Edmund de Waal

Writing

This lecture attempts to map a particular corner of the last century of ceramics. This isn’t so much territory that is complex and fought over, as simply abandoned. I want to try and do some simple clearance work. Given Peter Dormer’s extraordinary legacy to both makers of objects and writers, I thought that the best way of paying him any sort of tribute was to be personal, didactic, and open rather than attempt any great patrician academic height, and also to be brave in venturing into uncharted territory. So this is very personal attempt to make sense of two images. I am a potter who writes; the reason for writing is to make conceptual space for my own work with clay. Thinking about these two images is part of a process of clarifying ideas. This is just a scary public way of doing it.

The first image is of the wall of clay that the American-Japanese sculptor Isamu Noguchi constructed in his house in Kamakura in Japan in the early 1950s. It is a long wall of compacted clay, scraped back, with hollowed out niches, one for the hearth and one for a Haniwa, an archaic head from the Jomon period. Noguchi’s sculptures sit nearby. When thinking about this clay wall I kept hearing the amazed, furious, jealous comment of Kazuo Yagi, the great postwar iconoclast, potter and educator, when he first saw Noguchi’s ceramics at this time: ‘Christ he’s gone and done it…’ My question is: Why this impact?

Through this image I want to explore what can be described as a phenomenological approach to clay, how some artists have used clay as an improvisatory, and often studiedly non-intellectual way of expressing themselves. For some of these artists, using clay has been the recuperation of unmediated materiality. That is, they had a powerful sense of clay as earth, as being the great formless material void, that allowed them a kind of expression they could not approach through other materials.

Indeed the image of ‘a returning to earth’ and this is a phrase that I have kept coming upon in different cultures and at different times—carries with it, of course, the apprehension, the almost visceral feeling, of having been separated, alienated or disconnected from the earth. Or land or country or culture.

In Noguchi’s clay wall we see clay as home, as stage, as medium, as environment, as landscape. When I think of this I see not the small intimate gestures normally associated with ceramics, but a larger physicality: try beating out this mass of clay and you’ll see what is involved.

It reminded me of Miró putting his ceramic sculpture outside his Catalan studio to see how it worked alongside the surrounding boulders, or walking along a field of tiles painting a mural. It reminded me of the Danish artist Asger Jorn riding his motorbike across a playground full of clay. It reminded me of the Italian artist Lucio Fontana with a long pole pushing it deep into a large mass of clay to create an interior space. This was, and is, the search for the non-aesthetic and the uncommoditifiable: not an interest in making ceramic objects (exhibitable, catalogueable, saleable) but in the experiencing of clay/earth.

Art critics, mostly hostile, mostly American, have anatomised these kind of encounters as merely playful, indicative of—in the grand pompous words of Hilton Kramer—‘high unseriousness’, digressive activities rather than central ones. Critics from the ceramics world (if they have deigned to notice these things) feel they are just mucking about.

But this search for the experiential through clay, I will argue, lies in its valorising of the non-canonical. Its search for beginnings is one of the great themes of the ceramics of this century, with a legacy that has echoes with the land art and environmental art movements of the 1970s and 1980s. Most importantly of all, however, I want to try and recover playfulness (indeed the digressive) as important and exciting.

My second image is a photograph of an installation of massed white porcelain vessels Bright Earth, Fired Earth. They were designed by Lily Reich and exhibited, as if unpacked from a vast industrial kiln, at the Deutsches Volk, Deutsches Arbeit exhibition in Berlin in 1934. This image, catching the intersection between architecture, ceramics and sculptural installation fascinated me for what I felt to be the pull between the isolation of the object and its grouping together. I have become highly conscious of the different ways of framing ceramics as collectable objects, collected objects and as commodities from the shop window to the museum cabinet. Within contemporary ceramics the singularity of objects is almost always stressed over plurality. The singular is in focus, is precious, attainable. Uniqueness validates collecting. The multiple is confusing, inexact, muddlesome: some of this embarrassment might be thought justifiable of course.

I wanted to see whether this strange and powerful image, so redolent of the aesthetics of modernity, could help uncover an alternative history of the formal arrangement of ceramics. I tried to collect images of how ceramics were presented, and they kept multiplying. The phrase that kept ringing in my head was that of an anonymous Soviet commentator writing in Komsomol’skya Pravda, the newspaper of the Soviet Young Communist League in 1928. In an article ‘What do we want from a plate?’ an answer was that ‘we want it to be right for its purpose. The cultural revolution, like the bugler’s trumpet, is summoning for examination and revaluation everything which mobilises or poisons our consciousness, our will and our readiness for battle! In this “parade” of objects there are no non-combatants nor can there be! We demand that a plate should fulfil its social function.’ Think of Lily Reich’s massed porcelain as ‘a parade of objects’ and its presence in a 1934 Berlin exhibition feels quite different.

