One thing I love is Mazanti’s chutzpah in re-defining the term “super-object.” Garth Clark proposed it in the 1980s to describe highly refined, fetish-finish objects mostly coming out of California in the 1970s. It never really took off. Mazanti appropriates the term, redefining it as “an object that exists parallel to the design commodity, at the same time as it contains (super-) layers of meaning that  relate to visual art.” (62) Another way to put it is that super-objects grow out of a design language in their relation to function but they are explicitly about something, “content is central.” (62)

Manzani then argues that super-objects embody the semi-autonomous state that folks like Hal Foster (whom she cites) say art should have.  Semi-autonomous here means that art should offer a bridge to life, rather than hang isolated on a white wall for contemplation. Manzani connects this effort to bring together art and life to Arts and Crafts (obviously) and to interwar avant garde movements like Dada. This latter connection is excellent and she argues convincingly and revealingly how craft advances the avant garde through the “operational friction” that comes out of being neither a thing nor an artwork.

The only problem with this is her case study, Anna Tophoj’s Cultured Primitiveness (comes up in a googlebooks search of the book). Simply put, this piece is a group of ceramic objects, referencing function, in a museum case in Stockholm. Mazanti articulately takes apart how and why the piece operates semi-autonomously. I kept wondering, though: How is this more effective than actual pottery?

Real pots have the same semi-autonomous capacity to create operational friction, perhaps from the other end of the spectrum. They also take less thinking to get there, which to me makes them more effective. I would love to read Mazanti writing about utilitarian craft. I have not seen the Tophoj piece/pieces in person so I can’t really say, but they seem to me, if anything, to bridge the idea of art (museum-bound autonomous objects) and the idea of life which to me is just less interesting than the bridging to actual life, and then sort of disappearing as an expereince.

That said, I hope I get to meet Mazanti at some point. She definitely has her thinking cap on.

I just came across this fabulous picture on the Northern Clay Center website, and could not resist re-posting it here. Patty Warashina and Warren Mackenzie (and a fellow named Don, apparently) are together for what seems to be a Regis Master Lecture event. This is sort of a universes collide image for me, as I have always thought about Patty and Warren with different parts of my brain.

I love that this reminds me of how intimate the ceramics world actually is. Work from all over the spectrum gets quashed together all the time in this wonderfully productive way. And I love that Ron Meyers’ stand in between them.

What do you think Patty and Warren would say to each other about Ron’s pots? Should we invent a dialogue?

PW:

WM:

PW:

WM:

Maybe we need potter-turned-animator Tim Foss to get things rolling…

Honestly, I was put off by the title and avoided picking it up until now. Yes, clearly craft exists in relation to art and design and various other fields of cultural practice, but I am a little leery of always relating it to contemporary art. Enough already. The project seems more nuanced now that I’ve started reading, though, so we’ll see.

M. Anna Fariello’s essay “Making and Naming” has some really great aspects. She gives a really clear condensed history of studio craft, connecting it to Ruskin, education reform in the US, GI Bill, etc. Great for anyone wanting a ten page overview.

She also separates  function from utility, arguing that utility is the basic act of performing a task whereas function is “an abstract attitude of material expression” (36). So, for example, the social function of containing, separating out and saving something special, is distinct and as significant as the actual act of doing it. Use is physical; function is metaphysical.

I can accept this I guess, but this definition of function removes the immediacy of the object. Fariello celebrates craft for its interactivity, vs the passiveness of visual perception of ‘art’, but her definition of function locates the meaning of craft in its metaphorical value, its ability to represent function rather than actually be utilitarian. To me this reduces the intensity of craft, making it more like art. I think craft is powerful when function (metaphysical) arrives through utility (physical) not just through the idea of utility. The metaphysical meaning of the cup is revealed through drinking from or washing or living with the cup, not through having an image of a cup on a tile. Actual engagement trumps the idea of engagement. How is an installation of ceramic wallpaper more interactive than a mug?

Fariello defines craft as an approach rather than a specific medium or technique. This is a lot like Glenn Adamson’s definition in Thinkin’ Thru Craft, which I also kind of accept and wonder about at the same time. This is an effective definition to theorize why installations with ceramics or weaving get called craft, but maybe less effective when thinking about utilitarian objects.

Fariello also argues for a lexicon for craft that is distinct from art history, but she doesn’t actually say what this would be, or really put it into play, other than listing “hand-marked, holistic, social, functional, tactile, material and spiritual” (40). I don’t see how these are distinct from art history, which can use all of those terms.

