DOCUMENTS 

In this section are presented a group of writings - culled from diverse sources usually with limited availability – that, when viewed together, constitute a body of literature which supports and enlightens the subject of confrontational ceramics as an art form.  They are reproduced for those seeking a further exploration of the issues raised by the work shown in this book.  

“Clay Incarnate,” Clay Bodies: Barry Bartlett, Peter Gourfain, Arnie Zimmerman,  Catalog essay by Judy Collischan,  Neuberger Museum of Art, State University of New York, 1999.

………… Pioneers like Peter Voulkos, Paul Soldner, Viola Frey, Stephen de Staebler, Robert Arneson, Mary Frank, Jun Kaneko, John Mason, Ron Nagle and others produced new work with clay that challenged its iden­tification with and accompanying vilification as craft. Subsequently, other artists emerged with their own agendas for clay as art. In a manner par­alleling other ancient and historical civilizations' creations of clay objects for ritualistic, spiritual and communicative purposes, our culture has begun to produce clay works as fine art objects aimed toward a contemplative, aesthetic existence.

Figuration in clay has been in some ways even more heretical than abstraction. An emphasis upon pure form seemed a smooth step from the contour lines and shapes of enclosure of utilitarian ceramic ware. Interjection of the human body further asserted the independence of art created from clay.

The three artists in this exhibition use the figure in various ways. Peter Gourfain uses it to perpetrate a social and political viewpoint; Arnie Zimmerman approaches moralistic themes; while Barry Bartlett deals with fantasy in the format of tableau. All three have literary as well as cultural and philosophical bents. The work of this trio also bears a relationship with art of former eras.

Of the three, Peter Gourfain has used figurative imagery in clay for the longest period. After graduating from the Art Institute of Chicago, Gourfain came to New York City, where, in the 1960s, he began to show sculpture that was Minimalist and structural in character. Within the next decade, he decided to carve imagery on wooden beams arranged in a round and open formation. This concept that he called Roundabout, formed, in a sense, a basis for subsequent three-dimensional work in his arrangement of sequential imagery moving around outer perimeters. Possible physical damage from inhaling wood dust caused him to turn to terra cotta pan­els that he set into the wooden structure.

In the late seventies, he created a series of large urns that were paint­ed and built up on the outside, and sometimes the interior, with imagery expressive of human existence and struggle, especially conflicts between the various good and evil sides of humankind. Figures straining and toil­ing as they tug at ropes seem to pull together for their very survival.

The earlier woodcarvings relate, in part, to stone carvings on Medieval and Romanesque cathedrals, while the vase narratives have been compared to those of the ancient Greeks. In spite of these parallels with the artistic styles of former times, Gourfain's work has focused on current political issues in a manner parallel to the manner in which Christianity fueled the artistic imaginations of artists in earlier western civilizations. For example, one theme, The Fate of the Earth (1984-98) has to do with various means mankind has used to manipulate and destroy our natural environment in spite of its inherent beauty and indispensability. Depicted in both is the eco­logical destruction of humans pitting themselves against their environs— of war versus art, hunters killing animals and of marauders massacring the vanquished. This work exists in several versions. Originally it was a pair of doors inset with clay panels that are in this exhibition. Eventually, the pan­els were also cast in bronze.

The format of the panels is not unlike Romanesque and Early Ren­aissance reliefs, particularly the bronze doors of the Pisano brothers and Ghiberti, wherein perspective is indicated partially through receding and protruding forms that move back into and out beyond panel frames. Like the historical examples, Gourfain juxtaposes the flowing motion of linear patterns with volumetric projections. For example, the intertwined rhythm of deer antlers relates to the tangled trajectories of auto-packed freeways, in contrast to the preponderant bodies of a nesting pelican, falling log and diving fish.

An unusual format utilized by this artist is a carved ceramic hand. In this exhibition there are large-and small-scale versions, ranging from several inches to eight feet in height. Gourfain uses the human hand and its associations with handwork and art to carve sign language done with the hands and relief scenes along the wrist and upper arm. The fingers become characters involved in a narration having to do with the artist's own political philosophy about human conduct and values. The subject of the larger work, called Powerful Days, is the Civil Rights movement. The smaller hand, called Mamarojo (1997), depicts Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Robert and John Kennedy, referring to major leaders in the Civil Rights effort.

The large urn continues in Gourfain's repertoire with his latest work Font (1999) a carved pot that is begun with thickly built-up walls forming the ground for figurative forms cut into the clay. Characterized by a pulsat­ing movement of figures surging around the surface, the title itself indi­cates a purification process, a receptacle, a fountain or source. In Gourfain's work, whether it is painted or carved, there is a sense of energetic, coursing movement around and over a surface. Moreover, there is a continuing sense of renewal—a vigorous affirmation of human foibles and fables and dogged, determined expurgatorial impulse.

Arnie Zimmerman's stoneware works have dealt with exaggerated scale, writhing shapes and representational imagery since his years as a graduate student at Alfred University. His first excursions into massive, masculine and monumental vessels extended the notion of traditional, functional form—that of the vase, into the realm of contemporary sculp­ture. The large versions of the 1980s ranged up to eight or nine feet in height. Important to his subsequent development is the sense of architec­tonic scale embodied in these vessels. Also inherent in these pots—in their overall configuration as well as their surface lines and forms—is a complex, curvilinear motif that creates a sense of dynamic energy. In the latter part of the eighties, he turned to building arches, adding another architectural reference to his oeuvre.

Relative to the vessels was his evolution in the nineties of a fountain series. An example, Dry Fountain (1991) preserves a circular formation but spreads over the floor. Most recently, his functional fountains bear resem­blances in outer configuration, swirling external currents of form and verti­cal orientation to the giant vases. Water is pumped to the top and allowed to trickle down the sides for recycling. The fountains, even more than the vases, can be related to an architectural environment, specifically a square or courtyard where one might find such a structure.

Another source for his interest in fountains and subsequent figura­tive imagery, can be traced to his several residencies in Lisbon, where he became interested in Portuguese tile work. In particular, he was fascinated not only with the tiles but also the Manueline style of architecture dating back to the late 15th century. This unusual architectural format features exaggerated and grotesque plants and creatures. Inspired by a period of Portugal's dominance in sea trade and plunder, this form of architecture reflects maritime themes and exotic places. Twisting, turning, elaborated forms attracted this artist who was already involved with curvilinear pat­terns in his vases. Another influential discovery was a reservoir spanning 941 meters for Lisbon's 18th century aqueducts. The concept of flowing liquid echoes the movement of Manueline architecture and Zimmerman's own inclination for swirling, fluctuating movement.

The tile work Zimmerman created in the late 1980s and early 1990s appeared whimsical and decorative in character; it was abstract, yet sug­gestive of fantastic beings. These fanciful designs form a basis for this art­ist's most recent foray into figurative sculpture. This work, represented by the monumental Fools' Congress, Part Two (1999) represents Zimmerman's current interest in vertical forms capped by heads that relate organic trunk-stalks to human life. Somewhere between insect, plant and human, these forms are joined by limbs or tendrils that function as tubular con­nectors. Reminiscent of the work of Hieronymous Bosch or at times, Pieter Bruegel, this work exhibits Zimmerman's fascination with exaggeration and the bizarre. This impulse is in line with the grotesque, a decorative form of art that intertwines elements from human, animal and foliage sources. The resultant creatures in his Congress are interconnected in tiers as though caught in a common web of their own growth and existence. Lined up as though for a class picture or assembled as a delegation, the incredible creatures seem ugly, yet harmless. There is a blend of humor with deformity as these characters seem to clamor and chatter among them­selves. The din is an unearthly one that we nevertheless identify as partly human. In this work, Zimmerman combines anthropomorphic form with a moralizing content that relates a lesson about pretense and folly. He epit­omizes this ethical passage via a three-dimensional satire. An amazing tech­nical feat in clay, this complexity of seething shapes recalls the ebullience of the vases and fountains. In fact, the trunks bear resemblance to the vessel shape, as though many small vases grew tentacles and heads, join­ing in a macabre chorus.

…………. The work of each of these artists extends the possibilities inherent in the clay medium as it is able to give life to concept.  In the case of Peter Gourfain, there is an actualization of personal beliefs; Arnie Zimmerman manifests a moral significance; and Barry Bartlett embodies a romantic, open-ended story.  These artists invest clay bodies with human nature as well as form.

 “The Aesthetics of Mechanical Ruin.”  Steven Montgomery: Broken. Catalog essay, Arthur C. Danto, Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, NYC: 2005. 

Steven Montgomery belongs in the category of "vision­ary ceramist" — a term I recently coined to designate artists who use clay as a means to the realization of visions. Characteristically, these realizations demand a scale that transcends that of ceramic utensils, which imply a relationship to the human body, which will in the course of life interact with them — pouring, lifting, trans­porting, storing, and the like. Visions, by contrast, imply the human imagination, so that visionary ceramics is cognitive rather than practical, and often philosophical, providing a picture of the world and our place in it. Since modernist art was defined as strict adherence to the limits of a given medium, the visionary ceramist is post-modernist by default, since the limits of the medi­um are in his or her view merely de facto — obstacles to be gotten around when the imperatives of the vision calls for alternative ways and means. The visionary ceramist will, in the nature of the case, have mastered the repertoire of skills traditional to ceramics as a craft — throwing, molding, firing, glazing, for example — but the demands of art trump the constraints of craft, which will be subverted as the occasion demands.

Finally, the visionary ceramist exploits clay for its remarkable plasticity, but the aesthetics of the visionary work is ancillary to the vision it conveys, in which the properties of clay may not figure at all.

Montgomery has stated that "the aesthetics of damage, fragility, and the passage of time" are specific to his present body of work. Clay in its nature is fragile and subject to damage. When dry, it crumbles, when baked it is easily broken. It is a natural metaphor for mortality and temporality, as when Shakespeare writes, "Kingdoms are clay," or writes in Hamlet that "Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay, Might stop a hole to keep the wind away." In Biblical idiom, clay alternates with dust as a poetic synonym for mortal flesh. But in Montgomery's work, the aesthetic derives from the vision embodied in the work, and not from the medium in which the work is realized. The aesthetics of his work is in no sense the aesthetics of clay but rather, I shall claim, the aesthetics of the ruin, conveying the kind of poetry that the concept of the ruin acquired in the eighteenth century, when the discipline of aesthetics was invented, but transformed to suit the differences between that era and our own.

