Craft Design and Television

One of the things that I think gives ceramics potency – as a contemporary medium– is the complexity of its associations, or the slightly uncomfortable position it sits in either between, or maby more accurately, in reference to, a wide variety of different areas and ideas. I’m thinking about the sheer variety of forms and formal qualities of all of the ceramic objects that have been produced throughout history and the incredible breadth of geological conditions, cultural conditions, functional problems, and manufacturing processes that have generated this breadth! These objects are made through 1.industrial production (ie. sanitary ware like sinks and toilets, or high tech ceramics like piezoelectrics etc.) 2. pre-industrial production (individual or cottage industry production, by hand, of ceramic objects) and 3.non-industrial production (contemporary studio artists producing ceramics using pre-industrial technology). In using ceramics we connect the objects we’re making to, and create spheres of implication between all of these areas and sets of ideas! (On the other hand, or at the same time, we may choose to regard qualities of form and surface made possible with this incredibly plastic material as pure phenomena.)

All that said it seems that most of the time we’re confronted with ceramic objects today, any message embodied specifically in their materiality seems to me to be deeply buried in a kind of cultural subliminal unconscious – either in very specific historical knowledge of industrial processes and material culture, and/or in a sort of conissiour appreciation of the technique involved in their production. While the porcelain surface of an indoor toilet may have once been appreciated as a sign of wealth and class status that time has passed and today we’re rarely conscious of what the object we’re sitting on or eating off of is made of – and if we are it seems a plainly and simply utilitarian choice.

This weeks readings continue to examine this net of related ideas but in two different ways. The first is from the anthology, “The Culture of Craft” edited by Peter Dormer. The particular essay we’re reading is by Helen Rees, who at the time of this writing was a doctoral student at the University of Manchester. The essay is titled “Patterns of making: Thinking and Making in industrial design” and it approaches the idea that we’ve now discussed a bit in class of the relationship between the activity of the “Craftsperson” and the activity of the “Industrial Designer” – and how their products relate and respond to the consumer and material culture.

The second reading is from a collection of writings by Theodor Adorno titled “The Culture Industry”. Adorno’s writing can be a bit dense so I’ve chosen a really short section titled “Presumptuousness” from the essay/chapter titled “How to Look at Television”. The relationship between this reading and the topic at hand may seem oblique at first, but the core idea that seems really pertinent – and which Adorno articulates really well – has to do with the way the categories we form for classifying “Art” (in this case television) within genre’s affects both our expectations of the experience of the form, and the meaning that we can ultimately receive.

Week 2 Francophile/Francophilia/Francophobia

Hello Moldmakers,

So this week we're Francophiles - up for discussion we've got the opening scene from Francois Truffaut's "Day for Night" c.1973, Baudrillard's "The System of Objects" c.1968, and a contemporary French book on Industrial Design. So, let's light up a Gitane, pour a glass of Champagne and travel back to Paris in the early 70's.

I've posted he first 2 readings - as discussed in class please take some time to comment and respond here.

As we discussed on Tuesday, the first is from a book called "Industrial Design Techniques and Materials" by Jean Baptiste Toulard. This book describes a wide range of manufacturing processes from the point of view of the Industrial Designer. The section that we're reading focuses specifically on ceramics, and gives a nice synopsis of most forming techniques currently in use and in development for the manufacture of ceramics (all the way from teapots and sinks to isostatic pressing of Knives and Scissors that stay sharp almost forever, to ceramic piezoelectrics) . To take a step back here I'm really interested in looking at the way forming processes are described from the point of view of industrial design - is often quite different from the way they're discussed within the field of "ceramic art". Do you agree? If so what conditions do you see contributing to these different points of view? How can our practice as artists be informed by Industry and Design? Is our practice distinct from these fields? If so in what ways?

The second reading is from "The Sytem of Objects", by Jean Baudrillard. In this book Baudrillard creates a kind of Taxonomy of objects within contemporary culture (or the culture of 1968 when the book was first published): abstracting objects from 1.their functional properties (what Marx would call "use value") 2.Their material properties, and 3.their formal properties. In this particular section titled "Natural Wood, Cultural Wood" he talks about the ways that materials themselves have symbolic meaning within a culture (see also Marx on "Commodity Fetish" http://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=1656 ). I always think here about luxury auto interiors - wood and leather - or, of course Formica laminate printed with a photograph of wood, or vinyl siding imprinted with wood grain texture. Certainly ceramics (specifically porcelain) was deeply embedded with symbolic meaning in Europe in the 15th and 16th century, when the demand for Chinese export porcelain as a luxury commodity contributed to a huge trade deficit (www.lse.ac.uk/collections/economicHistory/GEHN/GEHNPDF/TREILLESBlaszczykPaper.pdf) . Do you think that ceramics, as a material, carries symbolic meaning today? What kinds of associations or meanings do you see ceramics carrying?

(an aside - perhaps there is something here in the shared etymological history of Commode and Commodity)