Historical and contemporary narrative

Telling stories has been an important function of art throughout history. After the Renaissance narrative slowly faded from main stream art in the west and it nearly disappeared in some movements during the height of modernism. This was the result of a political and philosophical environment that discouraged narrative. Even as the modernists were rooting out narrative from their work socialists were beginning to use it for propaganda. The kinds of stories being told and the people who were telling them in art were a good mirror of power and politics throughout history, but today narrative is both mirror and reality. Telling stories is one of the most important aspects of postmodern culture. The stories we tell often describe the world that we live in, but they also shape the world that we are going to live in. Narrative ceramics is not always considered to be cutting edge, but it is among the most important and defining modes of expression in postmodern clay. Through narrative artists encourage dialogue, share ideas, address morality, reveal desire, confront angst and define identity. As they do this they instigate change. Many contemporary artists borrow technique and content from historical narrative art and apply it to the contemporary context.

As Renaissance artists became more sophisticated in their ability to faithfully portray reality the complexity of their narrative devices devolved. It’s as though composition and perspective distracted them from the stories they were telling. Over time narrative faded slowly until it disappeared. Once abstraction moved away from representation it was no longer possible to tell stories. It’s true that some artists gave their pieces titles that alluded to commonly known narratives from literature or poetry but I can’t imagine someone getting any kind of story out of Jackson Pollok’s Full Fathom Five (the title refers to a poem from Shakespeare’s The Tempest).

I will discuss Six methods of relating narrative through art. My contemporary examples will all be works done in clay but for the sake of clarity in explaining my ideas I will also refer to paintings that exemplify the narrative methods that I discuss. I don’t generally care for artificial categories in ceramics. In the case of narrative ceramics, though, it is useful to break down the methods of telling stories into categories so that we can clearly describe the connection between technique and meaning. It also provides a much needed foundation upon which we can build a good dialogue about narrative clay. These categories are as follows.

1. Continuous narrative: A piece wherein multiple events in the same story line are present on the same space. This was common in early Renaissance painting but faded away over time. There is often a somewhat linear progression in the flow of events in a continuous narrative piece, but to a person who is accustomed to the more common and simplified structures that are common today it can be hard to read these pieces.

2. Multiple panel narrative: A piece composed of a group of sections organized chronologically wherein each part shows a single event in a story (like a comic strip). These kinds of pieces are common in chapels and cathedrals and are often helped along with text. This brings us to our next category…

3. Text dependent narrative: An image or group of images that work together with text in order to tell a story. Generally a text dependent piece is one that leaves out large parts of the story which are filled in by the text.

4. Referential narrative: A piece that portrays a moment in time from a well known story. Because the viewer is expected to know the narrative before hand the image acts as a prompt and the rest of the story gets filled in by the viewer.

5. Implied narrative: An image that clearly indicates what happened before and what will likely happen next so that the narrative is implied by a single moment.

6. Free Narrative: A piece that uses imagery in a way that does not tell a specific or recognizable story, but provokes the viewer into creating a narrative from the given visual information. The specific details of the narrative will vary from viewer to viewer. *This may or may not qualify as narrative, but I include it as food for thought and discussion.

These categories are not necessarily the final word in defining narrative ceramics, but they serve as a structure through which we can discuss it. It is common for the different methods to be used in combination with each other (for example an artist may use text along with multiple panels to tell a story). Because the artists who create narrative works are not concerned with staying within the parameters of artificially defined categories the lines that separate them are often blurred, this is especially true among contemporary artists

Continuous Narrative

Continuous narrative is interesting because it shows events that would more commonly follow an orderly timeline but are all simultaneously present in one piece. This takes a narrative that would otherwise be chronological and makes it synchronic. Scenes from the Passion by Hans Memling, is a good example of continuous narrative in Renaissance painting. In the piece we see scenes from the New Testament’s account of the last days of Jesus’ life. Jesus appears entering Jerusalem in the upper left hand corner and then going through various actions surrounding the crucifixion as recounted in the Bible until in the lower right hand corner he appears as the resurrected being. I count Jesus appearing eighteen times in the painting. There are two Golgotha crucifixion scenes and three tombs all present in a stylized Jerusalem. In the context of a Christian themed painting the ability to see all events simultaneously may refer to the doctrine of godly omnipresence.

In contemporary ceramics there are some interesting examples of works that use continuous narrative. In some cases artists take advantage of the fact that a vessel form can be viewed from various angles to represent more than one event in a narrative on a single piece without dividing it into sections. A simple example of this is Cindy Kolodziejski’s To and Fro. On one side of the piece is an image of a bald headed old man swinging at a playground. He is wearing a dark business suit, a pair of glasses and a child like grin on his face. On the opposite side of the piece the same character is shown from behind on the backward pivot of the swings pendulous action. In this case the synchronic nature of this continuous narrative contributes to the meaning of the piece. The man is moving but never going anywhere new in his continuous and timeless play. His clothing suggests that the piece is being allegorical rather that literal. The swing symbolically represents the trajectory of his life’s work. He is only interested in childishly gratifying his misguided desires. His greed and selfishness know no end because they are inverted like two mirrors facing each other; desire wanting desire and so on forever. A self serving business man who, by his appearance, could wield a great deal of power will cause a lot of trouble. Another clue illuminates the darker meaning of the piece. The vase is Victorian in form which in contemporary ceramics generally calls to mind an era of imperialist oppression. This never ending motion that is no more than an illusion of progress for the eternally self serving business man is a harsh criticism on the oppressive nature of capitalism in a male centered society. It encourages contemplation and lays a moral imperative at the feet of those who understand.

