Ceramics Today
Home | Articles | CT Update | Gallery | Contact | Search
 
Links A-Z
Articles


Ceramics and the Haptic Lapse I
by Damon Moon

I recollect a recent conversation with someone who was in charge of putting together an elective program in ceramics. This once great department (which shall remain nameless) was still full of sufficient equipment and
materials to run a mid sized factory, but it could no longer attract enough students or faculty support to offer a full time course of study. Where once students had competed to gain entrance to a full fee paying four-year diploma,
the three-year subsidized degree had been cancelled due to lack of interest. Art school life had become a series of electives, the educational equivalent of channel surfing. The bothersome discipline of clay and wheel had long ago lost ground to the fidgets of undergraduate conceit, and no amount of spin could disguise the fact that the situation was terminal. With multi-skilling and the departure of the last of the tenured staff it was only a matter of time.

In response to my highly undiplomatic suggestion that many ceramics departments had brought this situation upon themselves, I was rather archly informed that they still offered a unit called 'The Vessel', by which I was to assume that they had the situation well in hand.

My thoughts turned to a formidable artist and educator I had the privilege of knowing, who was once heard to mutter that it would be better if, and I quote, '.all the ceramists would just take their vessels and sail away', or words to that effect.

There is probably nothing intrinsically wrong with an environment where students wander in, fiddle with a lump of clay, paint it blue, stick a feather in the side and call it art. It happens in sculpture departments all the time. It does no permanent harm, or good, which is not to say that it is a wholly benign activity. The damage occurs when such things are confused with several thousand years of a enerable, and utterly different tradition, that of pottery.

How, you may ask, is this possible? Surely a lumpy feathered blue thing cannot be mistaken for a pot?

The problem is one of nomenclature.

Pottery is not sculpture, and it is only nominally ceramics.

Pottery refers to types of objects and materials, the place where these materials are manipulated and the objects are made, and the general disciplines associated with making them. People who work in this field are called potters.

Sculpture is a different activity entirely, well understood, albeit periodically contested, within a western paradigm of art history. It is also a widely used term describing certain types of non-functional objects. What a sculpture is made of is entirely irrelevant, insofar as it does not effect the categorization of the object as sculpture. Sculptures are made from marble and ice, telephones and twigs, and the musings of seagulls in the rain, as long as they have a presence in German biennales. People who make sculptures are called sculptors, when they are not being called installation artists, thus explaining why their work only 'occupied the space' for a week.

Ceramics are a group of materials with defined chemical and physical properties. Ceramics are also objects made from these materials. A brick and a Ming vase, and our lumpy feathered blue thing, are examples of these objects. Ceramists, or ceramicists, base their work on these material choices, and if they have been to art school they 'define their practice' as making objects primarily or exclusively out of ceramic materials, otherwise known as clay. Ceramics is also a hobby, where overglaze decoration is applied to a bewildering variety of slip-molded forms, designed to be fired at low temperatures. Sometimes these same techniques are utilized by 'ceramists', potters and sculptors, where the desire for irony or bright colors can be given full reign. A ceramist may make either pots or sculptures, but they generally like to call these objects 'ceramics'. I'm not sure why.

Lately, we have seen the arrival of a new group of practitioners, the 'designer-makers'.

'Hi, my name is Troy, and I'm a designer-maker with a ceramics based practice. I am currently developing a body of work, which explores the gender politics of domestic objects, and locates the kitchen as a site of abjection.'

Troy is a completely understandable product of the average ceramics department, the logical outcome of a system which privileges Habermas over Hamada. For the ceramics and painting student alike, the teaching of art
history, when it struggles back to a time before Andy, may dwell on 16th century Italy, but it won't be Majolica that is celebrated. This is because there is a hierarchy of art, an ever repeated narrative reified behind the massive
stone columns, or more lately titanium scales, which fence off the paddocks where curators chew the cud of futures past. The temple trains its acolytes, and, unlikely as it seems, some of them begin life at places like art school.
Fine art is money and power, the designer gym where Western culture flexes and preens, and the decorative arts are something you pass on the way to a wonderful new eatery. In this world pottery is way out of its league.

Continue


© Ceramics Today