Contemporary British Ceramics and the Influence of Sculpture: Monuments, Multiples, Destruction and Display 9781138054295, 9781315114132

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Contemporary British Ceramics and the Influence of Sculpture

‘This is an essential read for the student of contemporary ceramics, providing a fresh perspective on “post-studio” ceramic practice.’ Stephen Dixon, Manchester Metro­politan University, UK This book investigates how British contemporary artists who work with clay have managed, in the space of a single generation, to take ceramics from niche-interest craft to the pristine territories of the contemporary art gallery. This development has been accompanied (and perhaps propelled) by the kind of critical discussion usually reserved for the ‘higher’ discipline of sculpture. Ceramics is now encountering and colliding with sculpture, both formally and intellectually. Laura Gray examines what this means for the old hierarchies between art and craft, the identity of the potter, and the character of a discipline tied to a specific material but wanting to participate in critical discussions that extend far beyond clay. Laura Gray has a PhD in Art History from Cardiff Metropolitan University and is a freelance curator, writer and researcher specializing in contemporary art and craft, and twentieth-century sculpture.

Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies

This series is our home for innovative research in the fields of art and visual studies. It includes monographs and targeted edited collections that provide new insights into visual culture and art practice, theory, and research. For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/art/series/RRAR What Drawing and Painting Really Mean The Phenomenology of Image and Gesture Paul Crowther The Concept of the Animal and Modern Theories of Art Roni Grén The Aesthetics of Scientific Data Representation More than Pretty Pictures Edited by Lotte Philipsen and Rikke Schmidt Kjærgaard Art : Process : Change Inside a Socially Situated Practice Loraine Leeson Visualizing War Emotions, Technologies, Communities Edited by Anders Engberg-Pedersen and Kathrin Maurer Perception and Agency in Shared Spaces of Contemporary Art Edited by Cristina Albu and Dawna Schuld Contemporary British Ceramics and the Influence of Sculpture Iconoclasm, Monument, and Multiples Laura Gray Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies Making and Being Made Edited by Corey Dzenko and Theresa Avila

Contemporary British Ceramics and the Influence of Sculpture Monuments, Multiples, Destruction and Display Laura Gray

First published 2018 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business  2018 Taylor & Francis The right of Laura Gray to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested. ISBN: 978-1-138-05429-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-11413-2 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgements Introduction 1 Becoming Partners? Creative Tension: Defining Ceramics  1 Sculpture: A Category in Danger of Collapse  4 The Art and Craft Divide  6 An Overview of the Book  8

vii x xi 1

2 Monumental Matters Monuments and the Collective Memory  12 Two Approaches: The Logical and the Abstracted Monument  15 Ceramics in Civic Space  18 Wheel of Fortune: Monumentalizing Stoke-on-Trent  20 Making it Big: The Monumental Style  29

12

3 The Numbers Game: Multi-part Compositions Do Numbers Matter?  41 Plane Thinking: Horizontal Groups  43 High Rise: Stack, Build, Repeat  49 The Expressive Possibility of Repetition  52 Clare Twomey: Master Assembler  53

41

4 The Art of Destruction: Ceramics, Sculpture and Iconoclasm What is Iconoclasm?  62 Iconoclasm and Art  63 Vases and Vandalism  64 Out of the Ordinary: Destroying Domestic Ware  65 Clay in Common  68 Past Imperfect: The Art of Transformative Repair  71 Destruction as Cultural Critique  74 Please Do Not Touch: Destruction in the Vitrine  78 Biting the Hand that Feeds? Iconoclasm as Institutional Critique  80

60

vi Contents 5 Encounters: Ceramics on Show Thinking About Exhibitions  90 Clay as an Authentic Material for Sculpture: The Raw and the Cooked  90 Ceramics and Minimalism: The New White  92 Ceramics Under Threat: A Secret History of Clay  94 Post-Studio Practice: Possibilities and Losses  95 Ceramics for the Home  97 The Separation of Art and the Home  97 Home Coming: Contemporary Ceramics in Domestic Space  98 Domesticating the White Cube  104 Conclusion Radical Plasticity  109 A Single Material  110 Workmanship 110 The Vessel  111 The Current of Influence  111 The Future  113 Bibliography Index

89

109

114 132

Figures

Cover Image Edmund de Waal, Portbou, 2016. 14 porcelain vessels and 5 Cor-Ten steel blocks in a pair of aluminium and plexiglass vitrines, 53 × 116 × 15 cm each; 53 × 116 × 35 cm overall. Photograph by Mike Bruce. Courtesy of Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin | Paris.

Chapter Images 1.1 2.1

Keith Harrison, Last Supper, 2006. Photograph by Ted Giffords. 3 Antony Gormley, Angel of the North, 1998. Steel, 20 × 54 × 2.2 m. Photograph by Colin Cuthbert.  the artist. 16 2.2 Paul Cummins and Tom Piper, Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red, 2014. Poppies and original concept by artist Paul Cummins and installation designed by Tom Piper. Paul Cummins Ceramics Limited in conjunction with Historic Royal Palaces. 19 2.3 The Memorial to Heroic Self Sacrifice, Postman’s Park, London. 20 2.4 Clare Twomey, Monument, 2009. Photograph by Clare Twomey Studio. 21 2.5 Neil Brownsword, SY Series, 2001. 24 2.6 Neil Brownsword, Salvage Series, 2005/2008. Courtesy Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art. 25 2.7 Three Fused Teapots, c.1750. The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery. 27 2.8 Neil Brownsword, Salvage Series, detail, 2005/2008. Courtesy Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art. 28 2.9 Julian Stair, Six Cups and Beakers on a Tall Ground, 2017, and Eleven Cups on a Floating Ground, 2017. 30 2.10 Julian Stair, Monumental Jars XIII, XII and X, 2012. Courtesy Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art. 32 2.11 Julian Stair, Columbarium, 2012. Courtesy Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art. 34 2.12 Felicity Aylieff, Tower, 2010/2011. Wheel-thrown porcelain, constructed in sections, painted in cobalt blue, made in China. Photograph by Takeshi Yasuda. 36

viii Figures 2.13 Felicity Aylieff, Bud and Softly, Softly, 2001. 37 3.1 Natasha Daintry, Ocean, 2009. Photograph by Matthew Donaldson. 44 3.2 Anthony Caro, Early One Morning, 1962. Steel and aluminum, painted red, 114 × 244 × 143””/290 × 620 × 333cm.  Barford Sculptures Limited. Courtesy of Barford Sculptures Limited. Photograph by John Riddy. Tate Collection, London. 46 3.3 Edmund de Waal, Signs and Wonders, 2009. 46 3.4 Jacob van der Beugel, Nocturnes, 2010. 47 3.5 Edmund de Waal, A Sounding Line, 2007. 48 3.6 Edmund de Waal, a poem written in the hills, 2012. Seventeen porcelain vessels in three aluminum shelves, overall dimensions 32 × 30 × 12 cm. Photograph by Michael Harvey. 49 3.7 Arman, As in the Sink II, 1990/2004. 55 3.8 Clare Twomey, Heirloom, 2004. Photograph by Clare Twomey Studio. 56 4.1 Thomas Demand, Landing, 2006, Chromogenic print and Diasec, 180 × 286 cm.  2017 Thomas Demand, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Courtesy Sprüth Magers / DACS London. 61 4.2 Bouke de Vries’ Teapot, 2009. 65 4.3 Bouke de Vries, Dead Nature 4, 2009. 66 4.4 David Cushway, Fragments, 2008. 67 4.5 Clare Twomey, Is it Madness, 2010. Performed during Acts of Making Festival, Bilston. A Crafts Council touring exhibition 2015. Photograph by Sophie Mutevelian, courtesy of the Crafts Council. 69 4.6 Yarisal and Kublitz, Anger Release Machine, 2006. 70 4.7 Zoe Hillyard, Bird Vase, 2016. 72 4.8–  Ai Weiwei, Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, 1995.  and courtesy 4.10 of Ai Weiwei Studio. 74 4.11 Ai Weiwei, Breaking of Two Blue-and-White “Dragon” Bowls, 1996.  and courtesy of Ai Weiwei Studio. 77 4.12 Bouke de Vries, Yellow Cabinet Cup, 2010. 80 4.13 Linda Sormin, Rift, 2009. Courtesy Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art. 81 4.14 Clare Twomey, Consciousness/Conscience, 2001. Photograph by Andy Paradise, courtesy of the Crafts Council. 83 4.15 Jeppe Hein, Please do not touch the Artwork, 2003. Ceramic and plates, electrical motor, sensor. Courtesy: Johann König, Berlin 4.16 and 303 Gallery, New York. 85 99 5.1 Edmund de Waal, Cupboard Cargo, 1999. 5.2 Edmund de Waal, Reading Silence, 2007. 101 5.3 Clare Twomey, Scribe, 2006. Photograph by Clare Twomey Studio. 102 5.4 Clare Twomey, A Dark Day in Paradise, 2010. Photograph by Matthew Andrews. 103

Figures ix 5.5 5.6

Anders Ruhwald, Candle/Light, 2008. Courtesy Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art. Anders Ruhwald, You In Between, 2008. Courtesy Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art.

105 106

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the following institutions, artists, academics and friends for supporting this publication: The Crafts Council and Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art. The editorial board of Interpreting Ceramics, who have generously given permission for the use of ideas and text that first appeared in Issue 13 of the journal, under the title ‘Re-articulating Domestic Space in Contemporary Ceramics’. Clare Twomey, Edmund de Waal, Julian Stair, Neil Brownsword, Anders Ruhwald, Linda Sormin, Keith Harrison, Natasha Daintry, Jacob van der Beugel, Bouke de Vries, James Beighton, Amy Dickson, Alison Britton, Paul Cummings, Antony Gormley, Thomas Demand, Jeppe Hein, Ronnie Yarisal and Katja Kublitz, David Cushway, Zoe Hillyard, the Arman estate, the Anthony Caro estate, and Ai Weiwei Studio, who have supported my research and the production of this publication by generously giving their time, images of their work, and often both. Professor Jeffrey Jones, my PhD supervisor, whose intelligence and integrity are matched only by his kind and gentle manner, and who made the doctoral experience as smooth and enjoyable as I think it can be. Dr BS Ashim, my husband, who has embraced contemporary ceramics with gusto and without whom there would be no adherence to the rules of grammar in my work. Janice Stainton, whose incisive and constructive criticism has helped shaped this book. My mother, for introducing me to art, and letting me have every book I ever wanted.

Introduction

In which we prepare to find new points of view.

To look at ceramics from a different direction is to see them afresh. Resituating ceramics in relation to sculpture and, occasionally, sculpture in relation to ceramics, prompts new ideas, interpretations and connections that enhance the way we think about artworks, or perhaps how you perceive your own work. By taking time to contemplate and pay close attention, we create a space in which ceramics has the opportunity to appear in unexpected ways. At times, it can be hard to see how things are because of the object’s usual background. This background might be its classification, the place where you are seeing it, or what you know about the artist who made it. With this in mind, like a scene changing for the actors on stage, old backgrounds are replaced with new ones, allowing new narratives to be played out. Every relationship has differences of status and role, ceramics and sculpture are no different. It feels natural to think of sculpture as the defining discipline and the center of perspective; language reinforces this position. Ceramics are described as sculptural, but sculpture is not defined as ceramic-like. This suggests that ceramics is more likely to try to picture itself as it would appear to a sculpture’s gaze, instead of pursuing its own point of view. Ceramics is more likely to be in danger of living in bad faith with itself by emulating sculpture and, by adopting another discipline’s objectifying label ‘sculptural’, there is a danger of creating self-doubt. On the other hand, is ceramics’ alienation from the mainstream art world an opportunity for escape and freedom, with the possibility of reveling in that outsider status? We will look at the fringes, borders and barriers between ceramics and sculpture to try to find the balance in the relationship, a balance in which ceramics is both positively and creatively influenced by sculpture, without losing its own authenticity. In the space of a single generation ceramicists have taken their work from being a niche-interest craft into the pristine territories of the contemporary art gallery. This upturn in fortunes has been accompanied (and perhaps propelled) by a type of critical discussion usually reserved for the ‘higher’ discipline of sculpture. Ceramics is now encountering and colliding with sculpture, both formally and intellectually. What does this mean for the old hierarchies between art and craft, the identity of the potter, and the character of a discipline tied to clay but wanting to participate in critical discussions that extend far beyond materiality? The relationship between ceramics and sculpture is often assumed, but rarely clarified. While certain types of ceramics are described as ‘sculptural’, it is rare for there

xii Introduction to be any explanation of what that means. The way to begin setting this right is by bringing to light different ways in which this relationship is negotiated, and exploring the unexpected ways it is revealed. The themes of monumentality, minimalism and iconoclasm, testify to the formal and conceptual versatility of ceramics, and its ability to withstand comparison with sculpture. As we examine these themes, we will see ceramics encounter the tension between disciplinary and institutional demands and artistic freedom, and whether ceramicists benefit from a certain amount of creative tension. Such tensions do not demand resolution, it is simply the way things are. Indeed, it is the condition of contemporary so-called ‘post-studio’ ceramics to be ambiguous and the critical task is to embrace this uncertainty, not banish it. We will see ceramics open to creative development, both constrained and stimulated by disciplinary concerns, and responsive to the influence of another art form. It is important to acknowledge this influence where it occurs. We should not seek to restrict ceramics’ access to the wider art world out of concern that the discipline will melt away. Instead we will confront head-on and analyze sculpture’s influence on ceramics, while also acknowledging that those aspects that bind and limit ceramics are the same ones that give ceramicists scope for original action and perception in their practice.

1 Becoming Partners?

In which we start to think about classifications and relationships.

Locating the influence of sculpture on ceramics cannot be achieved without a clear understanding of both disciplines. We begin by going back to basics, defining ceramics and sculpture, and addressing why, despite having much in common, these two art forms belong to the separate camps of art and craft. By the end of the chapter we will be in a position to rethink the aspirational shorthand ‘sculptural ceramics’ so that it reflects the radical changes that both ceramics and sculpture have undergone in the late twentieth century.

Creative Tension: Defining Ceramics At a time when the boundaries of contemporary ceramics practice are often stretched, it is worth considering whether the category of ceramics is relevant for anything more than departmental divisions in museums and art schools. Despite widening boundaries that encompass significant diversity, including for example performance and film alongside clay, for many ceramicists the history and associations of their material remains an important intellectual framework. It is the situation in which their work has its freedom, and is demonstrated by the surprising but persistent relevance of the vessel in contemporary ceramics practice. The associations of clay that are present in contemporary ceramics practice are not just incidental, they form a bedrock of meaning that can both reference and extend beyond ceramic-specific perspectives and technical skills. If we take the view that a discipline is defined by the transmission of knowledge from one group to another, then ceramics is straightforward to understand. It is defined by the use of a single material, clay, and requires participants in the discipline to learn processes and acquire skills relating to the use of that material. While ceramics is tied to working with clay, in addition to the shared skills and material there are shared intellectual interests, knowledge and history. Today, dedication to working with clay unites a community of artists with increasingly different types of practice. As a section

2  Becoming Partners? of the contemporary ceramics world becomes conceptually ambitious, it is restrictive to consider ceramics as only a skills-centred discipline without an intellectual aspect. Despite radically different approaches, from makers of domestic ware to the avantgarde, artists working with clay share core intellectual concerns rooted in their common material. These shared intellectual concerns include the history of clay, its industrial associations, the rarity and preciousness of porcelain, the emotional associations of domestic ware, and the possibility that functional objects can cut across many kinds of practice, from studio pottery to grand-scale installations. While emphasis on material and skills in ceramics appears to contrast with the fluidity of practice in sculpture, these historical and material-centered associations create a set of references and touch-points that are used by ceramicists in many ways. These core concerns, as much as skill and process, distinguish ceramics from other disciplines. In the varied and growing field of contemporary ceramics practice, representation in museums and galleries becomes increasingly significant in reflecting and encouraging new areas of practice. Perceptions of the discipline are shaped by temporary exhibitions, which are less constrained by the practicalities of taking an object into a ‘permanent’ collection. Temporary projects such as the Victoria & Albert Museum’s event Clay Rocks (2006) and the exhibition Possibilities and Losses (Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, 2009) have provided a platform for an area of contemporary ceramics practice that is characterized by physical and conceptual ambition, dynamism and ephemerality. The Clay Rocks events at the V&A were part of the V&A’s Friday Late program, which was conceived and run by the museum’s Contemporary Team. Clay Rocks was co-curated by Laurie Britton Newell (Contemporary) and Alun Graves (Curator of Ceramics and Glass), and intended as a way to bring a fresh approach to ceramics. The Clay Rocks events featured three major installations, one by Clare Twomey and two by Keith Harrison. Each performance or event was sited in a prominent part of the building: Twomey’s Trophy in the Cast Courts, Harrison’s Last Supper in the Raphael Cartoon Court, and his Orbital bridged the John Madejski Garden and the adjacent gallery space at the center of the museum. Curatorial practice has a significant impact on the public perception of an art form. Many permanent displays of ceramics found in museums and art galleries around the country are historically focused and give no sense of the current direction of the discipline. On the other hand, temporary exhibitions and projects have allowed cultural institutions to engage with the conceptually ambitious work of leading ceramicists. Financial and practical issues mean that permanent collections are less able to capture these changes in the discipline. Clare Twomey raises a valid concern about the importance of recording transient works that represent a distinctly new direction for ceramics, If we don’t find a way to capture this then people like Keith Harrison will not be able to be seen as part of this evolving contemporary craft practice. And if we don’t find a way of capturing what we’re doing in museums then we could have a hole in our historical understanding.1 An intriguing aspect of contemporary ceramics is the continued use of traditional forms such as the figure and the vessel in otherwise challenging works. While there is still a thriving studio pottery scene that creates functional and beautiful domestic ware, and there are conceptually ambitious works that involve, for instance, firing

Becoming Partners? 3

Figure 1.1  Keith Harrison, Last Supper, 2006. Photograph by Ted Giffords.

liquid slip with electricity (Brother by Keith Harrison, 2009), there is also an area of practice managing do both at once (represented by Julian Stair and Edmund de Waal). The explorations at the borders and boundaries of ceramics are not only happening in visibly different ephemeral and performance-based works, but also with traditional pottery forms. ‘Vesselness’ is an important aspect of the identity of ceramics. The term is itself contentious and anxiety-provoking for many makers and writers. Alison Britton OBE, the influential potter and writer, stands resolutely against the term vessel. Britton is briskly dismissive of attempts to use language to bestow a value which should come from the work itself. She consistently describes her pieces as pots, and places emphasis on the recognizable and ordinary as a basis from which to explore the painted surface or distortions of form. I actually hate the word vessel, I’d much rather say container or pot. Mainly pot, I suppose I’d say. The vessel seems to make it exquisite and precious in a way that I don’t like. It was giving it a special status, it was saying ‘this is not just a pot, this has some extra qualities’.2 The struggle with terminology reflects tensions about the relative values of the pot, the vessel and the object, and the status differential between the useful and the useless in the art world. Emmanuel Cooper suggests that the difference between the terms ‘vessel’ and ‘pot’ is related to the aim of the artist and the perception of the viewer, and that language sets an expectation that relates to functionality (actual vs implied),

4  Becoming Partners? objects defined as vessels are usually seen to have a distant, sometimes faint, relationship to use . . . they occupy the ground between the pot and the object, asserting their independence and authority, with expressive work that has freed itself from any explicit function.3 Far from being abandoned as a relic of the studio pottery era with no place in contemporary practice, the vessel is deployed with verve and purpose. What’s more, this rather humble and basic functional form can be understood using theoretical frameworks that do not consider notions of utility or traditional pottery forms as primary to meaning, or even at all. A disciplinary challenge facing ceramics is the closure of the dedicated university courses that have the potential to develop subject-specific skills and discourse. Ceramics is a space-hungry subject that can be collapsed into other syllabi; this threatens not only the identity of the discipline but the existence of shared intellectual concerns belonging to a community of artists for whom clay is the sole material focus. Despite these challenges, ceramics has kept its distinctiveness and has not yet become a subset of sculpture or 3D design, though we can only guess what impact 3D printing will have on ceramics. The co-opting of ceramics into sculpture was a fear outlined by Brown in his essay ‘Theorising the crafts: new tricks of the trades’, published in Craft and Contemporary Theory. Writing in the late 1990s, Brown believed that ceramics would have to mutate into another subject in order to survive, and in certain instances this has been the case. With such anxieties about the identity of ceramics present in the background, it is worth noting that even while exploring commonalities between ceramics and sculpture, both disciplines are understood as distinct. In fact, it may be the case that ceramics’ sense of authentic identity is strengthened. Striking an optimistic note for the future, in 2015 York Art Gallery revealed a dramatic change in how it presents its world class ceramics collection to visitors. The small Gallery of Pots was transformed into the spatially and conceptually ambitious Centre of Ceramic Art, which includes a large space at the very heart of the gallery. Perhaps the outlook is brighter than some have dared hope for what Herbert Read called ‘at once the simplest and the most difficult of all arts’.

Sculpture: A Category in Danger of Collapse What is sculpture? How do we recognize it? By what criteria do we judge it? In attempting to locate what might be the distinctive concerns of sculpture the intention is not to provide a fixed and final definition of a discipline that many curators, art historians and artists have found to be unpredictable. Instead, outlined here are a number of definitions of sculpture made at different points in time, which give something of an understanding of what is meant by ‘sculpture’ and what its particular interests might be. Sculpture is fluid and difficult to pin down and for this reason there is a certain amount of concern over what it is. After all, if something has passed beyond the point where it can be defined, how does it manage to exist in universities and museums where classification and subject division is considered essential? For something that is hard to define, it is used liberally as a label, to the extent that it can feel that the term sculptural has been applied to so many different things that, like ‘luxury’ toilet paper, it has become a tag without any real meaning.

Becoming Partners? 5 The simplest definition is that sculpture is a three-dimensional form in space. One might develop that by suggesting that it is three-dimensional art made by one of four basic processes: carving, modelling, casting and, more recently, by construction. Again, further development of this definition could be offered by listing materials traditionally used: stone and wood for carving, clay for modelling and bronze for casting. The exhibition Bronze (Royal Academy of Arts, 2012) showed that there is still interest in defining sculpture in relation to material. The exhibition was not only of historic works. The curators also chose to show modern sculpture in bronze (Picasso, Jasper Johns, Moore, Beuys and Bourgeois), and in doing so they made a case for an area of sculpture that is still defined by the making process, material and three-dimensionality. The Henry Moore Institute (UK), a leading center for the study of sculpture, and whose business it is to know about these things, introduced the exhibition Sarah Lucas: Ordinary Things (2012) with this text, Sculpture is formed of a narrow and specific history, concerned with processes of making and informed by the ways in which human beings use objects to attempt to make sense of the surrounding world.4 The exhibition 1913: The Shape of Time (HMI, 2012) focused on sculpture in Europe in the year before the First World War, ‘investigating how sculptural thinking gave shape to art’.5 United Enemies: The Problem of Sculpture in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s (HMI Leeds, 2011) looked at sculpture made by artists in Britain during the 1960s and 1970s, ‘a time when the idea of sculpture was being radically contested’.6 These attempts to define sculpture suggest that curators and scholars are keen to impose or reinstate, or perhaps even just locate, the boundaries for sculpture before it slips beyond definition. They also give a strong sense that, despite being nigh on impossible to pin down, especially in its contemporary form, sculpture endures as a distinct discipline. Clearly there is still a desire to define sculpture, and such definitions still have a role to play in how we understand the work. In 1969 Henry Moore exhibited some of his work alongside the Ancient Greek sculptures at the British Museum. His intention was that the comparison ‘might help show that fundamental sculptural ideas persist’.7 For Moore these ideas included the sculptor’s instinctive understanding of material and a three-dimensional conception of form. Despite the collapse of the traditional sculptural rules of carving, modelling and construction, and the challenge to sculpture posed by the readymade, sculpture continues as a distinct category of art despite seeming to be without fixed boundaries or rules. Sculpture has ignored the Modernist call for the ‘purity and separateness of the various mediums’. Once so easy to identify (marble, bronze, stone, statue, and firmly positioned on the plinth), sculpture is now a discipline that we do and don’t know at the same time. Maybe we know it when we see it? Presently, sculpture is generously inclusive, taking in performance, ideas, objects, language, tactility. Though there are limits, because not everything is sculpture. The American art critic and academic Rosalind Krauss, in her influential 1978 essay, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, considered that sculpture was no longer about medium, ‘[the] bounded conditions of modernism have suffered a logically determined rupture’.8 Not content with drawing attention to how sculpture was splitting along what was historically one of its strongest and most important seams, Krauss also called sculpture ‘a category in danger of collapse’.9

6  Becoming Partners? The looming danger of collapse has meant that institutions invested in keeping a grip on what sculpture is, have used their exhibition programs to helpfully point out which art works are definitely sculptures. This might be what Tate Liverpool had in mind when they answered an unspoken question with the five-year exhibition This is Sculpture. Despite the fragility or porosity of the term, referring to an artwork as ‘sculpture’ continues to be a useful starting point for thinking about work that carries the tag, even when the categorization feels a little shaky. The reexamination of sculptural thinking through other media such as photography and an exhilarating expansion of the ways that sculpture is made might have brought the discipline to the brink in terms of categorization, but these things are a sign of a vital and dynamic area of practice, and one that has had tremendous impact on the most interesting ceramics being made in Britain today. During the course of the twentieth century these essential characteristics of sculpture were challenged, subverted and reconsidered. Joseph Beuys argued against the term because he felt it referred specifically to the act of carving.10 Herbert Read, in his 1956 book The Art of Sculpture, described sculpture as ‘plastic art that gives preference to tactile sensations’ (a description that could just as easily apply to ceramics).11 In The Sculptural Imagination, Alex Potts explores the idea of modern sculpture as activation of surface rather than a molding of form, and whether it is misleading to define sculpture as a plastic art.12 Robert Morris, in 1966, considered shape to be the single most important sculptural value.13 Reading about sculpture soon results in a near baffling accumulation of ideas about what sculpture is, or what its most important attributes are. Defining sculpture and trying to pin-point its distinctive values draws attention to a crucial fault line between conceptual and object-based sculpture. Yet, despite the clamor of ideas, and the acceptance of sculpture as an elastic field, three distinct sculptural concerns continue to assert themselves. Form, space and material remain important for thinking about sculpture, and they will be essential for understanding the nature of the relationship between ceramics and sculpture. Why struggle with pinning sculpture down in this way? In trying to define sculpture we attempt to express or move towards an understanding of the essential nature of sculpture. Definitions are important because they provide a thorough and common understanding from which there is scope for more complex manipulations of the concept. To work, a definition should be precise, with as few moving parts as possible. The definition of sculpture is a whole machine of moving parts and is different for different people. Ceramics, on the other hand, has the great advantage of being defined by the use of a single material. This simple definition encompasses works of great intelligence and complexity, but the simplicity of the definition allows us to assess what is happing within the discipline with ease.

The Art and Craft Divide A cursory browse of a commercial gallery’s price list, or the art review section of a broadsheet newspaper, is a reminder that at a financial and intellectual level there is a hierarchy present within the arts. This persistent hierarchical thinking stretches back to the Renaissance, a time when painting and sculpture enjoyed an elevated status while the arts that involved manual work were relegated to a lesser position. It’s easy to see how the messy visceral qualities of clay and the technical skill involved in

Becoming Partners? 7 working with it have contributed to this hierarchical divide. So just as painting, the less sweaty and less dusty occupation, was considered a higher intellectual pursuit compared with sculpture, so sculpture is generally positioned as having greater intellectual substance than ceramics with its cups and bowls and this is reflected in the price that works command. The art–craft debate that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s is often understood as part of a broader critique of the notion of the canon in art, and specifically as craft’s challenge to the canon-forming processes of art history. Many writers involved in the craft world at this time took the position that the canon of modern and contemporary art was constructed around anti-craft values and against a background of general disdain for the crafts. From the point of view of craft, the art–craft divide has two main areas of concern. Firstly, the exclusion of craft from twentieth-century art history and, secondly, the lack of theoretical engagement in writing on craft. These concerns were much explored during the 1990s. In his essay ‘The Salon de Refuse?’ published in The Culture of Craft, Peter Dormer suggests that craft is ‘intellectually inconvenient’ in modern and contemporary art, citing the example of the Bauhaus, where, Dormer argues, craftsmanship was acknowledged but down-played.14 On the other side of the debate, Rosemary Hill’s essay ‘Writing About the Studio Crafts’ points to the importance of Bernard Leach in establishing the intellectual and artistic status of pottery. Hill suggests that Leach’s writing positioned studio ceramics as a branch of art able to withstand critical analysis, expressive of the individual personality of its creator, and positioned the studio craftsman as an artist moving naturally within the artistic and intellectual mainstream.15 In an article in Ceramics Review from 1999, Edmund de Waal hypothesizes that if contemporary sculpture continues to develop its close relationship with material culture then it is to be increasingly expected that sculptors will discover the ideas embedded in ceramics. This possibility was foreshadowed by the close relationship that formed between ceramics and sculpture in the 1930s, highlighted by the exhibition Modern British Sculpture at the Royal Academy (2011). This exhibition brought ceramics and sculpture into contact in a display titled ‘Ceramics and the Influence of Craft’. Here cases of Song dynasty ware and ceramics by Bernard Leach and William Staite Murray sat alongside sculpture by Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson. During the 1930s many of these potters and sculptors showed their work in the same galleries and, for a while, these works were talked about in the same reviews and notices until a combination of the machine-age aesthetic of modernism, the Second World War, and Bernard Leach’s increasingly anachronist approach, pulled studio pottery in a different direction to the rest of the St Ives artists. While this closeness existed during the 1930s, and was present in a shared approach to surface in the 1950s,16 any sense of parity subsequently dissipated with the radical expansion of sculpture’s range of activities in the 1960s. That said, the differing positions in the cultural hierarchy between ceramics and fine art may not be as great as is sometimes supposed. A closer look at the existing critical literature for ceramics reveals a situation that has been steadily improving over the last ten years, assisted particularly by the publication of a number of exhibition catalogues that contain highly engaged and informed essays analyzing contemporary ceramics practice. Many of these catalogues are closely linked to a small number of artists, writers and institutions, but they have made a significant contribution to both scholarship and sense of identity.

8  Becoming Partners? The reluctance of craft writers to make use of existing theoretical positions and systems of thought has on the whole damaged the status of the craft disciplines. This hostility is perhaps rooted in the concern that the crafts will be co-opted into other fields. Hill, for example, frets that while Marxism has important insights to offer, ‘it annexes the crafts to an existing intellectual system’.17 In the long term, this suspicion of using established critical theory to think about craft has been damaging rather than protective. Peter Dormer, once an influential figure in the craft world, considered craft and theory to be as ‘oil and water’ and that language was inappropriate to describe a discipline that was expanded through practice.18 Dormer felt that depth of knowledge could only reside in the work itself and not in what was written about it. He considered that nothing that is important about craft could be put into words, a flawed and stifling logic that doubtless contributed to the lack of critical literature for ceramics that continued until the mid-2000s. There are some voices since the 1990s that continue to adhere resolutely to the idea that art and craft must remain distinct and separate from one another. Howard Risatti, for instance, sees cross-disciplinary exchange as a weakness, positioning such relationships as a temptation to imitate fine art that will result in the abandonments of craft’s unique perspective on the world. In his book A Theory of Craft: Function and Aesthetic Expression, Risatti sets out to reinforce the difference between art and craft and to quash the idea that art theory applies equally well to craft as to fine art. He goes so far as to propose a definition that clearly separates art from craft, ‘fine art is about perceptions and appearance; it always exists within the realm of the subjective. Craft is about physical and material function; hence, it always exists within the realm of the objective’.19 Acknowledging the gap between his stance and that held by other scholars in the field, Risatti rejects the view that meaning can reside outside the object, blaming literary criticism, specifically reader-response criticism, for the adoption of this approach to crafts.20 In this age of the expanded field for ceramics, when artists working in clay use ephemeral, site specific, installation and time-based elements, it is interesting to note pockets of continued resistance to bringing the framework of art criticism to bear on craft.

