Paul Mathieu, the Art of the Future: 14 Essays on Ceramics

Paul Mathieu, The Art of the Future: 14 essays on ceramics Preface “The vase gives form to the void, music to silence.” Lao-Tsu Most if not all books about ceramics are of two main types: technical books with an emphasis on processes and materials, equipments and tools or, historical books. These books on the history of ceramics are generally, if not always, organized around geography, where something was made, and chronology, when something was made, as if knowing these specific markers was in itself sufficient for complete knowledge. For this reason, ceramics is understood by just about everyone, by practitioners and lay people alike, in term of expertise and connoisseurship. How, where and when an object was made, and if at all known, by whom, is often perceived as all there is to know about a ceramic object in order to understand its nature and the very important role played by ceramics within culture, as a seminal and essential material of civilization. Although this material may be important and necessary, possibly crucial information, why an object was made is rarely if ever addressed, quite simply, and then often tangentially, as if it was an afterthought. Ceramics is the most important cultural material known to humankind, since the beginning of what is called civilization. This is still true today, although this essential aspect of ceramics role within culture now finds itself usually dismissed or ignored. In other publications, ceramic history is presented as a rather linear and chronological encyclopedic development; generally, the point of view is strongly ethnocentric. The difficulties arising from this method, presenting ceramics within 1 national boundaries, is that it creates an artificial construct from a limited context. A false impression is thus given of the significant contributions of each country in what happens to be a global perspective of ceramics as an autonomous yet universal art form. An unfortunate drawback consists in the search for a parallel with the dominant art form(s) and discourses of each country, to “legitimize”, so to speak, the significant artistic contributions of the ceramic art in question. By doing so, ceramics is relegated to an inferior status, and the real contributions, innovations and precedences are overlooked or ignored or even, dismissed. Geography is also largely irrelevant in ceramics since it is, of all art forms, one of the most universal and as such, its core tenets apply everywhere, indiscriminately. Chronology is also of little importance and significance, if we make abstraction of the concept of style, as I largely do here. Chronology also makes little sense since there are vast differences in technological developments from culture to culture through time, yet the achievements of each culture within the history of ceramics are significant beyond these technological discrepancies. There are a number of books on ceramics in existence whose aim is more philosophical, who look at the cultural aspects of ceramics, but these tend to focus on esthetics or on the history of style, or again on premises that approach making as if it was more informed by political, spiritual or ideological beliefs than by an actual connection to the real life of real people. Various biographies of important artists also exist but again these tend to focus on lifestyles and on rather useless and unnecessary background data, as if the author was filling up the text with superficial information in order to hide the fact that they have nothing substantial to write about. The result is almost always hagiography where we are lead to believe in the importance of the person more than on the contribution of the work, which remains largely unexplained. All recent monographs on ceramic artists I can think of are of this type and they are all basically useless, beyond gossip. They actually provide a great disservice, not only to the artists themselves, but to ceramics itself, as a field. One notable exception remains Philip Rawson’s “Ceramics” which is, if not the only, certainly the most intelligent book written on the subject. Yet, it dates from 1971 and it is showing its age. It suffers from an approach to meaning that is too deeply informed by formalism, the fashionable theoretical framework of the time and it would greatly benefit from an updating. It also misses on a number of opportunities to discuss aspects of ceramics that are in my opinion crucial, its connection to text and language for example, 2 among many. The book also contains a substantial section on the technical aspects of ceramics, information readily available elsewhere, and which feels here again as filler more than necessary material. The main quality of this technical section is that it is reasonably thorough and complete (not totally, though) and that it contains no mistake, something extremely rare in the literature on ceramics where most authors cannot even get the basic techniques, processes, equipments, materials and overall terminology right. Rawson’s book also suffers from the use of an academic language and vocabulary that is not always readily accessible to beginners in the formulation of complex concepts, not all of them useful anyway, and that are not easily grasped. Although still useful, its basic premise is on the formal aspects of ceramics, most notably pottery form (he has precious little to say about ceramics sculpture) which is really only appropriate for the historical material since the system he proposes for the analysis and appreciation of ceramic forms cannot possibly be useful to understand contemporary ceramics art, which has moved beyond the ideals of form and beauty presented in his book. Rawson’s criteria for evaluation of what is good is informed by a “classical” formalism which is largely irrelevant to understand various approaches to form now and all the recent formal developments in ceramic forms. Even as a system to analyze historical forms it remains limited and incomplete. Incompleteness is the curse of the ambitious writer, as it will be certainly for me, here. So if ceramics is largely misunderstood and underappreciated, the fault lies within the field itself, which has done a shoddy job of explaining itself with clarity and in a manner that is accessible to all. I want to propose here a new and quite different model to not only deepen an existing knowledge of ceramics but, most importantly foster a renewed interest and understanding of the contributions ceramics has made to culture and civilization. Ceramics is intrinsically a cultural material with social and historical properties, and not only (as is so often the case now, as we will see in “The Material Esthetics” chapter) a physical material with specific properties and transformative qualities. For this reason, this book will try to avoid technical aspects unless they directly inform the meaning of a work. It will also largely ignore the temporal and local contexts of an object to focus instead on the reasons why this object was made in the first place and how this understanding can generate relevancy and help us not only to understand ceramics better but most importantly make better and more relevant ceramics now and into the future. Again, I do not mean to imply that the temporal and spatial contexts are irrelevant, simply that they are not sufficient to explain fully the meaning of an object, why it came to be made and most importantly why it still speaks to us now. 3 The principal contents of this book were developed through thirty-five years of practice as a potter and as a teacher. They are informed by informal researches generated by curiosity more than scholarship. If I use the thoughts of others without always acknowledging them, I would welcome the perceptive reader to contact me so I can make amend. I am myself a ceramics artist first, a maker of functional and decorative pots informed by a conceptual approach to making since, after all, function and decoration are themselves concepts, something the hegemonic discourses on art history and contemporary art seems to forget. So, I have no pretension to an academic approach to the subject matter. This is first and foremost a subjective book, a very personal, opinionated and idiosyncratic outlook on the field as a whole, from its inception in the Neolithic to today. I am more interested in understanding than in knowledge itself, per se. Knowledge as a system is finite, while experience, practice and understanding are never- ending. One system is closed while the other is open. I am not looking for agreement and acquiescence here. I fully expect that the positions I take will yield disagreement, and I am afraid, misunderstanding as well. If you disagree it may be your fault, if you misunderstand, it will be mine, for not explaining myself clearly. But it is easy to disagree. If you disagree with a position, an argument I defend, then you need to articulate what is YOUR position, why you happen to disagree with mine. If your disagreement toward my analysis yields a clearer understanding of your position, then I will have achieved my goal. The current structure was given final form in a course on the History of Ceramics I taught recently at the Emily Carr University in Vancouver, Canada where I am Associate Professor in the Faculty of Visual and Material Culture. I had given that course before, using the traditional, academic, historical model of a progression through time, traveling historically from place to place, from China to Japan, to Europe and America, through chronological time. Ceramics history was taught to me following such a model, which is the usual model found in the literature as well, and I had found it at the time (and I still do) as basically boring and largely irrelevant.

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