost to breaking point’,¹ and as ‘a multiple and mobile concept that finds its way into all sorts of disciplines and positions’.² Ask ‘What does craft stand for?’ and you are likely to receive a variety of answers whose diversity points to seismic shifts in thinking. But ask ‘What does ceramics stand for?’ and you may well be met with hesitancy: ‘It depends on ...’ Ceramics commonly refers to pottery, studio pottery, studio ceramics, ceramic design and – perhaps contrarily, since it is so often seen as essentially a craft discipline – ceramic art. The journal Interpreting Ceramics takes a broader view; eschewing the loaded terms, ‘art’, ‘craft’ and ‘design’, it declares its interest in:

… all those categories of human activity which are indicated by the term ‘ceramics’ ... any practice or mode of inquiry which brings a social and cultural awareness to bear on the manufacture and consumption of objects made from ceramic materials ... the fields of studio, industrial, architectural, traditional, sculptural and figurative ceramics as well as the relevant branches of anthropology, archaeology, material culture studies, museum studies, archiving etc.³

The statement was written in 2000; today we might want to add ‘post-studio’ and ‘post-industrial’ to the list. Considered as an overarching discipline, ceramics is elusive; it can be understood in a variety of ways that are often interlinked and can sometimes seem contradictory. This is as true in the studio as it is in the library. Wander around a ceramics studio in a British university and you will encounter a miscellaneous assortment of artefacts. Eavesdrop on their makers and you will hear conversations about a similarly miscellaneous range of techniques, processes and materials. Scan through the makers’ personal statements and you will find them discussing their work against a medley of ideas and contexts. They are likely to be postgraduate students, as very many of the ceramics undergraduate degree programmes in Britain have closed. A strong sense of loyalty to their discipline pervades the ceramics community and considerable dismay has accompanied this development.

Paradoxically, just as ceramics wanes at undergraduate level or, as in many British universities, fragments to become a subset of programmes such as 3D design, applied arts, or contemporary craft, it is flourishing at postgraduate level and beyond. Recent years have seen the appointment of research fellows in ceramics, and a practice-led approach has been established as a credible route for doctoral research. This has had significant consequences and has been an enabling factor in the emergence of the new directions at the heart of this book. Postgraduate programmes generally include critical and theoretical elements that very often supply the backdrop (if not the instigation) for ceramics work that ‘pushes the envelope’. What is more, as Matthew Partington comments, ‘Many established, avant-garde ceramicists in the UK have been able to make the work they do because they had a teaching job to ensure a regular income ... These artists could make challenging, thought-provoking and often expensive work without the absolute need to sell’.⁴

Figure 1. Keith Harrison, Brother (2009). Brother was made for ‘Possibilities & Losses: Transitions in Clay’ (2009) at the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, England. Keith Harrison explains: ‘A record deck played northern soul while a life-size replica of Karl Marx’s head was fired at one end of the gallery. At the other end of the space, a facsimile of Michael Faraday’s Royal Institute lecture table became an impromptu mobile disco, which also provided a hub for powering the work. From this I started to experiment with using a turntable like a potter’s wheel and also to explore the potential for ceramics to carry sound.’ (Keith Harrison in conversation with David Trigg, 2011, http://blog.jerwoodvisualarts.org/?p=690). Marx’s head was represented by a tangled network of wires that had been coated with pink slip. When a current was run through them, they turned a suitably red colour – a metaphor for the rise of Marxism. Keith Harrison is Professor of Ceramics at Bath Spa University. PHOTO: DAN PRINCE.

Debates about the nature of both craft and ceramics are by no means confined to the UK. There have been parallel developments in the USA where the National Council for Education in the Ceramic Arts (NCECA) and the College Art Association (CAA) have both hosted international conferences to address the shifting condition of ceramics and consider how best to accommodate change, especially in terms of critical response. In 2010 the annual NCECA symposium ‘CRITICAL Santa Fe: Developing Criticism in Ceramics’ elicited vigorous debate. Three years earlier the 2007 CAA annual conference included a panel titled ‘Ceramics: Five Emerging Artists Survey the Discipline’. Glaze recipes, kiln temperatures and the like were conspicuous by their absence. The five practitioner papers dealt with topics such as ‘rupture, dissonance and multiplicity’; they offered ‘a palpable sense of the energy in the field at present and gave insights into future directions in ceramic art’.⁵ However, panellist Michael Jones McKean expressed a certain ambivalence – not uncommon amongst practitioners – when he identified an unevenness in the relation between practice and critical context: ‘Ceramic practice at its borders ... is usually way ahead or way outside of the critical discourse and the historical narratives we develop that try to contain and package our practices’.⁶

