High Unseriousness: Artists and Clay Edmund De Waal

44 — 45 High Unseriousness: Artists and Clay Edmund de Waal The plasticity of clay has always been of great interest to artists. But with this centrality also comes the highly charged area of the status of clay. The question of whether it is precisely because clay can be seen as practically worthless that so many artists have been able to use it as a material in exploratory and digressive ways. It is a complex map. The artists who have had significant involvement with clay—not just an occasional foray—include Gauguin, the German Expressionists, the Fauves, and the Russian Suprematists in the early part of the 20th century. They include the major mid-century involvement of Picasso, Miró and Noguchi, and the work of Lucio Fontana, and now the contemporary work of Tapies, Caro and Cragg. The reasons why such an extraordi- nary history of exploratory involvement with clay should have been so systematically undervalued and decried are complex: the critical history for this century of work with clay provides a back- drop for the exhibition. The great absence of a considered critical appraisal for much of the ceramic work by artists reveals anxieties about craft, anxieties about the value of the decorative and anxieties about the place that objects can have within modern art. But above all it reveals a dislike for the messiness and inchoateness of clay, the way in which it shifts its states from liquid to solid, the way in which it moves. Some artists who have used clay have wanted to disassociate themselves from ceramics: they felt that ceramics as a discipline was alienating. This was not simply capriciousness or removing themselves from the taint of craft. Indeed many of these artists knew precisely which elements of the craft of pottery were significant for them. And for several it was what they perceived as the health or vigour to be found in vernacular pottery that was most significant. In the vernacular could be found the living traces of the hand. Lucio Fontana Torero con Toro, 1949 At the end of the 19th century it was the seeming decadence of Art Pottery, where many different highly skilled craftsmen would work on a single piece to throw, trim, decorate, gild, and fire a pot all under the direction of a famous ‘Name’, that was so alienating. These were objets for vitrines, collectable, among them Sèvres vases. And as Gauguin so succinctly put it, ‘Sèvres has killed ceramics’. Ceramics had lost a vital link between the hand and the artist, becoming mere commodities. There is real anger and pas- sion here at the dissociation of ceramics and life; what had been, in Gauguin’s memorable phrase, ‘a central art’ had been turned into a frippery (une futilité). This threnody for the lost integration of hand and eye underpinned the parallel growth of the studio potter, someone who would undertake to make, decorate and fire pots by themselves. As Emil Nolde pointed out, ‘Our age has seen to it that a design on paper has to precede every clay pot, ornament, useful object, or piece of clothing. The products of primitive people are created with actual material in their hands, between their fingers…The primeval vitality, the intensive, often grotesque expression of energy and life in its most elemental 46 — 47 form—that perhaps is what makes these native works so enjoy- able.’1 ‘Actual material’ is a resonant description of clay: it throws up the idea that some materials have less reality, are less capable of connection with hands and fingers. Clay is experiential. It can be no more than a couple of squeezes of clay by a hand and two sharp indentations for eyes as in the figures made for Antony Gormley’s Field: ‘a materialisation of a moment of lived time.’2 This is using clay to record the passage of one moment of one person through the world. The use of clay to sketch, to mark in an abbreviated way the flux of feeling, is part of this map of the unexpected. It is possible to work with clay on a totally different scale. It can become an environment, taking not moments but months to make, as in the wall of clay that the American-Japanese sculptor Isamu Noguchi constructed in his house in Kamakura in Japan in the early 1950s. This wall is a long stretch of compacted clay, scraped back, and with hollowed niches; one for the hearth and one for a haniwa, an archaic head from the prehistoric Jomon period. Noguchi’s sculptures sit nearby. With Noguchi’s wall we see not the small intimate gestures normally associated with ceramics, but a larger physicality—try beating out a mass of clay and you’ll see what is involved. The idea of a wall of clay recurs across fifty years and three continents, from