44 — 45
High Unseriousness:
Artists and Clay
Edmund de Waal
The plasticity of clay has always been of great interest to artists.
But with this centrality also comes the highly charged area of
the status of clay. The question of whether it is precisely because
clay can be seen as practically worthless that so many artists have
been able to use it as a material in exploratory and digressive
ways. It is a complex map. The artists who have had significant
involvement with clay—not just an occasional foray—include
Gauguin, the German Expressionists, the Fauves, and the Russian
Suprematists in the early part of the 20th century. They include
the major mid-century involvement of Picasso, Miró and Noguchi,
and the work of Lucio Fontana, and now the contemporary work
of Tapies, Caro and Cragg. The reasons why such an extraordinary history of exploratory involvement with clay should have
been so systematically undervalued and decried are complex: the
critical history for this century of work with clay provides a backdrop for the exhibition. The great absence of a considered critical
appraisal for much of the ceramic work by artists reveals anxieties
about craft, anxieties about the value of the decorative and anxieties about the place that objects can have within modern art. But
above all it reveals a dislike for the messiness and inchoateness of
clay, the way in which it shifts its states from liquid to solid, the
way in which it moves.
Some artists who have used clay have wanted to disassociate
themselves from ceramics: they felt that ceramics as a discipline
was alienating. This was not simply capriciousness or removing
themselves from the taint of craft. Indeed many of these artists
knew precisely which elements of the craft of pottery were significant for them. And for several it was what they perceived as the
health or vigour to be found in vernacular pottery that was most
significant. In the vernacular could be found the living traces of
the hand.
Lucio Fontana
Torero con Toro, 1949
At the end of the 19th century it was the seeming decadence of
Art Pottery, where many different highly skilled craftsmen would
work on a single piece to throw, trim, decorate, gild, and fire a pot
all under the direction of a famous ‘Name’, that was so alienating.
These were objets for vitrines, collectable, among them Sèvres
vases. And as Gauguin so succinctly put it, ‘Sèvres has killed
ceramics’. Ceramics had lost a vital link between the hand and the
artist, becoming mere commodities. There is real anger and passion here at the dissociation of ceramics and life; what had been,
in Gauguin’s memorable phrase, ‘a central art’ had been turned
into a frippery (une futilité). This threnody for the lost integration
of hand and eye underpinned the parallel growth of the studio
potter, someone who would undertake to make, decorate and
fire pots by themselves. As Emil Nolde pointed out, ‘Our age has
seen to it that a design on paper has to precede every clay pot,
ornament, useful object, or piece of clothing. The products of
primitive people are created with actual material in their hands,
between their fingers…The primeval vitality, the intensive, often
grotesque expression of energy and life in its most elemental
46 — 47
form—that perhaps is what makes these native works so enjoyable.’1 ‘Actual material’ is a resonant description of clay: it throws
up the idea that some materials have less reality, are less capable
of connection with hands and fingers. Clay is experiential. It can
be no more than a couple of squeezes of clay by a hand and two
sharp indentations for eyes as in the figures made for Antony
Gormley’s Field: ‘a materialisation of a moment of lived time.’2
This is using clay to record the passage of one moment of one
person through the world. The use of clay to sketch, to mark in
an abbreviated way the flux of feeling, is part of this map of the
unexpected.
It is possible to work with clay on a totally different scale. It can
become an environment, taking not moments but months to
make, as in the wall of clay that the American-Japanese sculptor
Isamu Noguchi constructed in his house in Kamakura in Japan
in the early 1950s. This wall is a long stretch of compacted clay,
scraped back, and with hollowed niches; one for the hearth and
one for a haniwa, an archaic head from the prehistoric Jomon
period. Noguchi’s sculptures sit nearby. With Noguchi’s wall we
see not the small intimate gestures normally associated with
ceramics, but a larger physicality—try beating out a mass of clay
and you’ll see what is involved. The idea of a wall of clay recurs
across fifty years and three continents, from Noguchi to John
Mason’s Grey Wall of 1960 to the contemporary work of Andy
Goldsworthy in Britain. In all three cases there is a displacement
of the outside into the interior, a messing with the prescriptive
cleanliness of the studio or museum.
