Two ways of looking at ceramics

Tw o Wa y s o f L o o k i n g a t C e r a m i c s James Elkins This paper was originally posted on www.jameselkins.com and academia.edu Send all comments to the author Abstract Ceramics has only a minor role in the history of art In this talk I face that problem head-on, considering the major excuses that have been given (ceramics is a “minor” art, and so forth) I conclude that it is best not to continue to fight to have ceramic art accepted in art history Instead it is truest to ceramics itself to let the talk go where it seems to want to Here I suggest there are two “natural” directions: toward abstract philosophy, and toward an engagement with the nonverbal, nonconceptual qualities of color, feel, and temperature Author’s note This is an edited version of the keynote talk I gave at the 2002 NCECA Annual Conference I am contemplating expanding this material into a short book; I would love to hear from NCECA members who have suggestions, or would like to see particular works or processes mentioned; and I’d also be happy to hear from publishers who might be interested The paper is unrevised (August 2009) Illustrations have been added (April 2013) Two Ways of Looking at Ceramics! ! At the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, where I teach, there are a dozen or so departments, and within them there are maybe twenty different media and specialties: for example there is a sculpture department, and within it there is a wood shop, a metal shop, a foundry, a space for modeling clay (which is different from the Ceramics Department), and also a place where small metal objects like jewelry can be made It would be hard to count all the media we actually teach: there is neon, holography, digital video editing, old-fashioned 16mm film editing, kinetic sculpture and robotics, computer-generated fabric design, tapestry, felt making, pinhole camera construction, and even bioart (that is art that involves changing the DNA in organisms and calling them artworks) ! My own department is called Art History, Theory, and Criticism: we are supposedly in charge of offering courses that will tell the history, theory, and criticism of each one of those many media Of course we don’t, even though I think we are one of the largest art history departments in the country (each semester we offer over sixty different courses) Some studio departments seem to be closer to art history than others We have no problem offering courses for the enormous Painting Department But there are other departments that are are hardly represented in our course offerings: we don’t teach Neon, except when it comes to Dan Flavin; we hardly teach the history or criticism of glass, although we teach glass-blowing; and we hardly ever teach the history, theory, or criticism of ceramics Ceramics crops up in courses on Asian art, in the odd course on Baroque art, and in courses on the Arts and Crafts movement ! There are superficial and deep reasons for the exclusion of ceramics In a practical sense, we not offer courses on the history, theory, and criticism of ceramics because in the culture of the school, the Ceramics Department is relatively quiet and isolated Other departments dun us for courses: we are always Two Ways of Looking at Ceramics! ! being petitioned by the Film/Video Department for more film theory and film history, and the Performance Art Department asks us when we will finally hire a full-time historian of performance art To some degree the Ceramics Department also pictures itself as an isolated part of the school When I have served as a panelist on Ceramics Department critiques, I have noticed a very distinctive “critique culture”: a way of speaking about students’ works that is measurably different from the critical discourse in some other departments All that contributes to the relative isolation of the Ceramics Department, and the paucity of courses we offer ! But there is also a more profound reason why ceramics doesn’t figure more prominently in our course lists And here I have to speak a bit directly and soberly, because this is a sensitive subject The problem is this: ceramics has very little role in the central narratives of the history of art In preparing for this lecture, I looked through all 1,198 pages of Helen Gardner’s Art Through the Ages, which is the most popular of the one-volume histories of art (In the early 1990s, Gardner had 49% of the market share, outselling Janson two to one.) In Gardner’s Art Through the Ages ceramics is barely visible The first ceramic object, not counting two unfired Neolithic sculpted bison in the cave of Le Tuc d’Audoubert (they are mud sculptures, not ceramics), and not counting the glazed bricks in the palace of Ashurnasirpal II and the Ishtar Gate (they are really architecture, as much as ceramics), the first ceramic in Gardner’s book is a Kamares Ware jar from Crete, dated 1800-1700 BC Then comes one of the famous Marine Style octopus jars that are so ubiquitous in tourist shops, and a page illustrating a faience Snake Goddess from Knossos And that’s it By