By Richard Fahey Courtesy of Clay Economies

The fashioning of wet clay and its subsequent hardening through heat is a story synonymous with the notion of social progress. Less often noted are the historically contingent, partial and arbitrary histories that have flourished under the rubric of this universal story. The terrain of ceramic production has proved capable of carrying any number of accounts. The story of the rise of the New Zealand studio pottery movement is but one example. By taking a long view of the social life of clay commodities, Clay Economies intends to open up different considerations of contemporary ceramic production.By Richard Fahey Courtesy of Clay Economies

The fashioning of wet clay and its subsequent hardening through heat is a story synonymous with the notion of social progress. Less often noted are the historically contingent, partial and arbitrary histories that have flourished under the rubric of this universal story. The terrain of ceramic production has proved capable of carrying any number of accounts. The story of the rise of the New Zealand studio pottery movement is but one example. By taking a long view of the social life of clay commodities, Clay Economies intends to open up different considerations of contemporary ceramic production.Implicit in this undertaking is the assumption that the potentiality for future ceramic production becomes apparent when we recognise the complex but specific mechanisms that regulate taste, trade and desire. This approach calls for considering the bespoke ceramic alongside the industrially mass-produced, as well as eschewing discussion of the relative status and merit of different ceramic practices. Traditionally judgements of quality based on material or technical considerations have privileged the role of the producer while obscuring the role of the consumer in negotiating the meaning of objects. The meanings we attribute to objects, however, necessarily derive from human transactions and motivations, which is to say how those objects are used and circulated.

The ceramic tradition that the consumer has negotiated most extensively €” utilitarian, domestic ware €” is that which has been accorded the least attention in the telling of ceramic history. Due to prolific use in everyday preparation and consumption of food, domestic ceramic wares have never been accorded the same cultural value as ceremonial objects. Ceramics deemed to have ritual value have been endowed with greater significance within traditional museum displays because these objects offer expedient differentiation between cultures. Domestic ceramics, which are largely consistent in terms of form and function across many cultures, do not serve this story so well. Mortuary ware exemplifies cultural differences, and in addition, by virtue of use within burial sites, it is more readily excavated intact than domestic ceramics, which are often recovered as shards.

Ceramic material and process have tended not to be valued for themselves, so much as for the effectiveness with which they may emulate more esteemed materials and refined modes of manufacture. The majority of pre-seventeenth century Chinese ceramics for example, copied the forms of bronze-cast and jade-carved objects. Indeed, Northern Chinese celadon glazes were primarily developed to imitate the subtle colouring of jade. Many of the design attributes of these ceramic objects, such as feet and handles, are indebted to the form and construction of much earlier cast bronze objects. The reified ceramics that we have become most familiar with via the museum context are ironically, those that look least like they are made from clay.

The cultural delineations called forth by the museum, are rendered somewhat shaky when the complex history of ceramic trade and exchange is examined in detail. From the 14th century, and arguably from a great deal earlier, China actively sought contact and trade with the outside world. (1) Principle exports were tea, silk and porcelain. 'Porcelain' is in itself a product of cultural contact. The origin of the term has been credited to the 13th Century Venetian explorer, Marco Polo, who coined it to describe the blue and white ware of the Yuan Dynasty 1279-1368. From then on this ware was known throughout the world as porcelain, aside from China, where it is still referred to as 'Ci'. (2)

Early trade in domestic goods, whether ceramic or textile, has occasioned many stories that defy the type of cultural classifications that have historically been promulgated by the museum. Today these classifications are subject to much revisionist scholarship, often premised on closer examinations of quotidian life and trade. Hugh Honour's account of the origination of the conglomerative design of a textile destined to lie on many European beds, offers a parallel narrative to the emergence of Chinese porcelain as a global commodity. Honour writes, "Chinoiserie of this even more hybrid kind had become so far removed from genuine Chinese tradition that it was exported from India to China as a novelty to the Chinese themselves. In the 18th century, therefore, Chinese weavers were producing fabrics adorned with the now famous 'Tree of Life' design based on Indian patterns derived from English originals, which were an expression of the European vision of the Orient. There can have been few more bizarre incidents in the whole History of Taste." (3)