1
Emil Nolde in Victor H.
Miesel (ed.), Voices of
German Expressionism,
London 2003, p.35
2
Antony Gormley, Field
for the British Isles,
London 2002
3
See archive photographs of Miró’s work
in Pierre Courthion, Llorens Artigas, Paris 1979,
pp.116-9
Above all in these clay walls there is the use of clay as a home,
as a stage, as a medium, and as a landscape. The wall of clay is
also a cave, a return to first principles. It links the artist with the
iconic places where art ‘began’, the caves of Lascaux and Altimira.
Miró—who had been profoundly affected by his experience of
the caves of Altamira—placed his ceramic sculpture outside his
Catalan studio to see how it worked alongside the surrounding
boulders. It was as if there was a correspondence to be tested
between these ceramics and the geology which informed them.
His monumental work in clay, Portique, is an archaic gateway;
its scale demands that it stand comparison with prehistory. The
way of achieving this absorption into clay was to work with scale.
Scale simply prevented preciousness.3
In one of the most compelling images of this approach we see
the Danish artist Asger Jorn being pushed on his motorbike
Asger Jorn on a scooter
preparing the panel for
Aarhus, 1950
across a playground full of clay to make a mural for a Jutland
school. Marks made by hand were too discrete and safe: the tyre
marks of a Vespa were needed. This was the search for the nonaesthetic and for sculpture that could not be made a commodity.
It was not an interest in making ceramic objects (for exhibition,
catalogue, sale) but in the experience of clay as earth. The tough
physicality of this way of working is apparent in Lucio Fontana’s
Natura series in which he created an interior space by pushing a
long pole deep into a large mass of clay. Eduardo Chillida’s solid
ceramic forms are sheer mass. The series of monumental works
made by the American potter Peter Voulkos were titled precisely
to evoke a relationship with vast landscapes—5,000 Feet (1958),
Little Big Horn (1959), Camelback Mountain (1959), Gallas Rock
(1961). The scale of these ‘confirms our sense that something
48 — 49
big has actually happened in the art of our time’ as the critic E.C.
Goosens wrote in 1958 of Abstract Expressionism. This is clay as
challenge.
In the small figure from Field or in a clay wall we can see the
movement of the human body and how it has affected the clay
body. This is an immersive movement, a loss of self in materiality described powerfully by the philosopher Merleau-Ponty:
‘Every perception is a communion and a coition of our body with
things’.4 This coition of the body is one of the secret stories of
the century of artists working with clay; it reveals what can be
described as a phenomenological approach to clay. For some artists using clay has been the recuperation of unmediated materiality: they had a powerful sense of clay as earth, as being the great
formless material void that allowed them a kind of expression
they could not approach through other materials. Indeed the
image of ‘a returning to earth’ carries with it the apprehension,
the almost visceral feeling, of having been separated, alienated
or disconnected from the earth—or a land or a culture. Clay
allowed for a return to self, a return to the body, a return to the
earth. Kazuo Shiraga (1924-) of the Gutai group showed this in
1955 in his performance ‘Challenging mud’, writhing around in
clay until he was so exhausted that the earth had ‘won’. When the
radical young group of post-war Japanese potters were choosing
a name they called themselves the Sodeisha, after an earthworm
wriggling in mud. These young potters were ‘returning’ to clay,
were being ‘effaced’ by it. In doing so they expressed their feeling
that an older generation of potters had betrayed and smothered
the material. That much of the Sodeisha’s early work is unglazed,
often rough and even painful to handle is no coincidence: it
reflects this passionate, phenomenological, identification with
clay itself. Encounters with clay can be spontaneous, visceral
and violent. Noguchi, working in Japan in the early 1950s, made
work that possessed what he called ‘an essence of sculpture’. His
words reveal both the exhausting physicality of working with clay
and what others could gain from their encounter ‘...we may bump
into it, bleed from its rough surface, or delineate its contours with
our fingers’.
