"Multiplicity, Debasement, and Redemption"
By Glen R Brown
Spread like a diaphanous veil over the faces of thirteen otherwise banal industrially produced porcelain plates is an image that none will fail to recognize: an image that has been so relentlessly reproduced, so widely disseminated and so thoroughly engrained in popular consciousness of art that it has come to epitomize the eternal masterpiece. With arms spread to delineate a triangle that simultaneously evokes the Holy Trinity and formally anchors the composition of Leonardo's famous fresco, the doleful figure of Christ graces the center plate of Marek Cecula's The Last Supper with visual and conceptual gravity. Surrounding this focal point in metonymic reference to the twelve disciples, a dozen more plates solemnly acquire sections of the image like supplicants receiving fragments of the Heavenly Host. The allusions to redemption in this play between picture and plates are difficult to miss, and one rightly assumes that Cecula's attitude toward insipid mass-produced ceramic tablewares blends pity for their debased condition with hope for their ultimate salvation through the elevating influence of art.
Given their ubiquity, industrially manufactured porcelain plates were no doubt fated for entry into the work of art as soon as artists such as Picasso and the Dadaists established the sculptural legitimacy of found-object assemblage. Nearly a half century ago the Nouveau Réaliste Daniel Spoerri made the mass-produced ceramic plate a mainstay of his tableaux pièges (picture-traps): relief sculptures produced by gluing to ersatz tabletops the dishes and other odds and ends left over from actual meals and then hanging these slice-of life compositions vertically on the gallery walls. In thus turning the tables on the mundane, Spoerri raised the unobtrusive objects of daily use from the gray periphery of perception, making them the focus of uncommon attention. The sterile, mass-manufactured ceramic plate was in a sense rescued from obscurity through Spoerri's art, albeit in a manner rather different from Cecula's strategy. Spoerri imparted a saving grace to the mundane through emphasis on actual use and the consequent implications of human traces enveloping handled objects like so many glowing auras. Despite the strange frozen effect of the tableaux pièges however, the artistic value of the ceramic multiples they contain is only contingent: a quality enjoyed by all found objects so long as they continue to inhabit the context of art. Ironically, to wash Spoerri's dishes of their dried vestiges of food would be to dispel their dignity and to return them to quotidian banality.
Ceramists in general are not likely to scoff at the elevating effect that use can exert over things, since utility has historically been the raison d'étre of the majority of objects made in clay. Even Cecula, despite his leadership as a ceramics conceptualist, has never spurned utility itself as a debasing influence. On the contrary, through the firm Modus Design, now headquartered in his native Kielce, Poland, he has actively contributed to the aesthetic development and industrial production of utilitarian ceramics. At the same time, he values the heuristic power that art wields in its role as an abstraction from life. Installations such as The Last Supper are intended not only to confront the viewer with the baldly unimaginative character of much mass-manufactured ceramic tableware but also to inspire reflection on the potential for improvement in design. The porcelain plates in Cecula's installation have in this sense been transformed conceptually as well as materially. Unlike Spoerri's diary plates, they do not record physical use and are not humanized by individual touch. Their redemption, on the contrary, comes through partial transcendence of utility, but also, to some degree, of the entire world outside the realm of art. Although they remain plates, they have become artistic devices: both of the world and otherworldly. Like bodhisattvas they assume this dual existence implicitly for the purpose of enlightening those still bound exclusively to the material plane.
This altruistic aspect is noteworthy, since it by no means characterizes all incorporation of mass-produced ceramic multiples into works of art. On the contrary, artists have more often regarded such objects as permanent embodiments of naïve mass-tastelessness than as candidates for any kind of redemption. Take for example the work of the New York Neo-Expressionist Julian Schnabel, who in the early 1980s made a colossal reputation for painting tendentiously awkward, crudely brushed compositions over fields of broken dishes. Adoption of these unusual grounds allowed Schnabel to challenge the reductive logic of late-modern art theory – a theory that had gone so far as to link artistic purity to the material essence of the medium, which in the case of painting ultimately meant flatness. To subvert this flatness and thereby dispel the power of a narrowly materialist philosophy of art, Schnabel sought what he described as a prosthesis for painting.(1) The irregular surfaces of non-descript broken plates obviously served in this capacity, but the artist may have had an even more compelling reason to incorporate ceramic multiples into his work. The patent baseness of mass-produced porcelain plates was no doubt appealing as an obvious slap in the face to formalist connoisseurship and the notions of artistic purity and high taste.