starting there, Gardner’s editors omit literally thousands of years of ceramics: the lovely predynastic Gerzean jars from the Naqada Grave in Egypt, for example, which could have been used to introduce Egyptian writing, culture, and architecture (In the book, Egypt is introduced by a wall painting in Hierakonpolis and the carved slate Narmer palette But the ceramics would have been just as pertinent to explaining early dynastic culture.) Two Ways of Looking at Ceramics! ! By starting ceramics in Crete, the authors of Art Through the Ages also omit prehistoric Europe: the La Tène culture, for example, which could have been used to conclude the discussion of the Neolithic in France Those are missed opportunities, which would have moved ceramic art more to the center stage in the foundational moments of art history The customary omission of ceramics is especially unfortunate with early cultures, where ceramics tends to be one of the major media ! In the rest of Gardner’s thousand-odd pages ceramics fares extremely poorly The editors give two pages to Chinese porcelain (and one page is just a picture), two pages to Japanese ceramics, and one page or less to Korean, Moche, Nasca, Mimbres, and Wedgwood (That is a typical miscellaneous list, spanning the world and ten centuries.) ! When it comes to the contemporary art world, ceramics makes a brief showing with Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party (1979) and Robert Arneson’s California Artist from 1982 And that’s it Of course it is possible to turn to specialized books like Mark Del Vecchio’s Postmodern Ceramics (2001), but that is not a book undergraduates are likely to read.1 For them, the standard story of art has very little to with ceramics ! Now I want to confront that sad fact head-on If you’re an undergraduate student, and your exposure to art history is through Gardner’s text (and I should add that most of the other textbooks are very much like Gardner’s), then you will have the indelible impression that ceramics is a minor subject—it’s as if ceramics is a sidelined player, watching art history without participating I think if you ask people in my profession why there is so little ceramics in Gardner’s Art Through the Ages, you would get one of three responses I’ll call them the capitalist excuse, the official version, and the secret reason ! The capitalist excuse is one preferred by editors, curators, publishers, and teachers: ceramics isn’t better represented, they will say, because there is insufficient demand A version of Gardner’s textbook with more ceramics simply Two Ways of Looking at Ceramics! ! wouldn’t sell In universities, more courses on ceramics wouldn’t fill From a publisher’s standpoint, even if the subject is terribly important, it is legitimate to watch the bottom line My problem with the capitalist excuse is that it is in part a self-fulfilling prophecy If modern art historians had not “discovered” Vermeer, Piero della Francesca, and Giorgione in the nineteenth century, and started writing about them, would they be as important now? Or would they still be minor painters, as they were in the 17th and 18th centuries? ! The official version of the reason why ceramics is not well-represented in books like Gardner’s is that art history is still expanding Gardner’s original book was a skinny volume, with almost nothing in it except Western painting, sculpture, and architecture Now it’s enormous, and it grows larger with each revision The expansion of art history began at the start of the 20th c., with writers such as Alois Riegl, and—in the official version—it is an ongoing project Art history is increasingly open to women artists, artists of color, tribal art, “low” art, mass media, and non-Western cultures The official version is true, but it isn’t a sufficient reason for the sidelining of ceramics, because many of the new subjects art history has incorporated have remained minor The triumvirate of painting, sculpture, and architecture still accounts for most of the history of art ! That leaves the secret reason, the one I prefer I’ve argued in Stories of Art (a response to E.H Gombrich’s best-selling book Story of Art) that despite all the experimentation in art history, the plot of Gombrich’s book (which is essentially the rise of naturalistic painting, from the Greeks to the present) is the essential story of art Other stories just don’t fit The problem with ceramics is that it does not contribute sufficiently to the story of naturalism, except when it provides ancillary, and therefore dispensable, examples And what’s worse, ceramics is also marginal to the great theoretical explorations of art: the newly naturalized sense of religion in the Renaissance; the crisis of religious representation in the Baroque, the dissolution of naturalism in the nineteenth century, and the formal and antimimetic experiments of the twentieth This third reason is a secret reason because Two Ways of Looking at Ceramics! ! the politics of academia and historical scholarship makes it difficult to say that one medium is inherently major and