American Clay Artists

PORT OF HISTORY MUSEUM

Philadelphia supports a burgeoning craft community- galleries, artisans, and collectors have all grown in number and activity during the past decades. The Clay Studio and its associated artists have played an important role in this resurgence, functioning effectively as a gallery space, resource, and educational center combined. This success story has attracted support from federal and state agencies and private foundations. The City of Philadelphia, a beneficiary of The Clay Studio's commitment and energy, is pleased to host AMERICAN CLAY ARTISTS: PHILADELPHIA '85 at the Port of History Museum. The Museum pioneered comprehensive crafts exhibits in the 1960's, and continues this craft tradition in recent years with Contemporary Ceramics: A Response to Josiah Wedgwood and Furniture by Philadelphia Woodworkers.

The Museum is pleased to join in this national and regional juried exhibition showcasing recent clay art.

Ronald L. Barber

Museum Director

THE CLAY STUDIO

It is particularly fitting that The Clay Studio, a non-profit institution dedicated to promoting and encouraging excellence in ceramic arts, be instrumental in presenting this exhinition.

The Clay Studio provides exceptional facilities for working artists, education for those interested in learning about the ceramic medium, and stimulation for patrons who wish to cultivate an interest in the ceramic arts. It not only furnishes studio space for resident artists and a gallery for exhibitions but also offers teaching for beginners, continuing education for clay artists, and lectures and workshops for the public. Through its community service programs, disadvantaged youths are enabled to take classes and participate in workshops.

Originating from the ceramic artist's dependence on expensive equipment such as kilns, The Clay Studio evolved from a small cooperative formed in 1974 by five local clay artists who joined forces to share costs, facilities, and experience. Over the years financial support has come not only from the general public but from industry, foundations, and federal and state agencies. The National Endowment for the Arts, The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Mabel Myrin Pew Trust, the Fels Fund, the Dolfinger-McMahon Foundation, the William Penn Foundation, the Rittenhouse Foundation, Rohm and Haas, Bell of Pennsylvania, and The Old City Civic Association have all provided essential assistance.

The Clay Studio has successfully met the challenges inherent in any growing organiza-tion. It has developed into one of Philadelphia's foremost institutions dedicated to promoting ceramic arts and to bringing the finest in clay art to the residents of the Delaware Valley. AMERICAN CLAY ARTISTS: PHILADELPHIA '85 is an outgrowth of this dedication.

Wendy E. Worthington

Executive Director

ARMCHAIR ACCESS

It isn't going too far to say that one of the latest functions of ceramics is that they are made to be written about. Writers, photographers, and publishers are closing the gap, on a pound-for-pound basis, between the production of clay art and the copy it generates. For example, in addition to judging this exhibition I was also asked to write an essay about some aspect of contemporary ceramics.

This is a cautionary essay, ironic in that the further one reads the more emphatic will be the advice to read fewer words about ceramics and to read instead the objects themselves, the feelings they generate. The clay object is its own excuse for being, and the words of critics and publicists can surround the work like gnat-clouds, obscuring the central encounter of value-how do the observer and the work relate?

The written word is developing a relationship to clay objects the way lamprey eels have threatened fish in the Great Lakes. Or, to put it another way, ceramics are acquiring verbal make-up that can subvert qualities inherent in the work through the power of language to exalt a product by hype—be it tobacco, soap powder, stoneware, or porcelain. Critics confer pedigrees; sophisticated photographic techniques have become a means of enshrinement; and the image of a pot on the cover of certain magazines is the equivalent of an American Kennel Club's Best-of-Show award. As a consequence, "to be reviewed" and "to have one's pot on the cover of a magazine" are goals of some ceramists. The publications, in fact, might finance a reduction in subscription prices if they'd simply award cover spots to the highest bidders.

There is something suspicious and vaguely foul-smelling about clay work which depends on verbal subsidies to hold its own in the market place. Rhetorical overkill is everywhere, words becoming the "advance man" for our work. Objects which may or may not have the qualitative nutrient called "presence" are given "publicity" — that skeleton key to merchandising's door. The net effect is to risk becoming bloated with verbal and pictorial "information" about work we may never experience on our own terms. Through reading we may become so "knowledgeable" about a body of work that first person encounters may take place in a forced field of preconceptions. This often happens when I see and handle Wayne Higby's landscape bowls. These bowls are some of the most photogenic pieces being made today, depending to no small degree on the camera to flatten them into an image that will reproduce well. At arms's length, they invariably force me into a double take; some l prefer as photos.

Against this backdrop of access to information can come the truly moving experience of encountering work by-lord of hosts! —someone we've never heard of! Not knowing anything about an object, a body of work, or the maker can be the perfect prelude to an aesthetic experience. As Wallace Stevens has written, "One's ignorance is one's greatest asset!"

