Art and Design At Alfred; Turners and Burners; The New Ceramics, Book Reviews  1      2      3      4      -      PRINTER VERSION

Art and Design at Alfred: A Chronicle of a Ceramics College by Melvin H. Bernstein, published 1986 by the Art Alliance Press. Philadelphia, PA, and Associated University Presses, London, and Toronto.

Turners and Burners: The Folk Potters of North Carolina by Charles G. Zug III, published 1986 by the University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill and London.

The New Ceramics: Trends and Traditions by Peter Dormer, published 1986 by Thames and Hudson, New York, NY.

In the last seven to eight years there has been a manifest interest within the craft field in serious critical writing and historical analysis. Art and Design at Alfred, Turners and Burners and The New Ceramics reflect a shift (minute as it may be) from how-to, technique-oriented books toward scholarship and the history of craft.

The history of much of contemporary craft in the United States is to a large degree one of how academic institutions have acted as hothouses, protecting and nourishing a fragile and underdeveloped field. Perhaps the most prestigious institution to emerge in this role has been the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. Art and Design at Alfred by Melvin H. Bernstein, an Alfred professor since 1949, is a history of the College of Ceramics told through the tenures of its first six directors of art: Charles Binns, Charles Harder, Ted Randall, Val Cushing, Robert Turner and Anthony Hepburn. Unfortunately, Art and Design reads more like a corporate history from a yearly stockholders' report than a critical and insightful chronicle that would leave the reader with a vivid vision of what it was like at Alfred from 1900 to 1984.

Bernstein has gathered all the "facts" about the directors but is unwilling to interpret them. Consequently they are nothing more than dry data with little real meaning to an outsider. The author never expresses personal opinions, nor does he seem to have solicited any from those he writes about, except the most innocuous: he thus implies that Alfred escaped the ideological and political infighting so common in most universities. This may be an attempt at academic objectivity or simply a device to keep from offending his fellow professors. In either case, the result is a lifeless history that skims the surface of an interesting story.

It is not just the academic style, though, that makes Art and Design so difficult to read. Bernstein's history suffers from sloppy chronology as well. In what is potentially the most interesting section of the book, the five chapters on Harder, Bernstein takes him from birth to schooling, early employment, marriage and death (we also learn of his mother's interest in oil painting and her first show after his death)—all in the first two pages. In the ensuing chapters he has Harder die at least twice more. The book also lapses into a sort of Who's Who at Alfred; it is almost impossible to get through three or four pages without a long paragraph listing 20 or 30 names of students, graduates or faculty. This kind of obligatory review of the "accomplishments" of Alfred alumni serves little purpose other than institutional boosterism and will no doubt reinforce the contention of many in the ceramics world that there is an Alfred mafia.
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