Lamentations 2010 Rachel Kneebone at White Cube

 Pictured above is an earlier work from an exhibition at The Barbican in 2010 -  it gives a good idea of the way she works around the plinth. 

Lamentations: Rachel Kneebone at White Cube

An exhibition of glistening white porcelain works, mounted on giant, monumental plinths, theatrically lit in a darkened room with painted black walls and called, ‘Lamentations,’ states unequivocally that you must take it seriously. You should approach with due solemnity and appropriate hush, and regard – probably for quite some time.

The title alone sounds literary. Add the theatrical staging and it suggests a Greek Tragedy. Actually being in the gallery, surrounded by the six Lamentations, felt more like being in a church awaiting Benediction or the Stations of the Cross, such was the depth of reverence in the atmosphere.

Even now, it is hard to say if these works lived up to their onerous atmospheric conditions. They are magnificently made and produced by an artist who knows her material intimately and who casts aside all anxieties about self-conscious knowingness and the need to make satirical references and, instead, takes the risks required to stride, apparently without fear, into an unlikely world of large-scale porcelain statuary.

I say ‘statuary’ because the six Lamentations seem to imitate statues. The porcelain in these works is playing the part of marble. They resemble the marble figures on graves and tombstones. They are each made up of a mass of writhing porcelain figures, doll-sized and mounted on porcelain plinths and glazed. Though the individual works are small, table-top sculptures, they read as large-scale because of the way they have been displayed. The porcelain pieces, including their plinths, are placed on another white plinth, which is itself placed on a black plinth, adding to the overall stagey effect. They imitate the tumbledown-ness of Victorian cemeteries. The porcelain plinths are cracking open and threatening to fall apart any minute. There’s a hint of eighteenth century gothic in the atmosphere.

‘As grave as the imagined as frivolous as the eternal,’ is the title of the first piece. It might be a pun, I assume it is, but the atmosphere was dictating due seriousness, so perhaps not. They all have long literary titles. A distorted figure with extended legs and weird oozing toes is draped over the knee of another distorted, faintly girlish figure. The pair is instantly reminiscent of Michelangelo’s Pieta and sits atop a wriggling mound of dismembered bodies and twisted, porcelain spaghetti-like strands. None of the figures have heads, or, if they have something in place of head, they have a vagina or a penis.

The plinths are an essential part of the narrative. Some are overtly tomb-like, cracking open and releasing the vile spirits, while others are barely discernible amidst the swathes, festoons and yet more ecstatic distorted figures. All the figures have either enlarged vaginas or vagina or penis heads. Some have small breasts with agonising torsos which resemble enlarged ribs or hands gripping and squeezing the body. There is an innocence in the girlish legs and arms, in the bottoms and feet and something tortuous in these finger-rib torsos.

Inevitably the vagina and penis heads are a reminder of the Chapman brothers’ rubbery confections and of the cartoon grotesques of Breughel. Kneebone’s references derive from three sources: ceramics, sculpture and painting. The Meissen shepherdesses are present, and the Sevres swathes and flowery festoons, as are the tortured souls of Italian Renaissance sculpture. What is interesting though is that she does not seem intimidated by any of them; there is no sense of genuflection. She certainly isn’t subverting them she seems to be saying, ‘yes, this looks like a Chapman figure and that looks like the foot of a Meissen shepherdess, the ankle of a Renaissance religious figure, the twirl of a Sevres swathe, but never mind all that, just follow these wounded souls into their torment or sorrow.’

I wasn’t entirely convinced but I’m still open to persuasion. I’d like to see them ‘out in the field,’ in a Renaissance or even Medieval church or ruined abbey. They don’t need those dutiful titles and I’m not sure they need all that theatre. They need to breathe air. For all the death and the sorrow and the lament, they are, very much about life. They teeter on the edge of ridiculous but that might be a strength. It’s just too easy to dismiss work like this, with the titles and the grandiose display, as absurd, pompous, overblown and, yes, ridiculous. The catalogue essays, though blisteringly professional and academically proper, don’t help. Partly because neither writer sounds entirely convinced either.

That said, David Elliott’s essay is very convincing in places. He discusses in particular Kneebone’s interest in realising female sexuality in art – wresting it from the persistent image of ‘lack’ and ‘absence.’ It is a detailed, involved, and sometimes passionate essay - so perhaps he is convinced – but here too, it is possible to over-write just as much as it is to over-display.

