The matter of the artist’s hand
Olu Oguibe
In his essay, Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Walter Benjamin extolled the wonders of print technology, including photography and the printing press, as the ultimate subversion of the cult of originality in art, and the foundations of bourgeois taste and hegemony. Benjamin’s argument might seem to hold some truth because a century earlier photography had effectively taken portraiture away from the commandeering nobility into the hands and homes of the masses in a way that painting never could accomplish and photographic reproduction it seemed had substituted mechanics for the artist’s hand. In effect the mechanics of photographic reproduction had freed image-making from the fallibility and tyranny of the artist’s hand. But did it, really? Did photography remove the human agent from image making, or indeed extinguish our desire for the artist’s hand? It was clear even at the beginning, in the mid-19th century, that it did not replace human agency in image-making or remove the artist’s hand. The camera did not operate itself without human intervention and control. Someone had to set up the apparatus, arrange the subject, shoot the image at a particular angle and in a particular mood, and then, process the raw image with sufficient room, always, to manipulate or mediate it “by hand.”
Mechanical reproduction may have rescued image making from the decadence of late 18th century painting, but it neither replaced the artist’s hand nor assuaged the desire for evidence of human agency in art. In the early 20th century a new movement appeared that contributed once more to the revival of the idea that art could do without the artist’s hand. Conceptualism propagated the notion that the mind is more important in the artistic process than manufacture, in other words that the artist no longer has to make or fabricate in order to create art, and could do so competently through the agency of the will. Far more than photography or mechanical reproduction had done, conceptualism appeared to have finally driven the nail into the coffin of art as the West knew it. It has been nearly a hundred years since Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel of 1913. In that period we have seen numerous manifestations of the new freedoms that conceptualism brought to art. These freedoms also brought countless controversies with them, the latest of which include the unmade bed exhibited at the Tate Gallery in London, or the neon lights that won an artist the prestigious Turner Prize a short while ago. These latest manifestations of conceptual art are, of course, no more controversial than Duchamp’s pieces were at the turn of the 20th century, which might lead some to argue that not much has changed, after all. The elevation of the artist from artisan to intellectual has not revolutionized the world. One may then ask, have all the years and controversies of conceptual art and mechanical reproduction actually done very much to reduce, not to mention remove, our desire for evidence of the hand in art? One dares say, not really. The next and perhaps more important question, then, is why are we so keen on the matter of the artist’s hand? We walk into a Picasso exhibition or a Van Gogh show. We step up to the paintings and we observe the brush strokes. We observe the signatures intently. We imagine how the work might have sat on an easel; how it might have stood in the studio, how humbly it might have begun. We stare intently and we set our imagination adrift in the presumed world of the artist, insinuating ourselves into that world. Finally, when the imagination sets sail, we take ourselves through the processes and moments of the work’s creation. We walk up to an ancient or medieval monolith, or indeed a Pieta or a Henry Moore sculpture, and the first thing that comes to our mind is how it might have been hewn or cast or even carried from its place of origin to its present location. We think of the process of its manufacture: how it was made. Then, and only then, do we think of how it was conceived, or indeed what it might mean. Some will argue that we fixate on the evidence of the artist’s hand because there is a material value attached, or because it represents authenticity, because it distinguishes the real from the fake or copy and in so doing elevates it above the ordinary. But these fail to explain why we attach value to originality or singularity in the first place. What deeper meaning might it carry beyond a market value? As an artist one would argue that the artist’s hand speaks to something peculiar about creation. It speaks fundamentally to that ability which makes us peculiar among the species as creatures that also create. In his poem Good Morning, America, the great American poet Carl Sandburg pointed to the mystery of the human species, “the little two-legged joker... Man” builds machines that fly and edifices that reach for the sky and point a needle at God’s eye. Needless to say, this egotistical inclination has also brought us untold grief, as witnessed recently in the collapse of New York’s World Trade Center towers. We are the only species that aspire to divine capability. We create, and our ability to create makes us god-like. Now, there is no greater evidence of our surrogate divinity than the element of the artist’s hand, and we value whatever we create with our hands above all other things because it reminds us — it reassures us — of our likeness to the gods. The copy does not offer us this assurance, nor do occurrences in nature or the mere found object until we have moved it or changed it or repositioned it for better articulation or appreciation, until we have invested it with evidence of our presence. When we search for evidence of the artist’s hand, therefore, we search for evidence of the hand of God. It is for this reason that in spite of all predictions and declarations pronouncing it dead, painting remains alive and just as relevant today as it was in the caves of our pristine past.
This brings us to the practice of ceramics. It is my belief that hardly any other process or medium provides us with clearer evidence of the artist’s hand, or indeed the artist’s closeness to the gods, than that art which is produced with clay. Working in clay, manipulating and transforming the raw earth, that unformed and malleable, quasi-organic matter of which we were made, and turning it from its formless state into something that we recognise, takes us closest to reliving that ancient moment when, according all creation myths, we were formed from nothingness by a higher being. In the creation myths that I am familiar with in Africa, the creator gods sat down with a lump of clay like the potter sits at the wheel, and formed our earliest ancestors, and not without the fallibility that we associate with the potter at the wheel. In the Yoruba myths, Obatala, the creator god, succumbed to fatigue and drink after several days of work and began to falter at his task, creating albinos and the infirm. The Hebrew god formed the progenitors of that race from the soil of the earth into which he blew the breath of life. “The devout Persian touches his forehead to a bit of clay and bows to God,” the great Iranian architect Nader Khalili once wrote, and went on to describe how as his mother lay dying a relative brought a piece of powdered clay, and mixed it with water, and placed it between his mother’s lips as a last rite to cut her loose from the earth and set her spirit free. “Mankind is molded out of clay,” Khalili concluded, “Clay is the last substance a person should have in his mouth before death.” The artist who works in clay, therefore, works with an elemental and divine medium, and replicates the process through which, according to the ancients, all creation was made. The mark that the artist leaves on that elemental medium mirrors in all its essence, the hand of the higher principle that raised us from clay and the dust of the earth, and brought us into being.
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
