“Beware! Answered prayers cause more tears than unanswered ones.” Garth Clark quotes St Teresa of Avila in the opening keynote address at Verge, the 11th Australian National Ceramics Conference. Garth Clark’s presence, and that of his partner Mark Del Vecchio is the result of many prayers on the part of the Verge organising committee. For six years Australians had been attempting to persuade Garth Clark – of the Garth Clark Gallery, New York, ‘capo da capo’ of dealers in ceramic art, writer, editor and contributor to over 25 books on ceramic art – to come to Australia and speak. The cherry on the cake was that Mark Del Vecchio, author of Postmodern Ceramics and director of the Garth Clark gallery, came to speak as well.

That they were here was due not only to the persistence of Verge’s Stephanie Outridge-Field but also to Hurricane Katrina. In a devastating act of postmodern irony, the hurricane lifted a four-storey floating casino and dumped it in on top of the almost completed Frank Gehry designed Ohr O’Keefe Museum, flattening it completely. Garth Clark, who wrote a book on the life and work of George ‘The Mad Potter of Biloxi’ Ohr, should have been attending the opening of the museum on the day Verge opened.
Clark came neither to chorus along with the gloom merchants nor to pat backs reassuringly. Instead he came to tell us:

“Momentum is building towards a new direction for ceramics as art, and none of us know exactly where it is leading and whether we will like it when we get there. This is the result of an answered prayer – please take ceramics seriously as an art form on a par with the rest of the fine arts.”

And how have these prayers been answered? Prestigious and conservative institutions, strongholds of the fine arts world, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art NY and the Museum of Modern Art NY have opened the way, setting heartening precedents with their exhibitions of ceramic artists Betty Woodman and Ken Price, with the Woodman exhibition receiving rave reviews from the ‘we’ve- seen-it-all’ New York art critics. The significance of ceramics has been marked by an upgrading of museum collections of ceramics and the proliferation of museums devoted wholly to ceramics in many parts of the world. In New York, the international centre of contemporary arts, influential fine arts galleries are inviting ceramicists in. Other recent ceramic triumphs have been: UK ceramist Grayson Perry’s win of the Tate’s Turner Prize; the critics’ applause for Kathy Butterly’s four-inch-high cups at the Carnegie International exhibition; and Gwyn Hanssen Pigott reinventing her trails with a miscellany of pots from the Freer ceramics collection at the Smithsonian, to accompany an exhibition of her own work.

Above: Garth Clark

Left: Betty Woodman, Tang Pillow Pitcher, 1980, earthenware, h.45cm, w. 57cm I Right:Christine McHorse, Untitled, 2006, Micaceous Clay, h.46cm, w.26cm

And now what?

But ceramic art is being accepted in the fine arts world not because it is ceramic, but because it is art. So where does this leave us, devoted as we are to the medium of clay?

Clark uses the metaphor of: ‘Fortress Ceramica’ – our symbolic but highly effective walled city that we have built over the last 150 years; a self-contained society from which we can safely bemoan our marginalisation, while at the same time avoiding the pressures and the aggression of the bigger art market … There was a point at which ceramics needed this fortress to survive, when we were shaky, vulnerable, had few friends and some powerful enemies, modernism being one … But in 1980 this … was changing and becoming more of a regressive academy that favoured the traditional over the avant-garde and the academic over the experimental … our cry for integration, perversely, grew louder.”

Clark presents two possible futures for ceramics: one in which Fortress Ceramica becomes a historical theme park, a monument to past glories, abandoned by the new generation; or, if we are willing to dismantle the mud brick walls that have kept us so cosy for the last few decades, we can see clay as one of many media that we can choose to work with as artists. If we welcome in the ‘visitors’, artists from fine arts disciplines who have become intrigued with this fascinating material, in exchange we can benefit from their far wider network, marketing resources and prestige – “the power, reach, history and potential of ceramic art is actually radically increased” – with the result being an improved market for ceramics.

The Crafts Movement is dead. Haven’t you noticed?

Clark points an accusing finger at what he calls the ‘Anglo-Oriental pottery company’. Bernard Leach and his “narrow vision, bigoted, uninformed and so fearful of the now … has blunted us as artists”.

Contemporary design is reaching new heights: sharp, cool, innovative, and desired by a huge market. Where, Clark asks, are the functional handmade ceramics that tap into this soaring market for the contemporary urban home? This “brave new design world needs equally distinctive dinnerware” not more clunky pottery. Clark points out that utopian notions of affordability are not long term sustainable, and to survive, functional ceramicists either need to radically increase their prices or incorporate some degree of industrial production techniques.