The ‘parade of objects’ seemed to me the perfect phrase to catch the formality, the structure—and above all the drama, the staging, of this approach to multiplicity: here are six contemporaneous images from the very start of the twentieth century.

The ‘parade of objects’ made perfect sense of objects standing to attention in Edward Morse’s collection of Japanese ceramics in Boston here photographed in 1902. Rigorous taxonomies applied to what was mostly misattributed, overpriced demotic junk. The parade as catalogue.

It made sense of the posters for La Maison Moderne, the Parisian gallery where all the greatest Art Nouveau ceramicists displayed their work, with objects framed within a vitrine. Here the question of where ceramics sit in the picture plane, how near to them you were allowed to come, their ‘sensuous possession’ is rehearsed. The parade as spectacle. And in the radical Viennese architecture of Josef Hoffmann, his attention to how ceramics could be animated led to some remarkable experiments. At the most simple level Hoffmann was to design coherent shelves and niches for the integral display of ceramics. But tableware, too, was to receive the same attention as architecture. ‘Jutta Sika’s coffee and tea service is original in form and decoration; without depending on the help of a border, it is relaxed and light in form and ornament’ wrote a critic in 1902. These designs were conceived to be part of the new aestheticising of the everyday, part of the home as a stage for the drama of the domestic, here presented in Carl Moll’s painting Breakfast 1903, of a scene in a Hoffmann villa. The parade as domestic drama.

This was more than just trying to trace contexts for ceramics. Ceramics—of course—have staggeringly various lives. They have been made for display in the vitrine, or collector’s cabinet, for actual or intended domestic use, for the spaces of the museum and the art gallery, for cladding an interior or an exterior of a building. Ceramics have also been made as awards for revolutionary Soviet heroes, as the decoration for a Viennese nightclub, for the window of a thirties New York department store. They have been made to épater les bourgeois by English bohemians, and to placate the honest working classes in Sweden. Ceramics were at the centre of the debates about national identity, used in the great national expositions at the turn of the century to dramatise facets of essential style and character. At the turn of this century in the new wave of expositions they are doing the same thing. But above all they are used dramatically.

Ceramics and drama might seem to be sad self-aggrandisement of a potter, but there is a strong thread of animation that I feel justifies it. If we unpack the antecedents for Lily Reich’s installation, for instance, we find fascinating material.

The antecedents lie in the fierce bond between contemporary ceramics and contemporary architecture that existed in the first 30 years of the twentieth century. The Wiener Werkstätte, for example, mounted an exhibition the Der Gedeckte Tisch (The Laid Table) in which numerous tables were themed for a birthday, wedding, artists’ gathering and so on, with tableware, cutlery and flower arrangements: ‘the dumplings are hand-turned by a craftsman and the only stylistically pure black-and-white desserts are the poppy-seed puddings improved by Koloman Moser...here madness marries geometry.’

Though this is comic it also reflects interestingly on how closely thought-through the dramatic nature of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the ‘total work of art’, was scrutinised. This can be seen in the creation of the Cabaret Fledermaus in 1907. Hoffmann designed this café theatre as an informal headquarters for the Viennese avant-garde, a place that staged modern dance and semi-surreal masked plays against a background as vivid as the performances. This was the most ambitious ceramic project undertaken in Vienna: seven thousand maiolica tiles made up a continuous frieze of ornamental design, caricatures and mythical animals. It was, according to the critic Ludwig Hevesi, writing in 1909, ‘as colourful as colourful can be, as fantastic as fantasy. An irregular mosaic… seemingly composed at random.’ This so-called ‘paperhangers’ nightmare’ was a place where the drama of the stage and the drama of the audience intermingled.

Though we can see this in the revolutionary porcelains of the Russian Suprematists where even a place setting could be conceived of as a radical installation, it is in the ceramics of the Bauhaus that the most condensed expression of these stage settings occur. Bauhaus ceramics have a highly distinct character. Earthenware was used allowing for a clarity and hardness of profile: this meant that the pots could have convex rims or fine raised handles as sharp as any modern metal container. It was a clay body that did not warp, allowing for exact and complex combinations of components. Many of these pots exploit this: these are pots expressive of structure above all things.