Noguchi to John Mason’s Grey Wall of 1960 to the contemporary work of Andy Goldsworthy in Britain. In all three cases there is a displacement of the outside into the interior, a messing with the prescriptive cleanliness of the studio or museum. Above all in these clay walls there is the use of clay as a home, as a stage, as a medium, and as a landscape. The wall of clay is also a cave, a return to first principles. It links the artist with the iconic places where art ‘began’, the caves of Lascaux and Altimira. Miró—who had been profoundly affected by his experience of 1 the caves of Altamira—placed his ceramic sculpture outside his Emil Nolde in Victor H. Catalan studio to see how it worked alongside the surrounding Miesel (ed.), Voices of German Expressionism, boulders. It was as if there was a correspondence to be tested London 2003, p.35 between these ceramics and the geology which informed them. 2 His monumental work in clay, Portique, is an archaic gateway; Antony Gormley, Field for the British Isles, its scale demands that it stand comparison with prehistory. The London 2002 way of achieving this absorption into clay was to work with scale. 3 Scale simply prevented preciousness.3 See archive photo- graphs of Miró’s work in Pierre Courthion, Llo- In one of the most compelling images of this approach we see rens Artigas, Paris 1979, pp.116-9 the Danish artist Asger Jorn being pushed on his motorbike Asger Jorn on a scooter preparing the panel for Aarhus, 1950 across a playground full of clay to make a mural for a Jutland school. Marks made by hand were too discrete and safe: the tyre marks of a Vespa were needed. This was the search for the non- aesthetic and for sculpture that could not be made a commodity. It was not an interest in making ceramic objects (for exhibition, catalogue, sale) but in the experience of clay as earth. The tough physicality of this way of working is apparent in Lucio Fontana’s Natura series in which he created an interior space by pushing a long pole deep into a large mass of clay. Eduardo Chillida’s solid ceramic forms are sheer mass. The series of monumental works made by the American potter Peter Voulkos were titled precisely to evoke a relationship with vast landscapes—5,000 Feet (1958), Little Big Horn (1959), Camelback Mountain (1959), Gallas Rock (1961). The scale of these ‘confirms our sense that something 48 — 49 big has actually happened in the art of our time’ as the critic E.C. Goosens wrote in 1958 of Abstract Expressionism. This is clay as challenge. In the small figure from Field or in a clay wall we can see the movement of the human body and how it has affected the clay body. This is an immersive movement, a loss of self in material- ity described powerfully by the philosopher Merleau-Ponty: ‘Every perception is a communion and a coition of our body with things’.4 This coition of the body is one of the secret stories of the century of artists working with clay; it reveals what can be described as a phenomenological approach to clay. For some artists using clay has been the recuperation of unmediated material- ity: they had a powerful sense of clay as earth, as being the great formless material void that allowed them a kind of expression they could not approach through other materials. Indeed the image of ‘a returning to earth’ carries with it the apprehension, the almost visceral feeling, of having been separated, alienated or disconnected from the earth—or a land or a culture. Clay allowed for a return to self, a return to the body, a return to the earth. Kazuo Shiraga (1924-) of the Gutai group showed this in 1955 in his performance ‘Challenging mud’, writhing around in clay until he was so exhausted that the earth had ‘won’. When the radical young group of post-war Japanese potters were choosing a name they called themselves the Sodeisha, after an earthworm wriggling in mud. These young potters were ‘returning’ to clay, were being ‘effaced’ by it. In doing so they expressed their feeling that an older generation of potters had betrayed and smothered the material. That much of the Sodeisha’s early work is unglazed, often rough and even painful to handle is no coincidence: it reflects this passionate, phenomenological, identification with clay itself. Encounters with clay can be spontaneous, visceral and violent. Noguchi, working in Japan in the early 1950s, made work that possessed what he called ‘an essence of sculpture’. His words reveal both the exhausting physicality of working with clay and what others could gain from their encounter ‘...we may bump into it, bleed from its rough surface, or delineate its contours with our fingers’.

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