Kneebone is producing highly original, risky, substantial works. She uses porcelain in visceral, exciting and unorthodox way – mixing moments of studio pottery, (spaghetti strands and roses), moments of industrial production, (bottoms and feet), and moments of immensely Proper Sculpture. Putting aside the inflation and the derivation, they deserve and they reward serious contemplation.

Edmund de Waal: The Hare With Amber Eyes

I had no idea what to expect when I opened this book. I deliberately didn’t read any of the reviews. The only thing I had really absorbed was the image of the hare with its amber eyes which is on Edmund de Waal’s website. I still think it’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.

You can really lose yourself in the journey which forms back bone of this story and in the histories, the politics, the atmosphere and, above all, the objects, artefacts and interiors. It has been described as a memoir but it reads more like a cross between a thriller and a family saga with a hint of political journalistic travelogue thrown in. The chase is about objects, art objects, art history, collectors and collections. You’re panting your way across Europe from art dealer to salon to soiree to dressing room and at one stage, in the middle and, arguably, the heart of the book, we’re being lead through the cavernous rooms and corridors of a Viennese banker’s Palace, opulent to the point of vulgarity and crammed full of the, ‘accumulation of stuff from four decades of affluent shopping,’ (he’s scathing about their taste). All this is for the purpose of finding the netsuke, the hoard of 264 tiny carved creatures, human, animal and plant life. They are variously sexy, mysterious, malevolent, and much more, and we are introduced to them as the story proceeds. He holds back from really exploring the objects themselves until close to the end, which is perhaps why it feels so much like a thriller. The dénouement involves a brindled wolf, a hare with amber eyes, a tiger – who’s the star apparently, a monk with a begging bowl, a woman in a bath, a great many rats, some persimmon seeds and so it goes on.

It starts, if you read the preface, in Japan with de Waal’s great uncle Iggie who, when we first meet them, is the owner of the netsuke. Here too we learn that de Waal will be their next owner. The netsuke themselves also start in Japan, this is where they were made but several centuries earlier.

Part One, Chapter One starts with the writer as researcher in Paris, standing about on street corners looking at buildings and blagging his way into them seeking hard evidence about the Charles Ephrussi, his great, great uncle, who was a Nineteenth Century connoisseur, collector, art historian and aesthete and the son of Leon Ephrussi, the mighty grain merchant of Odessa. Leon was himself the son of the immensely ambitious Charles Joachim who changed his name to Ephrussi from something altogether more peasant-like and who developed the then modest agrarian business into a prodigious, global Empire. Leon continued the success and sent his sons to Vienna, the heart of Europe, the very pulse of Hapsburg Empire, to start a bank, be a magnificent and out do the Rothschilds.  Then they set about conquering Paris. There’s fantastic story in the first few pages and I wanted to know so much more about creaking grain carts and the shtetl in the Ukraine the thick black earth and all the rest of it. But we had to go in search of the caved beasts with their multi-coloured eyes, so that was it. We return to Charles who was the first member of the dynasty to own the netsuke.

In Paris, we get to know Charles, his milieu, his way of thinking about things and, especially, about collection and display. Simultaneously, we are becoming acquainted with the relentless, meticulous nature of the research process. This first part, as well as being a portrait of Charles and his astonishing art collection, which includes a procession of famous paintings now hanging in places like the Louvre and the National Gallery, is also an intimate portrait of research itself. It doesn’t happen on screen with search engines. The search engine in this case is de Waal himself ferreting through dusty boxes, lurking in doorways, nipping upstairs when no one’s looking and weedling his way into people’s lives to excavate, endlessly.

I have talked about one part of this epic journey. The rest is consistent. Although written in five parts, the story feels like it has three main stages, which are defined by the owners of the netsuke, Charles, Emmy and Iggie. The Emmy part is divided in two – the first half is the happy, social, glamorous time of parties, love, sex and shopping. These are the last heady days of the Hapsburg Empire before Nazification and war. The second half is the violence, dispersal, menace, and loss defined by the Nazi occupation and the holocaust and the extraordinary loyalty of Ana, Emmy’s maid, and the hiding and rescue of the netsuke.