The classical ruin was the paradigm motif in eighteenth century art. The conjunction of the ruin with decline and fall is made explicit in a famous passage in Edward Gibbon's Autobiography: "It was in Rome, on the 15th of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefoot friars were singing ves­pers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first entered to my mind." Goethe, portrayed by Tischbein as musing alongside the tomb of Caecilia Metella on the Via Appia, is the para­digm eighteenth century poet and thinker, whose mind was fixed on matters of "damage, fragility, and the pas­sage of time.” The paintings of ruins by Hubert Robert and Giovanni Paolo Pannini, purchased and brought home by travelers on the Grand Tour, served as roman­tic souvenirs of philosophical moments passed in the presence of broken columns and fallen architraves. The engravings of Piranesi conveyed through their exag­gerated proportions the irrecoverable grandeur of the civilization that erected the Colosseum, the aqueducts, the Forum, and the Pantheon. The eighteenth century gardens were ornamented with artificial ruins, to afford leisured aristocrats poetic occasions to ponder the brevity of earthly existence and the irresistibility of change. In a sense, Montgomery's pieces are artificial ruins for a twenty-first century sensibility.

An artist bent on conveying the aesthetics of "damage, fragility and the passage of time" to contemporary view­ers must find a contemporary equivalent to the ruin. Obviously, the classical ruin has lost its power to affect this, and though a visionary ceramist could readily enough shape clay in the form of columns and capitals and even sarcophagi, most of us lack the culture to be affected through them by thoughts of "damage, fragility, and the passage of time." Montgomery is a native of Detroit, Michigan, where the standing ruins of the great automobile factories in Highland Park or on Piquette Avenue in Detroit's east side, speak far more eloquently of decline and fall than what modern travelers see from the espresso bars on the Valentine hill in Rome. What he found as the vehi­cle of his vision is something with the implicit aesthetics of the classical ruin, but using con­temporary motifs, namely pieces of contemporary machinery fallen into a condition of desuetude. The fallen state of his machinery is able to do this because of the implied aesthetics of the machines when they were functioning the way they were designed to do.

As I see it, the implicit aesthetic of the classical ruin consists of lost beauty and vanished power. These were the attributes of the tragic hero in classical drama. The ancient theorists felt that the reversal of fortune unfolded in the course of the tragedy had to happen to a hero or heroine despite his or her immense initial advantages. It had to be the fall of the mighty, of the seemingly favored of the gods, if tragedy was to have the anticipated effect on those who came to watch the downfall of Oedipus or Orestes, and leave the theater purged and cleansed. Rome could not have fallen so low had its political shadow not covered so wide a region of the world. It was the irony of those barefoot, ignorant friars, singing amid the remains of the greatest of empires that moved Gibbon to narrate in detail the "vicissitudes of fortune which buries empires and cities in a common grave."

Montgomery has selected for his motifs pieces of engi­neering that serve in daily life as emblems of beauty and power — the high compression engines of swift and powerful automobiles and the doors of secure and powerful vaults where treasures are stored. These connect with two central points to modern cinema — the chase and the bank robbery. But the once impenetrable vault is crippled, the high-speed engine is stilled. They are con­temporary ruins, turned to rust. The lock is sprung, the cylinders are frozen. The symbols of strength and speed have fallen into the condition of eloquent junk. Montgomery's magic as a ceramist consists in the way in which he disguises the fact that these effigies of dis­integration are made of clay at all. He has created the illusion of actual mechanisms salvaged from dumps and displayed like memento mori— engines of might and strength deprived through evident decay of the power to do anything but stir the viewer with the pathos of power's irrecoverable loss. The biblical occasion for such feelings is expressed in the Book of Ecclesiastes: "the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be bro­ken, or the pitcher broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern." (xii, 1) The contemporary equiv­alent is: " the V-8 engine is rusted or the steel door is shattered beyond repair and the treasures it protected have vanished" We feel as if we are in the presence of relics of everything the technological spirit covets but now in a state of mechanical impotency, like the rusted cannon or the destroyed tank.

The transfiguration of clay into vision is not the only illu­sion in Montgomery's work. He is often described as a master of trompe I'oeil — an optical deceit that induces a false perceptual belief. The deception consists in believing that we are seeing a reality when we are seeing an imitation that dupes the eye. A standard case is painting a piece of paper currency so skillfully that we believe so strongly that it is a piece of paper cur­rency that our impulse is to soak it off and spend it. I don't think that people are primarily fooled by Montgomery's pieces into thinking that they are looking at an object made of forged or pressed metal. We are, I think, fooled instead into believing that we are looking at skillful imitations of real mechanisms in various states of decrepitude. But it is not in truth that he has repli­cated an actual automobile engine, or a rusted pipe, or a devastated door to a large safe. What he has pro­duced are convincing fantasies of such objects. There are no actual objects that he has, so to speak, lugged back to the studio and portrayed in clay. They are fabri­cations through and through. The illusion pivots on the fact that most of us have a fairly superficial idea of what powerful engines look like. Our knowledge of vault doors comes primarily from movies of scary heists. Expert plumbers, automotive engineers, or locksmiths, would know that there is something wrong. The rest of us are swept into the kinds of fancies that those who gazed upon ruins underwent when they had little knowledge of architecture or the history of architecture. Montgomery's sculptures are industrial fictions. Thinking of them as mere copies of reality spoils half the pleasure of looking at them.

Consider Re-entrance of 2001, an as-if rust clad safe door, with its inner works exposed. Next to a keypad, which implies a combination and an electronically activated latch, we see a system of ornamental gear wheels connected with delicate metal belts that looks like the works from a Nuremberg clock made in the sev­enteenth century. Keypad and clockworks belong to incompatible technologies. The word "EMERGENCY" is stamped onto two plates, both screwed into the assem­bly, but meaning precisely what? There are emergency exits — but how can the doors of safes be emergency doors? The ravaged doors, hung on massive hinges, actually look as if they belonged to some medieval fortress, too powerfully wrought to be emergency exits (which would probably be inconspicuous doors, hidden behind tapestries, leading into tunnels or other romantic escape routes.) On the right hand door, corresponding to the lock assembly, is what looks like a letter slot. There is a spirit of irony and spoof expended on a pseudo monumental object of dubious manufacture. It looks forbidding and factitious. In Re-Entrance No. 2, he has fabricated chromium fittings, not to mime reality but to use the familiar anti-rust property of chromium to com­ment on the body of the door, so rust-riddled that it looks as worm-eaten. Only its ornamental fittings have escaped the desolation.

Static Fuel is an engine from a visionary novel called Atlas Shrugged written by Ayn Rand. It is a non-internal combustion engine — just the kind of engine the world needs today — but since there is only a fictional proto­type, Montgomery was liberated to make an engine up, with manifolds and flywheels, gears and worm screws of implausible effectiveness. It carried a serial number — 44820 — and would fool anyone into thinking it an exhib­it from the Museum of Abandoned Mechanisms, some­what the worse for wear. But everything in Montgomery oeuvre is designed not as a piece of machinery meant to run, but as a piece of art meant to convey the idea of fallen machinery, with all sorts of winks to the viewer, conveying the truth that it probably couldn't have worked if it were real.

The question in the end is what explanatory narrative we are to project in explanation of how these seemingly once powerful machines fell into their present ruined condition. What story do they tell, what lesson do they convey? Edward Gibbon saw in the ruins of Rome the triumph, as he put it, of Christianity and barbarism. Shelley saw in his imagined pair of stone legs standing in the desert a mockery of the message "Look on my works ye mighty, and despair!" — the lesson that the ruin is the destiny of earthly power. One possible narra­tive might be based on the fact that Montgomery was inspired by the great murals of industrial Detroit by Diego Rivera, painted in the early 1930s in the Renaissance Court of the Detroit Institute of Art. One wall depicts the manufacture of the 1932 Ford V-8 engine, a beautiful piece of engineering, shown by Rivera being turned out in an endless stream on the assembly line by heroically posed workers. America was just entering the early phases of the Great Depression, but in 1932 Detroit's future, and more than that, the future of the automobile industry looked bright. Who knew that the paradigm vehicle of the thirties was to be not the shining V-8, but the rusting jalopy, carrying Dust-Bowl families that had abandoned their farms to search of work elsewhere? Rivera's murals, which aroused considerable political controversy in their time, were commissioned by Edsel Ford. The scene was Ford's River Rouge plant in Dearborn, where Rivera did his research. Like Montgomery, I grew up in Detroit, and was even taken as a little boy to see Rivera at work. I recall soup kitchens on Woodward Avenue, near my father's office, and visits to the Ford plant with my class­mates as a schoolboy. And I particularly recall the auto­mobile shows at the General Motors Building. It is pos­sible to imagine that that Montgomery's mechanical ruins are ironic comments on the progressivist ideology of our city, indeed of our country. But that surely cannot be the whole of his meaning.

Perhaps the narrative is one of obsolescence. The most advanced machinery today will give way to more advanced machinery still. It will be left behind by the relentless advance of technology. So much of the machinery that Rivera showed has given way to new generations of forges and presses, and the engine blocks that were the latest things became quaint has-beens of scrap metal, unless lucky enough to serve as exhibits in automotive museums, where viewers in the know marvel at their crudeness. However fast, pow­erful, and efficient the engine, it will be left behind by the faster, the stronger, the more efficient. So it is aban­doned to rust amid the weeds. Viewing it we are touched. And we think — we are like the machines. The V-8 is us. The aesthetics of decay, fragility, and the passage of time is our own destiny. The machine is a mirror, the way the ruins finally were, when Rome became a metaphor for our common destiny. That is the poetry of Montgomery's work. The fun of the work is intended to keep us from getting carried away by it.

“The New Climate,” Robin Cembalest. ARTnews, November 2001, Volume 100, No.10, New York, p 147
…………………………..The quality most likely to offend these days is not perceived obscenity but patriotic incorrectness, as Politically Incorrect’s Bill Maher discovered after he dispar­aged the U.S. military on his television program. The last Whit­ney Biennial featured an installation by Hans Haacke called Sanitation, a comment on the "Sensation" controversy. It in­cluded motifs evoking Nazi Germany, and while it didn't come out and actually label the mayor a fascist, it came close. It's hard to imagine we'll be seeing work quite so pointedly critical of our leaders, at least in mainstream venues, for a while.
New art that reflects our current times and conflicts is already germinating in studios, as Barbara Pollack reports. For if, as she writes, the initial response to a tragedy like the one we have suffered is, How can you think about making art at a time like this, it's not long before the answer becomes apparent: How can you not?

Nakamura, Kimpei.  “Ceramics: Transcending Fine Art with the Fascination of Compositeness and Ambiguity: Japanese Postwar Ceramic Sculpture, International Ceramic Symposium, 2001, Korea.” Tokyoware: My Work, My Theory: Born of the Struggle between Japanese Culture and Western Modernism.  Japan: Bijutsu, 2005.

To deal with the subject of the development of "Ceramics and  Sculpture" in postwar Japan, I have sought to bring together a number of writings on the subject and my own personal statements as a creator of ceramic works.

