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Objects in Transition

The Ceramic Art of Kjell Rylander

By Jorunn Veiteberg

28 curved shapes project horizontally from the white wall of the gallery. They are arranged in three parallel rows, the one close beneath the other. The material is faïence, and the tones range from white and beige to soft yellow and pale blue. The overall format is a modest one, and the shapes are positioned close to each other, creating a repetitive pattern reminiscent of the artistic strategies associated with the minimalism of the 1960’s.
Characteristic of this tradition is a serial style in which all the parts have equal weight and value. Also typical is the sense of impersonality and anonymity generated by smooth surfaces and techniques recognisable from industrial production. The forms are glued right on to the wall without any kind of frame or other boundary between the artwork and its surroundings. This too is a feature associated with minimalism. At the same time, however, the installation points a way beyond the mental horizon of minimalism by referring to a reality outside itself. Closer inspection reveals that the 28 component parts are made of the edges of plates, distinguishable from each other by their various shades of colour - a reminder of the wide range of colour choice available in dinner services. Here a whole new world of associations is revealed. The repetitive pattern is not just a reference to mass-production in the ceramics industry, but also an image of the many repetitions of day-to-day life: the dishes brought to the table and cleared from it, or stacked in rows on a drying rack. And just as the edge of the plate forms a decorative frame around the food on it, so the work hung on the gallery wall is an ornament for the room. The intimate format is a natural consequence of the choice of material, but it also indicates a desire to communicate on an everyday level. It is not a work that uses grand gestures to attract attention. On the contrary, it is deliberately anti-monumental, but nonetheless effective in its beauty, stillness and vulnerability.

The installation, which has no title, came to my attention as part of the group exhibition Stuff in the spring of 2005 at the Roger Björkholmen Gallery in Stockholm. It bears the signature of Kjell Rylander, a ceramic artist who has made a name for himself since graduating from the University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm in 2000. Particularly important for his reputation was his graduation project, from which two works, Circle and Resistance appeared in The Beauty and the Beast, an exhibition of Swedish arts, crafts and design arranged by the Crafts Council in London in the winter of 2004-5. Since a direct line of development links these early works to the installation at the Stuff exhibition, there is every reason to take a closer look at them.

Rylander’s graduation project, under the general title of Feedback, consisted of individual pieces such as Circle, Resistance and Untitled. Fortunate timing, coinciding with the beginning of a new millennium, added extra emphasis to all that was new in these ceramics, and since then these works have become icons for a new generation and a new direction in contemporary Swedish ceramics. Feedback is a symbol of everything that goes round in circles - to use another of the metaphors of everyday life - endless repetition and recycling. In this context the word may also suggest the treadmill on to which consumers in the industrial world are propelled, with its infinite choice of material items, but also to such private affairs as gathering in a circle of friends and passing food and drink around. As a geometric figure the circle is a visual metaphor for whatever repeats itself endlessly, and this may explain Rylander’s interest in round plates. Not only do they appear in the installation described above, but they are also the main feature of Resistance, in which a number of plates are placed in a drying rack. The rack constitutes both plinth and shelf, and in this way Rylander avoids putting his work on a podium, the main object of which would be to emphasise its status as a work of art. But the sense of everyday familiarity stops there: the centres of the plates have been removed, leaving only their decorative outer rims. In other words, they no longer have any value as useful objects. What seems trivial and secure has been tampered with, raising the question whether items thus dismantled have thereby lost their meaning. At the same time, attention is focused on the vivid colours and rhythmic arrangement of these plate rims. As decorative objects alone they have a lot to offer. But what kind of resistance is the title referring to? Is it resistance against those who think art ought to rise above daily life? Or those who believe that a craftsman should make useful things? Or against those who feel that ceramic artists should steer clear of ready-mades? Kjell Rylander’s works open the door to many searching questions about our relationship with inanimate objects, everyday life, pictorial art, crafts and ceramics. The questions are also about the choices he has as a ceramic artist in the year 2005. He can make usable objects or free works of art; he can create something new or re-use something old; and above all, he can create objects that challenge the existing boundaries between different disciplines.

