Crash. The hard crust of matter
Gianfranco Maraniello
“Collaborating” on a project such as the Biennale of Ceramics in Contemporary Art actually does mean “working together.” You need to know how to respond to the appeal of the places accommodating us and to absorb the stimuli provided by all those participating here. This is why I feel that it is opportune to examine some of the questions raised this morning. I believe we have to make the stimuli emerging from this conference our own and, for my part, I feel that it would be appropriate for me to modify the discourse I had planned. Considerable space has been devoted the idea of communication and its relationship with that of community. Themes discussed have included hospitality, participation and the festival — that I would like to interpret in the Nietzschean sense of a productive festival of thought. As co-curator, I would like to give a positive emphasis to certain “restrictions” of this Biennale. Firstly, clay itself constitutes a restriction: a number of restrictions are, in fact, encountered when working with it. Its physical limits are explored, its specific consistency, its hardness, the crust I referred to in the original title to this paper. One finds oneself reflecting on the way it states its own bulk and presents itself in space. The words of Nelson Herrara Ysla might encourage us to claim that such restrictions are also an appeal for the creation of works that carry within themselves characteristics of beauty that go above and beyond the intentions of the artist. Traditionally, in fact, ceramics lead us to think of manipulation reflecting the characteristics of the material and aspiring to a “beautiful form.” However, clay has above all a temporal restriction. Working with clay obliges us to accept periods of waiting — “attese” in Italian, hence, I believe, the name of the association behind this event — that evokes the time required for the ceramic object to concretize, challenging its own “hard” fragility, the empirical character of the production process that makes of every work an hypothesis to be consigned to the wheel, the kiln and the expert hand of the master ceramicist.
A further restriction — I am referring here to what Olu Oguibe had to say today — is that of “know-how,” because today artists are rarely familiar with this medium and necessarily have to rely on the expertise of the master ceramicist, a factor that frequently influences the creativity of the “inexpert” contemporary artists. We have talked about the artist’s hand, but how much weight does the hand of the assistant carry? Is it a kind of prosthesis? It might be said that the hand of the assistant is also that of an accomplice, frequently so aware of what he is doing as to render virtually obsolete that further restriction constituted by the discrimination between art and craft. This is a relationship that is continuously questioned by the protagonists of this Biennale. In an era in which the artist is frequently spared the need for know-how given that he can delegate the technical realization of his work, Albisola is instead an event that requires the artist’s presence and the time necessary for him to confront and assimilate a tradition. The artist often feels an initial sense of disorientation, but then begins to wander amongst the works of Wifredo Lam, Asger Jorn and Lucio Fontana, introducing himself to a tradition that appears to have been moulded on the wheel of time. He soon comes to understand the paradox into which he has fallen in accepting the invitation to become a part of this tradition while renewing it and carrying it forwards. He is asked to break with tradition so as to achieve a revitalization that distances the spectres of mannerism or even folk kitsch. However, in seeking originality the artist provokes fractures because, as with all traditions, there exists a series of discontinuities that mark the continuum of that which, in this case, is identified with ceramics and is capable of invading space and presenting itself as a work of art.
Young Chul Lee mentioned the “donative” nature of working with ceramics. It is curious to think that ceramics is also the material used for pharmacists’ jars, containing the ambiguous pharmakon, the gift, the dosis, both poison and the capacity to heal. Returning to the ambiguity of that which Olu Oguibe has defined as the artist’s hand and the assistant’s hand, I believe that it would be truly inappropriate to think of the know-how on which an artist “draws” solely in terms of assistance, prosthesis or tool. There are many artists whose modus operandi involves a form of appropriation of know-how or the development of cognitive experiences. Ganahl, with his learning of languages is an example.
All of us here are working to make a contribution to this tradition of which we have made ourselves provisional heirs in order to legitimize our conception of ceramics in contemporary art. We are giving ourselves an opportunity to give our own opinions on fundamental questions such contemporaneity, knowing that practices such as the working of ceramics may help us to support those themes that the first edition of this Biennale defined with such clarity. With regards to the question of the globalization of economy and art, I recall that the accent was placed on a term that could contrast the homologating violence and there was talk of “resistance.” I would prefer to slide semantically in the direction of the term “insistence.” We are involved in something that is not simply an exhibition but interrogates our work without finalizing it in terms of a spectacular expositional event. We are attempting to assimilate the time scales of ceramics and this requires continuous participation compatible with the timings involved with the working of the material. At most it involves the exhibition of a praxis, a dynamic, a degree of work in progress. The invitation is to observe the artists at work, to consider their tenacity and dogged, prolonged presence, their hand frequently experiencing the repetitiveness of the time of the wheel. A hand that, synecdochically seems to recall, as Olu Oguibe claims, that even the conceptual artist is physically involved. An ambiguity that finds confirmation in languages such as Italian that recall the tactility of thought with expressions such as “to grasp a concept,” a “prehensile” vocation that etymologically refers back to the Latin capere (to take) and that leads a philosopher such as Jacques Derrida to reflect on the crisis of metaphysics when writing a book significantly entitled Heidegger’s Hand. A making “by hand” that requires time, that claims it and makes a value of it. It obliges a period of waiting that becomes an integral part of every work and of this Biennale in general with its capacity for teaching us to accept the contingency in the long working processes and to persist with our attempts to transform clay into art.
Excerpt from the Proceedings of the “Local ceramic traditions and globalisation of contemporary art” conference, 19/20 October 2002, Fortezza del Priamàr, Savona.
Conference proceedings Local ceramic traditions and the globalisation of contemporary art