I was born the third generation heir to a traditional ceramics kiln in Kanazawa, a city of 460,000 on the Japan Sea Coast of Japan's main island. It is a city with a 400-year history in the various traditional crafts and one that has borne witness to the fact that arts that lose an eye for contemporary realities quickly become hollow forms without meaning. Being of the young generation that were encouraged to create with our own hands the new culture that was transforming Japan in the wake of the Second World War, I entered the sculpture department of a Kanazawa art university with the intention of becoming a person with the powers of expression. I was soon to lose interest, however, in the extremely academic sculpture training there and decided to quit the university after just one year. Finding that I was in fact more attracted to the pottery of Rosanjin Kitaoji than I was to Western sculpture, I then entered a period of apprenticeship at Japanese restaurant Rosanjin had been involved with, in hopes of deepening my understanding of the Japanese cultural tradition of the intricate and expressive relationship between pottery and cuisine. It was with the aesthetic values I acquired there that I began making pottery myself.

Forty years have passed since that time. These forty years, which include as one of their pivotal events my transition from a Creator of ceramic vessels to a creator of 3-dimensional works of ceramic art (I refrain from using the term sculpture), provide a personal background for dealing with this theme of "Ceramics and Sculpture." These forty years also correspond almost exactly with the historical period known as Japan's postwar era. These forty years are also defined by an unprecedented cultural transformation sparked by the war defeat that directly preceded them. That cultural revolution brought with it a consciousness of social problems and a tendency to turn a critical eye to the ways of the times. This in turned aided those involved in creative activities to form their own posture or philosophical attitude with regard to their work that is so important but often difficult to realize.  Finally, the closing years of these four decades brought the IT revolution as a defining element of the approaching 21st century. And, with it, came the feeling that the very point of departure in the act of creating works of ceramics, the natural assumption of it as an act of "using the hands and clay to make things," was sud­denly being undermined.

Returning to the theme of "Ceramics and Sculpture," it should be noted that the latter of these two, sculpture, did not exist in Japan 100 years ago. No name for it existed and neither the concept nor its actual manifestations.  In fact, "Fine Arts" itself was one of the many institutions introduced into Japan for the first time from the West as part of the government's program of modernization. Therefore, it is also something that has existed in Japan for only about a century.

In conjunction with the opening of Japan at the beginning of our Meiji Period, genre divisions like "painting," "sculpture" and "crafts" were suddenly imposed on us without regard for the cre­ative genre that had existed in Japan since ancient times, or their relation to our country's history. In other words, the point of departure for Japan's modern "painting" and "sculpture” was Eastern versions of Western concepts that were, of necessity, abstractions based on Western history. This is a unique fact about Japan that must not be overlooked.

So, what types of 3-dimensional works of art existed in Japan 100 years ago in lieu of "sculpture"? What the Japanese displayed at the World Expositions of the time were Buddhist sculptures. And these were probably joined by carved figurines of the type we displayed in the tokonoma spaces of our Japanese homes, as well as our miniature carved "netsuke" figurines traditionally used as ornaments on things like purses. As for the former, with the weakening of religious fervor in Japanese society, Buddhist sculptures lost much of their relevance. On the other hand, the figurines and netsuke were of an aesthetic that stressed a sense of material and the skill of craftsmanship shown in the intricate carving. This made them popular even among the masses, and that popularity continues to this day.

Although the Japanese of today wear Western clothes and drive cars down streets lined with tall buildings, most are still uncomfortable with the modern Western definition of self. Sculpture created in this context by people who have come to possess no certain ideology or individuality of their own, always has the danger of ending up as no more than a superficial execu­tion of inherently foreign tastes. Rather than grasping the rela­tionship between the 3-dimensional form and its surrounding space that is essential to sculpture, our 3-dimensional creations that have evolved within a history of preoccupation with how to pray properly before a Buddhist figure or how to arrange a tokonoma space, tend to be things that we only look at only from the front. And, our attention tends to be directed toward aspects like sense of material, craftsmanship, detail, texture and finish.

This lack of consciousness of spatial aspects, the lack of an inclination toward conceptualization and individuality, and the inversely proportional obsession with detail, craftsmanship and material so typical of craft; these two opposing poles can be consid­ered the defining characteristics of both the sculpture and ceram­ics of Japan. Our language reflects these trends, as we find a defi­ciency of expressions in Japanese that deal with spatial aspect and a wealth of expressions concerning detail and material qualities. It can perhaps be said that this is a defining quality of a Japanese creative sensibility rooted in the deepest layers of our mentality.

In the context of the art institutions that introduced sculpture to Japan, what sort of place was ceramics allotted to? To begin with, this kind of distinction between genre first became neces­sary for the Japanese when we began to enter the arena of mod­ern art at the World Expositions at the turn of the century. Among the things exhibited at the expositions, all that which did not fit in the fine arts—as represented by painting and sculp­ture—were called "crafts." It was to this category that pottery was allocated along with the other genre we call crafts today, like lac­quer ware, metal-work and wood-works, which were usually used and displayed together with other household items in domestic-type settings where all the pieces existed as elements in a compos­ite relationship. Sculpture was independent and pure (fine art), while ceramics carried the historical burden of being defined as functional items that were basically composite in nature.
Western modernism adopts a philosophy of pursuing pure, specialized "fine art" and then taking its products and reflecting them back into design and craft. In contrast, Japan had no such genre distinctions before the advent of its modem era. Rather, the ideal was to pursue a composite of material, technique, art, decoration and function in the creation of our domestic living spaces.

There is now a group of art critics and artists who are looking once again at the aesthetics of our pre-modern crafts as a possible key to freeing craft-oriented ceramics from the confines of mod­ernism and genre. It can perhaps be said also that this re-evalua­tion of pre-modern aesthetics has been supported by the fact that art has entered the realm of concept and eventually deteriorated to a state where the pursuit of the "pure" has given way to a situ­ation where "anything goes." It may also be that all this is occur­ring concurrent with the feeling that modernism has entered its twilight.

In postwar Japan there was a national search for new cultural values. In the field of ceramics, the answers arose from Kyoto. Here, I would like to introduce the case of Kazuo Yagi as an illus­tration of this fact. Here is part of an exhibition review that appeared at the time:

"Kazuo Yagi’s Samsa's Walk" by Shigenobu Kimura Freeing Ceramics from Practical Function
At an exhibition of the avant-garde ceramic artist group "Sodeisha" at the Kyoto Museum of Art in 1954, Kazuo Yagi showed a work titled Samsa's Walk. This was one of the first works ever to free ceramics from the conventions of practical functionality and, thus, holds revolutionary significance in the history of Japanese ceramics, as well as world ceramics.

This work takes the character Gregor Samsa from Kafka's Metamorphosis as the image of the artist and consists of numer­ous cylindrical tubes with holes in them and many small tubes thrown on a potter's wheel and assembled together into a form that stands on three legs. The fact that the parts of this work were all thrown on a wheel is very significant. This is not only because the idea of using a potter's wheel, which in itself is dia­metrically opposed to sculpture, is one of the defining aspects of this work, but also because of the unique concept of using the wheel merely as a machine for production rather than in its tradi­tional role in pottery as an extension of the hands of the potter. In this way, Yagi can be seen as having walked a thin line between sculpture and ceramics. . . .

According to Yagi himself, what makes pottery different from sculpture is that you can't use an eraser on it, and you can't spend a limitless amount of time in its creation. In other words, pottery has to be made within the temporally limited process of creating the form from clay, drying it, doing the initial firing, glazing it and then doing the final firing. That is probably the reason that when Yagi began making works like Samsa's Walk that resembled abstract sculpture, he was met with criticism that in effect asked why it needed to be done in ceramics.

In response to this, Yagi cited the fact that in the Chinese ceramics tradition external demands, such as the need for vessels to take the place of bronze vessels or the desire for vessels as close as possible in appearance to those made of precious stone, would often be the stimulus for a process in which working with the media of clay and potter's wheel would lead artisans to something of a spiritual awakening, and that awakened spirit would in turn be heightened repeatedly through the working process, thus giv­ing birth to new manifestations and eventually an artistic pinna­cle such as the one seen in Song period ceramics. This presents a very important question. No matter what the type of art an artist pursues, there is no such thing as complete freedom. Although they may be different in nature from those of the ceramic artist, the painter and the sculptor also work within a certain set of restrictions, and those restrictions serve to elevate the spirit of the artist.

However, Yagi approached the restrictions of clay and potter's wheel in a different way from other ceramic artists. . . .Instead of taking a negative attitude of the restrictions as only restricting, he took a positive attitude about it. The reason he has shown a preference for unglazed finishes or black raku finishes is that, by eliminating chance effects resulting from glaze firings, he is better able to capture the inherent face of the clay itself. Thus, he gave birth to a completely new type of art that was not simply ceram­ics and not sculpture; an art that resists any description other than what the French call objet.

In this way, Yagi continues to pursue pure creation with ceramics, but not in a way that is a rebellion against or denial of tradition. He has just been making a direct challenge against the ambiguity in ceramics. He sought to expose the ambiguity of ceramics that allows the application of glaze and the firing process to produce a presentable piece even if the original form were not really worthy, or conversely, that lets a work in which the creator has spent the utmost care in defining the form have that tension be weakened by the application of glaze and then melted away further in the kiln. In doing so, Yagi has shaken the foundations of a world of ceramics that are stagnant or too safe and taken ceramics a big step forward in the direction of art. [In excerpt from Seikai Bijutsushi, Asahi Shimbunsha, Nov. 1997]

The years just after the end of World War II saw the emer­gence of a group of people in Kyoto and California simultaneous­ly—but completely unrelated—who transcended the traditional realms of ceramics. The works exhibited in the "Contemporary International Ceramics Exhibition" [Japan 1964] by artists from California like Robert Arneson and Peter Voulkos, were a big shock to us of the young postwar generation.

I would like to introduce here examples of two different responses to those works; the first a review of that 1964 exhibi­tion by Yoshitatsu Yanagihara, and the second by myself writing about U.S. ceramics in 1971.

 "The Defeat of Japanese Ceramics" by Yoshitatsu Yanagihara,  After Seeing the "Contemporary International Ceramics  Exhibition"
. . . .Here is clearly a sculptural space.   Until now we thought, "This is the world of craft" or "This is the world of sculpture." There was always a distinction between the two. But, now I can no longer think of the art of craft and the art of sculpture as two different things. As long as they share the same artistic energy that a 3-dimensional form can possess, can't crafts—even with their ever-present questions of utility—be possessed of a sculp­ture-like spatial beauty?...

When [Japan] sees this exhibition, can it still lay claim to being an advanced nation in the field of ceramics? Unfortunately, what I see mostly… are works that look like the products of those who have forgotten the spirit of the great pottery… and are merely presenting empty displays of technique. It is hard to avoid the terrible feeling that the motivation some of the works—for what reason and for whom they are being created—has been left up to the tastes of the base revel-in the drinking houses.

…I would call the works from America, "Ceramics that are in the present." The reason I feel this way is that I see in American artist's works no reliance on the skeletons of the heritage of ceramics past.   Instead, they seem to be casting into coarse lumps of clay and fire the primitive questions of “am I living?” and then, "So, what should I scream out, and what should I make?" And this is based on their own inti­mate experiences of that giant structure called America. [In excerpt from Geijutsu Shincho Oct., 1964]

 Joe Bova’s Politics and War, Dorothy Joiner, Ceramics Monthly, April 2004, Vol. 52 Issue 4, pp56-60.