4
Quoted in James Hall,
The World as Sculpture,
London 2000, p.302
5
Quoted in Forces of
Nature: Axel Salto, New
York 1999, p.4
Clay becomes ceramic through the other tempestuous transaction of firing. The Danish potter Axel Salto (1889-1961) invoked
the image of Acteon metamorphosing into a stag to suggest
that ceramics could catch moments of transition or ‘the painful processes of transformation’5 as he put it. For some of these
artists working with clay—in particular Miró and Picasso—this
transition allowed them freedom from any absolute knowledge
of how their work would emerge; the chance inherent in firing
allowed them to cede control. As the French poet Paul Valéry said
in his essay On the Pre-eminent Dignity of the Arts of Fire, Earth
and Mars ‘are after all nothing but cooled bodies’ and that for all
‘the fire worker’s admirable vigilance and all the foresight learned
from experience…They can never abolish Chance. Risk remains
the dominating and, as it were, the sanctifying element of his
great art.’6
On one level a handle can become a snake or a spout a phallus.
The border of a meat dish can act as the audience for a bullfight,
the nest of a bird, a woman’s hair. The framework is unstable, a
handled jug ‘contains’ the image of a flower vase. And in one of
the most bizarre of these shape-shiftings a terracotta vase was
surrounded by a mould made from corrugated cardboard, and
plaster was poured into the space between the two: a vase was
thus made into a larger plaster jug. Many of these ceramics are
rooted in what Andre Breton described as the most fundamental
of all Surrealist visual techniques, the suppression of the word
‘like’. In Surrealism a tomato is no longer ‘like’ a child’s balloon,
it also is a child’s balloon. In Picasso’s ceramics, objects are often
other objects simultaneously.
These artists also treated the ceramic studio itself as a transient
place—everything they found within the ceramic studio was fair
game for incorporation into new objects. Picasso, for instance,
appropriated and manipulated the detritus of the studio, discarded kiln fragments and shards alongside casseroles, chestnut
roasters and tiles and meat platters. Some of these marmites were
painted with black figures in the manner of Etruscan antiquities,
some of the tiles broken to give the impression of archaeological
finds. They are knowing commentaries on the inherent archaicism of painting terracottas. He layers commentary on tradition
in a combative relationship with his artistic forebears, no more
benign in his ceramics than in his paintings. Threading their way
through the doves, or through the epicurean still lives in rich
fluxed colours painted onto the meat dishes, are sexual dramas
and the violent theatre of bullfights.
6
Paul Valéry, ‘On the PreEminent Dignity of the
Arts of the Fire’, in Paul
Valery: Collected Works,
Bollingen vol.12, 1960
For Miró, too, the excitement of using ceramics lay in their
unpredictability, the consignment of the work to the transforming
process of firing, where clay and glaze changed into mass and
colour. This transformative element connected with his sense of
how his art came into being, the way in which in a dream figures
←
Joan Miró
Œuf, 1956
and landscapes and symbols change and become ‘other’. It was
also present in his admiration for Neolithic art, where organs and
limbs interchange, and for children’s art where objects recede
in and out of focus in the picture plane. In his small ceramic
sculptures of women, this transmogrification is most clearly visible, with an almost studiedly archaic transposition of mouth and
sexual organs. Other works were more complex. When he saw the
outcome of a disastrous firing of his collaborator the Catalan potter Artigas’ ceramics, with broken detritus and pots stuck together
and to shelves, it was for Miró a surrealist symphony of melted
or fragmented forms. It was an epiphany, for materials as he said
‘always excite me and give me points of departure of great richness’. There is either an almost violent syncopation of different
forms or the bringing together of different ways of handling clay
within the same piece, all to the end of keeping alive the febrile
energy of making and painting.
