Stories of ceramic involving art and design

Beppe Finessi

Yes, many things start from here, meaning ceramic.
And everything seems to have begun in ’17, meaning in the 20th century.
On 9 April of that year, in New York, at the Society of Independent Artists, the mocking player of modern art, hidden behind one of his numerous pseudonyms, Robert Mutt, exhibits, or even better yet, attempts to present, because in reality it will be rejected, the work Fountain, a real upside-down wall-mounted urinal: the work in white porcelain totally breaks away from all previous concepts, marking the point of no return of contemporary art.
14 September, in Innsbruck, is the date of birth of Ettore Sottsass, an architect, like his father, who will produce a significant, intense, emotional and moving ceramic projects better and more prolifically than anyone else, who will work with ceramic for fifty years generating incredibly consistent results despite the extensive period of time involved.
Yes, many things start from here, meaning Albisola.
A story that begins in the mid 1500s with the Grossi laboratories, continues with Bernardo Corradi and ends up with the production by Chiodo and Levantino in the early 1800s. Then, at the beginning of the 1900s, many laboratories, like the one created with Giuseppe Mazzotti, or that of Alba Docila founded by Adolfo Rossello and directed by Mario Gambetta, focused their activities on the production of artists’ ceramic works. A key figure during those years was certainly Tullio (Mazzotti) of Albisola, who with Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Bruno Munari imported futurist ideas into ceramic production. And here we write one of the basic passages of our first (meaning Italian) modernity. Then Arturo Martini, the maestro, and from then on, from the end of the Twenties, Albisola’s real and tangible aura, so illuminating for the world of art, never stopped shining. Then World War Two, unrepeatable, with the evenings at Bar Testa, with Fontana, Sassu, Dova, Crippa, Fabbri and Lam but also Piero Manzoni (who began some of his important works right in Albisola, and one of the merits of this biennial is to have recovered “forgotten” information and materials of this leading figure) as well as international maestros like Asger Jorn who, in the mid Fifties, bought a rundown place in the hills of Albissola Marina, in the area of “Località Bruciatti”, moving there with his family and renovating that old farmer’s house into a special place of delights and surprises, as well as oneirism, anguish and levity.
What is being done today, activities that began a few years ago, is a complex project “to interrelate and make multiple and singular interests co-exist, being placed on a common level by numerous subjects in an overall field of action involving designers and artists, museum curators, critics and historians of art and design, ceramic laboratories, hi-tech companies, professional training centres, universities and fine arts academies”.
A Biennale of Ceramics in Contemporary Design, now in its third edition, “aimed at developing social and cultural assets in the Ceramic District of the Province of Savona”.
Laboratories and small workshops involved with the dreams, the undertakings, the actions and the ideas of thirty-six international artists, invited to represent the two disciplines – art and design – that have always focused on the use of this unique material.
There are great artists, like Getulio Alviani, who transform the idea of the tile with one of his famous “tensions”, identical white and black fields that by means of an optical effect seem to be dissimilar: white seems to have dominated black, light over shadow. Yes, a genuine Alviani.
And there are very young talents (like some students taking the Master’s course in Ceramic Design held during the months to prepare for the Biennale and that became an integral part), like Getulio Alviani, who puts together fragments of material that allude to a chair, utilising the traditional tubular structure always found in any public office, and adding small pieces of ceramic to it: sublime poetry worthy of making the headlines. Or Guido Rossi, whose fallen man was struck in the heart by a punch that is still quite evident: cruel truth.
Then, other high art: Pere Noguera stops the automobile, a symbol of last century’s speed and modernity, constructing inside a landscape of clay dust. And then for Runa Islam, dust again takes the centre stage, but this time from another starting point: reconstruction from old moulds of traditional figures of animals, giraffes, elephants and still others, exhibited next to the old productions found in a warehouse, still with their visible “layer of time”: almost identical pieces, but with what is certainly a different kind of luminosity.
Jacqueline de Jong came up with an installation as a tribute to Jorn and his heroic home: an installation to transform the rather plain railing surrounding the huge pond that basically divides the small estate into two parts: 60 ceramic potatoes to place/slip in/insert into the anonymous tubular frame of that evident and inelegant superfluous addition.
Adrian Paci pays tribute to the expressiveness of Pier Paolo Pasolini by utilising some pieces from Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (and applying them to three different types of earth): words in images drawn from the earth, something that we would/could have wanted to see in a Rotella that, from a material-oriented viewpoint, is less repetitive.
Corrado Levi proposes a triptych in the form of an enigma: three identical parts, but in different materials. The first in cedar wood, the second in cast bronze and the third in white enamelled ceramic, asking us “What is the relationship between what is felt and what is created?: his usual attempts at throwing us off track. Michelangelo Pistoletto transforms a book into golden ceramic to help us recall, literally, his thoughts as they soar toward infinity, thus writing a new chapter in the history of the artist’s book.
Some projects reinterpret and renew various types of daily objects: Joris Laarman transforms a large traditional Savona vase into a vacuum cleaner: for once the container is used differently, but still works. And just before having redesigned parabolas (that “like flowers, all point toward a satellite that reflects radio waves from some position in space”) using material as previously described and decorative patterns that reflect the world’s various cultures.
Ugo La Pietra makes an ironic statement about the proverbial “parsimony” of Ligurians, proposing an oval piggy bank with relief decorations in the form of perhaps protective quills: an object that’s smiling and “dangerous” at the same time, a skin that becomes a kind of reverse “use instructions”.
Franco Raggi “also wanted to think of those objects [centrepiece and book ends] at rest, while they are not being used. So that even without flowers or without books, they still exhibit a formal dignity that can perhaps prevent them from being concealed in closets”: so, they have become a small type of formally complete and evident domestic architecture, instead of mute presences to hide before or after being used.