Poised on the precipice of change

The Garth Clark Gallery is one of the very few remaining all-clay galleries in New York. But rather than finding this a cause for pessimism, Clark sees this as a time in which many new and exciting possibilities for ceramics lie ahead. Contemporary ceramic work has a place in general galleries. The much longed for integration with the art world has finally been achieved. Our proper place is now with the new art/design/architecture of our time. However, he warns, a refusal to accept this “will ultimately result in us being sidelined once again”. Welcome the change, he invites us, and be proud of our part in bringing it about. Be optimistic, be strong and accept the challenge of unexpected and unintended consequences that come when prayers are answered.

Find the vessel

Mark Del Vecchio, in his talk entitled ‘The 21st Century Vessel’, says, “The conventional wisdom when we opened our gallery in 1981 was, in order to get recognition as an artist, one should avoid the vessel. Or if one remained with that discipline, call it something else, disguise its origins. That proved to be wrongheaded. Ceramic sculpture has had a much harder time gaining traction in the art world than the vessel.”

He backs this up by pointing to the use of the vessel form by ceramic artists whose boat is firmly anchored in the art world. There is what he calls Ken Price’s ‘stealth’ vessels - his architectural cups, Kathy Butterly’s small forms, Ron Nagle’s cups, Grayson Perry’s vase forms. He refers to what he calls 20th century artists such as Peter Voulkos, Robert Turner, Richard Devore, Hans Coper, Gwyn Hanssen Pigott and others who have brought one form of the expression of the vessel to a zenith with their focus on “authorship, tactility, sensuality, original form and direct manipulation”.
The 21st century artist has another focus:

“Not the touchy-feely handcrafted and physical characteristics, rather the meaning of pots, their intellectual weight … Authorship is a modernist concept. The artist owns the piece by making it by hand and inventing its shape and surface. Postmodernism’s great shift was the concept that one could appropriate an object and, through manipulating its context, make it your own.”

The artist is a ‘bricoleur’ (Claude Levi-Strauss’s term), literally someone who tinkers about, taking a bit of this and that and reassembling it. Duchamp’s Fountain, a urinal taken and placed on a plinth, is the earliest and most famous example of this approach. Howard Kottler, a proto-postmodernist US ceramic artist said in the 1960s, “I am lazy … I seldom touch clay. I use other people’s moulds, other people’s ideas and other people make my decals.”

Above image: Ken Price, Mildred, 1991, edition of 25, earthenware, h.7.5cm, w.16.25cm

In the 21st century, the familiarity of the vessel form is exploited to give another layer of meaning to the artist’s exploration of contemporary issues such as AIDS, globalism, consumerism, the factory and our preoccupation with technology. Cindy Sherman’s comment on celebrity in her adaptation of Marie Antoinette’s rococo pink and gold tureen; Nicole Cherubini’s trailer trash vase forms raided from history and decorated with fake jewellery, fake gold chains and rabbit fur; and Denise Pelletier’s spouted invalid cups with their accumulation of caring; all these use the vessel form and are still made with clay, still bear the artist’s imprimatur. But what of wider interpretations of the vessel such as Kate Erickson and Mel Ziegler’s camouflage house painted in historical colours by a camouflage artist with each colour labelled with its name, or James Turrell’s ‘Lapsed Quaker Ware’, elegant black basaltware crockery realised from his design by Irish potter Nicholas Mosse.

Del Vecchio asks, “Do these kinds of ceramics mean that ceramics is doomed to be concept driven? Have we lost the primacy of earth, fire and emotion?” He refers us to another approach to 21st century vessel making by contemporary Native American potters. Using the same materials and methods of making as their ancestors, in the exhibition Free Spirit Native American ceramic artists Nathan Begaye, Susan Folwell, Christine McHorse, Virgil Ortiz and Diego Romero have gone beyond the Pueblo kitsch to make vessels that are provocative, transgressive and sometimes extremely beautiful. But this new direction comes from a very specific handful of makers. Will the vessel survive only as a manifestation of a cerebral postmodern post-industrial aesthetic? Does this mean the end of the vessel as we have known it, that touchy-feely creation laden with history, our history? Mark Del Vecchio equivocates. He regretfully makes it clear that the 20th century potter is an endangered species. The vessel will survive but “not always in hands of potters ... and not always in formats we are comfortable with”.

The message that both Garth Clark and Mark Del Vecchio have given ceramicists is, as Del Vecchio says, “Change is not an issue of morality but one of inevitability. One cannot cling to the romance of past eras and expect to make a fresh comment in one’s own time.” The gift that these two speakers have given us is to articulate clearly with sincerity, humour, and a deeply felt passion for the medium, a movement within the ceramics/arts world of which we in Australia have been aware but about which there has been little public discussion. Their analysis will hopefully provoke thought and clarify options for future directions for Australian artists, educators and galleries.

K.Weiss 2006
In the next issue of JAC, Karen Weiss will be following the Garth Clark/Mark del Vecchio trail with an article on their pre-Verge seminar on marketing work, pricing, galleries, dealers and making it at home and abroad.