Multiple panel narrative

An example of multiple panel narrative structure that follows a more traditional order is the painting entitled Scenes from the Life of Christ by Renaissance artist Gaudenzio Ferrari. The piece essentially reads like a graphic novel, starting at the top you follow each panel from left to right until you reach the bottom. One interesting manipulation of the structure that the artist employs is a section near the center that uses a box that is four times the size of the others. This larger section holds an image of the crucifixion. Its size is there to act as a means of emphasizing the importance of the moment being depicted. In Renaissance art multiple panel narrative structure essentially displaced the use of continuous narrative. The change indicates a trend toward neat, logical structuring that was easy to read. This affinity for logic and structure is likely the same compulsion that motivated the developments in composition, representation and perspective that can be observed in Renaissance art.

For the contemporary ceramic artist Jack Earl his character Bill is often sculpted multiple times as a kind of multiple panel story. For Earl Bill is a way of discussing identity and morality. Over time Bill is shown in a number of attitudes. In This is Bill. This is Bill Thinkin! This is Bill Talkin! This is Bill Tryin to Rest. This is Bill Workin! , Bill is represented in the attitude of thinking, talking, resting, and working as the title pointed out. In a lot of the Bill pieces you don’t catch more than a wry sense of humor, but as you look at the body of work it begins to become clear that Bill represents an ideal. He is unpretentious, and sometimes a little silly, but always an example of a kind of morality that the artist is drawn to. Two more representations of Bill are placed side by side in another piece called Bill in the Light and Bill in the Dark . In this piece the passage of time is alluded to as one of the Bills is painted black as though he were in the dark, while in the other likeness Bill is painted in full color as though he were standing in broad daylight. In other pieces Bill is shown in the field, the pig pen or at church. Bill’s facial expressions and mannerisms don’t change much in these pieces. The only difference is in superficial elements like clothing or tools. Bill is stable and predictable; he has a simple kind of righteousness that Earl wants to represent as the character goes about his daily duties. Bill is a composite of a combination of the artist and his father in law Roy. In one piece Jack Earl leaves the pseudonym out and calls “Bill” by his true name, Roy, in a piece entitled Roy, the man who saved his family. Acts, Chapter 16, Verse 31. (1984). In this piece the artist uses text in the title as a narrative device. This is something that the artist has done quite a bit throughout his charier.

Text dependent

Let’s keep looking at Jack Earl’s work. He has taken the narrative capabilities of a title to the extreme. The language in these titles is purposely written in the vernacular of rural Ohio to add to the work’s sense of place and implicit good ol’ boy morality. One such piece is a sculpture of Bill/ Roy with a carrot growing in the place of an index finger. The title of this piece creates an entire myth to accompany the figure :

The story of Carrot Finger: I knew a guy who had a carrot for a finger. I guess he had it when he was born cause he had it when I met him in high school when we was boys. It was just a carrot stickin’ out where a finger ought to have been. When I first noticed it I looked out of the corner of my eye at it a few times and then got used to it and didn’t pay any attention. Nobody else did either, they were all used to it. Sometimes some younger kid would holler ‘Carrot Finger’ at him from a distance but he didn’t pay any attention to them kids. When he got older and went to church, a wedding or a funeral, he would keep his carrot finger in a pocket so he wouldn’t distract from the service. He got married to a local girl here, a real nice girl, but not as pretty a one as he could have got, I suppose, if he hadn’t had a carrot for a finger. They had three kids and they all come out normal. Anyhow, one time he was walkin in the woods. It was in December, one of those special days in December when the sun is real warm and little fluffy white clouds was pasin shadows over you once in a while. He had plenty of clothes on since it was December and it was nice and warm and he layed down in the grass on the side of that hill and he was watchin’ the clouds pass by and listnin to the bees buzz. You know how nice it is to hear bees on a real warm winter day. Well he was layin there and he went to sleep but what he didn’t know was that there was a lot of rabbits in that woods. When he woke up his finger, the carrot one, was gone. He told me he thought it might grow back but it didn’t.

Yes, that whole thing is the tittle of the piece. Earl wrote his carrot finger story on a plaque that accompanies the piece.

Referential Narrative

Referential narrative generally does less actual story telling than the other groups because the artist assumes that the viewer will already have a certain depth of knowledge about the subject. Because of this, referential pieces often focus more upon other issues. This is the case in Caravaggio’s Crucifixion of St. Peter. Caravaggio’s dramatic use of light and composition pared with his skill in representation create an arduous depiction of a moment in the death of Peter. The dynamic composition is filled with diagonal lines and bodies in strenuous motion as they hoist Peter to be hung upside down. Our perspective is close, cutting out all peripheral action. This has the effect of drawing us into the composition and the painful moment that it represents. This is a motif that had already appeared in public art a number of times before, and viewers were assumed to have knowledge of the story from which only a brief snap shot was depicted. Because Caravaggio didn’t need to concern himself with telling the whole story he could focus on the formal and emotional elements of the composition.