The essay ends before Fariello really gets going on any of this, so I’ll have to start reading Objects and Meaning, her own book from 2005.

In skimming the remembrances I was struck by SImon Levin’s sentiment to Malcolm: “You owned shino, you made it yours for your time.” I love the idea that none of us owns anything, like shino. We’re stewards of the things we take up, we hold them for a while, and then they continue or not.

This is rather different from the NYTimes article about Damien Hirst and his dot paintings today.  People will own the paintings, maybe even steward them along, but there is little continuity outside the persona of the artist. Except the dot, of course. Is Hirst stewarding the dot through this point (ha, ha) in history? That seems like a stretch. Maybe he’s stewarding the role of ‘famous artist/courtier’ for this era. Maybe the notion of genius (famous) individual just isn’t about stewardship. Maybe stewardship is something we just create.

Getting back to Malcolm: my Malcolm story takes place when I ran into him my first year at the Baltimore craft show in 1998 (I think). We had met at Greenwich House Pottery (yay, Made in Clay this weekend) in maybe 1994 when he was a visiting artist one winter. We had a lovely conversation and then I saw him again at NCECA in Minneapolis a little later on. Cut to Baltimore, and he’s throwing a fit that I do not list him as one of my teachers on my fledgling resume.

Not that I had ever been his student. I assumed he was mistaken and I was too shy to correct him about it. Only later it occurred to me that he understood the experience of talking to me, being generous and frank with me, and sharing his knowledge and history as teaching. Which of course it was, but so not in the structured way I had understood education, even in craft. Teaching and being were not separated or formalized in his world view (it seems to me), and pottery as a field granted Malcolm the space to be a teacher in this way that many professions do not.

He expanded my understanding of learning, and of pots. Thank you!!

The spirit of craft rocks on if Rick Turner is any indication.

He made this guitar (image from MAD blog) that appears on the show’s blog in a post about the excitement of objects coming in.  Rick posted to comment that after he picked it up from his son’s house to bring to the museum, he played it a bit and noticed he had forgotten to include side position dots – so now he’s adding them! 42 years after he originally made it!

Isn’t that great!?!  Now the piece dates 1969-2011.  In craft, there is always work to be done. Objects we live with can be thought through and changed. This is the dynamic interweaving of objects into our lives.  It’s also making as offering provisional solutions. Do painters touch up their work before dropping it off at the museum? Is craft process more than genius? This kind of paying attention on Rick’s part is the genius of craft: it contains the space for us to think in this – a quintesstially human – way.

What struck me the most was the sense of slow: I forgot how slow pottery is. Clay itself has this glacial, geologic sense of time. The wheel turns slowly, moving the clay around is just a slow process. Relative to what? Life? Modern life?  it certainly feels slower than living in the city, and slower than reading.  This at-oddsness forces a change of perspective, is insistent.

I lost words right away again when I started throwing. I have taught and demonstrated loads over the years and talking while throwing is something I could do without particular effort. Tonight I just lost my sense of speech while I was making, stopped mid-sentence. Part of this is the recent unfamiliarity of making for me, but another part is the profoundly non-verbal attention potting can demand.

I’m teaching the class at Greenwich House Pottery, which is where I took the classes that got me into this mess in the fist place.  It is a delight to be there and like visiting all places of old familiarity it exists in the present and in the past for me all at once: time collapses and I am not sure where I am at a given moment. (Don’t worry if you’re a student, it’s not that bad.)

The other question is who am I as a teach? Who have I been? What kind of teacher was I the last time I taught?  I was reading about John Dewey and Joseph Albers in Glenn Adamson’s book Thinking Through Craft just yesterday.  Adamson writes how they believed in the open ended experience as the value in education: skills not as particular technique but as a set of experiences from which we build our sense of the world.  So do you experience the clay or learn how to make an 8″ cylinder?  This is especially relevant in adult education.  Is the goal to learn how to ask questions or to learn how to make a pitcher?  I honestly don’t know.  Does the experience of making need to be guided by inquiry or is it fine just on its own? Fine meaning enough, meaningful, realized. I genuinely wonder about this; I think it’s the real question.

The Victoria and Albert was a highlight for us dec arts types, of course, and I loved the new ceramics galleries on the 6th floor.  These galleries were recently re-installed for the first time in decades, and as such represent how curators think about museum installation right now.

They, like others, take the more is better approach. Many museums now use ‘open storage’ to make work visible but not isolated and interpreted.  If one Meissen figure is good, hundreds are great!  And they’re right!  Rather than having a few choice pieces out with explanatory text, scads of them fill the shelves.  Same thing at the Met, Brooklyn Museum and loads of others.