another minor But the entire apparatus of art history, theory, and criticism invests the “major” media with rich significance, and leaves the “minor” media—including ceramics as well as media such as glass and furniture—leaves “minor” media out in the cold ! A friend of mine, the Chicago-based critic James Yood, gave a talk at the College Art Association in 2002 on the subject of glass He made some of the same kinds of points, and he also addressed a kind of reactionary movement in the glass art community, which he calls “separate but equal.” The idea is that glass should not try to become part of the conversation about contemporary art He criticized the separatist movement, which he called “the enemy within,” by comparing it to the Supreme Court case of Plessy v Ferguson, which introduced the idea of separate but equal education Yood noted that Plessy v Ferguson had eventually been overturned by Brown v Board of Education, because it became apparent there is no such thing as separate but equal: separate always means unequal It is a very clever example, and it is often true in the history of art Before the 1970s, photography was separate but unequal, and glass, Yood thinks, can aspire to to be as central to postmodernism as glass art, if only its own separatist movement can be overcome Ceramics, I think, is in a better position, because it already has strong affinities with contemporary art As Yood says, glass is still in a “gilded ghetto”: a place that seems to glitter, but is actually sequestered from whatever is most interesting and challenging about current work.2 ! I want to add in passing that ceramics also has a more difficult problem, because in addition to the “gilded ghetto” there is a flourishing movement of postmodern ceramic art Postmodern ceramics, as Del Vecchio describes it, is “unconcerned about reverence for authorship or originality.” It is true that the postmodern attitude has “liberated ceramics, allowing it to express its historical literacy [and] its humor,” but I wonder if the result is, as he says, a “nirvana.” He argues that it is in the nature of ceramics to participate in postmodernism, because Two Ways of Looking at Ceramics! ! it is a “low” art (revalued by postmodernism) and because it is inherently figurative and involved in the messy, non-modernist requirements of real life The problem with his argument, I think, is that in many cases it is necessary to decide on a caseby-case basis what is contributed by the fact that the work is in ceramics rather than any other medium It is often unclear why work that is being done in many other media, from fiber to aluminum, and in many other styles, from minimalism to installation art, is remade in ceramics Most art historians try to solve the problem of ceramics (and “applied arts” or “decorative arts” including glass, furniture, and jewelry) by including as many examples as possible That is one of the main reasons Gardner’s Art Through the Ages is 1,198 pages long Now certainly it would be possible to many interesting things with a big textbook like Gardner’s Predynastic Egyptian ceramics would be a great way to introduce Egyptian Art A teacher could tell the story of the relation between Greece and Rome by looking at Roman ceramics in relation to Greek ones I’d wager most art historians have only a vague idea of what Roman ceramics look like (They are mainly dark, with simple patterns, entirely unlike the elaborate Greek vases.) The contrast between Greek innovation and Roman historian sense is much clearer in ceramics than it is, for example, in sculpture, where so many Greek originals are known through Roman copies that it becomes difficult for students to see the difference between the cultures In a similar fashion, it would be possible to introduce the difference between Islamic and Renaissance visual culture by showing the different uses each had for lustre glazes: Islamic lustre vessels always have some connotation of the immanence of Allah’s creation, while Renaissance lusters have more to with luxury and what now gets called conspicuous consumption There are many other such opportunities to bring ceramics into the mainstream of Western art history, and it would be fun to construct such a course, or write a short book, around the idea of ceramics as the central art: but I would like to suggest that in the end any such attempt would be artificial Two Ways of Looking at Ceramics! ! I think the entire project of trying to include ceramics, to give it equal footing with other media, is doomed to fail The arguments will seem forced, and there won’t be any convincing solution The way art history is currently practiced, no ceramic piece stands a chance of displacing Michelangelo’s marble or even Fragonard’s oil paint And that somewhat depressing conclusion brings me to the theme of my talk Here is my idea Instead of making yet another contribution to the ideal and impossible integration of ceramics and mainstream art history, instead of finding yet more examples of ceramics that deserve to be seen alongside the canonical works, instead of