In Kurt Weiser’s Europa a gourd shaped ceramic form is held at a tilt by a curved metal bar that allows it to turn like a globe. On the piece is a detailed china paint illustration of a moment in the Greek myth of Europa. In the story the princess Europa is abducted by Zeus who disguised himself as a tame bull. The bull wins the princes’ affection and when she decides to try to ride him he takes her down to the ocean and swims to Crete. Zeus reveals his true self to her there and, among other things, makes her the first Queen of Crete. On the piece there is only an image of Europa riding a bull in the water, but it is not hard for a person who is familiar with the narrative to fill in the rest.

Implied Narrative

Magdalene Gluszek uses the shape shifting nature of symbolism to encourage contemplation of desire and inhibitions in her piece Ate the Cake. At face value the narrative is basically this: a little lizard headed girl wanted a piece of cake really bad. She loved cake so much that she wore a pink dress decorated with little red cupcakes. She got a piece of cake and ate it quickly, getting frosting all over her face. The moment in the narrative that is depicted by the artist shows the elation that lingers while the lizard girl is still chewing the last bite. She is pigeon toed, full figured and uninhibited. She claps for joy looking up, maybe at the next piece of cake that has become the new object of her desire now that the last piece has no more pleasure to give. The little girl’s attraction to pleasure is unreserved; her primal state is made clear by her animal head. Children will go to any length to get their hands on a little junk food, and they will throw fits if they are denied it. In this piece the cake, the child’s candidly expressed desire, and her momentary pleasure in gratifying that desire are symbolic of the numerous ways in which all humans experience these same emotions. The piece reminds us that desire and the objects of want are too often the primal demiurges that drive our species. In our weaker moments we can often be animals whose behaviors are driven by desire. We become more adept at disguising this as adults, but this changes little. On the surface Ate the Cake is a simple narrative but as you decode it’s symbolism its meaning is as numerous as are the objects of our desires and the things we do to get them.

Meaning is slippery. This is a fact that we have become increasingly aware of. Language is not exact and signs and symbols seem to lose their effectiveness to communicate clearly as they gather more and more meaning over time. Artists today will often play with the multiplicity of possible interpretations that are imbedded in our means of communication It’s meaning at any moment is established by context and viewer. These pieces are objects of contemplation rather than a final word on a given subject. Their possible meanings only increase over time. This kind of fragmentation in meaning is important in the aims of the postmodern agenda because it makes room for more than one point of view, and ultimately for peaceful cohabitation. If meaning is not absolute and significance is determined by context then it is hard to accuse someone of being wrong.

These ideas inspire the last category of narrative:

Free Narrative:

Dada Thrown by John DeFazio(this is the piece that we looked at in class) is a good example of free narrative because it is full if images that are loaded with meaning and a viewer could potentially construct any number of stories from them. Inevitably though, the stories that are derived from the piece will not be the same for each viewer. In fact some(maybe most) viewers will not feel inclined to create a narrative from the piece at all. Hence the question: is this narrative art? Does a piece’s potential to inspire someone to construct a narrative make it a piece of narrative art? I’m not inclined to say one way or the other. There does need to be a point though where an image based art piece can no longer be called narrative. This doesn’t mean the piece is not good or that it is unsuccessful as a piece of art. It just isn’t telling a coherent story.  

land as the gallery

 

      Creating art work out doors that is able to hold its own in the landscape is no small task. You have to compete with mountains, trees, clouds, etc.. Even very strong pieces of art can have the same visual impact as a piece of garbage dropped on the ground if it isn’t presented right. I have some examples here of successful out door works and I want to point out a few of the qualities that work for them.

      First of all an out door piece needs to be built in a scale that is appropriate to the setting. This basically means one of two things it either has to be very large or there needs to be lots (like as in hundreds or thousands) of little things that work together to make a large visual impact. In Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson 1,500 linear feet of material was poured into the Great Salt Lake to from a very large spiral peninsula.       

      Another quality that most good outdoor art has is that it interacts harmoniously with the existing land scape. Rather than appearing to be an object that was plopped in the middle of a field the piece should transform the surrounding area into a work of art. Spiral Jetty turns the hill behind it, the shore line and the surrounding water into the art piece. The salt changes the color of the rocks and the shallow water in the spiral. This is one of the reasons that Smithson chose this location.

     In The Lightning Field by Walter De Maria 20 foot steel poles cover a 5,280 x 3,300 foot area. The poles interact well with the surrounding, but probably the most impressive aspect of the work is what happens during electrical storms. Each time lightning strikes one of the poles it creates a jagged line that connects the work to the clouds. For a brief moment De Maria’s piece incorporates both earth and sky into one immense art piece.

      Out door works can incorporate found objects that when organized in the right way will create an interesting or unexpected effect.

      In this piece Andy Goldsworthy uses reeds, thorns and the reflective quality of the water to create his work. While the piece exists harmoniously with the land scape it also stands out as it’s most compelling physical feature. Goldsworthy does this by using the elements of design (line, shape, pattern, rhythm, etc.) to draw the eye towards it. outdoor art needs to simultaneously blend in and stand out. This is not easy to do.