In 1831, Honoré Daumier portrayed the King of France as Gargantua, Rabelais' voracious giant. The effete, pear-shaped Louis-Philippe sits on a chaise percée (toilet). Leading up to his open mouth, a conveyor belt carries the sou (pennies) forced from the poor, money that the king in turn defecates as advantages for the privileged. Largely because Daumier's inflammatory caricature and others like it were so telling, the government decreed that freedom of the press be limited to verbal rather than visual expression. Over 150 years later, the pictorial image is still perhaps the most effective satirical instrument. Using clay as his medium, Ohio artist Joe Bova makes sculptural statements (some exclamatory)—at once funny and hauntingly apt—that lampoon contemporary American culture and the United States' policies in the national and international arenas. These works were shown at Bova's recent "Politics and War" exhibition at New Orleans' Marguerite Oestreicher Gallery.

America's commander-in-chief, pivotal to her policies, appears twice in the exhibition. He is first Pinocchio, the obstreperous Italian marionette who always got into trouble because he listened to the wrong people. Bova dresses him in black shorts with a curious peaked hat in cobalt and a matching child's top. Called "The Politician," the figure has a scowling face, a protracted nose and oversized ears set straight out from a rounded head. Not only are these auditory organs like those on popular caricatures, but they also resemble the projecting ears on representations of the Egyptian Pharaoh, conventional symbols of the monarch's attention to the pleas of his people. On the other hand, is this politician simply alert to the strategic instructions of his "trusted" advisors as the puppet was repeatedly led astray by his "friends"? The long, pointed nose simulates that of the Italian puppet, growing according to his lying. Adding vivacity to his diminutive, in-charge but obtuse orator, the doll-like arms are positioned slightly fore and aft, as though he's swinging them, and the head is angled to indicate that he has turned to confront an opponent.

Bova's second interpretation of the leader is also that of a marionette, but the puppet body is in the heroic altogether, replete with coiffed pubic hair. The only exceptions to the classical nudity are a golden crown and magnificent magenta cowboy boots, appropriate attire for "The Crown Prince."

Shifting his focus to those in close proximity to their commander—both with regard to shared proclivities and personal relationships (Pinocchio's sinister friends?)--Bova entertains with "Mr. CEO," a hybrid creature with a boar's head and humanoid body, whose hips bow out from a pinched-in chest, leaving little room for a heart. To underscore the figure's national identity, the artist gives him a white collar and red tie, completing the national colors with an off-blue, purplish head. No doubt about the entrepreneur's purpose: he holds up green hands, palms out, and wears a gold-hued suit. And, finally, a tell-tale bulge near the inseam of his trousers proclaims a ribald visual pun à la française. The French word bourse means both a purse and genitals.

As the female counterpart to "Mr. CEO," "New Millenium Woman" dons a sleek, ebony power suit and shiny pumps. Her face is covered with an amazingly detailed miniature gas mask. One hand is an intricately conceived cell phone, the other, a Beretta 9 millimeter. With biting irony, a tiny cross around her neck identifies this contemporary lady with religious principles that enjoin adherents to turn the other cheek.

With hollow-eyed, grinning skulls, girl and boy soldiers form a second pair. Pants pulled tight to create wrinkles that radiate suggestively out from the crotch, the buxom "American Daughter" aims a gun in each hand. Paradoxically less belligerent, her helmeted partner, "Prosthetic Warrior," holds his fancy automatic assault rifle down at his side, the armament having become his arm in a caustic visual pun. The other arm—a phallus—swings almost playfully. As with his female counterpart, it's sex and war.

In two works, Bova's humor darkens, becoming stark, indeed, disquieting. "10/26," the date of passage of the U.S.A. Patriot Act, is perhaps inspired by Millais' "Death of Ophelia," a 19th-century depiction of Hamlet's lover floating in the water, having drowned herself. Bova lays a miniature recreation of the Statue of Liberty in a funerary boat. Eyes closed, torch held down, almost extinguished, Liberty has succumbed. Scattered around her legs are bones—some broken—and 50 tiny skulls, each fashioned from white porcelain. On the clasp securing her cloak, the artist has placed his initials. As an ominous substitute for the American eagle, a dark raven clutches the prow with metal claws, an allusion to the chant of Edgar Allan Poe's famous bird: "Nevermore."

Military vessels add the final grim touches to Politics and War. A simian creature drives "Tank," its surface camouflaged, its angled gun a "manly pointer," to borrow Flannery O'Connor's inspired phrase.

Professor Emeritus of Louisiana State University and currently professor at Ohio University, Bova's work is not only admirable in conception but also ingenious in execution. Firing both stoneware and porcelain to Cone 10, he achieves remarkable detail and chromatic range. Using a practical kind of modular technique, he dresses his figures in a variety of hues and provides them with intricate accoutrements. "The Politician," for example, required three firings: arms, head and legs with salt; indigo tunic and hat with soda; the black shorts and shoes fired in reduction. Some techniques, moreover, derive from the artist's knowledge of ceramics history, such as the hands of "Mr. CEO," which fit neatly into his jacket cuffs and can be removed at will, just like those on the celebrated Xi'an warriors. And whereas Bova usually anchors arms and body with a threaded rod, other parts often fit together, he says, like "a lid on a cookie jar." "Mr. CEO's" suit coat simply lifts off his pants; and the legs of all the figures function like sockets resting in their trendsetter shoes, even the smashing Western boots worn by "The Crown Prince."

Bova's historical antecedents are many: the lively satirical ceramics of the Han dynasty; the hollow figures of the Moche tradition, with their ballooning bodies; Daumier's fatuous bourgeois; the Pueblo Indian figures of the late 19th century, mocking Americans; and certainly the work of Robert Arneson who, in the 1980s, held up to ridicule the culture's self-destructive tendencies.

Though time-honored in its traditions, satire is often greeted with a problematic response. Distanced by history, today's viewer can laugh at Daumier's flaccid ruler, appreciating the artist's incisive wit without an almost automatic reaction based on whether he is either a Bourbon supporter or a liberal French Republican. With Bova's art, no matter how inspired the burlesque or accomplished the craftsmanship, such aesthetic distance is virtually impossible. The people and situations he satirizes are too immediately real and too emotionally charged. Local reviews of the exhibition--one from a weekly paper, the other a daily--epitomized the expectedly antithetical judgments of the show. The weekly praised the work; the daily panned it. For about half the population, Bova's art is a delight. This section of America's citizens applauds the unrelenting humor with which he alleges the government and its concomitant culture to be a lethal mix of power, money and sex.

Portrait of Our Time. Catalog essay, David Ebony, Revolution, Ferndale, MI, 1995.

"We cannot define where a body begins and where external nature ends... The Human Body is that region of the world which is the primary field of human expression."
—   Alfred North Whitehead

Modes of Thought

Alfred North Whitehead would probably agree that portraiture is firmly situated in the primary field of human expression. Likenesses, especially of the human figure and face, involve matters of identity and difference. They can reveal age, gender, race, health and emotional states. Historical and sociological information may be relayed in a portrait; clothing, hairstyles, jewelry, postures and attitudes can suggest much about a person's occupation, wealth, social position, political stance, sexual orienta­tion and religious convictions, while positing the subject in a specific time and place. A portrait is always a double portrait. The work is at once a likeness of the subject and a reflection of the artist. Choices involved in creating a portrait often say more about the artist than the image reveals of the subject.

An exhibition of portraits also has a double identity. The recent figurative work in this show was created by eight artists: Robert Arneson, Frank Auerbach, John Coplans, Vincent Desiderio, Larry Fink, Judy Fox, Viola Frey and Lorna Simpson. Their wild­ly diverse methods and approaches explore and explode conven­tions of traditional figuration. While the exhibition proposes a very broad definition of portraiture, the disparate works brought together here may formulate not only a coherent world view that echoes the spirit of our times, but one in which we may discover some reflection of our own individuality.

Some of the works on view are very specific in terms of references to time and place……………

A similar monumentality may be found in the large-scale drawings of African-American men that Robert Arneson made not long before his death. Unique in the oeuvre of this artist who is more famous as a ceramic sculptor, these provocative images are concerned more specifically with issues of racism. Confronted with the inescapable gaze of the artist's Chief Executive Officer, viewers are obliged to examine their own feelings and prejudices regarding black men. This tightly-cropped close-up view of the man's face elicits a sympathetic response. These world-weary eyes have seen much sadness, no doubt. But the drawing, accentuated by brightly-colored, graffiti-like marks that flicker across the sur­face, is far from melancholy. Here, Arneson is wholly engaged with the beauty and nobility of his subject.

Likewise, in his large painting By-By Huey P., Arneson brings us face to face with Tyrone Robinson, the accused murderer of Black Panther Huey Newton. In a close-up that recalls a police mug shot, the defiant face is at once proud and resigned. But, Arneson makes an acerbic commentary by superimposing over this face a drawing of a praying mantis, an insect known for the practice of eating its own.

Racial identity is the prominent theme of Lorna Simpson's conceptual photo work titled C-Rations. The left panel of this diptych shows an empty white dinner plate, across which words appear in black letters that read: "Not Good Enough." The right photo shows a mouth, chin and upper torso of an African-American woman, over which white letters read: "But Good Enough to Serve." With just these few elements, the artist com­municates the frustration and bitterness of a black woman grap­pling with feelings of alienation in a white-dominated society. Simpson's portrait is a poignant statement about racial inequality.

. . . . More youthful bodies are the favored subjects of Judy Fox's lissome sculptures. Her delicately painted terra cotta and hydro-stone figures are life-size studies of naked children. In Fox's work, however, children are not simply sweet and innocent creatures. Instead, they are portrayed as mythological or allegorical figures in poses that often make art historical allusions. Shango is a powerful emotional tribute to African sculpture. The work shows a child in a posture of fervent supplication. Chacmool, a startlingly life-like reclining figure, with knees bent, head turned to the side, is an eloquent homage to pre-Columbian sculpture.

Grayson Perry ~ very much his own man. Catalog essay Lisa Jardine, Victoria Miro Gallery, London, 2004. 