listing more reasons why art history’s master narratives are unfair, I propose that historians and critics who write on ceramics should just stop trying to be part of art history ! It seems to me that two contradictory impulses are at work in the history, theory, and criticism of ceramics In each one, the talk is more interesting, more fully engaged, and more challenging than it is when it is chained to art history These are the two ways of talking that I refer to in my title One the one hand, it is possible to talk about ceramics in philosophic terms Some of the most fundamental concepts in philosophy are also the root-level concepts in ceramics Sooner or later, if you’re a ceramics student, you will wonder about what your teacher means by “object,” “form,” or “matter.” Those concepts are absolutely central to the philosophy of matter, and ceramics allows philosophy’s questions to be put more sharply and clearly than they often can in regard to painting, sculpture, and architecture Thinking of ceramics through philosophic problems is a way of bringing ceramics back to the center of fundamental conversations about art and its objects On the other hand, ceramics can be thought of as the visual art where sensual properties are at their most intense Painting, sculpture, and architecture are visual arts, but ceramics is often also a tactile art (and sometimes an art that involves tasting as well) It is also possible to leave aside the concepts or Two Ways of Looking at Ceramics! ! philosophy, and begin to enjoy ceramics—as people all the time—for their color, texture, heft, feel, temperature, and taste I think that these two extremes, diametrically opposed to one another, are the two directions ceramics naturally goes when it is not shackled by art history For the remainder of this talk, I am going to sample these two discourses, the one philosophic and the other mainly sensual The philosophic discourse is naturally dry, and I have tried to make it as desiccated as I possibly could After all, philosophy is abstract and often non-visual Then I am going to switch to the other discourse, and show some of the most gorgeous pictures I was able to collect For that second (and final) part of the talk, I will be trying not to make too much sense —not to use too many critical or historical terms, not to draw too many conclusions or reason too much The idea is to evoke the nonverbal, nonconceptual experience of ceramics What I hope to demonstrate is that ceramics is interesting precisely because it harbors these two extreme discourses: the most abstruse philosophy of things, matter, and form; and also the most delightful irrational experiences of holding, touching, and seeing I think that contrast, that inbuilt contradiction, is ceramics’ real strength, and the reason it will never fit in art history One of the best books written on ceramics, Philip Rawson’s, does something like what I have in mind I could never write something as well-balanced as his account Instead I want to suggest what might happen if he let his different approaches—philosophic, phenomenological, sensual, historical—fall apart into the two ways of looking I have in mind.4 (I might note in passing that Donald Kuspit’s essay for the NCECA 2002 Invitational Exhibition does exactly the same thing: he says that the works in the exhibition are “profoundly philosophical, however strong their physical presence.” But then, instead of letting the two ways of speaking go their separate ways, he fuses them in the concept of “romantic activism.” What I wonder in relation to his approach—which I think represents the majority of critical approaches—is whether the fusion holds.) Two Ways of Looking at Ceramics! ! 10 I will begin with philosophy: and let me warn everyone that the next ten minutes will be very dry I have tried to present the material as accurately as I can, and when it is accurate, philosophy is very cold I Philosophy ! At least three sets of philosophic concepts converge on ceramics: matter and form, things and objects, and the question of utility Each is central to ceramics, and in some cases ceramics can be taken to be central to the concepts themselves I will consider the three in order ! Matter and form Last year I started out a big lecture class by asking everyone what department they did most of their work in Most students said Painting, Sculpture, Time Arts, or Fiber; there were a few who were in Fashion or Interior Architecture At the back of the room, two students identified their department as “Mud.” It was partly a joke, but also it was their way of saying they were working with something fundamental, perhaps even more deeply immured in experience than the copper and zinc used in the Printmaking Department, or the plastic, titanium, aluminum, Two Ways of Looking at Ceramics! ! So to use the two English- ! language words, “thing” and “object”: the latter is the Western philosophic sense, which Heidegger critiques; and the former, “thing,” is closer to what Heidegger has in mind, what he “equipment” accepts (Zeug), as meaning 16 The second topic: