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 anxi- eties 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 were signifi- cant 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 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, 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 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 art- ists 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’.

4 Clay becomes ceramic through the other tempestuous transac- Quoted in James Hall, The World as Sculpture, tion of firing. The Danish potter Axel Salto (1889-1961) invoked London 2000, p.302 the image of Acteon metamorphosing into a stag to suggest

5 that ceramics could catch moments of transition or ‘the pain- Quoted in Forces of ful processes of transformation’5 as he put it. For some of these Nature: Axel Salto, New York 1999, p.4 artists working with clay—in particular Miró and Picasso—this transition allowed them freedom from any absolute knowledge of how their work would emerge; the chance inherent in firing allowed them to cede control. As the French poet Paul Valéry said in his essay On the Pre-eminent Dignity of the Arts of Fire, Earth and Mars ‘are after all nothing but cooled bodies’ and that for all ‘the fire worker’s admirable vigilance and all the foresight learned from experience…They can never abolish Chance. Risk remains the dominating and, as it were, the sanctifying element of his great art.’6

On one level a handle can become a snake or a spout a phallus. The border of a meat dish can act as the audience for a bullfight, the nest of a bird, a woman’s hair. The framework is unstable, a handled jug ‘contains’ the image of a flower vase. And in one of the most bizarre of these shape-shiftings a terracotta vase was surrounded by a mould made from corrugated cardboard, and plaster was poured into the space between the two: a vase was thus made into a larger plaster jug. Many of these ceramics are rooted in what Andre Breton described as the most fundamental of all Surrealist visual techniques, the suppression of the word ‘like’. In Surrealism a tomato is no longer ‘like’ a child’s balloon, it also is a child’s balloon. In Picasso’s ceramics, objects are often other objects simultaneously.

These artists also treated the ceramic studio itself as a transient place—everything they found within the ceramic studio was fair game for incorporation into new objects. Picasso, for instance, appropriated and manipulated the detritus of the studio, dis- carded kiln fragments and shards alongside casseroles, chestnut roasters and tiles and meat platters. Some of these marmites were painted with black figures in the manner of Etruscan antiquities, some of the tiles broken to give the impression of archaeological finds. They are knowing commentaries on the inherent archai- cism of painting terracottas. He layers commentary on tradition in a combative relationship with his artistic forebears, no more benign in his ceramics than in his paintings. Threading their way through the doves, or through the epicurean still lives in rich fluxed colours painted onto the meat dishes, are sexual dramas and the violent theatre of bullfights.

For Miró, too, the excitement of using ceramics lay in their 6 unpredictability, the consignment of the work to the transforming Paul Valéry, ‘On the Pre- Eminent Dignity of the process of firing, where clay and glaze changed into mass and Arts of the Fire’, in Paul colour. This transformative element connected with his sense of Valery: Collected Works, Bollingen vol.12, 1960 how his art came into being, the way in which in a dream figures

← and landscapes and symbols change and become ‘other’. It was Joan Miró Œuf, 1956 also present in his admiration for Neolithic art, where organs and limbs interchange, and for children’s art where objects recede in and out of focus in the picture plane. In his small ceramic sculptures of women, this transmogrification is most clearly vis- ible, with an almost studiedly archaic transposition of mouth and sexual organs. Other works were more complex. When he saw the outcome of a disastrous firing of his collaborator the Catalan pot- ter Artigas’ ceramics, with broken detritus and pots stuck together and to shelves, it was for Miró a surrealist symphony of melted or fragmented forms. It was an epiphany, for materials as he said ‘always excite me and give me points of departure of great rich- ness’. There is either an almost violent syncopation of different forms or the bringing together of different ways of handling clay within the same piece, all to the end of keeping alive the febrile energy of making and painting.

Where a form is unitary, as with his use of Artigas’ large jars or dishes, the images are placed so as to pull the form off centre; the smoothness and opacity of a glazed surface, its tactile coher- ence, was a ‘point of departure’ rather than a terminus. Just as his painting was connected to childhood mark-making through his use of stains and traces and scratches, so Artigas pointed out that Miró had to give up on the idea of accuracy in drawing on ceramic surfaces and had to inscribe the clay with a sharp stick, scratch through slips or trail glazes. Indeed the rougher the sur- face, the better. Just as Picasso was to do at Vallauris in the South of France, Miró picked up broken kiln shelves and discarded shards and even kiln-bricks to work with. Their brokenness gave them an immediate correspondence with the surrounding rocky landscape. Some of these painted fragments of kiln shelf have condensed ideographic figures, stars and animals which look as if they have been removed from the prehistoric caves at Altamira. The ceramic work of Noguchi has a great correspondence with that of Miró. For both, the metamorphosis of clay into ceramic connected them to an experience of the essential. For both of them this was expressed through the centrality of ceramic prehistoric sculpture. Noguchi, the son of an American mother and a Japanese father, spent his childhood in both America and Japan. He studied with Brancusi in Paris in the 1920s and worked with clay, stone and bronze in New York. On his return to Japan in 1950 he ‘jumped right into the world of Japanese pottery...’ as one critic wrote. He was ‘devouring the Japanese clay… he has become a potter… this is an exhibition of pottery. Nevertheless Noguchi is firing his pottery as sculpture, or, at least 52 — 53 they are being fired in a manner that captivates the fancy of the sculptor... He finds rightful justification in the primitive Haniwa sculpture; no modern potter shall deny the sculptural position of the Haniwa. The Haniwa is ultimately united with the ancient earthenwares and pottery; Noguchi’s aim is the revivification of this primitive relationship.’7

