How to Program a Kiln

How to mix casting slip in the Shar

How to Make a Glaze

How to Make a Glaze

Classroom Organization

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJV4fQIrSlU&feature=youtu.be

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXW4iLHLtfc

Reading 4: INTERVENTION, INTERACTION, AND THE WILL TO PRESERVE

"Ceramic vessels can be culturally symbolic, aesthetically moving, and personally expressive, but emphasis of these attributes at the expense of a functional vessel's immersion in life is surely akin to embalming an animal for display rather than permitting it to live out its existence in the wild, or even in captivity."

I found this sentence to really help pull some things together for me in reading this article. I think that especially for those of us working on functional objects, even showing our work in the spaces on campus we have trouble with finding a way to allow the pieces to occupy the space in a way that the audience can approach them the way we want. The framework of displaying work and its effects is something that this semester has come into focus more for me. I liked reading this article and thinking about this on a bigger and deeper level.

This article took a while for me to get through, but as always gave me a lot to think about. The will to preserve as a phrase seems to reference much more than just objects in a museum before even reading this article. As humans I think we do have the desire to have things last. This made me think of the objects we create and their vulnerability. We are always mentioning that what we put into the world through ceramics becomes a permanent structure. But it seems as though a these objects permanence really depends on our will or efforts to preserve them, to care for them. I actually find myself interested and comforted by thinking about the susceptibility of my work to time, to weathering almost. I think we do fear what will be lost over time, ceramics as a medium has done a lot to preserve history and art is a very distinct way it seems. I am not sure that we have always had access to or been seeking the perspective delineated in this article. It is very good for us to be thinking about what the setting of a museum does to the interaction with and interpretation of objects. It was cool to read about how the inevitable framework of museums and the effects on the objects chosen to dwell within them can be used as a tool to critique and enhance. Ceramic vessels and sculptures are often and I think can always be seen as a dwelling place, literally in regards to functional work but also for concepts, ideas, even history and techniques. Museums then seem to act as collections of dwelling places. It makes sense that critique, understanding and intention are required to really evaluate what is occurring as the objects come to be in these spaces, from there we find tools to use in the process. Sometimes reading these articles makes me feel like there are people out there, including ourselves, thinking too hard about things. But that is only because it takes a while to soak in what you are newly being exposed to.

Reading 4 Intervention, Interaction, and the Will to Preserve

Glen R. Brown’s Intervention, Interaction, and the Will to Preserve comments on the role of the museum to provide a neutral display of artworks and the ways in which contemporary ceramic artists are engaging with and responding to the precedented role of the museum. Artists (and occasionally spectators) engage in this act of revisionism in a number of ways, ranging from members of the public defacing works of art like the Guernica or Black and Maroon to artists designing works that respond to static museum pieces or the physical museum space. The site specific work Calling Earth to Witness, by Walter McConnel, is a good example of art that responds to the pieces around it. It echoes the formal qualities of historical pieces flanking it, but contrasts the eternal permanence of these static relics by showing clay in its unfired state. The act of displaying wet clay, and preserving it in this state for the duration of its showing, comments on the desire to preserve and maintain pieces, keeping them undamaged and pristine in the museum setting. In her site responsive piece, A Million Tiny Deaths, Jeanne Quinn reacts to our desire to protect and preserve artworks by creating a display for her historical forms which deliberately destroys them. 

These are two good examples of ways in which ceramic artists plan their work for the museums setting and use their art to comment on the traditional role of the museum, but this form of interaction and commentary isn’t the only way to alter museum intervention. Commentary by artists like Jeanne Quinn and Walter McConnel seems didactic and loaded within the gallery walls, commenting on (and arguably criticizing) museum intervention, while other artists find other gentler ways to comment on intervention by recreating the spaces for which their works are intended within the walls of the museum (like Heather Mae Erickson building tables for her work, giving the gallery space the impression of a domestic setting). I think that creating new settings for display is another powerful tool for artists to change the way the museum space intervenes in their artworks. 