This fundamentally changes the way we understand ceramics, or whatever we’re looking at.  As a young potter, I sought out works from all over as best I could in books, museums, magazines, etc.  But even something relatively well-known, like pottery from Iznik was reduced down to the 5 or 10 pictures in books and the handfull of pieces on view at the Met that I could see.  These often would become iconic, and the same historical images would pop up in slide shows and survey histories.  I’m thinking of that one Minoan jug with a white S shaped spiral on it for example.

Now there are literally thousands of Iznik pieces to see, with loads on various museum web sites as well as open storage so you don’t even have to make the trip to London to get the idea.

What does this mean?

Our visual memory banks have all opened up new branches.  In addition to all the trash images we see, historical images now abound at our fingertips.  Younger folks don’t really know the feeling of having only three images available of a given culture’s work.  Same thing when I was a kid: everyone talked about how many more images there were then, and color!  The story was that Peter Voulkos made historically referenced early work from tiny black and white photos, and got it so totally wrong.

Historical knowledge unfold in time.  In the 1910 and 20s, when Leach, Yanagi and Hamada were deciding what made good pottery, Song dynasty pots were new.  They kept popping up when people tried to build railroads.  And they made it to England, not for the first time but in quantities enough for there to be a sense of what the work looked like for the first time.  Leach’s passion for Song pots was not just historical, it was hip.

What will this generation look like, with unprecedented access to the material record?

What does it mean now not to know about Iznik pottery? Is it willful ignorance? Or just the same as it was before?

How does the onslaught of history affect our ability to make when it is so evident, maybe overwhelming?

How do we reconcile these vast stacks of Iznik plates and Meissen figurines with knowledge of the even vaster stacks of plates and figurines that escaped? Or the figurines we have no idea about?

How do accept the use of such a lame word as “vaster”???

So, SOFA.  It was my first time and I was able to go to the preview night.  There was a plenty of thought provoking and sensual work, particularly in ceramics and jewelry, but I am again left wondering what the role is of the utilitarian object in craft.  To be fair, SOFA does not present itself as presenting craft.  They talk about “sculptural objects”, “functional art” (functional is dodgy in this context, really just referential), and “decorative art”.  Is it a good thing that they don’t use the C word? Is it’s absence a source of caché?

I get that galleries cannot afford to show pottery there, and that buyers are generally not interested in low priced work at an elite venue.  But at the same time it still doesn’t make sense to me.  Does this kind of show create our values or reflect them?  What does this train us to see and understand as meaningful explorations in material form?  Or rather, does it train us not to look to pottery or utilitarian objects as sites of complexity?  Do we end up thinking that we have to make installations to make meaning?

The best thing happened the next day.

I had brought these home from the SOFA opening.  They were used to serve sushi, like little boats made of wood shavings – very green, don’t you know.  I pocketed a couple thinking my son would enjoy them, and also because they were kind of cool.

The next day when I looked at them more closely, I saw little pencil marks on the backs to indicate where to cut and glue the little flaps that turn them into boats.  These are handmade objects – craft, maybe even with a dash of mingei.  It struck me as ironic that this hall full of people was there to appreciate bravura performances of craft and design, while another class of craft – the utilitarian, handmade object – was literally thrown away without notice.

Events and institutions guide us in our attention and focus – they suggest to us what is valuable and frame our reference points.  We accept some of these based on our preferences and what we notice in the world, what stands out to us.

I’m not sure what point I am trying to make.  I suppose it strikes me as sad that we as a culture lack a frame to understand objects of use outside of a commercial context.  It is also sad that the continuum of craft has become so attenuated that the threads that connect types of objects feel like they are turning to dust.

But that’s just too gloomy to end on.  So: it actually is great that there was something beautiful and warm and human slipped into the stream of this peculiar category of art-craft.  In spite of being thrown away, these little boats endure as a fundamental expression of humanity – we will make bowls for as long as we need to eat.

Maybe this is why craft cannot be killed.  No matter how arch we become, we still need to meet our basic needs – our bodies bring us through this world and truly, everyone needs a bowl, at least sometimes. Perhaps the organizers of SOFA are really tuned in and thought handmade sushi boats would be an elegant way to speak to this continuum.  In the end, does it matter?  Here we are, with our little boats and – it has to be said – with our children that truly allow us to see in a different way.

Linda Sikora article here

and

the indomitable Yayoi Kusama