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.