Ceramics Battles Anti-Intellectualism At Recent Conference   1      2      3      -      PRINTER VERSION

Published in New Art Examiner, June 1986.

The impact of the '60s and '70s on American art training has yet to be fully assessed, and when it is, the results will not be reassuring. They will show a pattern of indifferent teachers (painters doing it for survival) serving institutions that, for a fear of a drop in enrollments, disliked failing anyone and were none too picky about the students¼ motives for being there in the first place.
   —Robert Hughes.
   Time, June 17, 1985

The ceramic arts in the United States have relied, more than any other field, on the patronage of the university system. Indeed, it is difficult to find a prominent ceramics artist who is not a teacher at some college or university. That the only goal of the thousands of ceramics artists turned out by educational institutions in the '60s and '70s was not to find a gallery in New York but to obtain a prestigious teaching job attests to the field's economic dependence on academia.

The audience for these new teachers' work was not the art-buying public but other ceramics teachers, who might help them obtain better jobs, $200-a-day workshops, or exhibitions in university galleries. Given financial security by academia, these ceramic teachers were freed from interacting with the buying public, whose tastes ran to traditional ceramics. Desiring the acclaim, notoriety, and stature of "fine artists", they moved to free their medium from the "craft" prejudice and its emphasis on pottery. Pottery, increasingly viewed as irrelevant, became the whipping boy of ceramics teachers who felt that it was the source of the field's exclusion from the fine arts world. By the 1970s "potters" had, by and large, been exorcised from the ivory tower of academia, where the ceramics avant-garde was gearing up to meet the challenge of "art".

Until recently, the National Council for Education in the Ceramic Arts (NCECA), the only professional association of ceramics artists in the United States, was awash with these professors, who, reacting against the theory and discipline advocated by potters like Bernard Leach, assumed an eccentric anti-intellectual, often macho persona. In an ironic twist, ceramics departments in universities across the country became the bastions of anti-intellectualism in the ceramics field. Things are changing, however.

Reduced enrollments and the closing of entire departments have induced a major reassessment of the role of ceramic art education. The recent NCECA conference in San Antonio reflected the field's tentative movement away from the jejune cult of personality so prevalent at past conferences, toward a more intellectual approach to ceramics and art education.

The conference got off to an inauspicious start, however. Robert Hughes, who had originally been scheduled to make the keynote address, was replaced by Philip Yenawine, director of education at the Museum of Modern Art. Conferees were dismayed by Yenawine's unreserved praise for and acceptance of all the recent fine art trends embraced by New York publications and museums. Ceramics artists who feel that the fine arts and institutions such as MOMA dismiss and reject their work on the
>>










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