The Form of Tradition: Part 2
March 1st, 2010 at 10:16am Doug Navarra
My topic you will notice has a slight change. Instead of Form & Tradition, I believe it is The Form of Tradition. This change allows a blending of two categories as one, instead of treating them as separate entities. My appeal is for “pluralism” in the study of Tradition and to allow for a diversity of inclusion.
Commeraws Stoneware, N.Y. approx 2 gallon Ovoid Crock, early 1800's
C.Crolius Ovoid Crock, approx 2 gallon, blue frame swag around makers mark, 12", 1800
Paul Cushman, One Gallon Crock with 6 distinct figural decorations, 9 3/4", 1809
Many of you who know me see that I have directed my attention to the early history of American pottery, specifically the early jug makers who, as early as the mid seventeenth century, were producing functional/utilitarian ware on these shores. It is interesting to note how little of this American ceramic history is reflected by contemporary practitioners today in the mainstream. I too am suspect and only after doing my own research did I come to realize there were early potters like Clarkson Crolius, John Remy, John Bell, and Paul Cushman, who made a significant contribution. But it’s still hard to understand why we do not pay attention to our own history?
Along the way, early potters have been classified and categorized, most often as folk artists, perhaps because the history falls neatly and easily into a method for study.
Unsigned Ovoid Jug, probably NY, approx 1800, incisions with blue designs
David Morgan, N.Y. -Ovoid Jug approx 2 gallon, accented scallop design, 14 1/2", 1790
J.Remmey, Manhattan-Wells, N.Y.1 gallon, 1790, one of N.Y.'s first pottersNavarra in the MAD Open Studio Feb 19th, 2010
Today there is a whole sub-culture of collectors who pay large sums of money for the right of ownership or, shall I say, temporary governorship of these historic vessels that bring a life-time of close living and daily appreciation. We are also privileged to have institutions, like the American Folk Art Museum, with dedicated curatorial staff to form and preserve collections of objects that become a nucleus of our past. These jugs, these vessels, these objects of art and design are assembled by institutions for public appreciation and learning. But these objects are divorced from their original context and act now as monuments in our exhibition halls, snap-shots of time, place, identity, and culture past. Their stresses, conditions, attitudes and influences, that originally reflected their initial form, have been arrested by time. We appreciate them as reliquaries from the past collective Self and yet often times our history is left forgotten, supplanted by what we would rather see as “new.”
Navarra in the MAD Open Studio Feb 19th, 2010
The Form of Tradition would like to advocate bringing our art history, specifically our historic pottery, into the light of day by posing the question of its absence in the contemporary dialogue. Is our lack of understanding about our American ceramic art history a responsibility of the individual or is this something better left to curators in public museums? Are museums enabling a view of our historic art and design in the contemporary dialogue so that it is not always a linear progression of time? Can exhibitions of objects be drawn juxtaposing history with what is “new,” revealing cultures using comparative design?
Impressed upon human consciousness for eons, the archetypal blueprint for our human patterning of action and objects help form the values and virtues that define tradition, through which our freedom is exercised. This gives shape to the present and simultaneously differentiates and joins “then” and “now.” This, I believe, is The Form of Tradition.
Many thanks to Bruce and Vicki Waasdorp for the use of these digital photos of historic vessels. For even more information I would encourage you to visit their American Pottery Auction Website: http://antiques-stoneware.com/index.html
Entry Filed under: in the studio
1 Comment Add your own
1. Karen Chambers | March 7th, 2010 at 4:09 pm
What an intriguing concept — to imagine Objects: USA 2010. Flipping through the original catalog’s pages divided by material, which included enamel, mosaic, and plastic as well as the big five – ceramic, glass, metal and jewelry, wood, and fiber–I was struck by three things. First, perhaps not surprisingly, many of the artists and artisans are unknown today.
For many who are still known, their work has evolved to become more refined versions of the forms and ideas they were pursuing four decades ago. Richard Shaw’s entry–Couch and Chair with Landscape and Cows,1966-67, earthenware painted with acrylics–is an obvious precursor of his later tour-de-force trompe l’oeil works. Such evolution can also be seen in other ceramic “artists’”—a loaded word that in some circles still evokes impassioned discussion—more recent work. Stephen De Stabler’s reclining woman now stands, and Jun Kaneko’s striped organic forms have become monument. Ken Price’s blobby painted, not glazed, forms, and Ron Nagel’s cup forms do inform their later work.
For others, they had already achieved their mature style in 1970. For example, Toshiko Takaezu’s 1968 Form A is a round porcelain vessel with a vestigial opening with her sensitive signature glaze treatment. It could have been made this year. And Peter Voulkos had already developed his abstract expressionist approach to vessel and plate forms.
But for some of the most prominent names today, there have been radical changes. An argument might be made that Dale Chihuly’s awkward glass form filled with neon and argon gases illuminating it is a precursor of his later vessels where the light emanates from his gloriously colored walls, but it is a stretch only a linear-minded art historian would make. Wendell Castle’s career has veered from one form and material to another, making his style his lack of style. Here he presented one of his organic laminated-wood exploration of functional furniture forms.
What is also interesting is that potters making functional forms, including Val Cushing, Ken Ferguson, Byron Temple, Karen Karnes, and Beatrice Woods, remained faithful to that idiom.
Lee Nordness also weighed in on the perennial question of what to call what those included in this collection made. He preferred “object,” which he noted the dictionary defined as “[a]nything that is visible or tangible and is stable in form, anything that may be apprehended intellectually; a thing to which thought and action are directed; the end toward which effort is directed, goal, purpose,” to the “perjorative connotations of ‘handcraft.’”
In an aside, he ends his essay with a “Coda” expressing his fear that the typewriter threatens the survival of handwriting. What would he have made of a discussion such as this taking place in cyberspace where words are no longer as concrete as the mechanical strikes of keys on paper.
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