Where a form is unitary, as with his use of Artigas’ large jars or
dishes, the images are placed so as to pull the form off centre;
the smoothness and opacity of a glazed surface, its tactile coherence, was a ‘point of departure’ rather than a terminus. Just as
his painting was connected to childhood mark-making through
his use of stains and traces and scratches, so Artigas pointed out
that Miró had to give up on the idea of accuracy in drawing on
ceramic surfaces and had to inscribe the clay with a sharp stick,
scratch through slips or trail glazes. Indeed the rougher the surface, the better. Just as Picasso was to do at Vallauris in the South
of France, Miró picked up broken kiln shelves and discarded
shards and even kiln-bricks to work with. Their brokenness gave
them an immediate correspondence with the surrounding rocky
landscape. Some of these painted fragments of kiln shelf have
condensed ideographic figures, stars and animals which look as if
they have been removed from the prehistoric caves at Altamira.
The ceramic work of Noguchi has a great correspondence with
that of Miró. For both, the metamorphosis of clay into ceramic
connected them to an experience of the essential. For both
of them this was expressed through the centrality of ceramic
prehistoric sculpture. Noguchi, the son of an American mother
and a Japanese father, spent his childhood in both America
and Japan. He studied with Brancusi in Paris in the 1920s and
worked with clay, stone and bronze in New York. On his return
to Japan in 1950 he ‘jumped right into the world of Japanese
pottery...’ as one critic wrote. He was ‘devouring the Japanese
clay… he has become a potter… this is an exhibition of pottery.
Nevertheless Noguchi is firing his pottery as sculpture, or, at least
52 — 53
7
Quoted in Garth Clark,
A Century of Ceramics in
the United States 1871978, New York 1979,
p.314
8
For a fuller discussion
see Bert WintherTamaki, The Ceramic
Art of Isamu Noguchi:
A Close Embrace of the
Earth, in Isamu Noguchi
and Modern Japanese
Ceramics, (ed.) Louise
Allison Cort and Bert
Winther-Tamaki, Arthur
M. Sackler Gallery/
University of California
Press, 2003, pp.1-85
9
Willemijn Stokvisa, ‘CoBrA and Ceramics’, in
Yvonne G.J. Joris (ed.),
Everything Valuable is
Defenceless, ‘s-Hertogenbosch, Museum het
Kruitjuis, 1993, p.20
they are being fired in a manner that captivates the fancy of the
sculptor... He finds rightful justification in the primitive Haniwa
sculpture; no modern potter shall deny the sculptural position
of the Haniwa. The Haniwa is ultimately united with the ancient
earthenwares and pottery; Noguchi’s aim is the revivification of
this primitive relationship.’7
In his exhibition in 1952 at Kamakura, Noguchi showed a great
range of vessels and sculptures, quick figurative clay studies and
fragmentary totems ranging from the scale of a hand to over six
feet high. These were often on wooden or metal stands, not to
express significance or value, but to show them like exhibits from
an ethnographic display. Many were like transparent structures,
abstracted versions of the interiority of the figure. They are, in
fact, abstracted haniwa, something that Noguchi hinted at in his
catalogue essay: ‘Abstractions themselves are rooted in associations as potent as anatomy.’8 The kilns he used were wood-fired,
his sculptures were unglazed; their connection with the primitive
was undisturbed by decorative surface associations.