For instance, Theodor Bogler’s Mocca machine consists of no fewer than four stacked components together. With his Combination teapots he illustrated, in fine Bauhaus pedagogical style, how it was possible to create numerous variants from a set number of parts, echoing in ceramic form Gropius’ idea of architecture as a ‘large-scale building set.’

They looked, in short, unequivocally modern and efficient. In this complex transposition of values, ceramics for the kitchen aspired to the status of those of the laboratory bench: teapots recall ‘water gauges’ as a critic remarked of the 1923 Bauhaus exhibition. But, these modern objects took a huge amount of labour as Wilhelm Wagenfeld ruefully noted: ‘dealers and manufacturers laughed over our products… Although they looked like cheap machine production, they were in fact expensive handicrafts.’ Given the difficult experience of the Bauhaus in actually producing quantities of any object, it was a useful presentational trope to display a unique object in a ‘laboratory’ situation and explain that it was a prototype for future mass production. Lucia Moholy’s photographs of Bauhaus objects often emphasised this laboratory-like clarity.

In making ceramics look as if they were ‘essential’, it meant a separation from the realm of the unique craft object and a connection to the multiple object of the industrial world. In the promotion of Marguerite Friedlander’s porcelain for the Staatliche Porzellan Manufaktur in Berlin published in Die Form in 1930, it is shown stacked as if recently unpacked from the kiln. By its side is a photo of other ‘new porcelain’, this time distilling vessels and a mortar. And Lily Reich’s porcelain is, of course, a hymn to the aesthetics of repetition.

This aspiration towards anonymity and severity was really an aspiration towards the ‘type’, an object whose form was so perfectly married to its usage that it could not be bettered. Looking for the ‘type’ in the work of studio potters was, as Geoffrey Grigson trenchantly put it in a review, completely pointless: ‘The best modern analogues for the medieval earthenware or the Siamese stoneware bowl of the tenth century, the T’ang earthenware jar [or] the Chinese stoneware bowls of the twelfth or thirteenth centuries… were not pots by Mr Staite Murray, Mr Bernard Leach, Miss Pleydell-Bouverie or Mr Cardew… but the Doulton fire-clay crucibles, the stoneware ginger beer bottles, the mercury bottle and bung jar by Messrs Joseph Bourne’.

‘Necessities’, proper types, found their ultimate moment of authentication in the American Museum of Modern Art exhibition Machine Art held in 1934. Curated by Philip Johnson, its purpose was to reveal an aesthetic of complete adaption to purpose and lack of extraneous ornament present in industrial production, from propellers and springs to the austere porcelain of hotel kitchen ware and beakers and dishes from the chemistry laboratory. ‘In spirit’, Johnson wrote in his introduction,’machine art and handicraft are diametrically opposed. Handicraft implies irregularity, picturesqueness, decorative value and uniqueness… The machine implies precision, simplicity, smoothness, reproducibility: plain textiles, vases as simple as laboratory beakers’. In keeping with the fierce didacticism of the enterprise each photo in the catalogue is priced: these are objects to buy rather than collect. The parade of objects in its high capitalist Modernist phase.

Of course it is no surprise that such framing devices should themselves be appropriated. The vitrine has become the place of anxious, unsettled drama. Here is Richard Wentworth’s installation shown at the Bowes Museum, Rims, Lips, Feet. ‘Playing shop’ is one way of not being outwitted, of keeping the upper hand with the world of the museum and the gallery. Oldenburg had done this in The Store in 1961 with its saleable objects made of brightly coloured plaster objects, and George Segal had segued real objects and figures in his tableaux.

So Ken Prices’ installation Ken Price: Happy Curios shown in 1978 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art stands within a contemporary context of the framing of objects as commodities. But Prices’ installation played even more complex games with the viewer-buyer-public, games that centred on taste, ethnicity and trade. His initial intention was to create a curio shop in toto, a ‘walk-in sculpture made out of pottery’, but he abandoned the plan and fitted these units and shrines into the museum.

The impact was huge. Price was acting as artist, craftsman, curator, dealer and ethnographer simultaneously: he was critiquing the idea of authentic ethnic ceramics and he was ‘enshrining’ kitsch by installing it so lovingly in his ‘units’. Its complexity of ideas and aesthetics made it one of the most compelling post-war exhibitions. The parade of objects meets Postmodernity.

These two images of Noguchi’s wall and Lily Reich’s installation lodged with me over the last few years as I researched a book on twentieth-century ceramics.