This kind of use of the ceramic multiple in art plays on what could be described as a two-fold perception of baseness. It implies that the typical mass-produced ceramic plate possesses such negligible art value that the painter is free to exploit it exactly as though it were a blank, albeit three-dimensional, canvas: its base inartistic nature seems in other words to make the industrially manufactured plate a perfectly neutral base for painting. One can hardly argue against this perception, although there is certainly a question as to whether aesthetic baseness ultimately dooms the mass-manufactured plate to artistic irredeemability. More significant, however, is the implication that smothering the ceramic multiple in paint is a harmless gesture because plates, even ceramic vessels in general, cannot in any event exist independently as art, regardless of whether they are industrially manufactured or individually crafted by hand. From this perspective ceramic plates can only serve in art as means of more radically incorporating the mundane. Although Schnabel did not, to my knowledge, ever include the handwork of potters among the broken dishes in his paintings, ceramists may nonetheless find in his practice something reminiscent of the Pop artist Robert Rauschenberg's blithe smearing of oil paint on a found hand-stitched quilt in his controversial combine-painting, Bed. However unwittingly, implications of a hierarchy of media are arguably evident in the actions of both artists.
My intention in raising this point is not to vilify any particular artists for callousness or condescension toward certain kinds of objects, but rather to reiterate that different attitudes have characterized the incorporation of ceramic multiples into works of art. One of these is clearly reflected in Schnabel's paintings on sherds, Spoerri's tableaux piège, Haim Steinbach's counter displays and similar works by scores of other artists who, though not themselves ceramists, have utilized ceramic multiples as found-objects. I think it possible to argue that all of these examples possess general ancestral connections to the inaugural and most celebrated of ceramic found-objects, Marcel Duchamp's 1917 Fountain. While this ready-made porcelain urinal (and its later replica) has sometimes been erroneously described as a ceramic sculpture, Duchamp adamantly denied that he ever intended for it to become an art object (indeed, he professed disgust for those who came to praise its formal qualities). He selected the urinal precisely because of its objective banality, a condition that even its entry into the context of art could not fundamentally alter. In fact, its power as a polemical device depended entirely upon its ability at any moment to shed its art status and sink back into the vast sea of mundane objects. Fountain made its point precisely because materially it possessed not a shred of 'artness.'
It would be senseless to deny the value of this polemical use of the ceramic multiple in art, but at the same time it would be erroneous to assume that ceramic multiples have always entered art as obvious and permanent embodiments of banality. Cecula's project – an overt effort to redeem the mass-manufactured ceramic multiple, not simply by bestowing upon it the contingent 'artness' of the found-object, but by altering it materially as well – is indicative of a different attitude toward ceramics multiplicity: one that, not coincidentally, most often characterizes the artist who is also a ceramist. Ceramists, especially those whose training or experience has at some point encompassed throwing or hand building of vessels, are perhaps more aware than other artists that multiplicity does not necessarily imply uniformity. In handmade vessels, slight variations in shape, surface and decoration are expected and even valued as points of interest. For the potter, the ceramic multiple has only acquired a sterile uniformity as a consequence of its concessions to expectations for mass commodities and not as a result of anything essential to its condition as a multiple. For this reason, the possibility of redeeming the debased ceramic multiple seems to pique the ceramist's conscience, and it is not surprising that many should seek in the ceramic multiple not simply a found-object that may be of use to art but rather a potential instance of art itself.
An instructive comparison can be made between Schnabel's paintings on ceramic plates and a recent installation by the Chicago-based Spanish ceramist Xavier Toubes. Titled Melodien, the work consists of 130 wall-mounted porcelain plates individually painted in a wide range of glazes and motifs. These plates, purchased from a catalogue of factory blanks rather than crafted individually by the artist's hand, would no doubt have struck many as tabulae rasae: empty surfaces on which to inscribe the force of the painter's will, even emotions, free of the slightest resistance from the ostensibly staid and bloodless countenances of the plates themselves. Toubes, however, has approached these plates not as characterless grounds lacking past and maker but, on the contrary, as melancholy members of a once respectable order that has come down in the world and only awaits a certain spark of ingenuity to reclaim its former dignity. As a ceramist, Toubes reads in the languid faces of these plates a mixed ancestry and a complex history that began in the Yuan dynasty workshops of Jingdezhen, crossed the seas to the factories of Limòges, Meissen and Wedgwood, and finally returned to the thriving industries of modern China. Although smoothed into near-featureless uniformity by relentless feeding to a global mass market, these bland multiples nevertheless bear key vestiges of the history of ceramics.
