Scoping A Contested Field
Janet Owen Driggs
Offering a widescreen view of contemporary clay-based visual arts in California, Superscope: Clay 2020 at the Cypress College Art Gallery presents seven makers whose works include manifestations of primal desire, sculptural “eye-fooling,” repurposed thrift-store finds, small batch production ceramics, and conceptual explorations of the medium and the thing.
In addition to showcasing the sheer fecundity of a field that is finally receiving some big attention from the art world, Superscope also speaks to the entwined histories of art and craft and the current shape of their 500-year old rivalry, which may just provide a rescue package for the moribund world of the “fine” and the “high.”
“Clay is currently contested, co-occupied territory” says Superscope’s curator, ceramic artist Molly Schulps. Its longest-term residents follow in the footsteps of such mentors as Schulps’s master potter father, John M. Schulps. Valuing technical excellence and the innate properties of the material, these inhabitants build upon centuries of craft tradition to make excellent functional objects that are also often beautiful.
No longer standing alone in the clay field however, the glaze-alchemists and master-throwers have recently been joined by a new generation of art school graduates. Professionalized into the modern fine art tradition that systematically elevated innovation and semantics while devaluing craft-skill, the newcomers are largely unconstrained by a potter’s formal training. Free to explore clay as a versatile addition to the postmodern toolbox, they use it to make non-functional objects that are replete with meaning.
More recently still, a third contingent has made itself felt. Long present in the world of clay but peripheral to its professional center, these are the joyful makers who have what Schulps describes as “a deeply seated desire to play with mud.” Lacking the rigorous training of either the craft potter or the fine artist, the ‘outsider makers’ approach ceramics as a pleasure, a therapy, and/or a hobby. Facilitated by Etsy and Instagram, they now compete with the professionally trained for eyes, buyers, and cultural capital.
This then is the current state of the field of clay: co-occupied by three camps that we can loosely identify as “the traditionalist,” “the elitist,” and “the populist.” In any other discipline, the situation might be a cause for war, but clay world is a famously supportive place. Consequently, while there are tensions, it is more of a neighborhood than a battlefield. Makers regularly pop in to borrow a cup of slip here and an idea there – no one stays in just one camp.
Take, for example, Bari Ziperstein: on the one hand this CalArts-graduate makes unique works in terra cotta and stoneware that are shown in prestigious art venues, most recently New York’s Charles Moffett Gallery; on the other, she is the founder and creative director of BZippy & Co, a fashion-forward design company producing ceramic vessels, lamps, and furniture. Or consider the partnership of painter Kat Hutter and potter Roger Lee, who met while studying art at graduate school. Their functional output retails at blue chip art gallery Hauser and Wirth, while their sculptural installations have been shown at the L. A. Arboretum and the Pasadena Museum of California Art.
More than just a question of skipping between disciplines as opportunity knocks however, the phenomenon that Superscope highlights is a matter of recombination. The works on display show what can happen when artists use the ideas, values, and assumptions of one tradition to challenge and enliven those of another.
Take, for example, Chris Dufala’s shiny sculptures, which mimic functional objects: a piano, a projector, a tricycle. He builds them using ‘real world’ blueprints and their level of verisimilitude is uncanny. Like the red balloon in It, these artworks are powerful carriers of metaphor and memory. Unlike other artists who have worked in the trompe l'oeil tradition however, Dufala does not aim for seamless illusion. Instead, his objects reveal discrepancies: sometimes it is a matter of scale, sometimes a question of surface – the piano keys look as if they are made from sheet steel for instance. Less frequently, where clay has shrunk to reveal its glaze-skin, the fabric makes itself known.
Dufala’s objects bring the west’s long obsession with illusion and narrative into play alongside its more recent obverse: modernist formalism. Together these tendencies probe a belief that has long been cherished by artist and crafter alike: the conviction that truth exists in the ‘stuff’ of the world. There is no truth to be found in this material, Chris’s piano seems to say, and no greater honesty in the handmade; all is fiction.
Clay and honesty have a long history together. Having a deep respect for “what the material is,” traditional craftspeople tend to feel that it is dishonest to hide “the fine thing that is clay.”[1] For Amy Santoferraro however, clay’s defining characteristic – its most fine thing – is its ability to masquerade.