There seemed to be no framework that could accommodate these two things: the surveys to date have discussed factories or potters or artists as if the artists and their works were completely disassociated from the times in which they were living, and as if they were completely unaware of their contemporaries. Rather than producing a survey in which only a shooting gallery of iconic pots or famous artists are presented I wanted to reveal the contexts in which these ceramics were made and why they were made. But I was also interested in why so many of the people whose work in clay I liked should want to disassociate themselves from ceramics, why ‘ceramics’ should be such a problem.

From Gauguin,(‘Sèvres has killed ceramics’) to Lucio Fontana (who said of his time at Sèvres: ‘Into these workshops where the tableware of all the kings of France had been made I brought a Minotaur on a lead to crash about amongst the dainty porcelain baskets and the allegories in biscuit-ware’) to the American sculptor David Smith (‘Only when I forgot all that ceramic crap could I start making art’), there was a chronic dislike of the world of ceramics.

What was it that made ceramics as a discipline so normative, repelling outsiders, the less suitably qualified, the untrained, the unbroken-in? It was partly of course that the languages in which objects have been described—critical, art historical, and aesthetic—have mapped the extent of the critical world in which ceramics inhabits. If I think of the map it resembles, it is one of those seventeenth-century ones with vastly detailed lands in the top right hand corner and huge Terra Incognita below, lands of anxiety. Here be art.

The language in which ceramics has been talked of has not helped. For much of the century there have been polemics and manifestos alongside the handbooks and manuals. The tone of these is often slightly embattled, a defensive attitudinising best characterised by Auden in his Letter to Lord Byron in 1937:

A child may ask when our strange epoch passes,

During a history lesson, ‘Please, sir, what’s

An intellectual of the middle classes?

Is he a maker of ceramic pots?’

A good example of this cabalistic defensiveness was the response to Picasso’s ceramics that toured Britain in 1950, Picasso in Provence. The trade journal Pottery and Glass called them ‘slap happy’, whilst a curator in Stoke-on-Trent wrote that ‘Picasso’s use of slip in broad washes is not altogether happy; it is a painter’s approach and not effective as pottery decoration. Doubtless he felt the limitations of a poor body material and it would be interesting to see what he could do with a good Staffordshire earthenware.’

But there is another literature for twentieth-century ceramics. This includes Miró’s journals, Fontana’s reviews of Picasso ceramics, Gauguin’s reviews of ceramic exhibitions, a Marinetti-inspired manifesto of Futurist ceramics, John Cage, Clement Greenberg, Soviet encomiums, colonial administrators on ethnic traditions, the German sculptor Ernst Barlach, Le Corbusier, TS Eliot, Hamada on tradition, Gropius on the untrustworthiness of potters, a German Expressionist pamphlet in defence of clay, and so on. Just as the visual map of the century is so much more than a series of discrete objects, a sort of positivist ascent of the sculptural ceramic, so the conceptual critical map is far richer than I believed.

So to return to—and analyse—that first image of Noguchi’s studio. To understand the impact of this clay wall, first think of the generation of young Japanese potters returning to the highly stratified world of salon exhibitions after the cataclysmic events of the Second World War.

Japan lay in ruins, and for the first time in its history was occupied by a foreign army. The art world that they were confronted with was unchanged, stultifying and unreal in its adherence to prewar conduct. There remained a clear separation between sculpture and ceramics, and the deep prevailing hostility to modern Western art that had been fostered during the highly nationalist 1930s. There was, in the words of one young potter, ‘no clay for making, no firewood for firing, no ceramics for selling’. It seemed a time to begin again and to return to first principles.

The language of these new groupings, in particular the Shiko-kai in 1947 and the Sodeisha in 1948 was heady and fervid: ‘A harmonious group of young ceramic artists have been born out of the decayed plain fields. Since we have been brought up by the earth which is warmer than a mother’s heart, we will efface ourselves by means of the earth’ as the Shiko-kai manifesto put it.

It was clay for Kazuo Yagi (1918-1979) and his four friends, all sons of Kyoto potters, rather than any particular kind of object, that lay behind the foundation of the Sodeisha. Reclaiming clay was a way of reclaiming a national identity from their parents’ generation

Their choice of name, ‘sodei’ referring to an earthworm wriggling in mud, was a palpable expression of their powerful absorption in an elemental relationship with clay. These young potters were ‘returning’ to clay, being ‘effaced’ by it: in doing so they expressed their feeling that the older generation of potters had betrayed and smothered the material. That much of the Sodeisha’s early work is unglazed is no coincidence: it reflects this passionate, phenomenological, identification with clay itself. The radical Gutai group, also stressed this, with Kazuo Shiraga (1924-)in a performance Challenging Mud in 1955 writhing around in mud until he was so exhausted that the earth had ‘won’.

