Reading 1, Erin Doherty

Soetsu Yanagi's, Towards a Standard of Beauty, brought up some very interesting and important points about craft today and our need to return to some of the beauty and personalization of the past. As a potter, what he writes about takes an important stance on things I hold dear to me. Although I am just a beginning potter and have much to learn, his concerns trouble me as well. With the age of machines and mass production, we as potters and craftsmen/women have a daunting task of competing against items that come at a cheaper price and can be made with little to no energy exerted. He brings up a good point when he states, "the machine has in its nature more power than the hand and that there is a limit to what the hand can do, but just as the hand has limitations, so does the machine." I feel that one major limitation machines have is the people who run the machines and what they choose is acceptable enough to mass produce. A machine can almost be thought of as a plaster mold used with casting slip to re-make an object over and over again, essentially, mass producing. But, as an artist we choose to make a mold of something beautiful, something worth mass producing, while designers that run these machines (for the most part) have no idea what beauty is and produce something plain, boring, and cliche. The only problem with this is that handmade items take time, energy, and emotion to make, and therefor that is why you often see the difference between them and machine made items in the price tag. So where one style of making fails, the other excels and vice-versa. Handmade items are personable and beautiful, but expensive, and machines made items have no emotion, and as Yanagi states, "they are not very human," but the price is right. The demands of current society is the deciding factor. People are searching for more than these mass produced items, they want something beautiful and well made but also at an affordable price. This is where Yanagi suggests that, "the best course, probably, is that handwork and the machine should co-operate and supplement each other's shortcomings." This immediately made me think of Molly Hatch who did a studio demonstration for us a while back. She teamed up with Anthropologie in order to get her vases to a production line that would help lower the prices of her art and make it affordable to the general public. Although she handed the reigns over to a company and in turn, their mass producing machines, her vases still hold a sense of beauty and quality that a handmade work would. I think this is the practical future we face now. Nothing will ever be able to beat the price and speed at which machines can make items, but why not put a designer/artist in charge that knows how to make even a machine made item special and beautiful. There will still be a difference between a highly crafted, handmade ceramic piece and a well designed and decorated machine made piece, but it will open up the field of beautiful and personable ceramics to more people and in turn will benefit ceramics as a whole.

After reading Nancy Selvage's, Art Versus Craft, The Issue of Craftsmanship in Twentieth-Century Art, I was forced to think about the development of ceramics and what kind of forms should be made by a potter today. Selvage writes, "Today very few first-world potters make a pot because they or their clientele have a particular need for a container. Industry has long ago taken care of this level of necessity. The studio potter is presumably working towards satisfying needs beyond those of functional necessity."If we only think like this then where in today's world is their room for our non-utilitarian and unnecessary ceramic objects? If we make a wonderfully decorated and shaped, utilitarian teapot by hand is it art or is it just a nice teapot? And why bother when a machine will certainly make a more perfectly shaped and usable teapot? The rise of machines sparked a new form of ceramics. A machine can make a better, more balanced version of your teapot, a perfect, beautiful teapot, but can it make an un-perfect teapot beautiful? No, for that the aesthetic of hands and personal expression must be used. Since the rise of mass producing machines a new style of working with clay began and not everyone found it to their liking. Potters began moving away from perfectly shaped utilitarian objects onto increasingly more and more abstract forms.
The great thing about clay is how versatile it is and how it can be manipulated to make just about any form the mind might think of, but that can also be its downfall. Anyone can take a slab of clay and poke holes and stretch it into a form they wish to make. This piece of plastic clay is then fired to high temperatures which transforms it into an object, a 3 dimensional rock that can last forever. It seems a shame to fire clay into a permanent, un-reversable form if it creates an unpleasing and unusable outcome, yet it happens all the time (I am guilty of this without a doubt). So how can we take clay and create an abstract form that has no utilitarian function and expect people to understand it more or just as much than they would a teapot? Selvage writes about artist Peter Voulkos who's abstract ceramic work tread on many feet by challenging the norm of pottery at the time. These kinds of forms strayed from traditional ceramics and people did not understand it because of how new and different it was. The world is ever changing and so are its inhabitants. Where people used to look for structure and uniformity, they are now looking for unique and different, and pottery is one medium that will be able to conform to this new found outlook by being so versatile. By society's view on life changing, ceramics is open to a whole new field of experimenting and abstraction. Where abstraction used to only touch a select group of people's imagination, it now excites more people because of its ability to escape the norm and the boring and evoke emotions or feelings in a different and moving way.

These two articles were interesting to read together. It seems that Yanagi pushes for a combination of machines and handmade craft while Selvage pushes ceramics to conquer feats that machines can't. I think that a combination of these two directions would be important for the future of ceramics. Because clay is so flexible we must push it in a direction that complements our society in order to keep it fresh and accessible to the public. In a world that houses so many different cultures and styles, ceramics are able to expand and create something for everyone.