An Overview of the Book Edmund de Waal has suggested that ‘sculptural ceramics’, as a phrase, has become so pervasive that it is pointless to try to pull the two words apart.21 A browse through the back issues of the British magazine Ceramics Review demonstrates how popular the term has become. Its use strikes an aspirational note and on a practical level usually indicates that the ceramics in question are either large or abstract. Rethinking, redefining and resituating the relationship that exists between sculpture and contemporary British ceramics needs to be addressed to understand why contemporary practice has emerged in the form that it has. By looking at artworks in relation to one another it is possible to see that hierarchical relationships can shift, depending on your point of view. Three important recurring sculptural motifs of iconoclasm, monumentality and accumulation provide distinctive ways to think about the relationship between ceramics and sculpture in formal and conceptual terms. While the cue comes from sculpture, the emphasis is on ceramics practice. Looking for direct formal and conceptual links and points of influence that progress the interpretation and criticism of ceramics, what is shown is the sheer range of ceramics’ sphere of

Becoming Partners? 9 practice, its incursions into the formal and conceptual concerns of sculpture, and the development of an expanded practice rooted in the skill, processes, history and context of the material. The broad approach to assessing points of influence and exchange between ceramics and sculpture is by drawing on concepts in twentieth-century sculpture and locating their traces in contemporary ceramics practice. Formal and conceptual comparisons are made between sculptors and artists working in clay, with the intention that such comparisons will reveal aspects of the relationship between ceramics and sculpture. The monumentalizing function and the conceptual and symbolic language of the monument is used to explore the relationship between ceramics and sculpture (Chapter 2). The idea of monumentality is used to explore connections between sculptors such as Edwin Lutyens, Barnett Newman, Rachel Whiteread and Antony Gormley and artists working in clay such as Clare Twomey, Neil Brownsword and Julian Stair. The reader is introduced to Rosalind Krauss’ idea that there are two ways that sculpture approaches the monumental – the logical monument or the monument as abstraction. The monument (in its form as the manifestation of the impulse to remember) is a point of coming together between ceramics and sculpture. In short, artists working in clay are using the idea and the function of the monument, and in doing so they are in a relationship with a particular area of sculpture that continues to interest contemporary sculptors. Yet while their paths cross, ceramics and sculpture are also pulling away from one another as each discipline continues to pursue its own concerns. The monument understood to commemorate loss, absence, and memory, is accessible to ceramics, and artists from this discipline are able take on such concepts with eloquence and ease using clay. While sculpture is troubled by its role as the traditional commemorator of loss and absence, ceramics is able to express difficult emotions with a directness and personal touch that is absent from much monumental sculpture. ‘The Numbers Game: Multi-part Compositions’ (Chapter 3) addresses the grouping and repeating of objects as an artistic strategy in ceramics and sculpture. The narrative draws on ideas that emerged with American Minimalism in the 1960s, and uses those ideas to understand the increasing presence and importance of the groups in contemporary ceramics practice, particularly in the work of Edmund de Waal. ‘The Art of Destruction: Ceramics, Sculpture and Iconoclasm’ (Chapter 4) uses destruction as a framework for considering the relationship between ceramics and sculpture, asking, in what ways is iconoclasm shared by ceramics and sculpture? This chapter shows how image breaking – the artistic gesture of destruction – is common across the work of artists in both disciplines. The reader is shown how destruction is an important meeting point between ceramics and sculpture. Firstly, because a significant number of sculptors and artists working with clay use destruction as an artistic gesture (including destruction as a performative strategy). Secondly, because the shared interest in exploring the creative potential of destruction occurs in the same time period (the late 1990s through to the present day – ceramics is often lagging behind). Lastly, because the use of destruction as an artistic strategy appears to dissolve boundaries between the two disciplines. ‘Encounters: Ceramics on Show’ (Chapter 5) looks to the making and showing of work as two key elements in the construction of identity. The reader is introduced to some of the central concepts of museology, gaining an understanding of how and why the display of ceramics contributes to the identity of the discipline. Further, ceramics

10  Becoming Partners? has a specific exhibition history that is responsive to the fluctuating status of clay, and in recent years this has been impacted upon by the increased confidence and ambition of the artists and curators connected with clay. This chapter charts ceramics’ move away from the home, where prized cups and plates are displayed on a shelf or dresser, into the white cube in the 1990s, before turning away from the white cube to return to domestic spaces again, or to bring domestic elements into white cube galleries. Ultimately, this book will extend the critical context for ceramics and test the potential for ceramics to be interpreted through the context and discourses that exist for sculpture. It shows that ceramics need not be automatically positioned in a discourse constructed around ideas of utility and craftsmanship, though this is not to dismiss those ideas as unimportant. Rather it is to suggest that ceramics can be understood and interpreted using the wider critical context offered by sculpture, which can develop the way ceramics is theorized and written about in the future by encouraging the use of other critical theories and frameworks. Drawing conclusions useful for ceramicists, academics, writers and curators who are interested in ceramics and its place in the art world as well as the craft world, it will prove useful for those who want to know more about the critical literature for ceramics, or to know how contemporary ceramics fits with sculpture, the discipline with which it is most often compared. By not only pointing to the influence of sculpture on contemporary ceramics, but by also identifying the limits, boundaries and borders of this relationship, we are not making a case for the inclusion of ceramics in the category of sculpture. Instead, we are clarifying a relationship that is often assumed to exist, but is not clearly defined or written about. In essence, we will see that sculpture can be used to develop thinking about ceramics, but that this does not diminish ceramics’ distinctiveness as a discipline in its own right.

Notes 1 C. Twomey, interview with the author, 2012. 2 A. Britton, interview with the author, 2012. 3 E. Cooper, ‘The Pot, the Vessel, the Object’, in E. Cooper, editor, The Pot, the Vessel, the Object: Fifty years of change and diversity in the Craft Potters Association, London, Ceramic Review Publishing, 2007, p.53. 4 Anon. See www.henry-moore.org/hmi/exhibitions/sarah-lucas-ordinary-things (accessed 26.09.2012). 5 Anon. See www.henry-moore.org/hmi/exhibitions/1913-the-shape-of-time (accessed 26.09.2012). 6 Anon. See www.henry-moore.org/hmi/exhibitions/past-exhibitions/2011/united-enemies (accessed 26.09.2012). 7 P. Meecham and J. Sheldon, Modern Art: A Critical Introduction, London, Routledge, 2005, p.222. 8 R. Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, in J. Wood, D. Hulk and A. Potts, editors, Modern Sculpture Reader, Leeds, Henry Moore Institute, 2007, (essay first published 1978) p.340. 9 Ibid., p.335. 10 M. Rosenthal, ‘Joseph Beuys: Staging Sculpture’, in M. Rosenthal, S. Rainbird and C. Schmuckli, editors, Joseph Beuys: Actions, Vitrines, Environments, London, Tate Publi­ shing, 2004, p.24. 11 H. Read,The Art of Sculpture, New York, Pantheon Books, 1956, p.70. 12 A. Potts,The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2000, p.148. 13 R. Morris, ‘Notes on Sculpture 1–3’, in C. Harrison and P. Wood, editors, Art in Theory 1900–2000, London, Blackwell, 2002, (essay first published in 1966) p.830.

Becoming Partners? 11 14 P. Dormer. ‘The Salon de Refuse?’, in P. Dormer, editor, The Culture of Craft, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1997, p.3. 15 R. Hill, ‘Writing About the Studio Crafts’, in P. Dormer, editor, The Culture of Craft, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1997, p.191. 16 See J. Jones, A Rough Equivalent: Sculpture and Pottery in the Post-War Period, catalogue for exhibition held at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, 2011. 17 R. Hill, p.191. 18 P. Dormer, ‘The Language and Practical Philosophy of Craft’, in P. Dormer, editor, The Culture of Craft, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1997, p.219. 19 H. Risatti, A Theory of Craft: Function and Aesthetic Expression, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2007, p.127. 20 Ibid., p.255. 21 E. De Waal, ‘Significant Form?’, Ceramics Review, no.176, 1999, p.34.

2 Monumental Matters

In which ceramics thinks big, sculpture shows an interest in the ordinary and monuments are made from unexpected things.

Beginning with breaking down monumentality into its two principal modes, the symbolic and the self-referential, we progress to consider sculpture’s increasing hostility to the form and the concept of the traditional monument. Turning to ceramics, we see how contemporary practice has adapted concepts closely associated with monumental sculpture, producing works in clay that experiment with both symbolism and size.

The landscape of contemporary ceramics practice in Britain has undergone far-reaching changes since the 1990s. There is tremendous variety in the work being produced, as well as in the ideas that underpin them. From large-scale works to a sprinkling of ceramic dust in Clare Twomey’s Scribe (2006), contemporary ceramics is characterized by its energy, intelligence, and dedication to material. Alongside that commitment to clay there is creative experimentation with film, performance, time-based elements, site-specificity and audience involvement. But where has this openness and diversity of practice come from? In making works that are large, or that seek to embody and preserve memory, ceramics is adapting methods and ideas that have been central to sculpture for thousands of years. To make something monumental or memorializing is to use sculpture’s traditional forms and concepts, in much the same way that the vessel is the traditional form for ceramicists. With monumentality in mind, it makes sense to look to sculpture as an important source of influence on that area of contemporary ceramics practice that is actively engaged with monumental matters.

Monuments and the Collective Memory ‘A public monument is, in a manner of speaking, the abridged drama of a great event’, said the priest and political leader Henri Jean-Baptiste Grégoire, who was greatly concerned with the destruction of French heritage during the revolution. Yet so accustomed are we to the presence of public monuments in towns and cities that it is easy to forget that they are there, we accept them almost as urban wallpaper. What Grégoire

Monumental Matters 13 reminds us is that the staid and conservative appearance of a public monument can mask an eventful backstory of bloody battles, political machinations, and nefarious activities of a kind required to reach a position of prominence. As symbols of great public dramas, monuments are generally commissioned by the church, state or nobility and their power and impact derives from this source of commission and their sense of permanence. They are fixed in a particular place and have a symbolic function that relates to that place. They are a blunt tool for communication, speaking mostly of power, conquest or sacrifice. Paying attention to location is crucial to assessing the monumental intentions of a piece of sculpture. To be a monument, a sculpture should be positioned for its symbolic significance. Walk around a city center and in the prominent public squares and parks the monuments that you will encounter usually commemorate royals, the achievements of men, and the martial. They are overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, nationalistic and socially conservative and as symbols they are potent. In the nationalist and Catholic religious atmosphere of 1930s Ireland, the statue of Queen Victoria that stood in the gardens of University College Cork was removed and replaced by the city’s patron saint, St Finbarr. The queen, who had died more than 30 years before, continued to be a symbol of British oppression and was therefore unacceptable as a prominent public presence on campus. The statue was at one point buried under the lawn in the university quadrangle, but rather than an attempt to further mute any lingering symbolism, it had proved too heavy for the floorboards in the room where it had been discreetly rehoused. University campuses continue to struggle with the monumental reminders of earlier loyalties and affiliations. In 2015 a group of students at the University of Oxford campaigned for the removal of the monument to Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College. The students viewed the sculpture of the British imperialist as an unacceptable symbol of colonialism. The college disagreed, symbolically recasting the monument as a sculpture representative of the complexities of history. While the abstract ideas they represent may be up for dispute, the debate around the display and removal of these sculptures gives a sense of the powerful symbolic potential of monumental sculpture, and their potential to become a focus of dissent and debate even when the figures they commemorate are long dead. Britain’s most potent monument is found in the middle of a busy road in central London, in close proximity to both the political and social elite represented by the government offices at Whitehall and the monarch’s residence at Buckingham Palace. This monument, Sir Edwin Lutyen’s Cenotaph, has been a focus for public remembrance since 1920. As a sculpture, it embodies a successful choice between figuration and abstraction. Using the power of non-representation, the Cenotaph commemorates patriotic death with such impact that its form has been repeated many times over. The ancient idea of the ‘empty tomb’ that Lutyens tapped resonated with those left bereaved by the First World War, and as a memorial to absence it was immediately recognised as a success. Most families who had suffered losses in the fighting had no body to bury, and were unable to perform the social rituals of death that give mourning focus and structure. The Cenotaph provided both, and manifested the state’s acknowledgement of the sacrifice that individuals and their families had made for the nation. The popularity of the Cenotaph led to adaptations and reproductions for the civic spaces of towns and cities throughout Britain, as well as the production of miniatures that could be displayed in the home. Surprisingly, the Cenotaph managed to retain its conceptual integrity in the face of this replication and adaptation. Catherine Moriarty,

14  Monumental Matters writing about these reproductions, suggests that the extent to which the sculpture was reproduced, rather than dulling its impact, only served to reinforce the extraordinary power of Lutyen’s concept.1 The iconic power of the Cenotaph is given continuity by the televised annual wreath-laying ceremony, and by press outrage at public figures who do not behave correctly in its proximity. In 1981 the Labour leader Michael Foot was famously lambasted by the British press for wearing a duffle coat to lay a wreath at its base on Remembrance Sunday. The Cenotaph’s hold over the public imagination seems unlikely to dissipate dramatically in the foreseeable future. Instead it shows with clarity how society’s collective investment in the power of certain public sculptures accounts for why such monuments still fall victim to acts of iconoclasm at times of political upheaval, and why the monument continues to be a relevant form in art. Emerging from the twentieth century, with Western Europe wary of displays of nationalism and military might, some sculptors have become both critical of, and uncomfortable making, conventional monuments. This has triggered a significant change in approach to monumental sculpture, characterized by rejecting established monumental forms and expressions of unease about their public function. Since 1999 this unease has had a prominent outlet via the Fourth Plinth commission at Trafalgar Square in London. The square’s fourth plinth was originally intended for an equestrian sculpture of King Willian IV, but lack of funds meant that it remained empty. The temporary sculptures that have occupied the plinth have included a number of works critical of the male and military monuments that share this slice of London’s public space. Marc Quinn’s 3.5 meter white marble sculpture Alison Lapper Pregnant (2005) is an example of the self-reflexive approach to contemporary monument-making. Lapper, an artist herself, is dysmelic. She has shortened limbs, and the sculpture is a celebration of her body in a state of pregnancy and her disability. As well as challenging the narrow conception of female beauty in sculpture, Quinn described his monument as embodying a different kind of heroism to that celebrated in other parts of the square. Lapper’s pregnancy is full of optimism and happiness, orientating the sculpture to the future rather than the past. Sitting outside the National Gallery, Alison Lapper Pregnant also drew attention to the narrow conception of female beauty in society and art, as well as making some headway in redressing the imbalance of the narrow social strata permanently represented on the other plinths. While the Fourth Plinth project is indicative of a degree of disquiet with one of the traditional forms of sculpture, ceramics is a newcomer to monumentalizing works, enthusiastically embracing scale, spectacle, and the domination of space with the appetite of a discipline tired of being tied to the scale of the potter’s hand. Felicity Aylieff has been making towering pots since 2006, and they are a totemic presence in many ceramics galleries in the UK. In Stoke, the cavernous factory spaces repurposed by the British Ceramics Biennial (BCB) are put to good use. In the 2015 BCB Paul Scott showed Cumbrian Blue(s) Tree after Davenport/Spode, a four-meter-tall tiled panel decorated with a blue willow tree. This piece was on display in the old Spode China Hall, becoming a monument to the style of decorating carried out by Spode’s artisans for 200 years. In defiantly large ceramic works there is a movement from small object to impactful monument, while in sculpture’s contemporary monuments there is a turn away from the heroic to the ordinary. Despite their differences, both ceramics and sculpture challenge the idea that a monument must be conventionally heroic, or that it should even

Monumental Matters 15 be a recognizably sculptural object. Being open to the possibility of finding monumental traits in non-sculpture objects is a chance to consider all kinds of unusual things as monuments. Richard Taws has written an essay in which he suggests that the guillotine – the historical artefact used to great effect during the French Revolution – be considered an anti-monument.2 By arguing for the guillotine’s anti-monumentality, Taws opens the possibility of the counter argument, that this functional and historicallyloaded object is a monument. Taws explains that during the eighteenth century many three-dimensional objects were treated in the same ways as sculpture, and that the guillotine was the most prominent of these. Raised on a plinth, functioning as a focus for public gathering and spectacle, a place where the defeated enemy was paraded, Taws likens the guillotine to the triumphal Trajan’s Column in Rome. The guillotine borrowed from the power of sculpture, literally and symbolically, becoming a monument to regicide and the period of destruction in which the new republic was forged. For Taws the guillotine has the power to destabilize sculpture as it throws wide open the idea of what can function as a monument. The monumental capacity of the guillotine became possible through its constant use and the circulation of its image in print and newspapers. But for Taws, it is the repetitive and murderous action of the guillotine that leads to its anti-monumental status. He argues that it should be understood as an ‘anti-heroic’ event-structure that simultaneously participates in and disturbs the function of the monument. Not only is Taws’ analysis of the guillotine fascinating, the implications for ceramics are encouraging. Ceramics are anti-monumental in their association with the functional. They are objects intended for repetitive use, usually the non-heroic acts of eating and drinking. Ceramic is an anti-monumental material, fragile and making no pretentions to permanence. Like Taw’s guillotine, ceramics is able to disturb the codes that govern traditional monuments even as they participate in them. This gives contemporary ceramics the opportunity to take part in and make use of an area of art-making and memorializing that has historically belonged to sculpture.

Two Approaches: The Logical and the Abstracted Monument Just as they need not always be a recognizable form of sculpture on a plinth, monuments are not always symbolic markers, fixed in an appropriately resonant location. There is another aspect to monumentality that was set out in an important essay by American art critic Rosalind Krauss in 1979. This essay, Sculpture in the Expanded Field, questions what sculpture is, and the role of the monument in defining the art form. It remains a key text in the study of sculpture, and one that has become increasingly interesting for contemporary ceramics, as the expansion of what ceramics is and does is changing in a similar way to sculpture in the late 1970s. In Sculpture in the Expanded Field Krauss writes disparagingly about art criticism’s desire to embed new works within a historical context, imposing a linear progression that serves to legitimize and authenticate works that appear radical and different. Krauss describes how this often involves drawing on other works to mediate between the past and present. She suggests that the danger of this approach is that by pulling in too broad a range of works to create a sense of paternity, the idea of what sculpture is can become muddled and unclear. This is a danger for ceramics too. In the desire to participate in art historical discourse, the risk is that what is particular about ceramics will be obscured, and the discipline’s distinct identity will break down.

16  Monumental Matters In the same essay Krauss sets out two types of monuments: she describes the ‘logical monument’, existing up until the late nineteenth century, as a commemorative representation, sitting in a particular place and speaking symbolically about that place. After this point, the logic of the monument fades, site is lost, and the monument becomes abstract. This abstracted monument is characterized by being placeless and largely self-referential. For Krauss, these are the characteristics of modernist sculpture. Such works are cut off from temporal representation, and instead comment on their own materials and process of construction. The distinction between a logical monument and an abstracted monument is demonstrated by the Angel of the North. The twenty-meter tall sculpture sits on a hill above a former colliery, and is made from two hundred tons of steel. Location and material combine to unite the two industries that the north-east of England was known for, and which now have only a ghostly presence in the region, lingering in the nicknames of the local football teams. Immensely popular, the sculpture can be seen from the East Coast mainline train from London to Edinburgh, or when driving north on the A1 in the direction of Gateshead. It has been in place since 1998, and is seen by around 90,000 motorists every day. Some stop to take a picture, and a few even helpfully review it for TripAdvisor, preparing other visitors for the experience (currently rated at four stars, ‘it’s big!’ reveals one recent visitor).

Figure 2.1  Antony Gormley, Angel of the North, 1998. Steel, 20 × 54 × 2.2 m. Photograph by Colin Cuthbert.  the artist.

Monumental Matters 17 But is the Angel of the North a monument? Size and location are key factors in considering this question, and understanding how these factors impact on the designation of the work gives the opportunity to apply this thinking to contemporary ceramics. Rosalind Krauss’ distinction is between monumental sculpture, which offers a commemorative representation, and modernist sculpture, which is monumental in scale and not tied to a particular location. To Paul Usherwood, who wrote an essay on the sculpture in 1999, the sheer size, the most impactful element, suggests that it is a monument. The site also indicates a monument, with both location and material combining to make the site meaningful. These are persuasive points, but there are other factors to consider. While the sculpture’s hilltop position is deliberately chosen, that does not make it a monument. After all, collieries are common in the area, and the location may have been as much to do with visibility from the roads and train line. The crucial thing, Usherwood insists, is ‘can you imagine it working in another location, and would it generate much the same meaning if it were somewhere else?’ State-funded, as we would expect a conventional monument to be, the origins of the Angel of the North project don’t make its categorization much easier. Gateshead Council’s Art in Public Places Panel had earmarked the reclaimed pit head site for a piece of public art in 1990. Three years later the panel invited a shortlist of international artists to propose work for the site. They saw a photograph of Gormley’s A Case for an Angel II (1990) and selected that sculpture to be worked into a version suitable for the site. Gateshead Council’s panel not only chose the location and selected the sculpture, they also chose the monumentalizing title of the work. The Angel of the North, having existed in a previous version, cannot then make a specific reference to local history. Despite the scale and the undoubted aspirations to permanence, the Angel of the North is not a neat fit for a monumental or a modernist sculpture and, to some extent, the question of monumental or modernist depends on who is looking. For the locals who drive past it every day, seeing the sculpture through the seasons, through all weather, as they leave and return to the region that they call home, it provides a focus for identity. Those who know of the colliery site, or who think of steel as link to the industrial history of the area, can feel that the Angel commemorates the passing of a way of life in the north east. For those who catch a quick look as they drive past on their way somewhere else, these references are not so readily available. For this audience, it is a modernist work; monumental in scale, but not reliant on that hilltop for its intellectual impact. Any well-appointed hilltop would have sufficed. While Gateshead council might not appear to be a promising source of art patronage, the focus and layered meanings that they brought to the project has resulted in a powerful and popular work of art. It is monumental in both form and content, but flexibly and adaptably so, allowing Angel to encircle those from beyond the north east in the span of its outstretched wings. The work’s meaning is a result of its location and because it resonates with those who live in the region. Meaning has grown around the work, and while the angel form was not created with this site in mind, the form and site are now firmly associated. What was modernist has become monumental. What all of this debate shows us is that, for all their suggestion of unyielding solidity, monuments are not as fixed in their form or function as we might expect. In fact, a monument is a rather fluid thing, with a few different ways to fit it into

18  Monumental Matters the category. We might designate something as a monument because of its physical scale or because of an idea that it embodies. The scale is the formal aspect of the monument, while the intellectual or conceptual aspect relates to the traditional memorializing function. This is best understood as what the monument says of the particular place where it is fixed. These two aspects of the monumental – the formal and the conceptual – provide many ways to consider the nature of monumentality in art. In turn, monuments and monumentality make an interesting way to think about the relationship between ceramics and sculpture. Paying attention to the ways that ceramics and sculpture approach the monumental allows us to weigh up the extent to which these two disciplines share ground and to speculate on how the sculptural notion of the monumental has been influential on contemporary ceramics practice. It is unsurprising that Krauss’ thoughts on the changing forms of sculpture has caught the attention of university ceramics departments. In 2011 the University of Westminster paid homage to her essay when they set up a research group called ‘Ceramics in the Expanded Field’, which aimed to develop a critical over-view of the relationship between ceramics and museum culture in light of the experimental nature of contemporary ceramics practice. Krauss’ consideration of sculpture resonates with those who recognize that ceramics has ruptured at its historic boundaries. Unlike sculpture, with ceramics material remains constant, but now it may be used in its different states, combined with film or performance, or be present as a ready-made. Just as sculpture has made a break with monuments, so ceramics has made a break with the historic modes of studio pottery. It is no longer primarily about form, decoration and material, but also about ideas, places and people, while self-consciously referencing its own forms and history. A key distinction between ceramics and sculpture is that contemporary sculpture is no longer organized around medium. Yet both have in common a break with the working methods, ideas, forms and approaches of the past, and a desire to open up their discipline in new directions.

Ceramics in Civic Space Because of the centrality of the monument to sculpture, an association with thousands of years of precedence, it is to be expected that ceramics is at a different stage in its relationship with monumentality. Contemporary ceramics is exploring an area of practice that contemporary sculpture now tends to subvert. Rather than viewing this as ceramics simply lagging behind, it actually points to a development in the status of ceramics and a significant change in the way ceramicists are thinking and the kind of works they are creating. The potential of the material is being recognized, and works in ceramic (though not always by ceramicists) are being commissioned for public memorials in civic spaces where bronze and stone sculptures would have ordinarily been found. The hugely popular installation The Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red, is a First World War memorial made up of 888,246 ceramic poppies that was first installed at the Tower of London in 2014. This work showed to great effect the impact massed ceramic flowers can have, something that ceramicists Clare Twomey, Stephen Dixon and Neil Brownsword have also explored in their work. In Manchester another First World War memorial was

Monumental Matters 19

Figure 2.2  Paul Cummins and Tom Piper, Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red, 2014. Poppies and original concept by artist Paul Cummins and installation designed by Tom Piper. Paul Cummins Ceramics Limited in conjunction with Historic Royal Palaces.

unveiled in 2016. The temporary installation The Path of the Remembered was made of a series of unique ceramic squares. Each square was designed by a different member of the public, uploaded online and then printed onto tiles that were then set into a pathway in the park. Both Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red and The Path of the Remembered related to Britain’s First World War centenary commemorations, and notably both were temporary. But perhaps the signs that ceramics and sculpture would come to share a common interest in monumentality have been present for longer than we might think. The Memorial to Heroic Self Sacrifice is a public monument dating from 1900 that can be found in Postman’s Park in London. The monument was the idea of painter and sculptor George Frederic Watts, and it commemorates ordinary people who died saving the lives of others. These ceramic memorial tiles were designed and made by potter and tile designer William De Morgan. An ordinary material, found in all the homes in Britain, used to make a monument to the extraordinary acts of bravery of ordinary people. The tiles in Postman’s Park are also a reminder that monuments are more flexible in their form that might first be expected and that artists have observed that conventional monuments represent a very narrow range of people, a hundred years before the Fourth Plinth gave this idea a more prominent showcase.

20  Monumental Matters

Figure 2.3  The Memorial to Heroic Self Sacrifice, Postman’s Park, London.

Wheel of Fortune: Monumentalizing Stoke-on-Trent The grand old factories of Stoke-on-Trent are deeply embedded in the ceramics psyche. Since Josiah Wedgwood founded his pottery works in 1759, Stoke has been a place that unites art, industry, fine craftsmanship and entrepreneurial drive. Thanks to an abundance of clay and coal, the area developed as the heartland of fine bone china production in the eighteenth century, becoming home to Royal Doulton, Spode and Minton and later Clarice Cliff and Susie Cooper. The forms, patterns, transfers, colors and techniques developed in these factories still provide a rich seam of inspiration for contemporary ceramics practice, and Stoke resonates even for those ceramicists who exist at the challengingly conceptual end of ceramics practice. Stoke’s history as a center for fine ceramic production and the subsequent dramatic post-industrial decline of the town is a sad but not unusual story. In the nineteenth century around 100,000 people were employed in the potteries. During the 1980s and 1990s the low-paid highly-skilled workforce suffered in the steep decline of British manufacturing, leaving only 10,000 people employed in the city’s long-standing industry. Now much of even Wedgwood’s production takes place in a factory in Indonesia. In British contemporary ceramics, this decline is treated with a tenderness not usually extended to industrial production. It is not the factories with their poor working conditions and low wages that are the subject of wistful glances, it is the workers’ skills and creativity, the perfectly executed technical processes and the material itself.

Monumental Matters 21 Deft skills and manipulation of the material are referenced and celebrated in formally challenging works that demonstrate contemporary ceramics is as knowledgeable of art history as it is of the history and technical expertise of the ceramics factories. Monumentalizing Stoke, its industry and its workers is an extraordinarily creative thread in contemporary ceramics practice, and one that unites the traditional sculptural form of the monument with ceramics-specific references capable of broader resonance. But can these transient works, on show in gallery spaces not public squares, really be considered monuments? Rosalind Krauss states that a logical or conceptual monument is one that speaks symbolically about the meaning or use of the place where it stands. In such a monument the past and the desire to remember is the raw material that is given physical expression in the artwork. The monumental aspect of the work is found in both the intellectual content and the relationship with where is stands. The ability of monuments to adapt to a new place and context and still comment on that site can be seen in Clare Twomey’s ceramic work Monument (2009). Monument first appeared as a temporary installation at the Zuiderzee Museum in Enkhuizen, but the concept for Monument originated in an image that Twomey had seen of a towering pile of broken domestic ceramics at the Johnson’s factory in Stoke-on-Trent. She showed a grainy image of that pile to the staff at the Zuiderzee Museum, and a commission that Twomey thought would be delicate and ephemeral, work of the type she was previously known for, became altogether more robust, powerful and intense. The work, about the presence of the material (ceramic) and monumentality in all its senses, combined approximately twenty cubic meters of broken china and domestic ceramics from Stoke-on-Trent with around ten cubic meters of broken Dutch tiles from the Zuiderzee Museum collection. Using the distinctive blue and white tiles from

Figure 2.4  Clare Twomey, Monument, 2009. Photograph by Clare Twomey Studio.

22  Monumental Matters the museum’s collection created a tie between the idea of the sculpture and the place where it was being brought to life and shown to the public. While the visual language of the pile of china that makes up Monument is a direct reference to Stoke, the challenge to first make Monument outside the UK led Twomey to incorporate ceramics that were iconically Dutch. Drawing on the Zuiderzee Museum’s large collection of Delft tiles, Twomey and the museum sought out those that were deemed beyond use but could not be disposed of. Asked about her use of the tiles, Twomey replied, it was tying in the relationship of this museum to this relationship of the great sense of loss of objects and the destruction of objects within the context of the Zuiderzee Museum. And there was a lot of controversy about the Delft tiles being used because they’re such an important part of the Dutch heritage.3 Monument’s ability to suggest an absent user, and an absent producer and consumer too, comments on the steep decline of industry in Stoke (the origin of the bulk ceramics used in the work) and the loss and absence of skills and workers. This is one of Twomey’s key works, richly invested with meaning, it invites and accommodates multiple interpretations. It can be viewed as a work that is a monument to the past, or a work that looks optimistically to ceramics’ future, be that art or industry. The very title and scale of Monument indicates Twomey’s wish to engage with the idea of what a monument is, as well as its potential and relevance to society. The symbolism of broken domestic china that Twomey uses in this work is powerful, suggesting disturbance in the home, events cataclysmic but personal, or an irreversible change. These possibilities are delivered on an industrial scale in Monument. The evocation of an industry in decay, skills and jobs held in families for decades and lost in a single generation, is a powerful part of the work. The pile of ceramics in Stoke that Twomey saw in the photograph was actually intended for recycling, to be turned into tiles, but this does little to alter the initial response to this work as an observation of a post-industrial decline and the devastating effect it can have on a town. The source of the material anchors Monument in the decline of present-day Stoke, but this does not prevent new sites from having a bearing on the piece. The origins of the ceramics do not make the work parochial. Site-sensitive rather than site-specific, Twomey’s presentation of Monument in the Netherlands indicates the relevance of this work beyond the context of Stoke, and the work’s ability to draw meaning from its immediate surroundings. This versatility was further emphasized when Monument was realized a second time in Middlesbrough, a town in the north east of England, as much in mourning for the loss of its traditional steel industries as Stoke is for ceramics. Responsive to place, Monument, though adaptable, should not be understood as site-less. Like any traditional monument, Clare Twomey’s Monument confronts time and tries to mark a particular moment. At the Zuiderzee Museum Monument could be seen to critique the wider world mission of museums to stop time, to gather examples of visual and material culture so that we can not only remember time that has passed but have a material link to that past. Monument’s use of the Delft tiles from the museum collection is a reminder of the ultimate futility of the museum’s mission to immortalize. There is no such thing as eternal preservation, despite the curious pact that museums make with themselves to do just that. Liesbeth den Besten writes about the two versions of Monument, made in two different countries, in her essay

Monumental Matters 23 ‘All About Transient Ceramics’. She draws attention to the history of export and movement in ceramics, Starting in the Dutch ‘Golden Age’, ships full of bone china were imported by the VOC from overseas, and loads of precious porcelain went to the bottom of the ocean. Now shards of today’s domestic china were shipped from Stoke-on-Trent, England . . . while broken tiles from the museum’s collection are put in between the consumer debris, emphasizing the conflict between precious and non-precious, museum and life.4 Twomey’s piece is a memorial to the absent – absent skills, companies, industry – and it is eloquently articulated by a monumental pile of broken china. It is in this respect that Monument makes itself most powerfully felt, drawing on the emotional power of being in the presence of a towering, overwhelming, pile of shattered domestic ware. More than anything else, Monument commemorates and embodies loss, despite the insistence that these ceramics are the beginning of a process rather than the end. If we understand a monument as the manifestation of the impulse to remember, Monument draws on loss, memory and commemoration in the same way a conventional monument would. It is this that aligns Monument so strongly with the sculptural tradition of the monument. To weigh up Monument with Krauss’s definition in mind, is it logical (speaking of the place where it sits) or abstracted (self-referential)? Monument conforms to the characteristics of the logical monument as it speaks in a symbolic tongue about the meaning or use of the place where it is situated, though this would not be the case without the use of additional material at the Zuiderzee Museum. This use of additional material begs the question of how the work would have performed in the space, in that context, had it remained as a pitcher pile exclusively from Stoke. Though Monument comments on the place where it is situated, be it the Netherlands or Middlesbrough, it does not need to sit in one particular place. Does that make it an abstracted monument, operating in relation to loss of site, acting as a monument only in the sense that it is huge? Or, in fact, is Monument better understood as an anti-monument? While is easy to take a rose-tinted view of the glory days of Stoke, the daily reality for most workers was that of unsafe, repetitive, low-paid factory work. Perhaps Monument monumentalizes this repetitive daily grind, the anti-heroism of the anonymous low-skilled worker at their place on the production line, a marker for those beneath the notice of more conventional monuments. The possibilities are explored by Amy Dickson in the essay ‘Fragile Existence’. Dickson suggests that in Monument, ‘Twomey deliberately sets up a tension between the threat of obliteration and the title of the work . . . defying the heroic narrative of the “monumental”’.5 In much the same way that many monuments seem suspended between definitions of the abstract and the logical, Dickson concludes that Twomey’s Monument hovers between monument and counter-monument, between representing a trauma and self-destruction in order to deny that representation, a monument in name and physicality but a counter-monument in potential. Stoke continues to be the focus for monumental art in the work of ceramicist Neil Brownsword. Brownsword began working at the Wedgwood factory in Stoke when he was 16, before studying ceramics at the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff, the Royal College of Art, and completing a practice-led doctorate at Brunel University in London. From Wedgwood apprentice to Professor of Ceramics, Brownsword’s career mirrors

24  Monumental Matters the ambitions of contemporary ceramics practice. Brownsword shifted from craft to art as he moved from the skilled clay modelling and drawing required of the industry towards the conceptual demands of an art school ceramics practice. His residency at the European Ceramics Work Centre (EKWC) in 1999 was a turning point. It gave him the opportunity to reflect on his work and led to a departure from the figurative narrative works that he felt, ‘had dominated previous objects to the point where it restricted further innovation’.6 In an article called ‘Action – Reflection’, Brownsword traces how his work changed during a trip home to Stoke during the EKWC residency. He describes how he became increasingly alarmed at the sight and speed of the decay of the Staffordshire ceramic industry, I set about documenting photographically many factories in the area which had been closed, been left to rot or were reduced to rubble . . . I was aware of the mass redundancies, which had occurred in recent years, but physically witnessing the destruction of an industry, that had formed the livelihood of local people for generations, fueled me to raise these issues in the work.7 Two key works to emerge from this change in direction were Transition and Salvage Series. To construct these works and others such as SY Series (2001) and Remnant (2000), Brownsword began collecting the detritus of the pottery-making process, poetically described by Grant Gibson as ‘the off-cuts, the imperfections, those areas where the human hand prevailed and, perhaps, a sense of memory lingered’.8

Figure 2.5  Neil Brownsword, SY Series, 2001.

