HYGIENE: Ceramics, the Body and Its Functions A
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Paul Mathieu, The Art of the Future: 14 essays on ceramics Chapter Ten HYGIENE: Ceramics, the Body and its Functions “The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges.” Marcel Duchamp. “The invention of television can be compared to the introduction of indoor plumbing. Fundamentally, it brought no change in the public’s habit. It simply eliminated the necessity of leaving the house.” Alfred Hitchcock “ Acting! Acting is not important! Plumbing is important!” Cary Grant “Craft is what you piss in, Art is what you piss on.” Old joke A short fiction: This research will never be finished. Like cleaning up (and messing up), there will always be another detail to check, another fact to verify or to add, another insight to articulate, another point to argue. As an example, I cannot remember where exactly, or what was the name of the book or its author, but a friend showed me once, years ago now, an illustrated comic book 1 about an archeologist digging a site on earth, in the very distant future. He had just discovered a new site that he believed to be particularly significant socially and religiously, as an important place for specific rituals in the ancient, forgotten culture he was investigating. He had just found an important, major structure and from the remains of the foundation and from the artifacts found on site, he could speculate that it was not particularly large since it must have been only one story high, possibly two, at most. It was clearly made up of a series of smaller rooms, about a dozen, all of the same size and shape, all independent from each other, yet connected by a shared wall. Each room was clearly entered by a single door, opening into a courtyard. He deducted that this large courtyard, open and bare, provided a meeting place for the clergy and the faithful, since this was clearly a religious site. Important roads from many directions led to this courtyard and along these roads, more similar structures were also located, about 50 miles from each other, or so. According to our archeologist, only members of the clergy would be allowed inside the rooms, while the populace would witness the rites from the courtyard outside. This average size room, according to his interpretations and speculations, was just an antechamber, a transition space before accessing a much smaller room beyond, where the important religious rituals took place. It was obvious that these small rooms, all similar yet very special, were certainly the most sacred and holy places in the mythology of the civilization under study. In each small room could be found the same paraphernalia necessary for the rites performed. There was an ablution bowl, where the priests could purify and cleanse themselves and another recipient, of the same material, whose purpose obviously served to make offerings to the underground deity. This other container was lower, closer to the ground (the god worshipped there must have been connected to the telluric, possibly), which permitted the officiants to genuflect and prostrate themselves as they accomplished the sacrament. The small room itself, in contrast to the antechamber, which was bare, was decorated with symbols and signs, on the floor and on the wall, using the same material used for the sacred vessels. The archeologist interpreted this material as particularly significant and important for that culture, specifically at the religious level. This material was obviously fragile, since all the objects found were broken (ritualistically, probably) but also very permanent, since they had otherwise survived for millennia, since the destruction of the temple. Our archeologist remained nonetheless puzzled by the succession of rooms, their consecutive arrangement, all identical, with offering altars and chapels, all connected to the exterior courtyard. He deducted that this permitted for numerous sacrifices to be made, simultaneously by multiple priests for the benefice of the assembled community. 2 Obviously to us, what our future archeologist was unearthing is but the remnants, the ruins of an ordinary motel, along a motorway, at some point in the future. The sacred chapel with its porcelain altar is just an ordinary bathroom, with its porcelain sink and toilet bowl. This may be how the future will perceive our familiar present, and reinterpret the world all around us, in which we presently live. What remains certain, is that ceramics will be at the centre of whatever traces of our passage here have left for interpretation. The modest, bland, ubiquitous bathroom, will remain, whether in a motel room or anywhere else, as one of the essential spaces of our culture. Like the human body itself, pottery forms contain, preserve and excrete solids and liquids, and pots receive the waste the body rejects. Pottery is also part of the cycle of life (and death) sustained by food, and pottery functions are closely related to bodily functions. This domestic dimension, of bodies coming in intimate and direct contact with ceramic objects, is still central to ceramics today. If all visual arts were suddenly to disappear, hardly anyone would notice. Take away all porcelain toilets and civilization, as we know it, would collapse. Another sort of fiction: Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain”, a ready-made found object (a porcelain urinal) was presented as a work of art in the context of an exhibition at the Armory Show in New York, in 1917. The presentation necessitated a repositioning, from the vertical wall (the space for pictures and images, as well) to the horizontal plinth, horizontality being the space location for most tools and objects. This shift of spatial orientation and context in Duchamp’s gesture is not only from plumbing to art, from the junk pile (the object was not brand new) to the art gallery. Duchamp took something, an object, which is meant for the vertical wall and thus in many ways operates within the physical space for flat images, and placed it in the horizontal space for real things. He took an object as image and made it into an image as object. It was essential that this gesture also be documented photographically, like most if not all subsequent such gestures will be, and there have been thousands of followers, all the way to today and probably into the distant future. “Fountain” is the first artwork made exclusively to be photographed (and by the most 3 famous American photographer of the day at that, Alfred Stieglitz), to exist “purely” as a document, in a necessary step to engage and maintain the myth, the mystery of artistic creation. If such a photograph had not been taken, we probably wouldn’t even know about it, in any case, its power would have been greatly diminished. Duchamp believed and stated as such that America’s greatest contribution to art and culture were its engineering and plumbing. “Fountain”, arguably the most famous art object of the 20th Century is (ironically) a ceramic object, although its nature as ceramics and the implications of that fact are usually ignored, unmentioned, certainly not analyzed or explained in the vast literature on this controversial object, more a conceptual gesture than an actual thing, of course. This is but another example of the invisibility of ceramics in art theory and art discourses. When even a ceramic object defies categorization as ceramics, we can see how the definition of “ceramics” as a term is intrinsically ambiguous and fluid, and confused still in most minds. This difficulty to categorize “Fountain” (and all the other objects it inspired all the way to today, and it is a tremendously influential object) is of course part of its potency. The urinal itself, that gave materiality to “Fountain”, as the first truly conceptual work of art, was soon discarded by the artist, after the exhibition and it is probably now resting in some garbage dump somewhere. It went from being worthless, ordinary hardware to become, for a short while, highly controversial art within the context of an exhibition, to return to irrelevant, worthless garbage at the end of the show. The dismissing of an object from junk to junk is seminal in its dematerialization. I predict that all the numerous art objects it subsequently influenced will probably succumb to the same fate. Nonetheless, if “Fountain” were ever found, as one of the most important early 20th Century artwork, it would certainly bring untold millions of dollars at auction. Will its present meaning and significance as a seminal icon survive long enough, until the day in the probably distant future when it is finally found and dug out by archeologists? Will it have returned to the status of the lowly ceramic urinal or will it still shock and create controversy or even have any monetary value? Will anyone even remember who “R. Mutt 17” was, or even Duchamp himself? Of course, a few reproductions already exist in museums and collections all over the world, since Duchamp himself reissued his artwork as an edition in the early 1960’s, to generate much needed funds in his older, more pragmatic days. Since “Fountain” is arguably the most famous artwork of the 20th Century, then could it be said that Duchamp himself is the most famous ceramist of the period, despite the 4 obvious fact that the material he used is completely irrelevant to his dematerialized, conceptual practice? Or is it? All the associations and connotations that the urinal invokes, between technology and the modern world, between the human body and its abject functions, in the relation between nature (peeing) and culture (the urinal), the fact that the object for exclusive masculine use is obviously formally gendered (some even see a Madonna figure, a Virgin Mary, in the white silhouette on the photograph), all these would not exist if it wasn’t for the familiar and ubiquitous nature of the material itself with which it is made and that provides the emblematic, semantic potency of the thing through implied function.