Craft Australia Research Centre
presents the forum paper, Reading ceramics after Modernism, delivered by Tanya Harrod as part of the Interpreting Contemporary Craft forum held in association with Transformation: the language of craft conference at the National Gallery of Australia in November, 2005. Tanya Harrod trained as an art historian and has been a Visiting Professor in the Department of Design History, Royal College of the Arts, UK since 1999. Harrod is the author of the prize-winning The Crafts in Britain in the Twentieth Century (Yale University Press 1999). She has organised many exhibitions and writes regularly for The Burlington Magazine and The Times Literary Supplement.

Those of you who know my work will recognise that I am at heart a social historian concerned to place craft practice in a series of historical contexts. The relatively weak identity of the twentieth century craft movement as a whole makes this an interesting task as throughout the twentieth century the crafts appear to have reinvented themselves, or been reinvented. Much of the book I have written on The Crafts in Britain in the Twentieth Century tries to show how craft negotiated relations with fine art and design, with government agencies and with consumers and how craft fits into the history of modernism in the visual arts. In many ways my book stands back from any kind of critical engagement with the craft object and I certainly do not provide an all-purpose critical language for engaging with any particular craft. For just as the different genres of fine art practice require different analytical tools - or at the very least a consciousness of their different histories - so too do the different genres of craft.

I think that we all recognise that ceramics, of all the crafts, has received the lion's share of critical writing and I am going to focus on ceramics this morning. Such writing was initially shaped by the formalist language developed at the beginning of the twentieth century by critics like Roger Fry and Clive Bell and carried forward by Herbert Read. There was a marked aesthetic synchronicity between sculpture and ceramics for a brief period during the 1920s that allowed them both to be seen as exemplars of pure form. But today I want to reflect on the relevance of more recent critical theory to our understanding of contemporary ceramic practice.

Currently artists and, to an extent, designers, self-consciously opiticalise - to use Sarat Maharaj's useful term - theory. That is to say they make theory visual. And most young artists can situate themselves theoretically or find someone to do that work for them. This is rare in the case of studio ceramics. Certainly we can theorise contemporary ceramic practice on the Cultural Studies model but only a few ceramic practitioners self-consciously create work in response to theory. For various reasons, mostly I think to do with one-off elite production and a perceived alliance with the modernist project, studio ceramics, with rare exceptions, have not attracted the attention of cultural theorists. There are drawbacks to this. There are very few discussions of ceramics that go beyond the technical, the biographical and a species of humanistic empathy - 'literal rendition, unfiltered representation and naïve description"(Silverman in Tilley, p.136). Writings like those of the Canadian potter Paul Mathieu who, for instance gives us an ambitious reading of ceramics through the prism of Michel Foucault's lecture Of Other Spaces, somehow do not seem to provide the hoped for insights. I can only think of one outstanding study of ceramics that I can unreservedly recommend for its theoretical profundity and that is Philip Rawson's book Ceramics first published in 1971. Its philosophical base would appear to be phenomenological but he makes no direct references to specific intellectual influences. His chapter headings give an idea of his concerns - with sections on sensuous memory, memory traces, tactile values, body images, ceramics as treasure, pot surface and actual space, potter's space, ceramics sculpture and imaginary worlds. This is a book that offers a way of understanding and writing about the conceptual and metaphoric roots of ceramics regardless of time and geographical place and I hope to return to it. Perhaps more important, Rawson goes beyond a purely visual emphasis to counter the ocular-centrism of Western aesthetics and brings in the neglected sensory experience of touch.

As I have suggested writers like Clive Bell and Roger Fry and Herbert Read saw pottery as exemplifing significant or pure form. They appear to have followed high culture in limiting their appreciation of ceramics to visualisation. The kind of direct engagement with clay exemplified by the thrown pot was echoed in the 1920s by direct carving of stone and neo-primitive techniques of weaving and printing textile. This synchronicity of the visual arts based on 'truth to materials' was short-lived. But the abstract vessel form is still with us, it continues to innovate, to declare that the Modernist project is not over.

Yet little attention is paid to such work - even if it is respected. This is surely a by-product of a particular approach to the visual arts in much higher education. The thinking of most contemporary art curators and commentators and indeed artists has been shaped by the concerns of Cultural Studies.

Cultural Studies grew out of sociology and literature studies to develop a particular concern for popular culture not high culture and with consumption not production and with a linguistic turn in which everything can be read as text. The work of Baldwin and Henderson is manifestly elite and its appreciation requires what Bourdieu has called, with a hint of condemnation, cultural capital. It is also linguistically resistant.

Cultural Studies would find it easy to place Baldwin's work in a system of hierarchy and value that ranks ceramicists, their artefacts and their consumers alongside the art world, and to analyse how the meaning of ceramics is constructed through cultural practices and discursive formations. But when we go in closer to look at individual objects, like these tea bowls by Ewen Henderson, can Cultural Studies, in appearing to deny the autonomy of the object, help us much?