This is a family of Russian Jews who become European Jews and then, in his words, 'had to encounter the Twentieth Century.' De Waal is dealing with very big stuff on a very intimate scale. At no point does he yield to nostalgia, nor is he afraid of this massive and complicated heritage. He does not romanticise this family or its story which would be extremely easy to do. He is critical of their behaviour where he feels they deserve it which allows him to write with real warmth about the people he loves – including the ones he could never have met. He winces palpably in the writing when Charles under pays one of his artist friends for their work but is full of praise for the way he cares about art. He doesn’t quite call the Vienna family a bunch of jumped up nouveau-riche plebs, but he does sort of suggest it – this is where he compares the ‘carefully calibrated,’ thoroughly well informed collection of Charles in Paris with the ‘accumulation of stuff from four decades of affluent shopping,’ in Vienna. At the same time, though, he loves Emmy and her love of clothes.

Weaving in and out of these minutiae of the family saga and the journey of the netsuke is a detailed discussion of anti-Semitism, what it is and how it works. He discusses the history from the ‘stinking hovel’ that defined the impoverished Eastern European Jews in the shtetl through the period of gaining citizenship and civil rights in Europe to the point where they were, realistically, able to own things and earn money. He then paints a graphic picture of the newly acquired wealth of some of the Viennese Jews as compared to the ‘proper Jews,’ the grindingly poor ones, who were grudgingly tolerated because at least they had the decency to be authentically poor.  What comes across with ringing clarity is the sense that wealth in Vienna was welcomed as long as it wasn’t Jewish wealth. Forget culture, writing, music, theatre, art, knowledge, anything that the Jewish population of Vienna at the time might have contributed, ‘they,’ the Jews, had got ‘above themselves,’ they were, ‘taking over.’ He traces the itinerary of anti-Semitism from a casual ‘given,’ where it was not just tolerated but normalised, showing how that created a fertile ground for the growth of the monstrous, politicised, paranoid, obsessive activism it became, culminating in the Third Reich and the Holocaust.

The view from the pages of this book is panoramic and global. From Europe descending into a state of savagery and eclipse we emerge slowly into lighter times, moving from the United States, to English suburbia with trim hedges and, finally, back to Japan. The last part of the book, the, ‘Coda,’ comes back to London with the writer and includes a visit to Odessa and, once again, I longed to visit Berdichev in the Ukraine, the shtetl where it all started but no, we stayed in Odessa on the promenade and imagined the black earth on the Eastern Ukraine border with Poland.

It’s a wonderful book. Just read it.

In Your Name: The Inconvenient Politics Of Palestinian Handicrafts

On the face of it, the ‘Justice for Palestine’ flag laid out on a stall selling plants and handicrafts seemed out of place at the fourth annual Tottenham Flower and Produce Show, an urban ‘village’ show with big white tents, vegetable competitions for allotment holders, a home crafts section, a dog show and various ‘side shows.’ The plants were local but the handicrafts on this stall were made by Palestinian women from a town called Azaria, divided in two by the accursed Israeli wall. Embroidered, stitched and crocheted objects jostled for position with olive oil, fragrant seeds and herbs and hand made soap. They were being sold by Haringey Justice for Palestinians, (HJP), a small local charity which does income generating projects with the people of Azaria which is now twinned with Haringey. The purpose of the stall was both to raise consciousness and therefore more support in the area and also to raise money - desperately needed income for families living ‘behind the wall,’ cut off from their work and even from family members, under siege in effect, by the Israeli occupation.

So, what was it about this stall that was still producing a sense of doubt and discomfort chewing at the edges of the otherwise pleasant experience of looking at the pretty, embroidered objects set out before me? 

In the current political context, groups supporting the Palestinians, including this one, must deal with an additional, increasingly difficult and demanding problem. Put very simply, much of the Palestinian struggle is ‘supported’ by Lebanese Hezbollah, and by Hamas, both of whom are in hock to the current Iranian ruling regime. Like it or not, all of these  campaigns supporting the Palestinians, including eminently sensible, practical ones like HJP, have the territorial scent markings of Iran sprayed all over them. They are inextricably linked. The violent oppression of dissidents in Iran, the mass rapes of Iranian women and men in prisons, the torture, the executions and the shootings and beatings on the streets, are all done, in the name of the Islam and, in particular, in the name of the Qods and of Palestine. The Palestinian women stitching those small bags and crocheting the flowers didn’t ask for Iran's support and certainly not for their slaughter, but they’ve got it and now their supporters must deal with it.