Combining her handmade ceramic pieces with cheap-as-chips consumer objects, Santoferraro’s egalitarian installations challenge the viewer’s perception. “Her execution in detail is wonderful,” says curator Molly Schulps, and it is near-impossible to tell which parts of the whole are handmade and which are mass-produced. More than just a guessing game though, Amy’s work engages a conversation about art and objects that is still triangulated by William Morris’s rejection of industrial production, Minimalism’s rejection of meaning, and Pop’s embrace of consumption. Far from taking sides however, Santoferraro cites them all to articulate a particularly contemporary ambivalence. As Schulps explains: “It's like seeing endless objects at the Dollar Tree…Amy repurposes them to create new forms. A new language, if you will. It makes complete sense [on a formal level] and it speaks to this massive consumption we see and take part of.”
In contrast to Santoferraro and Dufala’s schooled surfaces, Kim Tucker brings an expressionist ethos to clay. The artist describes her simultaneously sweet and abject figurines as “primal beings, ghosts, and human dummies.” Made using sphere, ovoid, and tube forms which look as though they were rolled by small hands on a kitchen table, the figures suggest themselves as spontaneous expressions of the artist’s psyche. For Kim, they invite viewers to find “humor, beauty, and spiritual truths in our own imperfections.” For Schulps, “the relatability of the forms, from the lumpy surfaces to their pattern and color, creates a connection.”
For almost two-centuries, western art has equated “primitive” surfaces and awkward lines with sincerity and truth-telling. In craft world, and for far longer, the same characteristics have indicated shoddy workmanship. Tucker’s seeming lack of skill is a thing of appearances only, however. By instrumentalizing her surfaces, refusing to offer visible veneration to the craft skill gods, and insisting that self-expression and truth-seeking are not exclusive to fine arts media, Tucker abuts two very different definitions of the “imperfect” and the “well-made.”
If the appearance of clumsiness is truly a mark of authenticity, then what should we make of K&R Ceramics elegant high-fire stoneware, which Roger throws and Kat hand paints with geometric designs that evoke a mid-century modern aesthetic? “Roger's vessels are clearly masterful,” said Schulps. “Kat then seamlessly finishes the forms with her incredible sense of design…Their forms come together as a unified vessel.”
Perhaps more than any of the other artists included in Superscope, Kat and Roger live the kind of life associated with William Morris. Rejecting the prevailing art/craft divide, this 19th century British socialist argued that, because all human-made things are expressions of the human spirit, they are all art. Daily engagement with making and using beautiful useful things, said Morris, lets the human spirit self-actualize; but working in a factory as a cog in a production line, crushes it. Condemning the fierce inequality and alienation of the industrial age, Morris promoted labor relations that engaged workers in designing and making objects from start to finish, usually by hand. To this end, he developed a studio-based production model that has influenced makers ever since.
For poet Rose Slivka, who edited the American Crafts Council magazine in the 1960s and 70s, “the good making of good things” was “a palpable chain through which each human being touches the other.” Similarly echoing the Morris ethos, Kat and Roger have described their objects as: “a result of the love for two different mediums, paint and clay…[and] a true expression of us as people and as partners.”[2]
Thinking about “the good making of good things,” Schulps observed that “one of the things that was really cool in the ‘60s and ‘70s was the pottery houses that were popping up. Edith Heath started “Heath” and they are still running as a full ceramic production facility, and when my dad began, he had a slew of employees…What we see now though are people working on a smaller scale, maybe with only one employee.” An exception to the contemporary shrinkage is BZippy. “Bari actually employees 6 people fulltime!” said Schulps, “that's just incredible.”[3]
BZippy is, said Ziperstein, “a fully fuctional business.”[4] It grew out of Bari’s desire to find a way to support herself at a time when the traditional artist-teacher career path had largely disappeared. Occupying a 33,000 square foot space in East Los Angeles, her still-growing company currently provides its 6-employees, all of whom are artists, with medical benefits and professional development opportunities.
Referencing both California’s convention-challenging clay history and the broader histories of the modern era, Ziperstein’s work divides into two main categories: production ceramics that are characterized by intersecting industrial forms, often in a single color; and multi-colored sculptural artworks that deploy images from Soviet-era propaganda and the geometries of Russian Constructivism.