But if the materiality of clay could be appropriated, the choice of what to reject was a more complex barometer of anxiety. Traditions were not, and could not, be ditched wholesale. After all, many of the Sodeisha potters were working alongside more traditional potters and Yagi was firing his new objets (as these avant-garde objects were called) in the traditional communal wood-fired kiln at Gojozaka in Kyoto. It was possible to find some traditions that could be elected as recoverable as modern and interesting. Yagi was declaring that it was possible to be an avant-garde Oriental potter, that modernity could be built on Oriental foundations. Indeed one of the key strategies in the work of these avant-garde potters was the animating of diverse parts of ceramic history, a good example of this being Osamu Suzuki (1926-) another founding member of the Sodeisha who made work with titles that referred to Jomon period figures: ‘deizo’ (clay image) and ‘dogu’ (clay figure).

The core example of this lay in the ‘discovery’ by this generation of the Haniwa, small earthenware archaic figures decorated with highly abbreviated patterns and marks from the Jomon period. Their ‘modernity’ and ‘new immediacy’ lay in the fact that they had never been historicised: they had not been considered as part of the ceramic canon by a former generation. And that the Haniwa should be so important a referent in the work of Isamu Noguchi (who was working in ceramics in Japan between 1950-52) gave them even more gravitas—they crossed over from the archaic to the modern, from pottery into sculpture—and indeed from the national to the international. They were, in effect, the African masks ‘discovered’ by the Parisian avant-garde. Their significance was comparable to the use of Primitivism in the work of Picasso or Die Brücke.

Yagi was the lynchpin of the movement and his early works were seen as a watershed in Japanese ceramics: they provoked hysteria when exhibited in a Tokyo exhibition in 1955. Their reorientation of wheel-thrown sections was greeted as an iconoclastic way of thinking about the wheel: it was as if the almost spiritual identification of the potter’s wheel with the potter had been upended. Here was a potter using the wheel ‘as a machine’, as a starting-point for a process of fragmentation and reconstruction. The inviolability of the vessel had been symbolically broken. With their deliberate reference to Kafka’s Metamorphosis, these were ‘walking sculpture’, the small thrown pipes acting like myriad disorientated legs.

The disjunction of seeing the gentle effects of wood-firing, the striations of the thrower’s hand, used to such new purposes was staggering. Much of the early work of Yagi, and Shindo Tsuji (1910-1981) followed this process of fragmentation of wheel-thrown forms, and their collaging into new works. All the usual properties of the vessel, the singularity of its opening, its volumetric clarity, its stability, are upended. These objects lie down, are broken, have multiple openings.

The presence in Japan of Isamu Noguchi between 1950 and 1952 made a considerable impact in the ceramics world. In the vivid words of Suzuki Osamu: ‘We felt his work to demonstrate the nature of clay itself; it was like throwing a rock into the seemingly unstoppable system of pottery.’ Noguchi’s work mattered because it reached deep into the young potters of the Sodeisha’s joint concerns with materiality and national ceramic history.

Noguchi, the son of an American mother and a Japanese father, had spent his childhood in both America and Japan. He studied with Brancusi in Paris in the 1920s and had worked with clay, stone and bronze in New York. Noguchi had a varied existence as a designer for contemporary dance, and for industry alongside his sculpture. On his return to Japan in 1950 he ‘jumped right into the world of Japanese pottery...’ as a critic wrote. He was ‘devouring the Japanese clay, firing in the traditional kilns of Karatsu, Shigaraki, Seto and Bizen; he has become a potter…this is an exhibition of pottery. Nevertheless Noguchi is firing his pottery as sculpture, or, at least they are being fired in a manner that captivates the fancy of the sculptor...He finds rightful justification in the primitive Haniwa sculpture; no modern potter shall deny the sculptural position of the Haniwa. The Haniwa is ultimately united with the ancient earthenwares and pottery; Noguchi’s aim is the revivification of this primitive relationship.’

