Francis Kyle Gallery: Psiché Hughes Ceramics

Had these works been made with any greater hand-work skill, craftsmanship, or ceramic technical knowledge, they would simply have been unspeakable. They would have resembled the worst kind of meretricious ceramic ‘kitsch’ associated with the craft shoppe, and from which the oh so tasteful craft connoisseur recoils, nay cringes, with embarrassment, appalled at the unholy image of craft that mocks him from the mirror frame. Psiché Hughes’ work confronts us – (the ceramics audience at any rate), with questions concerning the social construction of taste accompanied by a question of what constitutes skill – dare I say it – a question of epistemology. What counts as skill in ceramics is far from a given, although you could certainly be forgiven for thinking otherwise given the extent to which the word is used wholly uncritically and without interrogation in most of the writing, talking and teaching related to Ceramics.

Family Tree
We acquire skill with which to manipulate clay, this slippery, muddy stuff, at once pliable and compliant in some ways but, as Grayson Perry once observed, remarkably intolerant of amateurs. So the work gets shiny and accomplished, a little too accomplished perhaps, its absurdity becoming just too evident, embarrassing, so we rush to theorise and call on irony, for how else can we escape the worst excesses of our own bourgeois associations? It’s a bit like having embarrassing relatives – we think our own practices to be sound and appropriately knowing/ tasteful (or ironic – delete as applicable), / (in)authentic/ (post) modern – you can take your pick, but what about those others? Those others that aren’t us? Those makers of wobbly brown pots, or wobbly white pots or makers of uber-designed not/pots or makers of (my own particular pet hate and designated ‘other,’) the makers of ‘the female form’ - bleeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaagh!!!

East End Boys and West End Girls
Then, every so often, along comes an artist like Psiché Hughes and blows the whole ghastly edifice apart – almost certainly without meaning to which is, of course, the only way it can be done IF – and this is important - you’re going to do this way, that is without irony. And it gets worse. She’s done it in public in, wait for it, a Cork street gallery - actually it’s not, it’s Maddox St, but same difference – and since this bit is all about context, let’s take a couple of lines to examine that. Now I didn’t know these places still existed. I sort of did, but I freely admit I took absolutely no notice of them. I have no idea if anyone else does, but I was under the impression that the East End ruled, that the whole Cork St. thing had been blown clean out of the water 15 years ago by the Three Graces and that the West End was finished. I thought that Cork St was old money, Fine Art of the fiiiiinest variety and, bluntly, redundant. Old. And for all I know that may be right. Waddingtons is still there though. And it’s all looking pretty much the same as it did 25 years ago. What I don’t know is whether that is its strength or its weakness. Now that the East End is unquestionably the Establishment – (see Saatchi Gallery – gone West End) – will we turn round and regard the West End with some lingering respect? I honestly don’t know.


New Becomes Old Becomes New
I do know it will have to reinvent or at least refresh itself – it needs to be demonstrably alive but the interesting thing, potentially, is that these were the dealers of ‘fine art’, in other words craft, as in Camberwell School of Art and Craft. They were the dealers of paining, printmaking and drawing on paper. Old fashioned crafts by anyone’s estimation. So will they invigorate themselves by dealing in art that contains contemporary craft practices? Countless thousands of artist paint, draw, reproduce things on paper, and in clay and use lens-based media to make highly crafted films and photographs. So, let us hope that these dealers engage themselves with these practices. If they do, then we are in for an exciting time –but they should be warned that this space is not just vacant – Jay Jopling’s White Cube is doing exactly that and has been doing for some months now.

Study Collection
So let’s get back to the artist and translator who generated all this: Psiché Hughes. A small collection of her work, distributed among the pigeon holes of a white display case resembles the results of the curious empirical enquiry of a botanist or natural historian of another age materialised in clay. It even more closely resembles a study of ceramic types, like a series of approximations which seek to imitate or even ‘perform’ ceramics – like someone who attempts to perform gender, doesn’t do it very well so tries it in numerous different ways until finally ‘coming out’ as transgendered – and proud.

