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

>> arbitrary grounds of material, found it difficult, for example, to accept Yenawine's unbridled enthusiasm for Giuseppe Penone's primitive Dadaist proposition of breathing into a pile of leaves and then casting the resulting void in clay.

Discontent was brought to a head during a panel titled "Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow: Educating Artists". Yenawine attempted to moderate potters John Glick, Tom Coleman, and Michael Simon and ceramics sculptors Viola Frey, Ron Nagle, and Patti Warashina. When questioned, few of the panel members seemed to have any ideas about what art education should, could, or might be. Ron Nagle, who sounded like "Fonzie" from an early Happy Days episode, said that students should be left alone and that teaching them technique of any kind was useless because by the time they learned it their ideas would be gone. When Yenawine broached the subject of student critiques, Nagle replied that he subscribed to the "Dumbo" school of criticism. If you put a feather behind the students' ears, he explained, and tell them often enough that they can fly, then, like Walt Disney's elephant, they will be able to fly. Nagle's further admission that he believes art education is essentially "trivial" must be embarrassing for Mills College, where he is the chairman of the art department. Even Yenawine's cheery pose was strained by the panel's hostile, anti-intellectual stance. When the subject of writing came up, Patti Warashina cried that it was unfair to ask artists to write and talk about their work. It would be like asking a painter to be a dancer as well as a painter, she said. Yenawine, in his strongest reaction of the evening, suggested that since all of us use and share verbal skills this analogy, perhaps, was not quite accurate. Tom Coleman volunteered that because it took him all day to write a letter, he used the telephone instead, while Nagle commented that he never read the text in art books but only looked at the pictures.

While this kind of prattle is typical fare from what the field refers to as the "grunt and groan" school, it was heartening that it did not permeate the whole conference. The following morning, for example, in a panel titled "Towards a New Curriculum", the moderator, Jim Romberg, director of ceramics at Sun Valley Center, and the panelists—potter Catherine Hiersoux, sculptor Roland Reis, and ceramist Paula Winokur—reacted strongly to the previous evening's panel by rejecting the view espoused by Nagle—that regardless of education, the cream eventually rises to the top—arguing that art education should be viewed as the foundation of artistic development. They repudiated the current curriculum's emphasis on ego over object and its continued reliance on performances by ceramics "stars" on the workshop circuits as being outmoded and no longer viable. They called for a "new literacy", a greater awareness of the critical process, and the positing of ceramic art in an historical context. In another panel, Ward Doubet, a visiting lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, questioned Garth Clark's application of Greenbergian formalism as a critical cure-all for ceramic art. While he acknowledged it provided an essential vocabulary for discourse, he concluded that ceramic art will not advance by identifying its aims with such a narrow critical outlook. This kind of intellectual probing and questioning in public of established figures in the field is a healthy sign and shows there is change in the wind. It is too early yet, however, to tell whether the inveterate grunt and groaners in NCECA will seek to impede this progressive attitude or will join in the dialogue.
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