The distinctive cobalt blue, emblematic of Chinese porcelain to a European eye, is the result of Sunima ore imported to China from Persia for the express purpose of creating export ware. The Ottoman court valued most highly domestic porcelains that emanated from the Chinese export market, however these particular designs bore little resemblance to the wares that were favoured by successive Chinese courts. Inevitably export ware from China proved formative in the subsequent development of the Islamic decorative canon. The first European manufactured porcelain, produced in the early part of the 18th century by the German factory, Meissen, replicated Chinese designs. By the 19th century the popularisation of Chinoiserie in Europe was guaranteed by the advent of Northern Hemisphere produced tea-wares, adorned by the ubiquitous 'Willow' pattern, that were intended for the lower end of the domestic market.

This cursory survey of the trade and exchange of Chinese blue and white porcelain reveals that strategies of appropriation, rearticulation and combination €” widely presumed to characterise postmodern art practice €” are fundamentally pre-modern. The relationship between the indigenous and foreign, innovative and traditional, authentic and fake is evidently more ambiguous and complex than is generally acknowledged.

II

For the most part, the story of New Zealand ceramics operates within the appropriative paradigms associated with the rise of European colonialism and global capitalism. In the absence of indigenous clay traditions, the first forms of local ceramic production were industrial. Subsequent ceramic developments had to hitch a ride on the back of industry and were consequences of the manufacture of such workaday objects as water pipes, bricks and 'lavies'. (4) Ceramic production is dependent on the incorporation of many skill sets and involves a range of expertises. Len Castle, whose position within the canon of studio pottery has been well enshrined, gained his early experience and knowledge of firing from expert industrial workers at Crum Brick, Tile and Pipe Works in New Lynn, Auckland. He reports that in the mid-1940s, his pots were fired alongside sewer pipes and gully traps. (5) More recently, Peter Lange has made this traffic between the industrial and artisanal explicit in his series of works that utilise commercially manufactured bricks. (6)

The application of an art-historically derived model to a tradition that was predominantly utilitarian and domestic is problematic. The formation of a status-conferring canon has been constructed to recognize and promote divergence from tradition. However, within a craft practice, it might be more useful to regard innovation as a perpetual accretion of small instances, constituted from any number of related but distinct factors. 'Collective learning' arguably describes this type of cultural development more accurately than individual flashes of disembodied inspiration. Countless examples of individuals working and learning alongside others in the local context can be cited. Merilyn Wiseman attests to the significance of the social networks that existed among practitioners in the mid-1970s. She recounts holding Bernard Leach's A Potters' Book in one hand and a telephone in the other during the formative days of her pottery career. (7)

It was the 1970s that witnessed the full-blown flowering of the studio ceramic movement in New Zealand, in which unprecedented numbers of individuals were able to make a full-time living as professional potters furnishing the domestic market. A lifestyle creed with underlying political imperatives of self-determinacy and self-sufficiency was characteristic of the pubescent nationalist culture of the period. Arguably it was this latent politicising of 'lifestyle choice' that caused the infectious popularisation of studio ceramics, rather than any universal desire on the part of consumers for artfully misshapen, dribbly brown, lumpen tableware. The burgeoning of this ceramic tradition owed as much to the social, political and economic context as to a handful of significant individuals. Likewise, the inability to sustain this studio ceramic moment does not reflect a lack of dedicated practitioners, so much as the collapse of the wider societal formations that were crucial to the emergence of the development.