While the ideologies of the pro-industrial, materialist Constructivists are often placed in opposition to those of the anti-industrial, pro-spirit William Morris, these art titans all wanted the same thing: to use art to transform daily life along egalitarian lines. In its cog, pipe, and gasket forms, in the system she has set up to produce them, and in her interrogation of Soviet ideology, Ziperstein’s work speaks to an overriding interest in constructing beneficial relationships between the individual human ‘part’ and the socio-economic ‘whole.’
Like Ziperstein, Nicole Seisler uses clay for the kinds of intellectual investigations that modern culture ringfenced for fine art. Take Preparing for example, its orange-colored marks made directly on the wall are traces left by wedging: the repetitive action, something like kneading bread dough, by which air pockets are broken up and clay is turned into a workable uniform mass. Similarly turning process into product, each work in Holding Patterns takes a single slab of wedged clay as its starting point. A shelf is cut from the slab and the leftover scraps of clay are then glaze-fused to the shelf. “In essence,” Nicole has written, “the function of each shelf is to display the discarded parts of itself.”[5]
Deploying strategies that are more commonly associated with the discourse-driven arenas of conceptual, performance, and relational art, Seisler explores clay as material, process, experience, and interaction. She also “runs a project space...and writes about current practices with an insightful and contemplative voice. She is,” said Schulps, “a force to be reckoned with.”
“I believe in change, expansion, openness, and in the increasing plurality of the ceramic field within the larger context of contemporary art,” wrote Nicole in 2019. “But if I’m being truly honest, change is slow (painfully so).” [6] The pace is not helped, she has suggested, by the neighborhood ceramics studios that “are popping up like mushrooms after a rainstorm.” For, while they increase the number of people who have access to clay, they do not equip them with the curiosity and criticality they need to go beyond a superficial engagement with the medium. “Go on Instagram or Etsy and you’ll see countless cylinders…Perhaps it’s because the cylinder is easy…Whatever the reason, these functional wares do not strive beyond the starting point.”[7]
The positions identified at the start of this essay are, of course, falsely exclusive. Criss-crossing the territory between them, the artists included in Superscope bring values, traditions, and practices from the fine arts to craft, and vice versa; while all employ, to one degree or another, the same digital outreach tools as their hobbyist neighbors. Clay world is a fascinating and fertile place right now, as expertise from all its populations meet, folding together two aspects of human manufacture that have been (artificially) separated in the west for 500-years.
But there is more going on here than a disinterested realignment of the art/craft relationship. While the Superscope artists are enjoying the increased attention that clay-based work is receiving from gallerists and curators, some also have reservations. What, they wonder, might be lost if their medium is absorbed into the world of fine art? And what is it that the art world hopes to gain?
A recent embrace of craft by the College Art Association (CAA) points to some likely answers to that last question. Although the CAA’s annual conference has been an important talking shop and hiring fair for the fine art academy for over a century, the 2018 conference in Los Angeles was most notable for its many craft-focused panels, including: “Craft: Unsettling Hierarchies,” “Craft in an Anxiety Age,” and “Touch and tooling: a social and historical perspective on craft and engagement in contemporary ceramics.”[8] Speaking to art writer Jori Finkel, art historian Dr. Jenni Sorkin described the CAA’s new craft focus as an “attempt to reach a broader base of art historians, at a time when the conference is seen as less crucial for academic job seekers.”[9]
The CAA and its conference are currently experiencing a crisis of relevance. Not only since, as Sorkin noted, job seekers are “now more likely to interview over skype,” but because, as Bari Ziperstein understood when she set up BZippy, the art academy has been systematically gutted over the past 35-years.[10] Reorganized along corporate lines, the majority of art and art history departments are now overwhelmingly staffed by contingent professors, who are neither interviewed at CAA, nor offered the institutional support necessary for conference participation.[11]
But fine art’s crisis of relevance stretches way beyond a fading academic conference. While museum and gallery visits dropped by 16.8% in the decade 2002-2012, with attendance growing only among people aged 75-years and older, “over half of all American adults attended a live visual or performing arts activity in 2012…71 percent…used electronic media to watch or listen to art; 44 percent created, practiced, performed, edited, or remixed art; and 51 percent attended a live visual or performing arts event.” [12] Clearly it is not art in general but ‘Art’ of the high and fine varieties that is in decline.