Brown poignantly compares functional objects in museum settings to embalmed animals, and I’m interested in the ways that ceramic artists can display their art without sacrificing its “immersion in life.” I think artists can do this by engaging in revisionism outside of the museum setting, altering traditions and precedents of display without actually interacting with museum space to make a statement about it. Lots of ceramic artists are coming up with new ways to display their art while integrating it into its intended context. Clare Twomey’s Forever reminds me of Ayumi Horie’s online gallery of her cups in use, both allowing their audience to engage in the domestic reality of functional pots. Documentation and display of pots in use seems to me like an important contrast to the sterile museum setting. Inventive galleries that alter a traditional gallery setting, like the Artstream Gallery, are important too; the Artstream still acts as an intervention but a less jarring and sterile one in the cozy and cluttered environment that it creates. The Artstream’s cup library extends the gallery space to the renter’s home, and the documentation of the cups in use (like Ayumi’s online gallery) allows viewers a glimpse into the artwork’s domestic lifespan. 

Reading 4

In the article titled “Intervention, Interaction, and the Will to Preserve”, Glen Brown discusses the politics of preservation and display in galleries and museums, and the practice of museum intervention. The first few paragraphs in this article contain sentences and phrases loaded with meaning, any of which could be discussed at length in their own respective essays. In the first sentence, Brown brings to our attention the “revisionism” that has come through museum galleries, which challenge cohesiveness, and “ostensible objectivity” in display practices. By “ostensible objectivity” he means outwardly appearing as intended to attain or accomplish (in regards to the ways in which things are displayed).

Brown notes that in the West, convention in museum galleries has brought about a recontextualization of objects, which, in turn, brings about new meanings. This idea of recontextualization is an interesting one in my opinion. If an artist creates a piece specifically for a certain setting, say, in a gallery, that is the context in which that piece was intended to exist. If the artist then took the same piece, and placed it elsewhere, like in a museum very different from the gallery, this is recontextualization, and it can still be just as interesting. Now, if we take an object that was never meant to exist in the neutral space of a gallery, and place it in a gallery, not only is the meaning of the object changed, but we also may begin to question the gallery space itself.

Reading 4: Intervention, Interaction, and the Will to Preserve

Glen R. Brown, Intervention, Interaction, and the Will to Preserve

In his essay “Intervention, Interaction, and the Will to Preserve,” Glen Brown points out the virtue of clay material and ceramic vessels and suggests a way contemporary arts could explore beyond revisionist interventions.

As he writes, it seems paradoxical to remove its functionality of utilitarian ceramic vessels and preserve them in a neutral space of museum. However, when vessels are brought into relationship with a certain subject in a gallery, a new context could be created for seeing, interpreting, and experiencing ceramic vessels separated from their roots in usefulness.

Especially, Clare Twomey's Forever is an impressive example for this new context. 1,345 “Forever” cups that were displayed and later dispersed to museum visitors “who signed deeds committing themselves to retain and care for the cups forever,” are defined by the meaning of cup, not specified by its function even though it is still functional. In that sense, preserving of contemporary ceramics implies interaction “as a means of generating new and engaging ceramic art” rather than intervention which focused on revealing biases in practices of collecting and display in museum.

Reading Response #4

In Glen Brown's essay, he brings forth the notions of intervention, interaction, and the will to preserve. At first, I was confused by his first concept of intervention but soon came to realize that it is essentially the role museums and galleries play within the art world. An artist can spend so much time and effort to create a spectacular work of art for the sole purpose of having it temporarily placed on display in a controlled and neutral environment, where it will later be phased out. As he stated- we are addicted to it! For some strange reason, we as both humans and artists are obsessed with the notion of dedicating a special type of arena to directly display and represent our art, but what is overlooked is that even through all the effort, the work is stationary and will later be removed to repeat the cycle.