Pekka Harni throws 12 different red clay elements that can be placed on top of each other as needed, to obtain what are always variable compositions, based on the artist’s desire/objective, that are almost interactive.
This is similar to an idea by Liam Gillick, who sends signals to his world, that of art, with an almost elementary sequence of coloured glossy ceramic trays, to be combined or mixed with works by other artists: anonymous, diffuse and famous.
Adeline Lunati transforms the two traditional male-female elements of the gypsum mould into ceramic objects: and so a jewellery case is a box with “unindentifiable” forms and thickness but profoundly expressive, a new presence that we had seen before only in a warehouse.
Jurgen Bey imagines that the rough wooden packing crate can become an integral part of a vase and not just its simple protective covering, transforming it this way into a cabinet with doors that conceal that container for flowers.
Paolo Deganello continues his quest, the one that has been continuing for forty years, to seek “objects with a soul”, proposing a “genetic mutation of an electric wire into a ceramic lamp that flies”. Forgetting the overly exploited geometric shape (that even in the tradition, and only Italian, of design, set great records, such as the lamps Eclisse and Atollo by Vico Magistretti that won the “Compasso d’Oro”), he allows himself to be charmed by the world of animals: in this case, a gecko, or even better, its “belly”, that “loans” its shape for a lamp that crawls along the wall, just like a reptile.
Some worked on the real characteristics of the material, on the possible working techniques and on the traditional applications, or on the exact opposite. Like Carmine Deganello, who completely reversed the thoroughly established idea of the ceramic object “as a heavy and fragile product, placed on a table to collect dust”, imagining a hanging lamp, built in two parts like two valves that open and close to change the flow of light. Or like the Studio Demakersvan, that designed a streamlined stool (yes, a type never made before), then decorated with a technique based on tattoos (yes, real innovation of antennas in tune with the status quo).
Other artists worked on the relationship between the object and the body.
Amie Dicke with impressions of parts of herself, reinterpreting her work in marzipan covered with icing How sweet is the space between my legs, a project that she made while a young art student: a not so cold and more “personal” Rachel Whitered, with an erudite reference to Marcel Duchamp to whom we dedicated the first lines.
Franco Raggi brings back to life a forgotten project of the heroic years of radical design, at a time when everything was the subject of debate. These Shoes for a mandatory face-to-face confrontation are the end result of the first seminar, 1975, Global Tools, “The body and constraints”, an epic and intense “duel” – in a courtyard of old Milan – based on the ideas of intelligent friends and accomplices.
Florence Doléac designed a funeral urn for an entire family, giving it the form of a potato, in which each “sprouting” bud contains the ashes of a person.
Alessandro Biamonti reconsidered the concept of gym equipment, real weights to lift with the hands, after having filled them “with water or sand to efficiently do their job”, but not before having made them “beautiful and in proportion to admire”.
Others contemplated ecology and recycling, but in their own way: the irreverent, bold and  surprising Catalan genius of Martí Guixé, coming up with a ceramic volume in the form of a snowball that when placed inside a toilet water tank decreases its capacity and reduces “waste”.
Paolo Ulian with a table tray decorated with holes that if accidentally broken immediately allow the object to discover its own features, converting the broken pieces into small bowls: so a “negative event” might “generate new stimuli and new situations”. As the maestros once said, taking full advantage of the force of what are often inevitable events, or the “strength of the adversaries”. Yes, almost a Zen lesson.
Then, obviously there were many who challenged the eternal type of vase that never wanes.
Denis Santachiara came up with the idea of a double vase (once skilfully interpreted by Enzo Mari with the Pago-Pago vase), re-proposing the traditional form of the most economic and widespread pottery container, but enhancing the constitutive material while improving its function: his vase can contain a plant or, if turned upside-down, a single, proud flower.
The young Morgan Maggiolini reduces the vase to a pointed cone to plant directly into the bag of soil sold by nurseries: blessed and wholesome irreverence, and even more so if intelligently applied.
Stefano Giovannoni considers the characteristics of ceramic with respect to those of plastic and dares to create sharp and dynamic profiles, glazed in pastel, changing and brilliant colours to produce containers with perfect proportions and amazing colour combinations.
Andrea Branzi continues his work on the integration and intertwining of things, including flowers and vases, forcing diversities to interact “to create a new cognitive fabric”.
Alessandro Mendini transforms, with proverbial clarity, soap bubbles into a complex single-material and monochromatic construction, supporting and directly involved with laboratories to even set a production record.
Marta Laudani and Marco Romanelli emphasise the qualities and skills of craftsmanship through a decoration that is a kind of identity card open at the special features entry: a project that acts like a manifest for all the things made here, made by hand and made well.
Then, as pointed out by Corrado Levi, during his historical lessons at the Faculty of Architecture, Polytechnic University of Milan, “humour is the binding agent”, and so there are many possibilities involving irony and levity.
Guido Venturini, who silently, after years of great success, has humbly come back to learn (an example to be taken literally), also by studying an exceptional material like ceramic. And here he keeps various possibilities open, remaining close to the comical: a Fioraio as an anthropomorphic vase balancing on legs spread wide apart, and a potty for children happily decorated like a Skunk or like a canary (and that becomes, with pun intended, a Cagarino).
David Robbins brought to Albissola his work about the Ice Cream Social, transforming it into a vertical sequence of bowls to be inserted into each other in an irregular manner, decorating them with coloured stripes like melted sweets.
Then, another bright hope. Claudio Bracco, smiling in his youthfulness, prepares The plate for the last pea: leaving us with a specific and incisive impression that is light as a shadow.