objects and things (continued) Some synonyms for thing, in Heidegger’s sense: The English word thing comes from the Old English ing, a meeting or assembly of people das Ding, “the thing”: Heidegger uses this word instead of res or objectum, which seem ruined by Western philosophy “those entities which we encounter in concern”: things as they pragmata (πραγματα), “[useful] things,” the ancient Greek alternative naturally come into our world, not abstract Kantian “things in themselves.” “Equipment,” Zeug, is hard to something translate: like it means tool, gear, das Zeug, equipment: “those entities which we encounter in concern”—i.e., things as they naturally come into our world, not abstract “things in themselves” instrument, or stuff, but without the narrow connotations of those words.15 Heidegger uses the word das Ding (“thing”), and he notes the Greek word pragmata (πραγµατα), which could be translated as “useful things”; he rejects the Latin res (thing) and objectum Hence the terminology remains a problem, but the underlying motivation is clear enough: for Heidegger entities are always encountered in concern, with an orientation, and not abstractly.16 ! In “Holzwege” his critique is aimed at three elements of the Western idea of what an object is: first, the idea that it is a substance with its attributes (for example, earth shaped as a vessel, fired, with glazes); second, that it is a sum of sense perceptions (so that the vessel is nothing but the shape, size, color, texture, and value that reaches our eyes); and third, that an object is formed matter, in Aristotle’s sense ! The objection to the first definition of a thing (that a thing is a substance with its attributes) is that it is not possible to encounter an object in the world unless it is Two Ways of Looking at Ceramics! ! 17 oriented in relation to us—it has some effect or use or meaning Hence it is meaningless to speak, or speculate, about the unknowable substance behind or beneath the objects we can sense The objection to the second definition of a thing (that it is nothing other than the sum total of sensory impressions) is that it does not correspond to our experience of the world.17 We don’t say, “Ah, what a lovely combination of scattered impressions of color, texture, weight, and light”; we say, “Ah, what a lovely vessel.” To the third definition, that a thing is formed matter, Heidegger says that the entire claim that a thing can be conceived as matter given form depends on the prior concept of the equipmentality, or use, of things The reason is that it is not possible to think of an object’s form, and to distinguish its form from its matter, unless that object already has some use, some orientation in relation to human life Ceramics raises these questions in the most interesting way: what is the “orientation” of ceramics? The answer is not at all obvious if the piece is to be seen, and also to stir memories of use ! Utility is the third philosophic topic The entire debate within ceramics over the question of craft versus art is already resolved in Heidegger’s philosophy The problem with craft, from an art standpoint, is that craft objects have uses Art objects, as Kant said, evoke “disinterested interest”: they have no immediate uses Heidegger’s approach encompasses and dissolves the distinction No thing can exist for us without being zuhanden, “at hand” for a use, and that includes fine art just as much as craft Philip Rawson, who does not cite Heidegger, comes very close to Heideggerian formulations when he stressses the many ways ceramics can remind a viewer of use, of their making, and of encounters in life that cannot quite be named In that respect he is strongly Heideggerian—even though he draws his inspiration from Ortega y Gasset and Paul Valéry From this perspective the oppositional relation between craft and art is entirely false: what matters is that nothing is given to thought, as Heidegger said, or has any “particular relation to the mind,” as Valéry put it, without some element of use.18 A Heideggerian movement in ceramics, I think, could well end the discussion about craft and art, and take the Two Ways of Looking at Ceramics! ! 18 conversations in new directions The question might be: what sense I have about use when I encounter this work? Another dispute in ceramics is between people who think of ceramics as vessels and those who would rather that ceramics be conceptualized outside and beyond the idea of the vessel That difference also disappears in Heidegger’s philosophy A vessel has a certain mode of being that is different from an art object; because an art object is supposed to remain, untouched, on its pedestal But a vessel is simply another kind of at-handedness: if it is a vessel for actual use, it does not make its mode of being apparent because we are used to just going to it and picking it up If it is a vessel that is not meant to be used, or an object that is not even supposed to be touched, its mode of being is revealed—“unconcealed” as he says The difference can be managed by the artist so that it works in the most