Contemporary Clay and Museum Culture

Christie Brown, Julian Stair, Clare Twomey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317160861
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This groundbreaking book is the first to provide a critical overview of the relationship between contemporary ceramics and curatorial practice in museum culture. Ceramic objects form a major part of museum collections, with connections to anthropology, archaeology and other disciplines that engage with the cultural and social history of humankind. In recent years museums have provided the impetus for cutting-edge artistic practice, either as a response to particular collections, or as part of exhibitions. But the question of how museums have staged contemporary ceramics and how ceramic artists respond to museum collections has not been the subject of published research to date. This book examines how ceramic artists have, over the last decade, begun to animate museum collections in new ways, and reflects on the impact that these new initiatives have had in the broad context of visual culture. Ceramics in the Expanded Field is the culmination of a three-year AHRC funded project, and reflects its major findings. It brings together leading international voices in the field of ceramics, research undertaken throughout the project and papers delivered at the concluding conference. By examining the benefits and constraints of interventions and the dialogue between ceramics and museological practice, this book will bring focus to an area of museology that has not yet been theorized, and will contribute to policy debates and art practice.

Part I

The expanded field

1Productive friction

Ceramic practice and the museum since 1970

Laura Breen

Since the late 1990s, projects that foster new readings of museums – their collections, the spaces they occupy, the displays they house and the ways they operate – have gained a high profile in the ceramic field in Britain. Interventions such as Edmund de Waal’s Arcanum at the National Museum of Wales (2004) and Keith Harrison’s M25 London Orbital at the Victoria and Albert Museum (2006) might be regarded alongside other works that take the ‘museum as medium’, and which originated from the critical artistic practices of the 1960s and 1970s.¹ However, the relationship between ceramic practice and the museum has followed a different trajectory.²

While the 1970s saw the rise of artworks that critiqued or circumvented the museum, it was not museums but retail-led galleries, private studios and associations such as the Craftsmen Potters Association that produced the hegemonic narratives of ceramic practice at the time. Indeed, contemporary ceramic works started to enter, rather than leave, museums in Britain during this period. It might even be argued that museums served as alternative spaces for ceramics practitioners, offering a platform for more experimental works. Certainly, as the ceramic field was attempting to reconcile new forms of ceramic practice with historical ones, museums were facing similar challenges.

In the 1970s and 1980s the continued focus on object-making within the field formed a better fit with the collecting infrastructures of museums than other contemporary art activity. Furthermore, by the time ceramic practice and museum practice began to intersect more fully, museums routinely invited contemporary artists to create works that tested their limits in a less overtly critical manner. Ceramic practitioners – torn equally between disciplinary heritage and the contemporary landscape – have embraced these opportunities, using them to construct dialogues between past and present and explore the bounds of their medium.

Showing

In the 1970s, when studio ceramics became a more regular feature of British museum programmes, works were primarily tacked on to narratives about the evolution of ceramic design or separated out in contemporary exhibitions. Restricted by existing display furniture, which was designed to protect and accommodate multiple objects, museums often grouped diverse forms of ceramic practice together.³ Accompanied by minimal labelling, which detailed the maker, date, medium and techniques used, each exhibit was thus presented as a specimen for visual comparison with those that surrounded it, reducing complex differences to matters of aesthetic choice or temporal context.

The plinth, which had been adopted from the sculptural tradition and employed as a means of highlighting the aesthetic qualities of studio pottery since the 1920s, was the main alternative to the vitrine. In addition to showcasing works in the round, so that their three-dimensionality could be appreciated, it offered a greater degree of separation from other exhibits and flexibility in terms of arrangement. It also facilitated the reading of works by those, such as Alison Britton, who were concerned with ‘the outer limits of function’, by foreclosing, or at least deferring, the possibility of actual use.⁴ However, like the vitrine, the plinth privileged sight – albeit to cater to increasingly outdated notions of autonomy. This diminished opportunities for dialogue with the other forms of practice that informed the works, which Britton later described as fusing ‘Sevres with Krazy Kat’ (1983, pp. 18–23).

Of course, contemporary craft objects had been contextualised in room sets as well, an approach that Muriel Rose perfected in her Little Gallery (1928–1939) and which was evidenced in major exhibitions such as the Festival of Britain (1951). However, room sets in museums and historic houses centred on period design and, therefore, had little place for contemporary work. Aside from this, there were designs that employed more theatrical techniques, such as Barry Mazur and Brian Griggs’s set for The Craftsman’s Art (1973) exhibition at the V&A, which included silhouettes of trees, a bandstand and a recording of birdsong. Nevertheless, as the newly formed Crafts Advisory Committee’s showcase exhibition, The Craftsman’s Art did not reflect typical museum display. While The Guardian’s Richard Carr (1973, p. 10) remarked on the commercial aspect of exhibition, describing it as a ‘super shop’, it was also a shop window of another kind, which employed dramatic staging to weave diverse works into a homogenising narrative that marketed the idea of the crafts.