The list of kilns Noguchi worked at gives an indication of why his impact was so great: he was playing bagatelle with Japan’s ceramic heritage. This international sculptor was choosing to work with not just clay, but with particularly symbolic ceramic traditions. His use of a multiplicity of clays and different ways of firing echoed Yagi’s use of the wheel as a tool, as a starting-point for a process rather than an aesthetic destination in itself. In his exhibition in 1952 at Kamakura he showed a great range of vessels and sculptures, quick figurative clay studies and fragmentary totems ranging from the scale of a hand to over six feet high. They were often on wooden or metal stands, not to express significance or value, but to show them like exhibits from an ethnographic display. Many of them were like transparent structures, abstracted versions of the interiority of the figure. They are, in fact, abstracted Haniwa, something that Noguchi hinted at in his catalogue essay: ‘Abstractions themselves are rooted in associations as potent as anatomy…’ The kilns he used were wood-fired, his sculptures were unglazed: their connection with the primitive was undisturbed by decorative surface associations. They possessed what he called, in the same essay, an essence of sculpture, its tactility in words that reveal again this passionate identification with the visceral, the exhausting physicality of working with clay: ‘...we may bump into it, bleed from its rough surface, or delineate its contours with our fingers’.

Noguchi’s freedom with traditions and his eclecticism was read by some Japanese critics as superficial. This discontent and criticism found a particular focus in his choice of collaborator, the potter Kitaoji Rosanjin. A maverick in the ceramics world, a calligrapher, restauranteur and gourmand, Rosanjin chose to work in a diverse range of styles: he felt free from obligations to regional styles: he functioned as Noguchi was said to do ‘firing in a manner that captivates the fancy of the sculptor’. Aloof from the ceramic hierarchies (he turned down the award of ‘Living National Treasure’ as meaningless) Rosanjin offered Noguchi not only a place to live on his estate near Kamakura, but also the use of his kilns.

The studio that Noguchi built for himself here was also a focus for the critics: it was seen by American magazines as an example of lapidary Japanese taste, but in Japan as very novel and mystifying. And it was here that Noguchi built his wall of beaten clay with a fireplace and a crude alcove cut into it for a Haniwa. In a very literal way Noguchi was making a home, or a stage, for his sculpture, a way of thinking about clay as medium and environment. It is also a cave, a return to first principles.

When Noguchi’s ceramics were exhibited in 1954 at the Stable Gallery in New York, Hilton Kramer saw them as works of ‘high unseriousness’ and Time described them as ‘the gingerbread cookies of a playful and somewhat inebriated baker’. They were regarded as frivolities, as if Noguchi was on a Japanese holiday from his responsibilities to high seriousness—responsibilities that could only be achieved with other materials. Noguchi certainly felt this reproach. He had no exhibition after this for five years, and in his next show didn’t exhibit clay works, but marble, granite and bronze sculpture.

The equation made between childishness, spontaneity and clay revealed a distrust of the value of ceramics in the oeuvre of an artist: by suggesting that clay went with play, it was possible to diminish its importance. This is one of the principal reasons that although in the period of 1945 to 1960 Fontana, Picasso, Miró, Chagall, Braque, Leger, Cocteau and the Cobra group were all involved in using ceramics it was possible for Kramer, reviewing a Leger exhibition in 1955 to anatomise the situation as digressive and decorative: ‘The digression into ceramics which has lately occupied the elder generation of painters in Paris has tended to isolate certain decorative and frivolous aspects of their talents at the expense of their expressive powers. This digression has caught some of these artists in moments of relaxation if not actual decline.’

This I find fascinating for two reasons. First for the use of ‘decoration’ as a term of critical disapprobation—particularly revealing, for decoration was seen by formalist critics like Clement Greenberg as a secondary activity, one based around the disguising of forms rather than revelation of form. A disparagement strengthened by the fact that Greenberg’s advocacy of ‘optical’ sculpture that appealed to the intellect not to the touch was rapidly becoming an orthodoxy in the 1950s. Clay, messy and inchoate and sensual, had none of the putative clarity of steel.

Secondly it might be that there was an element of relaxation, play in the ceramics of these artists that could not be appropriated into general critical discourse, and could not be understood by contemporary critics.

One of the meanings of play is an upending of the linearity of narrative. For example, when I’m reading stories to my children, it is possible for narratives to repeat sections, go backwards, collage in fragments (‘I want a Robin Hood story, with King Arthur and me’). Endings are not discrete, they are generative and provisional.

In a parallel way Miró, Picasso and Fontana all upend the rootedness of ceramic objects and treat vessels as in some ways found objects, susceptible to the conditions of surrealist exchange. Vessels are starting-points—not conclusions. As we have seen from the fury about Noguchi’s insouciance over Japanese traditions, this is rather alarming for those who build their identity around immersion in grounded historic traditions.