interesting way The thought of a vessel can is fascinating in a different way than the experience of a vessel: neither one is simpler nor more sophisticated than the other, and the two are not immediately comparable ! So much for philosophy I think if I went on I would put everyone to sleep: but I think that these ideas—art, craft, substance, form, things, objects, use—are absolutely essential for discussion of ceramics Several of them are not as important in painting and even in sculpture and architecture, and so it is here that they should be explored and debated II Sensual Properties ! Now consider the other side of the coin of ceramics What I have just tried to conjure is the philosophic, abstract side, the side of concepts and arguments The other side is not opposed to those individual concepts, but it is set against the very idea of a philosophy that might be appropriate for ceramics ! Now I don’t believe that visual objects are actually structured as a layer of philosophy over a layer of sensory input, but I think that they are often treated as if they were built that way.19 And I think that it is a good idea to spend time Two Ways of Looking at Ceramics! ! 19 oohing and aahing and not trying to make sense, or philosophy, or meaning, at all And that is my second way of “talking” about ceramics It happens every day in studios, in galleries and museums, in peoples’ homes, and yet the art establishment —by which I mean critics, historians, and curators—tends to ignore it That does not seem right: after all, whatever oohing and aahing is—no matter how reprehensibly irrational it is, or how intellectually lazy, or unredeemably subjective, it is a universal and possibly even necessary part of our response to artworks So let me end this essay by doing some serious oohing and aahing, the kind I like to when I encounter these objects I will not be organizing these reactions into headings of color, texture, heft, feel, temperature, and taste, as I suggested earlier, because that would be capitulating to philosophy and criticism I just want to evoke the experience of encountering some objects Evoking is, strictly speaking, all I am allowed to do, and it is all I want to Anything more steps back into philosophy, and I want to stay as closely as possible to what Thomas Pfau calls, paraphrasing Schopenhauer, “the mesmerizing, sonorous, and material presence of the aesthetic object ” 20 Even Heidegger fell into the trap of thinking that mere description is somehow outside philosophy when he said that to avoid Western metaphysics it is only necessary to “simply describe some equipment without any philosophical theory.” 21 It is a romantic ideal in its genealogy: but it is also an ongoing element of the reception of what tend to be called sensual artworks: preeminently, I think, ceramics I’ll talk about three sets of objects: first some Song Dynasty Chinese ceramics that a friend of mine owns; then some commercial art ceramics by Michael Wainwright; and finally some recent work by the Galician ceramist Xavier Toubes, who teaches at the School of the Art Institute Two Ways of Looking at Ceramics! 20 ! A Chinese examples I will start with ! Chinese bowls, first a fish bowl called a ding yao , made in the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127 AD) It has a white glaze, which has been a little abraded At the bottom is a typical motif of two fish, swimming one on top of the other ! It shallow has a very pedestal underneath, with rough granular texture The unfinished look of the base seems to be telling me that I am not supposed to be looking quite this closely—but then I notice tiny, really tiny, serrations around the base, a very subtle decoration And once I notice that, I’m hooked I want to look as closely as I possibly can ! This is not a perfect bowl There are better ones in museums This one has little flaws, but that does not mean its maker didn’t care I think the person who made it cared a great deal Two Ways of Looking at Ceramics! ! ! 21 When I pick it up it feels terribly thin, like holding the hand of someone who is very old It has a beveled unglazed rim, which looks like it should feel like a knife Two Ways of Looking at Ceramics! ! 22 ! It feels rough, and to my eye it looks rough It has remnants of paint: once it must have been pretty, but now it is exquisite ! The second bowl is a peony dish, called hu tian yao Southern Song Dynasty from the (1127-1279 AD).22 Here it’s being held by my friend Qigu Jiang, a painter, collector, and dealer from Shanghai ! The peony is a little to see, because it is stamped so indistinctly This bowl and the other were done with moulds, but they are far from mass-produced: they are both clearly one-of-akind, different from every other ! The stamped pattern is clearly not unique, but it is beautifully melted into the inside of the dish ! And even the pattern itself, if you look closely enough, has a lovely drawn quality This bowl has a kind of glaze called ying qing, which is slightly bluish Two Ways of Looking at Ceramics! ! ! 