Museums also began to use live demonstrations to promote craft practice at this time, with places such as Shipley Art Gallery, the V&A and Hove Museum of Art (as it was then known) inviting ceramicists to demonstrate their making processes on-site. Initially, there was a strong commercial aspect to these enterprises, with V&A Director Roy Strong (1976) suggesting that The Makers – a series of events at the museum in 1975, which was based on Edward Lucie-Smith’s book World of the Makers – would encourage visitors to purchase contemporary craft objects, particularly those on sale in the onsite craft shop. This reflected the mission of the shop’s sponsor, the Crafts Advisory Committee, whose founder, Viscount Eccles, had asserted that one of the key questions craft advocates faced was ‘how to put craftsmen in touch with the public who are ready to buy their products and assure them a decent living’ (1972). Nonetheless, in a move that pre-empted the rise of artist-led interpretation, ceramics practitioners Walter Keeler and Mo Jupp were also sited alongside museum objects in the hope that visitors, observing their object-making skills, would gain a greater appreciation of the V&A’s collections (Ceramic Review, 1976).

Intervening

While The Makers promoted continuity, spotlighting the common ground between older objects in museum collections and contemporary practice, other initiatives disrupted established modes of ceramics display. Perhaps the most pertinent of these was Palaces of Culture, an exhibition held at Stoke-on-Trent City Museum in 1987, for which five artists were invited to create works that interrogated the notion of the museum. For one participant, Jo Stockham, the exhibition was a chance to ‘decompartmentalise museums, where disciplines such as social history and ceramics are separated, obscuring their intermeshing and interdependency’ (Dexter, 1987).⁵ Coating the inside of a museum case with wet clay, she frustrated attempts to obtain a clear view of the objects inside, drawing parallels with the museum’s displays, which espoused visibility, yet concealed less palatable histories. She also finger-painted a quote into the clay that referenced the toxic effects of lead glazes on workers’ health, declaring ‘the masters don’t tell us what’s in it’.⁶ Giving voice to those whose labour and suffering lay behind ceramic objects like those in the museum, Stockham exposed the impossibility of the Neutral History she took as her title and which many museums then purported to offer.

Figure 1.1Jo Stockham, Neutral History, 1987, installation view, wet clay, lead, coal, wood. Palaces of Culture, City Museum and Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent, 1987. © Jo Stockham.

Museum theorist Eilean Hooper Greenhill later used Stockham’s work and others in Palaces of Culture to support her argument that increasing the number of texts available in museums and diversifying their authorial base would ‘break down the curatorial monopoly of the description of experience and will work towards the democratisation of the museum as a social institution’ (Hooper Greenhill 2011, p. 118). This was a demand that museums were already trying to fulfil at the time she was writing, with artists increasingly used as a means of achieving this. However, the works in the exhibition also demonstrated that the creation of alternative narratives could expand the discourse around ceramics. As Hooper Greenhill observed, there is nothing inherently wrong with the way in which ceramics are traditionally displayed according to style, decoration or technique; issues of exclusion arise when objects are only displayed and discussed in one way. These issues were as applicable to the field as to the museum.

Despite the precedent set by these artists, it was another decade before ceramics practitioners such as Edmund de Waal began to produce works that engaged the museum as medium. De Waal’s projects constitute a thorough investigation of how a practitioner might create texts for and through the museum. For example, Modern Home (1999) at High Cross House, explored the effect that placement can have on the reading of both architectural space and ceramic vessels; Arcanum (2003) at the National Museum of Wales revealed how different approaches to museum display can reinterpret porcelain objects; Signs & Wonders (2009) addressed the experience of visiting the V&A ceramics gallery and creating a personal pathway, which defied the rationale of the museum display; and 2013’s On White: Porcelain stories from the Fitzwilliam Museum, took these concerns a stage further, foregrounding the subtle differences between objects and the merits of close examination. Although site-sensitive, these works are perhaps best viewed as part of de Waal’s oeuvre – an ongoing exploration of how framing can foster, among other things, different understandings of ceramics.

In his paper at the landmark ‘Ceramic Millennium’ conference in 1999, de Waal (1999) had urged craft practitioners to speak for themselves, warning that if they did not, then critics or curators would do so in their stead. It was an address that demonstrated an awareness of the historical basis of institutional critique, echoing Daniel Buren’s ‘The Function of the Museum’ (1970). However, his focus on replacing curatorial speech with that of the artist harked back to transmission models of learning. Proceeding from the position that works and texts have a fixed meaning which receivers, such as museum visitors, absorb, he substituted one form of authorship for another. This jarred with the constructivist approaches to meaning-production cultivated in the museums that would commission him and which theorists such as Hooper Greenhill promoted (2000). Furthermore, it also operated in tension with the constitutive import of the visitor in the site-sensitive practices he would adopt. In both instances, objects, artworks and texts were intended to offer catalysts for the visitors’ meaning-making processes, rather than offering explanation.

To a certain extent, de Waal has attempted to mediate the gulf between intent and reception through...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Introduction Ceramics in a place of cultural discourse
• Part I The expanded field
• Part II The museum as context
• Part III Audience engagement
• Part IV Process and material
• Part V Curation and authorship
• Index