Performing Ceramics
At first glance, the collection of objects presented in their white pigeon holes, look like someone’s collection of pottery but instead of buying the original object, they decided to make copies. Thus we have: the Lucie Rie, the Gabby Koch, the imitation souvenir from Morocco, the shell and the faux fruit and veg – the sort you get from a semi-posh kitchen ware shop to put in the fruit bowl in the absence of real fruit. The ‘Moroccan Souvenir’ should be symmetrical with flat lid, but it’s wonky, it flops a bit to one side. It would be cleanly, faultlessly re/produced by a Properly Trained Designer, but it would also be ‘knowing’ and ‘ironic’ in some way, a ‘comment’ on the souvenir industry. Hughes, however, does not concern herself with such predictable nonsense. Why should she? As a translator of Spanish American literature she has more understanding of satire in her little finger than the average clunky designer can amass in a lifetime of attempted ironic comment - comment which is rarely, if ever, backed up with any understanding at all of what satire actually is, what it’s for, or how it works. No, this is a carefully but imprecisely made study. It’s not a ‘quotation,’ it is a performance. The wonky lines on the Rie pot and its all-round wonkyiness, the pretend ‘designer’ fruit all deliver the same message. They’re a careful, loving study, tender and wholly unselfconscious.

Translation
I wonder, for a while, if this is a ‘knowing’ execution, even though there is clearly no attempt at irony. Then I see the oranges in the fruit bowl and the penny drops. They are not oranges in fruit bowl exactly, they are a ceramic rendering of a painting of oranges in a fruit bowl. They are arranged to the point of seeming to be almost flat. They are certainly not trompe l’oeil but they are oddly convincing because they can be comfortably believed as a version of a painting of an arranged still-life which itself signifies an ordered version of real-life. The orange and lemon skins are not rendered in glaze – why bother - all that kerfuffle and for what - just to prove that the maker can make orange peel glaze? Not only is the image clearly articulated by acrylic paint, it also clarifies the intention. These are not meant to be ‘proper’ ceramics. She is – well – translating – as she has always done.

Painting
Hughes makes clay objects with the eye of a painter. What painters constitute as important, valuable, and as skill is categorically different from the way potters assess these things. Painters see, collect and show and make ceramics completely differently from potters and, in the UK at least, the differences between these ways of seeing and comprehending is enhanced by the difference in the original training. The vast majority of artists working in clay in the UK have trained as potters and what they constitute as skill, as proper making, is largely concerned with material finesse. The joins must join, the glaze mustn’t have bubbles – you can’t concern yourself with how the bubbles look, if they look right – it’s just not – well – pottery – by definition they DON’T look right. You can’t let things break and then glue them back together again, unless its done in a proper way – raku or something. That’s permitted breakage. Potters have rules of engagement – a sort of haram and halal approach to things. And painters do too, and this is what potters don’t get. Take colour, for example. Tone, saturation, local colour, distribution of weight, the visual equivalent of sentence stress – it all matters, but not to potters who tend to just jumble it all up in a firework display of dreadful virtuous glaze technique. Oooooooooooh – look how clever she is! Look at those crystals! Will you just LOOK at those finely controlled drips! That RED! And so on.
Painter: ooooooOOooo. That’s intesting, Fine tonal variation, there, sort of cloudy looking.
Potter: It’s CRAWLED. Snort. That’s against the rules. We don’t concern ourselves with the way things LOOK. Only if they’re properly done or not.
But then again you see, that’s not quite true either. The problem is that the seeing of the potter, the potter’s gaze if you like, is so obsessively trained that all they see IS the crawl, not the colour variation.