I enjoyed the points he brought up about preservation. In historic ceramics, the creators crafted works with functional intentions- ergo if something is to function, it should function for as long as possible. Today, we still thrive on the concept of preservation, and making our work eternal in a sense. However what does this accomplish other than personal reassurance that our work is valued in some sense. Valued in a way that people would take extra care to preserve and maintain the condition of the work rather than letting go in a sense of that attachment. As Brown stated "...attributes at the expense of a functional vessel's immersion in life is surely akin to embalming an animal for display rather than permitting it to live out its existence in the wild, or even in captivity." With that said, I think it endorses the idea of severing that lively attachment we develop to our work , and instead just let the piece function in the world- let it experience life. I would venture to say that the more life a ceramic work experiences, the more experiences it has to offer to life. 

Reading 1

In Paul Greenhalgh’s Discourse and Decoration: The Struggle for Historical Space, Greenhalgh recognizes that ceramics as a media has not been dealt with in a major way in art history, although there have been crossovers between it and other media. He notes that nature of clay, whether it takes shape in a vessel or sculptural form, means that it will last forever, which is of huge importance, but he asks “How does it recognize itself?” and “how exactly are we, the contemporary audience, supposed to respond to it?”

            Greenhalgh suggests that in order to make claims about ceramic work in any measure, we need a good history on the subject. Without this, we have no real grounds from which to make claims, therefore we risk misinterpretation. The second of two main arguments that Greenhalgh makes, which is perhaps the most important, is that in the art world, theories that were created without the thought of ceramics are constantly being used toward it. He realizes that none of these classifications which art historians have come up with (i.e the avant-garde) have anything to do with ceramics. This means that one cannot simply say something does not fit into a certain style or movement, if that style or movement was created without a specific media in mind.

            This is an important argument, and perhaps even more important that it comes from such a respected and widely read figure in the art world. It is not as if it is a ceramic artist attempting to in some ways “make a case” for ceramic art, rather it is someone looking in from a relatively outside perspective, asking important questions without any bias.

Reading 3

In reading the intro of Jean Baudrillard’s “The System of Objects”, I found myself most interested in his explanation of the “technological plane” from which we understand objects.  He recognizes this technological plane as being an abstraction as we understand it; we are mostly unaware of the technological reality of the objects we use in everyday life.   I am interested in the idea that we are so familiar with the psychological and sociological, as well as formal context of objects that we regularly use (those which Baudrillard says are inessential), but are mostly unaware of the technological structure (the essential part) of an object.  He sees the technological aspect of all objects to be most essential to its meaning, yet talks about the necessity of not only technique but putting an object into practice in order to perpetuate the cycle of technological advancement and improvement.  I don’t really understand how the significance of an object can be entirely in its technological aspects even though it is through a process of being put into practice and altered repetitively that the object came to be how it currently is.  I see this process of an objects gradual evolution to be where its meaning can be found; the history of how an object came to be how it is. 

Baudrillard goes on to argue that in order to understand objects and the process through which they are “produced and consumed, possessed and personalized” we must understand their technological structure.  He uses the example of early and modern engines; the early being “abstract” as its parts functioned individually, and the modern engine is “concrete” as its parts work together to more efficiently complete the same process.  To me the existence of a modern engine is less meaningful without the knowledge of how the early engine functioned and why/how its evolution came about. 

While trying to understand Baudrillard’s ideas, I attempted to relate them back to ceramics.  I still think that a ceramic cup is less interesting if you only think about its structural and technological form, than if you consider how a user might interact with these forms.  I guess that I am still unable to understand how technological aspects of an object can be any more “essential” than other aspects.  For me, as a consumer as well as a maker of objects it is hard to separate the formal from the sociological and formal aspects of an object. 

The System of Objects, Introduction by Jean Baudrillard

Baudrillard, Jean. “Introduction.” The System of Objects. Verso, 2005. 1-10. Print.

            Rather than working to try to summarize the main ideas in this conceptually rich chapter by Baudrillard, I would like to discuss some smaller, detailed ideas that struck me personally which I find worth discussing. So here it goes.