The 1970s was characterised by consumer awareness of planned obsolescence, a perceived energy crisis (real or otherwise), import substitution and trade protectionism. Bucolic pastoralism encouraged economic self-sufficiency, homespun egalitarianism spawned neo-survivalist tendencies. (8) In the absence of indigenous clay traditions, this necessarily meant co-opting the international in the form of the Anglo Oriental tradition of Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada. In a process of colonialisation, transplanted constructs often take on a veracity more pervasive than in the place they originated. New Zealand's geo-political distance and diminutive demographics provided an occasion for a particular ethos to take persuasive hold over the cultural imagination. New Zealanders have a 'club mentality' that draws its members from a small gene pool. Nationhood is played out on a village scale, where town gossip becomes the main determinant of cultural worth. It is worthwhile acknowledging, however, the ways in which backyard activity has and does translate into world-leading performance. The flip-side of messianic adherance is the ability to be light on one's feet; remarkable performance arises when different arguments rub shoulders in tight proximity. In this microcosm of four million, social capital acquires an inordinate efficacy; the exemplary abuts the amateur and there is little room for the mediocre performance. The institutional inertia of larger populations mitigates against such volatility.

Twentieth-century modernism had by necessity taken a circuitous route to these cloudy isles. On its belated arrival it was commandeered by cultural commissars who repackaged it as a marriage of romanticism and nationalism. During the 50s, 60s and 70s, this nationalistic economic and cultural assemblage was pieced together. By the late 1970s, the socio-political culture had begun to unravel. Rob Muldoon's overly proprietorial hand was beginning to lose its grip. By the 1980s, the 1970s phenomena of the 'brown pot' had lost its allure as the country became a laboratory for new right, neo-liberal economic policy, and contemporaneously declared itself a nuclear-free zone. The generation who had ushered in the country's fourth Labour government had been numbed by the reverberating phrases, sounds and images of the mass media. Buffeted by post-feminist, post-modernist, post-colonial discourses, their collective understanding of 'self' was in a shambles, defactoed, decentred, multiple and mobile.

The accessibility and even inescapability of cultural exchange is palpably different within the twenty-first century transnational context. The once historic reliance upon the regional to supply value and meaning is possibly now supplanted by license and the imperative to engage in broader conversations. The infamous 'information explosion' that has accompanied an increasingly digitised world has profoundly altered the generation and subsequent reception of 'meaning'.

III

In contemplating what might be regarded as contemporary ceramic production, we need to acknowledge how the semiotic landscape has undergone substantive changes. The narration of the story of New Zealand studio ceramics via an art historical approach has limited an understanding of the spaces where ceramics might operate and thereby what might be accorded merit. Undue emphasis was placed on the opposition between the humanising rhetoric of the handmade and the perceived homogeneity of industrial production. A similar schism was promoted between wares produced for utilitarian purposes and those produced for ornamental display. Invariably, the construction of a historical canon is as significant for what it renders invisible as what it celebrates.

Many of the ways ceramic technologies inhabit our lives remain barely visible. How many of us would be nominally aware that our toilets and white-wall bathrooms are made from cooked mud. It is true that we care less about what sanitary ware is comprised of, or looks like, than how we expect it to function. These pristine white non-porous vitreous surfaces, impervious to dirt and moisture, are press-ganged into psychically loaded regimes of hygiene, implicated in the protocols for evacuating bodily excrement, fluid and detritus.

There are further ways in which ceramic objects may become invisible. These relate to the shifting emotional, aesthetic and psychological vagaries of fashion as the cultural medium in which objects move. Early Crown Lynn production of white mantelpiece vases, which were once proudly displayed as markers of refined sensibility, then relegated beneath the washtub as containers for soaps and scrubs, have now re-emerged through 'op' shops and auction houses. Reframed by nostalgia, these same objects are now recognized as chic adornment for minimalist apartments. The ever-shifting generational desire for 'authenticity' sees the traffic in ornamental objects orbit. Realms of vernacularised kitsch are inevitably linked to ideas of iconic value.

The material composition of the everyday cup and the technologies necessary for its production are a focus for precision science and technology today. The intrinsic utilitarian properties of ceramics - their malleability, robustness, heat-resistance and corrosion-resistance - that humanity has pressed into service for many thousands of years are still at the forefront of technological advancement. The scientific class of ceramic materials is differentiated from other materials by atomic bonds. Ceramics involve high-temperature sintering or a refining process through which inorganic, non-metallic materials are formed through ionic or covalent bonding. This means that ceramic materials do not corrode in strong acid conditions, cannot melt under high temperatures and do not change shape under rapid or repeated friction. These attributes mean ceramic material is potentially a great deal more versatile than standardized metals. Ceramics have unique electronic properties allowing them to function as insulators, semi-conductors, conductors and superconductors, which offer a variety of applications in magnetics, thermodynamics, acoustics and mechanics. Ceramics are further utilised within the medical arena. Stethoscopes and ultrasonic diagnostics made of piezoelectric ceramics are used in photoelectric scanning. Ceramics are also employed in the construction of teeth, bones, joints, pacemakers and hearing aids. Reputedly, the inert properties of a ceramic scalpel blade will enable a wound site to heal at a considerably faster rate than an incision made with a metal scalpel.