These artists also treated the ceramic studio itself as a transient place—everything they found within the ceramic studio was fair game for incorporation into new objects. Picasso, for instance, appropriated and manipulated, using the detritus of the studio, discarded kiln fragments and shards alongside casseroles, chestnut roasters and tiles and meat platters. Some of these marmite were painted with black figures in the manner of Etruscan antiquities, some of the tiles broken to give the impression of archeological finds. They are knowing commentaries on the inherent archaism of painting terracottas. There is the layering of commentary on tradition so present in his combative relationship with artistic forebears (his paintings and lithographs of the time) but no more benign in his ceramics than in his paintings. Threading their way through the doves, or through the epicurean still lives in rich fluxed colours painted onto the meat dishes, are sexual dramas and the violent theatre of bullfights.

Picasso manipulated thrown pots while they were still soft, bending the tall neck of a bottle over to make a face, squeezing a jar to indicate a woman’s body, using ceramics’ particular ability to show a speed of working and change. Transformation took place at different levels of seriousness, humour and complexity. On one level a handle can become a snake or a spout or a phallus. The border of a meat dish can act as the audience for a bull fight, the nest of a bird, a woman’s hair. The framework is unstable, a handled jug ‘contains’ the image of a flower vase. And in one of the most bizarre of these shape-shiftings a terracotta vase was surrounded by a mould made from corrugated cardboard, and plaster was poured into the space between the two: a vase was thus made into a larger plaster jug. For much of these ceramics are rooted in what André Breton described as the most fundamental of all Surrealist visual techniques, the suppression of the word ‘like’. In Surrealism a tomato is no longer ‘like’ a child’s balloon, it is also a child’s balloon. In Picasso’s ceramics objects are often other objects simultaneously.

For Miró, too, the excitement of using ceramics lay in their unpredictability, the consigning of the work to the transformative process of the firing, where clay and glaze changed into mass and colour. This transformative element connected with his sense of how his art came into being, the way in which, in a dream, figures and landscapes and symbols change and become ‘other’. It was also present in his admiration for Neolithic art, where organs and limbs interchange, and for children’s art where objects recede in and out of focus in the picture plane. In his small ceramic sculptures of women, this transmogrification is most clearly visible, with an almost studiedly archaic transposition of mouth and sexual organs.

Other works were more complex. When he saw the outcome of a disastrous firing of Artigas’ ceramics, with broken detritus and pots stuck together and to shelves, it was, for Miró, a surrealist symphony of melted or fragmented forms. It was an epiphany, for materials, as he said ‘always excite me and give me points of departure of great richness’. There is either an almost violent syncopation of different forms or the bringing together of different ways of handling clay within the same piece, all to the end of keeping alive the febrile energy of making and painting. Indeed in a notebook of 1948 he counterpointed the deadness and academicism of ‘frozen porcelains of decadent dancers’ against his ambition to have ‘ceramics that one can throw in the face/during the ecstasies of LOVE.’

Where a form is unitary, as with his use of Artigas’ large jars or dishes, the images are placed so as to pull the form off centre: the smoothness and opacity of a glazed surface, its tactile coherence, was a ‘point of departure’ rather than a terminus. Just as his painting was connected to childhood mark-making through his use of stains and traces and scratches, so Artigas pointed out that Miró had to give up on the idea of accuracy in drawing on ceramic surfaces and so had to inscribe the clay with a sharp stick, scratch through slips or trail glazes. Indeed the rougher the surface, the better. Just as Picasso was to do at Vallauris in the South of France, Miró picked up broken kiln shelves and discarded shards and even kiln bricks to work with. Their brokenness gave them an immediate correspondence with the surrounding rocky landscape. Some of these painted fragments of kiln shelf with their condensed ideographic figures, stars and animals looking as if they had been removed from the prehistoric caves at Altamira. Miró’s identification with the landscape extended to his painting of the boulders outside Artigas’ hillside studio and finished ceramics were placed outside to see if they had the necessary aesthetic to survive the comparison.

This approach was a challenge for the COBRA group, formed in 1948 by Danish, Belgian and Dutch artists, sculptors and writers. For them, too, improvisatory assemblage was a way of escaping from the straitjacket of high art. Determinedly experimental, they believed in this approach to materials, unhampered by anxieties about technique. In 1948 the Dutch artists Karel Appel, Corneille, Anton Rooskens and Constant had experimented with ceramics. In 1954 the Danish artist Asger Jorn organised International encounters in ceramics, inviting amongst others Fontana, Corneille and Appel from the Netherlands and Matta from Chile to work collaboratively and experimentally in Tullio’s workshop. Karel Appel recalled this: ‘It was like opening the floodgates. We were allowed to make pottery at Mazzoti’s factory. Everyone was busy painting pots and plates and vases, but I preferred to hit the bits of clay I pulled out of the dirt with an iron bar. I beat animal reliefs into the material, and once I had hammered out the shape, I painted it before firing the piece.’