Monumental Matters 25 In an interview with the author in 2012, Brownsword described his work Transition (1999), which referenced the changing state and disappearance of Stoke’s industrial landscape, You’ve got this disparate dialogue of shards which is then composed in this regimented form, repetition. A sense of disorder in the fragments but also the system of display which was trying to make sense of them for an audience. Which was what I was trying to get across with Transition. And again the reference to landscape, a vista which was low on the floor, the reference to archaeology.9 Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (mima) purchased Transition through the Contemporary Art Society in 2011. It was exhibited that year in Interloqui, an exhibition and collaboration between cultural partners in the north east of England and Caterina Tognon Arte Contemporanea, Venice (to coincide with the 54th Venice Biennale). Mima’s decision to purchase this piece, and its exhibition in Venice, are not only testament to the importance of this work in Brownsword’s development as an artist, but also its ability to communicate beyond references to Stoke and the declining ceramics industry. Asked about this very different context for display in Venice, Brownsword replied, In this posh gallery alongside artists like Paul Noble I think it opened up the interpretation of the piece. I think you still get a sense of it referencing archaeology. The remnant of something. How significant the reference to place is, and whether it was picked up there, I don’t think it mattered.10

Figure 2.6  Neil Brownsword, Salvage Series, 2005/2008. Courtesy Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art.

26  Monumental Matters Salvage Series, first created in 2000, takes the form of carefully arranged ceramic objects distributed across a series of low white plinths. These ceramics were a mixture of objects found in the ground at Brownsword’s home in Stoke, leftovers from the industrial process, and works by the artist. In addition to these objects, Salvage Series also comprises of two films; one a National Electronic and Video Archive of the Crafts (NEVAC, now known as Recording the Crafts) production recording pottery skills at the Wedgwood factory, the other showing the dismantling and demolition of Stoke factory buildings. Salvage Series was exhibited as part of Collaging Histories, Brownsword’s show at the Potteries Museum in 2005, and again in 2009, in the exhibition Possibilities and Losses, co-curated by Clare Twomey and Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art. Brownsword described the exhibition at mima as, a unique opportunity to show that work in its original conceived form . . . And the films which were initially research for the PhD became an integral part of the work . . . It gave it a stronger context with the films, within that space it meant so much more to have the impact of the images.11 David Whiting, in his review of Collaging History, writes of these films, The stark contrast was unbearably poignant. Brownsword’s elegiac exhibition offered both a sense of celebration and memorial, a melancholy reminder of what is haemorrhaging away . . . what is going and what has gone.12 Brownsword is palpably concerned by the cavalier attitude to the industrial heritage and the skilled work force formerly a vital part of Stoke, ‘When those people go that knowledge goes with them . . . I wanted to give these people a voice to talk about what they were doing’.13 His creative response to the tragic and specific decline of industry in Stoke is best understood in relation to the monument. In Salvage Series Brownsword creates a well-ordered spread of objects, deliberately set out, as if they had been found on an archeological dig. He uses the formal language of archeology to present a narrative of contemporary loss, but it is the material that is the cornerstone of the work. The odd pieces, shards and fragments are relics of the ceramic production that the town once centred on. Some pieces were found in derelict pot banks, dug up in his own garden, or borrowed from the town’s museum; they are relics of a fast disappearing way of life, and a focus for remembering the recent past. When discussing Brownsword’s work, writers often make reference to a curious object found in the Potteries Museum & Art Gallery in Stoke, a group of three glazed blackware teapots, partially collapsed and fused to the saggar they were fired in 250 years ago. These conjoined teapots sum up the risk and potential for failure that is inescapable when firing ceramics. As a snapshot of a moment in the life of the Potteries this piece is evocative as well as rich in archaeological value, evidence of working practices and thriving workshops of two and a half centuries ago. Brownsword, pulling his material from the ground of Stoke, makes improvisations that, ‘transform and reinvigorate a once commonplace dialect of Bullers rings, cranks, saddles, saggars, spurs and wasters’.14 These objects, the waste and discarded ephemera from the ceramics industry, are repurposed by Brownsword to form a conceptually robust body of work that is aligned

Monumental Matters 27

Figure 2.7  Three Fused Teapots, c.1750, The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery.

with the function and purposes of the traditional sculptural monument. Brownsword’s interest in catching traces and ghosts invites comparisons with the work of the sculptor Rachel Whiteread who, like Brownsword, is interested in showing traces of real life in her work. House (1993–94) is the sculpture that brought Whiteread to widespread public attention. An East London Victorian house cast in concrete and demolished eleven weeks later, House was a monument to domesticity. Whiteread and Brownsword both reject the bombastic heroic monument, but work to anchor memory. They subvert and manipulate the traditions of the monument, rejecting the form but taking the concept, and applying it to ordinary life. The distinction between the monument traditionally erected as a sign of power, and the contemporary realignment of what can be a monument, is present in the work of both artists. Bartomeu Marí describes House as demonstrating ‘the possibility of making a contemporary monument that uses a language which is both locally recognisable and at the same time universal’.15 It is this same local and universal visual language of memory teetering on the edge of loss that is key to the monumental function of Brownsword’s work. Brownsword’s working process, mixing found objects with objects he has made reflects this, I will collect things from derelict factories, things which are ephemeral like workers sponges or tools which I coat with clay and then fire out the material so you have a ceramic ghost of the object.16 The desire to fix memory is at the core of Brownsword’s work. He combines material, concept and context to produce works that attempt to make tangible the collective but fading memory of Stoke’s ceramic industry. His process of excavating, selecting, making, grouping and ordering objects is in contrast to an almost clinical approach to

28  Monumental Matters presentation that lays the cold ceramics industry out for examination. Where he uses film in his work, this heightens the sense of warmth Brownsword has for the subjects of his recordings. Brownsword’s interest in relics of the working life of the Stoke factories, the skilled but anonymous hands that formed the ceramics, is evident in his fascination with the supporting cast of tools. The kiln props, saggars, clay from the edge of molds are what Brownsword selected for veneration and attention, rather than the highly-finished factory product. As Brownsword describes it, These things that are redolent of tacit knowledge, things which have been so much a part of the process of refining an object but the kind of knowledge that gets lost and that we don’t think about when we look at the product.17 Brownsword’s work results in, ‘. . . a form of memorializing that only an artist with a real knowledge of the industry and its skills could undertake’.18 Frank and without sentiment, he confronts time by using museum objects as inspiration and coopting fragmented relics dug from the ground in Stoke. Assembling these fragments together, Brownsword is observing and marking the passing of a way of life. He has created the sense that Stoke’s ceramics industry is worthy of remembrance, rather than somehow distasteful as a subject because of its industrial associations. In this way, Brownsword is very much at odds with the traditional studio-pottery approach allied with Bernard Leach and a quasi-spiritual veneration of the folk-craftsman. Instead, Brownsword made a significant rejection of the legacy of studio pottery, and in doing so has helped set a course that has taken contemporary ceramics practice in Britain to a place of conceptual integrity and artistic innovation that few could have foreseen in the 1980s or early 1990s. Glenn Adamson, reviewing Brownsword’s work after his 2008 show at Galerie Besson in London, suggested that this exhibition helped clarify the nature of Browns­ word’s relationship to ceramics history. For Adamson, the exhibition, with the works

Figure 2.8  Neil Brownsword, Salvage Series, detail, 2005/2008. Courtesy Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art.

Monumental Matters 29 isolated on plinths as individual objects, revealed their connection not only with the detritus of Stoke, but with a wider ceramics history, including the organic forms of Japanese ceramics, In using such quintessential ceramic touches, but recontextualising them into a wholly unfamiliar sculptural idiom – more evocative of Antony Caro or Robert Rauschenberg than Bernard Leach – one feels that Brownsword is not only drawing from ceramics’ long history, but also showing us that this history has life in it yet.19 Brownsword’s post-1999 body of work is best understood by thinking of the essential functions and purposes of the monument as an underlying structure upon which the artist builds. His works are memorials to the absent: absent workers made redundant, an absent industry relocated to China and elsewhere, and the absence of new workers to learn the skills of the ceramics industry and pass them on again. Brownsword’s work operates unequivocally within Krauss’s definition of the logical monument even as the pieces move around the world to be exhibited. Shown in London, Venice or Middlesbrough, these works are so rooted in Stoke that they continue to perform the civic duty of the monument as well as inviting associations with any industry, be it steel or glass, that is threatened and has a hidden history of skilled but anonymous workers embedded within it. Brownsword’s works are symbolic of loss, memory, decay and absence in Stoke, but elsewhere too, any place that can be, as craft historian Tanya Harrod puts it, ‘represented not by images of its people but by something subtler, by the interaction of the workforce and their materials’.20 The long low plinth that Brownsword often favors mediates, to use Krauss’ concept, between the site of display and the representational sign that is the piece. The plinth is a physical demarcation that transforms ceramics industry detritus into art, and it is used by Brownsword with a decisiveness that suggests a deliberate formal invocation of sculptural display. Brownsword uses ideas around monumentality to address the end of things, to mark and record the end of an era. In his work we see the end of skills, the end of industry, the end of a particular chapter in the working life of a town and its inhabitants and yet his monuments are able to withstand movement from place to place and retain their integrity. His monuments not only sustain memories of a particular place and industry, they also remind those of us with no connection to Stoke that sometimes the most important element is an absence.

Making it Big: The Monumental Style Not all monuments comment on place. For some, scale is both the subject and the form. In ceramics the use of scale has visual impact and signals artistic, technical and economic ambition. It also often marks a break with the traditions of studio pottery as making large-scale work can require ceramicists to depart from hand-making in the studio and collaborate with industrial manufacturers. Ceramicists whose work is large in scale are using monumentality as a formal element. These works are modernist or abstracted monuments, depicting only their own autonomy, material or making process. Discussion of such large ceramics often focusses on technical details, reflecting how the discipline has remained firmly grounded in making processes even when the work is intellectually rigorous and ambitious. In large works, sculpture and ceramics

30  Monumental Matters alike, there is less interest in the monument as a repository for conceptual content, marking a specific place for a specific meaning. Instead the art work is a spectacular object, reveling in its own physicality, relating to the architectural scale of its environment and demanding the attention of the viewer. Each year the Saatchi Gallery in London plays host to Collect, the Craft Council’s international art fair for museum-quality contemporary objects. The fair is an important date in the craft calendar, attracting around 10,000 visitors and more than £1 million in sales. At Collect 2008 gallerist Clare Beck showed a group of ceramicists together under the title ‘Monumental Pots’. One of these pots, Julian Stair’s Monumental Jar V, achieved a price of £25,263, the highest price paid for a piece at Collect that year. The vase was bought by the Art Fund on behalf of Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (mima). Monumental Jar V marked the beginning of a period of great creativity for Julian Stair. The groundwork was laid in 2004 when Stair was awarded a Queen Elizabeth scholarship to research the making of monumental ceramics. Only a few years before this he was best known for his restrained functional ware, which remains integral to his practice, alongside his more experimental larger works.

Figure 2.9  Julian Stair, Six Cups and Beakers on a Tall Ground, 2017, and Eleven Cups on a Floating Ground, 2017.

Monumental Matters 31 Edmund de Waal, with whom Stair shared a studio for some years, described his approach to ceramics in the late 1990s, In his working trajectory from ceramic sculptor to potter, Julian has neatly inverted the career expectations of a generation where work began small and gained significance in relation to its size and distance from utility. In short his work has not only gained steadily in intimacy, but also in strength.21 This was written in 1997. Seven years on, Stair had upended this inversion of expectation and instead developed a practice with two distinct but intimately related elements. On the one hand, he continued to make intimate objects such as teapots and beakers, but he also began to work on a much larger scale, in a different space and with a different type of clay. In 2008, when mima acquired Stair’s Monumental Jar V, the distancing effect of the museum allowed this work to exist in a self-referential state that aligned it with sculpture rather than ceramics. First displayed in isolation in a double-height glass atrium, the jar appeared as a work about scale and material. The importance of material was emphasized by visitors being able to touch its surface. James Beighton, the curator who had selected the work, felt the vase was a good fit for the gallery’s permanent collection, because of its certain architectural feel, because it is a monumental piece, it is about scale but it’s not just about scale. . . . It had a very obvious relationship to our space, and some of the monumentality of our spaces.22 Monumental Jar V is a large piece demanding a large space, which, unusually for a gallery with a special interest in contemporary craft, mima was able to deliver. When displayed in the atrium, the jar conforms to the rules of the abstracted monument, with form, material, scale and texture the most readily available starting points for thinking about the piece. Though made from the same material as the engineering bricks that form the pathway into mima, this is a coincidence, and Monumental Jar V does not speak about this place as a logical monument would. It is not a symbol that speaks about its site. Ambitious in scale and austere in color, the towering grey vessel complements the aesthetic of the gallery. Moving around the work and touching it, visitors can experience its scale in relation to their own height, and gain a different understanding of the form, volume and internal space, its roundness and the visible throwing lines that are traces of the making process. Monumental Jar V worked well in the contemporary ceramics collection that was taking shape at mima at that time, and James Beighton saw this work as a complement to Edmund de Waal’s Wunderkammer, purchased the previous year, We did see it in relation to Edmund’s piece. I think inevitably Edmund and Julian are often associated with one another. They shared a studio for a very long time. They’re both articulating ideas, and sometimes quite similar ideas, through an adherence to the vessel form.23 Deceptive in the simplicity of its appearance, the beauty and complexity of Monu­ mental Jar V is its ability to satisfy the conventions of both the traditional and moder­nist monument. Standing alone, the vase appears in the guise of an abstract

32  Monumental Matters

Figure 2.10  Julian Stair, Monumental Jars XIII, XII and X, 2012. Courtesy Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art.

modernist monument. There is a sense of primacy to the work’s scale, vessel-ness, and material qualities. However, the particular type of containment it quietly references means that it has symbolic potential. When this is emphasized by context, the symbolic becomes the center of meaning for the work. Beighton drew attention to this potential and the themes that Stair had been exploring, but not emphasizing, in his work at this point, . . . his monumental work considers the human body as a vessel, and the implications of this for the ceramic object. This concern has led to an investigation of funerary ware and in particular the idea of “extended inhumation”, an archaeological term referring to the tradition of burying the dead in fully extended form. This has led to him creating a series of human sized vessels.24 The idea of the containment of the body after death either became increasingly important or Stair became more at ease with these references being at the forefront of how the work was understood. By 2012 he was decisively positioning his work away from (but not excluding) the self-referential, and towards the universal themes of life and death. These ideas emerged with great beauty and clarity in the solo exhibition Quietus:

Monumental Matters 33 The Vessel, Death and the Human Body. This exhibition, and the project to create new work for this show, was commissioned by mima and first shown there in 2012, before touring to National Museums Wales, Winchester Cathedral and Somerset House in London over the following two years. The variety of venues gave the opportunity for this new body of work to sit against a series of very different architectural, historical and social contexts. Fundamentally and directly the exhibition was grounded in the context of death and the human body, with Stair approaching the subject of life and death through formal references to, and authentic creations of, funerary ware. The pieces themselves ranged dramatically in scale from huge vases in muted earth or grey tones that continued to reference upright burial, life-sized horizontal coffin forms with the negative space of the coffin positioned like a shadow at the side, and small cinerary urns that would fit on a mantelpiece. The empty vessel is both a powerful symbol of loss, and a reminder of the finite nature of our own lives. This was underlined by one vessel being occupied. Reliquary for a Common Man contained and was made from the ashes of a member of Stair’s family by marriage. As Brownsword had done with Salvage Series and his more recent piece Re-Apprenticed (2015), Stair used film in union with ceramics, in this instance playing old home footage of his uncle-in-law Leslie Cox in the gallery alongside the white porcelain cinerary jar. Stair’s Quietus works were especially responsive to site when they were installed at Winchester Cathedral and Somerset House. Though the cathedral chose to exclude Reliquary for a Common Man, the architectural setting, the church as a place where rites of passage are marked, and a space to contemplate eternity, amplified the symbolism of the pieces. In Somerset House, the final tour venue, the works were installed in the Deadhouse, an underground space beneath the grand courtyard lined with historic gravestones. Preservation of the dead, the rituals of death, the setting up of memorials, Stair’s work touches these things with sincerity and humanity while rising to technical challenges of developing new techniques and referencing old ones in his use of Etruria Marl, the local clay of Staffordshire. By the end of the two-year tour Quietus had been seen in a white cube, alongside an archeology collection, in a working cathedral, and in the company of Catholic gravestones. The success of the work at each of these locations made the tour of Quietus just what a touring exhibition should be; responsive and adaptable to place, able to comment on and resonate with well-chosen locations that draw out different facets of the work, while maintaining a central core of meaning. These themes of the vessel, the body and death were present, but not so central, when Stair first began experimenting with monumental pots. Taken alone, these huge pots look to be purely abstract and self-referential. They reference their material and the process of their making, both of which pose significant technical challenges. Stair’s large-scale works are made in brick factories rather than a potter’s studio. Requiring a massive kiln, up to eight firings, and with some pieces weighing almost a ton, this is not the kind of rustic hand-production that studio pottery is known for. But, like the consummate potter that he also is, Stair has found a beauty in the clay used for making bricks, as well as a pleasure in making creative use of the skills and tools of the industrial side of working with clay. Stair embraces both the formal and a conceptual approach to monumentality and, as a result, his work shifts back and forth across the borders between the abstracted and logical monument. While the Quietus works do not relate directly to a single specific site, they have the ability to enter into dialogue with the place where they are on show.

34  Monumental Matters

Figure 2.11  Julian Stair, Columbarium, 2012. Courtesy Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art.

In contrast, the American sculptor Robert Therrien’s engagement with monumentality as scale is direct. Ordinary things such as tables and chairs, an oil can, a stack of plates, tower above the viewer. Stubbornly, almost confrontationally ordinary, these objects bring to mind Martin Heidegger’s description of the jolt one experiences when an object does something unexpected and forces you to contemplate it anew. Therrien, like his fellow American sculptors Jeff Koons and Claes Oldenburgh, employs an epic scale more usually associated with royal and political monuments. Where size would historically have reflected status, the viewer is instead presented with a familiar low-status object of gigantic proportions. This is monumental sculpture with the scale present but the monumentalizing function removed. Anonymous things with no vocabulary to commemorate an individual or event, Therrien’s objects exist as self-referential sculptures on a monumental scale. The simple lines and shapes of Therrien’s almost three meters tall No Title (Oil Can) (2004), are ‘reminiscent of the classical grandeur of heroic monuments’.25 The tip of the oil can projects heroically upwards but refuses to engage with the rules of the historical monument. It makes no comment on state power, national sacrifice, or heroic acts. The monumental reference

Monumental Matters 35 is only to the grandeur, the impact of size that monuments harness for to assert themselves in public spaces. This grandeur is punctured by the commonplace nature of the things that Therrien selects to reproduce as towering objects. Therrien’s monumental works can be read as a wry commentary on the desire to monumentalize individuals and events, an approach to sculpture-making that renders complex and conflicted personalities and events in the simplistic terms of ‘heroic’, ‘victorious’, ‘patriotic’. In contrast, Therrien makes the simple object a monument to be contemplated and wondered at with a level of attention not usually given to a table and chairs or an oil can. In Therrien’s work we can see sculpture’s unease with the legacy of monuments, with the sculptor working both with and against this classic sculptural motif. Rejoicing in scale, but elevating ordinary things Therrien can be seen as part of the shift in sculpture away from the traditions of the monument. This shift, the break with sculpture’s history that sees a formalist rather than symbolic pursuit of the monument, is an important influence in contemporary British ceramics. Ceramicists Felicity Aylieff, Rupert Spira and Julian Stair have all made ordinary vessels in extraordinary sizes. Their adherence to the traditional pottery form of the vase is comparable to the way Robert Therrien, Jeff Koons and Claes Oldenburgh pursue the traditional form of the sculptural monument at the same time as breaking the monumental rules. Both ceramicists and sculptors are making ordinary things of extraordinary sizes and when ordinary things refuse to carry out their usual tasks they cause a rumple in the smooth fabric of our consciousness. In Nicholson Baker’s novel The Mezzanine, a man ties his shoelace and as he does so it breaks and he is left staring at the snapped lace in his hand. This sort of incident is momentarily disorientating and suddenly reveals situations and things in a new light, in this case the obstinate shoe-lace. Rupert Spira, when he was working in ceramics, was consistently within the traditional parameters of the studio potter. He remained committed to making tableware, without engaging in the experimental projects of interest to ceramicists such as Stair, Twomey, Brownsword and Aylieff (who all hold university posts which gives greater opportunities for developing such a practice). In addition to tableware, Spira has also occasionally made enormous jars, up to four feet tall, which are thrown in sections and decorated with text, abstract floral motifs or scratched lines. Text appeared regularly in Spira’s work, and this relationship between text and ground brings to mind the relationship between inscription and surface in monumental sculpture. The 2004 exhibition Rupert Spira: Bowl held at the Sainsbury Centre (Norwich, UK) exhibited some of his larger works. Large, but committed to a scale that can be accommodated in the home, Spira’s works are the smallest of the monumental ceramic works discussed here, but his large jars are particularly interesting because they form a bridge between the studio-made and the factory-made in monumental ceramics. Spira’s works are made without the need for a different studio space, outsourced skills, industrial materials or tools. He is committed to traditional forms and processes, and works only to the scale that his chosen type of clay can support. Spira’s A Pair of Very Large Jars (2007) are self-referential and beautifully so. They look inward, meditatively, to their own form and surface decoration and are tribute to Spira’s clear and sustained commitment to ceramics, without the distraction of the influence of other disciplines on the form or material. This does not mean that we see Spira’s approach as closed. Instead, his interdisciplinarity comes from literature rather than the visual arts, with the surface of his pots stamped with an

36  Monumental Matters alphabet of hand-made letters that spell out Persian poems and other texts. There is a contradiction within all this, for though Spira seems to be the potter most committed to the studio ceramic tradition, he has now stopped making pots, and instead writes, lectures and holds retreats on the Advaitha philosophy of nonduality. Like Therrien’s stack of plates, Spira’s works are autonomous. Text on the surface of his vessels cannot necessarily be read as Spira often overlays the words so they become illegible. Unlike Therrien, Spira does not make use of drama or spectacle. Instead, internality of two kinds is what matters in his work. First is that meaning should be sought within the limits of the work. The second is that expression of human inner nature present in his pieces. Spira exercises his creative freedom against a strict background of studio pottery traditions, and this balance of freedom and constraint reflects the human condition, and is expressed in his focused working methods that meant pots could take weeks to complete. Felicity Aylieff’s monumental pots, along with those by Julian Stair and Rupert Spira, were shown by Clare Beck for Adrian Sassoon at the contemporary craft fair Collect in London in 2008. This was a productive time for Aylieff, and her monumental work

Figure 2.12  Felicity Aylieff, Tower, 2010/2011. Wheel-thrown porcelain, constructed in sections, painted in cobalt blue, made in China. Photograph by Takeshi Yasuda.

Monumental Matters 37 was displayed in a number of exhibitions such as Out of China: Monumental Porcelain, at West Dean Gallery in 2008, and Felicity Aylieff: Working to Scale at Contemporary Applied Arts in London in 2009. This exhibition featured six giant vessels, with the tallest three meters in height.26 Around this time her work was acquired by a number of museum collections. Chasing Black was purchased for the newly reopened ceramics galleries at the Victoria & Albert Museum, and York Art Gallery acquired Hua De Tu An, Flower Pictures II. Aylieff made Chasing Black in 2006, during a four-month residency in Jingdezhen, China, at the Pottery Workshop Experimental Factory. During this residency Aylieff made a series of large-scale vases with the help of the technical expertise of a Chinese factory that specializes in ‘big ware’. Since 2006 Aylieff has continued to make these giant vases, with variations to form and surface decoration. Before the residency in Jingdezhen, Aylieff had been building a reputation for making ‘sculptural’ works in clay. Her 2002 exhibition Sense and Perception at Manchester Art Gallery included boulder-like and shell-like forms such as Bud (2001) and Softly Softly (2001) that the audience were able to explore with their hands. The experimentation with form and material that were of interest to Aylieff in the early 2000s gave way to more conventional but visually and physically bolder forms and decoration in the Jingdezhen project. Since this time, she has used monumental

Figure 2.13  Felicity Aylieff, Bud and Softly, Softly, 2001.

38  Monumental Matters vases and experimented with pattern on the surface, treating them ‘like a huge canvas’.27 Monumental scale has become embedded in Aylieff’s practice and the surface decoration has intensified and varied. As early as 1997 Aylieff had expressed a ‘thirst to create objects of scale’.28 The 2006 residency in China gave her access to the technical support that she needed to create ‘big ware’. Though the scale of these works is ambitious, the forms remain consistently simple, with complexity reserved for the surface decoration. This decoration is clearly essential to Aylieff, and when pictured with her gigantic vases she is often decorating them. In her earlier style of work Aylieff was concerned that scale should not be the main source of visual impact. Instead she hoped that a sense of presence would come from, ‘volume, fluency and clarity of form and purpose’.29 Aylieff has since come to use scale to dramatic effect, both to create a powerful presence and to provide a large surface area for decoration. The importance of the decorative to Aylieff is uncomfortable for those schooled in conventional art historical values. As long ago as 1910 Adolf Loos was denouncing ornament as crime, yet Loos was not troubled by decoration that was appropriate to the material. Aylieff’s tall vases, particularly those with the blue and white handpainted decoration, quote the colors and brushstrokes of the Chinese porcelain that entranced Europeans encountering the material for the first time. Self-referential, commenting on their own material, production and decoration, Aylieff’s monumental vases are a continuation of the long tradition of European fascination with Chinese porcelain production, and the struggle to work with porcelain as successfully as the Chinese. The material is an important subject of the work, and provides a rich commentary on ceramic-ness in an era of interdisciplinarity and porous boundaries. Even the location of the factory Aylieff has chosen for her collaboration adds a layer of depth to the way her vases speak about their material, as the mass-production of fine, translucent, blue and white porcelain started in Jingdezhen in the early 14th century. In many ways porcelain is a most unmonumental choice of material. Historically prized for its translucency, fragility and fine light delicacy, it has been used by Aylieff to produce works on a gigantic scale. The largest vase that she has been able to exhibit in Europe is Chinese Ladders (2012), which stands 4.5 meters tall and is decorated with muscular cobalt blue brushstrokes. Not only the form, but even in the monumental brushstrokes, these vases challenge expectations of what a porcelain vessel can be.

Conclusion Despite material and technical constraints, ceramicists are making vessels that engage with scale to a spectacular degree. This use of scale in contemporary British ceramics is comparable with the use of monumental scale in sculpture, and particularly in relation to Krauss’ categorization of the abstracted monument with its central notions of freedom from context and site, and rejection of the symbolic role. Weighing up the nature of ceramics’ engagement with the formal aspect of monumentality offers no easy answers to the question of how far ceramics can be judged to be operating under sculpture’s influence. That such an influence is present is certain, but the points where it begins and ends are indistinct. This is an uncertainty that we should be attentive to and accepting of. Ceramics, even when appearing to be self-referential, exists in a rich context full of history and associations that prevent it from being completely rootless. Once this ceramic-ness is acknowledged, it is reasonable to point to monumental

Monumental Matters 39 sculpture as a formal influence, but the ceramics in question are unlikely to solely be about pure form, they are too embedded in their own background. Nonetheless, looking at monumental ceramics directly in relation to sculpture’s formal strategies and theories shows that ceramics can function within a framework separate from craft or clay, and that it is possible to deepen our understanding of specific ceramics, and contemporary ceramics practice in general, by using the critical approaches and tools available to other disciplines. The monument as both form and idea is a meeting point between contemporary ceramics and sculpture. Ceramicists using vessel forms are engaged with these sculptural concepts, and translate them into their own ceramics language. Ceramics’ interest in monumental form and function has developed at a time when sculpture is selfcritical and uneasy about its relationship with monuments. In sculpture we often see the monument subverted or abandoned altogether, and instead sculptors have become increasingly interested in ordinary objects and have become anti- or un-monumental in their approach to this type of art making. That said, history is still being used as raw material, and particularly so in ceramics. Neil Brownsword and Clare Twomey unite history, social commentary and material so that style, material, function and ideology dovetail in their monumental works. As well as being influenced by the sculptural traditions of the monument, ceramics leads monumentality in a new direction. A delicate material unsuited to long-standing public monuments, contemporary ceramics has taken up this most sculptural of ideas and experimented with it in a non-sculpture material. The permanence of stone and metal is exchanged for the fragility of ceramic and the vulnerability of the material adds to the emotional impact of ceramic monuments. Instead of the arrogance of granite, the material of choice for the ruling elite, the transience of ceramic makes a realistic and perhaps more emotional comment on the nature of memory and remembering. Gracefully and thoughtfully, contemporary ceramics practice addresses both elements of the monument, monument as a fixer of memory, and monument as style. As sculpture has struggled, fought against, subverted and dismantled the idea of the monument in the late twentieth century, ceramics has embraced monumentality in both form and function. Perhaps when it comes to monument making, contemporary ceramics is more sculptural than sculpture?

Notes 1 C. Moriarty, ‘The Cenotaph’, in Penelope Curtis and Keith Wilson, editors, Modern British Sculpture, London, Royal Academy of Arts, 2011, p.46. 2 R. Taws, ‘The Guillotine as Anti-Monument’, Sculpture Journal vol.19. no.1, 2010, p.34. 3 C. Twomey, interview with the author, 2010. 4 L. den Besten, ‘All About Transient Ceramics’, in L. den Besten and A. Dickson, editors, Monument: Clare Twomey, The Netherlands, Zuiderzee Museum and Middlesbrough, mima, 2009, p.23. 5 A. Dickson, ‘A Fragile Existence’, in L. den Besten and A. Dickson, editors, Monument: Clare Twomey, The Netherlands, Zuiderzee Museum and Middlesbrough, mima, 2009, p.11. 6 N. Brownsword, ‘Action – Reflection: Tracing Personal Developments’, Interpreting Ceramics, no.2, 2001, unpaginated. Available from: http://interpretingceramics.com, 12.10.2011. 7 Ibid. 8 G. Gibson, ‘The Kilning Fields’, Crafts, no.211, 2008, p.30. 9 N. Brownsword, interview with the author, 2012. 10 Ibid.

40  Monumental Matters 11 N. Brownword, interview with the author, 2012. 12 D. Whiting, ‘Neil Brownsword: Collaging History’, Crafts, no.196, September/October 2005, p.64. 13 N. Brownsword, interview with the author, 2012. 14 N. Brownsword, Neil Brownsword: Poet of Residue, 2008, text quoted from www.galeriebesson. co.uk, accessed 13.10.2011. 15 B. Marí, ‘The Art of the Intangible’, in R. Krauss, B. Marí, S. Morgan and M. Tarantino, Rachel Whiteread: Shedding Life, London, Tate Publishing, 1996, p.66. 16 Ibid. 17 N. Brownword, interview with the author, 2012. 18 T. Harrod, ‘The Memory-work: Recent Ceramics by Neil Brownsword’, in N. Brownsword, T. Harrod and D. Barker, Neil Brownsword: Collaging History, Stoke-on-Trent, The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, 2005, p.12. 19 G. Adamson, ‘Neil Brownsword: Up From the Ashes’, Ceramics Art and Perception, no.73, 2008, p.70. 20 T. Harrod, ‘The Memory-work: Recent Ceramics by Neil Brownsword’, in N. Brownsword, T. Harrod and D. Barker, Neil Brownsword: Collaging History, Stoke-on-Trent, The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, 2005, p.9. 21 E. de Waal, ‘Personal Possession’, Ceramic Review, no.163, 1997, p.14. 22 J. Beighton, interview with the author, 2010. 23 J. Beighton, interview with the author, 2010. 24 J. Beighton, application to Art Fund Collect, mima archives, December 2007. 25 Anon. National Galleries of Scotland object description. See: www.nationalgalleries.org, accessed 27.10.2011. 26 Anon. ‘Preview. Felicity Aylieff: Working to Scale at CAA, London’, Ceramic Review, no.239, September/October 2009, p.15. 27 Anon. ‘Preview. Felicity Aylieff: Working to Scale at CAA, London’, Ceramic Review, no.239, September/October 2009, p.15. 28 F. Aylieff, ‘Larger than Life’, 1997, Ceramic Review, no.165, p.36. 29 Ibid., p.37.