      This piece incorporates hundreds of balls of clay organized around the trunk of a tree to make an interesting visual impact. The tree and the lawn become parts of the statement here as well.

      These large ceramic fish interact whimsically with the pond and surroundings. This effect is mostly pulled off by the way that they were made to look like they are swimming.

      These pieces by Jun Kaneko show how simple forms can have greater visual impact than more intricate ones. When working outside it is important to think less about the subject matter of your piece than about the form and how it will interact with it’s surroundings. Kaneko also uses pattern and color to his advantage in these pieces.

    Robert Arneson was careful to maintain simple egg forms with his giant heads in this piece. This enabled his work to maintain a strong visual impact even when it would be easy to be distracted with the details of the subject mater.

 

Improvisation and Sampling

Arneson

In 1963 Robert Arneson made a distorted toilet that appeared to have been decorated by a pack of feral bathroom kids with very bad aim. Unlikely as it seems, the poop-covered toilet was a turning point for his work and created a new genre in ceramic art. He named the piece Funk John and thus it was that the new style of art was called “Funk”, or so the story goes. The problem with the name is that when most people think of “Funk”, the first thing that comes to mind is the music genre. Rather than thinking of sharp witted, satirical and often narrative art you are reminded of George Clinton and Bootsy Collins playing Flashlight dressed in garish, funkadelic costumes…well at least that’s what I think of.

Bootsy’s da man!

“Funk” is just one example in a long list of bad names for “movements” in ceramics. There are few enough contemporary clay artists doing noteworthy fine art that there is hardly a need for artificial categories. The names for these movements are generally invented by critics and promoters (Slivka, DelVeccio, Clark, etc.) in order, as they see it, to lend legitimacy to the work. “Funk” is typical of these names in that it does not describe the work very well, only covers the work of three or four artists and distracts from the true quality of the art. Bad as the name “Funk Ceramics” is, the notion of comparing music with ceramic art does have potential to shed light on what was being made by the artists in the last sixty years and why. Provided that the metaphor is not taken too far, the branch of the popular music scene in the U.S. which shifted from Jazz to Funk and then to Hip Hop mirrors the progression of ceramics from the late fifties to the present. Both were inspired by the same Zeitgeist and interestingly, the methods of composition and creation mirror each other as well. It is also significant that the way that culture is created in the face of modernity is similar to the way that both the music and art discussed here were made. Jazz musicians were not looking at artists and saying, “Hey! Let’s work the way they do,” any more than culture on a whole decided to behave like an improvising Jazz band . Society was acquiring new tools to deal with accelerated change and artists on the cutting edge were perceptive enough to express themselves in a mode that echoed the general manner of assimilation of modernity around them.

Improvisation

Voulkos                              Souldner

Mason

Cool Jazz and the work of Peter Voulkos, John Mason and Paul Souldner are a good place to start. Aside from being one of the most important ceramic artists of the twentieth century Voulkos was a musician. He even had his own Jazz band for a while so the comparison is natural. Rose Slivka was the first person who made this connection. The working style was fast and action oriented. The guys did a lot of improvising and playing off of each other’s ideas. They also borrowed concepts from other artists in much the same way a Jazz musician would play a standard. Improvisation and the concept of the standard are defining characteristics of both cool Jazz and of the early work of Voulkos, Mason and Souldner. If you went to a Jazz club in the sixties to hear Miles Davis play you would hear him perform a few of his own songs and some songs written by a number of other musicians. He might start a set with Blue In Green, which he wrote, then do Round Midnight by Thelonius Monk, then play Cantaloupe Island by Herby Hancock and so forth. No one would even think twice about it because that’s the way everyone did it. When someone laid out the architecture for a good song it became a standard and all the other great musicians of the time did their versions of that song. Musicians weren’t accused of being unoriginal for doing this because they were improvising something new and personalized within the structure of the standard. One song had the potential for infinite interpretation.

Improvisation is defined for the purposes of this essay as personalized and spontaneous activity within the boundaries of a set structure often involving others with whom ideas and possibilities can be exchanged. An incredible amount of skill and understanding of music theory are necessary for musical improvisation to be successful. A musician needs to know what notes and chords will sound right within the liner notes of a song and more or less stay within the rhythmic flow of the piece. The musician also needs to have the vocabulary of music mastered so well that it can become a seamless medium for personal expression. A visual artist must also have a highly refined command on technique and design theory for the work to be successful.

Like members of a band, Voulkos, Souldner, Mason and the boys (it’s too bad there were no girls in the group) would get together nights at Otis State and make work playing off of each other’s ideas and the concepts of artists they were interested in. Voulkos would check out a show by the sculptor Fritz Wotruba then go back to the studio and do an improvised piece off of the standard Wotruba created.

 

Fritz Wotruba                                  Peter Voulkos

Later on he’d paint the piece in a style that was an improvisation on something similar to what De Kooning had done except for that it was new because he was doing it in a way no one had done before. John Mason would see what Voulkos was up to and do his own version of it. Working like this they would go through a vast number of variations and work through ideas. They would expound on and add to Picasso’s ideas then combine the outcome with ideas borrowed from traditional Japanese ceramics. The process was not unlike what Miles Davis was doing with Rodrigo’s music in Sketches of Spain. The music and art created in this way was rich, vital and original. Like a John Coltrane solo that hit every conceivable variation on a theme at double speed the Otis group worked through the vast scope of possibilities at a break neck pace.