Avoiding Conclusion
So, who’s right? Darned if I know. I’ve become too much of a hybrid myself over the years. Well not quite, not yet. I’ll always despise virtuosity even if I can be persuaded it’s there for a reason. I do know that I greatly enjoyed Hughes adventure through planet ceramics and her lovingly made ceramic fruit and veg and, perhaps most of all, I loved the imitation paintings, with very lovingly ‘painted’ banana skins and fennelly looking fennel. It’s not just the passion and love and tenderness and curiosity, all of which can be admired, it is that she is developing her own material visual vocabulary which works. It resembles the rendering of a language that you know but the speaker is laying the emphases – the sentence stresses - in unfamiliar places. For this reason, you find it difficult to understand. Slowly you realise you do know all these words and that the construction of them is also correct, but you just didn’t recognise it as first because of the unfamiliar rhythm.

A Note On Think Tank
I’ll just add here that Think Tank has produced a collection of papers on the subject of Skill. It’s not bad at all, in fact it’s a good start, but it is only a start. It comes across as a collection writing from people – albeit intelligent, thinking people, who have only just woken up to the fact that skill isn’t either uncontested or uncontestable. This may be because the only maker among them is unfortunately absent from this collection of papers, or it maybe they really haven’t been thinking about it for long. I’ve read almost all of it, and when I’ve finished, I might attempt to review it…

Jerwood Contemporary Makers

Jerwood Contemporary Makers, (JCM), opened on June 4th and runs until July 13th at the Jerwood Space, 171 Union St. London SE1. It replaces the Jerwood Applied Arts Prize, (1995-2007).

Introduction
JCM is the first in a series of three such events, which I assume will run annually. Seven makers were selected, given £30,000.00 and asked to ‘run with it,’ possibly not the wisest advice to offer under the circumstances but you get the picture. The point
is they could produce whatever they wanted in six months and they agreed to work with the idea of touch as the starting point to the work. The panel of selectors were Edmund de Waal, who chaired the process, Amanda Game, Director of IC: Innovative Craft, based in Edinburgh, and Love Jonsson, School of Design and Crafts, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He and Edmund de Waal are also members of Think Tank, which you can read about elsewhere on this blog. De Waal opened the show with a brief explanation of the process set out above and further conversation clarified the following: selection for the show is the prize; there is no race for the single, star winner. The purpose is to create optimum conditions in which a selection of makers have the opportunity to produce their best ever and, in so doing, create an exhibition which might be seen a cross section of contemporary craft practice at its most exciting, most experimental. Seven makers couldn’t be expected to exemplify craft practice in its entirety but it will be interesting to see the final result after the third such event.

Theme
Touch, you might think, is a problematic beginning and, interpreted literally, it would be. Arguably it’s one of Craft’s orthodoxies but it’s such a broad term, particularly by the time you’ve included the metaphorical interpretations, that it feels (sic) more like a truism in this context, which in turn raises the question ‘why bother at all?’ But bother they did and it didn’t seem to hinder.

Gary Breeze: Lettering
My first encounter was with six enormous wooden beams, each carved with strange looking words I couldn’t quite read. Skirting round them for a while I alighted on one, someone singing to his lover, or would be lover, which drew me into the other words until I put together some disjointed lines of a song or poem, something like rhyming left-overs, all about the sea and love and loss and big stately sailing ships. These were the work of Gary Breeze, taxonomically named on the invitation with the single word ‘lettering’. It’s a bit like describing Carol-Anne Duffy as ‘typist.’ Lets just say it doesn’t quite tell the whole story, but then again, shows just how intensely poetic ‘lettering’ might be. These tattered shreds of song, carved so carefully and properly and evenly into the oak beams, (they have a proper nautical name which I’ve forgotten), direct you to the next work, carved in slates, placed on the wall. Here the collections of carefully ‘lettered’ words, again all related to matters nautical, hang together at times, producing some suggestively raunchy narrative before falling apart into separate words again, missing each other, looking for meaning. The not-touch was almost more touching than the touch in this work. Yearning. Yeah, I did love it. The beams were called Drynautica and the slates, ‘Sea Shanties’.