23 Underneath the bowl, the contour changes twice, once from the petals to a rim around the pedestal, which catches the light here, and then again where the ring attaches to the pedestal, which casts a shadow in this picture ! Right around the pedestal the glaze pools a little—it becomes thick there, like glass B Commerical ceramics by Michael Wainwright ! The Song Dynasty bowls are precious and very, very light: they not make me anxious, but they make me careful ! There is another kind of experience that fits commercial art ceramics, like this work by Michael Wainwright, who is represented by Bergdorf Goodman and Barney’s ! Michael’s work is heavy, intentionally so Its contours fit the hands in verious ways, making it easy to hold Picking up one of his pieces, I don’t think Two Ways of Looking at Ceramics! ! 24 about how to hold the object, as I with the Chinese ceramics Many different fits between hand and object are possible ! It’s almost like the difference between a friendly conversation about some general topic like weather (that is how his work makes me feel) and a complicated discourse on meteorology (that would be the Chinese bowls) ! That is part of the appeal of Michael Wainwright’s work: it is easy, fairly easy, to look at and to handle, and so it is inviting It also keeps me at a proper distance: most of his work, after all, is meant to be used, and you can’t eat and worry about the nature of matter and form at the same time—at least I can’t C Abstract ceramics by Xavier Toubes ! My final example is an art object made by the Spanish artist Xavier Toubes, who teaches at the School of the Art Institute, where I work, in the Ceramics Department ! One thing that makes Xavier’s work different from the ones I have just discussed is that it is not necessarily meant to be touched What matters here is often the idea or the thought of touching (Although of course Xavier picks up his work constantly, and touches it whenever he looks at it.) ! Xavier makes a wide variety of forms, and works at both large and small scales Here I only have space to to consider one pieces, which he was working on when I visited him a few weeks ago ! It is a flat slab, a foot or so wide, which he had already glazed several times Underneath it was unglazed, and the layers of glaze could be seen where they dripped around the rim ! It had three bands of red and violet, with linear borders Xavier had also painted some lustre onto the surface, which made gold patches The result was an object that had, at one and the same time, a stable sequence of colors in bands, and also a widely varying range of effects depending on how the light struck the surface Two Ways of Looking at Ceramics! ! ! 25 I ended up looking very systematically, along the edges, as if I were reading the changing lights and colors I felt as if I were invited to look as closely as I pleased, provided that I did not think of the surface In doing so I was in some danger of taking a “formal” approach to the object, excerpting portions and not responding to the whole: and yet the object also invites that kind of looking ! On the day I visited, Xavier painted some acid on the surface, in an expressive pattern ! The principal result was that the acid left a mat white surface, but the effect was very complex in some places where the acid revealed underlying glazes Two Ways of Looking at Ceramics! ! ! 26 One of Xavier’s purposes that day was to undermine the figure-ground relation that the linear stripes had made possible, so that his surface could become more ambiguous In that way the object could become even less amenable to any single interpretation: neither useful object, nor object to be touched, nor painted picture Two Ways of Looking at Ceramics! ! And with that I will end I only want to draw a brief moral: ceramics is an extremely interesting practice, far more widespread and ancient than painting, much more deeply connected with human experience Ceramists, I think, should forget about their marginal position in art history We should talk the way that the objects compel us to talk: either at the fundamental level of philosophy, or on the irrational level of entrancing, hypnotically sensual encounters That is freedom, and it is also, I think, real pleasure ! 27 Two Ways of Looking at Ceramics! ! 28 Notes Del Vecchio, Postmodern Ceramics (London: Thames and Hudson, 2001) Yood, personal communication, March 3, 2002 Del Vecchio, Postmodern Ceramics, Rawson, Ceramics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984 [1971]) I thank Clive Dilnot for bringing this book to my attention Kuspit, “Speculative Objects,” in Material Speculations, exh cat., ed Steve Reynolds (Kansas City MO: H&R Block Artspace at the Kansas City Art Institute, 2002), 22 Heinz Happ, Hyle: Studien zum aristotelischen Materiebegriff (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1971); see also the formalized account in Kit Fine, “Aristotle on Matter,” Mind 101 no 401 (1992): 35-57 For eidos see John Malcolm, “On the Duality of ‘Eidos’ in Aristotle’s ‘Metaphysics,’” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 78 no (1996): 