Garth Clark 1 2 3 4 5 6 - PRINTER VERSION
>> writing going, but I write for the same reason that lots of people write, I have to write, if I haven't written anything for three or four months I get really edgy, and I've got to get back to it. At the same time, I get requests from museums and public spaces to write for them. These are organizations that are perfectly aware of ethical considerations and yet they still choose to ask us to do these things for them.
RB: Because basically there is a shortage of writers about ceramics?
GC: Yes.
RB: Why is this shortage there, what's behind it?
GC: I recently discussed this with Jeff Perrone and Peter Schjeldahl. Both are extremely sympathetic to ceramics. Adrian Saxe and I to an extent were instrumental in getting them involved. They have difficulty remaining involved, however, because they say that it's such an uninspiring environment intellectually. Now and then they read something that they can at least disagree with intelligently if not find some positive attributes, and that's it. Thereafter, the writing is so paltry, the intellectual constructs are so slender that as intellectuals they have great difficulty in retaining a cerebral edge in ceramics. It lacks the stimulation for them, which they find in abundance in painting, sculpture, and photography, where the whole level of scholarship is much higher.
RB: Who are the good writers on ceramics now?
GC: There's a young man by the name of Ed Lebow; he's lazy and should work harder and write more, but he does write well. Jeff Perrone has done some very interesting writing. He is not a specialist in ceramics per se. He used to write for The Village Voice, he writes for Artforum, Arts Magazine, occasionally writing on ceramics. But there's just not very much there.
RB: Both of these people are outsiders to the ceramic world to a certain degree.
GC: To a certain degree (pause)... Ceramic writing tends to be promotional writing; it also tends to be emotional writing where somebody likes somebody's work for a number of reasons, perhaps out of friendship, or perhaps just out of a passion for the work, and they set out to write something to share how much they like it. It sounds like such a good intention, but it makes for the most dreadfully syrupy and uninspired writing. That's what the field suffers from to a great extent. It's not unethical, it's not that they're just trying to paddle a friend's canoe; it's just that it is written without any kind of tough historical or aesthetic basis. I'm sure that if you took many of those writers and grabbed a few of their phrases out of the publications and said, "Okay, what does this mean?" they wouldn't be too sure. If you took several of them and said "What are the three major dynamics of the vessel aesthetic?", they probably wouldn't be able to tell you. Now you can ask those sort of questions of painting critics and ten-to-one they've got answers—very well thought out, well-defined aesthetic views about painting and how it functions. You don't find much of that intelligence in ceramics. It's understandable, we're a small field.
>>
© 1980 - 2025 Rob Barnard . All Rights Reserved. Site design: eismontdesign
>> writing going, but I write for the same reason that lots of people write, I have to write, if I haven't written anything for three or four months I get really edgy, and I've got to get back to it. At the same time, I get requests from museums and public spaces to write for them. These are organizations that are perfectly aware of ethical considerations and yet they still choose to ask us to do these things for them.
RB: Because basically there is a shortage of writers about ceramics?
GC: Yes.
RB: Why is this shortage there, what's behind it?
GC: I recently discussed this with Jeff Perrone and Peter Schjeldahl. Both are extremely sympathetic to ceramics. Adrian Saxe and I to an extent were instrumental in getting them involved. They have difficulty remaining involved, however, because they say that it's such an uninspiring environment intellectually. Now and then they read something that they can at least disagree with intelligently if not find some positive attributes, and that's it. Thereafter, the writing is so paltry, the intellectual constructs are so slender that as intellectuals they have great difficulty in retaining a cerebral edge in ceramics. It lacks the stimulation for them, which they find in abundance in painting, sculpture, and photography, where the whole level of scholarship is much higher.
RB: Who are the good writers on ceramics now?
GC: There's a young man by the name of Ed Lebow; he's lazy and should work harder and write more, but he does write well. Jeff Perrone has done some very interesting writing. He is not a specialist in ceramics per se. He used to write for The Village Voice, he writes for Artforum, Arts Magazine, occasionally writing on ceramics. But there's just not very much there.
RB: Both of these people are outsiders to the ceramic world to a certain degree.
GC: To a certain degree (pause)... Ceramic writing tends to be promotional writing; it also tends to be emotional writing where somebody likes somebody's work for a number of reasons, perhaps out of friendship, or perhaps just out of a passion for the work, and they set out to write something to share how much they like it. It sounds like such a good intention, but it makes for the most dreadfully syrupy and uninspired writing. That's what the field suffers from to a great extent. It's not unethical, it's not that they're just trying to paddle a friend's canoe; it's just that it is written without any kind of tough historical or aesthetic basis. I'm sure that if you took many of those writers and grabbed a few of their phrases out of the publications and said, "Okay, what does this mean?" they wouldn't be too sure. If you took several of them and said "What are the three major dynamics of the vessel aesthetic?", they probably wouldn't be able to tell you. Now you can ask those sort of questions of painting critics and ten-to-one they've got answers—very well thought out, well-defined aesthetic views about painting and how it functions. You don't find much of that intelligence in ceramics. It's understandable, we're a small field.
>>
© 1980 - 2025 Rob Barnard . All Rights Reserved. Site design: eismontdesign