Nicholas Rena: Ceramics
I wandered off into another room full of metal things and some tapestries and then to another with a vast, IN YER FACE, selection of Nick Rena’s ‘big juggy things’. These, ‘The Ecstasy of St. Teresa’ were a turbo-charged Nick Rena production. Magenta, lemon yellow, lime green, pillar box red and other acidic, toxic colours assailed you and shone. The waxed, acrylic-surfaced objects were warm to touch, inviting and smooooooooooth. They looked and felt like plastic but much too hard. They suggested formica: a very post-soviet café in Prague, but no, that wasn’t it either. Furniture, ships funnels, fog horn sounds. And what’s all this ecstasy? St. Teresa of Avilar, whose ecstasy we are invited to contemplate here, is attributed with an intensely sexualised description of an encounter with an angel, ‘who left me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan,’ etc etc, I’ll spare you the rest. Rena once told me that he considered contemporary ceramicists to be ‘like monks in a scriptorium’ which gets even more interesting in the light of his cheerful reply to a question once posed by De Waal: ‘Do you write?’ (this at a conference somewhere, sometime), ‘Yes,’ says Rena, ‘I once wrote a pornographic novel.’
I don’t know what goes on in Rena’s scriptorium but it’s clearly not what I had originally envisaged when he made this comment. The title and therefore the narrative, historical and poetic context offered to the viewer seems to produce an absolute and irreconcilable disjuncture with the plasticy, very straight edged, sharp cornered, faultlessly realised objects, which are made using industrial mould-cast methods and look like they’re made that way. The result is that industrial perfection blooms into a much more voluptuous perfection. I didn’t start moaning, but you never know…

Some thoughts on textiles
I don’t seem to be very interested in textiles, at least I didn’t respond to these. The thing is, when you consider, say, Nina Edge’s batiks, which were shown at the Arnolfini gallery in the ‘Circular Dance’ show in 1992, surely the precursor to Yinka Shonibare’s (vastly more celebrated) batik work - spot the gendering of this? Nina’s a woman, (of Indian origin), – right so she’s just doing what comes ‘naturally’ then, whereas Yinka’s a man - Ooooaah, well that makes it really interesting - Let's shortlist him for the Turner prize. Where was I ? Yes, when you consider Edge’s work, (pictures will be provided soon, I promise), or those searing embroidered protests by Chilean and Palestinian women in the early 1980s, or the achingly expressive Aids Quilts of similar times, you have to wonder what has happened. Textile craft seems to have gone backwards. I suspect that some textile work really has been fully integrated in mainstream art production; as if to prove the point, here’s a link to Edge's latest work. Now, in its effort to become respectable 'fiber art,' I suggest that textile craft, has dissipated its energy and become not art, but instead acquired the modernist reserve of masculinity. DISCUSS! Ok, that can be your homework for the next seven weeks. Call it a holiday project. I’ll give you a clue though. Take a look, a few posts earlier, at X-hibitionism: Lulu Allison’s quilts and Doris Domestic’s / Wendy Haslam’s ‘Boudoir’, these still have some that earlier zest. How come they’re exhibiting in a shed in Stoke Newington? A shed it may have been, but it did engage with contemporary art concerns and was recieved as such, partly because of the shed. They wanted a 'dirty' space. I don’t know where that leaves textile work in terms of the craft enclave, but it may mean that textile craft is going to seem lacking in energy, or just overly self referential or stuck in its materiality rather than the material being a liberating force.

