In a recent talk delivered in Auckland, New York based ceramic historian, gallerist and taste-maker Garth Clark offered a new spin on an old theme. The subject of fairytales and the kind of homely advice picked up at grandma's knee, Clark's paper was a cautionary message to the ceramics community: be careful what you wish for because you might just get it.
This was a somewhat surprising message from the man who has arguably done more than anyone else to enhance the prestige of ceramics in both a critical and financial sense, and who, from the lofty heights of his eponymous gallery, has led the transformation of ceramics into verifiably high art. A roll call of some of Clark's stable proves the point: Grayson Perry, Ron Nagle, Anthony Caro, Anthony Gormley, Marek Cecula, Ken Price – all names one might be as likely to find on the rolodex of a contemporary art critic as in the black book of an ambitious ceramics curator.
Discussing the desire of the ceramic world to be accepted into the art world, Clark's warning came from a fairly grim observation: artists make better art than ceramists, who make great ceramics. While the art world offers a maker greater status, higher prices, and a sharper critical discourse – what we might call the greater rewards showered on artists and viewed resentfully by ceramists with equal talent, skill and time spent honing their practice – this desire is at heart a curse that seems like a blessing. Absorbed into the art world, and judged by art standards, not all ceramists will survive the encounter.
It is safe to say that Clark, who operates a ceramics gallery that flourishes in the toughest of art worlds, doesn't believe that ceramists are inferior to artists. The warning of Clark's lecture was not at the same time a condemnation, a command to makers working in clay to return to the wheel and stick to the well-turned bowl. Rather, what motivates Clark's timely observation is a question about how objects and practices perform in a cultural sense. Clark's talk was ultimately about sources, about origins, and the value to be gained when artists, and practices such as ceramics, take responsibility for their history, and where they've come from. It is a question of intelligence of discourse.
British ceramist, critic and historian Edmund de Waal has suggested this is a problem of the relationship between centre and periphery. As he puts it:
The impulse to be in the centre is the linguistic attempt by makers of craft and writers on craft to be in the centre of things, to be able to discourse cogently with the other artists, with design, with literature, psychoanalysis, with new media, ethnography, art history, the social sciences. This is ‘the project', the mid to late twentieth century emphasis on the idea that without a coherent intellectual argument for the crafts they will be weakened and poorer. 1
There is nothing wrong with these objectives. What maker, who believes what they are doing is successful and important, would not want their work to be explored through the systems of knowledge – old and new – that have emerged in the 20th century? What maker believes that just because they have chosen to work in clay their work is automatically poorer, and without the resources which can be unlocked by discourse? What maker does not aspire to have their work on show within the white cube of the contemporary art gallery, and thus receive all the rewards that this heavenly site promises?
There is a flaw here, which brings us back to the message of Clark's talk. The desire for the white cube, and the anointing of art discourse, ignores that this site is itself a specific historical entity, and one that is incredibly loaded. The white walls are not a mark of neutrality, but a sign of a space, a set of expectations and a discourse, that can make sense of certain kinds of practices – and which just as forcefully excludes other practices, whether art or not. Introduce ceramics into this space, and you might find that the discourse does not fit, cannot make sense of the object or the practice that has brought it into being. Introduce the ceramic object into the white cube, and you might find it becomes invisible – which is to say it is no longer meaningful, or successful.
In an essay in Shards, Clark suggested that the problem of ceramics' status was not to do with quality, or the practice itself, but the lack of resources that are necessary for an object to be canonised. 2 Artists, artworks and practices are canonised when their importance to the culture is demonstrated and proved. This canon is the product of a system – makers, critics, historians, and institutions working in concert. When ceramics makes an argument for its importance through the quality of the objects, and via the appropriate critical and historical discourses, ceramic objects will be taken seriously, and they will find a place in the canon.
The mark of success for ceramics is not to achieve a replacement of ceramics discourse with art discourse. The mark of success is to work within a ceramics discourse, and a ceramics practice, that will do honour to the histories, particularities and potentialities of ceramics – to demonstrate, in other words, the power of a ceramics discourse and the unique contribution this discourse might make to our understanding of contemporary cultural practices
Unconvincing as much of our current ‘art' made from ceramic is, whether deriving from re-labelled potters or from fine arts trained grads trendily slumming it while it's hot, the absence of acknowledgement of ceramics' own resources - those long, complex and rich histories, the thinking about use, function and practicality, the appreciation of all those facets of decoration and knowledge of material, the intelligence of the haptic - is the most concerning. This must surely be the starting point – not some esoteric imposed discourse, but an underline of ceramics' own foundations. We need an education that encompasses all of these and can link them to contemporary art discourses so that clear boundaries are apparent and ceramists can take pride in their own practices without recurrent lusting for that white space and all that it entails. We need a defined structure from which to expand cogently, and we need it soon or we are vulnerable to assimilation, and then possibly marginalisation, by design and visual art configurations. That is something that ceramics could wish for and not regret receiving.
References
1 De Waal, Edmund, ‘Places Sensed, Senses Placed' in Think Tank #2 , Gmunden. 2005, p14.
2 Clark, Garth, ‘Voulkos' Dilemma: Towards a Ceramic Canon' , in Shards: Garth Clark on Ceramic Art, New York. D.A.P./Ceramics Art Foundation, 2004, p 317-327.