Both the music and the art were responding to a larger cultural environment of evolution. Freshness was sexy and change quenched the desires of a hungry consumerist nation that had just hit a growth spurt. Modernity in the post war environment was a juggernaut that glutted itself on the growing economy and demanded a constant sense of newness in order to keep productivity on the rise. Television, the media, air travel and a global economy that was expanding at an ever increasing rate meant that new ideas and imagery were being introduced and assimilated like never before. The integration of new products and ideas functioned much like improvisation within the structure of a standard. The standard was something familiar and well liked that could be redone over and over each time a little differently. A culture with a broad framework of morality and ritual would take in and make its own an invention or concept that was imported from somewhere else or an individual would absorb a new product, fashion or idea in a manner that was personalized. A concrete example of this is the way that the German made VW Bus became an iconic part of hippie culture. The social significance developed independently of the manufacturer’s vision and was the expression of a culture that improvised its own idiom based on what was readily available. There is a parody between cultural, musical and artistic improvisation.

Make it Funky

As the Otis group disbanded each member started doing something new and working in a new direction. Voulkos continued deconstructing functional forms and his clay work became more or less standardized. He also started working in monumental scale with bronze. John Mason’s aesthetic taste became increasingly pared down and he began working with bricks to construct installations that explored simple geometric formations and patterns that commented on industrial and architectonic form. Souldner started experimenting with Raku and adapting his organic forms to a Japanese/ American hybrid aesthetic. The Jazz community also started to branch into new directions. Miles Davis for example began creating work that became increasingly experimental and chaotic in nature; dissonant noise, near chaos. Fragments of coherent music. Herby Hancock and Quincy Jones (among others) started fusing Jazz and Funk. In his first solo album Hancock introduced a song called Watermelon Man, and then during the seventies he released an album called “Head Hunters” wherein Watermelon Man is redone as a funk song. It’s easy to miss the catchy metropolitan melody of the original in the seventies-hip urban textured funk sound of the second version. Some musicians have implied that Hancock had sold out by making a funk album, but it was the product of an impulse triggered by a new environment that demanded a new way of communicating. The old modes of expression could no longer describe the feeling of the time and so it was necessary to make new ones for a culture that was addicted to change.

In 1961 Robert Arneson did a vessel with a cap over the lid that didn’t allow anything in or out. On the side of the piece he wrote the words “no deposit” and he titled it No Return. The piece expresses the inability of functional ceramics to articulate what he wanted to say and it hinted at his desire to do something else. After a stint of emulating the type of work created by the guys in the Otis group he decided to do something new. The last shove away from the free and easy vessel forms that he had been producing was an invitation to show work together with the guys from the long since canonized Otis group. He wanted to speak in his own voice not a borrowed one. This was when he did Funk John. Just as Hancock had fused his Jazz sound with funk in order to keep pace with the zeitgeist, Arneson started using representational imagery. It was necessary to leave the old style behind because it had lost its ability to speak to and about a changed world. Funk ceramics was outlandish theatrical and sharp witted while maintaining a tongue in cheek silliness that acted as thin insulation for deeper social commentary. The funk band Parliament did some similar things with their stage act. In their silly and bizarre productions which included space ships, garish costumes, lights and smoke they would make statements about the corruption of government, racial inequality and new coping methods for the oppressed. Parliament’s brand of urban Vaudeville has been quoted by the Hip Hop comunity not the least of whom is the group Outkast.

Another progeny comes by means of the fact that the funk music of the seventies is hands down the largest source of sampling among Hip Hop musicians today.

The style pioneered by Arneson has also sent echoes through contemporary ceramics. At the time it was being made some were unsure how to contextualize it. Historians and art promoters compared Arneson’s work to pop art in general and more specifically to Claes Oldenburg. There are certainly similarities and the intention of this was to legitimize the clay work, but the comparison detracts from some important and original contributions that were made by Arneson’s art. His work was telling stories in an art world that had temporarily anathematized narrative. The particular brand of satirical wit that would come to characterize Arneson’s work was distinct at the time but would be center and front for the next generation’s sense of humor. The cartoon like imagery that Arneson was doing at the time was uncommon and often misunderstood. Some considered it weird and a bit flippant for the often serious subject mater it took on. Arneson’s characteristic satire, sarcasm, multilayered irony and rope-a-dope faux-stupidity are a second language today. Some obvious examples of this are Saturday Night Live, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report but the list could go on and on. Today Arneson’s style of working is nearly ubiquitous among ceramic sculptors. In the 2008 NCECA invitational art show “Voices” almost every piece was cartoon-like, narrative, witty, and political. Most of the work had a direct line relating it to the work of Arneson and Gilhooly.

Arneson’s art also deals intimately with his sense of identity. In a series of sculptures Arneson represented his home, 1303 Alice Street in Davis, California, which he nicknamed Alice. These works deal with the artist’s sense of place and community as they relate to him. Arneson also explored his identity in the self-portraits that make up the bulk of his body of work. In Klown he sculpted himself as a deformed clown, then as a pottery kiln filled with self portraits in Kiln Man. In Captain Ace Arneson is a pilot who has been soiled by numerous birds while in a large drawing he portrays himself as the fallen and drowning Icarus. Robert Arneson’s work tells a story of his own struggle for a sense of identity through intense self-inspection.