            The first idea that grabbed my attention was that of the “ever-accelerating procession of generations of products, appliances and gadgets” (p. 1).  Although Baudrillard uses this as more of a context for his later points, I think it is important to acknowledge the fact that we live in a world of things. And not only that, but a world of things that is constantly growing, changing, expanding (etc.) from generation to generation. History can be recorded by technology and that technology is then recorded through the documented history of a culture. In ceramics, we make things that live in this context of the world, both functional and non-functional. We strive to engineer/design to discover/share beauty and we break the pots that don’t “make sense” in the world of objects.

            Baudrillard mentions how an “every day object transforms something” (p. 1), forming in my mind all sorts of intriguing questions. What is that “something?” Is it food (such as a plate), experience (the feeling of using and interacting with a plate), or relationships (the intention of a set of plates being to bring people together to share a meal)? He also writes of objects being linguistically defined by human interaction/experience/needs.  I believe this gives us a sense of the “who” of the objects we create, with the transformation previously mentioned being the “how,” the objects we create acting as the “what,” and the “when” and “where” being the cultural context.  The author then discusses the “personalization, of formal connotation, where the inessential holds sway” (p. 7), giving us (more or less) the concept of “why.” While it is important for an artist to keep his or her work open to change both technologically and interpretively, I think it is also important for an artist to begin to narrow down the key concepts that are important to them. There remains a more personalized and individual perspective that reflects what the artist needs to say. Without this aspect, ideas remain as ideas and objects as objects.

            In the last portion of this chapter, Baudrillard writes of “the ways in which techniques are checked by practices” (p. 9). It is interesting to me how, in pottery specifically, we as artists seem to experience both learning the sheer physical/technical processes (such as wheel throwing and mold making) and the conceptual/philosophical processes (color theory and formal visual elements) simultaneously. This process, although steep at first, continues throughout our experience and working with clay. We learn, practice, and play and it is through this that we discover the complex system of objects. We make things not just to create but also to learn. It is as Sanam Emami once said: “How you make something is just as important as what you are making.”

Molly Post 

Reading 3

I read the article titled The System of Objects written by Jean Baudrillad; this article contained many stimulating points and evoked some interesting thoughts. However the vernacular of this article made it particularly difficult for me to read, this may be just my personal opinion but it seemed so abstract that I was constantly getting lost in-between ideas. Other than that the authors attempt to relate objects to a spoken language and the designations that he made about objects and technology were very astute. The questions that Jean asked at the end of this article were significant because it gave me the ability to think back to the most important points that were made. The one question that stood out the most to me was “by what means does this ‘speech’ system (or this system which falls somewhere between language and speech) override the linguistic system”? To this question I would have to answer that objects create an understanding that transcends language barriers but the lack of ability to effectively communicate this understanding still exists. For instance two mechanics that speak different languages may have the same understanding of how vehicles work but their ability to communicate this understanding may be hindered by their language differences.     

Reading 3

Reading Response # 3

The System of Objects

By Jean Baudrillard

Response by Chelsea Skorka

I would first like to say: What nonsense. How did someone make an entire book dedicated to the system of objects? A better question would be WHY. I am intrigued by this introduction and would like to, in time, read this book even if it is to answer the questions I just asked.

While reading this introduction, a lot of things came to my mind, things that barely had to do with what she was talking about about but more or less, the reading was extremely dense, so I had to take each sentence in turn, and try to glean information from the words I did know to understand what the author was trying to say..

The book cover says “radical thinkers”, and this is exactly what they are. Radical to the point that I do not understand why the book was written. The only information I gleaned from the text was that objects and their function and their attributes and characteristics can be categorized. So I will respond to that...

As a species, it is natural for us to develop schemas, all species do. For example: A bear may have encountered one person in his lifetime that gave him food and then developed the schema that weird, two legged, hairless animals, wearing food colors, bring food. It is also fitting to add that without social context most objects in our possession at any given time would be considered simply by their physical characteristics.

I use this image of The Little Mermaid as an example of many things.

1. Ariel has developed schemas of her own from prior experience with similar objects.
2. A specific object taken out of social context may or may not allude to its actual function.
3. In observing an object without context we observe only the physical characteristics of an object, from this observation we can only speculate as to its function. Then we can get a glimpse of that society.
4. Not knowing what an object does can lead to imagination, innovation, and speculation.