In Europe ceramics discourse is experiencing a similar renaissance, especially in the Scandinavian countries. Centres such as the International Ceramic Research Centre at Guldagergård in Denmark and the European Ceramic Work Centre at Hertogenbosch in the Netherlands host international practitioner residencies that foster dialogue and knowledge exchange. Much relevant research in critical context has coalesced around key individuals, most notably Jorunn Veiteberg, a professor at Bergen National Academy of the Arts, whose writing and curating have been influential. Veiteberg sees craft as ‘a field in transition’:

It has been common to describe craft’s position as a borderline area between fine art and design. I have preferred to call this area an intervening space or, to be more precise, the space between function and non-function, tradition and breaking with tradition, craftsmanship-based art and idea-based art.⁷

In his 2010 address to the International Academy of Ceramics in Paris, Professor Jim Romberg, who has been an advocate for ceramics criticism and was project director for CRITICAL Santa Fe, observed that ‘The practice of ceramics now encompasses expressions unimaginable only a few years ago’.⁸ Such ‘unimaginable expressions’ operate within a conceptual framework; they include performance events, site-specific installation, and time-based (or ‘durational’) work. The notion of an ‘expanded field’ has been adopted in order to comprehend and respond to the current diversity of ceramics modes. It is a useful analogy that enables activities to be mapped within (or onto) a metaphorical territory. Researchers routinely position themselves somewhere in the expanded field: betwixt and between concepts and practices, recent or historical. We can think of arenas or stages (or sites, or events) where particular attitudes are enacted and new possibilities are explored. I might suggest that the ceramists whose work is discussed in this book are ‘clearing new ground’; perhaps creating something akin to Veiteberg’s ‘intervening space’.

What is it that propels an artefact into one cultural arena or another? The way it is framed for consideration – in exhibition, yes, but especially via text – looms large:

The work is made not twice, but a hundred times by all those who are interested in it, who find a material or symbolic profit in reading it, classifying it, deciphering it, commenting on it, combating it, knowing it, possessing it.⁹

How we articulate our response in writing, in speech, in studio, in curating, is important and often involves considerable institutional and individual investment. Exploratory work is intellectually seductive, provokes new understandings and triggers fresh critical strategies. But the question of critical discourse remains an issue. The application of critical theory is seen to bestow enhanced significance on its objects of enquiry, for experience indicates that – as in other cultural arenas – ultimately ideas are rewarded over hand (craft) skills.¹⁰ With its pervasive flavour of ‘how-to’, ceramics writing has typically been interested in process and material: how something was made has taken precedence over how it makes meaning. Indeed, many texts continue to fetishize method and bypass the significance of ceramics in terms of ideas. Romberg’s ‘unimaginable expressions’ are my ‘new directions’ and they may require framing in relation to – for example – aspects of art theory or philosophy, downplaying instructive accounts of the material and its handling. On this count, Glen R. Brown is optimistic:

A solid groundwork is being laid for an academic discipline capable of treating contemporary ceramics in intellectually sound and sophisticated terms. As some of this groundwork draws upon aspects of critical theory, there is no wonder that some ceramicists have begun to view criticism as the central requisite of positive change in the field.¹¹

Even so, when Romberg convened ‘The Critical Article’ for the 2012 assembly of the International Ceramics Academy he encountered ‘a rather parochial attitude’; journal editors on the panel expressed concern about ‘readership response (so far generally negative for true critical articles)’.¹² Within the wider ceramics community, what we might think of as ‘the critical turn’ has been considered objectionable by some. Their anxiety can in part be ascribed to a sense of uneven development in the field, which appears to prioritize less conventional work and suggests that traditionally crafted ceramics are likely to be undervalued. When it comes to the quality of attention that is devoted to them, there may be truth in this. It is possible moreover, that the emergence of a body of theoretically informed writing on the crafts is capable of influencing future production. My personal experience as a lecturer in critical studies indicates that this may well be