Robert Arneson

It’s worth taking a moment for David Gilhooly. He doesn’t get as much attention as his mentor Robert Arneson, but there is something special about his work that needs to be recognized. Mathew Barney has received a lot of attention for creating a sort of alternative universe that can be strange and self absorbed while capriciously flowing in and out of cultural criticism and semi-allegory. David Gilhooly created an alternate universe that was quirky and original at least twenty years before Barney. Gilhooly’s frogs were benign and silly but spoke of darker issues. The real world often peeks out through the cracks in his inane frog world and catches you off guard. Arneson and Gillhooly had unique voices that still resonate today. As with Funk music the ceramic artists have been quoted again and again over the years.

Sampling the Mix, Bring that Funky Track Back

In 1989 Adrian Sax did a piece called Yo, Karnak. The pot is made up of a gold-colored, gourd-shaped upper section with a semi-fancy base that paraphrases the kind of motif you might see on a baroque vase. Snails cover the exterior and seem to crawl towards the crowned top. On the side of the piece the word “Yo” stands out in high relief letters that are near bronze in color. Anyone who hasn’t been living in a cave for the last twenty years knows that the word “Yo” is a vernacular term that means “hey” but can also mean other things like “hello” or “you’re about to get a serious beating”. The word was popularized by Hip Hop music and became a part of almost-everyday speech when MTV used it in the title of their all rap music show called Yo MTV Raps. The ceramic piece draws an interesting comparison between hip hop music and some strategies of communication that are commonly used in contemporary ceramics. In art we call these modes of expression quotation and pastiche; in Hip Hop it’s called sampling. Sampling in music is a direct descendant of the practice of improvising on a standard while in ceramics a similar lineage can be traced from the kind of borrowing that the Otis group did and the quotation and pastiche that have become postmodern mainstays.

The fabric of culture is formed in our postmodern lives through an eclectic sampling of products and images that are widely available. In the clothing industry for example there is constant borrowing from past fashions. These are reproduced with new elements and are often worn with a sense of irony in light of the historical reference. Hip Hop and other art forms including ceramics will often use a patchwork of outside elements that are fused in a new way and meshed together with a novel element that is entirely original. This is the same way that culture on a whole creates its self in our current global environment. As was the case with improvisation in Jazz music, Ceramics and culture in the sixties, there is a clear parody between sampling, pastiche and quotation, and the way that we create contemporary culture. The central difference between what happened then and what goes on these days is that the change is accelerated by a vastly increased exposure to new images and ideas. We have also become more self aware in our habits of quotation and it has become more sophisticated.

In a Hip Hop song an old Funk track may be paired up with a Hip Hop beat, new vocals and maybe some other elements like sound bites from movies and some record scratching. This is exactly what the Beastie Boys did in their 1989 song Egg Man. The track starts with a looped baseline that the Beastie Boys borrowed from the song Super Fly by Curtis Mayfield. They add on a new drum beat that makes the seventies original sound contemporary (for the late eighties anyway). The added on sounds and textures are important because they are what make the piece new and relevant. In ceramics the simple act of quoting a form or motif from a past movement is not a new idea. Around the turn of the century for example it was common for artists to make pieces that referenced historical styles. Two movements that are defined by this tendency are Historicism and Orientalism. Postmodern quotation differs from these movements in that the act of quoting is not intended solely to showcase the skill and sophistication of the artisan as was the case with the previously mentioned genre. A contemporary artist’s intention is more likely to make a piece that borrows historically established vocabulary in order to articulate a new idea. Meaning and method go hand in hand so it is necessary at this point to explain both.

Cindy Kolodziejski

In Pearl Necklace (1999) by Cindy Kolodziejski an hourglass-shaped Victorian pitcher form is put to work as a means of discussing the historical oppression of women. The foot and handle are elegantly ornamented and the body of the pitcher narrows to an almost obscenely slim width at the middle. On one side of the pitcher is an image of a very thin woman wearing a black dress and a pearl necklace. The image and form call to mind corsets, starvation diets and other ways in which women inflict pain upon themselves to be fashionable. The functional pitcher form which would traditionally impart nourishment seems to be saying that the aggressively libidinal male appetite and gaze are fed by the torture of women. On the flipside of the piece is an image of a phallic cucumber which is thin in the middle like a girdled waist line. A hand grips the base of the cucumber while the other hand skins it with a vegetable peeler. The image clearly indicates aggression towards men. It seems to ask the question of men, what if we made you do the sorts of things that you make us do? The use of a Victorian form as the vehicle for this statement calls to mind the recurrence of oppression and inequality throughout history.

Hip Hop also uses historical references in order to communicate new ideas. In Rock and Roll 2 the group Handsome Boy Modeling School juxtaposes a contemporary Hip Hop beat against sound bites taken from Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. The song touches on a smattering of issues, with the typical posturing bravado that seems to seep through the cracks of every rhyme in Hip Hop. The main theme is how Rock music influenced Hip Hop and “Hip Hop influenced the world“. The use of Vivaldi’s music in this setting is interesting because it invokes in the mind images of stodgy European high culture. This is layered together with a sound from what at one time may have been seen as its opposite. When considering the influence of Hip Hop culture on the world it is hard to deny its legitimacy as an expressive medium. Hip hop artists assert themselves as the new high culture and conspicuous aristocracy-nouveau…hence the fancy pants classical sound paired up with an urban beat.