The problem for the Palestinians is twofold. The first and, for them, the most urgent, is that the Iranian regime needs dead Palestinians, as many as possible, especially women and children, to prop up its ailing government. The only support it has left in Iran is the hard core of Iranian Hezbollah who will continue to support them as long as Palestinians are dying at the hands of Israeli soldiers. Hence the necessity to ensure that they do go on dying. Bluntly, a dead Palestinian is worth far more to the Iranian regime than a living one. A prosperous, cheerful, independent Palestinian is no help at all and a prosperous, independent Palestine would spell the end of the Islamic Republic in Iran.

Tehran 2009: Police attacking protesters after the 2009 election

The second problem is that much of the support structure, in Britain and elsewhere in the West, is cheerfully burying its collective head in the sand and ignoring what Iran is actually doing in Palestine and, even more, what the same regime is doing in Iran itself – namely murdering Iranians at a rate and with a degree of impunity which would make any Israeli government green with envy.

HJP is affiliated to Palestine Solidarity Campaign, both of which have laudable aims. While both organisations carefully state their affiliations, their links, their patrons and their sources of support and what they aim for and what they do not support, (the latter includes ‘all forms of racism, anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia’), there is a howling silence on Iran.

Iranian Street Protester: Tehran 2009

They must now declare their independence and condemn, unequivocally, the atrocities meted out to Iranian dissidents by the ruling regime. This must be clearly stated on their websites and, wherever possible, on their publicity material. They can no longer ignore what is happening in Iran. No longer can they state that it may not really be so, that it is just an invention of the Western press, (or ‘Zionist’ as some prefer), they cannot afford to risk colluding with a hard-core proto-fascist regime which celebrates the deaths of Palestinians as much as it celebrates the rape and death of its own dissidents.

Tehran 2009: Police attacking protesters

It is time for all of these groups to adopt another ‘not in my name’ badge, a second one. This one might have an electric baton, an image of the Iranian basiji beating the life out of one of the women protesters or a crane with a dead Iranian protester hanging by the neck. They need to do this as a matter of urgency, because it is being done in their name.

The thought and care put into projects such as those of HJP is fatally undermined by this cavernous silence. Maintaining silence, in effect sacrificing one set of lives, (Iranian lives) in order protect Palestinian lives is manifestly absurd. And who wants to buy a lovingly embroidered oyster card-holder drenched in the blood of Iranian street protesters?

Ceramic Review: A conversation with the editor

Things are on the move at Ceramic Review. The much esteemed and now, 'former' editor, Emmanuel Cooper, is departing and has been replaced by Dr. Bonnie Kemske. For those of you, and you are many, who have been feeling that CR is, 'stuck stuck stuck,' relief is on the way. It will be slow. You will not detect changes immediately. The first issue in which Kemske has had any input at all is the next one, the July / August issue. She wrote the editorial but has had little, perhaps no other input.

We're in the office in Carnaby street and she's growling impatiently at the paper proofs, 'what's the point? Who still has paper proofs?' or words to that effect. Further indignation at the full-page, black and white image of a bearded Mick Casson on the back cover and some shamefully conventional photographs of Paul Scott's work on the front. 'Well, that's enough of Mick Casson for the next seven years at least,' she announces with a bold sweep a the hand, 'and these photographs!' She snorts her disapproval at Scott's blue and white subversions, barely visible in the format chosen. It's not the work that's the problem here, it's the picturing of it.

It's all music to my ears. I almost dared to feel cheerful. Perhaps I might actually enjoy working for this magazine again instead of dreading every assignment. I couldn't quite believe that here was someone, the editor of CR no less, ranting about how truly appalling the standard approach to photographing ceramics is. Goodness, it's only, what, seven years that I've been cheerfully holding forth to a brick wall on this subject. Every review I've ever written and almost every feature has included a critique of the way the work is photographed and almost every time I've explained why it really doesn't work. Not that I actually expect anyone to take the slightest bit of notice but it is deeply depressing to find ghastly, pompous, didactic demands in everything from grant application guidelines to articles in potters' newsletters to calls for contributions for books to guideline for exhibition submissions telling people exactly how their work should be pictured and, without exception, the photographer / artist must exclude, 'clutter', for which read, 'life.' I'm then expected to believe that ceramics is oh so accessible and close to human life and so tactile and embodied. And where is the human dimension? Eradicated, cleansed, sanitised, GONE. Just a pot, or something else ceramic, in a vacuum. Dead.