1-10 Hyle means “wood”; the Latin translation, materia, is also found in Englishlanguage texts Aristotle, De anima II By far the best meditation on hyle and the doctrine of hylomorphism, I think, with many potential applications to ceramics, is Fine, “Aristotle on Matter,” Mind 101 no 401 (January 1992): 35-57, especially 39-40 A treacher named Christopher Conn actually teaches the matter-form distinction using clay, but I think ceramics is interesting because it shows how confusing the distinction is, not because it provides a clear pedagogical tool for expositing Aristotle Conn, “Teaching Aristotle with Modeling Clay,” Teaching Philosophy 23 no (2000): 269-76 10 George Blair, Energeia and Entelecheia: “Act” in Aristotle (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1992) gives the development of the terms in Aristotle’s thought Two Ways of Looking at Ceramics! 11 Aristotle, ! 29 Metaphysics A 12 This is the etymology Heidegger stresses in What is a Thing?, translated by W.B Barton and V Deutsch (South Bend IN: Regnery, 1967), 54, 137 See further Herman Dooyeweerd, “The Epistemological Gegenstand-Relation and the Logical Subject-Object Relation,” Philosophia Reformata 41 (1976): 1-8 13 Daniel Palmer, “Heidegger and the Ontological Significance of the Work of Art,” British Journal of Aesthetics 38 no (Oct 1998): 394-411 14 Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 26 [H n.] 15 Heidegger, Being and Time, 97 [H 68 n 1] 16 Philip Rawson also comes to the point where he wants to define “thing,” and he says “it may well be that the very notion of the ‘thing,’ as a unit which exists and is independent of other ‘things,’ is based in some way upon that fundamental experience of transforming elemental material out of the unbroken tissue of outer and inner reality”—a very Heideggerian idea Rawson, Ceramics, 17 Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Basic Writings, edited by David Krell (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993), 152 On Heidegger’s essay see especially Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Truth of the Work of Art,” in Heidegger’s Ways, translated by John Stanley (Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 1994), 128-39; and Otto Poggeler, “Heidegger on Art,” in Martin Heidegger: Politics, Art, and Technology, edited by Karsten Harries and Christoph Jamne (New York: Holmes and Maier, 1994), 106-24 Both of these are cited in Palmer, “Heidegger and the Ontological Significance of the Work of Art.” 18 Rawson, Ceramics, 3, quoting Valéry (no source given) Two Ways of Looking at Ceramics! ! 30 19 Much of this is in my book Domain of Images (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1999) There is a philosophic version of this same argument, which is roughly this: language, sense, and meaning are inherently logical, and there is nothing beyond or before them except meaninglessness This is the type of argument at work in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus; for a recent version see Ian Hacking, “What is Logic?” Journal of Philosophy 76 (1979): 314 For an interesting counter-argument, which partly (but critically) follows late Wittgenstein to make the claim that “the adoption of choices may be what makes logical articulation and manipulation possible,” see Richard Mason, Before Logic (Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 2000), 115 20 “The Enlightenment ideal of the intrinsic rationality, or transcendental coherence of all representation here gives way to a (Buddhist-inspired) conception of transcendence, a metaphysical ideal that demands askesis (Ger Entsagung) and promises ekstasis Both the condition and the reward, however, imply that the subject of aesthetic experience entrust itself altogether to the mesmerizing, sonorous, and material presence of the aesthetic object, thus effectively surrending all the epistemological and moral objectives that Kant had struggled to balance in his third Critique.” Pfau, Aesthetic Critique: The Voice of Cognition After Kant, part 3, paragraph 24, in the collection Romanticism and Philosophy in an Historical Age, edited by Karen Weisman, published on the internet at http:// www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/philosophy/phtcs.html 21 22 Heidegger, “Origin of the Work of Art,” 158 For similar examples see New Perspectives on the Art of Ceramics in China, edited by George Kuwayama (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1992), 26, 29-30, 32 ... meant that it is a kind of universal Ur-form, like Aristotle’s unapproachable hyle Two Ways of Looking at Ceramics! This is related to Aristotle’s doctrine of the four causes (aitiai) that used... sensory input, but I think that they are often treated as if they were built that way.19 And I think that it is a good idea to spend time Two Ways of Looking at Ceramics! ! 19 oohing and aahing... underlying glazes Two Ways of Looking at Ceramics! ! ! 26 One of Xavier’s purposes that day was to undermine the figure-ground relation that the linear stripes had made possible, so that his surface