Another example of a historically referential work in ceramics that discusses contemporary issues is Playmates, 2007, by Pavel Amromin. This piece appears in the catalogue for the 2008 NCECA show Voices and is one of those Arneson offspring that I spoke of earlier. In Playmates a pink skinned puppy dog faced figurine dressed only in black military boots awkwardly points a rifle at his bound prisoner who is also a naked puppy dog soldier. The gun toting soldier seems to be posing for a photograph with one foot holding his POW’s head down. The captor wears a smile that is absurd considering the gravity of what is happening. The image alludes to a group of widely circulated photographs from the Iraq war wherein young pink faced American soldiers smile triumphantly (and inappropriately) while their prisoners are being forced into humiliating and often obscene positions. The piece is small (9”x8”x5“) and mimics European porcelain figurines like those made at Meissen, Sevres and Chelsea among others. The color scheme, ornate base and figure gesture all mimic a style of work that one would expect to see in the home of the very wealthy.

The irony being expressed in the piece is layered. First is the reference to the general youth and inexperience of soldiers in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the myriad other places where lives are taken and lost every day. Inexperienced soldiers who are almost children are placed in situations where the wisdom and good judgment that come with age couldn’t be more needed.

The second irony expressed in Playmates is spoken through the historical reference. Especially in Iraq it is difficult to uphold the expedience of our invasion in light of the debunked “intelligence” that was used as its justification. Many have suggested that the war was motivated by corporate interests who stood to make a very large profit. This essay does not propose to prove or disprove such accusations, but it is undeniable that for many wealthy and powerful people war is a means of earning an obscene amount of money. The style mimicked in Amromin’s piece is one that was engineered to appeal to the wealthy and powerful of Europe principally in the seventeen hundreds. These people were insulated from the colonial horror that generated their wealth, yet their lifestyles and decisions determined the outcomes of numerous lives. A part of this insulation was created by the insouciant and decadent art (cute porcelain figurines and so forth) that furnished their dwellings. Though we pretend to have overcome the evils of imperialism the wealthy and powerful are still far removed from the conflicts that generate their wealth. At least now some of the art work that our culture generates is willing to bite back.

In music two offspring of sampling are biting and mash up. Biting sound bits from anywhere you could imagine is common in nearly all genre of popular music these days. Sometimes this is done to make a point and sometimes the sound bite is thrown in there just because it fits the flow of the song. A break off idea that was born of sampling is “mash up” music. A mash up is when the vocals of one song are played against the music of another one. Often the two songs that get mashed are from very different genre. A good example of this is a mash up album done illegally by the artist Danger Mouse. He took music from the Beatles’ white album and coupled it with the lyrics and beat off of the rap artist Jay Z’s Black Album. Danger Mouse entitled it The Grey Album.

Mash ups are common in ceramics. An example of this is Acid Toby, 1993 by Richard Slee.     

 

Richard Slee

The piece mashes a contemporary kitsch yellow smiley face with the historical kitsch Toby jug form of 1800 England. The historical jug was a representation of a legendary drinker nicknamed Toby Fillpot who could drink ridiculous amounts of alcohol. The yellow smiley face on the new version of the Toby jug and the title point at the new ways in which people intoxicate themselves (acid, heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, etc.). Because Fillpot and the Toby jug motif are part of English history the piece can be read as a cultural critique upon the English. Slee’s piece seems to be saying that although there are new substances to get trashed on little has changed in English substance abuse.

Ceramic artists also do something similar to the musical practice of biting sounds. The work of Gertraud Mohwald is a good example of this.

Gertraud Mohwald

Mohwald will take shards from broken ceramic vessels and sculptures and use them to form her pieces. Her serene countenanced figures are avatars of a global culture that builds itself from the bits and pieces it finds to suit its needs. These cultural shards are easily gathered through a number of modern media.

No medium of information-propagation has broken down culture into bits quite like the internet. With a few mouse clicks a person can encounter information and imagery from nearly any conceivable aspect of world culture. Fashion, music, art, sports, etc.; if people are interested in something they can probably find it neatly broken down into abbreviated blurbs, sound bites and video clips on the internet. These fractured elements are often relatively free of context and can easily be mashed up with a new cultural backdrop. We live in a broken-down-and-pieced-together-mash-up world where artists, musicians, cultures and individuals assimilate new ideas and elements through improvisation.

