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Ceramics and the Haptic Lapse II
by Damon Moon
The ceramics student is left feeling like a second class
citizen, because the rich history, which he should be able to draw
upon for sustenance and inspiration, is not valued within the institution.
Hell, mostly it’s not even taught. Ask many ceramics lecturers who
Ernest Chaplet or Auguste Delaherche are and they won’t have a clue,
but mention a French post structuralist philosopher with absolutely
no interest in pottery at all...
That this is a loss not only to Troy, but also to the painting student,
is not even considered.
In this situation, students find themselves in a real bind. It is
difficult enough for staff to explain why students should be taught
to make stoneware cereal bowls in an art school, and why such a
skill, no matter how successfully mastered, is worth a university
degree. It is even more embarrassing for the student who attempts
to make the bowls, when surrounded by the uncompromising cool of
grainy video’s and multiple piercings.
The tragic fact is that the alternative has often seen students
retreat into making bad sculpture under the tutelage of untrained
staff. It is tragic because the sculpture department hate people
muscling in on their turf, and it is self-defeating because you
don’t need two separate departments telling students how to make
sculpture. When crunch time comes and one has to go, guess who it
will be?
Calling these sculptures ‘ceramics’ fools no one, although there
have been heroic attempts made to justify the field. A common argument
for the continuing existence of ceramics departments is one of material
specialization, and it goes something like this.
Clay is just so difficult to use that lumpy blue feathered things,
when made out of this material, are beyond the ken of sculpture
departments, limited as they are to coping with relatively simple
tasks like large-scale bronze casting. If the department also has
a small percentage of students who make stoneware cereal bowls,
well, all the better, because everybody knows sculptors can’t do
that. It is absolutely no problem at assessment time, to compare
the cereal bowls with the blue lumpy feathered things, because they
both sit on plinths and short of never turning up, no one fails
anyway. It is purely academic.
For the historically minded, it is easy enough to trace the onset
of this schizophrenic condition. It is often characterized as a
battle between the Anglo-Oriental Brownies and West Coast Funkers,
a muddy gang warfare played out on the margins of art, like a couple
of spectators grappling on the sidelines whilst the match goes on
somewhere else. The real situation is much more complex - and interesting
- but the fact is the fundamental split within many ceramics departments
must, to an outsider, look truly bizarre.
So, how is it that students still manage to do it? The subtleties
of celadon are still with us, as each successive generation finds
ways to learn the necessary skills. The bad sculptors are hanging
in there as well, passing their treasured knowledge on to future
generations.
The answer is that there are still some very good ceramics departments
left, as well as limited opportunities for advanced training. But
we should not fool ourselves - even the best departments are under
threat, and as each one closes the opportunities to acquire skills
and knowledge decreases. I am not worried about the bad sculptors
- there are sculpture departments to take care of that side of things.
I am worried about the potters.
There surely is a point of critical mass, beyond which the whole
enterprise loses viability. As it is there are almost no potters
left who earn their living by selling to the general public. They
have become reliant on the gallery system, often paying for the
privilege of exhibiting. Without an art school background it is
unlikely that they would even have the dubious opportunity of exhibiting
in publicly funded spaces - they would not be ‘in the loop’. For
those that do, pottery has increasingly become a process of making
simulacrums of useful objects. It is like a friend of mine who has
a stack of Gwyn Piggott dinner plates, made when she was at the
Jam Factory workshops in Adelaide. Believe me, they don’t see the
inside of a dishwasher any more.
These phenomena may explain the rise of porcelain, with its associations
of rarity and value. We are asked to pay a thousand dollars for
a group of objects arranged on a shelf, so they may be admired whilst
we eat our dinner out of the ten dollar China plate. There is a
haptic lapse, and in a reversal of the common phrase popularized
by Ali G, we ‘talk to the face, ‘cause the hand don’t want to know.’
There is much more to be said, and I know what I have written
is rather short on solutions - although removing ceramics departments
from the university system entirely might not be a bad start - but
at the end I am left with this question.
If the general public has, to a large extent, stopped buying hand-made
pottery, and the courses are closing down one after another, is
it at all possible that the ceramics fraternity - we - are at fault?
Bernard Leach (yes, the bad daddy who bothered DeWaal
so much) was once in America, where he was doing what Bernard did
best, namely sharing his wisdom, or pontificating, depending on
your bias. (Keep in mind that people queued up for this - it wasn’t
like he had Yanagi judo chop them into submission.) Anyway, he had
seen the birth of the West Coast funk movement, when American art
schools, fueled up by the post-war economic miracle were full of
confident, questioning iconoclasts. Leach was said to have looked
around him in despair and asked ‘Where has pottery failed these
people?’
It still is a good question to ask. I have my answer - it’s just
a matter of doing it.
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