Over time, expect the imagery - the nature of the imagery - in CR to change. This is the moment to rethink your own photographs. Start breaking the cast iron rules. It's only when artists rebel that the establishment eventually catches up, lumbering breathlessly into line - by which time you'll be twenty steps ahead again, but never mind. And here's an interesting thing - expect the adverts to change. Kemske wants the entire look of the magazine to be different. How much of this can happen this year I dont know. I do know that the layout will stay the same for at least a year but the intention is to change that as soon as finances allow. Finances, since we're on the subject, are dire and they have to change offices which in itself will take up time, energy and scarce resources.

I would like to have asked what the five and ten year plan would be. I know it's going to include practicalities such as raising the number of subscriptions, retrieving the student and adult education market, and making sure CR appears in the academic search engines. It will also include introducing at least one longer, chewier, more analytical article per issue as soon as possible. I know that articles which chat amiably about the potter's studio, what the weather was like that morning, how many times the kiln was checked, and whether of not the maker has a cat, will be discouraged - removed in fact. The really big question that remains unanswered is: 'what about marketing and audience research?' Marketing, I learnt, has not been a part of anyone's job description since the day the magazine began. Shocking but true and wholly unsurprising. Kemske knows that has to change. but how it can change has still to be worked out. I say this is the big question because, without it, the other changes become almost irrelevant because the magazine would struggle to survive long term.

We will have a magazine more conversant with the blogosphere, the internet, with e-books and online publishing of all kinds. We will also find out who the contributors are - something which has always been lacking. In short, CR is about to become a good deal more professional. I have been worried for a couple of years now that, in a harsher economic climate, such as the one we now have, CR could not survive. I'm happy to say that I'm a good deal less worried now.

Quilts at the V&A

Quilts 1700 - 2010 is a mesmerising collection of stitched, appliqued and variously decorated bedware all gathered together in several rooms at the V&A with explanatory texts, very little lighting, (such is the problem with displaying textiles), and freezing cold jets of air. That latter may be because the dimmed lights and dormitory of beds upon which the said stitchery is displayed, is enough to reduce even the most hardened exhibition goer to a stupor and induces a desire to just kick off your shoes and climb in. Just as you're about to submit, out rushes the cold air-shower and you remember where you are.
It's much more fun to listen to the frighteningly well-informed audience than it is to read the explanatory notes. I never know what to say about quilts. They're gorgeous, all of them - well apart from a couple of horrible contemporary deconstructed 'interrogating the quilt' type offerings - god I wish they'd just go home and watch the telly. This authoritarian desire among contemporary craft makers to interrogate things and people and expose their weaknesses is repellant.

Contemporary Quilts
Apart from the one or two of those, the contemporary work enlivens the show considerably. Two memorable paper quilts, one made entirely of old and new Chinese bank notes, the other from news print - thousands of tiny squares - roughly equal in number to lives lost among Iraqi civilans. In among them, a few tiny painted portraits of dead British soldiers. Works well - something about the background, 'wallpaper' feel of quilting itself, repetitive, detailed, boring in some senses, certainly in terms of the work involved, combined with the extreme intiimacy of the object itself, that vivifies the statement being made such that it goes well beyond vacuuous rhetorical statement. You sense the maker cares. That is one of the great strengths of domestic craft. The bank notes one is more conversant with the 'show off,' display aspects of quilting, which has always been a part of it's identity - 'darling- we must get the x's over and show them the new conservatory,' is just the updated version of 'darling we must get the x's over and show them our new quilts.'

Fantastic quilt done by prisoners at Wandsworth, (men's) prison. Really excellent, this one, and the film that goes with it with the voices of the makers and what they think about it. Grayson Perry's Right to Life quilt is there - excellent idea and works very well indeed, especially in this context - come to think of it, it works better here than I've seen it anywhere before.

Censorship again...
Tracy Emin did a lovely quilted, appliqued bed in 2003, it seems - and it is gorgeous. She's sewn some writing on the to bottom sheet which we're not allowed to see. I stood on tip-toe, put on my long range glasses and gazed into the deliberately obscured gloom, 'I'm not weird it's the hole fucking thing that's weird...' then it gets hidden under the bed clothes. I haven't remembered this correctly unfortunately, but it's something about 'wierd sex' and it's not her at fault. Feels like a protest and I didn't take kindly to not being unable to see it. It is work that we should be able to walk round, but we got only one view. Inexcusable.  I know I'm rather sensitive about these things these days, but I suspect the censorious hand of the public sector again, and I'm getting mightily pissed off about it. It's what gets censored as much as that it is censored that is really starting to make me angry. Ok for Primark and Accessorize to proclaim the joys of sexual attraction for seven year old girls, but not ok for adults to protest about sexual abuse... something doesn't make sense here. If we stick to gallery / museum art, fine for Grayson Perry to do whatever he wants but not for Tracey Emin apparently...