In his exhibition in 1952 at Kamakura, Noguchi showed a great range of vessels and sculptures, quick figurative clay studies and fragmentary totems ranging from the scale of a hand to over six feet high. These were often on wooden or metal stands, not to express significance or value, but to show them like exhibits from an ethnographic display. Many were like transparent structures, abstracted versions of the interiority of the figure. They are, in fact, abstracted haniwa, something that Noguchi hinted at in his catalogue essay: ‘Abstractions themselves are rooted in associa- tions as potent as anatomy.’8 The kilns he used were wood-fired, his sculptures were unglazed; their connection with the primitive was undisturbed by decorative surface associations. This approach to immediacy was a challenge shared by the CoBrA group, formed in 1948 by Danish, Belgian and Dutch artists, sculptors and writers. For them too, improvisatory assemblage was a way of escaping from the strait-jacket of high art. Determinedly experimental, their approach to materials was unhampered by anxieties about technique. In 1948 the Dutch artists Karel Appel, Corneille, Anton Rooskens and Constant also

7 experimented with ceramics, voicing similar concerns. In 1954 Quoted in Garth Clark, A Century of Ceramics in the Danish artist Asger Jorn organised ‘International encounters the United States 187- in ceramics’, inviting amongst others Fontana, Corneille and 1978, New York 1979, p.314 Appel from the Netherlands and Matta from Chile to work collab- oratively and experimentally in the Italian workshop in Albisola 8 For a fuller discussion of Tullio Mazzoti. Karel Appel recalled that ‘It was like opening see Bert Winther- Tamaki, The Ceramic the floodgates. We were allowed to make pottery at Mazzoti’s fac- Art of Isamu Noguchi: tory. Everyone was busy painting pots and plates and vases, but I A Close Embrace of the Earth, in Isamu Noguchi preferred to hit the bits of clay I pulled out of the dirt with an iron and Modern Japanese bar. I beat animal reliefs into the material, and once I had ham- Ceramics, (ed.) Louise Allison Cort and Bert mered out the shape, I painted it before firing the piece…’9 Winther-Tamaki, Arthur M. Sackler Gallery/ Appel’s work, with its bright poster paint colours and freely University of California scratched surfaces, mostly consisted of an almost medieval besti- Press, 2003, pp.1-85 ary of animals and birds, graphic and emotional. He also made 9 Willemijn Stokvisa, ‘Co- small squeezed heads from clay with punctured eyes and mouths, BrA and Ceramics’, in an intense and cursory engagement with clay that emphasises Yvonne G.J. Joris (ed.), Everything Valuable is the anti-aesthetic. If playing with clay constituted a crime Defenceless, ‘s-Herto- against the ideals of , then there was true radicalism genbosch, Museum het Kruitjuis, 1993, p.20 in CoBrA’s involvement in ceramics at Albisola where, amongst other initiatives, a hundred plates were decorated by children and exhibited on equal terms. In endeavouring to release spontaneity with clay, reliefs and murals were made, their vast scale neces- sitating huge gestural markings.

All these factors—the sense of unmediated materiality, the engagement with transformative process, the anxiety to avoid making commodities—connect these mid-century artists with the focus of the 1970s’ environmental movement. Here, the iconog- raphy of earth continued to be potent. Robert Smithson called the key 1968 New York exhibition Earthworks after the science fiction writer Brian W Aldis’ novel where, in a dystopian future, soil had become precious. This concept was explored within the movement, loosely titled ‘Earth Art’, where many sculptors worked by displacing earth in the landscape or removing it into galleries. Indeed, commenting on the1970 Unfired Clay exhibition held at Southern Illinois University, Evert Johnson wrote that ‘[t] here is something spiritually appropriate in the implication of the pot returning to earth, of artists participating physically in the installation of their own exhibit, and of creative man being, for a short time at least, really at one with his work, the earth from which it was made and elements that besiege both’.10 In a paral- lel spirit of adventure the American ceramicist James Melchert produced a happening in Amsterdam, Changes (1972), in which people dipped their heads in clay slip and then sat in a room of different temperatures while the drying process was filmed. In America Charles Simonds (1945-) made his own body the site of exhibition: ‘I lie down nude on the earth, cover myself with clay, remodel and transform my body into a landscape with clay, and then build a fantasy dwelling-place on my body on the earth.’ His archaic ruined constructions made out of thousands of tiny bricks either on his body or on the edges of steps, window sills, or vacant lots in cities attempted to make connections between the body and the earth as sacred places—‘Landscape-Body-Dwelling is a process of land into body, body into land.’