The acceleration of recurrence and re-appropriation of cultural shards is what defines contemporary global culture, music and art. Amid all this recurrence there are echoes of improvisation and signs that the standard though distorted is still knit tightly into our social fabric. In music and ceramics this is easy to find. Gershwin’s old standard Summertime comes up again and again in music. As a Jazz tune, then as a Rock song in Janice Joplin’s version, later as a Hip Hop song by Sublime, and once again as a Jazz song played by Herby Hancock and Joni Mitchell. In ceramics an interesting line can be traced from the punctured platter forms that Luccio Fontana did to the somewhat more organic and Japanese platters that Peter Voulkos made, then down to those done by Don Reitz and finally to the more urban and political platter forms done by Niel Tetkowsky. In world culture you might expect that all the sharing of ideas would create a homogeneous world culture but this is not the case. The reason why cultures maintain a unique identity in the face of change is that the absorption of modernity is achieved through improvisational incorporation of new elements within the standard structure of the already existing cultural heritage. At this point improvisation, adjusting style to keep up with change, sampling, biting, mash up and their artistic and cultural counterparts are difficult to separate from one another. Rather than a world of demarcated borders and neatly defined categories we inhabit one of fractured bits of information that shift in a constant state of flux. Its form in the elusive present is the world we live in but it won’t hold still long enough for artificial categories to stick to the constantly distorting structure.

Luccio Fontana                                 Peter Voulkos

Don Reitz                                            Niel Tetkowski

Wabi sabi

 

The tea bowl is a small object that represents the whole Zen philosophy. Its modesty, restraint and quiet refinement exemplify the ideals of Zen. The importance of Zen Buddhism in Japan cannot be understated. Aside from being one of Japan’s major religious sects it has become very popular in the west as well. Zen informs Japan’s historical and national identity as well as its unique sense of aesthetics. This is why certain tea bowls are considered to be priceless national treasures.

These two bowls were glazed using the traditional Japaese raku firing technique. The word “raku” means “felicitous” (apt, or appropriate for the occasion); it indicates a free and easy attitude toward glazing.

 Noble austerity, organic simplicity, and the kind beauty and refinement that only come with time can be seen in this rock garden. Wabi Sabi is the central aesthetic sensibility that inspires many of Japan’s most important sites and artifacts.

Wabi Sabi in contemporary ceramics

Many contemporary ceramic artists are inspired by traditional tea bowls and the aesthetic philosophy behind them. Here are a few Japanese artists who have applied the traditional aesthetic ideal to new work.

  Shiro Tsujimura    

                              

Yasuhisa Kohyama

 

Shiro Otani

 

Ryoji Koie

Zen Buddhism made its way to the US in the fifties and sixties. It inspired writers and poets like Jack Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg and Gary Snyder. It also inspired artists who were working in clay at the time. Probably the most well known of these artists is Peter Voulkos. It is hard to say how devout Voulkos was as a Buddhist, but his admiration of the wabi sabi aesthetic is clear in this large platter.

This vessel by Jack Troy was fired in a traditional Anagama kiln. Troy was among the first American ceramic artists to build one of these traditional Japanese wood firing kilns in the US. Today these kinds of kilns and the aesthetic sensibility that espoused them are very common in the US, Canada and across Europe.

 This is an Anagama kiln at the peak of a firing. By the time this shot was snapped it had already been heating up for days.

Modern and Postmodern ceramics

These two vessels were made by Pablo Picasso and are a good example of abstraction in ceramics. Picasso was a socialist and part of his motivation for working with clay was that socialists saw high art as elitist and decadent (thus unacceptable). Pottery on the other hand was considered to be a rustic and noble vocation which was in perfect harmony with the proletariat ruled society that socialists envisioned.

            
This sculptural form was made by Joan Miro. Both Miro and Picasso enlisted the help of master potter Jose Llorens Artigas to do their work in clay.

      

The Italian Futurist artist Lucio Fontana worked extensively in clay, but is best known for his canvases. He treated his clay pieces in much the same way that he treated his two dimensional surfaces. He generally worked in single colors and with simple forms which he would slash and puncture. He did this to attempt to impress upon the viewer the possibility of a fourth dimension. Fontana and the futurists believed that it was the roll of art, science, philosophy and politics to establish a new consciousness and hence a new world order. 

   

This vessel by the Pueblo artist Maria Martinez is a good example of the traditional pottery of that region. The celebration of her work and culture are an example multiculturalism in ceramics.

           

The sculptural work of the Japanese artist Akio Takamori has a narrative quality to it that never would have been acceptable to modernist artists. His large pieces transform the gallery into a stage bustling with a patchwork of micro-narratives.

When do you think this piece was made? 1990, surprised? It is an appropriation of late 1700’s style ceramics. This piece is a riff on a piece that was made for Napoleon’s mistress Madam Pompadour. The image on the vessel is a self portrait of the artist Cindy Sherman. Sherman does a neat trick with this piece because it is an example of both appropriation (borrowed style) and re-appropriation. The artist places a portrait of herself on the object thus inverting the objectification of the female form committed in the original.

            

The work of Adrian Saxe is an example of another kind of borrowing. His work is composed almost entirely of styles, forms, and objects that are borrowed from somewhere else. In a way his style of work is similar to the way hip hop artists create beats: sampling here and there then adding on a little of their own input to make something new.

      

“Field” by Antony Gormley is composed of thousands of clay figurines that fill the gallery space. This piece is a good example of installation art.

       
“World Mandala” by Neil Tetkowski has 188 different clay samples collected from each country represented by the United Nations. The piece inspires reflection upon the rich diversity of cultures and ideas that exist in our global community. It suggests that a celebration of diversity and tolerance of differences is the way to find piece.

      
This installation piece by Richard Notkin comments on the danger of nuclear warfare. The image of a mushroom cloud in the background is a mosaic of small tiles that were colored with smoke.