We might prefer to go back to Bell or Fry's formalism and then maybe talk about the sensuous feel or the weight of these bowls in the phenomenological spirit of Philip Rawson. Tea bowls possess what Rawson calls touch structures that allow for tactile as well as for visual contemplation. Not all Henderson's work is tactile. Bigger pieces have a monumental intention, here inspired by megalith stone circles. But most of Henderson's work alludes to early or philosophical cultures that he perceived as more holistic and organic than our own. He clearly had no time for theoretical debates that questioned authorial authority, individual genius and intentionality. He did not frame his work ironically. He saw himself as a magus artist whose taste and discernment and progressive drive was at the centre of his work. Today his work and the work of Baldwin as we have seen, act as kind of memory receptor for the heroic days of early modernism.

Potters like Henderson fail to get the kind of attention we might see as their due because their work fits uneasily into a prevailing intellectual universe whose implicit references and preferences imply a rejection of Modernism. One big post-modern idea, encapsulated in Roland Barthes' self explanatory essay The Death of the Author, has been taken up by design and art history with particular enthusiasm. The design historians, for instance, have adapted Barthes' emphasis on the death of the author and the birth of the 'reader' by substituting the consumer for reader, chosing to study consumption rather than authorship or production. In the fine arts "the death of the author" debate has developed into discussions about the "myth of originality". Modernism was uneasy with the idea of the cast and copy and with the great banks of images that informed Victorian art practice. Art training, most strikingly at the Bauhaus, was reconfigured to encourage fresh solutions and direct techniques were adopted in order to make anew. There is now a growing body of writing that seeks to discredit those ambitions and to emphasise the elitist, rigid nature of Modernism - and also seeks to demonstrate that artists did not really have the agency they claimed. Le Corbusier's debts to vernacular architecture are beginning to be explored while the Abstract Expressionists painters are being reconfigured as puppets of their patrons, critics and of government agencies by Thomas Crow and Serge Guibaut for instance.

The potter is, however, a peculiarly authorial figure or at least constructs him or herself as such in striking ways. The alchemical transformation over which he or she presides, the creation of clay bodies and glazes and slips, the risky, elemental ritual of firing, the importance of touch in most processes aside, perhaps, from casting, the ability to appreciate serendipitous accident, the moral redemption offered by intense physicality are all peculiar to pottery. Hence the biographical and autobiographical emphasis in ceramic writing - much of which focuses on the moment of epiphany when clay is discovered as the medium of choice. All these factors mean that the potter does not sit easily in a theorised art world in which artists seek to distance themselves from their work by employing various framing devices.

Thus when we consider the fine art scene, at least in Britain, we find the Chapman Brothers declaring themselves to be cultural cannibals, raising issues of racism, colonialism and globalisation, debating sociological and philosophical theory and consumer culture and commenting on the end of the Enlightenment project. The list, of course, mirrors the concerns of Cultural Studies and current design and art history which naturally dominate academic activity in colleges of art. Thus, we find the Chapman Brothers opiticalising one of Cultural Studies central themes - the culture of the copy and popular culture as opposed to high culture. Goya prints are defaced by addition of little clown-like faces. Their recent show The Chapman Family Collection pursued the same themes with a room full of what appeared to be African tribal sculptures (a category of inspirational object for modernism) that on closer inspection turned out to be commentaries on the ubiquity of MacDonaldisation.

The concept that informs most of this work is irony. Irony is currently endemic in the world of fine art - partly employed as a defence against the responsibilities of authorial authority. Thus the painter Fiona Rae parodies passages of abstract painting - thus putting an ironic distance between herself and the act of painting. The painter Glenn Brown re-presents the paintings of Frank Auerbach, copying them from reproductions of Auerbach's work in catalogues and therefore reproducing the shiny smoothness of the photograph rather then the heavy impasto of the original. This list of examples could go on and by no means all this kind of work lacks value. Existing objects can be reconfigured to make powerful political points - as when the Canadian Brian Jungen* cuts up Nike Air Jordon's to create what look like West Coast Aboriginal mask - Prototype for a New Understanding. Or the Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare, an Anglo/Nigerian artist who recreates distinctly Western tableau using cloth manufactured for the West African market - The Swing (after Fragonard) to make points about Western dominance and control.

And in fact the applied arts, and in particular ceramics with its complex language of ornament, offer an area where irony and cultural comment can operate very effectively, in ways that range from the subtle to shocking. We might start with the shocking, with surprise Turner Prize winner, Grayson Perry. Perry's strategy, to lure the innocent spectator over with the promise of a classical urn shape decorated with a touch of gold, operates with particular bite in this piece We've found the body of your child. It makes the chilling point that parental grief may not be quite what it seems while the pots reassuring form plays an ironic joke on us. Most of his pots are embellished with ready made decals as well as with reprocessed images sgraffitoed onto pot surface. But then every aspect of Perry's art strategy, his cultural policy, is ironised - ironically to disguise his vulnerability - its double bluff of a kind. For instance these images of Perry as Edith Perry, nineteenth century pottery painter and as Claire Perry, twentieth century faux-rustic studio potter are amusing enough but they veil his need for a female person. As he explains "I am grateful to the art world - its been a place where my choice to live life with my subconscious on my sleeve has been welcomed even celebrated. I may have gone truly mad with out it."