This approach to immediacy was a challenge shared by the
CoBrA group, formed in 1948 by Danish, Belgian and Dutch
artists, sculptors and writers. For them too, improvisatory
assemblage was a way of escaping from the strait-jacket of high
art. Determinedly experimental, their approach to materials was
unhampered by anxieties about technique. In 1948 the Dutch
artists Karel Appel, Corneille, Anton Rooskens and Constant also
experimented with ceramics, voicing similar concerns. In 1954
the Danish artist Asger Jorn organised ‘International encounters
in ceramics’, inviting amongst others Fontana, Corneille and
Appel from the Netherlands and Matta from Chile to work collaboratively and experimentally in the Italian workshop in Albisola
of Tullio Mazzoti. Karel Appel recalled that ‘It was like opening
the floodgates. We were allowed to make pottery at Mazzoti’s factory. Everyone was busy painting pots and plates and vases, but I
preferred to hit the bits of clay I pulled out of the dirt with an iron
bar. I beat animal reliefs into the material, and once I had hammered out the shape, I painted it before firing the piece…’9
Appel’s work, with its bright poster paint colours and freely
scratched surfaces, mostly consisted of an almost medieval bestiary of animals and birds, graphic and emotional. He also made
small squeezed heads from clay with punctured eyes and mouths,
an intense and cursory engagement with clay that emphasises
the anti-aesthetic. If playing with clay constituted a crime
against the ideals of modernism, then there was true radicalism
in CoBrA’s involvement in ceramics at Albisola where, amongst
other initiatives, a hundred plates were decorated by children and
exhibited on equal terms. In endeavouring to release spontaneity
with clay, reliefs and murals were made, their vast scale necessitating huge gestural markings.
All these factors—the sense of unmediated materiality, the
engagement with transformative process, the anxiety to avoid
making commodities—connect these mid-century artists with the
focus of the 1970s’ environmental movement. Here, the iconography of earth continued to be potent. Robert Smithson called
the key 1968 New York exhibition Earthworks after the science
fiction writer Brian W Aldis’ novel where, in a dystopian future,
soil had become precious. This concept was explored within
the movement, loosely titled ‘Earth Art’, where many sculptors
worked by displacing earth in the landscape or removing it into
galleries. Indeed, commenting on the1970 Unfired Clay exhibition
held at Southern Illinois University, Evert Johnson wrote that ‘[t]
here is something spiritually appropriate in the implication of the
pot returning to earth, of artists participating physically in the
installation of their own exhibit, and of creative man being, for
a short time at least, really at one with his work, the earth from
which it was made and elements that besiege both’.10 In a parallel spirit of adventure the American ceramicist James Melchert
produced a happening in Amsterdam, Changes (1972), in which
people dipped their heads in clay slip and then sat in a room of
different temperatures while the drying process was filmed. In
America Charles Simonds (1945-) made his own body the site of
exhibition: ‘I lie down nude on the earth, cover myself with clay,
remodel and transform my body into a landscape with clay, and
then build a fantasy dwelling-place on my body on the earth.’ His
archaic ruined constructions made out of thousands of tiny bricks
either on his body or on the edges of steps, window sills, or vacant
lots in cities attempted to make connections between the body
and the earth as sacred places—‘Landscape-Body-Dwelling is a
process of land into body, body into land.’
10
Evert Johnson, ‘Clay
Unfired’, in: Craft Horizons, 1970, pp.36-37
Anthony Gormley in European Field and Host (1993) highlighted
the counterpoint between the formless and the formed, the specific and the general through two parallel installations in the Kunsthalle zu Kiel in Germany. In European Field Gormley installed
40,000 terracotta figures produced by children, their parents and
grandparents in the galleries dedicated to European painting.
These small figures crowd together to form a mass that is both
menacing and absurdly affecting in its vulnerability. The figures’
historical resonances (Japanese haniwa, Chinese terracotta
Isamu Noguchi
The Curtain of Dream, 1952
warriors) are less significant than the impact of the installation,
the challenge to museological convention in that the artefacts
have taken over. In the parallel installation in the contemporary
wing three galleries were flooded with 43 cubic metres of clay
and 15,000 litres of seawater to the same height as the terracotta
figures in European Field. The polarity between the two states of
clay and fired ceramic could not be clearer, nor more resonant.
