Clay Revisions: Plate, Cup, Vase, a national travelling show of seventy ceramic works by twenty-six contemporary craftsmen, deepens the debate currently raging over art versus craft.
The initial catalyst of the debate was the opening of the new American Craft Museum in New York City two years ago. The museum's sumptuous inaugural exhibit of contemporary crafts. Craft Today: Poetry of the Physical, went on to travel around the country, resulting in some four hundred reviews and essays. Reviewers agonized over whether craft was art, argued the merits of functional or non-functional crafts, and split semantic hairs over words like vessel and pot.
While reviewers weighed these ponderous issues, the public in large numbers went to museums to see Craft Today as well as other national craft exhibitions such as The Eloquent Object, which opened earlier this year at the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and is now on a tour of four U.S. cities.
Indeed, the public now has an appetite and appreciation for beautifully made crafts objects that often exceeds that of myopic museum curators, who are just now beginning to wake up and scramble to acquire objects made earlier, during this century's previous explosion of crafts expression, the Arts and Crafts Movement.
Freewheeling Innovation
That turn-of-the-century movement was a reaction against shoddy, machine-made goods and emphasized skillful, handmade work. But a whiff of the sanctimonious hovers over the crafts of the period, especially its heavy, dark "Mission" furniture. The contemporary crafts movement, by contrast, is marked by freewheeling innovation and an irreverence toward function--attitudes especially prevalent in the medium of ceramics.
Ironically enough, the current renaissance in American ceramics was initially sparked by intense interest in the centuries-old traditions of Japanese folk pottery. Just as William Morris was the main theorist behind the Arts and Crafts Movement, the writings of the British potter Bernard Leach, a devotee of all things Japanese, led to the post-World War II fascination in this country with Japanese pottery.
Any potter worth his salt in the 1950s and early 1960s was familiar with Leach's writing, which espoused a Zenlike appreciation for accident and spontaneity in the making of pots. Robert Sperry [see "An Ancient Craft Lives, " THE WORLD & I April 1988, 259] and Peter Voulkos, two of the best-known potters exhibiting work in Clay Revisions: Plate, Cup, Vase, were no exceptions. In fact, Sperry made an award-winning 1963 documentary, Village Potters of Onda, about the changes encroaching on a folk-pottery village in Japan. Sperry has retained his affinity for Japanese ceramics, but Voulkos went on to embrace another kind of spontaneity--abstract expressionism.
Voulkos, noted for the slashing and poking of his pots, ushered in a brave new world of personal expression in American ceramics. Clay began to be likened to a painter's canvas. Shortly after, ceramists in the San Francisco Bay area gave one more twist to the personal-expression issue by showing outrageous, nonfunctional sculptures that came to be labeled
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