Anthony Gormley in European Field and Host (1993) highlighted the counterpoint between the formless and the formed, the spe- cific and the general through two parallel installations in the Kun- sthalle zu Kiel in Germany. In European Field Gormley installed 40,000 terracotta figures produced by children, their parents and grandparents in the galleries dedicated to European painting.

10 These small figures crowd together to form a mass that is both Evert Johnson, ‘Clay menacing and absurdly affecting in its vulnerability. The figures’ Unfired’, in: Craft Hori- zons, 1970, pp.36-37 historical resonances (Japanese haniwa, Chinese terracotta Isamu Noguchi warriors) are less significant than the impact of the installation, The Curtain of Dream, 1952 the challenge to museological convention in that the artefacts have taken over. In the parallel installation in the contemporary wing three galleries were flooded with 43 cubic metres of clay and 15,000 litres of seawater to the same height as the terracotta figures in European Field. The polarity between the two states of clay and fired ceramic could not be clearer, nor more resonant.

*

‘The digression into ceramics which has lately occupied the elder generation of painters in Paris has tended to isolate certain deco- rative and frivolous aspects of their talents at the expense of their expressive powers. The ceramic form itself is doubtless involved here, yet it ought to be recognised too that this digression has caught some of these artists in moments of relaxation if not actual decline. Of Léger this is particular true.’11

Most art critics have anatomised the encounters between artists

11 and clay as merely playful, indicative of (in the grand and pomp- Hilton Kramer, Arts ous words of Hilton Kramer) ‘high unseriousness’, digressive Digest vol 29, 1st Janu- ary 1955, p.22 activities rather than central ones. This is fascinating for two reasons. Firstly, ‘decoration’ is used as a term of critical disapprobation. This is particularly reveal- ing, for decoration was seen by formalist critics like Clement Greenberg as a minor activity, one based around the disguising of forms rather than revelation of form. Without doubt this is to use decoration to diminish by association with the role of women in ceramics. It was a disparagement strengthened by Greenberg’s advocacy of ‘optical’ sculpture that appealed to the intellect not to the touch, something that was rapidly becoming an orthodoxy in the 1950s. Clay, messy and inchoate and sensual, had none of the putative clarity of steel. A good example is the critical reception given to Noguchi’s work with clay. His freedom with traditions and his eclecticism was read by some Japanese critics as super- ficial. When Noguchi’s ceramics were exhibited in 1954 at the Stable Gallery in New York Hilton, Kramer saw them as works of ‘high unseriousness’ and Time described them as ‘the gingerbread cookies of a playful and somewhat inebriated baker’. They were regarded as frivolities, as if Noguchi was on a Japanese holiday from his responsibilities to high seriousness—responsibilities that could only be achieved with other materials. Noguchi certainly felt this reproach. He had no exhibition after this for five years, and in his next show did not exhibit clay works, but instead marble, granite and bronze sculpture.12

Secondly the disparagement of critics suggests that there was an element of relaxation, of play in the ceramics of these artists that could not be appropriated into general critical discourse, and could not be understood by contemporary critics. This anxiety around play has continued to this day. It reflects a limited under- standing of what happens in the process of creating art, presup- 12 posing that doggedness is the main driving force. To suggest ‘Eastern Yeast’, in: Time, 10 January 1955, otherwise is to question the status of artworks themselves. For p.54. Another reviewer, Otis Gage, called them one of the aspects of play is an upending of the linearity of narra- ‘humourous…playful… tive: endings are not discrete, they are generative and provisional. charming…decoration’, Arts and Architecture, In a parallel way Miró, Picasso and Fontana all upend the rooted- February 1955, p.4. For ness of ceramic objects and treat vessels in some ways as found the most interesting and extensive descrip- objects, susceptible to the conditions of surrealist exchange. Ves- tion of the reactions to Noguchi’s work see Bert sels are starting points, not conclusions. Winther-Tamaki, Op. cit. For the relationship between Noguchi and When art critics have written of these encounters they have Japanese ceramics see Louise Allison Cort, usually denied any significance to the collaborators who fired or ‘Japanese Encounters glazed these artists’ ceramics. The potters disappear. There is an with Clay’, in: Isamu Noguchi and Modern invisible history of great collaborations: between Gauguin and Japanese Ceramics, the pioneering French potter Ernst Chaplet, between the Fauves Berkeley 2003, pp.103- 1991. and Andre Metthey, Miró and the Catalan potter Artigas, and Asger Jorn Animal, ca. 1944 between Noguchi and the maverick Japanese potter Rosanjin. Collaboration continues to this day—the Swiss potter Hans Spin- ner works with Caro, Tapies and Chillida. There is also another history of antipathy and misunderstanding, a chronic dislike of the world of ceramics by some artists, and a bitter animus in return. Critics from the ceramics world (if they have deigned to notice these things) feel these ‘visitors to clay’ are just muck- ing about—and getting too much attention for their efforts. To these complaints they add that the artists are only as good as the craftsmen who fire and glaze.