*
‘The digression into ceramics which has lately occupied the elder
generation of painters in Paris has tended to isolate certain decorative and frivolous aspects of their talents at the expense of their
expressive powers. The ceramic form itself is doubtless involved
here, yet it ought to be recognised too that this digression has
caught some of these artists in moments of relaxation if not actual
decline. Of Léger this is particular true.’11
11
Hilton Kramer, Arts
Digest vol 29, 1st January 1955, p.22
Most art critics have anatomised the encounters between artists
and clay as merely playful, indicative of (in the grand and pompous words of Hilton Kramer) ‘high unseriousness’, digressive
activities rather than central ones.
This is fascinating for two reasons. Firstly, ‘decoration’ is used
as a term of critical disapprobation. This is particularly revealing, for decoration was seen by formalist critics like Clement
Greenberg as a minor activity, one based around the disguising
of forms rather than revelation of form. Without doubt this is to
use decoration to diminish by association with the role of women
in ceramics. It was a disparagement strengthened by Greenberg’s
advocacy of ‘optical’ sculpture that appealed to the intellect not to
the touch, something that was rapidly becoming an orthodoxy in
the 1950s. Clay, messy and inchoate and sensual, had none of the
putative clarity of steel. A good example is the critical reception
given to Noguchi’s work with clay. His freedom with traditions
and his eclecticism was read by some Japanese critics as superficial. When Noguchi’s ceramics were exhibited in 1954 at the
Stable Gallery in New York Hilton, Kramer saw them as works of
‘high unseriousness’ and Time described them as ‘the gingerbread
cookies of a playful and somewhat inebriated baker’. They were
regarded as frivolities, as if Noguchi was on a Japanese holiday
from his responsibilities to high seriousness—responsibilities that
could only be achieved with other materials. Noguchi certainly
felt this reproach. He had no exhibition after this for five years,
and in his next show did not exhibit clay works, but instead
marble, granite and bronze sculpture.12
12
‘Eastern Yeast’, in:
Time, 10 January 1955,
p.54. Another reviewer,
Otis Gage, called them
‘humourous…playful…
charming…decoration’,
Arts and Architecture,
February 1955, p.4. For
the most interesting
and extensive description of the reactions to
Noguchi’s work see Bert
Winther-Tamaki, Op.
cit. For the relationship
between Noguchi and
Japanese ceramics see
Louise Allison Cort,
‘Japanese Encounters
with Clay’, in: Isamu
Noguchi and Modern
Japanese Ceramics,
Berkeley 2003, pp.1031991.
Secondly the disparagement of critics suggests that there was an
element of relaxation, of play in the ceramics of these artists that
could not be appropriated into general critical discourse, and
could not be understood by contemporary critics. This anxiety
around play has continued to this day. It reflects a limited understanding of what happens in the process of creating art, presupposing that doggedness is the main driving force. To suggest
otherwise is to question the status of artworks themselves. For
one of the aspects of play is an upending of the linearity of narrative: endings are not discrete, they are generative and provisional.
In a parallel way Miró, Picasso and Fontana all upend the rootedness of ceramic objects and treat vessels in some ways as found
objects, susceptible to the conditions of surrealist exchange. Vessels are starting points, not conclusions.
When art critics have written of these encounters they have
usually denied any significance to the collaborators who fired or
glazed these artists’ ceramics. The potters disappear. There is an
invisible history of great collaborations: between Gauguin and
the pioneering French potter Ernst Chaplet, between the Fauves
and Andre Metthey, Miró and the Catalan potter Artigas, and
Asger Jorn
Animal, ca. 1944
between Noguchi and the maverick Japanese potter Rosanjin.
Collaboration continues to this day—the Swiss potter Hans Spinner works with Caro, Tapies and Chillida. There is also another
history of antipathy and misunderstanding, a chronic dislike
of the world of ceramics by some artists, and a bitter animus in
return. Critics from the ceramics world (if they have deigned
to notice these things) feel these ‘visitors to clay’ are just mucking about—and getting too much attention for their efforts. To
these complaints they add that the artists are only as good as the
craftsmen who fire and glaze.