WHY do I bring this up? These ideas can be transcended into thoughts towards making one’s own artwork:

• With the knowledge that each viewer or handler of your work brings with them prior schemas about the world, those schemas WILL BE projected onto your work. Thus, it is recommended to research/ know such schemas for better understanding of how an audience is going to react to your work.

        For Example: A tea cup. When presented with this object we consider certain things; can it hold tea? can I hold the cup? is it comfortable? uncomfortable? is this because of the handle? or the weight? or the heat? what does it look like? what does it remind me of? does the tea taste good coming out of the cup?

What is the artist trying to say through combination of all of these things?

Etsy seller StayGoldMaryRose

Hommage a Meret Oppenheim, Betty Hirst. Photograph: Eat Me Daily

• What happens when you, as the artist, takes your made object and change the context? Etsy seller StayGoldMaryRose takes away the concept of tea in these tea cups and adds new context so that now, these objects are worn and have no utilitarian value anymore.
• Through creating art we, as artists, are reflecting upon and reacting to our personal experiences. Even if we are experiencing someone else reflect on their experience. So as we create art we give a glimpse of social context, even if the art makes fun of something in society. When an artist makes a tea cup that is made of meat, we understand something about society. For different types of people, this has different meaning, because people bring different schemas to your work. Personally, as a person who does not eat meat and loves tea, I am repulsed by the concept of a meat tea cup. However looking at this form as an archeologist, I could conclude that there must have been some controversy about the topic of consuming meat. In the context of a teacup, I can speculate that the artist might have been making a statement about eating meat as often as we drink tea.
• As artists, we have the opportunity to really use schemas to our advantage, either to sell our work or make a statement or both. We can do this in many ways through pushing context, function, experience, and knowledge of a form.

Above is a drawing of a cabinet of curiosities. People would travel to foreign parts of the world and collect objects to bring back and place in their cabinet of curiosities. Usually after taking the object out of context the traveler would embellish upon the physical characteristics of the object (sometimes physically) and then by telling a fictional tale about what the object was, what it belonged to, and what that thing did with the object. Some of the objects collected were displayed as Unicorn horns and dragon scales. Much to the interest of the viewer of another’s cabinet of curiosities their imagination of the rest of the world was able to run rampant.  Thus creating the same: innovation, imagination and speculation as Ariel encountered.

However, throughout the centuries we as humans have begun to lose some of the old ways with the advance in technology. At one time, a caveman used his club, innovatively, to bludgeon, to bash, to poke, to smash, to show aggression, to hunt, to tenderize, to protect, to fight etc. Now we have multiple objects for each of those purposes.

While investigating an average kitchen these days one might find: a chopper, a lettuce spinner, a rice cooker, a vegetable steamer, a juicer, a popcorn maker, a toaster, a blender, a slow cooker etc. At one time, humans had fire, and a sharp rock. What I am getting at here is with all of these objects our lives have become more and more complicated even though these objects are supposed to make our lives easier, similarly to technology. And for what? We save five minute now putting the vegetable in the chopper but waste ten minutes later trying to clean the damn thing.

Below is a video giving us a perspective towards objects or stuff.

The Story of Stuff.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=9GorqroigqM

We have developed so many schemas and categories for everything that we tend to waste our time defining things and categorizing them. And for what purpose? The reading touched on an idea of making one part of a car that does multiple things. This is similar to the human body most parts of the body do multiple things, like a mouth chews food but also speaks, and a stomach breaks down food but also digests, blood carries oxygen to cells but it also carries carbon dioxide and antibodies that have different functions. The point I am trying to make though is that everything in the body works together to sustain life, thus everything in the body is connected. Much like everything in the universe is connected. So, we could choose to waste our lives trying to organize everything neatly into categories but everything IS connected so this is a feat of which one should not attempt. “The greatest illusion of this world, is the illusion of separation. things you think are separate and different are actually one in the same.”- Guru from Avatar cartoon.

Kohei

A part of the same whole.