3 The Numbers Game Multi-part Compositions

In which we wonder whether ceramics are more than the sum of their parts.

What may have caused the rise of the multi-part ceramic artwork? The sculptural movements of assemblage and minimalism are examined as potential sources of influence. Horizontal and vertical groups are positioned as key compositional strategies across both ceramics and sculpture. Finally, we take a detailed look at the work of ceramicist Clare Twomey and the sculptures that form a backdrop to her distinctive practice.

Do Numbers Matter? At one time a clear division between sculpture and the decorative arts was that decorative art objects were available in multiples while sculpture was unique. Rare things cost more and mass-produced things are cheap, so where price and cultural status exist in relation to one another, making more of something is likely to impact on its status, certainly its preciousness. Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction proposed that art is devalued when reproduced. While the reproduction might be perfect, the aura and authenticity of the original will always be absent. What is readily available is valueless, and this has been in part responsible for the lower status of ceramics in comparison with sculpture. Ceramics are found in every home, while sculpture is not. The repetition of vessels, grouped works and installations of large numbers of objects has become a familiar sight in contemporary ceramics practice since the late 1990s, and while sculpture offers insights into this, ceramics has its own traditions of the multiple. Ceramics’ long-standing relationship with the multiple object and more recent interest in using numerous forms in a single work was the subject of the exhibition Multiplicity: Contemporary Ceramic Sculpture at The University of Texas in 2006. Bonansinga, writing in the exhibition catalogue, makes reference to the factoryproduced ceramic vessels of the early twentieth century, made in multiples, ‘designed with consideration, and finished by hand’.1 A few years later, the exhibition Taking Shape: Finding Sculpture in the Decorative Arts held at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds in 2009 also addressed the question of the multiple. Penelope Curtis, in her

42  The Numbers Game foreword for the exhibition catalogue, considered whether making two or four of something changes its status; do sets belong to the decorative arts and unique pieces to sculpture?2 Where multiples appear in art, whether in a limited edition of prints or in a stack of Brillo boxes, these pieces pose a challenge to the notion of uniqueness prized for its role in constructing the economic and cultural value of art. The minimalist sculptors who came to prominence in America in the 1960s were also concerned with challenging the unique art work. They rejected art as the expression of the individual and used materials and processes that enabled them to eradicate signs of the artistic gesture. Seriality and repetition were used as strategies to emphasize these ideas. A number of writers on ceramics have weighed up the potential link between ceramics and minimalism. Veiteberg, writing about the use of repeated vessel forms in contemporary ceramics practice, suggests that this method reduces the importance of the individual object, challenging ‘modernist ideas about the unique, original, autonomous piece’.3 For the modernists ‘make it new!’ is the clarion cry, as they will objects without the contamination of tradition to spring spontanously into life. Describing an area that has piqued the interest of a number of British ceramicists, Veiteberg’s essay is a useful starting point for considering the use of repeated and accumulated vessels in contemporary ceramics practice, and where the art historical origins of this approach might lie. In sculpture, minimalism and assemblage both deployed multi-component work, making these movements useful reference points for testing ceramics’ ability to be understood within sculptural discourse. This is not an attempt to co-opt the best work in clay into sculpture, but instead to test and develop interdisciplinary understandings that have the possibility to widen the interpretative possibilities open to ceramics. In making claims for the presence of sculptural qualities in some ceramic works, there is a conscious attempt to pinpoint exactly what those sculptural qualities, concerns, or associations might be. To some extent these associations between ceramics and sculpture are out of step with one another, as we consider whether contemporary ceramics has been influenced by ideas that were current in sculpture half a century or more ago. There is no crime in looking to the past for inspiration, but when using the prefix ‘sculptural’ is it important to acknowledge the time and the context in which certain ideas or working processes were current in the rapidly changing field of sculpture. Numerous repetitions of a form in a single work, such as the series of firebricks that make up Carl Andre’s notorious ‘pile of bricks’, more properly known as Equivalent VIII (1966), has been a prominent strategy in sculpture since the 1960s. Multiple objects in a single work was first seen in ceramics in 1971, when Colin Pearson caused a stir by showing a large number of winged vases together as a group at the Craft Centre of Great Britain.4 For Jones, their numbers and the manner of their display signaled a change from ‘pottery’ to ‘ceramics’ and, ‘their cumulative effect meant that “pottery” itself needed to be reconsidered in light of this unusual and challenging presentation’.5 Despite the interest in this exhibition, multi-part ceramic works gained real traction as an aesthetic strategy only in the 1990s. Since then it has become a popular way of working, allowing the hand-made scale of the vessel to be maintained while giving the work physical scale and dramatic presence. Certainly, a shared aesthetic gives the sense that there is a relationship to explore, but this can falter as it becomes difficult to account for the differences in attitudes to

The Numbers Game 43 material and the different approach to the regulation of space between objects. Where a minimalist sculptor might employ mathematics and precision, a ceramicist is more likely to use intuition to space the parts of a group. So while there does seem to be a relationship here, like all relationships it is complicated. What then can we learn from the minimalist’s use of multi-part works that informs our understanding of the use of multiples in ceramics? In the essay ‘Serial Project no.1 (ABCD)’ originally published in Aspen Magazine in 1966, Sol LeWitt defined a serial artwork as consisting of ‘multipart pieces with regulated changes’.6 Employing such a definition, putting to one side the geometric shapes employed by the minimalists and widening the use of the serial object to include Pop Art for example, one might make use of the discourse around the serial object to interpret the use of repeated forms in contemporary ceramics practice, and understand something more of this area of common ground between ceramics and sculpture. When it comes to multi-component art works, the crucial influence of sculpture on ceramics is not just how the work appears, but also the viewer’s experience of their encounter with the work. The environment in which the object is encountered and the importance of the viewer in the ‘activation’ of the artwork are key concerns for the minimalists, and Edmund de Waal has identified both of these elements as important to the relationship between ceramics and minimalist sculpture.7 Where appearances give the impression that ceramics and minimalism appear to be in close conversation, as it were, we should remain alert to whether ceramics is fully engaging with the minimalist project or is, in part, running counter to it.

Plane Thinking: Horizontal Groups Since the 1990s ceramics arranged in discrete groups across a flat plane has become one of the prime ways of presenting concept-driven work. Ceramics, as they tend usually to be small, are easily deployed to explore the compositional potential of the horizontal surface. Indeed, this is how we often encounter decorative ceramics in our homes, grouped on shelves or a mantelpiece. In sculpture, where the units making up the piece are usually larger, horizontal groups can aggressively dominate space. Plegaria Muda by Doris Salcedo was shown at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm from 2008 to 2010. Made up of pairs of tables stacked back-to-back, one on top of the other so that one becomes the plinth for the other, this sculpture occupied the entire gallery where it was shown. The sculpture’s command of the horizontal axis forced the viewer to walk within in rather than around it, transposing the usual viewing process in which the visitor circles the sculpture. The horizontal spread is a form of arrangement used by prominent ceramicists such as Gwyn Hanssen Pigott, Jacob van der Beugel, Edmund de Waal and Natasha Daintry. But do these multiple arrangements bear the influence of sculpture? While presenting individual ceramics in this way is fairly normal, the use of multiple vessels in a single work is not a practice that comes from within ceramics. The rise of this formal approach during the 1990s came at a time when contemporary ceramics was becoming increasingly interested in engaging with a context beyond craft. One would expect ceramicists to look outwards towards sculpture, a fellow plastic art, and those with an interest in art history would be aware of works such as Andy Warhol’s Ten Brillo Boxes (1968) and Edward Allington’s Ideal Standard Forms (1980), as well as the grouped forms prevalent in 1960s American minimalist sculpture.

44  The Numbers Game

Figure 3.1  Natasha Daintry, Ocean, 2009. Photograph by Matthew Donaldson.

Natasha Daintry’s use of color in her groups of small slender vessels has an obsessive repetitive quality that calls to mind the beautiful series of tiles on which potters test carefully graded shades of colors, a process that combines the systemic approach and creative expression that is the essence of working with clay. Daintry is particularly interested in how colors come alive in relation to what they are put next to, making her clusters of vessels visually compelling explorations into the interplay between form, group and color. British sculptor Anish Kapoor’s pigment sculptures are also concerned with form and grouping, but it is the color and the intensity of that color that is at the center of these works. 1000 Names (1979–80) was the first pigment work Kapoor made, after travelling through India. The tapering forms of intense yellow, red and white pigment recall the pointed heaps of Rangoli pigment powder for sale at market stalls all through India. The vibrancy and intensity of the color palette used by both Kapoor and Daintry is heightened when different colors are seen in relation to one another. Without the scale of Kapoor’s sculptures, or the intensity of his pigments, Daintry, with her intense acid and canary yellow, seems to be striving for the effect

The Numbers Game 45 of visual arrest present in Kapoor’s sculpture. Color has symbolic attributes in art and culture, but it is also used by Kapoor and Daintry in relation to the formal concerns of space and shape. Where the work differs, and their concerns diverge, is in respect to the human hand. Kapoor’s pigment works are carefully colored (dry pigment powder flicked onto the form with a brush) so that no trace of the human hand can be found in the final work. Daintry, on the other hand, has spoken of how she wants the dynamism of the potter’s wheel to flood her work even after it is static.8 She intends the human element of making to be present not hidden. In this way, Daintry remains firmly connected to the studio pottery tradition while expanding the idiom in her work. Space and color can be explored in the single work, but Daintry has chosen space as her subject too, using height as well as spatial composition to create waves of color that seem to slide across her groups of slim vessel forms. In any discussion of grouped vessels it would be churlish to omit mention of the Australian ceramicist Gwyn Hanssen Pigott (1935–2013), who in fact trained and had her first studio in the UK. A great admirer of the painter Morandi, from the 1980s Hanssen Pigott placed her pots in a manner reminiscent of his quiet still-life paintings of bottles and bowls. She made use of space, negative space and pauses between objects in a way not possible for the single vessel. Discussions of Hanssen Pigott’s work frequently centers around the idea of the still life, but a sense of movement or progress is often present in the title of her works, Blue Travellers, Wave and Trail with Blue Bowl. Caravan was the title of her major touring show of 2004, in which a fifty-five-foot-long line of vessels processed across the space. Despite obvious stylistic differences, it is tempting to align Hanssen Pigott’s muted groups with Michael Craig-Martin’s description of the ‘primacy given to simplicity, clarity, directness and immediacy’ present in the pop, minimal and conceptual art of the 1960s.9 The prioritization of simplicity is a hallmark of Hanssen Pigott’s restrained vessel forms. In Shore (2010) all of the vessels included in the piece have an off-white exterior while the interior surfaces use a limited palette of greys and blue. While simplicity and clarity might be shared, Hanssen Pigott’s evocative titles exclude her work from comparison with minimalism, as beyond visual simplicity the minimalists prize the physical rather than the metaphorical. In contrast, the metaphorical is an important element in Hanssen Pigott’s work. Over time her work has evolved to create a sub-language that exists within a simple gathering of beakers and bowls, able to take on the air of a group of travelers or a caravan winding its way slowly through the landscape. These are vessels conceived to represent things other than what they are. Such ideas are essential to Hanssen Pigott’s work, again disqualifying her from the broad concerns of minimalism, but not from exhibiting influences that come from sculpture, particularly the use of space and the role of the viewer in the creation of meaning. Edmund de Waal quite literally elevated the ceramic group in his 2009 Victoria & Albert Museum commission, Signs and Wonders. Raised high into the cupola of the gallery, a suspended steel ring frames the edge of the dome and forms a ledge to support pale porcelain vessels that stand out crisply against this red backdrop. The shelf is covered in slick red lacquer. One of the few colors de Waal uses, it has appeared in a number of his shelf works. The combination of color, material and the weightlessness effect that has been achieved with the suspension of the steel ring are direct references to Antony Caro’s seminal sculpture Early One Morning (1962).

Figure 3.2  Anthony Caro, Early One Morning, 1962. Steel and aluminum, painted red, 114 × 244 × 143""/290 × 620 × 333cm.  Barford Sculptures Limited. Courtesy of Barford Sculptures Limited. Photograph by John Riddy. Tate Collection, London.

Figure 3.3  Edmund de Waal, Signs and Wonders, 2009.

The Numbers Game 47 These ideas may have been germinating a few years before the commission, as de Waal identified a reference to Early One Morning in the work of ceramicist Anders Ruhwald in 2007. In the catalogue that accompanied Ruhwald’s exhibition in Stockholm de Waal wrote, Being above the ground is an interesting place to be for sculpture. Anthony Caro’s iconic Early One Morning of 1962 with its discrete elements held above the ground completed his profound disjunction from Henry Moore’s placing of objects on the plinth or earth. I feel that Ruhwald is presaging just such a major shift.10 Adamson relates Signs and Wonders to Early One Morning through a weightlessness present in both works, writing that de Waal, ‘wanted each element of his works to float independently from the next, rather than sit heavily upon it’.11 Certainly, holding objects above the ground is a feature in works by Judd, Caro and de Waal. In the case of de Waal, this suspension of ceramics in the air makes an agreeable metaphor for the suspension of his work between the categories of ceramics and sculpture. Once de Waal’s apprentice, Jacob van der Beugel is another ceramicist closely associated with horizontal compositions. Did his time in de Waal’s studio pique his interest in ceramic groups? As well as multi-part works, musical references are common between the two potters. Van de Beugel’s Nocturnes (2010) and de Waal’s A Sounding Line (2007) both give expression to the rhythm and resonance of music through the horizontal arrangement of a group of vessels. Van der Beugel has since developed his work in a direction indicative of increased freedom and confidence.

Figure 3.4  Jacob van der Beugel, Nocturnes, 2010.

48  The Numbers Game

Figure 3.5  Edmund de Waal, A Sounding Line, 2007.

Still exploring the horizontal axis, this principle of composition has been given an ambitious treatment in a work made for Chatsworth House (UK). The North Sketch Sequence (2014) is a depiction of the DNA of The Duke and Duchess of Devonshire and their son and daughter-in-law translated into 650 ceramic panels installed to line one of the corridors of the house. Despite simplicity of appearance and the use of repetition, horizontal groups in ceramics have a fluidity and freedom that is unlike the regimented intervals of minimalist sculpture. Ceramics’ rhythmic and varied groups, with their evocative titles and web of associations, suggest that while minimalism offers valuable insights into developments within the ceramics field, particularly in the way in which the work is encountered by the viewer, perhaps a sculptural influence of a different order is also at play.

The Numbers Game 49

High Rise: Stack, Build, Repeat The most conscious and purposeful relationship between ceramics and minimalism is in Edmund de Waal’s knowing quotations of one of Donald Judd’s most iconic sculptures. De Waal’s Listing, Listing (2006) and Wunderkammer (2007) occupy the vertical plane, both drawing the eye upward and physically dominating the viewer. The vertically stacked vessel, or a series of vertically stacked shelves, is a motif that de Waal has repeatedly returned to since his extraordinary work The Porcelain Room was unveiled at the Geffrye Museum in London in 2003. His use of shelves is one of a series of cleverly executed formal dialogues between his work and twentiethcentury sculpture. De Waal’s interest in Judd’s approach to material, shape, rhythm and interval is widely acknowledged. Judd’s use of box forms, plywood and metal is echoed in the frames and boxes that have become central to de Waal’s presentation of his ceramics. De Waal’s Listing, Listing (2006) is made up of eight shelves similar to the individual units that make up Judd’s stacks. Listing, Listing and the similar work a poem written in the hills (2012) are influenced by minimalist sculpture, but not slavishly so. These ladders of shelves are laden with pots in a decidedly maximalist manner, challenging the orderly restraint of the meticulously positioned shelves.

Figure 3.6  Edmund de Waal, a poem written in the hills, 2012. Seventeen porcelain vessels in three aluminum shelves, overall dimensions 32 × 30 × 12 cm. Photograph by Michael Harvey.

50  The Numbers Game Jorunn Veiteberg associates de Waal’s shelf works with control and repetition, but remains unconvinced of the link with minimalism, Even though his interest in the serial links him to minimalism’s visual strategies in general, and the choice of shelf system to Donald Judd’s ‘stack’ sculptures in particular, the differences from these important traditions are as striking as the similarities. The most obvious difference is clear in the reference to Judd’s sculptures. Judd maintained a clear distinction between art and design, sculpture and furniture. When de Waal uses these sculptural forms as shelves, he not only does away with this opposition, he also opens for a whole new world of associations.12 Veiteberg is saying that while a formal element may be common across ceramics and minimalism, the result can be very different. Repetition in minimalist sculpture has an air of the mechanical or process-driven, but in de Waal’s work the repetition of vessels feels loose, spontaneous and teems with references to the wider world. There are two types of repetition in works such as a poem written in the hills and The Porcelain Room, the regulated repetition of the shelves and the freer repetition of the pots that sit on them. These repeated pots are not the endlessly multiplying forms of factory mass-production, instead Veiteberg suggests that they capture a sense more akin to the repetition of daily rituals.13 So what is the nature of the formal relationship between Donald Judd’s stacks and works such as Listing, Listing and a poem written in the hills? De Waal is certainly influenced by the radical changes that were taking place in British and American sculpture in the 1960s. He is at ease directly referencing highly recognizable works from this period, just as he does when paying homage to the abstract painter Agnes Martin with long rows of pots that echo her signature stripes of paint. Across his body of work de Waal is having a conversation with important works of twentieth-century sculpture, whether that is through form, color or the disconnection from both ground and plinth. It is remarkable that all of this is possible with ceramics, and that the discipline has reached this point with such rapidity in a single generation of ceramicists. Nonetheless, beneath these formal similarities there is a tension between ceramics and minimalism found in the way that minimalism rejects the notion of the artwork as a unique creation. The minimalist artwork does not reflect the personal expression of the artist or the presence of the hand of the master within or upon the work. This was considered a distraction and was prevented, sometimes using highly skilled unnamed fabricators or through the use of materials requiring no further intervention such as bricks and timber planks. Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt and Robert Morris shared this approach, creating works that were impersonal and neutral. The aim of making sculptures so minimal in form was so that the viewer should have a direct unmediated reaction to the object itself. Minimalism demands the attention of the audience in the here and now. As Frank Stella famously said, ‘What you see is what you see’. This demand for attention is what Jones described in the Colin Pearson exhibition of winged vases in 1971, and is perhaps what de Waal pursues in his exploration of color and presentation in the peripheral non-ceramic elements of his work. His use of shelves, vitrines, obscure glass, birch-wood boxes with narrow windows all make the audience look at ceramics differently, with attention, and, beyond this, to think about ceramics in a new way. While the ceramic forms might be familiar, these stacked plates and bowls are not just craft objects, they are able to operate in the art

The Numbers Game 51 world and this is what the overt references to sculpture seem to signal. These references are loud and demanding compared with de Waal’s restrained porcelain forms, but they provide a clear frame that claims space and attention for ceramics, demanding the respect and attention that would be given to a sculpture or painting. De Waal’s use of red shelves or stark black-edged vitrines prompt people to look for more than they normally would when looking at porcelain, and possibly creating a whole new audience for contemporary ceramics in the process. While minimal art does not refer to anything beyond its literal presence, de Waal draws on myriad ideas in his works, whether that be Judd’s use of the colored stack, or revisiting Kettle’s Yard (Cambridge, UK) to create work for a place he visited often as a student. With de Waal, the viewer is not simply in the presence of the object, but in the presence of memories, of wide-ranging cultural, museological or biblical references, and often standing in a particular place that has strongly informed the work. De Waal is interested in the history and use of space, and how that can be articulated through the placement of vessels. As with minimalist sculpture, his work is carefully arranged to emphasize and reveal the architecture of the space in which it is placed. The exact placement of the work, in corners, directly on the floor, on a ledge, encourages the viewer to be conscious of the architecture around them, a strategy often employed by minimalist sculptors. In de Waal’s work there is a ‘continued concern for the aesthetics of display: how the pots should be exposed, perceived and contained’.14 This is the essential influence of minimalism on de Waal, and it is present in the way the work is encountered, not in form, or color, or in references to Judd. Even the use of the stack hints not only at Judd but makes a more historic reference to the way that porcelain tea bowls were packed when used for ballast in ships. Glenn Adamson believes that stacking is a way for de Waal to engage with the history of sculpture, ‘Since Constantin Brancusi’s first forays into abstraction, vertical arrangement has been a critical tool in the hands of modern sculptors’.15 Robert Therrien’s No Title (Stacked Plates) (2010) and No Title (Pots + Pans II) (2008), and Tony Cragg’s Stack (1975), have continued to make reference to the vertical arrangement. It is in the form of the stack itself rather than the color or shape of the vessels that the influence of sculpture on contemporary ceramics is more likely to be present. As well as the controlled regulated positioning of forms used in minimalism, less orderly arrangements also have a presence in sculpture. An important feature of the messy stack is that it brings different materials into contact with one another, and offers a challenge to the traditional idea that a sculpture is made from a single material. This influence is strongly felt in ceramics, which has traditionally used a single material and now exercises the freedom to combine ceramics with other media. This looser attitude to material is a feature of Tony Cragg’s Stack (1975). Cragg’s first Stack was made from gathering all the material around him in his studio, creating stratified layers suggestive of archeology and geology and creating a sense of disorder contained, the messiness of everyday life shaped into art. Cragg’s by-chance approach to the materials that formed Stack has an antecedent in the method of assemblage practiced by the highly influential German artist Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948), as well as incorporating the vertical stacking of material that could be associated with Brancusi’s approach to arranging forms. Cragg is interested in the ‘mythology of material’, feeling that materials carry a ‘balloon of information’ with them. Rejecting the approach to sculpture that tried to strip materials of their associations, in Cragg’s gathered debris pieces the material remains connected to the

52  The Numbers Game world that it has been plucked from. This connection is shared with contemporary ceramics, which embraces the history of the material, using it as an additional layer in the work even as ceramicists pursue new forms and approaches. The relationship of the part to the whole in Cragg’s stacks offers a productive association with de Waal’s multi-piece method of working. This method is indicative of a broad shift in British contemporary ceramics that prioritises the whole work over the individual ceramic piece. Increasingly, non-ceramic elements make up some of the parts that contribute to the whole. Where there is film or performance, as in David Cushway’s performance Plate Spinner (2011), for example, in which a series of plates are set spinning on wooden poles, their breakage inevitable, ceramics works effectively in collaboration with other elements. However, in an increasingly diverse field of practice clay remains the anchoring material. This is what gives ceramicists a distinct identity even when their work encompasses other media and occupies a fundamentally expanded field of practice. The vertical arrangement of forms and the resultant visual impact is not only present in de Waal’s pieces. Clare Twomey’s Manifest: 10,000 hours (2015) is made up of ten thousand hand-made bowls arranged on a towering scaffold and was specially commissioned for the reopening of York Art Gallery in 2015. The gallery is home to one of the largest and most important studio pottery collections in the UK, and this work subtly blends the studio pottery heritage of the collection with the formally ambitious nature of post-studio practice. The black steel frame quotes the viewing space created by museum vitrines but on a towering scale, with seventeen individual levels and reaching a height of six meters. The birch-ply shelves support 10,000 slipcast bowls, which are stacked on one another as Chinese tea bowls were when they first came to Europe by ship. Each bowl represents one of the 10,000 hours of practice required to master a skill and, in keeping with Twomey’s interest in drawing audiences into her work, they were cast by members of the public. The legacy of minimalism’s approach to material and seriality is present in the structured steel grid that provides a rigid boundary, and in the forced shift in how the viewer responds. Manifest is about as far from looking at a small bowl in a glass case as it is possible to be. The work is exultantly large, a spectacle to be admired, your neck cranes backwards to take it in. Onwards and upwards is the mood that Manifest and York’s Centre of Ceramic Art project. Works such as Manifest cannot help but command the attention of the viewer and, for those coming to contemporary ceramics for the first time, these soaring works effect a recalibration of what can be expected from ceramics in much the same way that the deployment of industrial materials in minimalism disrupted and recalibrated what audiences could expect from sculpture. These large-scale skyward builds are a recent development in British ceramics and the influence can be traced to sculpture with its long history of imposing vertical forms, from the obelisks to commemorative columns.

The Expressive Possibility of Repetition Even at the peak of minimalism’s influence, not all sculptors adhered to the reduction, abstraction, seriality and repetition associated with the movement. Eva Hesse (1936–1970), for example, drew on and subverted these processes. Hesse’s way of bringing an organic unpredictable element to repeated forms offers another way to think about the way repetition is used in contemporary ceramics practice. Hesse’s

The Numbers Game 53 works such as Addendum (1967) and Repetition Nineteen III (1968) make use of repeated serial elements such as vessels and ropes, but the vessels are crumpled and the hanging ropes are unruly. The systematic deployment of the multiple object is subverted by the element of chance that shapes the appearance of the final work. In Repetition Nineteen III this element of chance is extended to the arrangement of the individual units, which Hesse did not dictate. Eva Hesse reworked the grids, cubes, repetition that were the motifs of minimalism and created a personal and expressive language of material and objects. The expressive possibilities of rope, a material of use and practical purpose, makes a point of contact between sculpture, ceramics and the other crafts. This ability to relax control and allow materials to be expressive, in conjunction with series, groups and repetition, has been put to effective use by contemporary ceramicists such as Twomey, de Waal and Brownsword. Elizabeth Sussman suggests that Hesse, while working within a minimalist vocabulary of industrial materials and serial repetition, ‘found that those materials and those systems could be broken down’.16 In breaking and subverting the systems and vocabulary of minimalism Sussman argues that Hesse moved it away ‘from its anti-expressive, systems-based activities and aesthetic and, in two short years, helped establish a paradigm shift’.17 Hesse is sometimes positioned as the organic feminine side of minimalism, reserving precision and an unemotional surface for male artists. There is certainly a freedom in her work that is not present in the works of Judd or LeWitt. It is this freedom and the communicative potential of industrial materials that invites comparisons between Hesse and ceramics. In Hesse’s sculpture the unease caused by minimalism’s reductive, and often dehumanized, forms is offset, an approach used by Twomey in Manifest, where the human touch present in the ceramic bowls softens the steel that frames them. Hesse’s combination of regularity, repetition and the multi-part composition is articulated in Julian Stair’s Columbarium (2012). The name for a room where funeral urns are stored in niches, Columbarium is a ten-meter-high shelved wall populated with 130 cinerary jars. When it was shown as part of the exhibition Quietus at Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, this was the first work that visitors encountered. Entering the gallery through double doors revealed a white structure divided into a grid of regular square niches reaching up the gallery wall and touching the ceiling. This must have taken some by surprise, indeed, many visitors may not have seen a ceramics exhibition quite like it. As in Manifest, the hand-made ceramics set into the regular structure of the shelved wall reached back to ceramics’ pottery traditions, especially in the use of material, which included porcelain, basalt and stoneware. While making use of the regulated space offered by a super-structure, Manifest and Columbarium make room for expressive possibilities in the ceramics that sit within the structure.

Clare Twomey: Master Assembler Accumulation is a moment of transition in twentieth-century sculpture. As a method, aesthetic and concept, it rejects the minimalist approach, replacing spare studiously mute forms with an explosion of images and symbols. In 1961 the Museum of Modern Art in New York held an exhibition called The Art of Assemblage. In the exhibition catalogue William Seitz described the artist-assembler as both a metaphysician and a poet, creating works with three levels of operation, ‘that of tangible materials, that of

54  The Numbers Game vision, at which colors and other formal qualities alter each other . . . and finally that of “literary” meanings’.18 The areas of material, color and meaning are significant to ceramics, and their importance to assemblage suggests this area of sculptural practice, despite the cool white surface of porcelain, may have a greater resonance with ceramics than minimalism. Assemblage is characterized by its use of the bits and pieces of everyday life, with its chaotic, euphoric and sometimes orderly gatherings of stuff. Gathering bits and pieces of rubbish and other materials found in the street or in the studio, the discarded fragments of everyday material life, these assemblers, such as Kurt Schwitters and painter-sculptor Robert Rauschenberg, chose not to participate in the use of the historic and enduring materials of art. The many small elements that make up their whole assembled works often creates a feeling of chaos, sometimes ordered chaos, but representing the commotion and disorder of life. As early as the 1930s and 1940s Kurt Schwitters was using discarded articles from everyday life to create works of art, busily constructing his own world from remnants of the contemporary world. Isabel Schulz labelled these pieces as ‘metaphors of a society increasingly shaped by industrial production and consumerism, advertising, and the media’.19 It is what is offered by the connection with the real world of things that draws ceramics and assemblage together, in contrast to the distance created by the industrial anonymity of the treatment of materials in minimalism. Compared with minimalism, assemblage takes a very different approach to the use of material. Present as a method and a mind-set both before and after minimalism, accumulation takes a view of material more akin to the Arte Povera movement, which through materials shares a direct engagement with everyday life. Tony Cragg’s approach, turning detritus from the mass-manufactured use-and-throw material world, has been absorbed into ceramics and used with great effect. The influence of material on form is evident in Cragg’s sculpture Black and White Stack. An accumulation of the debris of everyday life, painted in one of two colors and corralled into piles, this sculpture has a thin veneer of order. Black and White Stack brings to mind Clare Twomey’s works that combine ceramics and accumulation. In Heirloom (2004) and Present Traces (2011) there is freedom and chance in how the individual components of the work are found and arranged, but within carefully observed parameters. Sculptors accumulated, gathered, collected and scavenged found materials and activated them within their work as a way to break down assumptions about which materials are appropriate for making art. The assembler-sculptors bridged the gap between art and everyday life using perishable materials such as newspaper, string, adhesive tape, or real food, making a decisive break with the traditional sculptural ideas of craftsmanship and permanence. This was later echoed within Dutch and German contemporary jewelry-making, which frequently rejects precious metals and stones in favour of plastic, rope and found objects. For ceramics too, the abandonment of craftsmanship is a significant break with the skills and processes that are historically used to differentiate and understand the discipline. To disregard or consciously move away from permanent materials, or materials able to endure over many centuries, has become part of the practice of some ceramicists. They have rejected the sculptural traditions of permanence and craftsmanship and the deliberate shaping of material. The British sculptor Tony Cragg was central to sculpture’s transition from minimalism to a more expressive style, and during the 1980s he made a number of sculptures assembled from found objects. These were predominantly discarded plastic items,

The Numbers Game 55 a material without cultural associations, the unwanted remains of a post-industrial nation. One of Cragg’s most important works from this period is Britain Seen from the North (1981), a depiction of the British Isles turned on its side, constructed from a twenty-two-foot mosaic made from gathered plastic mounted on the gallery wall. The artist himself is present in this work, as a figure taking stock of the country. Cragg was living in Germany when he made this work and was viewing Britain, the country he had grown up in, from the perspective of an outsider. The year he created this piece, 1981, was a particularly difficult time for his home city of Liverpool and the city’s economic and social difficulties came to a head in the Toxteth riots of July that year. Britain in the north was a very different place to the booming south, and there was widespread feeling that the Westminster-based Conservative government had left Liverpool and other regional towns and cities like it to rot. The appropriateness of the material and subject matter was not lost on the sculpture’s audience; it was an exemplary piece that captured the mood of the time, leading to its purchase by the Tate in 1982. The French sculptor Arman (1928–2005) offers a bridge between ceramics and sculpture in the area of assemblage. Attracted by the repetition of a single form found in factory-made ceramics, Arman worked with Bottega d’Arte Ceramica Gatti to create several assemblages from cups and teapots. His work As in the Sink II (1990) is a heap of white china fused together to create one complex form. Looking like an all too familiar pile of washing up, the teapots and jugs are actually formed as halves, with one side flat as if half the mold that produced the form was flat. This is a reference to the demitasse (in French literally ‘half cup’), a small cup used to serve Arabic coffee or espresso.

Figure 3.7  Arman, As in the Sink II, 1990/2004.