Words-those second cousins to feelings-count for little compared to a moment when you've just drunk the last of a cup of tea at a lull in the day; the warmth of your hand matches precisely the warmth of the cup; you find yourself centered by a small amount of clay.

The written word is piffle compared to the play of light across a sculptural object in just the right location, encountered season after season or merely one unforgettable time: at the Western edge of the continent in the de Young Museum, a room at the end of a corridor contains a Lucite cube on a pedestal; within it stands a Shigaraki jar. It is big-you could hug it and barely touch your fingers together. You sit on a bench by a window in clear afternoon light. Wind off the Bay moves some bamboo growing outside; you see its reflection on the cube. Bamboo shadows finger the jar's sandy hide. Your being authenticates the pot beyond anything you'll ever read about it.

Without some interaction on our part, clay objects might as well be figments of their writers' imaginations, substantiated by flat images presuming to represent the presence of work in the world. Armchair access makes us passive absorbers of the ghosts of real objects, doing virtually nothing to enlarge our capacity to know the work itself. The end result of half an hour or a lifetime in the company of a certain teapot or object meant to be handled with the eyes, will, and should, outweigh anything any "authority" can write about it. A blind person with tactile access to an object may know more about its intrinsic qualities than the reader of several illustrated critical articles about the piece. James Dickey, in the Preface of Babel to Byzantium, writes, "I am for the individual's reaction, whatever extraneous material it includes, and against all critical officialdom."

Why are we so timid about trusting our own perceptions about the objects we encounter? We mince words; we look to critics to function as our aesthetic Consumers Research staffs; and we may arrive at the unenviable position of wondering whether our personal preferences count for much when the verbal heavies up on the publishing mound keep tossing those knuckleballs our way. It's to be hoped that as our experience grows, our strike zones enlarge, but that's another story.

For the same reasons we don't hire professional beach combers to accompany us on seaside walks, we needn't enlist the words of critics when we approach clay objects, which we should encounter as we do seashells: of infinite variety, they derive from similar raw materials transformed by a distinctive organism. We should never heed the slightest pressure from an outside source to prefer one over the other, or to prefer any at all.

The words of "authorities" interceding between us and ceramics we may be about to discover on our own terms can have the same disquieting effect as a cough from beneath a honeymoon bed.

One of the main reasons anyone goes to the bother of writing is to shape thoughts—to "see what I think"-and to share those thoughts in a way that ceramics can never be shared-by being in more than one place at a time, an inherent advantage of literature over three-dimensional art. In recent years, however, the sheer volume of words relating to ceramics assaults our priorities. Now it is possible to be "informed" about ceramics as we might become "informed" about Africa or snail darters. On the other hand, our understanding of ceramics... the lid's musical click on its jar, the fit of the cup in the hand, the noon sun's washing a segment of the mural... benefits little, if any.

Writing is also a vital part of the growing ceramic commodity market, critical acclaim frequently being a factor by which certain collectors make purchases, which is not to say that there aren't collectors who intuitively "go for the goods" primarily on intrinsic merit. Critical acclaim moves mountains, opens wallets, and transforms the way work is perceived— a fact brought home to me in a friend's house: "I used to keep Toby's dogfood in that big stoneware covered jar by the front door, but now it's become... a Ferguson!"

Yet another aspect of the power of the written word pertains to the gallery owner who also wears a critic's hat and whose market strategy for pots can resemble that of Cabbage Patch Kids-building status into the product, controlling the market, and trickling the merchandise to a hungry public whose appetite has been assiduously created and maintained by promoters.

We need to bring a healthy skepticism to what we read, and should furnish our own Surgeon General's Warning for much of it: "A writer's enthusiasm may be directly proportional to anticipated market trends."

We have an obligation to circumvent the printed word, to become recreational illiterates, approaching work directly-in exhibitions, in the storerooms of museums, in galleries, studios, and homes— continually exercising our senses of comprehension. As surely as ceramics have sprung from the hands of their makers, just as surely should they enter the lives of their beholders directly.

What is the voice of the work? If it has none today, keep coming back and listening. In the words of old-time radio, "Stay tuned." If the piece never speaks, never mind. If the voice isn't there, the work can't be given one by a critic.

Words about the source of the words are seductive. They can block our perceptual field. Wallace Stevens, in "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven," has this to say about primary encounters:

"We keep coming back and coming back To the real: to the hotel instead of the hymns That fall upon it out of the wind. We seek The poem of pure reality, untouched By trope or deviation, ...

Straight to the transfixing object, to the object

At the exactest point at which it is itself, Transfixing by being purely what it is,...

The eye made clear of uncertainty, with the sight Of simple seeing, without reflection. We seek Nothing beyond reality..."

Jack Troy

Huntington, Pa.

March 18, 1985

From "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" copyright 1950 by Wallace Stevens from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf Inc.