Quilts and meaning is very old hat for most craft makers, especially feminist ones, but I'm delighted that it hasn't become worn out and deconstructed to oblivion, (except in one or two cases).  Artists are still using quilts to great effect and not only about matters of intimacy and sex. Very good indeed to see to prisons and the people in them, war, and the people touched by them, and international finance entering the quilting frame too.

Possibilities And Losses: Transitions In Clay

Possibilities And Losses: Transitions In Clay is the catalogue for the exhibition of the same name held at Middlesboro Institute of Modern Art, (MIMA), in Summer 2009. Published by the Crafts Council in partnership with MIMA, it follows a conventional exhibition-catalogue form: it’s a big, more or less A4 size, book of shiny photographs with two essays. I did not see the exhibition itself and, of the four works represented in this book, I know only one, so I write about it here only as a literary representation of ceramics. I’m not commenting on the work itself. It does not claim to be a new approach to publishing, nor does it claim to break new ground as a model of discussing craft. The two essays, one by Glenn Adamson, the other by Jorunn Veiteberg, discuss and, on balance, promote the work. If one was feeling both churlish and excessively disinclined to scrutinise, one could just dismiss it as more / (mere), Crafts Council (self) promotional literature.

However, what makes this catalogue production different and worthy of comment is that, firstly, it follows the standard format with considerable flare and, secondly, and here perhaps it does do something new if not revolutionary, both of the essays are critical - in the sense that they discuss and critique contemporary ceramic work and current trends and developments in a way that allows the reader to think, scrutinise the work, even if only in picture form, and then form his/ her own opinion. The nature of the writing opens up discussion, rather than closing it down. This does mark a tangible progressive development: catalogue essays usually take the form of an introductory essay by the curator or other representative of the host institution, followed by an essay which discusses only the work in the show, usually with little other context, and which is invariably a positive appraisal rather than a serious discursive essay. The result amounts to an exercise in marketing and propaganda rather than an intelligent introduction to new work.

Publishing Ceramics

How ceramics is discussed, either in the pages of a book, in journals, in lectures and presentations, and now, increasingly in the blogosphere and on social networking sites, is a subject close to my heart. The lack of a proper publishing infrastructure for this discipline is something I’ve referred to many times – most recently in my review of Confrontational Ceramics, (Ceramic Review, 235:26). Increasingly, academics and researchers are turning to catalogue essays, as the major source of literature on ceramics, rather than to books which consistently lack substance and concern themselves only with visual representation. There is some freedom of movement in the catalogue form which is not dependent on the commercial demands of a publishing corporation or the weighty history of an esteemed publishing house. Moreover, small institutions, and relatively speaking the Crafts Council and MIMA are minute, could, in principle, take more radical decisions about what constitutes excellence in the field of literary representation of ceramics. They could mobilise digital technology to improve the visual representation, all being well that will materialise with the advent of e-books. Poss and Loss is still stuck with magnificently perfect still photographs, taken from a single angle without much human context. There are many photos so the angles are taken care of – sort of – but, even so, they remain detached from human intervention. There is so much more that could be done.

A Tale Of Two Essays

Glen Adamson’s essay discusses the work in the show, one artist at a time, Jorunn Veiteberg’s discusses the show as a whole in the context of related developments in contemporary ceramic practice. The exhibition was curated by Clare Twomey, who also edited the book and her choice of writers is faultless. Both are immersed in craft, but one, Adamson, is a slight outsider to ceramic work, just enough that he is able to keep a distance and interrogate the work of the four artists, and the other, Veiteberg is very much immersed in ceramic practice but, in the UK at any rate, she is not beholden to any institution or strand of thinking or developments in practice that are grounded in this country. There is just enough detachment in both of them to escape that vexatious sense of cosiness that persists in writing on ceramics.