56  The Numbers Game The messy and chaotic appearance of Kurt Schwitters Merzbauten,20 the hybrid painting-sculptures of Robert Rauschenberg, ceramic accumulations of Arman, stacks of debris by Tony Cragg, have all had their influence in numerous ceramics works by Clare Twomey. When it comes to using multiple objects, the influence of sculpture is not one of order and careful method, but as an inducement to embrace mess, chaos, chance and risk in bringing together many objects in a single work. Clare Twomey’s Heirloom (2004) shares distinct formal similarities with Arman’s ceramic works. Installed at the Mission Gallery, a converted chapel in Swansea (UK) in 2004, Heirloom is made up of more than 2,000 cast porcelain objects. Each object that was cast and became part of Twomey’s piece was donated for the project by local people, then cast in porcelain and embedded in the wall of the gallery. Casting gave a uniformity of appearance to a wide assortment of forms, turning a large and disparate group of objects into a coherent whole, a fitting metaphor for ‘community’ and reminiscent of Tony Cragg’s scavenged sculpture Black and White Stack (1980) in which a variety of plastic, metal, plaster and ceramic found objects are brought together in a tidy rectangle on the gallery floor and carefully divided down the middle, half black, half white. While order, process and rules are present, the element of chance is inherent in assemblage. The tangential nature of bricolage means that the works evolve in response to what is to hand. In Heirloom, the bowls, dishes, cups and teapots made their way to Twomey by chance but, like Cragg, their arrangement in the final piece was controlled and considered. Twomey said of Heirloom, I controlled the composition. It was almost like a piece of theatre . . . I piled them up in one area so that it looked like they were going to come tumbling down on top of you . . . When the exhibition opened, people crowded in to see their heirlooms given new life and meaning. “It was incredible, the stories that we were told in front of each piece. It’s that point of contact, that’s where the power lies”.21

Figure 3.8  Clare Twomey, Heirloom, 2004. Photograph by Clare Twomey Studio.

The Numbers Game 57 Like Cragg, Twomey brings order to groups of unrelated things, uniting them into a whole. Heirloom, with its visual language of the massed accumulated object, led Twomey to develop the more physically and emotionally impactful Monument some five years later. The very titles of these two works indicate a shift from the inwardlooking personal heirloom to the outward-looking public monument. Formally, Monument intensifies and builds upon the language of the accumulated object that Twomey tested in Heirloom, resulting in a work that is able to resonate beyond the immediate locale in which it is exhibited. Monument is closer to the conventions of accumulation than Heirloom in that there was no individual selection of objects and the process of massing ceramics to make up the work did not involve individual narrative, though this is not to say that personal connections could not be made with the work. Her deliberate use of unselected factory seconds is reminiscent of the use of whatever material was at hand by sculptors who used accumulation as a process and a form of composition, recalling the activation of ordinary things as art by the Arte Povera sculptors. While purity, stasis and disdain for natural materials helps to define minimalism and keep it distinct from ceramics, the counterpoints of decay, change and material inclusivity inherent in the art of assemblage suggest that connections can be made between ceramics and this aspect of sculptural practice. The freedom from striving for permanence that assemblage allows is present in Clare Twomey’s work, where impermanence and the transitory nature of things are expressed in clay. What the combination of assemblage and contemporary ceramics offers to the viewer is a metaphor for a society shaped by industrial production and consumerism. Assemblages are fragile and perishable in a way that ceramics can relate to. Kurt Schwitter’s assemblage-installation that he referred to as Merzbau has been a formative influence on installation art, though it only survives in photographs and written accounts.22 Risk is inherent in working with fragile materials, something that ceramicists are well aware of, and a related commonality between assemblage and ceramics is that they disrupt received notions of what are acceptable materials for making art and carry on regardless, forcing the viewer to confront and question the validity of separating art from life.

Conclusion Looking at the rise of the multi-part composition in ceramics it is easy to assume that sculpture is the dominant artistic force, exerting influence on the weaker. Sculpture’s influence is not due to lack of direction or ideas in ceramics; in the great variety of multi-part ceramic works, ceramicists consciously mine sculpture’s approach to color, material, space, height, visual impact and demands on the audience. Ceramicists use those elements in combination with their own forms, materials, history and traditions, which has resulted in a body of work that has radically extended expectations of the conceptual and formal reach of contemporary British ceramics. Though prefigured by the work of Gwyn Hanssen Pigott, it is De Waal’s use of groups from the 1990s onwards that has challenged the limited critical context for ceramics. His grouped works draw on, but are not restricted by, the legacy of studio pottery. These multi-vessel pieces reject the idea of the single work where the focus of the makers’ and viewers’ attention is concentrated on a lone object. Instead, the critical gaze of the viewer is led to the effect that a collection of objects have in the space

58  The Numbers Game in which they are placed, as well as the relationship of the parts to the whole. The focus of meaning is not associated with function, because the context of display jolts that expectation. Instead, the pots are able to develop a new role, that of revealing or emphasizing the architectural space around them, raising questions about how we recognize an authentic work of art. What was the extent of minimalist sculpture’s influence on the plain and muted ceramics that emerged in the 1990s? It is likely that this simplicity of style was as much a reaction against the highly patterned surface decoration of the 1980s as it was influenced by the work of the American minimalists of the 1960s and 1970s. While minimalism may have had some degree of formal influence on contemporary ceramics, at a conceptual level there is little in common between the two. It is not until the ceramic works of the new millennium that minimalism’s ideology permeated some areas of ceramics practice or, as in the case of Edmund de Waal, was deliberately and purposefully invoked. In general, minimalism’s use of anonymized non-expressive form contrasts with ceramics’ engagement with its placement, material, social and historical setting. The imposition of order through pattern present in Donald Judd and Robert Morris’s meticulously regulated sculptures do not yet have an equivalent in ceramics. With multiple accumulated works, the line of influence between sculpture and ceramics is intricate. It might reasonably be expected that, as a craft, ceramics would be more likely to drawn on sculpture for intellectual ideas, while the business of form and composition would be a more established area of ceramics practice and less open to change. On the contrary, ceramics demonstrates conceptual confidence, working with its own discipline-specific questions and associations, though remaining open to formal influences from outside the medium. While the obsessive repetitive character of minimalism strikes a chord with the working methods and processes of making ceramics, this connection is limited. Ultimately ceramics and sculptural minimalism are conceptually and materially distinct; they do not share the same focus and emphasis and their processes stand in opposition to one another, particularly with regards to the value of craftsmanship and the presence or absence of the traces of making. Bearing this in mind, can de Waal’s work be positioned in relation to minimalism in a meaningful way? Morgan offers a definition that suggests that minimalism is essentially about the object. If that object ‘. . . retains a position of reductive neutrality in object form, usually fabricated, then we can talk about minimalism’.23 There is a reductive neutrality to de Waal’s pots, and particularly to the boxes, shelves and black-framed vitrines that have become regular occurrences in his compositions. His pots are simple forms, never radically altering, delicately colored with tones drawn from a limited palette. But the presence of the human hand remains, and the artist is celebrated in the traditional ceramics maker’s mark incised in the clay of each pot. While the repeated object is an example of ceramics and sculpture united by a shared formal element, this compositional strategy actually heightens points of difference between the two disciplines. While using some of the motifs of minimalism, such as purity of appearance, stacks and repeated forms, and of assemblage, where the work has no predetermined configuration, ceramics maintains a distinct character of its own. This amply demonstrates ceramics’ ability to be influenced by sculpture without being co-opted into it. Ceramics is simply too independent.

The Numbers Game 59

Notes 1 K. Bonansinga, ‘Forward, Back and Around’, in K. Bonansinga, S. Taylor and V. Burke, Multiplicity: Contemporary Ceramic Sculpture, El Paso, The University of Texas, 2006, p.10. 2 P. Curtis, ‘Foreword’, Taking Shape: Finding Sculpture in the Decorative Arts, Leeds, Henry Moore Institute, 2009, p.1. 3 J. Veiteberg, ‘Visual Essays’, in E. De Waal, J. Veiteberg and H. Waters, Edmund de Waal at Kettle’s Yard, MIMA, and elsewhere, Cambridge, Kettle’s Yard and MIMA, 2007, p.13. 4 J. Jones, Studio Pottery in Britain, 1900–2005, London, A&C Black, 2007, p.150. 5 Ibid. 6 S. LeWitt, ‘Serial Project no.1 (ABCD), in J. Meyer, editor, Minimalism, London, Phaidon, 2010, p.226. 7 E. de Waal, ‘To Say the Least’, Crafts, no.169, 2001, pp. 44–47. 8 A. Britton and N. Daintry, ‘Testing the Zeitgeist’, Ceramic Review, no.223, Jan/Feb 2007, p.53. 9 M. Craig-Martin, ‘The Art of Context’, in L. Biggs, editor, Minimalism, London, Tate Publishing, 1989, p.6. 10 E. de Waal, ‘Watch this Space: New Work by Anders Ruhwald’, in Form and Function: Anders Ruhwald, Stockholm, Galleri Inger Molin, 2007. Available at: http://ruhwald.net/? p=503, accessed 14.02.2011. 11 G. Adamson, ‘You Are Here’, in G. Adamson, A. Graves and E. de Waal, Signs and Wonders: Edmund de Waal and the V&A Ceramics Galleries, London, V&A Publishing, 2009, p.38. 12 J. Veiteberg, ‘Visual Essays’, 2007, p.13. 13 Ibid. 14 H. Waters, ‘Edmund de Waal: Specific Objects and the Space in Between’, in E. De Waal, J. Veiteberg and H. Waters, Edmund de Waal at Kettle’s Yard, MIMA, and elsewhere, Cambridge, Kettle’s Yard and Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, 2007, p.25. 15 G. Adamson, ‘You Are Here’, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, 2009, p.38. 16 E. Sussman, ‘Eva Hesse: Sculpture 1968’, in E. Sussman and F. Wasserman, editors, Eva Hesse: Sculpture, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2006, p.1. 17 Ibid. 18 W. Seitz, The Art of Assemblage, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1961, p.83. 19 I. Schulz, ‘Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage’, in I. Schulz, editor, Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2010, p.52. 20 ‘Merz’ is Schwitters’ term for his principle of using any material in his work. ‘Merzbauten’ is his term for his ‘Merz buildings’. 21 V. Simpson, ‘Breaking the Mould’, interview with Clare Twomey, 2008. Available at: www. magnificentme.com, accessed 07.12.2011. 22 The first Merzbau installation was destroyed in the allied bombing of Hanover in 1943, and the second version that Schwitters constructed in Norway was destroyed by fire in 1951. 23 R. Morgan, ‘Tadaaki Kuwayama’, in G. Harper and T. Moyer, editors, A Sculpture Reader: Contemporary Sculpture Since 1980, Hamilton, ISC Press, 2006, p.171.

4 The Art of Destruction Ceramics, Sculpture and Iconoclasm

In which many things are broken, some are put back together, and museums prove to be dangerous places.

Destruction unites ceramics and sculpture, with artists from both disciplines using ceramics in combination with destructive action as a method to critique the construction of cultural value and institutional power. Acts of literal and metaphorical destruction come under scrutiny, as attacks take place on both the material and meaning of artworks. Meanwhile, repair is explored as an aesthetic approach that challenges narrow conceptions of beauty and desirability in the art world.

On 25 January 2006 Nick Flynn’s visit to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge made national newspaper headlines. A fine example of the danger of untied shoelaces, Mr Flynn stumbled and fell as he walked down the stairs in the museum, knocking over three Qing dynasty vases as he went. Initially arrested on suspicion of criminal damage, he was later cleared of all charges. None the less, Thomas Demand’s photograph, Landing (2006), based on images of the aftermath of the incident, has something of the crime scene photograph about it. It shows a paper sculpture based on the conservator’s photograph of the broken vases in pieces at the bottom of the stairs. The texture of the paper model gives the scene a smooth, uncanny stillness. Demand’s photograph shows, at three removes from reality (a photograph of a model of a photograph), the accidental destruction of art in a museum. His careful reconstruction of the Fitzwilliam’s conservation photographs reflects the meticulous reconstruction of the vases by conservators. However, Demand’s photograph, with its blank emotionless atmosphere, draws attention to the difficulty of understanding the causes and motivations of destruction and the difficulty of the museum’s little questioned, yet inherently unsustainable, quest for preservation. The incident at the Fitzwilliam Museum also exposes the museum curator’s fear of damage by the visitor, who is simultaneously encouraged and at the same time viewed with suspicion, while kept in check by signs, ropes, alarms and keen-eyed gallery invigilators.

The Art of Destruction 61

Figure 4.1  Thomas Demand, Landing, 2006, Chromogenic print and Diasec, 180 × 286 cm.  2017 Thomas Demand, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Courtesy Sprüth Magers / DACS London.

A similar incident took place at the Museum Boijimans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam in 2010 when a work by ceramicist Hella Jongerius, comprising some three hundred vases on open display, was accidentally damaged by a visitor who became ill and fell over, and knocked down forty vases. Any form of destruction within the safe confines of the museum catches public attention, but more so when it is purposeful. In 1914, when the suffragette Mary Richardson made her way to the National Gallery with a meat chopper inside her coat and slashed the Rokeby Venus, she understood and exploited the impact of destroying art in a public museum. Despite the negative and philistine associations of destroying art, a significant number of sculptors and ceramicists are using destruction as part of their creative practice. While artists have been exploring destruction throughout the twentieth century, in ceramics and sculpture this shared interest in its artistic potential flourishes in roughly the same time frame, from the late 1990s through to the present day. Notably, in engaging with iconoclasm, ceramics is not using a form or method of working popular among sculptors some fifty or sixty years ago, as is the case with minimalism or assemblage. This raises the possibility of a concurrent exchange of influence between ceramics and sculpture. Indeed, sculptors have appropriated ceramics as a material that lends itself to the physical act of destruction and as a symbol that speaks beyond its ‘ceramic-ness’. Within the context of iconoclastic action, it becomes clear that ceramics’ referential reach is broad and expansive, related to material, but not discipline-specific.

62  The Art of Destruction The shared language of iconoclasm provides a fixed point from which to view this current of influence between ceramics and sculpture, and it will be explored from two perspectives: the formal and the intellectual. Destruction as a formal strategy encompasses aesthetic approaches common to both ceramics and sculpture. As an intellectual strategy, destruction is deployed as a form of cultural critique, concerned with the canon of art and disciplinary boundaries. These two approaches, the formal and the intellectual, are common to both ceramics and sculpture, and formal and intellectual ideas are communicated by unexpected damage to the physical or symbolic state of artworks and objects.

What is Iconoclasm? In historical terms ‘iconoclasm’ refers to breaking religious images, usually sculpture, but extending to stained-glass windows and other works of art found in churches. Contemporary usage has broadened wider than the destruction of sacred objects, and it has become a flexible term able to refer to both damage to material and damage to meaning. This means that an attack may be metaphorical as well as physical.1 Often, iconoclasm marks the end of one way of thinking, and the start of a new one; a new regime, religious order, or movement in art, and this is how destruction can be a creative process as well as an act of obliteration. In art, the Futurists perhaps best embody the idea of destruction clearing a space for the new, for which they felt the destruction of museums was essential. Ruthless and unsentimental in their attitude to revering the historic, the Futurists demanded a fresh start without the art and ideas of the past cluttering the walls. There is of course another point of view, which is that in most instances the destruction of art is not a creative act, and it is worth noting that here at least the power to destroy is for the most part in the hands of artists. The idea of damage to the meaning of a work as well as to the material is particularly interesting when that damage takes place within a museum or art gallery. When these institutions of care and preservation are sites of and complicit in the destruction of art, many thought-provoking ideas are raised. An example of museum as iconoclast is a disagreement that took place between the sculptor Carl Andre and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 1976. Andre had agreed to the installation of his tessellating square tiles, Twelfth Copper Corner, in a specific place in the galley where the walls were free of architectural incident. The curators installed the piece in a different corner, where it shared space with a fire alarm, a door and a window. Andre said that this clutter ‘spoiled his concept for Twelfth Copper Corner’, and withdrew the piece from the Whitney’s exhibition of American sculpture.2 He felt the meaning of the piece had been destroyed, and in protest rented a vacant shop on West Broadway to show the sculpture, which he subtitled ‘Rescued from Mutilation at the Whitney Museum of American Art’.3 If the museum did not intentionally set out to disrupt or damage Andre’s sculpture, is this iconoclasm? If there is no specific intention to destroy, but damage or destruction happens, then perhaps another term is needed. Bruno Latour addressed this very problem of the uncertain agency of the iconoclast by coining the term, ‘iconoclash’, iconoclash was meant to offer an alternative term to iconoclasm, where the emphasis on destructive breaking (‘-clasm’) was replaced by the less pejorative, italicized ‘-clash’: iconoclash.4

The Art of Destruction 63 Iconoclash fits the situation at the Whitney where destruction was perceived rather than physically evident. An interesting idea, but for some scholars breaking an object must be intentional for it to be considered iconoclasm. Certainly, accidental iconoclasm does not have the same symbolic punch as deliberate destruction. Hanging a painting upside down is not the same as slashing it with a blade. It is unlikely that the Whitney museum intended to destroy Andre’s sculpture when the institution valued the work enough to include it in an important exhibition. As no visible material destruction had occurred, Andre drew attention to the metaphorical damage with the subtitle. This incident is an example of a type of contextual iconoclasm that includes hiding or relocating on the destructive continuum, along with more obvious methods of attack.5 The concept of contextual iconoclasm widens the scope of the forms destruction can take, and makes us aware that damage can be to the meaning as well as the material of an artwork.

Iconoclasm and Art During the twentieth century iconoclasm has become associated with artistic progress and creativity. The Futurists, with their ideas about modernity and erasing the past, created a link between destruction and creativity that caught the attention of other artists and art movements. The artist can be the perpetrator as well as the victim of iconoclasm, and there is a strong art-historical precedent for artists destroying their own work or the work of other artists running through twentieth-century art history. In 1953 Rauschenberg created Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953). In 1966 the Destruction in Art Symposium was held in London. This interest in this area continued, and in 1993 a conference ‘Vandalism in modern art’ was held in Ostende. At the 2011 Venice Biennale Vesa-Pekka Rannikko’s . . . and all structures are unstable (2011) was displayed in the Finnish pavilion. This work comprised three unsynchronized overlapping video projections that show a hand in the process of painting a wall white, the painting over of unknown artists’ paintings and the hanging of repainted found paintings. The appropriation used here and in Rauschenberg’s work was notoriously taken up by Jake and Dinos Chapman when they altered, or vandalized (depending on your point of view), a set of Goya’s Disasters of War prints to create their work Insult to Injury (2004). If one thing is clear, it’s that iconoclasm does not necessarily indicate the end of the life of a work, instead, it can herald the creation of a new one. In 2005 the Centre Pompidou in Paris unveiled a redisplay of the gallery’s permanent collections under the title Big Bang. The idea behind the redisplay was that wiping the slate clean is a process at the heart of twentieth-century art, that can be summed up as ‘destruction before construction’. Catharine Grenier (2005) wrote about the ideas that underpinned the new display, Expressionism destroying the figure, Cubist deconstruction, Abstraction dynamiting form . . . The history of modern art is staked out by these successive and ever more radical challenges, invariably occupying new fields of action.6 Grenier makes the case that the profound changes in twentieth-century sculpture were brought about by destruction of ideas and forms,

64  The Art of Destruction Sculpture was wrenched from its pedestal and dragged into a conquest of space that was to assume several forms: repetition and modularity initiated by the work of Constantin Brancusi and later developed by the Minimalists . . . The shift to the horizontal is the emblematic manifestation of this new position of challenging form. Extreme examples are found in . . . Carl Andre’s regular system of assemblages.7 The involved relationship between sculpture and iconoclasm has come about because sculpture is often found in public places where it is vulnerable to attack. Sculpture’s size, materials, the suggestion of permanence, and embodiment of political, cultural or religious symbolism, all combine to make it a compelling target for iconoclasm. Destruction is the ultimate challenge to form, and it is found in ceramics as well as sculpture. The shared use of iconoclasm by sculptors and ceramicists sees their work simultaneously enter into a dialogue concerned with the destruction of form, materiality, ideas and practices, and the radical expansion of what constitutes art.

Vases and Vandalism Contemporary ceramicists have been quick to grasp the impact iconoclasm can have on the viewer, and have heightened this impact by uniting acts of destruction with traditional pottery forms. Despite their conventional outward appearance, pots are remarkably transgressive and often found within contemporary ceramics practice. In terms of destruction as an aesthetic and conceptual strategy, ceramicists have used the forms, processes and ideology of iconoclasm by variously provoking, inviting and controlling, acts of violence and destruction directed to their work. Paradoxically, ceramics and destruction make for a productive pairing, with a match of material and meaning so effective that it has been adopted by sculptors. Ai Weiwei, Jeppe Hein and Richard Wentworth have all united ceramic pots and plates with destruction. Much of this destructive practice involves the museum as a site and, at times, even as an active participant in iconoclasm. Ceramics’ particular dialogue with destruction has at times focused on its own disciplinary history. The product of a discipline pulled simultaneously in the opposite directions of art and craft, such works are symbolic of ceramics’ conflicted identity, as well as the troubled identity of the artist. Potter-turned-comedian Johnny Vegas’ film Pot Shots (1999) was shown at the Ceramic Millennium conference in Amsterdam, and was part of a two-part contribution from Vegas that also included a live performance. The film showed Vegas in a room suggestive of museum stores. This room appeared to be filled with pots from the ceramics canon; Bernard Leach, Martin Brothers and Bernard Palissy, though they were in fact reproductions. In the film Vegas holds forth about his failed career as a ceramicist and inability to live up to these great names, before smashing the pots in a fit of rage. Vegas’ destruction of worthless fakes has a more subtle and complex counterpart in Simon Fujiwara’s Rehearsal for a Reunion (with the Father of Pottery), after Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada (2011). Fujiwara is an artist with an English mother and a Japanese father, and was born a short distance from St Ives, the home of the Leach Pottery. Rehearsal for a Reunion includes a film of a rehearsal for an unmade play that shows Fujiwara ritually destroying Leach standard ware. In the film Fujiwara chooses

The Art of Destruction 65 to destroy the authentic ceramics rather than the copies that he and his estranged father made together in Japan in an effort to restore their relationship. If sculpture is attractive to iconoclasts because of its durability, expensive materials, public prominence and ability to embody ideas or values, then ceramics seems an unlikely target for destruction. While ceramic is a material not generally used for permanent public monuments because of its fragility, ceramic vessels are often what endures to represent long-past societies and cultures through their archeologically excavated shards. In this way, ceramics does connect with the notion of the longevity of ideas and practices that encourage acts of iconoclasm towards public sculpture. Or perhaps, more disturbingly, it is ceramics’ very vulnerability that invites assault?

Out of the Ordinary: Destroying Domestic Ware Despite a widening of approach in British contemporary ceramics practice, domestic ware continues to occupy a central position and demonstrates a startling conceptual range. In fact, destroying cups, plates and teapots is something that ceramics and sculpture have in common. Sculptors as well as ceramicists are using the full range of ceramics production in iconoclastic works, from the precious to the industrially made. Ceramicist Bouke de Vries frequently uses historic domestic ware in his work, particularly in his Exploded Artworks series. Teapot (2009) is an eighteenth-century Chinese armorial porcelain teapot frozen at the moment of explosion. The spout has detached from the rest of the pot, which in turn is now fragmenting. A puddle of tea and some damp tea leaves spill out from the pot onto a glass plinth. A scene of some drama, but an exploding teapot is not so unlikely. The eighteenth-century European porcelain factories trying to imitate Chinese wares struggled to get their porcelain recipe quite right, and the fragile soft-paste teapots often exploded when boiling water was first poured into them.

Figure 4.2  Bouke de Vries’ Teapot, 2009.

66  The Art of Destruction De Vries, with an expert eye, seeks out damaged historic ceramics to use in his work. Not knowing how the objects he uses came to be broken, he invents a fictional moment of destruction that captures the object in a moment of action, and the suspended fragments heighten rather than temper the visual impact of the injury. In a series of works entitled Dead Nature de Vries uses broken bowls to make reference to Dutch still-life paintings. The cracked and fragmented bowls evoke the moment at which the painter has finished with his props and discards them, ‘the bowl gets pushed into the corner, gets kicked and falls apart. The fruit that was in the bowl dries and rots. I’m capturing that moment’.8 Dead Nature 4 (2009), a sixteenth-century Chinese Wanli porcelain bowl and Dead Nature 6 (2009), an eighteenth-century Worcester soft-paste porcelain bowl, both capture this moment. The Perspex rods used to support the broken porcelain of Dead Nature 4 support the fragments so that they seem to rise slowly into the air. Amongst the shriveled fruit an iridescent beetle, a symbol of salvation and immortality, nestles within. In Dead Nature 6 the Worcester bowl has split open, revealing a cargo of moldering fruit and dead vine leaves. A butterfly, symbolic of the life cycle and resurrection, rests on the rim of the bowl. A native of Utrecht, de Vries is steeped in the history of the vanitas paintings of the Dutch Golden Age and it is this, in combination with works that repurpose historic ceramics rather than reverentially isolating them, that provides the frame of reference for this series. The things that we use or see daily become precious in a way that is unrelated to their monetary value. Breaking such a cherished object is a painful moment. Dropping a favourite mug perhaps, or cracking a bowl that was part of a grandparent’s dinner service. This is the subject of the film Fragments (2008) by ceramicist David Cushway, in which the slow-motion destruction of domestic ceramics is transformed into a prolonged moment of graceful destruction. The pace of the film makes the moment of destruction a hyper-realized one where the viewer can closely observe the splintering of the object.

Figure 4.3  Bouke de Vries, Dead Nature 4, 2009.

The Art of Destruction 67

Figure 4.4  David Cushway, Fragments, 2008.

Using the University of Wales Engineering Department’s high-speed cameras (which capture images at 3,000 frames per second), Cushway filmed the breaking of ordinary domestic ceramics, slowed the film down and edited it to run backwards, so that the objects break and then reform themselves. For Cushway, the importance of technology was that it allowed the viewer to witness an ordinary occurrence in an extraordinary way. The high-speed camera allowed Cushway to document the moment of destruction, slowing down to minutes an event that we would usually experience in a split second. The inevitability of the impending moment of destruction is transformed into an extended moment of anticipation as the viewer expectantly waits for the visceral pleasure of the meeting of teapot and hard surface. The fragmentation of the teapot is the focus of the film, and the effect of teapot meeting the ground is shown with deliberate pace and clarity. The use of black and white film, and the pale body of the teapot, means that every shard can be seen. For Cushway there is a strong link between the material destruction of the object, the importance of the ease with which a pot is broken, and the role that shards of ceramics have in understanding history, The onlooker is at once aware of the qualities and limitations of the ceramic object. The work again acts as a metaphor, for the way in which we attempt to piece together fragments of culture, (ceramic) to reconstruct the past.9 Cushway’s interest in the destruction of ceramics appeared in his earlier work Sublimation (2000), a looped twelve-minute film depicting the breakdown of a clay cast of the artist’s head submerged in a tank of water. In a published transcript of the paper ‘Presence and Absence’ delivered by Cushway at the Fragmented Figure Conference (Cardiff School of Art, 2005), Cushway made a statement that connected his work with the notion of loss which ‘underpins everything that I make’.10 Loss precedes creation, and in looping the film he explores a constant cycle of making and

68  The Art of Destruction remaking. Cushway exhibited Sublimation in a number of different forms on different occasions, playing with the effect of the size of the image on the work, On a larger scale you actually are much more aware of the violence of the image . . . On a smaller scale . . . You kind of get much more caught up in the actual beauty or what I feel is the beauty, the beauty of the dissolving of the object.11 Unlike Sublimation, in Fragments the teapot is seen broken and then whole again. The moment of climax, the emotion of the break, is momentary as the teapot is resurrected before our very eyes. The point of interest in this work lies not in the emotion of breaking a favourite object, but in its representation of the control of violence, and the transformation of casual destruction into something controlled and understated. Cushway has continued to bring together ordinary cheap ceramics, performance and destruction. At the 2011 British Ceramics Biennial he performed a work that involved trying to spin plates. Destruction, as well as performance, is perhaps a natural direction for an artist who in 2007 declared, ‘I really wanted to make nothing’.12 The aesthetic effect of the broken teacup, bowl or plate offers a point of exchange between ceramics and sculpture in which the current of influence between the two flows in both directions. The power of using ceramics lies in the human ability to invest and load inanimate things with great emotional or symbolic significance. As a consequence, domestic objects have a wide range of symbolic possibilities, especially around family relationships, and breaking domestic ceramics can (potentially) be understood as a destabilizing act that unsettles the familiar associations of the home. Disruption of normal patterns is a thought-provoking thread to look out for in works that involve the motif of destruction. In Fragments Cushway destabilizes the expectation that a potter should make tangible objects, while in his Exploded Artworks and Dead Nature series De Vries destabilizes our reverence of the historic.

Clay in Common Clare Twomey takes a gentler approach to the destruction of clay vessels in her 2010 work Is it Madness. Is it Beauty. This piece was the result of a collaboration with choreographer Siobhan Davies, and the performance element of this work, particularly the repetition of certain movements, is surely a sign of the choreographer’s influence. The piece has so far been realized at three UK locations, the Siobhan Davies dance studio in London, the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester and at the Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh. In each version, a number of gray trestle-type tables are laid end to end. The surface of the tables is covered with neatly arranged, identical, unfired clay vessels. Behind the tables more vessels are neatly stacked, waiting. What the visitor will see depends on the moment at which the piece is encountered. Perhaps nothing is happening and only a chair and mop and bucket hint at the possibility of performance. A closer look reveals that some of the pots on the tables are collapsing in on themselves, and there is a slow drip drip drip of water from the table to the floor. Perhaps you catch the performance at a different moment and see a woman carefully pouring water from a jug into the vessels on the table, walking round the tables or rhythmically mopping the floor. These are some of the quiet moments, evocative of the Dutch interior paintings of the seventeenth century, that form Is it Madness. Is it Beauty. It is a work

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Figure 4.5  Clare Twomey, Is it Madness, 2010. Performed during Acts of Making festival, Bilston. A Crafts Council touring exhibition 2015. Photograph by Sophie Mutevelian, courtesy of the Crafts Council.

of near silent destruction in which water gradually breaks down the unfired vessels uniformly arranged on the tables. By pouring water into the unfired leather-hard vessels a process of slow erosion is set in motion. Not seeking to manipulate or freeze time, Twomey lets things run their course. Twomey described Is it Madness. Is it Beauty as ‘a performative piece that other people will perform but I’m kind of authoring’.13 In this sense, the work is not such a departure for Twomey as the performative element might initially indicate. The presence of ceramics, destruction and performance is prefigured in her earlier work. In Trophy (2006), Twomey filled the cast courts at the V&A with four thousand birds made of Wedgwood blue jasper clay. Playing on the desirability of porcelain as a material that is elevated in status through back-stamps and their institutional and historical associations, each bird was stamped with marks for the museum and the artist. On a single day, visitors were free to roam through the cast courts and select and take home their favourite bird. Over the course of the day the installation disappeared from sight. Though Trophy was dismantled and effectively destroyed, equally, the work only became complete with the participation of the public who removed the birds, each a trophy of participation, and brought the piece to a close. In contrast with the slow and suspended time in Cushway’s Fragments and Twomey’s Is it Madness. Is it Beauty, Yarisal and Kublitz’s Anger Release Machine (2006) embraces the sudden destruction of ceramics as a moment of release and catharsis. Anger Release Machine takes the form of a vending machine that dispenses

70  The Art of Destruction

Figure 4.6  Yarisal and Kublitz, Anger Release Machine, 2006.

ceramic and glass vessels, but instead of delivering them safely to the purchaser to be used, the vessels are released to smash in the bottom of the machine in order to deliver a moment of stress release through vessel-breaking. Sanitizing and regulating destruction through the mechanized operation of a vending machine, the act of obliteration is commoditized and available without the guilt, loss and consequences that an iconoclast might otherwise experience. This is statement-less destruction. Without the grand backdrop of a political, religious or social revolutionary message, the machine represents the opportunity to vent a bad temper. Divorced from any political or cultural context Anger Release Machine invites destruction without the need for introspection from the iconoclast. The machine places the destruction of ceramics at the centre of the work, encouraging associations such as the commoditization of iconoclasm, mass production, disposability and the lack of status of ceramics, as well as the negation of the visceral and physical aspect of iconoclasm. This is iconoclasm that is not performed by the artists, but is permitted by them, for the payment of a small fee. Anger Release Machine is destruction without construction, in which the moment of the smash is the final moment and there is nothing further available apart from repetition of the experience with a different object. The vending machine sells an experience, not an object, and the broken plates and bowls remain behind the glass. In Anger Release Machine ceramics is employed owing to its ability to shatter, and ceramics sit alongside glass, waiting to be chosen. Neither material is valued for more than its ability to break. This emotional and physical distance from the object

The Art of Destruction 71 replaces the high passion of throwing a plate at the wall, which has been substituted with sanitized destruction for the health and safety age. The visual effect of breaking ceramics can be dramatic or quiet. A sharp sudden break, or slow and silent erosion, destruction can be over in an instant or hardly noticed. Material contributes to the meaning, and ceramic or clay becomes the starting point for interpretation, especially when a sculptor has deliberately selected the material, and any differences in treatment in the hands of sculptors and ceramicists are not obvious. Instead, the approach to material facilitates a convergence between ceramics and sculpture to the extent where disciplinary boundaries are unidentifiable and established categories of art are disregarded.

