Form & Tradition
February 18th, 2010 at 03:01pm Doug Navarra
Shino Flask #3 - Wood-fired Stoneware
I’ve been very enamored by the ceramics coming out of England built on the Leach and Cardew tradition. Some of the top potters there are doing some great work. But what I see there (as opposed to here in the States) is an unparalleled pride or charge of excitement for functional work, which I think is a very compelling aspect of their tradition. Here in the States, we tend to look outside of our American pottery tradition and towards the more extensive traditions of Europe and Asia and then adapt what we see. It leaves me wondering if that heightened level of excitement that the British have for their tradition, will ever be captured here in the States within our own tradition?
This leaves a few questions and I’d like to get your take on it from our blogging audience.
I’d like to use my residency here at MAD as a means to look at and explore the American vernacular of our own ceramic heritage, specifically to explore the forms of the early American jug makers and re-interpret those forms in a contemporary light. Those early and now historic utilitarian ceramic wares are both fabric and form of our American ceramic heritage and I believe there is some work to do in recognizing this often neglected aspect of our history.
So I would like to create a forum for discussion, inviting all to participate: to define here and now, how Tradition works and informs us today? Specifically I am directing this to ceramic artists and potters working in the field but it can be open to a larger audience response.
In the broader context, I’d like to ask how does this traditional lens of our own diversity form the meaning of who we are today? It can be as broad or as specific as you want to make it, if you choose to make it at all…… This blog is interactive
Entry Filed under: in the studio
3 Comments Add your own
1. Barb English | February 19th, 2010 at 5:37 pm
Yeah Doug!!!!
2. Lauren Becker Downey | February 20th, 2010 at 2:04 pm
As an artist NOT involved in the world of ceramics and pottery, my observation is one that there ARE traditional potters at work today, continuing the traditions of 100+ years. For the average person who purchases and uses these functional pieces, their choices are based on their limited knowledge of what makes a good pot.
I think when ceramic artists who were educated in the university system since the 60′s, look to Europe and Asia as the standard to meet (or beat), I believe they are doing what artists do. And that is finding ways to push the limits. So, through that lens, it might APPEAR that contemporary US potters are adapting from what is seen from the extensive traditions elsewhere. I think the traditions are ours. Look out of the art world to see functional potters’ work based on what came before, down through family lines or in the communities.
Ah, did that make sense? LB
3. Doug Navarra | February 24th, 2010 at 2:06 pm
I wish I could believe that all artists were working towards the ideal of “finding ways to push the limits” of their work. There happens to be a myriad of forces upon the artist at work today, especially in the marketplace, that often places limitations on their performance and direction. This is not to say that there are not good functional potters and artists working in the field today. There are, but we have to make value judgments based upon our own insights, background, and educational experience, or the lack of it. Buying a blue coffee mug because it fits the décor of your kitchen is not one of them. As a consuming public, an artist’s reward of a sale does not always confirm that the work is good. There are artists who find a “signature style” and who work within that style for years because it sells, so the subscription to pushing the limits becomes tempered by the sale in accord with their personal survival. The field of contemporary glass is plagued with gallery artists working with the same idea for years, not willing to take the risk, but because of the intrinsically beautiful and seductive material, (visual “eye candy”), they sell it to a largely uneducated audience. Then there are artists who take such risks and try so hard to present something “new” that their work becomes such an outlandish novelty, it has little to do with content and meaning in a work of art, and the work falls way short. We have conceptually based artists today who believe that the beauty of a work is found in its idea so that the object is no longer what we see, but what we are led to think, beauty becomes idea based, but then can leave the viewer without a ground to stand on. We also have to acknowledge good work being done that does not conform to the arena of the art gallery world, or craft fair, but remains unmarketable and virtually unseen by the public. I think where we are headed by answering all this is to come to terms with a definition of content, and base our judgments on the work as to whether it supports that definition, breaks the rules of our beliefs, or just doesn’t make it at all. Even good functional pots have strong concepts that support the work.
As for the university system that grew out of the sixties, it helped to usher in a “liberating attitude” to our work within the crafts. The exhibition Objects: USA (1969) was heralded as significant and from the dust jacket of the book “many artists have turned to crafts as a reaction to the conformity, the built-in obsolescence, and the anonymity of mass-produced objects. They are creating objects to satisfy none but their own standards of technique and aesthetics…” American craftsman also became fascinated by what was happening in painting and sculpture (Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and POP) and one could argue that our American tradition became conscript to that fine art milieu. It also questioned the role of technique in the means of our thinking and that too then became a part of our then “liberated” attitude. University art departments grew and found it necessary to find the means to include many of the hand crafts, glass in particular, in the educational process.
But my original question about the role of tradition bears down on where we find our sources, what we choose to acknowledge or leave out, categorize and compartmentalize.
I say this with the realization that we live in an Age of Pluralism, and we need to begin to recognize our voice today without a continued loss of who we were yesterday.
Can you imagine what Objects: USA 2010 (Forty Years After) would look like today?
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