Grayson Perry's work unsettles the contemporary art world. It is not simply because he chose to accept the Turner Prize 2003 in the persona of his alter-ego 'Claire', dressed in the latest of his art-work 'coming out' frocks in mauve satin, exquisitely embroidered with rabbits, roses, hearts, and the words 'sissy' and 'Claire', and teamed with white ankle-socks and red patent-leather Mary-Jane shoes. Although, as Perry himself is quick to point out, the 'tranny' (which is how he refers to himself) does have a remarkable capacity to provoke anxiety. That, he explains, is some combination of disappointment and unease at the fragility of the illusion. The tranny does not try to 'pass' as a woman. He hovers on the brink of the absurd, all too obviously not a woman, all too clearly failing to convince, playing a part. In the street, the sidelong appreciative glance of the passer-by detects the illusion in a split second and their admiration falters. As Claire, Perry inhabits a space too close to the edge of acceptability for us — as audience — to be altogether comfortable. What makes the art world even more nervous than Claire is the status of Perry's pots. Does a pot count as high art? Can an art vase move out of the world of craft, the WI, school art rooms and evening classes? The decorated pot brings the domestic, the banal everyday, into the gallery. It blurs the boundary between familiar homely clutter and the way a gallery space strives to keep us aware of the representational strangeness of what we are looking at - the need to scrutinize it closely if we are to understand it. Is the critical anxiety generated by Perry's work a response to the fact that an exhibition of his ceramic pots all too closely resembles a department store window display of desirable consumer items set out for sale on pedestals?

Feminists have heard these kinds of questions before. Indeed, by selecting ceramics and embroidery as his preferred media Perry has chosen to inhabit that 'second place' - the space of inferiority - traditionally allocated to craft-based art works produced by women over the centuries, during which they were excluded from the public sphere. The repetitive painstaking nature of such 'women's work' has been designated second-rate, circumscribed and limited in its ambition from the outset - or so connoisseurs and critics have maintained. Almost by definition it lacks the intrinsic elan or brio that could give rise to descriptions such as 'serious', 'important', 'brilliant'.

Perry himself uses language that self-consciously references this art-world gesture of demotion of the feminine: 'A vase is somewhere where we traditionally have a sensuous experience. There's something humble about a vase - it's not a big, showy-offy thing.' His insistence on the artisanal nature of the work, the emphasis on repetition, the mark of the maker (Perry's W and an anchor mark cocks a snook at those of more conventional potters), tethers him strategically to that often disparaged tradition. As does his emphasis on a cherished repertoire of motifs, painstakingly executed in modest materials: 'I'm interested in developing a rich vocabulary with one or two media and I think artists who don't do that are sacrificing part of their vocabulary, their kind of fingerprint on the work and that physical relationship to [the] work.'

In talking about his work Perry signposts the distinction between his art, with its particular kind of mesmerizing beauty, and the tradition of high art. He defines as 'sublime' another sort of art that captures beauty with deft, minimal gestures, and is then quick to distance the work he executes from such sublimity. 'Often the splendour of my work is in the man hours, rather than effortless.' His pots are products of painstaking endeavour, each one coiled laboriously from snakes of clay, worked gradually into a reassuringly smooth, familiar shape, with an investment of enormous amounts of attention, time and effort. 'There's a kind of elegant gesture in throwing [pots] which is like ballet, kind of a graceful arc - and then there's what I do which is kind of a war of attrition. I think high culture has a big appreciation of that subtle, sublime view of beauty. Say, like Luc Tuymans, I think he's a good example of it. Everything about the paintings depends on line, the colour relationships, the composition, the hint, the reference, the texture, everything about them is so thought about, but there's not a lot there. And it is almost a counterpoint to my work in some ways.'

Perry chooses a different set of tactics to catch and hold the viewer's attention. His high-gloss glazes and the liberal use he makes of gold and lustre on his surfaces draw on traditional art's implied promise that its surface beauty will repay close scrutiny. From a distance, the seductive shimmering beauty of the work is immediate and irrefutable, with its evocations of precious oriental art-objects, and apparent patina of age. That beauty seems to give the work an aura of authenticity, to offer a guarantee of gravitas. When the viewer does get up close, Perry rewards them with a breathtakingly rich level of detail, which, in his words, 'never lets them down'.

Perry says he wants his work to reward and repay the viewer's attentive inspection however close they get. Indeed, the closer they come, the more times they circle the work - which in its resolutely three-dimensional roundness can never, by its very nature, be viewed all at once - the more there is to be found and read into its detail. This is high-resolution art. Zoom in on a Grayson Perry and you access ever-finer levels of demanding detail.

With Perry's embroidery the sensation of discovery as you move towards the work is alarming, as the apparently innocent repetitions of decorative pattern break down under scrutiny into more sinisterly meaningful components: ejaculating penises, fetuses, jet planes, hypodermic needles, swastikas. In the case of Perry's pots, once the viewer is held by the hypnotic detail of the drawings, photographs, fragments and texts, applied to and incised on its surface, the experience can be almost overwhelmingly intense. Perry's pots turn out to be scary. Pots are not supposed to be extreme, they are not supposed to disturb, nor to convey thought-provoking political messages. Close-to, the viewer encounters a compilation of lurid headlines, photographic images (some family snaps, some familiar clichés), sentimental off-the-peg transfers, kitsch ornament and an obsessive vocabulary of powerful images drawn from Perry's private fantasy. Fragmented and disjointed, directionless and in-the-round, how is one to know where the narrative begins and ends? More troublingly, who is taking responsibility for our putting together this compilation of fragments, teasing it out into our own 'reading' or interpretation, which undermines and disturbs our equilibrium?

It is here, with our nose up against the fantasy world of our own and his imagination, that Grayson Perry's careful tactics for enticing us into complicity - stealth tactics for the contemporary art gallery - begin to yield a shockingly strong set of responses from us as audience to the pot's drama. For we are all alone. Grayson Perry as artist authority-figure, called upon to assign meaning to his work, is nowhere to be found. His insistence on the subordinate, inferior stance of the 'tranny potter' will not allow us to look to him for any sort of masculinist or triumphalist version of the 'meaning' of his work. 'It's no good asking me. I put forward the question in the work, I don't answer it.'

When you talk to him, Perry has an evident dread of sounding authoritative. 'I'm tiptoeing up [on authority]. I mean I talked to my therapist about the figure of an aged but reverent orchestral conductor and I said that's about as far as I'm going towards having authority. I'm going to be the guy who's given authority by reverence for skill and artistry. That is the person for me, that is my kind of analogy for the sort of role I'm tiptoeing up to - the platform of that.'

The very authenticity of the work depends, for Perry, on this refusal to take responsibility: 'In our times, maintaining authenticity for me involves dealing with the changing role of being an artist. I think that's an important question. How do I inhabit this role now, when my work is in demand and it can command quite high prices and I can see in other people's eyes that they want me to take command? I want to go. It's not my job really. It might be a job for another artist, but it's not my job.'

It is easy to see from this why Perry should be drawn to the art of 'outsider' artists - artists beyond the art world, who cannot be called upon to answer for the meaning or authenticity, or even the status as art, of their own work. In 1979, Perry went to the Outsiders exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London, where he encountered for the first time the work of Henry Darger, who remains his favourite artist. Entirely unrecognized in his lifetime, Darger was a reclusive loner, who lived for 43 years in a second-floor room on Chicago's north side, and worked as a hospital janitor. When he died in 1972, he left behind an illustrated fantasy, in twelve massive volumes running to 19,000 single-spaced typed pages of legal-sized paper, entitled The Story of the Vivian Girls, in what is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion.

In Darger's case, the artist himself is permanently absent, his artistic imprimatur forever inaccessible as part of the viewer's transaction with the exquisitely detailed drawings and watercolour paintings which comprise the illustrations to The Story of the Vivian Girls. The gallery goer, critic or collector (Dargers sell for very large sums of money) is left alone to decide on their artistic worth. Because of the obsessive fantasy nature of the material - its violence, its curiously prurient drawings of naked girl children - the viewer cannot avoid the anxiety of feeling that they too might be sharing in some sad, solitary, obsessive fantasy. No reassuring artistic voice tells them this is not the case. An edge of doubt colours our reaction to outsider art such as Darger's. And so it does, more deliberately, colour our response to Perry's.

Which brings us back to disappointment. Behind Perry's work stands a sort of sadness - the plangency of anticipated disappointment - which clings to the kind of masturbatory fantasies he returns to again and again. Perry draws attention to this expectation of failure, of not achieving the looked-for pleasure, of loss and regret, in several modes as he seeks to specify his role as artist, and this must surely make us pay attention.

In the domain of fetish and fantasy, repetition is the endlessly deferred anticipation of a pleasure which is always less than the best that might have been. After the fantasy comes the reality - but the reality will, as every fantasist knows, always fail to live up to the fantasy. Again, as potter Grayson Perry emphasizes, the disappointment comes each time the kiln door is opened - each time the pot does not quite come up to the artist's expectations (the ideal pot in his mind's eye). 'That whole idea of realizing fantasy and the cruelty of that, the cruelty of dealing with the disappointment. When I open the kiln I'm dealing with the fact that I'm always working with the feeling of what I hope it will be like, and then I have to deal with it coming back at me from the object when it's finished. And you get a very sudden moment of that when you open the kiln because suddenly the feeling is into a real sensory experience. It's like I have an idea of the atmosphere of a work and if it really works for me, it gives it back fairly closely, but very rarely.'

Then too there is Claire. Grayson Perry's artistic agenda is already set out in his self-presentation as 'tranny potter', the disappointingly not-quite-perfect-enough illusion of the adorable little girl in the beautifully embroidered dress. Describing the role he sees for himself as an artist, Perry says he wants to have his hand on the shoulder of the viewer as they come to terms with his work, that he is there, quietly and submissively, having embraced his own sense of inferiority, having relinquished his status as powerful male figure in the art world. But it is Claire's hand we find on our shoulder, warning us that after the rapture of anticipation we should be ready to settle for disappointment. That is what gives Grayson Perry's work its extraordinary power and contemporary importance. Here is a specifically 21st century art and an emotional intensity specific to it - an emotional intensity that acknowledges the inescapable liaison between desire and disappointment, the inevitable failure of reality to fulfill our overheated consumerism-enhanced dreams.
Lisa Jardine

“Kim Dickey,” Catalog essay excerpt, Paul Koudonaris, California State University, Long Beach, 1997.

I would not rent an apartment to Kim Dickey; I don't think I'd get it back. She has a partic­ularly alarming way of appropriating the space around her, creating a body of work that refuses to sit passively and wait to become animated by the pleasure and dis­cretion of the viewer's eye. Humble clay is transformed into a sensual and dynamic medium, an organic entity that looks back at me. Ostensibly, she creates cups and bowls, pots and vases... but Kim Dickey is a liar: cups do not demand my attention; vases do not summon up their own voices, teasing me with the mysteries of unseen internal machi­nations; pots do not flaunt the florid sensu­ality of a bodily appendage. Kim Dickey cre­ates golems. Her clay, I believe, does not come from the ground. It's fallen from a tree, and it seems to have landed on its feet.