There are probably a lot of reasons for this decline – the near-erasure of art from public K-12 education comes to mind – but there is one, older than the rest, that is particularly relevant to this exhibition. Its roots grow in the soil of the early Renaissance, when a few symbolic items with no utilitarian purpose were given a higher value than the mass of handmade objects. This is when cultural production in the west began an inexorable drift away from relevance to the many.
Although generations of artists have worked hard to shrink the resulting gap between art and life – William Morris and the Constructivists among them – the numbers suggest that the gap is as wide as ever it was. Or, as LA-based group F..k The Art Market puts it, “Art is not for everyone. At best, it’s a circle-jerk among an intellectual elite who have the visual literacy necessary to ‘speak art.’ At worst, it’s…just another way for the filthy rich to get filthier and richer.”[13]
Question: What does the art world hope to gain by embracing clay? Answer: A bridge between the exclusive and excluding world of Art, and the accessible joys of playing with mud. Best case outcome: building on the egalitarian efforts of Morris et al, that bridge will enable art to become more widely viewed and used as a tool to improve the human condition. Worst case scenario: what the artworld is building is less a bridge than a canulla, a tube through which to transfuse the joy, authenticity, and popularity of clay world into its own moribund body.
In addition to demonstrating that reality, as usual, sits somewhere between the extremes, Superscope, Clay 2020 suggests that the future is recombinant. The biological process of recombination, which is also known as genetic shuffling, produces an offspring that is different from both of its parents. Shuffling the different histories, traditions, values, and markets of their ‘parent’ art and craft worlds, the artists in Superscope are doing the thing that artists are really good at – making exciting objects from what is available, stretching existing possibilities, and generating new ones. For now, the traits of the parents are still evident; but give it time. Something new and different, something ‘not art’ and ‘not craft,’ is coming soon.
Footnotes
[1] Edmond de Forrest Curtis, Pottery: its Craftsmanship and its Appreciation, Harper, New York, 1940, p. 61
[2] Kat Hutter, Roger Lee, exhibition text, December 2019
[3] Molly Schulps, in email communication with the author, California, 1/25/2020
[4] Bari Ziperstein, in conversation with the author, California, 1/31/2020
[5] Nicole Seisler, in email communication with the author, California, 1/31/2020
[6] Nicole Seisler, “Mediums in Crisis,” Board of Photography, Accessed 02/01/2020, boardofphotography.com
[7] Ibid.
[8] College Art Association, CAA Annual Conference Schedule, 2018, Accessed 02/03/2020, https://conference2018.collegeart.org
[9] Jori Finkel, “Scholars weave craft into the art history canon at College Art Association,” The Art Newspaper, 2018, Accessed 02/05/2020, www.theartnewspaper.com
[10] Ibid.
[11] “73% of all faculty positions in US colleges and universities are contingent workers who are off the tenure track,” American Association of University Professors, Data Snapshot, 2018, Accessed 02/02/2020 www.aaup.org/sites/default/files/10112018%20Data%20Snapshot%20Tenure.pdf
[12] US Office of Research & Analysis, A Decade of Arts Engagement: findings from the survey of public participation in the arts, 2002–2012, by Bohne Silber and Tim Triplett, Washington, 2015 www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/2012-sppa-feb2015.pdf (Accessed 02/06/2020)
[13] Alessandor Earnest, Terri Lloyd, “Home,” F-ck the Art Market (Accessed 02/02/2020) www.fucktheartmarket.com
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Images
Clockwise from top left: Amy SANTOFERRARO: Scrubbers, 2019, ceramic, wood, polyester, found materials, 2019; Nicole SEISLER: Holding Patterns 3, 2019, glazed clay; Bari ZIPERSTEIN: XL Ruffle Planter, stoneware and glaze, 10.75” x 15.5”; Kim TUCKER: Pleasure Sun Family, clay and glaze, 2019; Chris DUFALA: Tried and True, 2018 , earthenware, glaze, stain, enamel paint, metal, 22 x 28 x 18”; K+R CERAMICS (Kat and Roger): Vessel, hand-painted, high-fired stoneware.