Past Imperfect: The Art of Transformative Repair Curators and collectors of historic ceramics often encounter objects bearing the signs of anonymous repairs carried out in another age. The joining, filling and retouching of ancient and precious ceramics becomes part of the history of the object, and poses a dilemma for the curator and conservator. When should a mended piece be restored to its original appearance? Should recent damage be mended or restored? The distinction between mending and restoring is the visibility of the work, the trace of the moment of drama. Should this be acknowledged or concealed? Is invisible restoration deceitful? Accidentally breaking pottery is a problem as old as pottery itself. We know little about ancient repair work to ceramics, but archaeological finds reveal repairs that are thousands of years old, and carried out with materials as diverse as bitumen, animal glues, plaster, lead and iron rivets. These repairs paid scant attention to appearances, aiming simply to make the object usable again. Natural glues were not effective at making pottery watertight or heat resistant again so mechanical repair techniques involving metal were common.14 The professional repair of ceramics developed in western Europe after the eighteenth century, and the use of metal repairs seen on much earlier ceramics was also used on the newly imported or experimental china and porcelain. This process of metal riveting involved drilling holes in the broken pieces and lacing them back together with wire, or holding them in place using a metal staple. These repairs can appear somewhat brutal, and because porcelain was an expensive and precious commodity there was a distinction between repairing for everyday use and restoring appearance. For decorative objects, a missing finial could be refashioned by an artisan skilled in working with metal or wood, or a replacement part could be made in plaster and retouched to conceal the damage. In Japan, the art of kintsugi makes repaired objects more beautiful than before. Kintsugi or kintsukuroi is a method of repair using gold that dates from the seventeenth century. Broken ceramics are repaired using lacquer and the seam, rather than being concealed, is decorated with gold. Kintsugi is a transformative process, changing catastrophe to improvement and damage becomes a catalyst for metamorphosis and change. Ceramicist Zoe Hillyard reimagines the brutal and the beautiful aspects of historic ceramic repairs in her patchwork pieces in which broken pieces of pottery are covered with fabric and hand-stitched back together. In Bird Vase (2016), a shattered vase is repaired by covering the shards with different fabrics stitched back together into a wonderful patchwork of colorful fabrics pulled taught over the ceramic pieces. The stitched pieces shift if the vase is lifted, allowing the work to retain a fragility that more conventional repairs would try to banish, and the metal lacing historically used to repair broken porcelain is reworked in her gentler process of hand-stitching.

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Figure 4.7  Zoe Hillyard, Bird Vase, 2016.

The patchwork of fabrics brings an unexpected sense of exuberance to the repairs and creates an aesthetic that quotes boro, the traditional Japanese technique of patching worn garments, as much as it does ceramic restoration techniques. The repaired object has a similarly upbeat outlet in the work of ceramicist Bouke de Vries, who transforms fine ceramics that have suffered ‘accidental trauma’. Repair 4 (2014), is an eighteenth-century blue and white Chinese porcelain lidded tureen and dish. The broken tureen looks as if it has been thrown back together, with gaps showing here and there, and one shard lurching away from the belly of the tureen. The unruly pieces are held in place with what looks like gold sticky tape, jagged at the edges and arching up from the surface of the tureen as if they are already peeling away. The tureen almost seems to be struggling out of the grip of the repairs, ready to burst free. There is a satisfying contradiction at the heart of Bouke de Vries’ practice. He is an artist who works with broken ceramics, and he is also a ceramics conservator with clients that include museums, auction houses, antiques dealers, the National Trust and Grayson Perry. In his own work, instead of repairing these historic vases, bowls and figurines to conceal the moment of drama, he draws attention to it by positioning the broken pieces on Perspex armatures, jigsawing vases together into mismatched outlandish shapes, and repositioning the fragments of a Tang dynasty horse so that

The Art of Destruction 73 it turns to take an apple from its rider. With his irreverent reconstructions, de Vries seems to question repairs that are driven by restoring perfection, erasing traces of history that are unacceptable in the commodity market. The outlandish fictions that he creates for his pieces are no more fictional than repairing a Meissen figurine so that no one can ever tell that her arm was knocked off. The motif of the repaired vessel also appears in the work of Andrew Lord, an artist who works at the boundary between sculpture and ceramics. Lord, when he was making vessels (he stopped in 2005), made them himself. As a consequence, while determinedly categorizing himself as a sculptor, his early works are often found in museum ceramics collections.15 Knowledgeable about the historic ceramics of Meissen, Staffordshire and Italy, Lord’s early works experimented with traditional pottery forms. Moving to New York from Britain in the 1980s, he began using different parts of his body as a making tool, pressing his face into the clay to shape it for example, but still in conjunction with the vessel form. Lord’s vessels are craggy Giacometti-like constructions and they sometimes incorporate repair as a formal element. However, perhaps reflective of Lord’s sensitivity to status in art, particularly his own, the repairs present are of the finest sort. A reference to kintsugi, drips of gold appear ‘here and there, patching holes or binding seams’.16 Lord’s multi-part work Thirty Pieces. Sorrow. (for T), (1996) includes vessels with these visual references to gold repairs. On one lumpen matt-black vessel, dabs of gold draw the eye, the fineness of the material contrasting with its haphazard application to the body of the jug. The British sculptor Richard Wentworth has no delicacy about the repairs to the ceramics that appear in his work. In Brac (1996) the surface of a grand piano is covered with broken plates, dishes and jugs, the usual car boot sale or charity shop bric-a-brac, that have been repaired with epoxy resin. Horizon at 15 Metres (2002) is a single broken plate, crazed repairs across its surface, fixed to the wall. In Rims, Lips, Feet (1996) plates and dishes, again repaired with epoxy resin, are spread over the surface of a large rectangular sheet of glass that is positioned on top of a ceramics cabinet. Were they found in their broken state or deliberately broken? The ugly repairs emphasize their injuries. Andrea Schlieker remarks that ‘Wentworth’s sculpture has always been marked by a preferred use of the simple, even the archetypal thing’.17 In Stonehenge (1992), a gravity-defying plate is frozen in the moment before it rolls off a sloping glass shelf. The only thing not typical about the plate is the way it is behaving, the suspended plate foreshadowing the breakage that we see in Wentworth’s other pieces of this period. The plate in Stonehenge is paused in time, refusing to behave according to the rules of its situation, under threat because of its precarious position, but resisting destruction. This mysterious disobedience of the laws of gravity brings to mind Simon Groom’s phrase, the ‘radical instability of the object’.18 In Brac and Stonehenge the instability of the object is both literal and metaphorical as the sculptor presents nondescript plates in unexpected, sometimes uncanny, situations. There is a clumsy ordinariness to the highly visible repairs of Wentworth’s plates, and also a defiance in the way the jagged epoxy resin scars command and direct the viewer’s gaze to the repaired damage. No attempt is made to hide or beautify the mending process. The plates themselves are resolutely mundane, and yet their clearly defined repairs are, in their own way, exceptional. With his repaired ceramics Wentworth restores the unity of the three-dimensional object. The repaired plates, if not for their curious positioning in relation to other objects, could theoretically return to function. However, there is also a sense of the repairs as part of a process of liberation that sees the plates released from their functional duties.

74  The Art of Destruction Hillyard, Lord, Wentworth and de Vries share the impulse to aestheticize the labor and materiality of repair, making the artist a figure able to transform the object into something new, without erasing the memory of the original object.19 There is beauty in broken sculpture. A Greek beauty can still be a beauty with her arm knocked off, but for ceramics the loss of a limb from a Meissen figurine will drastically reduce her desirability and value. While the ceramicists work to reverse the degrading process of damage, the sculptor, Wentworth, lays out for inspection ceramics bearing mysterious welts and scars, patched together without any frills.

Destruction as Cultural Critique Critique of a dominant power is central to iconoclasm and artists are drawn to iconoclastic action when making works that comment sharply on cultural and political issues. The Chinese artist Ai Weiwei often uses ceramic vessels in his work. In Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995) the iconoclastic moment is captured in three photographs. In the first image, Ai is holding the vase. In the second he has released it, and in the third the smashed vessel lies at the feet of the expressionless artist. Dario Gamboni, in his essay ‘Portrait of the Artist as an Iconoclast’ (2010) observes Ai’s impassive expression, which in the context of iconoclasm contrasts with the depiction of iconoclasts, ‘which generally emphasize emotional involvement’.20 Much has been written about the destruction of this two-thousand-year-old vessel and many interpretations placed on this act of destruction. It is a depiction of an individual act of iconoclasm that shows us the artist as vandal and jolts the assumption that the only role of the artist is that of creator.

Figures 4.8–4.10  Ai Weiwei, Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, 1995.  and courtesy of Ai Weiwei Studio.

76  The Art of Destruction But Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn is as much about the creation of an image as it is about breaking an urn. Tinari considers Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn as, the negation of a vessel in order to create an image. And then on another level . . . contemporary China’s curious relation to its past – in a situation where destruction of historical artifacts happens almost daily.21 This image of iconoclasm can be seen as an act that comments more widely on Chinese cultural tradition that is closely bound up with ceramics, allowing a vase to function as a cipher for the country. Ai’s expert knowledge of Chinese ceramics would enable him to select old and important works from a secondary market flooded with fakes, to co-opt them into his own practice and his personal history. His own history is bound up with China’s, and this is central to his work: When asked if Ai’s childhood experience during the Cultural Revolution of helping his father burn books and destroy artifacts taught him to treasure history as opposed to “splattering it with paint”, he responded: “We are learning from the past . . . You have to know it to destroy it.”22 What Ai refers to is not only the knowledge required to select a valuable object to destroy in a market awash with high quality fakes, but also that in order to select the object to destroy one must be aware of its cultural, symbolic, religious and political powers or significance. Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn can be understood as a critique of political approaches to culture in China, both now and at the time of the Cultural Revolution, but also a question directed to the importance of the authenticity of the art object. If it’s not a Han Dynasty urn, what does that mean for the act of destruction? The impact of the work depends on the viewer’s belief that the urn is what Ai says it is – a precious historic object. This is the constructed and fluctuating nature of art-value that so often frustrates ceramicists. Moore and Torchia make reference to the issue of status and value of ceramics, Within Ai Weiwei’s œuvre . . . ceramics is the only discipline that is the target of such disdain . . . the value of historical ceramic objects is remarkably dependant on era and context. Adding to this confusion . . . is ceramics’ slippery contemporary status as either “craft” or “fine art”. While this distinction is moot for Ai, it is at the heart of insecurities that have become part of the medium’s conflicted identity in the past century.23 While their points about the shifting value of ceramics at a particular time or in a particular state are interesting, interpreting Ai’s act of iconoclasm as disdainful of ceramics may not be correct. If Ai were contemptuous of ceramics then the destruction of the vase would lose its power. As it is, contempt or disdain for the material seems unlikely considering the frequency with which Ai has used ceramics in his work, whether painting directly onto vases as with Coca Cola Vase (2011), or in the use of porcelain to make sunflower seeds in his 2010 installation at Tate Modern. The act of destruction is only powerful if the onlooker invests value in the object being destroyed.24 For those artists working in clay and using the language of iconoclasm, the status and value of clay is both an obstacle to impact and an important part of constructing meaning.

The Art of Destruction 77

Figure 4.11  Ai Weiwei, Breaking of Two Blue-and-White “Dragon” Bowls, 1996.  and courtesy of Ai Weiwei Studio.

A year after Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, Ai smashed two porcelain bowls for the piece Breaking of Two Blue-and-White “Dragon” Bowls (1996), photographing himself while he did so. The artist has stated that the two porcelain bowls were from the Kangxi era (1661–1722), but the status of the objects remains ambiguous, as it does in other works in which Ai transforms historical Chinese ceramics. The uncertain value and status of the object being destroyed is a key idea within these two iconoclastic works. The conflicted status of contemporary ceramics is central to understanding the destruction of works in clay as cultural critique. The alleged extreme age of the vessels that Ai Weiwei daubed with car paint and Coca-Cola logos is a guarantee that the viewer, should they accept his claims, will find the image of destruction powerful. The willful destruction of cultural heritage is often regarded as barbaric rather than artistic, but as contemporary ceramics are not generally regarded as high-status art works their destruction is less shocking and does not tend to prompt public outrage. Ai Weiwei and Bouke de Vries work at the intersection between ceramics and the destruction of historic vessels. De Vries, also possessed of expertise in historic ceramics, uses destruction to express ideas about the value and status of ceramics. A key difference between the two artists is not only their cultural background and level of political engagement, but in the authorship of destruction. Whereas Ai fixes the viewer with an impassive stare as he drops the Han urn, leaving no doubt that the artist is the author of the destruction, de Vries uses objects that are already broken. With an interest in how easily ceramics can be stripped of their value due to imperfections,

78  The Art of Destruction cracks and the attendant damage of a long life, de Vries searches for and buys ceramics to use in his work with the same expert eye that Ai Weiwei employs to identify important works within a secondary market full of fakes. De Vries breathes new life into previously desirable broken objects by emphasizing rather than concealing the damage they have suffered, accentuating the beauty of the broken pieces that would otherwise not be considered worth restoring because their commodity value cannot not be reinstated. This commodity status is highlighted in Old-fashioned English Rose (2009), a rose made up of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fragments of porcelain complete with a Christie’s lot-number sticker nestling between its porcelain leaves. Echoing the philosophy of kintsugi, De Vries transforms objects that are no longer desirable to museums or collectors, and plays on their fragmentation to transform them into highly desirable objects for collectors of contemporary ceramics and art. He embraces the imperfections that reduce the value of a historic ceramic, questioning the artificially constructed value of art.

Please Do Not Touch: Destruction in the Vitrine Museums place the safety and preservation of objects above all else. Their stores are carefully locked, movements in and out are monitored, traps are laid for pests, and objects recline in nests of acid-free tissue paper. So when the museum becomes complicit in iconoclastic acts, through manipulating the systems of display and by inviting institutional critique, we take note. In the public space of the museum, the vitrine protects the object from the public. Using this piece of museum furniture as an accomplice in acts of iconoclasm is deliberately provocative and highly impactful. Vitrineous space is a powerful framing method that bestows the ‘museum effect’ and acts as a secular reliquary. The glass vitrine makes an effective frame for objects that have been victim of some destructive process, as it gives rise to displays that run counter to an audience’s usual expectations. The punch of something unexpected in the vitrine has been used with great effect by Joseph Beuys, Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, all of whom have deployed the vitrine for its physical demarcation, sense of detachment and ability to bestow authority on its contents, whatever they may be. The vitrine, in its conventional manner, offers knowledge and correct taste framed for the viewer. It is a container of ideas, but also sees ideas squeezed out, representing a single point of view. Elysse Speaks, in her essay The Transparent Signifier, draws attention to how vitrines act as containers of value structures and present intangible ideas, the canon of art history for instance, as fact, when such a history is closer to constructed fiction than unassailable truth.25 In this way, according to Speaks, the framed views that the vitrine offers raises questions about misapplied belief. Beuys, Koons and Hirst capitalize on this in their different ways, and each also use the vitrine to demonstrate that this apparatus of preservation and authority is actually rather permeable. Their theatricalized aesthetic practice makes us think a little more about the context and circumstance of our viewing, as well as what we are being asked to value and believe in. The frame has long been of interest to ceramicist Edmund de Waal. In his 2015 Case Study series, de Waal uses a crisply definitive black-edged case to frame the grouped ceramics within. He has experimented with open-sided plywood boxes mounted on the wall, cases with their contents partly concealed by opaque glass, and cases bordered with white aluminum. Is the vitrine any different from a shop window with

The Art of Destruction 79 its goods laid out? De Waal’s vitrines riff on the twin inspiration of sculpture and museum practices, but also raise the question of the distinction between art and commodity that plagues ceramics, with many ceramicists unable to move their work on from the craft shop into the art gallery. In Rims, Lips, Feet (1996) the sculptor Richard Wentworth juxtaposes encasement with permeability by presenting pieces from the Bowes Museum collection housed safely within a traditional wood and glass vitrine, while repaired vessels sit precariously and exposed on a glass sheet balanced on top. This work made effective use of the specific physical and conceptual frame of the Bowes Museum, where it was shown, as well as more general museological associations. Standing the old V&A case on bricks, somewhat like a car whose tires had been stolen, Wentworth raised the case onto four small plinths making the case itself part of the work. This elevation of things that usually form part of the background rather than occupy the limelight is one of the key motifs of Wentworth’s work. The broken plates resting on their sheet of glass above the case of historic ceramics speak of the careful yet arbitrary and unsustainable preservation of the past that is one of the core functions of any museum. Wentworth writes of the intensive collecting habits of the museum’s founders, John and Josephine Bowes, that their ‘attempt to outflank mortality is palpable’.26 The display of these unremarkable broken plates emphasizes the futility of the Bowes’ endeavors and, at the same time, they trouble the usual processes of display in the museum. The museum display would usually be didactic, but in this case the display is a puzzle. It confounds the viewer rather than presenting tasteful objects and instructive information penned by an anonymous authoritative hand. Through the shared formal element of the repaired break Wentworth gives his ordinary plates a collective group identity that is emphasized by their position massed together on top of the vitrine. The ambiguity of their identity, ordinary object or art object, is emphasized by their position on top of the case. The plates have been invited into the museum, but they were not offered (or perhaps they refused) a place in the vitrine. Bouke de Vries uses the vitrine in a slightly different manner, working within the glass case rather than outside it. The vitrine that surrounds Yellow Cabinet Cup plays on the system of value in which ‘museum quality’ is the highest grade of object, and the system of value in ceramics that prizes perfection. De Vries regularly uses vitrines and glass domes to encase and frame his work, in this instance, Yellow Cabinet Cup (2010), a broken bright yellow eighteenth-century European porcelain cup, saucer and lid. The cracked saucer lies in bits at the bottom of the glass case. The fragments of the cup and lid are held at the moment of separation, the finial from the lid rising upwards into the air. De Vries houses the cup within the case, as a rare specimen, frozen in the instant of explosion. He uses the classic museum framing device to maintain the value of the object in the face of its damaged state, its demarcation and specialness communicated by its encasement, which elevates this cup above other broken cups in the world. Using the apparatus of museum display as a formal element in works that involve the destruction of objects plays on the unexpected disruption of the relationship between object, museum, curator and viewer. In the museum, the vitrine legitimizes its contents and subjects them to the elevating and distancing museum effect. But, as sculptors and ceramicists have discovered, drawing the vitrine into the work can disrupt visitors’ expectations, poke fun at passivity and give that passivity a jolt, or create a framing device that encourages a more concentrated gaze. Systems of display are the white noise of the museum and gallery, but when sculptors and ceramicists

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Figure 4.12  Bouke de Vries, Yellow Cabinet Cup, 2010.

draw attention to them by implicating them in, or associating them with, the act of destruction, they enable us to see them afresh. The glass case is used to legitimize objects, elevating some examples above others. The constructed nature of this position is emphasized by the act of destruction; why preserve some but not others, does a crack really matter, why can’t we cope with imperfection? The museum’s authority in part comes from allowing artworks into the canon and controlling the way that they are viewed and interpreted, but Bouke de Vries and Richard Wentworth have taken control from the curator and manipulated the apparatus of display for their own ends, as well as raising the question of where the art work ends and the display equipment begins.

Biting the Hand that Feeds? Iconoclasm as Institutional Critique An object that enters a museum collection no longer functions in the way it was originally intended. Things take on new functions and meanings when they enter collections and curators are responsible for selecting and reframing them according to the institutional agenda or their own personal views. Some artists, conscious of the power of the curator to influence the meaning and function of a work, have been highly critical of museums and galleries at the same time as these institutions have enabled them to create ambitious projects. The willingness to be critiqued from within, to collaborate with artists who are openly critical of the museum as a concept, is a legacy of the self-reflexive ‘New Museology’ in which institutional insight and openness to self-critique is considered essential. This tension between the artist and

The Art of Destruction 81

Figure 4.13  Linda Sormin, Rift, 2009. Courtesy Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art.

the institution is the starting point for exploring works that use the museum or gallery as the site of destruction. Linda Sormin’s multi-media walk-through installation Rift (2009) was commissioned by ceramicist Clare Twomey and curator James Beighton for the exhibition Possibilities and Losses, held at Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (mima) in the north of England. The development of Rift, one of four ambitious works in the exhibition, can be traced through a series of email exchanges between USA-based Sormin and mima’s curatorial team. Sormin drew up plans and sent images to inform the local fabricator, while she worked on the ceramic elements of the installation in her Rhode Island studio. The plans, images and emails sent back and forth between Sormin and mima reveal a collaborative refinement of ideas and the development of Sormin’s vision for the piece that was often in response to the limits of what could be achieved in the space. The final version of the installation was made up of a number of distinct elements including a wooden walkway to guide the visitor through the piece. The boardwalk, prefigured in her earlier installation Salvage (2008), was interrupted by constructions built from ceramics and other materials. One of the central themes of Rift was to test the physical endurance of ceramics. Sormin’s frail ceramic constructions were subject to attack on six occasions during the exhibition, when curator James Beighton was charged with taking a hammer to one of these ceramic pieces. Asked to crawl through a raised Perspex tunnel first, wearing safety goggles, Beighton gamely chipped away at the ceramic structure, knocking shards and chunks of debris into a tall Perspex cylinder below. This event was filmed, and the film of the destruction was projected on the wall of the gallery for the duration of the exhibition. Asked why she had chosen to make an iconoclast of the gallery’s curator whose duty it is to care for objects, Sormin replied,

82  The Art of Destruction I am interested in the love/hate relationship between artists and curators. Curators and/or the art museum are charged to care for and protect art objects . . . However, this process often includes setting limits on the work physically or contextually (due to safety regulations or aesthetic tastes, etc.), and in so doing, the curator’s decisions (or the institution’s rules) can drastically change and in some cases actually hurt the work, or block the work from fulfilling its potential.27 Beighton too found the destructive aspect of the installation key, and described Rift as, . . . troubling in that particular space, that’s troubling to the whole institution, institutional priorities, ideas of collecting, the priority of a museum to care for an object. Linda’s piece Rift was a performative work and had the curator smashing pots over the course of the exhibition. So she’s squarely tackling that nonsensical idea of a museum holding onto works for posterity. So yes the spaces can make the work look beautiful but it’s not a one sided relationship and artists are very often battling against that.28 The destructive element of Rift was not simply a straight criticism of museum and gallery practices. Sormin also conceived Beighton’s performance as an act of ‘opening’, literally and metaphorically, as he cracked the ceramic pieces open to access their concealed potential. Breaking through a thin and brittle skin of glazed porcelain, Beighton was able to access complex ceramic grids hidden within the now open form, in a process that Sormin intended to be as much about deconstruction as it is about destruction. I didn’t only want us to see the curator in one fixed way, so . . . I invited James to approach the fracturing of the work in different ways. For example, by opening the door to the oval Perspex enclosure, stepping over the moat and then using the stepping stones to “walk on water” towards the ceramic form hovering inside the enclosure, James performed a mythical, heroic role . . . this is also the Love part of the “love/hate” relationship.29 Sormin also situated the installation within the context of the natural destruction brought about by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and on the social and economic decay of Middlesbrough in the wake of post-industrial decline. While Beighton’s role on the opening night showed human destruction in action, there was also a quiet form of destruction taking place through the course of the exhibition, as wind and water eroded the ceramic forms that had been carefully constructed and installed. Sormin’s desire that the curator of the institution (rather than the exhibition’s co-curator and fellow ceramicist Twomey) should perform a destructive act in public view on the opening night shows a desire to disrupt the balance of power between artist and curator. Sormin has been openly critical of a relationship where the balance of power can often be unequal, with the curator directing collecting, making selection for exhibitions, acting as a gatekeeper to funds, influencing the reputation of artists and impacting on how a work is realized. Sormin processed these feelings by instructing Beighton to destroy part of a work that he had commissioned. The artist exercises her power to the full, making the suit-clad Beighton crawl through a Perspex tube, raised above the gallery in full view of onlookers. In short, making an exhibition of the

The Art of Destruction 83 curator. In this way, Sormin reveals what she sees as the changeable disposition of the curator and the capricious, shifting and potentially destructive nature of this role. Clare Twomey’s work Consciousness/Conscience (2001) also brings ceramics, des­ truction and the museum or gallery into contact with one another. The 2001 version of Consciousness/Conscience consisted of seven thousand hollow ceramic tiles laid as a tiled floor. Viewers were invited to walk across the floor but, in the process, they destroyed the bone china boxes. Consciousness/Conscience offered a haptic relationship with the material, as participants had the tactile experience of crushing the tiles. Any intellectual response came after the unusual experience of the materiality of the work, which set up the relationship between viewer and artwork as simultaneously destructive and exploratory. The very title of the work implies a thought process, a consciousness or awareness of the destruction that one is deciding whether or not to cause, and the effect on the conscience of the viewer turned destroyer. The considerations of conscience and consciousness suggested by the title of the piece is secondary, the initial focus is what happens to hollow tiles when they come into contact with the pressure of the foot. The conscience suggested by the title indicates moral choice and an inner sense of right and wrong, while the word consciousness points to the state of being aware of one’s own existence that is perhaps heightened during the destruction of the work. Yet this is no senseless destruction, instead the work seems more suggestive of individual human enquiry as the weight of the body is transmitted to the delicate china tiles. In Korea, the effect of many feet ground the tiles to dust, leaving behind a substance possessed of strong associations with ephemerality, memory and loss, and a material which Twomey later used in other works.

Figure 4.14  Clare Twomey, Consciousness/Conscience, 2001. Photograph by Andy Paradise, courtesy of the Crafts Council.

84  The Art of Destruction Consciousness/Conscience was subsequently shown in the exhibition A Secret History of Clay at Tate Liverpool in 2004. Reduced in scale, the tiles formed up a threshold between galleries, and instead of being unavoidable, destruction was now a choice. Amy Dickson, an assistant curator of the show at the time, described the question the work posed to the audience, As a viewer you are faced with this choice, do you want to break this thing or not? It’s quite a powerful feeling. Whereas we had it as a threshold and people could choose to either step over it or walk on it. So the threshold of the room was these tiles that got broken down, and I think we had to replace them every other day.30 In Tate Liverpool’s realization of Consciousness/Conscience there was a two-fold destructive element: first, the destruction of the tiles by the viewer, and second the alteration (and destruction, depending on your view) of the work by the gallery because it was practical to do so. In the first version of the work the audience were forced to walk over the tiles to view other works. In each subsequent installation, the work has been slightly different, changing the way the audience interacts with it. Yet instead of reacting in a hostile manner to the influence of the gallery, Twomey works productively within institutional boundaries and limitations, making them part of the creative process and the evolution of the work. Like Sormin, Twomey encourages destruction in a space where artwork is sacrosanct, usually handled only by gallery staff wearing white cotton gloves. In Rift Sormin uses destruction to challenge the power of the institution, and while the curator is her collaborator, he also remains the institution’s collaborator, party to its collecting practices that create and perpetuate hierarchies and shape what is seen as ‘good’ art. For Twomey the act of destruction is less about drawing attention to the power of the institution, but instead stems from an interest in metaphorical and literal instability that tests the boundaries of ceramics in terms of material and art-historical classification. A second destructive work was included in A Secret History of Clay. Please do not touch the Artwork (2003), by German sculptor Jeppe Hein, is a single plate mounted on the wall, with a line on the floor to indicate that the visitor should not come too close. When a visitor leans forward to inspect the plate, a sensor releases it from the wall and it drops to the floor. The shattered plate is left on the floor of the gallery until the next day, when it is replaced with a new one. The plaintive and much ignored request, ‘Please do not touch the artwork’, is the subject of Hein’s practical joke. The ambiguity of this work, the duping of the visitor, and the powerful emotion elicited by the destruction of an object on display in a public gallery meant that the inclusion of this work in A Secret History of Clay was not without controversy. The layout of the exhibition meant that Hein’s work was reached after the visitor had passed through spaces populated by ceramics by Gauguin, Miro and Picasso, followed by a huge lump of oil clay that could be touched and manipulated by the visitor (Nubuo Sekine’s Phase of Nothingness – Oil Clay, 1969) and Chen Zhen’s Purification Room 1995, a room that could only be looked at, not entered. The apparent simplicity of such an object after so many challenging and unusual works and famous names would surely invite the viewer to take a closer look, and in attempting to fathom why a seemingly ordinary plate was included in the exhibition the unfortunate (or fortunate?) visitor becomes the perpetrator of what seems a most unlucky accident. Amy Dickson recalled,

Figures 4.15 and 4.16  Jeppe Hein, Please do not touch the Artwork, 2003. Ceramic plates, electrical motor, sensor. Courtesy: Johann König, Berlin and 303 Gallery, New York.

86  The Art of Destruction One of our visitors did get very upset that it fell off the wall because in that context it was such a powerful experience. So after that we had to put a warning onto the wall, saying, “Warning: this plate may fall without warning”. So suddenly this work that was about the unexpected, in order to manage our visitor expectation we had to have this warning. Again, in terms of it challenging an institution to do a show like that it was an archetypal example, although I think that it detracted from the work to have that warning, but there was also an element of humour in the way that it was worded, pointing to the ludicrousness of having to have such a warning.31 The response of this one particular audience member to Hein’s work indicates the power that the language of object-breaking has, stemming from the immense cultural and financial value that works can carry in the gallery context. It is the element of the unexpected, combined with the environment in which the work is situated, that makes Hein’s work so impactful. The viewer who has the misfortune to activate the motion sensor is an unwitting iconoclast, forced into the role by the artist, his work and the institution. For Kirsty Bell, Hein’s work plays with, the unspoken boundaries that dictate the proper distance between artwork and audience and challenging the quick run-in, run-out approach of many a gallerygoer . . . enabling the art object to answer back, so to speak, or even to initiate the conversation.32 In these works by Hein, Sormin and Twomey, destruction is used variously as institutional critique, and critique of cultural consumption. For the gallery visitor Consciousness/Conscience makes what would have otherwise been a casual drift from work to work instead a deliberate placement of foot on tile that makes the act of walking part of the work, while also bringing about its destruction. While Twomey’s work does not itself critique the gallery for alterations to the work, the installation at Tate Liverpool did shift the concept underpinning the original piece. In this particular version of Consciousness/Conscience the broken tiles, which were laid only over a small surface area, were replaced regularly to present visitors with fresh tiles to destroy. But is the meaning of the work under threat if there is an unending supply of replacement tiles? Where is the emotion in breaking something that can be so easily replaced? Is the gallery’s role to repeatedly deliver an experience to the viewer? How does it change the work if the visitor does or doesn’t know about the store of fresh tiles? Tate’s decision to replace the tiles potentially undermined Twomey’s work by drawing attention to how easily it can be reformed. But does this constitute the gallery’s destruction of the meaning of the work as Twomey first conceived it in 2001? In Felix Gonzales-Torres’ unlimited print works a stacks of prints sits in the gallery, available for the viewer to take away. The huge pile is gradually depleted, but can be endlessly replaced by the gallery. The unlimited nature of the component pieces makes the sculpture more powerful, more engaging, rather than less. The viewer is openly and generously invited into the work, and the gallery is under instruction to endlessly supply this experience.

Conclusion Iconoclastic artworks and acts of iconoclasm operate on a metaphorical and literal level. Destruction critiques and comments upon cultural boundaries that relate to the

The Art of Destruction 87 status of clay, boundaries between art and craft, the role of the curator and the role of institutional influence on artists and their work. This convergence between ceramics and sculpture, as they come together in the moment of destruction, is underpinned by a significant shared formal approach. The act of iconoclasm creates a moment at which the question of influence falls away and a relationship of exchange comes to the fore. The iconoclastic act as a moment of creation as well as destruction gives an opportunity to consider ceramics and sculpture on an equal footing. The works discussed here demonstrate the literal and metaphorical instability of ceramics and provide a view of the aesthetic strategies of destruction, closely linked to materiality of clay, used by sculptors and ceramicists alike. Ceramic objects lend themselves to being broken. Breaking is a part of the risk of the making process in ceramics, where success is contingent on various processes beyond the control of the artist. The artistic gesture of iconoclasm deals with death, recollection, decay and aging at narrative and formal levels, and accentuates these themes through broken pots and plates. These broken objects suggest a psychological break with boundaries through the destruction of the physical object. But, as the reconstruction of the broken vessel suggests, there is a desire to construct something new. New meanings and new categories of art are suggested through the act of iconoclasm done and sometimes undone. The presence of destruction and broken objects in the museum questions the presumed enduring value of the museum collection. Not only a threat to the boundaries of what should and should not be in a museum, destruction as an aesthetic strategy is a threat to the disciplinary boundaries between sculpture and ceramics. In works that see the meaning of the work residing in the visibility of action we are reminded that sculptors do not only create three-dimensional objects, they also create a space or a moment to be experienced. It is not only the vessel that is physically and metaphorically unstable. In Sculpture in the Expanded Field Krauss calls sculpture a category in danger of collapse.33 This collapse is reflected in the interest in iconoclasm and destruction exhibited by the sculptors referenced in this chapter that can also be interpreted as relating to the human desire for ‘omnipotence and immortality’, desires ultimately ‘thwarted by the limitations of reality’.34 As such, the destruction of artwork becomes part of the natural order of life and an expression of the human condition that is expressed across media and disciplines.