Outsider Artists

Adamson characterises the four artists firstly as, ‘outsiders’ to the studio pottery model of ceramic practice, while acknowledging that two, Twomey and Keith Harrison are thoroughly grounded in that practice through their art college training and Brownsord, who initially trained in the industry, also migrated to studio practice via the Royal College of Art. Secondly he ascribes ‘typologies,’ to each of them: Brownsord is the historian, Harrison the alien, Sormin the immigrant and Twomey the curator. He then introduces the work as operating in a context imbued with pathos. Referring to the collapse of the ceramics industry in Britain accompanied by the slow eradication of discrete ceramics courses, he sets up a theme of exponential degradation, ‘the ‘medium feels more fragile than usual… news is bad… slow motion collapse… abandoned…downgraded… mounting wreckage…’ etc etc. That sets the scene for the phoenix from the ashes or rather the ‘punk concert in a tea room.’ He then builds the bad-boy metaphor into a mildly rapacious declaration of war against MIMA’s ‘chaste galleries,’ and, by implication, against studio pottery, which the exhibition, ‘takes by storm, possibly by the throat.’ Don’t get me wrong, I’m delighted I’m not the only one who refers to the highly problematic notion of ceramics a ‘virtuous female,’ it’s just I’d rather constitute the achievements of this show as emancipatory rather than as violation. After all, all four have training in ceramics, three in a very orthodox sense and, for all I know, Sormin’s training may also have been very orthodox. They themselves chose to disrupt the virtue of the discipline, they didn’t come under attack.

That said, it’s a fine essay and immensely helpful to the many of us who did not see the show. As a general comment, I’d say he sounds assured about Brownsword and Twomey -  he has a clear sense that he knows who they are and what they’re up to. He sounds uncertain and, possibly, unconvinced about Sormin’s work and is amused and also entranced by Harrison who he perceives primarily as a performance artist using the tropes of ceramics and Marxism in his performance rather than having any real attachment to either of them.

Continuity or Collapse: Ceramics in a post industrial era

Jorunn Veiterberg is an altogether more sober writer and more immersed in contemporary ceramic practice – certainly in contemporary studio practice. She takes as her starting point, almost as a given, the understanding that the industry has migrated to the studio and that studio potters are now deeply immersed in industrial as well as 20th century studio practices. Her essay is a survey of contemporary practice related to the industry and to collaborative, or community, non-individualistic practices. Thus the essay ranges from the work of groups like We Work In A Fragile Material and Temp, both Scandinavian groups who work collectively with what ceramics means as well as with what it does, to Marek Cecula, based in the USA and very much the individual studio artist practitioner, but one who designs for industry as well. The latter is not a new model. Cecula’s is the traditional model. Studio practice alone is very unusual indeed and probably took off only when the growth in arts schools meant that artists could teach. Otherwise artists of all kinds have always worked for public institutions, be it frescoes for churches or portraits for monarchs and their courtiers.

Veiteberg discusses the rise and rise of the readymade as a material in individual studio ceramic practices and ends with Christin Johanssen’s ‘Feminoir,’ the urinal for women which operates, according the artist, ‘in the borderland between industrial design and fine arts.’ Johanssen makes work in the studio that imitates industrial design. She sees this area of practice as a way to ‘question and discuss function and design,’ which Veiteberg seems to agree with. I hope that ceramics, as it reinvents itself in what Veiteberg calls, the ‘post-industial’ age, won’t be quite so po-faced that artists feel obliged to be ‘questioning and discussing function and design,’ all the time. I’m slightly concerned that this is going to be virtue reinvented. It’s a bit clean and worthy sounding – which is funny, when you consider how witty and un-worthy ‘feminoir’ is.

Veiterberg’s writing produces ceramic practice as an immensely self-conscious process - this is in some contrast to Adamson, who has a brief love affair with something he perceives as mad and dangerous, in the positive sense of those words, but then extricates himself. The book is a good read about current practice and is illuminating and hard working – by which I mean that a relatively small amount of writing about one exhibition with a finite number of images does an enormous amount to inform and gives the reader a clear sense of an expanding practice at an exciting point of departure.

Ceramic Art London, 2010

Here is the 6th Ceramic Art London at the Royal College of Art. It looked tired. Only six years old and tired already. It’s not so much that the work itself looks tired, it’s the overall curation of the event that is the problem. I would suggest parking restrictions. I mean a simple rule – you can park your pots here for two consecutive years, but no more, and no return within two years.  That would help to refresh the show a bit but it needs more than that. I don’t know who is on the selection panel or on what basis they select, but it is clear they are not keeping the look of the whole in mind. If they need a wider variety of makers to apply for selection then they need to say so. At the moment it looks like they’re short of applications. There are far too many people who have been showing year after year. There were very few new faces. The inclusion of two makers of table ware in bone china, (Lowri Davies and Maria Lintott) was very welcome indeed and another, slightly over complicated, but nonetheless appealing collection of work by Solomia Zoumaras, (there for her second year), was also a welcome change.