Within the various spheres of technologically advanced industry, ceramic material has found new applications; refractory bricks for metal foundries, yarn guides for textile industries, grinding wheels and abrasive metal lathes, insulation tiles on space shuttles, golf clubs, the valves of water taps, bullet-proof vests for law enforcement and transparent lenses used in advanced laser technologies. These examples testify to the serviceability of contemporary ceramics that can in hindsight be seen in stark contrast to the wholesome utilitarian philosophy that sustained the local studio ceramic movement.

IV

Material production in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century has seen functionality, inspiration and circuits of exchange all undergo profound alteration. The historical coordinates that previously circumscribed ceramic production may no longer be useful in anticipating future developments, as delineations between what was handmade and that which was industrially produced, erode, and that we have previously deemed worthy of status or that which is hidden from view, become freshly contested. The quest for 'distinctiveness' that prevailed over much of New Zealand's cultural aspirations of the twentieth century may no longer be a quest so much as an inevitability that arises by simple virtue of living here. The license and capacity for being adaptable, and conversely, susceptible, coupled with that endearing of attributes - the ability to get it entirely wrong and in so doing create something anew, will provide further sustenance to the muddied terrain, out of which new clay economies will be fashioned.

Footnotes:
1. For discussion of incipient Chinese globalism long before the 14th century, see, James C. Y. Watt, China: Dawn of a Golden Age 200-750AD, Metropolitan Museum, New York and Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2004.
2. John Carswell, Blue & White: Chinese Porcelain Around The World, The British Museum, London, 2000, p. 53
3. Hugh Honour, Chinoiserie: The Vision of Cathay, John Murray, London, 1961, quoted in Howard Davis, Chinoiserie: Polychrome Decoration on Staffordshire Porcelain 1790-1850, The Rubicon Press, London, 1991, p. 23
4. Gail Henry provides extensive documentation of this in New Zealand Pottery: Commercial and Collectible, Reed, Auckland, 1985
5. Len Castle, Len Castle Potter, Sang Architects & Company, 2002, p. 11
6. See fig 1., Peter Lange, Ampersand, 2008
7. Janet Mansfield, Contemporary Ceramic Art in Australia and New Zealand, Craftsman House, NSW, 1995, p. 16
8. For extensive discussion of the economic context that prevailed during this high point in local studio ceramic production see Michael Stevenson: This Is The Trekka Creative New Zealand and Revolver, 2003.

Clay Economies exhibition at Objectspace, Auckland - until 30 August

By taking a long view of the social life of clay commodities, Clay Economies intends to open up different considerations of contemporary ceramics. Implicit in this undertaking is the assumption that the potentiality of future ceramic production becomes apparent when we recognise the complex but specific mechanisms that regulate taste, trade and desire.

The works in Clay Economies traverse the industrially mass produced and the handcrafted; the ornamental and the utilitarian; the authored and the anonymous; the high and low status; the visible and the barely acknowledged. By assembling such a diversity of works the intent is to expand our understanding of contemporary ceramic practice by considering the multiplicity of ceramic production and consumption that exists beyond the narrow confines of studio pottery.

Coinciding with the Clay Economies exhibition is the launch of the Clay Economies publication. This is a critical anthology of essays by Dr David Craig, Moyra Elliott, Richard Fahey & Dr Christopher Thompson, which address ceramics as a significant form of local cultural production. Clay Economies (which can be purchased at Objectspace) is published by 6 Point Press with the assistance of Creative New Zealand, Objectspace & Unitec.

26/08/08