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.