Take her "Lady J" series. Marcel Duchamp could make us reassess a urinal, but it is an homage to the unique genius of Kim Dickey that she can make us want to touch one. She accepts the traditional premise that "ceramics provides objects for eating, drink­ing, and other necessary rites"—but the utili­tarian is transcended by an aesthetic that "intensifies the relationship between the viewer and the object". An evocation of tac­tile pleasures and suggestive forms invites her work into the viewer's space; and it is a psychological space as well as a personal one. A diverse set of influences, as much lit­erary as artistic, forms the basis of her work, and gives it the power to consciously touch the viewer. Kim Dickey's ceramics are a ceramics of life: she does not just read Charles Simic, she blends him into raw earth, then raises the two into a vase, the surface punctured with the expressiveness of words, the walls cradling the imagination. Art, craft, poetry and prose are elusive enough on their own; in Kim Dickey's work, they are finally stripped of all separate iden­tities. The enveloping sense of expression provides a narrative. Not a story, however, this is the narrative of personal revelation, based on the conjunction of the viewer's lived experience and organic form. The prod­ucts of her hand introduce themselves not as strangers, but as partners in a life lived.

The grace and delicacy of the "Lady J" series-one like a swan, others like seashells—is put at the service of function, as ceramic art unites body and mind. This union is achieved in a most intimate way, although the function is not readily apparent: the "Lady J's" give women equality at the urinal, providing access to the heretofore unqualified male domain of urinating while standing upright. Kim Dickey proudly points out that she can now write her name in the snow; and with two, even three spouts, she has defeated me yet again...

These infamous "urinals for women" leave their viewer permanently balanced between the scandalous and the humorous, the public and the private, and wrapped in an aesthetic that allows the precious and delicate to be tempered by the crass and disposable. The viewer is permanently activated, trapped between individual perspectives and those imposed by society at large...and the "Lady J" series is a trap, confronting us with the flaccid and shallow dichotomies and contradictions that we are perpetually surrounded by, then snaring us with the subjective ways that we separate and reconcile them. The "Lady J's" are not about an interpretation, they are about the act of interpreting. They are about the ways that we balance social and personal oppositions: a permanent cycle, a switch which is never on but never off. Stranded between art and life, the viewer is left to learn that any separation between the two was always arbitrary and superficial.

The personal nature of touch is stressed in the "Lady J's" perhaps more emphatically than in any other artworks that preceded them: not only is each one a unique product of the artist's own nurturing hand, in their function they become specific to a single individual, to be used by that person only. An extension of the physical body, their organic shape seems to mirror their intimate relationship with the user. But the fact that they are not only manu­factured, but of a fine, hard porcelain, seems to contradict such a relationship; it speaks of an intrusion. This intrusion becomes magnified by the photographs that accompany their exhi­bition. Kim's intention with these pictures is to provide a mediation which "suggests intimacy while distancing the viewer, emphasizing the ambiguous relationship we have to real acts and physical touch." The viewer becomes the voyeur, placed at the intersection between object and event, at once drawn further into the former, while excluded from the latter.

As mere objects, the "Lady J's" present a statement in favor of urine-versal suffrage that is subversive, yet ultimately superficial. But Kim Dickey's world is one of personal experience, hence the framed photos dis­played with these sensually appealing objects are also an explicit "how to" manual validating their participation in the physical act. While these photographs serve to docu­ment a function that unites art and individual, they also exploit that relationship almost to the point that it seems ready to rupture. Almost to that point, but never reaching it: the polarities between private and public are portrayed as equally strong; neither can ever dominate, and the viewer can never abandon one for the other. Accordingly, whatever illu­mination the "Lady J's" ultimately provide, they never allow for resolution, and intel­lectually the viewer has no choice but to exit from the same point he entered...and even then, backing out, warily. But, after all, isn't that the nature of a good trap?

These same things can also be said about her series of "Nursing Bottles (for Men)," which finally allow men the privilege of experiencing the joys of lactation. Again complete with their own set of documentary photographs, they confront and transcend the same sets of boundaries, but manifest­ing a new form, now addressing male sexu­ality. Of course, these two series represent two sides of the same coin, providing a stringent reminder that Kim Dickey's work must be looked at as a complete oeuvre. A contextual dialogue unites all that she makes. While individual pieces provide abundant satisfactions on their own, to view them without considering the holistic nature of the entire body of her work is to lose sight of much of its meaning and wit. A bot­tle must be considered as a part of a group, a group as part of a series, and her series in terms of their relationship to each other. An underlying sexuality in her forms com­bines with sensually undulating surfaces to constantly broach questions regarding the nature of the physical body and gender; with the "Lady J's" and "Nursing Bottles" Kim Dickey addresses these issues directly with two series of works which are simultaneously united and polarized.

She works between art and life, finding a symbiotic relationship that draws from both to question how we interact with all that surrounds us. But the final synthesis is always left to the viewer’s imagination. Kim Dickey does not strive for the con­crete; if it ever existed, it has been obliter­ated by the multitude of subjective impuls­es that swarm into and out of her work.

“In the Beginning was the World,” Ronald Kuchta, American Ceramics, Volume 11, Number 1, New York, NY, 1993.40-42

There are certain 20th-century women artists whose indomitable spirits have resulted in strong, unforgettable and obsessive images of themselves and their works. There are, for instance, the weath­ered desert skulls of Georgia O'Keeffe and the blackened boxes of Louise Nevelson. More recently, there are the sky goddesses of Nancy Spero, the serial textured figures of Magdelena Abakanowicz and, finally, the decaying Bibles of Takako Araki. Clay is supremely suited as the medium for Araki's elegiac conception of the Word of God: clay is brittle and cracks, and, by her masterful manipulation, can be pressed into ever-so-thin sheets, which she silk screens with text.

The vanity of man's hope to live and die by the teachings of the Great Book have fasci­nated Araki and compelled her to repeat the image of the Bible for more than 20 years. Her beloved brother's gradual and painful death from tuberculosis and his profession of the exotic Christian faith, an unusual choice in Buddhist Japan (their father was a Zen priest), touched Araki profoundly and had given her (an atheist) nagging doubts about religion in general. Still, she respected the treasured book her brother left her to contemplate and to use (she retrieved a small, worn Bible from his deathbed and carried it with her always, rather as a talisman).

Used it she did, as the content of her work as an artist. Araki studiously read the Bible as a profound symbol of Western cul­ture and as a clue to Western thinking. She found the Old Testament, in particular, wonderfully compelling and frightening in its power. She has said that she admired the religions of the world, but found incom­prehensible the various cruelties that have been committed throughout history and the false hopes and zealous missions they have too often inspired. Araki found it reas­suring that religion is alive and well in many countries, while in pragmatic, non-transcendental and nature-inspired Japan (which she felt was presently too comfort­able), religion is hardly thought to be need­ed and is practically ignored, except for rit­ualistic events accompanying marriage and death. In a rather “faithless”, sectarian Japan, I remember asking a Japanese acquaintance many years ago what the difference was between Shintoism and Buddhism, to which he replied that he wasn’t sure but that for weddings he went to Shinto Shrines and for funerals to Buddhist temples.

The inspired beauty of decay exemplified in Araki's work and the calculating, con­trolled technique by which her expression was realized appear very Japanese to me. The traditional Japanese appreciation for wabi and sabi, for the forlorn and lonely and the weathered and ruined, are certain­ly ingrained in Araki's otherwise individu­alistic and modern sensibility. These quali­ties, so admired in Japanese aesthetics, can be related in the West, I think, to the late-18th- and early-19th-century romantics' love for the nobility of ruination and the lessons about vanity taught by ancient abandoned monuments, their beauty and the peculiar attraction that waste, despair, and sadness held for them. The well-known poem, "Ozymandias," by English romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley comes immedi­ately to mind:

"My name is Ozymandias, King of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and
Despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

And in Thomas Gray's equally renowned "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard":

Their names, their years, spelt by th' unlettered Muse,
The place of fame and elegy supply: And many a holy text around she strews, That teach the rustic moralist to die.

Contrary to the romantic poet's faith, how­ever, Araki's skepticism and doubt are exemplified by the disturbing quality of her work. The Bible's failure to save her brother and man's failure to learn from the powerful teachings of the Bible, lead us to interpret Araki's work as indictments of religious teachings. For instance, are men's hearts and souls as petrified and far from the glorious visions of the Bible as Araki's Stone Bibles and Rock Bibles imply? And are the old religions worn out, their teach­ings and governing authorities overwhelmed by worldly human desires, affairs, and conditions? Conflicting ideas of life and religion are implicit in Araki's stoical statements in stoneware and porcelain, countering any doubt that work in clay can be as strong and philo­sophical an art as that in paint or stone or bronze.

Her degenerating Bibles are, to my mind, comparable in feeling though quintessen­tial in their media and scale to the forlorn landscapes and vast howling architectural spaces painted by the German painter Anselm Kiefer, some of whose obsessive metaphorical works have also involved books in metal. Both Araki and Kiefer, from their respective locations in Japan and Germany, may be pondering nations defeated in their lifetimes, the transitoriness of glory and the vanity of belief. Here's hoping that our best hopes and glo­rious inspirations are not abandoned, that all the eloquent, commanding words of virtue and redemption are not lost as detri­tus and that the message of the artist's clay, of Takako Araki's work, is heeded. Once seen, Araki's arresting sculptures are impossible to forget. The questioning theme of the artist is transmitted to the viewer with absolutely fatal impact. Who, after appreciating Araki's sobering work, cannot also be inspired to wonder about mankind's past and future? In some of the later Stone Bibles and Wave Bibles of the 1980’s and 1990’s, a certain simpli­fied formalism seems apparent. An even more ephemeral treatment of the Word seems to be implied by the simulation of the stone and especially the water. Devoid of piety or devotion, except to her work, no longer preoccupied with finding inspiration but possessing it, the artist obsessively continued, absolutely secure in her mission. The forms kept developing and the possi­bilities of destroying the Word by external metamorphosis continued naturally with ever more astonishing aesthetic results. Post Script: In April 2005 Araki died in the interior village of Sanda, in Hiyogo prefecture where she had worked in a greenhouse-like studio surrounded by rice fields since the devastating Kobe earthquake destroyed her home in the near by coastal town of Nishinomiya. On her death bed, it’s reported, she was given “last rights” and converted to Christianity. Her funeral arranged by another brother (Araki never married) was held in Sanda’s small Catholic Church. Even in her death then, Araki, the accomplished and inspired yet quizzical artist posed, for us yet again, the persistent and eternal question; Why?