Notes 1 S. Boldrick and R. Clay, ‘Introduction’, in S. Boldrick and R. Clay, editors, Iconoclast: Contested Objects, Contested Terms, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2007, p.9. 2 T. Hess, ‘Carl Andre Has the Floor’, New York Magazine, 7 June 1976, p.71. 3 Ibid., p.70. 4 S. Boldrick and R. Clay, Iconoclast, 2007, p.4. 5 F. Rambelli and E. Reinders, ‘What Does Iconoclasm Create?’, 2007, p.18. 6 C. Grenier, ‘The Modern Big Bang’, in Big Bang: Creation and Destruction in the 20th Century Art, Paris, Centre Pompidou, 2005, p.15. 7 C. Grenier, ‘The Modern Big Bang’, 2005, p.42. 8 B. de Vries in B. de Vries, A. Ducas and H. Quick, Precious, printed privately to accompany the exhibition Precious, a collaboration with Annoushka Ducas, London, 2011, p.xii. 9 D. Cushway, www.davidcushway.co.uk, accessed 21.07.2011. 10 D. Cushway, ‘Presence and Absence: edited transcript of presentation’, Interpreting Ceramics, Issue 8.

88  The Art of Destruction 11 Ibid. 12 J. Dahn, ‘Conversation: Clare Twomey and David Cushway’, Crafts, 207, 2007, p.24. 13 C. Twomey, interview with the author, 2010. 14 I. Garachon, ‘From mender to restorer: some aspects of the history of ceramic repair’, conference paper delivered at the ICOM-CC working group, New York, USA, 2010. 15 For example, Lord’s Cubist Vase and Tray (1978) is currently on display in the Studio Ceramics section of the V&A’s ceramics galleries. 16 J. Kraynak, ‘Unfamiliar Objects’, Andrew Lord Sculpture and Related Drawings, New York, Paul Kasmin Gallery, 2004, unpaginated. 17 A. Schlieker, ‘Preface’, in M. Warner, Richard Wentworth, London, Thames & Hudson and Serpentine Gallery, 1993, p.7. 18 S. Groom, ‘Terra Incognita’, in A Secret History of Clay: From Gauguin to Gormley, London, Tate Publishing, 2004, p.18. 19 R. Paulson, Breaking and Remaking: Aesthetic Practice in England, 1700–1820, New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1989, p.18. 20 D. Gamboni, ‘Portrait of the Artist as an Iconoclast’, in G. Moore, R. Torchia, P. Tinari, G. Adamson et al, Ai Weiwei: Dropping the Urn: Ceramic Works, 5000 bce–2010 ce, Pennsylvania, Arcadia University Art Gallery, 2010, p.87. 21 P. Tinari, ‘Postures in Clay: The Vessels of Ai Weiwei’, in G. Moore, R. Torchia, P. Tinari, G. Adamson et al, Ai Weiwei: Dropping the Urn: Ceramic Works, 5000 bce–2010 ce, Pennsylvania, Arcadia University Art Gallery, 2010, p.33. 22 Ibid. 23 G. Moore and R. Torchia, ‘Doing Ceramics’, in G. Moore, R. Torchia, P. Tinari, G. Adamson et al, Ai Weiwei: Dropping the Urn: Ceramic Works, 5000 bce–2010 ce, Pennsylvania, Arcadia University Art Gallery, 2010, p.12. 24 P. Tinari, ‘Postures in Clay’, 2010, p.34. 25 E. Speaks, ‘The Transparent Signifier: Hirst, Invisibility, and Critique’, in John Welchman, editor, Sculpture and the Vitrine, London, Ashgate Press, 2013, pp.231–250. 26 R. Wentworth, artist’s statement, in P. Curtis, editor, Private View, Leeds, Henry Moore Institute, 1996, p.80. 27 L. Sormin, email correspondence with the author, 23 June 2011. 28 J. Beighton, interview with the author, 2010. 29 L. Sormin, email correspondence with the author, 15 June 2017. 30 A. Dickson, interview with the author, 2010. 31 Ibid. 32 K. Bell, ‘Jeppe Hein’, Frieze, 2004, Issue 81, p.91. 33 R. Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, (first published 1978), in J. Wood, D. Hulks and A. Potts, editors, Modern Sculpture Reader, Leeds, Henry Moore Institute 2007, p.335. 34 A. Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order of Art, London, Phoenix Press, 2000 (first published 1967), p.175.

5 Encounters Ceramics on Show

In which pots are found on the mantelpiece and the gallery plinth.

Exhibitions shape and reflect formal and conceptual changes in contemporary ceramics. Here we examine key exhibitions that have responded to important developments, including the minimalist aesthetic in porcelain, the place of clay in broader art history, and the exhilarating rise of post-studio ceramics. We look at how, having got a foothold in the white cube gallery, contemporary ceramics promptly rekindled its relationship with the home as a display space.

Contemporary British ceramicists have been influenced by important movements in twentieth-century sculpture and, at times, ceramics and sculpture are indistinguishable unless the artist’s background is known to the viewer. Considering these porous disciplinary boundaries, how are ceramics communicating their ‘ceramic-ness’ in the space where they are encountered by the public? How are curators placing ceramics, and does this placement reveal relationships or distinctions from sculpture? This chapter considers how curatorial practice has impacted on the construction of ceramic identity, and the role of museums and galleries in shaping the ways that ceramics are perceived and encountered by the exhibition-going public. By focusing on how ceramics have occupied exhibition space during a period of radical change in creative practice we get a sense of the changing and sometimes conflicted identity of the discipline. We will also see how contemporary British ceramicists have reached a point of self-assurance where they can place their pots in domestic spaces, confident that those objects can assert themselves as something beyond functional. This is not to say that ceramicists have abandoned their ambitions for their work to be displayed in white cube spaces, or that this is no longer an important context for their work. Instead, there is a confidence in the ceramic object to assert itself as art through a combination of conceptual integrity and thoughtful curation, in a space where it would usually be recognized as a utilitarian object. Julian Stair was dismissive of what he saw as fine art’s reliance on the frame of the white cube to bestow legitimacy, was this his anxiety over curatorial approaches to ceramics?

90 Encounters . . . the paradox of showing pottery in galleries is that this transience sits uncomfortably within a codified art world which requires site-specificity for its objects. The ubiquitous white plinth is a microcosm of the gallery itself, reliant on separation from the outside world.1 Time moves on, and in the decades since taking this position Stair has become increasingly comfortable in art-world spaces, and his work was shown at the Frieze Art Fair in London in 2016. Despite some initial resistance, curating ceramics in large challenging gallery spaces has proved crucial for the development of contemporary ceramics in Britain. Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art has been key in supporting the development of cutting edge practice, and James Beighton’s tenure as a curator of contemporary craft at mima from 2007 until 2014 gave rise to a period when the gallery was showing and purchasing contemporary ceramics in a way that showcased the discipline at its original and assured best. The confidence and ambition present in contemporary British ceramics was given full expression in mima’s pristine white spaces, which allowed for larger works. Intriguingly, in addition to pursuing the benefits of displaying in such spaces, ceramicists have also been interested in returning to the domestic environment and using houses (or more accurately, houses that have become museums) to display their work. Surely this was the very context for display that ceramics was trying to escape?

Thinking About Exhibitions The importance of curatorial practice to the development of art history is due to the importance of the museum as the framing institution for art. Museums shape our view of things, and the ability of museums and the individuals who work within them to create authoritative narratives, to include and exclude certain histories, is well documented in museological literature. By looking at ceramics in terms of its recent exhibition history we can build a picture of how curatorial practice has shaped and been shaped by an ambitious turn in contemporary ceramics practice. Curators and their exhibitions have played a part in the movement of the vessel away from a purely craft context to a context where the intellectual perception of the vessel can range wider, transcending or taking a new approach to the issues of skill, process and function, which are still core concerns for ceramics. Museums and art galleries are spaces that are constantly reshaping themselves, and paying attention to rearrangement, selection and exclusion of objects is vital as these changes to display reflect external cultural developments. Exhibitions have been used to construct the identity of the vessel, disrupting its role as a functional craft object and repositioning it, with varying success, as a sculptural object. This is important to understand how perceptions and expressions of the influence of sculpture on ceramics have altered over the last twenty years.

Clay as an Authentic Material for Sculpture: The Raw and the Cooked The 1980s and early 1990s was a time of redefinition for ceramics in Britain. The positioning and re-positioning of ceramics as either art or craft was carried out on the pages of journals and magazines and within exhibitions and exhibition catalogue essays. The late 1970s’ and early 1980s’ issues of Crafts magazine were full of articles

Encounters 91 that addressed the relationship between art and craft. It was in this climate, amidst concerns that the functional potter was being squeezed out by the emergence of the ceramic sculptor, that The Raw and the Cooked: New Work in Clay in Britain was conceived. The exhibition opened in 1993 at The Museum of Modern Art Oxford as the third in a series of exhibitions that surveyed the state of British art during the eighties and early nineties. In the proposal for the exhibition, originally titled The Undomestic Product: New Parameters in British Ceramic Art, Martina Margetts and Alison Britton identified scale and function as attributes that put the crafts into a domestic context and inhibited considerations of their cultural and intellectual value. Martina Margetts had been editor of the British magazine Crafts from 1979 until 1987. A prolific contributor to books and catalogues, her writing through the 1980s pushed for a development in the critical context for ceramics. By the time of The Raw and the Cooked she was robustly arguing for an expanded and forward-looking ceramics practice that had strong links with sculpture. The location of the exhibition in an art gallery rather than a craft gallery was important in shifting the critical context of ceramics. The architect John Pawson designed the layout for The Raw and the Cooked, creating stark white blocks for the ceramics to sit on. This simple cool backdrop was pursued with the intention to place the works in an ‘undomestic’ setting. By placing the ceramics in an unfamiliar and invigorating context, Britton and Margetts aimed to create a space in which they would receive serious contemplation befitting their status. This was not a position that Britton had always held. Eight years before she had penned a robust rebuttal of the suggestion that a relationship exists between ceramics and sculpture, ‘It is rare that something made in ceramic can comfortably be described as sculpture. Sensible makers avoid this label’.2 Britton pinpointed the ‘vesselness’ of a pot as disqualifying it ‘from the broad concerns of sculpture’ and suggested this relationship is often mistaken to exist because of the three-dimensionality that ceramics and sculpture have in common. By 1993 Britton’s position on the relationship between ceramics and sculpture had changed, and she now considered it as going beyond the ‘shared use of space and material’. In the catalogue for The Raw and the Cooked she writes that the pots in the show are operating as abstract works of art in that they are aesthetic compositions of three-dimensional form, colors and surfaces, carriers of meaning, open to interpretation, actual and metaphorical containers.3 The Raw and the Cooked marks an important moment at which a leading ceramicist and writer used an exhibition to communicate that ceramics, and the thinking around ceramics, is changing. Britton and Margetts wanted to both cement that change and to communicate it to the public. Margetts identified movement between the modern and the postmodern in ceramics during the 1980s, from an abstract narrative about form to a literal narrative about content. These are the same ideas that we encountered in Krauss’ essay Sculpture in the Expanded Field. It was perhaps the concept of the expanded range of possibilities for sculpture that inspired Margetts’ statement of intent for The Raw and the Cooked, ‘In this exhibition, clay is not a craft material but an authentic medium for sculpture’. 4 Certainly this exhibition signalled an appetite from makers, writers and academics for fresh possibilities for conceptualizing ceramics. In some ways The Raw and the Cooked: New Work in Clay in Britain was a response to Peter Dormer’s 1985 exhibition Fast Forward: New Directions in British

92 Encounters Ceramics, which looked at ceramics as a domestic art form. Fast Forward was held at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London and, despite the location and Dormer’s postulation that studio pottery exists on the border between art and utility, the exhibition drew on a wholly ceramics-based frame of reference. Britton and Margetts both contributed essays to the Fast Forward catalogue, leading to a sense that in The Raw and the Cooked they were working hard to find their own position and articulate a point of view that has moved on significantly from 1985. Fast Forward and The Raw and the Cooked occupy very different positions, the former competing to retain ceramics for the category of craft, and the latter shifting it towards the category of art or sculpture. These two exhibitions characterize the split in ceramics between the desire to work within the boundaries of ceramic practice, and the impulse to transgress those boundaries. Reflecting on the evolving views of Margetts and Britton gives a sense of how the critical context for conceptualizing ceramics was beginning to change. While the radical art-school and sculpture-influenced developments were yet to take place, the critical ground was being prepared to receive such works.

Ceramics and Minimalism: The New White As the 1990s drew to a close, the highly decorated, awkwardly shaped jugs and vases of the 1980s began to lose ground to a subtler style. Simple porcelain shapes and barely-there tints of color were the order of the day. But was this new stylistic austerity evidence of the principles of minimalism reworked in porcelain, or was it part of the understated style that was also on the rise in home decoration and fashion? To understand whether it is possible to use minimalism as any more than a loose term to denote stylistic austerity in ceramics, we must be clear about what the term means for sculpture. Kenneth Baker defines two types of distinct but overlapping artworks that the term might be applied to, primarily sculpted or three-dimensional work made after 1960, that is abstract . . . and barren of merely decorative detail, in which geometry is emphasized and expressive technique avoided.5 And, . . . things that are – or were when first exhibited – indistinguishable (or all but) from raw materials or found objects, that is, minimally differentiated from mere non-art stuff.6 Baker identified two key ideas underpinning minimalism: to clarify the terms upon which art takes its place in the world and the renunciation of personal workmanship.7 Challenging the idea that the artist must manufacture the work of art, minimalism stands in opposition to traditional studio ceramics in which the notion of the handmade is essential. However, a ceramicist such as Clare Twomey, whose works are sometimes made by many hands, incorporate found objects, or are cast in molds, challenges the importance of the hand of the potter in much the same way that minimalism did for sculpture in the 1960s and 1970s.

Encounters 93 Michael Craig-Martin (1989) echoed Baker’s views on minimalism, There is no reference to another previous experience (no representation), no implication of a higher level of experience (no metaphysics), no promise of a deeper intellectual experience (no metaphor). Instead Minimalism presents the viewer with objects of charged neutrality.8 This is difficult territory for ceramics because of its commitment to material and the wealth of associations contingent on its use. Approach to material is the source of fundamental differences between ceramics and minimalist sculpture. If the material of a minimalist sculpture carries no record of passing through human hands, how far can ceramics relate to minimalism when shaping raw clay by hand is considered essential, certainly to studio ceramics? For many artists working in clay, this physical engagement with their material, and the manual processes of shaping, decorating and firing is crucial. The physical gesture gives the artist opportunity for expression through their material. The presence, indeed the celebration, of skilled labor and the intelligence of the hands is seen as key to the crafts. The stylistic shift in studio ceramics did not go unnoticed by the UK’s national ceramics collection and in 1999 Alun Graves curated the exhibition The New White: Contemporary Studio Porcelain at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. This exhibition reflected the formal austerity coming to the fore in ceramics and contributed to the debate about porcelain’s association with minimalism that was current in the ceramics press. A number of articles published around this time weighed up the significance of this new and distinctly minimal style of studio pottery. In an article titled, ‘The Bare Minimum’ (1998), Nick Lees suggested a link between simplicity in ceramics and being taken seriously by art critics. Lees described ‘the prevalence of a “minimal” aesthetic’ in studio pottery and cited an article in The Observer that noted that works by potters Rupert Spira and Edmund de Waal were being taken seriously by prominent auction houses such as Bonhams.9 Was it because these pots connected with the austerity of minimalism that collectors were responding positively to them, or because they were simply more attractive than brown studio pottery? Either way, under the influence of sculpture or in reaction to the ceramics produced in the preceding decades, the simple aesthetic in ceramics persisted, as did a suspicion of sculpture as the source of this aesthetic change. In ‘Minimal Objection’, published in 2000, Westergaard questioned whether looking at ceramics through the framework of minimalism risked, ‘overlooking qualities specific to the new studio ceramics’.10 She expressed concern that ceramics could be subsumed into sculpture and the particular ceramic qualities disregarded. For Westergaard, the comparison with minimalist sculpture served to emphasize the distinctive qualities of ceramics, such as the ability to function outside the context of the gallery and the presence of the mark and gesture of the maker.11 Alison Britton was less troubled by the ceramics on show in The New White, describing them as ‘evidence of the high cool edge of contemporary throwing in Britain, that fits so beautifully into current moves towards minimalism in the interior’. With a ‘what you see is what you see’ pragmatism, Britton allows herself to enjoy the simplicity of the porcelain without being tortured by existential angst

94 Encounters relating to the presence of sculpture’s malign influence. For Britton, ceramics’ interest in minimalism is in step with current notions of good taste, rather than demonstrative of a true relationship with sculpture.12 Despite the aesthetic purity of the works in the New White, Britton aligned the new studio porcelain with function rather than sculpture, Alun Graves in his exhibition leaflet stresses that use, as well as the special associations and qualities of porcelain, are central to its appeal. For me the table settings, offering the most functional, everyday pleasures, were the best feature of this exhibition.13 This question of function keeps cropping up, and Westergaard also sought to anchor discussion of ceramics to the core craft principles of ‘form and function, material, skill and expression’, while suggesting that pared down colors and forms allow ceramics to be presented as ‘the acceptable face of crafts – the formal similarities allow them a gravitas associated with minimalism as a serious art movement’.14 This criticism that any relationship between ceramics and sculpture is a one-sided attempt by ceramicists to claim higher status for their work by describing it as ‘sculptural’ is often present at the fringe of discussions about ceramics and fine art. In The New White Graves curated an exhibition in which functionality was not denied but rather celebrated by placing porcelain in table settings. As a curator he created a space in which the satisfaction of using beautiful objects for everyday activities such as eating a meal could be imagined and appreciated. The New White also served as a reminder of the old white, the crisp white Chinese porcelain that so thoroughly appealed to Europeans when they first encountered it. This exhibition included works by Julian Stair and Edmund de Waal, ceramicists who would continue to value function and functional forms, but also seek an expanded context for their work, a web of associations rooted in the story of porcelain. It was around this time that minimalism’s conceptual rather than formal influence began to be felt, with increasing disruption of what is expected of ceramics, and how the audiences view and interact with the work.

Ceramics Under Threat: A Secret History of Clay The exhibition A Secret History of Clay: From Gauguin to Gormley took place at Tate Liverpool during the summer of 2004. The exhibition was curated by Simon Groom, then Head of Exhibitions at Tate Liverpool, Amy Dickson, at that time an Assistant Curator at the gallery, and the ceramicist Edmund de Waal was an advisor. Broadly speaking, the exhibition had a two-part structure, the first looking at historic practice and the second looking at clay in contemporary practice. The exhibition began with work by Gauguin, the German Expressionists and Fauve artists, before moving on to Russian revolutionary ceramics and the Italian Futurists. Also present were ceramics by Miro, Picasso, Jun Kaneko, Ken Price, Isamu Noguchi, Andy Goldsworthy, Richard Wentworth, Jeppe Hein and Tony Cragg, amongst others. The final room of the exhibition showed a return to a domestic vessel-based practice, and included Cindy Sherman’s Madame de Pompadour porcelain tea service (1990) and Edmund de Waal’s Porcelain Wall (2002). The studious exclusion of ceramics’ own canon of great artists such as Hans Coper, Lucie Rie and Bernard Leach reflected the desire to reveal the ‘hidden history’ of the relationship between clay and fine art, and

Encounters 95 prevented the exhibition from running a ceramics greatest hits of the sort that had been seen many times before. The stated aims of the show were clear: to position certain works in clay within the history of art; to challenge the automatic label of ‘craft’ for those works made from clay; to trace making in the medium into the post-modern era; to understand the materiality of clay and its visceral appeal to artists; and finally to understand the enduring appeal of object-making, particularly of vessel-making, in the contemporary world. The question of how to handle what constitutes art and what constitutes craft when a single material was used was a conundrum throughout the exhibition. What was clear was that there are two parallel histories for clay, one art and one craft, and that the vessel is also interesting to artists who are not ceramicists. A Secret History of Clay received media coverage in excess of what one would expect for a ceramics exhibition outside London. Reviewed in The Guardian, Crafts, Ceramic Review, Ceramic Arts and Perception, Keramik and Kunsthandverk, the exhibition was also the subject of a television program presented by Tim Marlow and Antony Gormley that aired on Channel 5. Most unusually, the catalogue sold out. The exhibition was popular, but provoked strong feeling from some in the craft camp. Edward Lucie-Smith published an edited version of the lecture he gave at the exhibition symposium in Ceramic Review, in which he wrote, much of the work included in A Secret History of Clay makes a virtue out of apparent clumsiness. In other words, it is classified as art, not craft, primarily because it is self-evidently not very well made in terms of what we know the material can achieve’.15 Lucie-Smith used ‘skill’ as a key differentiator between art and craft but, in setting up such a division and setting up the ‘artists’ to fail in terms of their technical skills, he failed to heed the central idea of the exhibition which was to present the ceramic works of artists who would usually work in another medium. Lucie-Smith expressed anger at what he saw as an attempt to co-opt ceramics away from craft into art history, and a disregard for the work of master potters. The exhibition assistant curator Amy Dickson believed that the show elicited strong responses because it challenged the form and importance of the vessel within ceramics practice. For Dickson, the deconstruction of the vessel was a significant narrative thread running through A Secret History of Clay, there’s this idea that the vessel is already under threat in this first part of the show, and the second part of the show is looking at contemporary practice and how increasingly the vessel becomes completely exploded to the point where in Twomey’s work it completely disintegrates.16 While Dickson sees deconstruction and remaking of form as the theme of the show, for some in the craft and ceramics world it was the very category of ceramics that was being placed under threat by this exhibition.

Post-Studio Practice: Possibilities and Losses The ceramicist Clare Twomey developed the idea that turned into the exhibition Possibi­ lities and Losses when working as a Research Fellow at the University of Westminster.

96 Encounters Twomey was writing about installation, clay and craft, and questioning its durability in the wider visual arts. She had identified the rise of the ‘installation’ in the craft world, but had reservations about whether or not the term was being correctly applied. She wondered if, instead, the term was creating an aura around certain types of work in clay without a real consideration of how the term is applied in the wider visual arts. Invited by the Crafts Council to curate an exhibition, Twomey began to plan a show that would be an extension of the ideas she had been developing at Westminster. Initially envisaged as including the work of a larger number of artists, the exhibition was refined to focus on the work of just four. The artists Neil Brownsword, Linda Sormin, Keith Harrison and Twomey herself were chosen to demonstrate the strength of work that brought together clay and installation, and to show that ceramics did not need to be understood only in a craft context. Originally, the exhibition was going to take place in the Craft Council’s Islington gallery, but the closure of that space led to a collaboration with Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, a venue that had just then opened and was building a reputation for curating challenging contemporary craft exhibitions. Twomey soon became clear that her interest lay with what her contemporaries were doing and how work in clay might develop in the future, ‘I was much more interested in trying to find out how to engage contemporary craft rather than doing what probably the Secret History of Clay is, which is putting an umbrella over everybody who has used clay’.47 Twomey produced a second and larger version of her work Monument in the space available at mima.17 Neil Brownsword was able to show all elements of his work Salvage Series, film and objects together in their own dedicated space, while both Linda Sormin and Keith Harrison created work that included a performance element. Sormin created Rift, a work that was a collection of ceramics and found objects, film and performance, and Keith Harrison’s work continued his interest in the transformative properties of electricity, creating a mass of slip-coated wires on a plinth which were gradually fired by an electric current passing through the wires during the course of the exhibition. As both artist and curator, Twomey hoped to express the changing role of a practitioner who worked with clay, a role that she felt in part developed from the shifting outlooks that surround craft practice. In Possibilities and Losses, which she co-curated with James Beighton, ceramics moved away from the scale and role of the domestic and instead engaged with ideas around post-industrial decay and renewal on an imposing scale. Willful destruction, coursing electricity, a lament for dying industrial skills, and the looming threat of a monumental heap of broken ceramics, the work in Possibilities and Losses was resolutely beyond the capabilities of a domestic setting. The dominant theme was change. Twomey’s pitcher pile was not discarded ceramic landfill but a pile waiting to be recycled into a new product; Harrison’s work used the changing properties of clay when fired; Sormin’s installation changed during the course of the exhibition, it was gradually broken down by those who would usually treat works on display with the utmost care; Brownsword’s work observed a city and an industry in change, a changing way of life for people who had not only worked in the potteries all their lives, but had followed their parents and grandparents into the ceramics industry. Part of the development of the language of craft that Twomey identified in this exhibition was the extension of the materials used by the four artists. Twomey, the only artist using solely ceramics, was using industrially made ‘found’ objects. Harrison used breezeblocks to construct a plinth and car batteries to provide the electricity source for his work. Brownsword’s Salvage Series comprised two films and a group of found objects relating to ceramics production such as the props and spurs that are made

Encounters 97 to support objects in the kiln. Sormin used the gallery to create an immersive blackpainted space with a raised decking walkway to take the viewer through the work, which included ceramics and found objects. Possibilities and Losses was one of a series of exhibitions at mima that pushed the boundaries of contemporary British ceramics. The gallery was important not only for commissioning works and allowing the artists to be seen together, but also in shaping the future direction of the discipline and giving an opportunity for ceramicists to be seen as part of an international art world rather than limited to a circuit of smallscale craft venues. Reactions to the work of these artists would also serve to shape the construction of this new gallery’s identity as a site for extending the boundaries and language of contemporary ceramics practice. The four artists in the exhibition have come to define a significant moment in contemporary ceramics practice in Britain. A moment incorporating a British pottery industry in collapse and the increasingly out-dated image of the studio-potter, and yet ceramics managed to maintain, if not reaffirm, its disciplinary identity and commitment to material, carving out an intellectually and formally compelling area of practice.

Ceramics for the Home Before craft galleries existed and the white cube came to prominence, the home was where ceramics were displayed, carrying both high- and low-art references into this space. The domestic arena neatly divided into two social segments, represented by the porcelain rooms of palaces and stately homes, and the more familiar type of domestic space where the display apparatus is the kitchen dresser, the mantelpiece or a handy shelf. In the porcelain rooms found in European princely palaces high-status ceramics were exhibited in high-status domestic spaces, in an environment where costly paintings and sculpture were also on show and porcelain formed part of a decorative scheme designed to communicate wealth and taste. In the modern and post-modern periods, the home has been both an important and an undervalued location for encountering art, particularly ceramics. Important because domestic space is where we most often encounter ceramics, and undervalued because of the designation of domestic space as a female sphere, its functional associations, the generally small financial value of the objects within, and the small size required for display in the home. Despite these associations, ceramicists have sought to return their work to a domestic context or create an association with a type of location that through the modern period has been constructed as the antithesis of serious art. The resurgence of the domestic as an element of contemporary ceramics is indicative of a practice that has developed beyond the straightforwardly functional, even when works reference the domestic and take the form of objects that could theoretically be used. Such works might reference domestic objects or the home, but they behave squarely as art objects rather than things to be used.

The Separation of Art and the Home From the early twentieth century, in the wake of the Arts and Crafts movement, domestic space was repositioned ‘as the antipode to high art’.18 Christopher Reed quotes Russian artist Alexandr Rodchenko as saying, ‘The art of the future will not be the cosy decoration of family homes’.19 Reed goes on to suggest Dada and Surrealist artists, with their fascination with the uncanny,

98 Encounters habitually appropriated the accoutrements of domesticity in ways that undermined connotations of homey comfort, while the theoreticians of these movements sustained the anti-domestic rhetoric of earlier modernists.20 So where does the powerful modernist rejection of the domestic and objects with domestic connotations leave ceramics, particularly vessels, whose suggestion of function makes the home a natural place to encounter them? If serious art has been banished from the home, what does this mean for the status and perception of ceramics that continue to use vessel forms and so persist in their domestic associations? Even the human scale of most vessel-based ceramics is sufficient to align them with the domestic. In answer to the call from some artists for art not to be brought into contact with the everyday, and as part of the desire to find a new kind of space for encountering art, the stark modernism of the ‘white cube’ gallery emerged in the 1920s and 1930s. In America, 1929 saw the establishment of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. The founding director of MoMA, Alfred Barr, covered the walls with a natural colored cloth and eliminated the salon-style of hanging paintings.21 Today this manner of presenting paintings has become conventional and its significance is completely invisible, but Barr’s style contributed to the introduction of a particular type of installation that came to dominate museum practices.22 The MoMA 1934 exhibition Machine Art is an example of the simple, spare, pared-down aesthetic that became, and remains, the standard environment in which to view art. The development of ‘white cube’ spaces for the display of art facilitated a severance of art from the domestic elements that were previously found in exhibition spaces, such as comfortable seating, or the ‘country house’ approach to the display of artworks that incorporated richly colored walls and dense hangs of paintings. Despite the fact that stark white spaces of the modern art gallery have become synonymous with the display of art that has ‘intellectual significance’, artists working with clay have, over the last decade, returned to the domestic environment. Clare Twomey and Edmund de Waal, ceramicists with an interest in installation and site-sensitivity, have often chosen house-museums as a site for their work. In such instances, the housemuseum not only offers a frame for the work but becomes part of it. The work does not sit passively but has an active relationship with the environment that it inhabits.

Home Coming: Contemporary Ceramics in Domestic Space Edmund de Waal and Clare Twomey have effectively used the public–private space of house museums for their installations, taking advantage of what Gill Perry identifies as the fluid nature of the viewer’s experience when encountering installation art, in contrast to ‘the clearly defined object in the white cube’.23 In a domestic space, even one that has become a museum, more layers of meaning are possible. Encountering their work in such a setting is not simply about an attractive placement. Edmund de Waal’s invitation to exhibit his work at High Cross House in 1999 led to an architectural intervention, or installation, of a kind that was then new for ceramic practice. High Cross House in Devon, completed in 1932, is a modernist house that was built for William Curry, the first headmaster of Dartington Hall School. The opportunity to engage with the Le Corbusier-inspired environment of High Cross House, complete with Bauhaus furniture, allowed de Waal to extend ideas that were already present in his ‘cargo’ works – groupings, repetition, concealment and revelation.

Encounters 99 De Waal began to make these works as a way to question the assumption that it was not possible to be a serious contemporary artist and make pots.24 Calling them cargos to emphasize the fact that they were groups, but also that they were in transit in some kind of way between different cultures, between art and craft, and between sculpture and ceramics. Part of his experimentation with the cargo works was to start putting them in interesting and diverse places, and trying to work out why groups of pots had a particular resonance in certain places. This idea took hold so that de Waal’s practice became about making things for places, It wasn’t just about plonking them on tables, it was more about the discovery of them in those places, so I put them in cupboards or on the ground or high up so you could only just get a sense of them. I was really just trying to experiment with the life of pots, and that’s really taken me over. I now feel that that is my practice: I make things for places.25 The installation at High Cross House was the beginning of this manner of working, which has become central to de Waal’s artistic practice. Instead of using High Cross House as an attractive modernist backdrop for his work, De Waal became interested in using the house as a whole, less as an unusual exhibition space and more as a

Figure 5.1  Edmund de Waal, Cupboard Cargo, 1999.

100 Encounters collaborative element with the porcelain. It is this collaboration between domestic space and the vessels, and the ability to make references beyond form and material, that draw out the sculptural qualities. In the kitchen, an open cupboard reveals a line of porcelain vessels. A single tall lidded jar sits on the fireplace in the living room. Slim vases in a neat row replace books on a shelf. Pots are where you would expect to find them in a house. But they have the cool stillness of marble sculptures. The possibility of function is simultaneously suggested and denied. With the careful placing of vessels de Waal invites the kitchen cupboard to become a showcase and the fireplace to become a plinth. Michael Tooby writes of these pots in the exhibition catalogue, saying that ‘the commission to make site specific pieces enables him to relocate his “craft” in the realms of both “art” and “architecture”’.26 These are pots, with the suggestions of utility and function that we could expect to find with pots, and though they are encountered in what was once a home, they assert themselves as works of art through their placement, through their dialogue with the calm modernism of the architecture of the house. In 1999, around the time of the project at High Cross, de Waal was quoted in Ceramics Art and Perception, ‘The whole lazy approach to how ceramics are used, displayed and revealed within our cultural spaces is an important issue that has to be addressed’.27 With the project at High Cross House, de Waal was taking up this concern directly, and display and revelation still persist as strands of thought in his more recent works such as An English Matins (2010) that make use of closed doors and opaque glass. At High Cross House, a domestic space transformed into a museum (and back into a domestic space again in 2013), ideas of privacy and display, private and public, could be tested through the placement of pots. De Waal’s installation challenged the modernist separation of home and art, which persists in the idea of the white cube as the ideal space to show art and in the distinctions between categories of art. De Waal continued his concern with the aesthetic of display eight years later with an exhibition across two galleries. The exhibition began at Kettle’s Yard and later moved to mima, where the same works were adapted to the very different spaces of the then newly opened gallery. Kettle’s Yard is another example of a space that has been by turns domestic and public. The house was the home of Jim and Helen Ede from 1958–1973, and housed the collection that Jim Ede had created when he worked as a curator at Tate during the 1920s and 1930s. Their open-house policy meant that students were able to come and view the collection, and in 1966 the house and contents were given to Cambridge University and its role as a gallery was formalized while retaining the character of a home.28 James Beighton describes the importance of the domestic setting of Kettle’s Yard to de Waal’s work at that time, and how the exhibition also signaled a physically more ambitious turn that was better expressed in mima’s white cube spaces, Kettle’s Yard allowed his work to be seen against the backdrop of Jim Ede’s particular collecting interests . . . The gallery that was representing Edmund at the time was the New Arts Centre, Roche Court, which is a gallery known for its sculpture. So you could see even in Edmund’s practice that he was being pulled in those two different directions. On the one hand he is very interested in early modernism, which does have a strong sense of the domestic sphere, and he’s interested in early decorative traditions and earlier modes of display in ceramics . . . what our show demonstrated was that when you give Edmund a white gallery space . . . he’s up to the job.29

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Figure 5.2  Edmund de Waal, Reading Silence, 2007.