I want to turn to another potter who also works in the ironic mode and he is Richard Slee - currently his retrospective exhibition is touring Britain. Like the Chapman Brothers, but with considerable more subtlty, Slee touches on cultural issues such as national identity, the cult of the souvenir, the everyday, landscape, cheap industrial pottery and so on. His work bears no trace of that authorial hand even though the pieces are carefully hand-assembled from moulded parts. But despite the obvious debts to Pop art and the fact that his use of found objects that are summarily glued onto his piece might seem aceramic, his work is steeped in ceramic history - therein lies perhaps its post-modernism. Nonetheless it is work that could encompassed by Philip Rawson's generous study in a section on the ceramic sculpture and imaginary worlds. In the case of Slee popular culture is substituted for the high culture of eighteenth century tablesettings.

Now I admire the work of Richard Slee and I also admire the very different work of Henderson and Baldwin. All are considerable figures in the world of British ceramics. But currently a figure like Slee will be accessible to the powerful methodologies for cultural analysis developed in Cultural Studies or Visual Culture. In a very clear way his work seems to comment on or allude more to consumption than to autonomous production. This is a paradox that goes I think deeper than mere fashion - it may be something to do with multiple possibilities of clay and should alert us to the problems of evolving a critical language around a material rather than around practice. In any case, Slee's encourages our active response - we can all have an opinion about a piece like this - Acid Toby. But Henderson and Baldwin and Lowndes offer work that we attend to more respectfully, more passively perhaps. But currently in a consumer-led world we all want to have our say and Slee and Perry make that easy - or at least easier.

But to return to Rawson and the current interest in what are called the proximity senses - smell, taste and touch. These new areas of research, currently being led by the anthropologist David Howes at Concordia University, seem to suggest a way of enlarging visually orientated models of aesthetics to bring to the fore previously overlooked aspects of aesthetic experience. Touch is perhaps most relevant to our concerns today. Perhaps we should reflect that the work of Richard Slee is weak on tactile values. But in the case of many ceramic objects, tactility in the form of texture and weight are important, and neglected. Touch has been almost entirely marginalized in our responses to work in clay and in our responses to what, tellingly, we call the Visual Arts.

I suppose I am arguing that there is no one way to interprete contemporary craft. We each - as critics and as articulate makers - have to fashion our own tools, and seek out writing from other disciplines that provide a context for craft practice. It is perhaps easier to write discrete histories than to create theoretical frameworks. In the United States there is now a body of serious historical writing on wood turning - that has been in a sense artificially generated by the Wood Turning Centre of Philadelphia who have invited decorative arts historians to turn their attention to contemporary wood turning, the writing funded by wealthy collectors. Before we recoil with distaste it is worth reflecting how much art historical writing flows indirectly from the wealth of collectors. But on the whole design and craft history on the whole will not benefit in that patronal way and that is all to the good.

What is the required reading for those of us interested in the craft field. Many of you will have discovered anthropology offers some of the most open-ended and useful writing. I'm thinking in particular of Alfred Gell's book Art and Agency which blows the visual art field wide open - in his provocative book he shows art to be a series of social relationships between objects and persons. Some objects, for instance Chinese cloudstones, author themselves. They are recognised rather than made by artists. Sometimes the patron is the author, as arguably was the case with Louis X1V's creation of Versailles. Sometimes the owner works on the object, as when a Volt sorcery devotee sticks pins into a wax image of an enemy. Gell, in effect, removes sole agency from artists and makers.

So a job of interpreting contemporary craft demands that we read outside our area - not difficult as there is so little that is stimulating to read within our area. That is what a little group of us are trying to do by meeting in Austria once a year under the rubric THINKTANK for the applied arts. We go there to exchange ideas on a Europe-wide basis. Though our shared language is English we are all Europeans - we have no North American members. This year each member gave a paper on how craft was discussed in their language - in Spanish, Danish, Swedish, German, Dutch and Norwegian - from the period of the Arts and Crafts Movement onwards. And we found verbal acrobatics in all these languages when suddenly the word for 'craft' seemed to send out the wrong signals and all kinds of alternatives were sought, mostly in the 1970s and 1980s, and mostly to bring the crafts into the fold of fine art. In the case of Germany and Spain this linguistic self censorship occurred for a rather different reason, and rather earlier in the case of Germany - because craft as a concept was been blighted by association with fascism. That is how we want to proceed - with a strong sense of historical research in our area though not lacking a theoretical framework. There is no shortage of broad themes - from regional and national identity, to the politics of work to the special kind of knowledge that craft can represent to the relationship between craft and new media. There is plenty of work to be done.

Tanya Harrod, Canberra, November 2005