The following are the texts which were incorporated onto the tiles installed in the lobby of the University of Oslo’s Faculty of Divinity for “Graffiti Wall: God Is a Woman.” By Ole Lislerud

One small step for Woman - one giant leap for Womankind.
What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. There exists only one religion, but it has hundreds of variations. Everybody thinks that God is on their side. The rich and famous know it.
God is the celebrity writer of the world’s most famous book. If God dies, everything will be permitted. God has no religion. God is alive – he just does not want to be involved. Every time I leave things to God’s will, it all goes to hell.  The danger is over, God is forgotten. God is an artist, he created the giraffe
Most people are more comfortable with old problems than with new solutions. The world is the proof that God is a committee. It is good to have God around when everything goes to hell. God is good. Jesus for Norwegians. God has a big mouth. If you seek revenge – dig two graves. You gotta Serve Somebody. Some women wait for Jesus, some women wait for Cain, So I hang upon my altar and I hoist my axe again, And I take the one who finds me back to where it all began, When Jesus was the honeymoon. And Cain was just the man. For whom the bell tolls? I do not want to be present when I die. Momento Mori - remember – you shall die. I got to keep my eyes open so I can see my Lord, I’m gonna watch the horizon for a brand new ford, I can hear him rolling down the lane, I said Hollywood be thy name, Jesus gonna be here soon. Do you have any idea where you are going - God. Have you read My No.1 Best Seller? There will be a test - God. Will the road you are on get you to my place - God.  Billboard for God - We need to talk - God. Keep using my name in vain, and I will make rush hour longer - God. Big Bang Theory, You’ve got to be kidding - God . Don’t make me come down there - God. Follow me - God. Need a marriage counselor? I am available - God. Jesus was a vegetarian. Discover the real Jesus. Meek Mild As If. You are what you know www.jesuschrist.com - God answers www.members.aol.com/bjw1106/marian.html (Ave Maria) www.Yet 2.com - www.oed.com - www.jesus - online.com - www. Become a member.click here. Jesus - 2000 faces - Jesus for everyone’s taste. Jesus was a punkrocker. Why is Jesus so popular?  More God – Less Jesus.  The alternative Jesus - anything goes. Was Maria raped? I have a dream. I may not get there with youHat kan aldri fordrive hat, det kan bare kjærligheten. Eternity’s a terrible thought. I mean, where is it all going to end. Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new. Everybody wants to go to heaven – but nobody wants to die. Turn on - Tune in - Drop out - Timothy Leery. Nothing works, but it all works out. To be an angel – is a woman occupation. To be a devil – is a male occupation. Symbol of woman is water. Virgin Mary - Mother of mothers. Anatalia - land full of mothers God is a Nigerian. Relax God is in charge. He who does not learn from history will repeat it. Our religion is death. Foreword ever - backward never. Jesus Christ - a man with a mission. The missionary man. God loves America - God wants cash. God loves Audi lovers. God gives cash ----- maybe. Mannlig teologi ikke enerådende - Ursula King. Can God be a mother ? Some believe in Allan, others believe in Harry Krishna. Missionaries are very kind people who do not live in America. God wrote The Old Testament before he died. The Big Guy in the Sky. God is married to Maria, but first he was together with Eve. Jesus died, but then he changed his mind. A congregation are those who voluntarily go to church. The minister does not get any salary until he comes to heaven. All people have the same worth, even though they have a skin color. The Catholics do not believe in God, but in the Pope. The Catholics call heaven – The Vatican. Madonna and child is a popstar in the USA. God created Adam to be the boss, but Eve screwed it all up. In South Africa they believe in Nelson Mandela. Dear God you are a miracle. Good God are you rich or only famous. Dear God, I think the Bible is great – have you written other books too. Dear God, why are you not on TV. Dear God, if we live after we die, why do we have to die first. In God we trust - all others pay cash. Jesus loves the little children – is he a pedophile? He is dead but he wont lie down. Watch out for toilet walls without graffiti. Jesus was a Jew, but only on his mother’s side. Being a pessimist is a luxury a Jew can never indulge. If you first want to be a Christian you might as well become a Catholic. Everyday people leave the church and return to God. Jesus was a typical man, they always say they will come back, but they never do. Go to church next Sunday – avoid the Christmas rush. Jesus is the most famous celebrity. Your touch is better than wine. Jesus, Socrates and The Truth. Only those who move - feel their chains. If you love somebody set them free. If you are not saved, how can you go to sleep at night, not knowing if you will wake up in your bed or in hell. Christians are the most intolerant of all people. Christianity has too many lawyers and too few witnesses. Those who expand their knowledge, expand their pain. Knowledge is food for the soul. Those women who are angels in church are devils at home. Everything has an end, except for woman’s work and eternal pain. He is dead but he wont lie down. Everybody wants to go to heaven - but nobody wants to die. Black is beautiful God is Black. God is dead. God is a woman. The Wall is in your mind. I have been there - but He was not there.  Praise God for AIDS - I am just a little white priest. Celebrity Crucifixion. God sees everything but does nothing. Has God promised too much? Is God blind. Jesus the Muslim. God Bless America  - God wants cash. Violence and Racism - hand in hand. Public virtues and private vices. Worth waiting for - The American Dream. System of Bigotry, Segregation and Slavery. Liberty is a statue in New York. Killjoy was here. Jesus - 2000 years after Christ. Jesus for everybody. Jesus a friend of the fags. Jesus as mother. Jesus not born of a virgin. More God less Jesus. What are you praying for? COMFORT - AN IDOL - A HANDOUT - HARM - FOLLOWERS - LOVE - ECSTASY - POWER - A MIRACLE - PURIFICATION - GOOD BUSINESS - STRENGTH - RELEASE - ACCEPTANCE - SECRECY - PATIENCE - A DREAM - GOOD HEALTH - A STRONG COUNTRY - SELF IMPROVEMENT - A FRESH START - SAFE DRIVING - A GOOD TIME - GUIDANCE - THE JACKPOT - BONDING - HEALING - RESPECT - A SAVIOR - A WIN - GOOD WEATHER - FORGIVENESS - A ROOF - DEVOTION - RECOVERY - A BIG FAMILY - A DAY OFF PROTECTION - A SECOND COMING - A MEAL - YELLOW PAGES - CAN YOU NAME YOUR GOD. Internet prayers : email to the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland at : rukous.hsrky@evl.fi Jews can email or fax pleas for guidance directly to The Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. Haiti’s problems are spiritual, not political.       Image is nothing - will the chosen people please stand up. Jerusalem Syndrome. Call toll-free - 999 phone God direct members only. We pray to no man - Somali refugees. The prayer chain. Promise keepers. Pray to Nike - the Greek goddess of victory. www.instituteforworldpeace.com - Money, love, success - How much does it cost ? Three Our Fathers and a Hail Mary - or - fasting all day for Ramada. Holy Trinity - the 4 Ps - price, product, place and promotion. The Burning Man Project. Embarrassed to read the Bible in public : www.canongate.net What would Jesus do - WWJD www.spiritualwear.com or www.yesibelieve.com Be careful what you pray for ...You just might get it. Universal life Church - ULC - www.ulc.org Cryonics Institute - spend your death in liquid nitrogen email : cryonics@cryonics.org  Send your prayer through cyberspace and have it placed in The Wailing Wall in Jerusalem  : www.kotelkam.com Jehovah’s Witnesses official site : www.watchtower.org or Randell Watters and former Witnesses : www.exjws.net  Pray 24 hours a day- with a Hindu tattoo from Cambodia.  The Nourisher - Islam. The Cosmic Mystery - Taoism. Living Water - Christianity. The Ever-Indulgent - Islam. One who Conquers The Mind - Hinduism. The Enchanting Dancer - Hinduism. The Great - Taoism. The Support - Hinduism. The Enricher - Islam. The Lord of Majesty and Generosity - Islam. The Light of The World - Christianity. Lawgiver - Christianity. The All-Sufficient - Judaism. The Treasure of Compassion - Hinduism. Ever-Strong Consolation- Christianity. The Breath of The Almighty -Christianity. The Protector - Islam. Celestial Wish-Fulfilling Tree - Hinduism. The Fulfiller - Islam. Fortress - Judaism. Divine Messenger - Zoroastrianism. The Conqueror - Jainism. The Way - Taoism. One Who has gained Victory over Death - Hinduism. The Originator - Islam. The True One - Sikhs. The Guardian of the Destitute - Hinduism. The Creator - Sikhism. One adorned with Snakes - Hinduism. Shield - Judaism. The Friend - Islam. Success - Buddhism. The Unnamable - Taoism. The Greatest Pleasure Hinduism. The Bread of Life - Christianity. The Glorious - Islam. The All-Compassionate - Islam. The Sun Goddess - Shinto.  M to the power of N.Three things make the heart live longer : To look at water, green plants, and a beautiful face. (written in Arabic signs on the wall – citation from the Koran)

“The World of Ting-Ju Shao.” Ting Ju Shao.  Taipei: Taipei County Yingge Ceramics Museum, 2004.  pp. 18-19.  Essay by Hiroko Miura, Curator, The Museum of  Contemporary Ceramic Art, The Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park, Japan.

Big bulging shoulders and a rather small head for its body size. The prototypical figure has no eyes, mouth, or nose on its face to show expression. Within the various spaces created by Ting-Ju Shao, this large, powerful figure takes on the role of a messenger to our modern times. Regarding this figure, Shao says, "I show the toes of my ceramic figures to show the innocence of human being (when people take off their shoes, it is as if there is nothing to hide), and I make the heads so small to underscore the fact that modern people are too smart and tricky for their own good - I shrink their heads to bring them down to size."

When we go back and trace Shao's works in the past, we can see that she has been sending out her own messages through a variety of scenes, using these distinctive clay figures. Jo Lauria, the for­mer curator of Los Angeles County Museum, describes Shao's works as resembling a visual drama. As such, we can learn much about her succinct and experienced skills of scene construc­tion from the many illustrations she has worked on as an illustrator. Her focus on the narrative, having the figures serve as the main characters and constructing various settings around them is, in a sense, a very characteristic style for a contemporary ceramist. The centrality of the narrative style as key tool of expression has been integral to Shao's work since her initial period as an artist, her ubiquitous figures having appeared in the early 1990's. These seemingly comical figures weave out a broad range of issues that cast a shadow on modern society, including the destruction of the natural environment; mass media and society; the insatiable desires of mankind; life and death; the relationship between individuals and groups within society; and the isolation felt by individuals. These themes represent some of the many diametrically opposed forces that exist deep within society and our daily lives.

Various ceramic techniques and materials have been used in her different pieces corresponding to the theme addressed. For example, for the piece, "Dream Fragments Between illusion and reality", the busts without the head are made using glass and clay and are arranged in an alternating pat­tern. The bust made of glass makes the soul seem as if it were transparent, and the piece made of clay portrays clearly the curves of a face and makes one think of a physical being. By arranging these contrasting media next to each other, the transparent glass expresses the inner side of human beings, the mind, and the earthenware, with its presence, gives an impression of the body.

Shao has also used many different kinds of materials to create her own unique space. Those spaces are made so that wood, metals, and strings come together in such a way that the colors and the texture of each material blend well with the clay. In one of them, "Between Freedom and Confinement. Only the Heart Can Free the Mind from Mortality", a human figure placed in the center holds taut strings with its left and right hands, and below, inside the cage on which the fig­ure is sitting on, is a heart. The tension of the taut strings precisely expresses the balance of the strings. It shows that, in one life, true enrichment of the mind will never be complete regardless of which idea - "freedom" or "constraint" - prevails. Capturing two extremes in a state of balance, such "freedom" and "constraint," is a central theme in her unique construction of ideas.

