This is an old post, re-edited. A shorter version, unedited, appears on
The C Word complete with pictures. The following is an excerpt from a short presentation I gave for an
artists panel at Cartwright Hall in Bradford in October 2008.
In 2005, artist Edmund de Waal did a project with the Ceramics
collection at the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff. It was called, ‘Arcanum:
Mapping 18th century European Porcelain.’ It involved the recuration and display of the Museum’s
historic collection of porcelain and a new installation of work by him. In his
catalogue essay he comments: ‘ceramics have not been well served by museums.’
It is indeed often the case that historic ceramic collections, usually
comprising either highly flamboyant European porcelain, or odd-looking shards
from Roman excavations or ungainly medieval vessels from abandoned monasteries,
have little or no discernible connection with contemporary ceramics. Museums
tend to view ceramics as historic objects - the material evidence of past
lives. The position and purpose of the modest collection of contemporary
ceramic work, which is someitmes exhibited alongside, is at best uncertain and
at worst it’s all confined to the top floor of the museum, like the mad woman
in the attic, disconnected from the rest of the museum’s displays, with few
visitors and offering no meaningful dialogue with contemporary audiences. Thus,
for museums, for public collections, there is an urgent need to address the
disjuncture between the historic and the contemporary and to make sense of both
old and new acquisitions to their audiences.
What Miss Haversham Did Next
So, the ‘mad woman in the attic,’ the jilted or abandoned
bride,- namely the V&A’s ceramic collections - has had a make-over. Someone
has bravely attempted to sort out and make sense of the most colossal symptom
of inflated imperial over-production imaginable. The V&A seems to have
examples of everything ceramic that has ever been made or collected.
I am one of those few visitors that used to climb to the top
of the museum, with flask and sandwiches and compass in case of bad weather,
and spend hours gazing at rose-painted Chinese enamelware, and decorous Sevres
porcelain. I’d stop, about half way up to adore the stoves, which had somehow
escaped. I seem to remember them being on the next floor down, but I’m probably
wrong.
The main thing is that it’s all still there – acres of it in
new cabinets. Yes, it’s still all in cabinets. They haven’t gone that radical.
Much of it is still crowded like Kings Cross on a rainy Friday. But you can
still warm yourself on the stoves and gaze with love at the Andrea della Robbia
leaning nonchalantly against a wall somewhere.
Pots At Work: Teaching Ceramics
The really BIG change is the teaching gallery. It has a real
live studio where you can watch real live potters making things, like going to
the zoo, only I don’t suppose mating in public is encouraged. There’s a
reconstruction of a Lucie Rie studio – now this is interesting because the
‘studio potter’ is presented as an historical exhibit – so this must be the
stuffed extinct animals section of the museum. The middle bit of this gallery,
like a spine running down the centre, is a display of clays and glazes and all
manner of ‘how to do it’ explanations and instructions. It’s brilliant. The
best bit of the whole show is in this section. It’s called ‘under the sea’
(something like that). It’s a case full crockery that has been salvaged from
wrecked ships that were carrying tea and the like from ‘The East’ and also
carried chests full of crockery. It’s got bits of coral and you can almost
smell the salt water and see the fish. It’s wonderful.
Contemporary Collection: The Ready-Mades
Finally – the other big change – is the attempt to exhibit
the contemporary collection and connect it to the historic collections. Where
they’ve mixed it up with the historic collections, it really works well. The
teaching section has a several cases of contemporary work –mostly from Norway
with a couple of particularly successful pieces by Paul Scott, (UK). These are
examples of works where the artists are using ‘ready-mades,’ and they
undoubtedly fare best in the V&A context. The overwhelming majority of the
collections are made industrially - that’s just what people like to collect. So
inevitably the work that is connected with the ceramics industry is in the
right context. At last! These makers have not, in the main, been served that
well by craft galleries.
Contemporary Collection: The Clay Pots
There ‘s also a collection of industrial based work in a
cabinet in the ‘Contemporary
Ceramics’ section and, again, you immediately sense it’s in the right place.
