Between Points in Clay   1      2      -      PRINTER VERSION

>> shelf in the classical Western manner as "objet d'art"? John Dewey in his collection of essays written in 1931, titled Art As Experience, offered that "When an art product once attains classic status, it somehow becomes isolated from the human conditions under which it was brought into being and from the human consequences it engenders in actual life experience." Use, I believe, can be an antidote to the kind of isolation of which Dewey speaks, by making the owner or user an important and active part in the aesthetic life of the object.

I don't want to mislead anyone into thinking that I am trying to compete with K-Mart in providing useful everyday objects. My goal has never been to provide America with a good $2 mug. Rather, it has been to make a mug that compels one to be aware of every aspect or the act of drinking and hopefully to transform that commonplace act into the kind or rare aesthetic experience that has a life beyond that fleeting moment. This may not, to some, be a very ambitious goal. But it is in this very private and domestic part of our lives, I believe, where art's ability to help us cope with the hardships of life, has its greatest potential.

A few years ago, I attended the Mountain Lake Symposium and was heartened by Donald Kuspit's talk titled, "The Good Enough Artist: Beyond the Mainstream Avant-Garde". Kuspit argued for "good enough art", art, which helps us, adapt to the mundane, given world and that attempts to restore the generic human purpose of art. The good enough artist, he said, stands in sharp contradiction to the avant-garde artist whose outrageous and grandiose acts, he feels, have become nothing more than academic strategies for marketing themselves as artists rather than any manifestation of a sense of artistic destiny. He went on to say that, in contrast to the alienation from society that avant-gardism is predicated on:

"...the good enough artist attempts to re-construct, as it were, his sense of both self and world, in however cautious and tentative a way. He does not regard himself as better than the world and/or better than other selves, but in the same existential dilemma and difficult worldly relation as them. With other selves, he shares the vicissitudes of the world, rather than claiming superiority to them, or the ability to use the power of art as a springboard to a position of privilege above them, and the world. The good enough artist does not appoint himself as the avant-garde artist-leader of the world and other selves, a megalomaniac fantasizing a superior knowledge and affect than them."

I felt like Kuspit's good enough artist must have been modeled on some of the potters I know, who have struggled over the years to communicate their philosophical and aesthetic concerns in an idiom the mainstream avant-garde finds inconsequential. Their ideas and work, though, offer our culture one way to address the radical separation that currently exists between art and everyday life. It is my belief that pottery capable of this kind of expression, positions itself, to use Yagi's paradigm again, somewhere between the extremes of the highly mannered and purely visual stance of art pottery on the one hand and the trite, cloying, sanitary air of commercial, mass-produced dinnerware, on the other. It manages, somehow, to be both traditional and modern, useful and aesthetic, critical and accepting, in other words it reflects its makers as well as its owners humanness.
<<










© 1980 - 2024 Rob Barnard . All Rights Reserved. Site design: eismontdesign