CAL is not a survey of contemporary ceramic practice, no single show or art fair could achieve that and certainly not in that format – it is the standard approach to art fairs with a single small, kiosk type space for each maker. Susan O’ Byrne took over two spaces to show her troupe of dancing vermin, (one muntjac, ( a small deer), a pack of galavanting foxes and a gathering of crows,) but apart from that, it was one space each and set out your pots as tastefully as you can. Apart from O’Byrne, and the three named above, there was really nothing fresh, experimental, progressive, or thought provoking, - not the right space for contemplative or thought-provoking work anyway – but only these four made me stop and look again and want to see and know more. For a show this size, and this established, it isn’t enough.

Looking over the CAL catalogues for the last six years, the buzz and excitement of the launch in 2005 is barely recognisable as being part of the same event. It is difficult to discern if this is a gradual fade or a sudden collapse. The 2005 catalogue includes a collection of commentary from Grayson Perry, contributions from Edmund de Waal, Louise Taylor, (then head of the Crafts Council), as well as something from a collector, Michael Evans and from Jack Doherty, chair of the CPA which, with Ceramic Review, hosts the event. Variety breathed life into the show. Perry is, of course, a bona fide celebrity and can’t fail or, at that time, couldn’t fail to bring a sprinkling of stardust to almost any occasion. Edmund de Waal is the kind of star whose writing means something. In this otherwise unassuming catalogue, he writes a response to Stephen Bayley’s article published a year earlier in The Independent on Sunday, (Feb.15th 2004). The title of the article was: Pottery: The Evil in Our Society. While, according to de Waal, Bayley berates potters who, ‘did not know their place any more,’ de Waal himself responds by making the simple observation that they never had: ‘As to making installations, they were the currency of European Modernism,’ he remarks, after a brief discourse on the less functional aspects of Bauhaus.

The point is that there was lively debate, a sense of boundaries being broken, a sense, in short of a kind of renaissance in craft and, in particular, in ceramics. If commentators like Bayley and also Germaine Greer could get sufficiently steamed up about it to write articles in broadsheet papers, then we were certainly doing something right.

Now we are in a different phase. Ceramic work in mainstream and blue chip art galleries is becoming commonplace. It maybe tokenistic or only a brief flirtation, a kind of cultural tourism – let’s give this a try while we’re in recession. It doesn’t much matter, the danger for ceramics now is complacency. Where are the new voices, the new stars? Well they certainly weren’t at CAL. I’m not talking only about the work in the show, I’m almost more concerned about the ‘Discovery’ section – these are lectures and demonstrations. Whereas in earlier years we have had Clare Twomey (2009) talking about installation and Jeremy Theophilus talking about the forthcoming Biennial, both with a strong sense of mission and future developments, it seems we have now returned to a round up of fairly standard makers doing picture shows and demonstrating making techniques - tried and trusted, or maybe just tired and musty. Closer examination of the six catalogues I now have reveals that the seed of this is there right at that start. De Waal is recycled three times, the makers who give their presentations and demonstrations are the ones we’ve seen a thousand times before. Where is ‘the Discovery’ exactly? Is it not usual for London shows to curate new work rather than established work? How on earth can a public develop any sense of discernment, any experience of looking and deciding, if they are never presented with new work to consider and respond to?

In his 2005 essay, de Waal issues the following warning concerning the ways we might respond to Bayley’s attack: ‘There are other options, of course: bunkering down is an option, preaching to the converted is an option, talking to ourself is an option.’ This year’s CAL is disappointing because it has not heeded that warning. In responding only to the desires of the known and established ‘collectors,’ bringing in only the ‘tried and tested,’ it is, above all, talking to itself and people who talk to themselves  quickly become boring. CAL cannot afford to look this dull again. The visitors and buyers will depart and with them will go much of the good will and enthusiasm that has been built up over the past six years.

For a different angle, please take a good look at the coverage of this event at Sliponline. You will find vast numbers of excellent pictures and probably some lively commentary - it says 'from Tuesday,' I guess this means Tuesday, March 9th or 16th.