To most people, Kjell Rylander’s objects will probably come under the heading of fine art, but they can also be seen as craft, especially if we use the term according to the definition suggested by Norwegian arts historian Gunnar Danbolt. He argues that it is not an object’s functional utility that classifies it as a craft object, but the fact that the work is about practically useful articles. In other words, the motif is an item recognisable from everyday life, even though the purpose in creating it may not have anything to do with practical use. Circle may be taken as an illustration of this. It consists of nine saucers cut and glued together to form a tight, closed circle. On one of the saucers there is a cup with nine handles - and, the handle of a cup being a common metaphor for the ear, one is immediately reminded of the expression ”to be all ears”. A common kind of social get-together in Scandinavia is a chat over a cup of coffee. Starting with two quite trivial kinds of item from the ceramic repertoire, the cup and the saucer, and seeing them transformed into an unusable object, we are invited to look at them as both form and narrative. As metaphor, they consist of both object and image. Circle is a reminder of the social rituals in which these everyday ceramic items take part, at the same time as the work, on a metaphorical level, is about intimacy and companionship.

A potter’s raw material is clay. So too is Kjell Rylander’s, but he generally chooses to base his work on clay that has already been fired, in the form of ceramic ready-mades. This inclusion of real objects puts him in line with the ideas of the French curator and theoretician Nicolas Bourriaud, who argues that the role of the artist is to appropriate things produced in other contexts, and to recycle and duplicate them. But like most other artist-craftsmen, Rylander differs from these reorganising ”post-producers” who are Bourriaud’s artistic ideal in using his chosen ready-mades as components in an otherwise new work. He cuts and glues the ceramic material carefully and precisely into meaningful new units. As a trained joiner and potter he is well versed in the practice of different crafts, and he wants his works to reflect the commitment and insight that comes of putting something together with one’s own hands. His background in joinery probably also explains his fondness for cutting things and linking them together.

Turning articles into art is a challenge to the demarcation line between valuable and useless. What items are worth keeping, and which can be thrown away? In Untitled an anonymous, industrially mass-produced cup is put together with an elaborate, richly decorated coffee pot from a child’s toy service. They are equally large in size, but does that mean they have equal value? Most people will probably say that the memories attached to things from our childhood make them more valuable than an anonymous cup that we drink from in the canteen every day. Value is thus a subjective concept, based on the feelings and tastes of the individual. But what determines value is also subject to cultural conventions. In his book Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value (1979), the anthropologist Michael Thompson has developed a complete theory as to how things can change in value. He makes a distinction between two main categories determining the fate of objects: the durable and the transient. Many of the items used by Rylander as raw material have been among the transient. They have been useful at one time, but at some stage they have been replaced with something else, lost their value and ended up under the category of rubbish. In this condition of zero value, they may end up as dust, or they may be rediscovered and put back into circulation. The transition from transient to durable by way of the ”rubbish” category is made possible by the fact that this category is exempt from the social mechanisms that control the fate of objects accorded ”durable”, and therefore valuable, status. Their reuse by the artist adds a new magic, a new fascination to these articles. The artist’s role may be compared to that of the alchemist who turns base material into gold, a dream image of great mythical power.

The issue of value is also relevant to the categorising problem that has been a recurrent theme throughout this presentation of Kjell Rylander’s works. There is a long tradition of consigning the works of ceramic artists to the realm of ”minor arts”, meaning decorative or trivial art as opposed to the ”great” and the ”sublime”.It is not, on the face of it, a particularly attractive label, but since the French theoreticians Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari put forward the idea of ”minor literature” in their book on Kafka (1979), a whole new interpretation of the concept has been made possible. ”Minor” in this context is not to be seen as meaning small. Certainly the French word mineur (from the Latin minor), used as an adjective, mean ”small”, ”insignificant”, ”inferior” and ”unimportant”. But as a noun the word means ”miner” or ”minesoldier”, with the connotations of something underground, undermining, subversive. This is the sense that is relevant here. So-called immigrant literature in particular has been labelled ”minor literature” - that is, literature written in another language than the writer’s native one, a language used by the immigrant writer in such a way as to deconstruct the established forms of cultural dominance and authority. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari see one of the chief characteristics of this literature as being the deterritorialisation of language, meaning the dissolution and distortion of both geographical and cultural boundaries. In the age of globalisation there are a great many people living with languages that are not originally their own, and the analogy to the ceramic artist’s situation in the contemporary art world should be obvious. Rylander can be regarded as an artistic nomad expressing himself in the language of contemporary art, while at the same time calling this language into question by bringing in motifs and material from other - though related - ”languages”. The result is works which move both back and forth and upwards and downwards in the cultural landscape, and which, by virtue of their very existence, challenge concepts such as durable and transient, major and minor.

Translated from the Norwegian by Alistair Cochrane.

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