Toubes's redemption of the blank industrial plates was not a matter of conferring upon them the idiosyncrasies of his artistic personality but, on the contrary, of instilling in each a sense of individuality derived largely from unpredictable materials and processes. Undermining any potentially unified style or narrative, he employed a broad range of glazes and lusters and a variety of techniques. Key to his practice was the tendentious suspension of some aspects of control, as if in compensation for the rigid authority exerted over the plates during their industrial manufacture. After painting them one by one without concern for an overarching harmony, Toubes fired the plates then immediately stored them away so as to eradicate any feelings of personal connection that might otherwise have lingered on. Languishing entombed in boxes until months later when Toubes ultimately resurrected them and observed them together for the first time, the plates seemed to reverse the process that had initially rendered them sterile and uniform. Metaphorically, Toubes's actions transported them back in time to an earlier period of ceramics production in which chance and accident still regularly wrought their effects of individualization on ceramic multiples. Significantly, the appeal of these effects in Melodien ultimately arises not from the treatment of each plate as an autonomous unit but rather from interplay: a dynamic of uniformity and resistance to uniformity that is only evident because the plates have become individualized multiples.
Additive processes have no doubt been the most common means of conferring individuality upon industrial ceramic multiples by those who recognize in such objects the traces of a dignified past and the potential for redemption. The temptation to impart the first mark to a blank white porcelain surface is no doubt difficult to resist, especially when such an action carries connotations of ennoblement. Swedish ceramist Kjell Rylander has, however, chosen the unexpected and antithetical route of reducing what are generally already highly reductive industrially produced ceramic forms and, through a minimalist-like economy of means, expanding upon their conceptual value. Relying on the skills acquired during the decade-long career as a carpenter that preceded his training as an artist, Rylander precisely cuts and often reassembles ceramic blanks, cultivating within them a sculptural presence while preserving their connections to a utilitarian past. Through his work, the previously sterile products of mass-manufacturing become sites for the metaphorical enactment of social dramas. In an untitled work from 2001, for example, Rylander removed, with surgical-like precision, the center of a featureless porcelain plate, in the process exposing a wire hanger with unmistakably anthropomorphic connotations.
A certain pathos envelops Rylander's altered porcelain form and the wiry figure that seems to grip it with all the intensity of desperation. Through this simple configuration, Rylander invokes the tensions between individuality and social uniformity that the East German Neo-Expressionist A. R. Penck so concisely and so compellingly embodied in his stick-figure "Standart" paintings during the Cold War era. The difference between the works of the two artists is, of course, that Rylander's reflections on social tensions are effected through a material object that is itself a product of both an imposed uniformity and a sudden, cathartic, release into individuality. In its narrower scope, Rylander's untitled work is about the tenuous yet tenacious grip of the human on objects of industrial production (which so often, in their sterile, debased form seem to descend upon the mass market out of an anonymous and impoverished autogenesis). It is worth noting that the disemboweled plate may frame the odd anthropomorphic hanger, yet it is the latter that preserves the former from certain destruction. (Is it only coincidental that the wire form should resemble the central figure in Cecula's Last Supper?) In the end, Rylander's work is a symbol of optimism, however fragile, for the prospects of the ceramics industry.
This optimism is, of course, tempered by knowledge that those economic forces that have brought the industrially produced utilitarian ceramic multiple to its current state of debasement have not in the least abated. It is interesting to compare Rylander's altered plate and Cecula's Last Supper with another provocative work by Cecula, the 1998 Violations Shard. In this piece, a blank white porcelain plate is built up (rather than cut down) around a small but ominous nucleus: the found fragment of a Nazi plate still bearing its sharply Spartan back stamp of stylized eagle and swastika. The implications of fascist fashion – an austere uniformity coupled with aspirations to domination on a global scale – are, sadly, easy enough to connect with endless products of today's mass-marketed industrially manufactured ceramics: violations of the ideal of diverse freedom if there ever were any. Can one harbor legitimate hope for the redemption of such objects or are they, having experienced the abyss, entirely irredeemable even through the elevating powers of art and design? The question haunts contemporary ceramic art, even when it affects disdain for a past in both craft and industry, and the results of this lingering shadow on the conscience are among the most intriguing of contemporary works in clay.
|