Byron Temple: The Gift To Be Simple   1      2      3      4      -      PRINTER VERSION

>> Temple's pottery is constantly evolving. Since his move two years ago to Louisville, Kentucky, he seems to have adopted a freer and more expressive approach. His recent wood-fired casseroles and covered jars, for example, have a fluid and lyrical quality that is only hinted at in his earlier pots. He has achieved this, however, without abandoning either usefulness or the leanness that has always marked his work. Unlike much of the purely visual ceramic art now being made, Temple's pots are not symbolic and do not make grandiose claims. His cups and saucers do not attempt to portray the angst of anticipating a nuclear holocaust, but offer instead, if only for a moment, a sense that there may still be some good in the world. This realization not only comforts us but may also ease our sense of helplessness when faced with cosmic issues. The surest criterion of good pottery, as Michael Cardew has written, is that "its presence will fill the gaps between sips of tea or coffee at those moments when the mind, not yet focused on activity, is still in an open and receptive state; and it will minister quietly to the background of consciousness with a friendly warmth, even perhaps on some occasions with a kind of consolation."3 This has been Temple's goal, to produce intelligent and sensitive utilitarian pottery that creates an empathetic response extending beyond mundane function.

It is ironic that as modern craft seems closer to becoming indistinguishable from painting and sculpture, the cultural, spiritual and aesthetic values of postmodern painting and sculpture are being seriously questioned. The art critic Donald Kuspit believes that "the notion of the avant-garde artist has become passe, more precisely, it has become an establishment conception of the artist", and he has called for art that can retrieve the sense of human purpose in art making and that addresses on a personal level the difficulties we have in adjusting to the vicissitudes of modern life.4 Philip Rawson in his book Ceramics was remarkably prescient when he wrote:

But the basic elements of the potter's art will not vanish from our lives even if our "pots" are to be made of plastic. Furthermore, another revolution in art may well demand that work be addressed to the whole multisensuous man, hands and all, to awaken those important and intensely valuable regions of feeling and sensuous order which pure visual-abstract work ignores, or even affronts.5

If we look at Byron Temple's work in this light, it seems more relevant now than ever before. Even, I dare say, avant-garde.

References
1. Quoted in a review of "Mark Rothko: Works on Paper" at the National Gallery, The Washington Post, May 13, 1984.
2. Hughes, Robert, Amish: The Art of the Quilt (New York: Alfred A. Knopf/Callaway Editions, 1990), 15.
3. Cardew, Michael, Pioneer Pottery (London: Longmans, Green and Co. Ltd., 1969), 250.
4. Kuspit, Donald, "The Good Enough Artist: Beyond the Mainstream Avant-Garde Artist," talk delivered at Mountain Lake Symposium, Virginia, November 1989.
5. Rawson, Philip, Ceramics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971 ), 206.
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