Vessel Yōki Gefäß

Vessel Yōki Gefäß

A Virtual

Greenwood Street Project

Bernard Leach, potter, artist, writer, poet, and one of the great figures of twentieth-century art, made visits to Korea and Japan between 1918 and the late 1930’s. In 1940 he published his influential text, A Potter’s Book, which combined an aesthetic approach to appreciating pottery, advocating the “Sung standard”, along with practical instructions for ceramic tectonics and glaze formulas. Popular for its embedded notion of the indivisibility of work and leisure in the life of a potter, the tome elevated the status of a potter’s work. 

Leach presented this as an objective statement showing itself to be the “subjective expression of a judgement of taste”: the expression of a “categorical eye”; to paraphrase, Guido Ballo (The Critical Eye, 1969). Ballo's distillation is simple: 'Critical judgement is ... synonymous with basic knowledge, which enables us to penetrate into the very essence of each particular work by examining the technique and the style employed in order to achieve expression' .

In this way, direct engagement with the works and the situation of their making can give us access to new aesthetic experiences that would, otherwise, be closed to us, if we let our taste and aesthetic conventions frame our perception. Think now of our screens separating it from our relationships to these artworks and the filtering of material nuance.

This Greenwood Street Project presents works in this virtual exhibition, created after this transcontinental argument was in flight. Physically this would be apparent in the framework of a real-world exhibition, but, in the current world of insistent disconnection, imagination and the need for interrogation, mirrors our need to observe critically in new narrower fields. 

Our contemporary state of feverish connectivity viewed against the rapid surge and fall of borders would have been difficult to predict for Ballo and Leach, in 1969 & 1940, respectively. It abandons the “critical judgment” of craft and the “categorical” boundaries of type by presenting work of artists that move between painting & sculpture and the borrowed & found. Now with fear and borders reinforced by hapless & fidgeting government, we should reengage with the tactile and physical.

The ceramic objects in the exhibition are by German, Japanese, American, and English makers: a collecting of states from an already cross-fertilized world. The majority of these artists work beyond the vessel while being a strong element of the practice of all, with the exception of the unknown makers from the German factories (for we cannot speak for the silent makers). They use the technical depth of the potter’s skill while individually producing across media and scales.

Unlike the recent fashion for goofy expressionistic childlike plaques and intentionally amateur clay sculpture as extensions of still nascent painting practices, these presented works’ technical prowess elevates them. It is mastery of technique not taste or type binding them.

In quasi-opposition, an opinion from Lucio Fontana in interview on his ceramics in “Tempo” published in1939 states:  

“I am a sculptor and not a potter. I’ve never thrown a pot on the wheel nor a vase. I dislike filigrees and shading. The delicacies and the choice firings of” Royal Copenhagen” pottery bore me. And the same goes for all the Sèvres dinner services, porcelain biscuit faience majolica. I loathe the mystics of technique. With the prodigious technique of Sèvres and Copenhagen you can satisfy the taste of high- society ladies and collectors. It is a sort of rapture of fragile things and the half-tone. I’m looking for something else.”

And so, the argument continues, as does the toil. 

Is the subject the object? Is skill talent enough? Is taste value? Is it art at all?

Donald Holt- March 2020

A Virtual Project including works by Stephen Benwell, Jane Bustin, Patrick Hartigan, Takuro Kuwata & Brian Rochefort. This exhibition was planned as a physical experience but has been atomized, fictionalized and digitized to comply with community standards.