The rest of the work still struggles for some reason. Ten years ago, someone
asked me to go and look at the V&A contemporary ceramics collection and
tell them what I thought of it. I said I thought it was an absolute disgrace. I
remember being really horrified. It was an apology for a collection. Not only
was it shockingly narrow, restricted to the worst kind of stoneware
‘Camberwell-Grey’ studio ‘vessels,’ it didn’t even have the best examples of
those. It resembled the reject section of Oxfam – the stuff they put in boxes
on the pavement and sell for a quid. It’s not quite as bad now. Modernist
stoneware has expanded to the next phase of modernism, but it’s all still
strangely soulless. From dirty modernism we’ve progressed to clean shiny
modernism. They are now buying better examples of people’s work and certainly
the industrial collaborations and readymade users are looking good – these kind
of artists just make much more sense of the obsession with being clean, shiny
and meticulous.
Edmund de Waal’s Signs and Wonders - He started this post so I’ll let him end it
Structure
The new, improved contemporary collection is displayed in a
dark, solemn, tomb-like room. It’s not a room as such, it is the landing of
on the V&A’s splendid wooden staircases. In the middle is a square opening.
You can peer over the balustrade down several floors into the entrance hall. The big lumpen
mounds of fired clay which represent the truth-to-materials section of the
contemporary work is arranged on a semi circular, raised stage which embraces
the square balustrade. The pots are
spot-lit in a brave effort to make them look more dramatic and the semi-circle of the stage connects it, visually, to the
circular base of the dome above. The bright white space of the dome is itself circled at its base by a glistening
red steel bracket. If you were to take a cross section of the bracket it would
look like one of those square brackets: ]
- like that. On the lower lip of the bracket are perched the white pots
you probably associate with Edmund de Waal. The overall effect is slightly more
elegant-interior-design-ish than I was expecting. I had imagined something that
would look immensely precarious and a bit dangerous, with the pots stacked up
to some height. It’s actually much more controlled than that, more arranged.
The bright Red and White is magnificent. It really lifts the drowsy darkness lurking below –
there is a lightness about the work, both in the sense that it is well lit and
in the weightlessness sense, that provides a sharp and very welcome contrast to
the layer beneath – where one half expects some of the crustier pots to start
hatching.
What It Feels Like
The best bit is remembering to check from the entrance hall
downstairs on your way out. You really can see it from the ground floor. From
there it resembles the gums of some frightful hag bearing her chipped teeth at
you. When you get closer, the chipped teeth turn out to be pots. They contain
elements of various part of the collection so it is like a celestial meditation
on the mighty imperial collection of collections.
One of the aims of Signs and Wonders was to connect the
historic and contemporary collections and to embed it all in the architecture
of the building. This it does very successfully, especially since it also
connects the two, apparently disparate halves of the contemporary collection –
the ready-mades and the carefully made, finely produced porcelain appear to
have no connection whatever with the big beasts in the darkened cave. If you
were to view it Marxist terms, it would be like trying to connect the lumpen proletariat
– noble peasants toiling in the cave, with the petty, ever-so-refined
bourgeoisie nestling in cabinets with tight lips. De Waal’s pots occupy the
space which is exactly in between and which is somewhat under occupied at the
moment. He still makes pots. They’re clay pots. They’re not obsessively clean
and finicky and tidied up to within an inch of their lives – at least thy don’t
look like they are – and porcelain seems to attract the most anally retentive
of potters who just cant resist imitating the precision of industrial ware. De
Waal relishes the wonky aspects of the material, its ‘mind of its own’ness, he
certainly doesn’t do precious – well a bit sometimes, but not so it makes you
worry, but not does he pretend he’s toiling in the mud. De Waal’s ‘collection’
is more like a parliament of pots and they do succeed in unifying the two
halves which is quite a feat.
The Sunday Times best selling novelist, writer of 'sizzling bonkbusters,' Rebecca Chance, has generously agreed to be my 'Molly Bloom.' In this first pot, 'There's Nothing Like a Kiss,' Molly, the fictional character, appears both as herself, lying on the bed, thinking, and also reinterpreted as Rebecca Chance, writing the remembered first kiss in Gibraltar, 'by the Moorish wall.'