Furthermore, although Shao has made the figures mostly by hand-building in the past, she began experimenting with making figures with molds from around the time she worked on her pieces at the Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park in Shiga Prefecture in the year 2002. She began using this method in full scale in her most recent works.  In one of them, "What's Wrong?" a high degree of precision is achieved by using molds. In this work ten white figures have stopped for an instant and have turned around to look back at a lone figure in brown. This lone figure is look­ing up at the sky in such a way that says, "What's wrong?" It is a message sent out to our modern society, which condemns an individual who strays from the group and does something different. Also, in another of her recent works, in which a human figure is placed inside a cir­cular object that looks like a Ferris wheel, "Your Majesty, where are you going?", all of the fig­ures are created using the molding method. The title speaks with full irony to the made-in-a-mold human beings of today who may, per­haps, be meaning to be moving forward but are not reaching any certain destination. In ceram­ics, a "mold" is a tool that allows us to mass produce things of the exact same shape. By forming the shapes using molds, Shao depicts those in our society who have lost their distinct characteristics as individuals, as well as those many people who have lost their vitality. Her message regarding the uniformed indoctrina­tion and social tendencies of today is expressed strongly in her recent works.

Moreover, in the installation piece exhibited at the Gallery Maronie in Japan in 2002, "The Seventy-Seven Gentle Warnings", she portrays seventy-seven birds facing human beings. The birds are not artificially but wood-fired in the manner of Shigaraki ware - baptized by the nat­ural flame and shaped into powerful and strong birds. The birds in this piece take on the role of nature and give out a warning to the humans threatening nature. People of today tend to think that there is nothing they cannot control, but her work shows us the need to real­ize that we are living in and are supported by nature. Furthermore, in her most recent work, "Living in the generosity of time, do we know who is near the finishing line?", twelve birds each hold a string in their mouths, which leads to the spider-web-like shape in the center of the piece, in the middle of which a human figure lies. The 12 birds are balancing the strings and are, together, supporting one human figure. The birds represented in this work have wide beaks and rather small wings, and their eyes are round and have a cute appearance, perhaps to express the inner kindness of birds since they are being used as a symbol of nature. In contrast with the gentle gaze of the birds, the human is represented as being in a critical condition, in which it would suffer grave consequences should the natural cycle be disturbed even slightly. This work shows that today our present condition vis-a-vis nature is being maintained amidst an extremely fragile balance. As the birds represent nature in her works, there are other symbols that appear in her works. A chair represents status and greed, and stairs, position. Furthermore, each piece of work she creates in which the dwarf-like human figures are moving about on big, bulging hand and feet also reminds us that we are only shuffling about in a place that is truly beyond the power of human beings.

One of Shao's impressive works, "A Heart Far Flung in the Corridor of Time", is one of the early pieces among her ceramic works. In this piece, a slightly red heart is embed­ded in the body of a large human figure. Here we see the interlocking themes of Mind and Soul beginning to take form in her works. In the piece she created the following year in 1992, "The Mind Dictates How the Form Undulates", a big human figure is manipulating a marionette. The marionette symbolizes the Body, and Shao is expressing through her work that humans are driven by the Mind. This piece of work was the one in which she first started portraying the idea that the mind controls the body, and that the balance between the two makes up a human being.

Shao's works, which seem to magically reenact a passage from a story and have titles that are like an epic poem strewn with polished words, first originated by revealing the twin concepts of Body and Mind. She began portraying the inspi­rational themes that delved into the inner aspects of human beings through ceramics, all the while executing her work with a humorous touch.

Garth Johnson  is the creator of the web site Extreme Craft (www.extremecraft.com)  where he expresses his very personal,  witty, and  “extreme” view on a wide range of issues  on art and craft. His site represents how the Internet is making it possible for some of the freshest, uncensored, and critically relevant  ideas to reach a wide audience for exchange and  dialog. I asked him to present a mini manifesto for this publication and he obliged. 

The line between ART and CRAFT is gone. I’ve heard several self-congratulatory blowhards in the ceramic world make this pronouncement in the past few years, and I have to agree with them.  I’m not agreeing for the same reasons, though.  The curators at the Whitney aren’t going to swoop into Granny’s Kraft Korner gallery and reward them with a career retrospective.  Instead, the line between art and craft has been blurred into nonexistence by an army of tattooed indie rockers churning out crocheted skull and crossbones iPod covers and Frankenstein thrift store clothing.

The current groundswell of D.I.Y. (do it yourself) craft began as a backlash against a generation of feminists who rejected domestic arts as a symbol of male oppression. There were certainly many exceptions (Judy Chicago chief among them), but I can attest to the fact that most of the women that I have dated were never taught to cook or sew. This began to change as women rediscovered the joy, utility, and community inherent in craft. As a man, I don’t feel that I can adequately comment on the feminist roots of D.I.Y., but still, I have to call them like I see them.

I am a University-trained ceramic artist who has always been drawn to ceramic processes commonly associated with the domestic sphere, such as china painting and world of collector plates.  I learned china painting from a group of genteel old women in their garage clubhouse/studio in Lincoln, Nebraska, and I haven’t looked back.  I have always been conscious of the divide between art and craft—drawn to material exploration and ceramic processes, but conscious of their potentials as vehicles for expression and meaning.

I have a love/hate relationship with craft.  Ceramics are a harsh mistress, stingy with yielding desired results.  I have walked away from clay at various points in my life, only to return on bended knees, ready to make the next body of work. I always felt isolated in my views on craft.  Many of my fellow artists resist or reject the designation of craft outright, seeking the validation of the art world, even as they remained mired in utility or process.

That began to change in the early 2000’s. I gradually became aware of like-minded “transgressive” artists who used the history and utility of craft as a layer of meaning in work that combined traditional craft with subversive modern content and themes.  The field of ceramic art was blessed with early practitioners of transgressive clay like Robert Arneson & Howard Kottler.  The “Funk” movement was a joyous exercise in plumbing the depths of “low” culture and traditional craft, resulting in a legacy of self-awareness in clay.  From my vantage point, it looked as if domestic craft, particularly fibers, were entering their own “Funk” phase.

Not that self-referential fiber art hadn’t existed in the past:  Miriam Schapiro was assassinating Holly Hobbie in subversive quilts and painters of the “Pattern and Decoration” movement were referencing fiber history and notions of domesticity in an art world setting.  These efforts are dwarfed by the current wave of artists using craft as their vehicle.  I sensed a camaraderie with the artists that I was encountering, and setup a weblog called Extreme Craft to record my thoughts on their art.

The name Extreme Craft neatly summed up the burgeoning movement to me. Aside from being a bit redolent of ads for sport drinks, the “extreme” moniker was a way to sum up the transgressive nature of the new wave of craft. The site’s subheading became, “A compendium of craft masquerading as art, art masquerading as craft, and craft extending its middle finger”. I felt like I had a viewpoint to offer the craft and art world, and I wanted to participate in defining what I saw as an emerging movement. The line between art and craft had indeed become hopelessly blurred, and I could not decide whether that was because fine artists were using craft as a metaphor or because craft artists were beginning to push their work to extremes (in terms of concept and labor). I noticed craft so audacious that it defies easy categorization: it only dares you not to take notice.  

Early posts struggled to incorporate everything from certain strains of folk art to the Quilts of Gee’s Bend and collage using breakfast cereal into my worldview.  Here is an early post about a taxidermist who makes pillows from your dead pets:

Are you facing the loss of a cherished pet? If so, Jeanette's Taxidermy offers an alternative to having Fluffy stuffed and mounted (terribly gauche). For a nominal fee, Jeanette will turn your pet into a PILLOW that you can cherish forever. Tasteful. Timeless.

“Please freeze your pet immediately upon passing to insure there will be no hair slippage.  Double bag to insure no freezer burn.  Ship packages ONLY on Monday's to prevent carrier mishaps.  All frozen animals must be shipped next day air to insure against spoilage.  In case of large animals please call for shipping instructions.”

I wonder what she could do for my goldfish.... or Terry Schiavo!

The post that brought Extreme Craft national exposure was a review, complete with photos of one of my favorite books, Rosey Grier’s Needlepoint for Men.  For the uninitiated, in 1973, Rosey Grier was a 6'5" 300 lb. retired tackle for the New York Giants. He took up needlepoint as a lark--he was, after all, an enlightened fellow, but like most craft activities, needlepoint became an obsession for him. In the book, he shares some of his signature designs, photos of his work, and profiles of other men in the needlepoint world at the time. Tens of thousands of people visited the site to view scans of Rosey’s projects. I often hear from men who drew courage from the example that Mr. Grier set; he is a key figure for men in the craft world. 

Extreme Craft also became a platform for me to pontificate about the current state of the field of ceramics:

My background is in ceramics, yet I rarely feature ceramic art on Extreme Craft. Why? Because most ceramic artists are neo-hippies who like to whine about how the art world won't take them seriously. This isn't true of everyone, of course, but the vast majority of ceramicists (ceramists?) avoid looking at things in the "big boy" art world like the plague (not to mention their aversion to closed-toed shoes). Sometimes, a ceramic artist finds the clay world a bit too insular, or a bit too stuffy, spreads their wings, and flies the coop. So it is with Cary Leibowitz, who technically never really aligned himself with ceramics anyway. Leibowitz, popularly known to the art world as "Candyass" uses all sorts of tchotchkes and ephemeral objects--ceramic and otherwise to convey his messages…

As the weblog continues to mature, Extreme Craft has become a “unification theory” of new craft.  I see no problem writing about art world darling Ghada Amer in the same article as a fellow who creates a seaworthy Viking ship out of popsicle sticks.  I try to post to extreme Craft every weekday, which is never a problem because I am never lacking in material.  I always feel positively Whitmanesque when I find a craft artist who blows me away.  Extreme Craft is proof that there are no limits to creativity: America (and the world in general) is full of ambitious crackpots and geniuses who have an intense need to see their wildest visions realized.

The core of my worldview is summed up by a concept that was introduced to me by the sculptor Mark Burns.  He called his creative impulse “The whim of iron”, which stands in opposition to the “will of iron”. To realize the whim of iron, one must take the outlandish ideas that swirl in one’s head and see them through, no matter how bizarre.  Prior to the Internet, craft artists of the extreme stripe often toiled in anonymity, slavishly turning their visions into reality. With the advent of the computer, artists and crafters have formed communities, using the Internet for sharing work, advertising their wares, and setting the bar of achievement ever higher.

Extreme Craft makes no distinctions between high art made by academically trained artists and audacious works of craft. When displayed together, a remarkable thread of human ingenuity helps bind the artwork. Throughout history, craft has been a vehicle for passing traditions from one generation to the next. Craftsmen have always been shaped by the technological and aesthetic limitations of their craft.  Conversely, practitioners of Extreme Craft use new technology, popular culture, and historical awareness to shape their craft.