Visual Culture and Ceramics

Dateline: 09/21/98

oday it is difficult to talk about the ceramic object without talking about images. Our experience of ceramics relies heavily on the images we see in magazines and other media, e.g. the Internet. By doing this, we form a learned opinion about the works we have seen, although in most cases we haven't seen them in the flesh. This has become quite normal to us in an age of mass media and mass information distribution, based on economic principles. Thus western societies have become societies that are pervaded by the image.

The dissemination of the image was rapidly increased in the 15th C with the invention of the Gutenberg Press and further in the 19th C with the invention of high-speed printing processes and then photography. The dominance of the image was further increased in the 20th C with the advent of motion pictures and finally television. Finally television? No, not quite, for we now also have an ever increasing computer culture. The computer takes photography one step further. Through the use of the digital camera and photo-realistic inkjet printing, we can bypass the photo lab altogether.

What has this got to do with ceramics? A lot. We in the 20th C live in a gallery and museum culture, where we place the ceramic object into a 'white cube' for the public to see. An exhibition of contemporary ceramics will be seen by hundreds, possibly thousands of people. The show is then dismantled, perhaps to be toured, perhaps never to be seen in that form again. At least not in the flesh. This is where the image steps in and takes over in the form of the catalogue or magazine or web site. The catalogue becomes in the words of Susan Sontag 'the reality of the event'. She says that 'ultimately, having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it, and participating in a public event comes more and more to to be equivalent to looking at it in a photographic form'. Of course in most cases we do not even get to see an exhibition at all, but know of it through a catalogue. We may 'know' what a 17th C Thomas Toft platter looks like, but how many of us have actually seen one? This surrogate experience is now even extended into space: we are familiar with images of the moon and mars - places we are not likely to go...

The increasing importance of the image may not spell the death knell for the ceramic object, but it pays to think about how it influences the way learn about and experience the world around us.