Metal work and Jewellery
Two makers, one billed as ‘Jewellery, one ‘Metal’. Also not my thing. I dont do jewellery of any sort unless it’s cheap beads from the post office next to Shadwell tube. So, I think it's better not to attempt a comment; we’ll move on, and my profound apologies to Lin Chung, whose jewellery is ably and illuminatingly commented upon in the Jerwood catalogue by A C Grayling. There's a beautiful essay on Sara Brennan's tapestries by painter Moyna Flannigan, and another on the textile works of Deirdre Nelson by Jessica Hemmings from Winchester School of Art. Craft writer Lesley Jackson discusses Drummond Masterton's work in fascinting digi-detail. All the work deserves a good, long, uninterrupted look. Dont be put off by my ingorance of these particular crafts.

Clare Twomey
So, I’d done the rounds, I thought, and was wondering what had happened to Clare Twomey’s work, when, drifting back into Drynautica’s room, looking for my lover lost at sea, I saw some feint scrapings, weird looking scribbles, emerging out of a wall somewhere on the horizon. This turned out to be Witness, one of the happiest co-habitations of titles I’ve ever encountered. Witness was a white clay wall, which was why I hadn’t noticed it in the white cube gallery space and it was Clare Twomey’s work. The scribbles were beginning to reveal a darker under-layer which turned out to be gold. As the evening progressed more and more of the white clay over-layer was scratched into and smudged and brushed away until it became a haze of scrawls and words. She has relinquished more control to the audience than she usually does and the audience responded, but hesitantly.
I assume she chose white clay to merge with gallery space, and it worked perfectly. It had the resonance of a wall prepared for fresco: the mix of gold and white dust coming off the walls and its finesse gave it that ‘quiet’ and slightly historicised feeling, but the audience were disobedient, or too obedient, depending on how you look at it. Here is the problem of what is, in essence, a graffiti wall in a private, hushed, gallery space. Graffiti, by contrast, is loud and rude and public.
I was part of a graffiti group once, (see Spray It Loud by Jill Posner). We concentrated on adverts, which isn’t the same thing as a blank wall, but you still daub your message and run. You certainly don’t hang about and see if it looks good which is what happened in the gallery. It will be interesting see if, by the end of the run, it has become a gallery drawing, rather than a graffiti wall, which may well have been the idea. At the time, I really wanted to take it somewhere else. I was making notes later on the train to Hull, and as we slid out of Selby, I spotted an abandoned industrial area, brick-built in about 1900 I would guess. Sunlit and backed by slate-grey clouds, surrounded by angry green fields it looked just the right place. Small ex-industrial towns a full of angry disaffected youth who can be rude and loud or full of poetry and pathos. A collection of this kind of scrawling intervention would have been a wonderful drawing and the gold would have twinkled in the sunlight which would have allowed it to be precious and surprising with impunity. ('Precious' is forbidden in craft circles along with flowers and anything that might be feminine, unless it's ironic, then it's ok.) Ah yes, but this is Selby. Yorkshire. It’ll rain, and the clay’ll slide off the walls, but it was an interesting thought for a while. Witness is a great idea, possibly in not quite the right place, but time will tell better than I can. You have until July 13th. Then it goes to Edinburgh in the Autumn.

Afterword: fostering the frisson
Just one other thing to consider. July 13th isn’t long. Media coverage is scant and there’s no race to excite journalists. How is the Jerwood going to find an audience and generate excitement? How will it avoid being an exercise in establishment back-scratching? You can’t apply to be selected, you just wait and then you forget. Given that there is going to be little response from mainstream media channels to JCM, it is even more important than usual that the various communities of makers stay interested. Listening to the opening speeches, the excitement of those involved was palpable. Refusing the singular beauty parade is a genuinely interesting risk to have taken, but The C Word has encountered much disaffection, and good intention of the sort which ends up as, ‘oh damn, I really did mean to go.’ So, how can the interest and therefore the engagement and support of makers be sustained in this enterprise? The selection process, at the moment, relies on the selectors knowing about a wide range of makers with established track records of one sort or another, but you can’t always know who can produce something astounding just by looking at their track record; it may simply be evidence of useful patronage, or even a well-off family who can help sustain a career through the difficult bits. More importantly, an apparently uneventful career may just be evidence of children, elderly parents, someone needing to be cared for, an absolute absence of additional resources to draw on, and so on. The process at the moment excludes surprise, and surprise is a very good way of sustaining interest. One possible route to surprise is to invite proposals. What would you do with your 30 thousand? Tell us in 300 words and a couple of pictures / diagrams, something like that. There is no perfect solution and this one had the advantage of being efficient and productive, not wasting endless hours and money on middle managers and unnecessary process, but I suspect it may need some variation, some element of risk, to sustain the necessary frisson.