A good example of this cabalistic defensiveness was the response to Picasso’s ceramics when the exhibition Picasso in Provence toured Britain in 1950. The trade journal Pottery and Glass called them ‘slap happy’, whilst a curator in Stoke-on-Trent wrote that ‘Picasso’s use of slip in broad washes is not altogether happy; it is a painter’s approach and not effective as pottery decoration. Doubtless he felt the limitations of a poor body material and it would be interesting to see what he could do with a good Staf- fordshire earthenware.’13

This defensiveness, a feeling that it is inappropriate for potters who by definition work with clay to ‘play’ with clay, or to allow others to take such liberties, has had excessive significance. But it reflects only one, highly moralised, aspect of the studio pot- tery world. The more visceral approach is exemplified by George 13 Ohr’s almost kinaesthetic description of his experience of clay, G.J.V. Bemrose, ‘Picasso and the Five Towns’, ‘When I found the potter’s wheel I felt it all over like a wild duck in: Pottery and Glass, in water’.14 This can stand for an alternate strand of playfulness. December 1950, pp.61- 3. For other British Play can happen if clay is a primary activity: it is not only a func- reactions to Picasso, tion of liberation from alternative art forms. Interestingly, the see: Tanya Harrod, The Crafts in Britain in descriptions of play are often metamorphic. Here is Ohr’s vivid the 20th Century, New Haven 1999, pp.266- account of the way in which spatial and formal possibilities 71. For European and unfold sequentially when he is making pots on the wheel, ‘This American reactions, see: Edmund de Waal, is what I [can] do, with four pounds of clay on the wheel— 20th Century Ceramics, blindfolded—turn a jug, put a corncob stopper in it, change the London 2003. The most succinct reaction to corncob into a funnel, have the funnel disappear, and have a Picasso’s ‘catalytic’ use of materials is by Arne- jar, change the jar into an urn and half a dozen shapes.’ He is sen, ‘Picasso the Crafts- describing something akin to a performance, to a series of ‘mani- man’, in: Craft Horizons, no.6, Nov-Dec, 1967, festations of lived moments’. The blindfold was part of Ohr’s pp.28-33 fairground performance, but it also reflects the absolute primacy 14 of the bodily over the visual. A parallel can be made with an exhi- Garth Clark et al (ed.), The Mad Potter of bition of Voulkos’ pots in 1968, work characterised by intense Biloxi: The Art and Life slashes and punctures. In a telling critique Jim Melchert wrote of George E. Ohr, New York 1989 that ‘[the] group is composed of the most haptic pottery I’ve seen 58 — 59 in a long time; it wouldn’t surprise me if the pots were made in the dark.’15 Blindfolded, haptic work with clay; this is serious play. It is this element of serious play that allows us to see commonality between some potters and some artists. Being seen by others to be ‘playing’ can be liberating: it enabled them to be transgressive, to muck around with structures of ceramic world. This is what joins Ohr and Voulkos with Miró and Fontana. Miró wrote in his Sur- realist notebook of poems in 1948 that it was ‘plates that are not even signed/not even signed…/plates that are sold/five sous a piece...’ that were alive; their cheapness meant that they were not collectable. Miró was in search of

‘...ceramics that one can throw in the face during ecstasies of LOVE not glass cabinets the colour of tits.. frozen of decadent dancers…’16

This polarisation of the ‘ecstasy’ of ceramics that are alive and ‘frozen porcelains’ was based on the collapsing of the great chain of technical interference of Art Pottery into an immediacy of working with clay.

15 Jim Melchert, ‘Peter Voulkos: A Return to Pottery’, in: Craft Ho- rizons, Sept-Oct, 1968, pp.20-1

16 Quoted in Rosa Marie Malet, ‘From the As- sassination of Painting to Ceramics’, in: Anne McPherson (ed.), Miró Playing with Fire, To- ronto 2000, pp.23-6. Peter Voulkos Untitled Vase, 1963