Reading 3: The Order of Things

This reading, like the other we have had, was very rich. The author's thought process and description of the relationships, conversations and effects of things on one another was very engaging in that it made you really think about subtleties and details that often we do not consider deeply.

The author talked about 4 main "figures that determine the knowledge of resemblance with their articulations." The first of these was convenience (convenientia), or the juxtaposition of objects, like the touching of the beginning of one to the ending of another, or the edges of two objects coming in contact. This is not the normal connotation of connotation of the word convenience I think of. As I read about this figure, I kept thinking of our critique's in class, when we set up our work and this convenience starts to play out, without us even intending it to sometimes. Often though, we try to use this as a tool, or at least keep the possibility of it in mind as we put our work out on display. The second figure the author described, aemulatio, is "the means whereby things scattered through the universe can answer one another. This figure creates circles of connection, like convenientia, of resemblance with out needing contact. This relationship or interaction between objects of some kind seemed a little more abstract, requiring maybe a little bit more investigation of something to see. But of course this is something that I think many of us are trying to achieve in our work, creating the resemblance of something deeper or different through more than proximity or exact replication. The third figure was the  first two superimposed, analogy, this one seemed a little more familiar because I think is something that is obviously taught to us but the author describes on a much more complex and deep level. The author describes analogy as being able to create resemblances across space (like aemulatio), but also speak to "adjacencies, bonds and joints". The author talks about this figure being about subtle resemblances of relations, these relations can be reversed or refocused without losing their force or contradicting each other. This was good to think about in relation to how we are always seeking after different or new ways to go about building things or generating ideas. Why not start at the other end of an idea or form to get to a conclusion? The final figure was called sympathies. The author describes this figure as one that transforms, as a principle of mobility, a displacement of qualities that take over from one another in a series of relays. He talks about this being dangerous if left alone without other figures at work, that everything would run the risk of becoming the same. This is good to be reminded that there is a balance to be acquired in similitude. This concept also reminds be of the idea of entropy, or the disorder of the universe. It is the measure of progression towards thermodynamic equilibrium, at which forward and backward reactions are at an equal occurrence, things would be the "same", which would actually be very bad.

The author's writing made all of these interactions and relationships between things visually, physically and contextually carry intense significance. This was an interesting thing to think about and realize the power in working with, in and around all of these forces. We often underestimate or are unaware of these things being at work with in, between, around and through our work.

Reading 3 - The System of Objects, by Jean Baudrillard

Jean Baudrillard’s The System of Objects, talks about how objects uses as “practical or technical” are ever changing with the growing needs of the people that use such objects. That makes for a shorter lifespan that these objects are wanted/needed before the next, more improved model comes out. With new and improved versions of objects that came before being made, there are far too many different things in the world that we can hardly come up with a means to classify them. Their differences are too vast.

“There are almost as many criteria of classification as there are objects themselves: the size of the object; its degree of functionality (i.e. the objects relationship to its own objective function); the gestures associated with it (are they rich or impoverished? Traditional or not?); its form; its duration; the time of day at which it appears (more or less intermittent presence, and how conscious one is of it); the material that  it transforms (obvious in the case of a coffee grinder, less so in those of a mirror, a radio, or a car – though every object transforms something); the degree of exclusiveness or sociability attendant upon its use (is it for private, family, public or general use?); and so on.”

I find this part of The System of Objects to speak well to thoughts we need to have as ceramicists. In making our work, we need to have a very specific, intended purpose for that work. By asking ourselves what criteria of classification we would like our work to be placed into (or even touch upon many of them), we can then make successful pieces that are specific to those classifications. However, work does not NEED to fall under just one classification. Why couldn’t someone make a vase that functions well as a vase, yet still stand alone as a beautiful object? I think that is where art differs from what Baudrillard is speaking about. Art doesn’t necessarily have to be classified in a certain classification area. It can be classified as many things, if able to be classified at all. My question is what classifies art as art. Could anything be considered art? If art cannot fall into a specific category, couldn’t something not intended to be made as art be considered art? And something made to be a work of art function in a practical way? Is pottery considered practical, technical, or both?