Think Tank

Saturday, Januaray 27th, saw the Think Tank Party. Now I know that sounds like a contradiction in terms, but it was a party of sorts. Perhaps more plotting than partying, more networking than thinking, but hey, they tried. And I tried too.

This too was staged at a venerable institution of planet C, commonly known as Contemporary Applied Arts, or the CAA. It lurks on the north side of Oxford St. in central London, and sells things, most of the time. That, at least, is its purpose, and as far as I know, it acquits itself admirably, or is doing so now after a bad patch, by all accounts.

One day, I promise, The C Word will delve into the sordid underbelly of the Craft’s political/social (?) economy, and find who exactly does fund who and who knows who, taught who, is propped up by who, and how the whole ghastly closed-shop edifice is constructed and maintained, and how the hegemonic practices, of ceramics in particular, are hedged in, protected, regularly clipped, and by whom. But that could take a while, and is a digression from our current concerns with the TANK.
link to website here

Think Tank, for those not in the know, was dreamed up about four years ago, in a small Austrian town called Gmunden, by one Gabi Dewald, who invited ‘some of the most committed thinkers in the field of applied art from right across Europe’ to ‘lay a theoretical foundation for the concept of the applied art in Europe today.’ My guess is we’re now about half way through Think Tank’s natural life span. They’ve produced four publications, three of which have accompanied exhibitions, which themselves respond to a concept, which is discussed in the seminar papers published in the books. The first of the three exhibitions, and therefore the title of the collected, published papers, was called ‘Languages’; the second was ‘Place(s)’; the third, ‘Gift’. The first of the publications was called ‘The Foundation,’ in which the contributors discussed their reasons for participating in Think Tank and what they considered the purpose of the beast to be. So, Gift was the exhibition hosted at the CAA, whose papers are now published in the book of the same name. Ok so far?

Word on the craft corridor is that the Tank members each chose a piece of work they like, and want to talk about in terms of the proscribed concept, pop it in their handbags, bring it to the exhibition space and lob it on a plinth. I imagine the process isn’t quite as cavalier as this, this is simply what my, probably rather unreliable, source told me, but the point is that the shows are curated by the members (nine writers from eight countries) and assembled in situ. In other words the curatorial process is predicated on the concept, almost as though the concept, ‘gift’ in this case, does the curating, or at least has the casting vote. Make no mistake, this has produced some wonderful shows. That said, the last two, Gift and Place(s), has had a cobbled together look. The first time, it felt like a welcome break from the preciousness of craft curating. The second time, it’s starting to look like a bad habit.

One of the most important things about these shows is the writing, which also appears in the gallery space with each of the objects exhibited. These are the thoughts of the individual who chose that piece in response to the concept. Place(s) and Gift both were shown at the CAA, and in both shows, the objects were set out on big white plinths with typed statements next to them. As I said it looked clunky but home made and interesting the first time. Now I want to see the writing look like it really is part of the show. I want to see it curated. I love what Think Tank does and I don’t want it to be part of miserable little note left in a survey of craft centred art practices. So, I’m hoping for a LOT MORE punch in the next show. It still has the small-but-perfectly-formed-objects look to it, but that may just be what the Thinkers like. No disrespect intended to the makers here, the ‘look’ is what happens when you put them all together. I’d like to see all this seminar-ing and laying of theoretical foundations to have some real weight which is made visible, and indeed material, in the exhibitions themselves.