The vessel as we encounter it in de Waal’s work has returned to the domestic environment, but it is a changed vessel and it is occupying the space on its own terms. It has transitioned from thing to object; pots sit in domestic space but no longer speak the language of craft and utility (though they may be about craft and utility, in some sense). For de Waal, domestic space has become the site for a more sculptural ceramics practice, a practice that undermines the distinctions between sculptural objects and functional things. In the aftermath of the modernist insistence on the separation of the home and the display of art, de Waal has successfully reasserted the domestic environment as a legitimate site of encounter with his work. This repositioning can be seen in two stages. His presence in the domestic environment is not with the ironic detachment of the Pop Artist Roy Lichtenstein’s ceramic dinnerware for example, but with a careful consideration of the space, light and history of the setting, and the movement of the spectator in that space. In 2009 Clare Twomey was commissioned to create a work for an exhibition to celebrate the tercentenary of the birth of English lexicographer Dr Samuel Johnson (credited with A Dictionary of the English Language). Twomey’s work Scribe was displayed as part of the exhibition House of Words at Dr Johnson’s house. Beneath a layer of pale blue dust created from Wedgwood blue Jasper clay lay books, paper and quills, as if the users of these writing materials have abandoned them at a time of great activity and have simply never returned. Twomey created this installation in the garret room of the house to pay homage to the six unnamed assistants who supported Johnson in his work.

102 Encounters

Figure 5.3  Clare Twomey, Scribe, 2006. Photograph by Clare Twomey Studio.

Twomey has used blue Jasper clay in her work before; as dust and to make objects. This particular type of clay opens up the work to numerous possible associated meanings. There are shared associations between Wedgwood and Johnson, two great figures of eighteenth-century England, who both came from the Midlands. The dust itself created an association with a struggling ceramics industry, mothballed factories and lost skills. Twomey’s dialogue with the house does not acknowledge the space as a domestic environment, though it was, for a period, both home and workplace for Johnson when compiling his dictionary. Where de Waal would have perhaps pursued an engagement with architecture and space, Twomey engages with the memories contained within the building. A connection with the ephemeral made with an ephemeral material. Though she does not ignore the history of the building, Twomey’s work uses the house museum and its history as a starting point for the exploration of more universal strands of thought, such as memory and the passing of time. Twomey’s use of dust, butterflies, flowers and birds as motifs in her work evidence these themes, which display a Keatsean preoccupation with transience and permanence. A Dark Day in Paradise, made up of thousands of ceramic butterflies, was created for the Royal Pavilion in Brighton in 2010. Twomey’s three thousand blackglazed ceramic butterflies swarmed, hovered and rested in the decadent interior of the dining room of this exotic royal pleasure palace, which was built in stages for the Prince Regent, later King George IV, between 1787 and 1823. The glistening black butterflies flutter at the windows and pause, resting on the fruit on the dining table. Twomey described her concept for this piece as of a swarm of unsavory but very beautiful butterflies that had landed in the pavilion and they were

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Figure 5.4  Clare Twomey, A Dark Day in Paradise, 2010. Photograph by Matthew Andrews.

judging it in some way. Twomey also explained the cloud of butterflies as a romantic image, which had become part of the inescapable, and at times overwhelming, romance of the building.30 Her idea was to try to embed them, to give the impression that they’ve always been there and unsettle the visitors who are unsure whether the butterflies are part of the historic interior: an enterprise that could only have taken place in a building with an interior as extravagant as this. Twomey described the pavilion as a very difficult environment to make for because the interior is visually overwhelming and competing with the decor for the visitor’s attention is almost impossible. Nevertheless, the building, with its particular history and associations, allowed her work to have a dialogue in a very particular language that only existed there, in that place. And it is that particular dialogue, the

104 Encounters collaborative element, different in every one of the house museums, that makes such places rich collaborative partners for contemporary ceramics practice.

Domesticating the White Cube Ceramics has been gradually moving out of craft galleries into white cube spaces for at least three decades. Bringing ceramics into exhibition spaces closely associated with the display of ‘fine’ art was part of repositioning ceramics as a medium with sculptural potential that The Raw and the Cooked aimed for. Anders Ruhwald, a Danish ceramicist who studied at the Royal College of Art in London, began his career making pottery. As his practice advanced he developed an understanding of the potential of functional forms to comment on ideas beyond the confines of pure utility and function. For Ruhwald the term kunsthåndværk (literally art-craft) is defined by a studio practice that generates carefully labored objects formally linked to objects of utility but rarely fulfilling that role in a practical sense. Ruhwald prizes interaction on a material and practical level, and has written of his frustration with exhibitions that the visitor is only permitted to observe passively. Rather than signaling intellectual elevation, Ruhwald sees sculpture on plinths as holding artwork away from the viewer and closing down dialogue instead of starting new conversations. Ruhwald’s references to the domestic, in both the arrangement and the objects in his exhibitions You Will See (Lemberg Gallery, Detroit, USA, 2010–11) and We float in space and cannot perceive the new order (Miyako Yoshinaga Art Prospects, New York, USA, 2007) place the viewer and the object in the same space, sharing the same ground. The works comment on the domestic rather than exist as part of it, as one aspect of a complex relationship between material and form. Instead of using the white cube gallery as a supposedly neutral backdrop for his work, Ruhwald disrupts that crisp and serious aesthetic by introducing domestic touches such as ribbon curtains, carpets and visible plug sockets into these spaces. He isolates and makes uncanny abstracted elements of a domestic or suburban setting, presenting objects that we halfrecognize but struggle to make sense of in that space. In 2008 Ruhwald’s solo exhibition You In Between opened at Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art. Ruhwald’s approach to mima’s white cube spaces was not to revel in the status that such a setting could confer on his work, but instead to undermine this effect. This involved deliberately making gestures of domesticity to offset the white spaces. Candle/Light is made of a simple shelf that has from one end a light bulb hanging down and at the other end a candle sitting on top. The candle is lit and over the course of the exhibition, over the course of each day, it burns down to nothing and another candle is put on and is lit at the beginning of the next day. Over the course of the exhibition wax falls over the edge of the shelf building up in a pile on the floor. Curator James Beighton referred to this piece as ‘anti-modernist’, saying, It is very squarely against our gallery spaces but that’s something that Anders was interested in, the role of decoration, of domesticity in a modernist gallery space. There were even gestures such as plug sockets. Anders wanted us to fix plug sockets onto the walls, domestic plug sockets, and they weren’t to be set into the walls, they were to be on boxes coming out of the walls.

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Figure 5.5  Anders Ruhwald, Candle/Light, 2008. Courtesy Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art.

Beighton found the unconcealed plug sockets and cables trailing drawing-like down the wall as simultaneously ‘decorative and uncomfortable’ in the gallery space. The gallery was equipped with hidden plug sockets and cables that could have been used to power Candle/Light. The ugly awkward plug socket and trailing cable were ornamentation disguised as function, wanted for their visually troublesome effect on the space. Instead of allowing his work to take on the lift in status offered by a solo exhibition in a contemporary art venue, Ruhwald playfully disturbs the carefully designed spaces, filling them with color, texture and unexpected visual encounters that reveal the irreverent and confident streak present in contemporary ceramics practice. This playful use and subversion of the domestic runs counter to the approach of European modernists, for whom being undomestic ‘came to serve as a guarantee of being art’.31 As a result the domestic becomes a site of subversion, ‘a staging ground for rebellion’, and it is this attitude that we encounter in Ruhwald’s work.32 If modernism suppressed a serious engagement with domesticity, some ceramicists and sculptors have returned with energy to the domestic as a field of enquiry. Sculptors such as Louise Bourgeois and Mona Hatoum, for example, have used ideas surrounding the home and domesticity, unsettling and destabilizing this familiar environment in their work.33 While Ruhwald, Twomey and de Waal have not attempted to destabilize the

106 Encounters

Figure 5.6  Anders Ruhwald, You In Between, 2008. Courtesy Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art.

idea of the home in quite the same way, they have conducted their own quiet rebellion against the idea that serious contemporary art must be seen in a certain environment. In using the house-museum and exploring what ‘the domestic’ might be like in contemporary ceramics practice they have revised and raised expectations of what audiences can expect from their material and discipline. Such changes cannot happen in isolation, and in tandem there has been a curatorial open-mindedness towards ceramics that is a far cry from Peter Dormer’s insistence in 1985 that the role of pottery was in ‘thickening’ the visual texture of the home.34 For Dormer, the domestic scale and function of pottery was the correct and appropriate focus for the medium. As the conceptual transformation of the vessel began in the 1980s, Dormer contemplated with concern ‘how far the forms of pottery can be transformed without losing their domestic language’.35 What Dormer did not contemplate was a climate in which ceramics could manage both at once: to be transformed and to maintain the language of the domestic while making a wealth of other references to ceramics history, the history of displays and to art history itself. Dormer did however recognize the importance of exhibitions. In his book The New Ceramics Dormer took stock of the influence of museums and galleries in constructing knowledge, shaping disciplines and dissolving or maintaining disciplinary boundaries, Showing in these spaces has professionalized the practice of fine art and generated a substantial apparatus of criticism, theory, reviewing, articles, catalogue essays, monographs and books. Curators have become as influential as artists and to put art in an art gallery is to place it amidst a web of theoretical contexts.36

Encounters 107 Disapproving of curatorial intervention, what Dormer failed to acknowledge was that without the theoretical contexts, surprising associations and critical framework provided by curators, ceramics would stagnate and be all the poorer for it. Contemporary ceramics practice has shown itself more than able to cope with the challenges of the white cube environment and its demand for physical and intellectual scale. Ceramicists’ use of different settings for the exhibition of their work, particularly former domestic spaces, indicates that the discipline is untroubled about being encountered in a place where vessels may be first recognized for their functional associations. Contemporary ceramics has the self-assurance to dismiss the modernist separation of home and art and look for spaces beyond the white cube or, as with Anders Ruhwald, to poke fun at the white cube and its demands for pristine walls and floors with naked plug sockets.

Notes 1 J. Stair, ‘A Sense of Place’, Ceramic Review, no.191, 2001, p.19. 2 A. Britton, ‘The Modern Pot’, in P. Dormer et al, Fast Forward: New Directions in British Ceramics, London, Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1985, p.12. 3 A. Britton, ‘Use, Beauty, Ugliness and Irony’, in A. Britton and M. Margetts, editors, The Raw and the Cooked: New Work in Clay in Britain, Oxford, The Museum of Modern Art Oxford, 1993, p. 11. 4 M. Margetts, ‘Metamorphosis: The Culture of Ceramics’, in A. Britton and M. Margetts, editors, The Raw and the Cooked: New Work in Clay in Britain, Oxford, The Museum of Modern Art Oxford, 1993, p.14. 5 K. Baker, Minimalism: Art of Circumstance, New York, Abbeville Press, 1988, p.9. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid., p.10 and p.55. 8 M. Craig-Martin, ‘The Art of Context’, in L. Biggs, editor, Minimalism, London, Tate Publishing, 1989, p.7. 9 N. Lees, ‘The Bare Minimum’, Ceramic Review, no.171, 1998, p.18. 10 C. Westergaard, ‘Minimal Objection’, Ceramic Review, no.181, 2000, p.36. 11 Ibid., p.37. 12 A. Britton, ‘Overthrowing Tradition’, Interpreting Ceramics, no.2, 2002, unpaginated. 13 Ibid. 14 C. Westergaard, ‘Minimal Objection’, 2000, p.38. 15 E. Lucie-Smith, ‘From Gauguin to Gormley’, Ceramic Review, no.209, 2004, pp.32–35. 16 A. Dickson, interview with the author, 2010. 17 Monument had been shown earlier that year at the Zuiderzee Museum in the Netherlands. 18 C. Reed, ‘Introduction’, in C. Reed, editor, Not at Home’: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture, London, Thames & Hudson, 1996, p.7. 19 Quote taken from Solomon-Godeau, cited in C. Reed, ‘Domestic Disturbances: Challenging the Anti-domestic Modern’, in C. Painter, editor, Contemporary Art and the Home, Oxford, Berg, 2002, p.39. 20 Ibid. 21 A salon-style picture hang emulates the style of the nineteenth century where many paintings were squeezed together onto the walls. 22 M. Staniszewski, The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 2001, p.61. 23 G. Perry, ‘Dream Houses: Installations and the Home’, in G. Perry and P. Wood, editors, Themes in Contemporary Art, New Haven, Yale, 2004, pp.231–276. 24 E. de Waal, ‘Edmund de Waal Part 1: On Location’, transcript of an interview conducted for the V&A. Available at: www.vam.ac.uk/channel/people/ceramics/edmund_dewaal_ part_1_-_on_location/. 25 Ibid.

108 Encounters 26 M. Tooby, ‘Edmund de Waal’s Work in Progress’, in E. de Waal, E. and M. Tooby, Modern Home: An Intervention by Edmund de Waal at High Cross House, Totnes, Dartington Hall Trust, 1999, p.20. 27 As cited in J. Jones, Studio Pottery in Britain 1900–2005, London, A&C Black, 2007, p.234. 28 See www.kettlesyard.co.uk/house/index.html, accessed 17.06.2011. 29 J. Beighton, interview with the author, 2010. 30 C. Twomey, interview with the author, 2010. 31 C. Reed, Not at Home, 1996, p.16. 32 Ibid. 33 G. Perry, ‘Dream Houses: Installations and the Home’, 2004, p.256. 34 P. Dormer, ‘Familiar Forms’, in P. Dormer et al, Fast Forward: New Directions in British Ceramics, London, Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1985, p.5. 35 Ibid., pp.6–7. 36 P. Dormer, The New Ceramics: Trends and Traditions, revised edition, London, Thames & Hudson, 1994, p.196.

Conclusion

In which ceramics endures.

Radical Plasticity Why has contemporary ceramics developed in the way that it has? This is the question at the heart of this book. The answer explored is that the influence of sculpture has brought about a profound change in ceramics practice; that as sculpture has evolved, moving from a specific set of processes and materials to an expanded range of activities, ceramics has echoed this change. The notion of sculpture’s influence on contemporary British ceramics immediately raises a whole host of related questions. If there is an influence running from sculpture to ceramics, is it beneficial? Are ceramicists purposely emulating sculpture in order to ‘improve’ or progress their work? Is this sculptural stimulus conscious or unconscious? Does the current of influence run in one direction, or is sculpture also influenced by ceramics? Where does sculpture’s influence leave ceramics in terms of its art or craft status? The answers to these questions are contentious, but what can be done with some clarity is to trace the trajectory in which ceramics has followed sculpture’s development and examine points of contact and divergence. Observing the course of ceramics’ progression reveals how the discipline has been transformed in the presence of the critical stimulus of mid-to-late-twentieth-century sculpture. In its traditional form, sculpture embodied a physical and conceptual space that was inaccessible to ceramics. Marble sculptures, classical imagery and grand public commissions; these things were at odds with the world of studio pottery that was more attuned to folk art and studied rusticity. Yet as sculpture radically reinvented itself and became more avant-garde, paradoxically it became more accessible to ceramics. Cut loose from specific materials and processes, sculpture became a highly inventive plastic art, where the material for manipulation might as easily be the human body or the landscape as much as a block of stone. This gave sculpture an openness and freedom that has stimulated ceramicists and overhauled the cutting edge of clay from the 1990s onwards. Related to these existential questions, it is useful to ponder the real-life manifestation of ceramics as an altered discipline: the site of display. How has ceramics managed to find a place in white cube galleries, a type of space that is the ultimate framing device for serious art? Is it because ceramics has become subsumed within sculpture? Also, if ceramics continue to be shown in art spaces, surrendering their craft identity, does this mean that ceramics as a discipline is in danger of collapse?

110 Conclusion British artist Rachel Kneebone’s works encapsulate this general fear of the collapse of ceramics as a distinctive subject area. Holding a first-class undergraduate degree in ceramics, and a postgraduate degree in sculpture, Kneebone’s works take the material, processes and qualities of ceramic’s most highly prized material, porcelain, and positions it within an ‘art’ context. Fittingly, transformation and metamorphosis are recurrent themes in her work, while Rodin is the sculptural touchpoint for her constructions of massed writhing white figures. Kneebone is represented by the high profile White Cube Gallery in London, and her astonishing seventeen-foot porcelain work 399 Days (2017) – named for the number of days it took Kneebone to handsculpt the figures – was placed in the sculpture court rather than the ceramics gallery at the V&A. Further taxonomic migration from ceramics to sculpture can be expected if the critical context for ceramics is not rapidly and radically overhauled.

A Single Material Specific concerns such as form, the mechanics of the making process, material and history are what makes ceramics distinctive, but to make these things the extent of critical discussion and interpretation is ultimately limiting. Nonetheless, it is form, process and material that has allowed ceramics to connect with sculpture. This connection means that ceramics is able to draw on and integrate sculpture’s radical rethinking of these concerns. As well as having discrete intellectual interests and historical reference points, the constancy offered by the use of a single material has allowed ceramics to develop and change under the influence of sculpture without surrendering its sense of identity. That is not to claim that ceramics’ identity is uniform and settled. Indeed, at times it is deeply conflicted as ceramicists negotiate tricky territory between developing their practice and remaining grounded in their subject area. Ceramics’ enduring craft status is linked to the use of a single material, in the same way that weavers and glass makers are linked to material and process but sculptors no longer are. This has had consequences for scholarly and critical attention, and the places where ceramicists can expect to show their work. The material can also impose limitations, as the technical aspect of working with clay restricts the size that ceramics can achieve. It is not possible to produce work in clay on the breathtaking scale of Anish Kapoor’s sculpture Marsyas, for example, because the properties of ceramics do not allow this. This is why artists working in clay have used accumulation and repetition of form to tackle scale, finding creative possibilities in limits and boundaries. While there are many positives to ceramicists exploring material-specific concerns, undoubtedly this commitment to their field can lead to works being restricted to a crafts context, a restriction that can be interpretative, curatorial or economic. This is not necessarily problematic. There are highly respected craft scholars such as Glenn Adamson and Tanya Harrod working in this field, craft-dedicated spaces to show work, and a strong sales scene for well-established makers. However, this means that discussions around ceramics can be restricted so that, at times, material and process is not the beginning of interpretation and critical thought, but the extent of it.

Workmanship Fabrication is no longer central to the identity of the sculpture in the way that it was when Barbara Hepworth refused to allow her studio assistants to be photographed

Conclusion 111 carving her work. In sculpture, the second half of the twentieth century was marked by the rejection of workmanship. In contrast, ceramics continues to be comfortable bearing the marks of hand-making. The work of Cardiff-based artist Cecile Johnson Soliz combines a little of both of these positions. On the one hand, she takes pains to emphasize that she is a sculptor, and while some of her work takes the form of vessels and is made from clay, this does not necessarily mean that she intends her work to be understood within a ceramics context. The title of her exhibition Regarding the Function of Objects: Recent Sculpture by Cecile Johnson Soliz (National Museum Wales, 1999) encapsulates the pull of ‘craft’ and ‘art’ present in her work, reflecting how the functional object stands in opposition to sculpture in most theorizing on art and craft. In contrast, projects such as Sculpture Studio (a flexible working space for artists in Cardiff created by Johnson Soliz) and her role as Senior Lecturer in Sculpture, and later Head of Sculpture at Cardiff School of Art, firmly attest to her alignment with sculpture. In Johnson Soliz’s work Twenty-Eight Pitchers (1994–96) the trace of the hand-making is important. The repeated vessels are not made in molds, they are all individual works, skillfully made by hand. This work shares so much of its identity with ceramics through material, the making process and skill, so how does Johnson Soliz convince the viewer that it is sculpture? The answer must be subjective, heavily dependent on the position of the viewer, the exhibition that frames the work, the type of gallery, the works that share the space, and the narrative into which the work is placed by the curator.

The Vessel Even when searching for the influence of sculpture on ceramics, it is impossible to ignore the centrality of the vessel. It is a form that is present even when ceramics is making its own incursions into the ‘expanded field’. Ancient and universal, the vessel remains relevant to ceramicists whose work has expanded in physical scale and intellectual ambition. The referential properties of vessels have been successfully used by Edmund de Waal (porcelain and the exchange between East and West, private and public, display and concealment), Julian Stair (funerary wares, the enclosure of the body after death), and Claire Twomey (post-industrialism, emotional symbolism), to name but three. Their work has been at the forefront of the expanded outward-looking practice that contemporary British ceramics has become.

The Current of Influence Sculpture is a highly flexible discipline, and while it is no longer defined by a specific set of making processes, materials and forms, these traditional elements continue to underpin its visual and conceptual identity. A combination of traditional and radical sculptural forms and concepts have impacted on ceramics. In this book, monumentality, multi-part compositions and iconoclasm have been selected to provide a framework to locate and appraise a current of influence between the two disciplines. Challenging the all-too-common prefix ‘sculptural’ given to ceramics that want access to a wider critical context or are simply held in high regard, here we see how ceramics has negotiated a relationship with sculpture based on very specific concepts. In place of the hazy ‘sculptural ceramics’, there are now firm connections. The influence of monumentality has been seen on both the form (scale) and the function (memorializing) of ceramics. The monument as something to commemorate

112 Conclusion loss, absence and memory is a concept readily accessible to ceramics, and ceramicists have engaged with this sculptural tradition with sincerity and sensitivity. While sculpture seeks to disrupt its historic role in public commemorations, ceramicists are making monuments with a sense of common humanity and a proclivity for hidden histories and fading memories. This contrast draws attention to a commonality; sculpture’s self-reflexive questioning of traditional monuments is mirrored in ceramicists’ questioning of their own traditional form, the vessel. Monumentality employed as scale demonstrates sculpture’s irreverence and perhaps also discomfort with its own history. Firmly established within the art world, sculpture does not need to prove itself by making large sculptures of political and military leaders. Instead, sculptors can make monumental puppies (Jeff Koons), or hamburgers and ice creams (Claes Oldenburg). What is art but selection and arrangement? When considering the common use of repetition and accumulation of forms in ceramics and sculpture, nowhere does the influence of sculpture feel stronger than when comparing the work of Edmund de Waal with Donald Judd. De Waal has used Judd’s stack works as a model for his own, deploying stacked shelves and horizontal wall-mounted boxes that directly quote some of Judd’s most well-known works. In this homage to a major formal influence, de Waal demonstrates the positive and invigorating influence that twentieth-century sculpture has had on contemporary ceramics practice in Britain. Despite such close connections, the search for influence can reveal limits as well as relationships. The minimalist pursuit of eradicating evidence of the making process means that there is little conceptual convergence between ceramics and minimalist sculpture, but the formal influence is a significant one. Ceramicists have happily plundered the minimalist motifs of repetition and a white neutral aesthetic. This is not to say that ceramicists are unware of the intellectual concerns of minimalism, but instead they have selected the simplicity, repetition of form and concern with the occupation of space as the most relevant aspects to their material and working process. Perhaps the most mutually beneficial area of influence is that of destruction. Iconoclasm is a moment of formal and conceptual exchange between ceramics and sculpture. The material properties of clay, while limiting when working on a large scale, can be used to advantage when an artist wants to break, or get others to break, their work. A relatively inexpensive material, ceramics can be repeatedly broken, opening up the possibility of recurrent performances or participation from viewers. As a result, a number of sculptors have turned to ceramics when making works that incorporate destruction, making this an area in which a mutual influence has developed. Shared ideas, common to both ceramics and sculpture, result in the boundaries between the two disciplines falling away. Without prior knowledge, it would be difficult to distinguish between the sculptors and the ceramicists. This is the point at which distinctions between the disciplines are at their least important, leaving the viewer untroubled by whether this is art or craft, and instead deciding only if it is good art. Finally, we enter the world of museology to question how the display of ceramics has reflected and impacted on the identity of the discipline. Ceramics has a specific exhibition history that has been responsive to the fluctuating status of clay, the ebb and flow of trends and ideas and, more recently, the bold confidence and ambition of ceramicists who often have a research practice running alongside their creative practice. Exhibition histories chart ceramics’ move away from the home, into the white

Conclusion 113 cube, and back again. Curatorial practice has mediated between ceramics and the public gaze, a mediation that is central to how perceptions of the discipline are shaped. In aiming to progress critical thought and scholarly writing around contemporary ceramics practice, each chapter has brought contemporary ceramics into contact with important sculptural ideas and works. Traces of that influence can be clearly identified in the radically and rapidly changed ceramics scene in Britain. As ceramicists have reconstructed the idea of what ceramics can be, the vessel has not only endured, it has thrived. Clay has gained a new relevance and traditional pottery forms have a place in some of the most challenging ceramic works being made in Britain.

The Future Contemporary ceramics has emerged from the conservative laments of the 1980s, in which innovation in approach was seen as synonymous with a collapse in standards. In this critical climate, which was still simmering in the mid-2000s, innovative ceramicists were positioned as makers who had forgotten their true (craft) selves in the desperate search for their new (art) selves. Far from closing down experimentation with forms and concepts in ceramics, this blanket of critical conservatism has dated, quickly becoming irrelevant, and without lasting influence. Ceramicists, rather than losing themselves in experimentation and dangerous manifestations of disciplinary instability, have made their discipline flourish. Of course, not all ceramicists are interested in experimental practice. This means that there are two broad areas of activity in ceramics that can be understood as studio (hand-made, functional) and post-studio (concept-driven, tending towards so-called ‘installations’). Even taking into account this division, fragmentation of the discipline has not occurred. This is because, despite radical differences in purpose and form, the shared dedication to the vessel, material and a common grounding in ceramics history have proved protective against disciplinary disintegration. Remarkably, the discipline of ceramics remains robust and distinct, notwithstanding the influence of sculpture. It continues to be a community of practitioners with shared heritage, skills and intellectual interests. These interests range from material associations, post-industrial decline, the history of porcelain, sites of display, to the broad themes of life, death and the passage of time. Such diversity in ceramics’ sphere of intellectual engagement has resulted in a healthy balance of looking inward to the discipline and outward to the world. As a consequence, ceramicists participate in the art world. This is typified by inclusion in white cube display spaces, or works being shown alongside artists rather than craft practitioners. Even in this loose blended context, ceramicists remain grounded in their subject-specific context. This prevents ceramics from being subsumed into sculpture or three-dimensional design as it makes inroads into the new sculptural territories of installation, film and performance.

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Index

A Secret History of Clay: From Gauguin to Gormley (exhibition) 85, 94–95, 96 Adamson, Glenn: Neil Brownsword 28; Signs and Wonders 47; stacks and ceramics 51 Andre, Carl: Equivalent VIII 42; as a minimalist 50; systematic approach 64; Whitney Museum disagreement 62–63 art and craft divide 6–8 Arman 55–56 Aylieff, Felicity 36–38

critical theory and context: overview 7–8, 10; development of 91–92; sculpture as stimulus 111, 113 curatorial practice 2, 26, 82, 113; acquisitions 31; institutional destruction 62; authority 80; collaboration with artists 85, 96; role in constructing identity 89–90, see also James Beighton, Alun Graves and museology Cushway, David 52, 66–68, see also film

Beighton, James: curatorial practice 90; Edmund de Waal 100; acquiring Monumental Vase V 31–32; Possibilities and Losses 81–82; Anders Ruhwald 104–105 Brancusi, Constantin 51, 64 British Ceramics Biennial 14, 68 Britton, Alison: on vessels 3; The Raw and the Cooked 91–92; The New White 93–94 Brownsword, Neil: film 33; Possibilities and Losses 96–97; Stoke and monumentality 23–29 see also Stoke-on-Trent

Daintry, Natasha 44–45 de Vries, Bouke 65–66, 72–74, 77–80 de Waal, Edmund: house-museums 98–102; minimalism 58; on Julian Stair 31; Signs and Wonders 45–48; stacked works 49–51, vitrines 78 Demand, Thomas 60–61 Dickson, Amy 23, 85, 95 domesticity in art 27, 98, 104 Dormer, Peter 7–8, 92, 106–107 see also Fast Forward: New Directions in British Ceramics

canon of art 7, 62, 78, 80 Caro, Antony 45–47 Centre of Ceramic Art (CoCA), see York Art Gallery ceramics: craftsmanship 7, 10, 20, 54, 58; ephemerality 27, 83, 102; industry 20, 22–24, 28–29, 96, 102, see also Stokeon-Trent; performance 2, 52, 64, 68–69, 82, 96; surface decoration 35, 37–38, 58; vessel form 31–33, 35, 37, 41 Chinese ceramics 37–38, 52, 65, 76–77, 94, see also Jingdezhen Clay: continuity of clay 6, 12,18, 52, 93; in destruction, 67, 71, 76, 87; historical associations 26, 38, 39; mass production 20–21 see also Wedgwood; material 31, 33, 110, 112; in sculpture 61, 110 Crafts (magazine) 90, 91 Cragg, Tony 51, 54–56

Fast Forward: New Directions in British Ceramics (exhibition) 91–92 film 28, 96; Julian Stair 33; David Cushway 52, 64, 66–67; Johnny Vegas 64; Simon Fujiwara 64; Linda Sormin 81 Fourth Plinth 14 Fujiwara, Simon 64 Graves, Alun 2, 93–94 Gormley, Antony 16–17, 94 Groom, Simon 94 Hanssen Pigott, Gwyn 45 Harrison, Keith 2, 3, 96 Hein, Jeppe 84–86 Henry Moore Institute 5, 41 Hesse, Eva 52–53 High Cross House see house museums Hillyard, Zoe 71–72

Index 133 house museums: Dr Johnson’s House 101–102; Kettle’s Yard 100; High Cross House 98–100

Rauschenberg, Robert 29, 54, 56, 63 Royal Pavilion, Brighton 102 Ruhwald, Anders 47, 104–107

identity and ceramics 4; centrality of clay 52, 110–112, disciplinary history 64, museums 89; Possibilities and Losses 97; status and value 76

Schwitters, Kurt 51, 54, 56 sculpture: the plinth 29, 47, 50, 90, 104; traditional forms 12, 14, 35, 109 Sculpture in the Expanded Field, see Rosalind Krauss Siobhan Davies Studio 68 Sormin, Linda 81–83, 85–86, 96–97 Spira, Rupert 35–36 Stair, Julian 30–34, 53, 90, 94 status and ceramics 18, 41, 76–77, 109–110; domestic associations 98; language 3, 94; see also art and craft divide Stoke-on-Trent: industrial heritage 20–29; post-industrial decline 20, 22, 26, 82, 113 studio pottery tradition 7, 36, 45, 52, 93; break with 18, 28

Jingdezhen 37, 38 Judd, Donald 49–51, 112 Kapoor, Anish 44–45 Kettle’s Yard see house museums Kintsugi 71, 73 Krauss, Rosalind 5, 9, 15–18, 29, 87, 91 Leach, Bernard 7, 28, 64 Lord, Andrew 73 material, importance in sculpture 51, 53, 54 Margetts, Martina 91–92 Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art 90; Anders Ruhwald 104; collaborating with ceramicists 81–82; Edmund de Waal 100, Julian Stair 30–31; resonance of location 22–23, 25, 26 see also James Beighton and Possibilities and Losses mima, see Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art minimalism, principles of 50, 92–93 modernism: sculpture’s rejection of 5; association with studio pottery 7; characteristics 16; ceramic’s challenge to 42, 104; rejection of domesticity 98, 105; Edmund de Waal 100, Monuments: abstracted monument 16, 23, 19, 31; anti-monuments 15, 23; First World War 13–14, 18–19; logical monument 16, 23, 29, 31,33; symbolic significance 13, 15, 22, 29 museology 112; museum effect 78–79, 90; ‘new museology’ 80 Museum of Modern Art, New York 98 New Arts Centre, Roche Court 100 porcelain: Ai Weiwei 76–77; contemporary use 33, 45, 50, 56, 69, 100, 110; historical associations 23, 38, 51, 65–66, 71 see also kintsugi; The New White: Contemporary Studio Porcelain 92–94 Possibilities and Losses (exhibition) 26, 81, 95–97 Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, Stoke 26, 27

Tate Liverpool 85, 86, 94 The Museum of Modern Art Oxford 91 The New White: Contemporary Studio Porcelain (exhibition) 92–94 The Raw and the Cooked: New Work in Clay in Britain (exhibition) 90–92 Therrien, Robert 34–36, 51 Twomey, Clare 52; destruction 68–69, 83–85; domestic space 101–103; Monument 21–23; multi-part works 53–57 see also Possibilities and Losses University of Westminster 18, 96 utility and function: in practice 100–101, 104, 89–90, 104; tension 98, 100, 106, 111; in theory 3–4, 8, 94 V&A, see Victoria & Albert Museum Van der Beugel, Jacob 47–48 Vegas, Johnny see film Veiteberg, Jorunn 42, 50 Victoria & Albert Museum 2, 37, 45, 69, 93 Vitrines 50–52, 78–79 Wedgwood 20, 96, 101–102 Weiwei, Ai 74–78 Wentworth, Richard 73–74, 79 White cube space 89, 97–98, 100, 104 Whiteread, Rachel 27 Yarisal and Kublitz 69–70 York Art Gallery 4, 37, 52