Exhibitions

Ceramics, as much as any medium in the arts (possibly with the exception of wood and baskets), has deep roots in function.  Its origins, so it seems, emerge from prehistory, when, it is told, a primitive woman attempted to fill the interstices of a basket with mud to keep seeds from falling through the cracks.  Perhaps--- now we are drifting from surmise to fantasy---she did not care for the mud flavor in her food and threw the darned thing into the fire.  Voila:  she had fired the first pot.

I find this story compellingly believable, if not provable.  It jibes with our love of pots and the hands-on way in which they are made.  It is easy to imagine the fingerprints of this first potter pressed into the mud.  It reflects the virtual ubiquity of clay objects.  And there seems to be something about manipulating clay that matches the very nature of our--- nature:  who we are as a species.  Every nursery-school kid makes a pinch pot without anyone showing her the way to do it, and then makes a wiggly-worm and spirals it around to make a coil pot. The material invites experimentation, which is the adult word for play.   

The other thing to note about the kid in the nursery school is that playing with clay is a permissible way to get dirty.  So perhaps there is an inherent permissiveness in working with clay which encourages creativity. Your experiment, unless you fire it, can be merged back into the clay in the big box with no penalty.  If you do fire it and still don’t like your result, be glad that the material is cheap, and you can crunch it up into temper and not be reminded of it.  

Zooming into the twentieth century, I would like to suggest two artists whose work forms hinges in the progression.  The first is Peter Voulkos and the second is Adrian Saxe.  Voulkos come on the scene after the long and elegant evolution of the Japanese-inspired hegemony of Shoji Hamada and Bernard Leach. The revered traditions of potters in Japan were carried to the West through these artists, and the elegant, utterly satisfying work that they made was the standard for excellence for a long, long time.  It still inspires.  The heritage from the Chinese and Japanese, which are quite distinct from one another, are equal in the demand for mastery in forming the object, elegance in the array of glazes and decoration.  The Chinese, it is generalized, dominate the clay; the Japanese allow the form to emerge from the clay itself.  It was the Japanese tradition that had the greatest impact on potters in America. 

Then along came the 60s and Voulkos.  He brought clay right back to its telluric beginnings.  CLAY, chunks of it, lapped one piece over the other, more like architecture created by people who have only the barest of materials and tools.  These were big, bad pots.  They suggest landscape in their scale and muscularity.  They defy criticism of lack of refinement. An entirely new way to handle clay and think about it had arrived, and the impact of Voulkos is still with us today.  That’s the first hinge. 

Then, somewhat later, came another revolutionary.  Adrian Saxe arrived as an artist with post-modernism--- drawing from history, exploiting a pastiche technique of cobbling many traditions from a grab bag of cultures.  He, too,  made landscapes often enough.  But Adrian’s landscapes are parodies and fabulous, incorporating reflections of Chinese landscape painting all the way to science fiction post-apocalyptic visions.  Talk about dominating the material, Adrian can do ANYTHING with clay, and does.  I love his work--- it is crazy, unpredictable, disobedient, elegant, scholarly, witty.  He can place a tiny sculpture of an antelope on a base that looks as if it had escaped from the hands of a master sculptor and places it on a base that recalls the lavish displays of Chinese export ware at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  While Voulkos opened the door to guerilla and gorilla pottery, Adrian opened the opposite one, to history, mastery of the fine-muscle sort, and an unending unfolding of creative possibilities.

Lucky us.  The potters of today can now build on the deeply rooted traditions of China and Japan, translated for us by Hamada and Leach; they can look south to fabulous images and techniques from pre-Colombian America--- the Maya and the narrative traditions those pots so exquisitely depict; the figurative traditions of Fire Gods and all their colleagues shown to us by the artists of Teotihuacán and Mixtec and later Zapotec artists from the region around Oaxaca.  Go further south to Usulután, and then PERU.   Potters today, like artists in any medium, know the world of their predecessors in the field, a phenomenon in response to the availability of printed documentation and slides articulated by Andre Malraux in Museum Without Walls, and now taken to the umpteenth power by the internet.  You can input any term I might toss into this essay and know quite a bit about it in two minutes.  Geography is no barrier.  Google Chancay.  You can find it faster than I can say it. 

The potters working now can also add their knowledge of technology to the work.  The pastiche of styles and references in Saxe can also be the combination of different materials in one object.  The earthbound quality of a Voulkos pot, filtered through the landscape reference of someone like David Shaner reverberates in the installations of Steve Hilton’s Tea for 48.  The combination of tradition with innovation balances in the zebra-striped pitcher by Thomas Perry’s Zebra Skin Pitcher. 

The figurative finesse of Adrian Saxe meets political cartoonist in the work of Corie J. Cole’s Untitled Decorative Object #2, Starring Thom Yorke, Leonard Numoy and Ralph Nadar with Special Guest George W.  Ceramics is a filed in which content usually is overshadowed by technique or just plain beauty.  This piece has both of these, but beyond that, it has content.  It is political satire in the manner of Henri Daumier or Thomas Nast.  This artist is superbly skilled—not only in her ability to model the figure and convey a likeness, but in the way that she can tell a story in a very concise way.  She makes a statement, using humor and our response through recognition--- of “getting it;” and she does it without being mean.  Her figures demonstrate the impact that small scale can have, too.  You have to get your nose right down there, and before you realize it, you are hooked by the humor and elegance.  You are not just her audience, you are her accomplice.

You can see all three of the strands of tradition I outline here (it is an arbitrary number--- I could have delineated many more and chosen other artists) in the wonderful work in this exhibition.  Encouraging innovation can be a dangerous thing since some things from the past are the stabilizers of a style, a technique, or a culture.  But we live like time travelers and, unless we choose to spend our days in isolation and meditation, which sounds very attractive at times, there is just no real point in closing off the impact of the richness that travels so handily as access to information.  This influx of knowledge adds to our instincts and links us to the past and the distant in a way that is utterly about the present.   The works in the exhibition are innovative, celebrating the nature of NOW.    

                                                                     Marilyn A. Zeitlin, Director and Chief Curator

         Arizona State University Art Museum