A good example of this cabalistic defensiveness was the response
to Picasso’s ceramics when the exhibition Picasso in Provence
toured Britain in 1950. The trade journal Pottery and Glass called
them ‘slap happy’, whilst a curator in Stoke-on-Trent wrote that
‘Picasso’s use of slip in broad washes is not altogether happy; it
is a painter’s approach and not effective as pottery decoration.
Doubtless he felt the limitations of a poor body material and it
would be interesting to see what he could do with a good Staffordshire earthenware.’13
13
G.J.V. Bemrose, ‘Picasso
and the Five Towns’,
in: Pottery and Glass,
December 1950, pp.613. For other British
reactions to Picasso,
see: Tanya Harrod,
The Crafts in Britain in
the 20th Century, New
Haven 1999, pp.26671. For European and
American reactions,
see: Edmund de Waal,
20th Century Ceramics,
London 2003. The most
succinct reaction to
Picasso’s ‘catalytic’ use
of materials is by Arnesen, ‘Picasso the Craftsman’, in: Craft Horizons,
no.6, Nov-Dec, 1967,
pp.28-33
14
Garth Clark et al (ed.),
The Mad Potter of
Biloxi: The Art and Life
of George E. Ohr, New
York 1989
This defensiveness, a feeling that it is inappropriate for potters
who by definition work with clay to ‘play’ with clay, or to allow
others to take such liberties, has had excessive significance. But
it reflects only one, highly moralised, aspect of the studio pottery world. The more visceral approach is exemplified by George
Ohr’s almost kinaesthetic description of his experience of clay,
‘When I found the potter’s wheel I felt it all over like a wild duck
in water’.14 This can stand for an alternate strand of playfulness.
Play can happen if clay is a primary activity: it is not only a function of liberation from alternative art forms. Interestingly, the
descriptions of play are often metamorphic. Here is Ohr’s vivid
account of the way in which spatial and formal possibilities
unfold sequentially when he is making pots on the wheel, ‘This
is what I [can] do, with four pounds of clay on the wheel—
blindfolded—turn a jug, put a corncob stopper in it, change the
corncob into a funnel, have the funnel disappear, and have a
jar, change the jar into an urn and half a dozen shapes.’ He is
describing something akin to a performance, to a series of ‘manifestations of lived moments’. The blindfold was part of Ohr’s
fairground performance, but it also reflects the absolute primacy
of the bodily over the visual. A parallel can be made with an exhibition of Voulkos’ pots in 1968, work characterised by intense
slashes and punctures. In a telling critique Jim Melchert wrote
that ‘[the] group is composed of the most haptic pottery I’ve seen
58 — 59
in a long time; it wouldn’t surprise me if the pots were made in
the dark.’15 Blindfolded, haptic work with clay; this is serious play.
It is this element of serious play that allows us to see commonality
between some potters and some artists. Being seen by others to be
‘playing’ can be liberating: it enabled them to be transgressive, to
muck around with structures of ceramic world. This is what joins
Ohr and Voulkos with Miró and Fontana. Miró wrote in his Surrealist notebook of poems in 1948 that it was ‘plates that are not
even signed/not even signed…/plates that are sold/five sous a
piece...’ that were alive; their cheapness meant that they were not
collectable. Miró was in search of
‘...ceramics that one can throw in the face
during ecstasies of LOVE
not glass cabinets the colour of tits..
frozen porcelains of decadent dancers…’16
This polarisation of the ‘ecstasy’ of ceramics that are alive and
‘frozen porcelains’ was based on the collapsing of the great chain
of technical interference of Art Pottery into an immediacy of
working with clay.
15
Jim Melchert, ‘Peter
Voulkos: A Return to
Pottery’, in: Craft Horizons, Sept-Oct, 1968,
pp.20-1
16
Quoted in Rosa Marie
Malet, ‘From the Assassination of Painting
to Ceramics’, in: Anne
McPherson (ed.), Miró
Playing with Fire, Toronto 2000, pp.23-6.
Peter Voulkos
Untitled Vase, 1963