Appel’s work, with its bright poster-paint colours and freely scratched surfaces, mostly consisted of an almost medieval bestiary of animals and birds, graphic and emotional. He also made small squeezed heads from clay with punctured eyes and mouths, an intense and cursory engagement with clay that emphasises the anti-aesthetic. If playing with clay constituted a crime against the ideals of modernism, then there was true radicalism in COBRA’s involvement in ceramics at Albissolan in Italy: a hundred plates were decorated by children and exhibited on equal terms, for instance. And similarly in Asger Jorn and Corneille’s ceramics there is the element of ‘high unseriousness’ that Kramer disparaged so brutally in Noguchi’s ceramics. In endeavouring to release spontaneity with clay, reliefs and murals were made, their vast scale necessitating huge gestural markings. For a Jutland school, Jorn even rode his scooter over the unfired clay.

All these factors, the sense of unmediated materiality, the engagement with transformative process, the anxiety about ending up making commodities, connect these mid-century artists with the focus of the 1970s environmental movement. The iconography of earth was potent, Robert Smithson had called the key 1968 New York exhibition ‘Earthworks’ after the science fiction writer Brian W Aldis’ novel where, in a dystopian future, soil had become precious.

This was explored within the movement, loosely titled Earth Art, where many sculptors worked by displacing earth in the landscape or removing it into galleries. This bringing of the material into the gallery, of counterpointing material and artifice, was done dramatically by the Japanese potter Ryoji Koie (1938-) who made a series of masks out of unfired clay that were shown in different stages of disintegration at the Kyoto National Museum of Modern Art in 1971. The installation, Returning to Earth, was received with shock.

Indeed commenting on the 1970 Unfired Clay exhibition held at Southern Illinois University, Evert Johnson wrote that ‘There is something spiritually appropriate in the implication of the pot returning to earth, of artists participating physically in the installation of their own exhibit, and of creative man being, for a short time at least, really at one with his work, the earth from which it was made and elements that besiege both’.

Koie also staged a series of happenings, each concerned with how little could be done to define something as ‘ceramic’. Some were as simple as video taping the digging of clay from a riverbank, or blowtorching the ground. At the Earth Festival in 1972 that he organised with Jun Kaneko in the industrial ceramics city of Tokoname, they invited the 500 participants to use clay in whatever way they wanted to make vessels or sculptures or to cover bicycles with clay. The emphasis was on the contingency of meaning of clay: it could be used in multiple ways, and could mean anything. To show this Koie also went back to the Japanese term for pottery ‘yakimono’, literally ‘fired things’, and fired clocks and sewing machines onto slabs of clay. Alongside this he threw porcelain vessels, glazing some of them by firing ‘dirt from my backyard’ onto them. In a parallel spirit of adventure the American ceramicist James Melchert produced a happening in Amsterdam entitled ‘Changes’ (1972) in which people dipped their heads in clay slip and the sat in a room of different temperatures, while the drying process was filmed. In America, Charles Simonds (1945-) made his own body the site of exhibition: ‘I lie down nude on the earth, cover myself with clay, remodel and transform my body into a landscape with clay, and then build a fantasy dwelling-place on my body on the earth’. His archaic ruined constructions made out of thousands of tiny bricks either on his body or on the edges of steps, window sills, or vacant lots in cities attempted to make connections between the body and the earth as sacred places: ‘Landscape-Body-Dwelling is a process of land into body, body into land.’

Indeed Anthony Gormley in European Field and Host (1993) counterpointed the formless and the formed, the specific and the general through two parallel installations in the Kunsthalle zu Kiel in Germany. In European Field Gormley installed 40 000 terracotta figures produced by children, their parents and grandparents in the galleries dedicated to European painting. These small figures, little more than two or three squeezes of clay in the hand and two abruptly formed eye sockets, crowd together to form a mass that is both menacing and absurdly affecting in its vulnerability. The figures’ historical resonances (Japanese Haniwa, Chinese terracotta warriors) are less significant than the impact of the installation: the challenge to museological convention in that the artefacts have taken over. In the parallel installation in the contemporary wing three galleries were flooded with 43 cubic metres of clay and 15,000 litres of sea water to the same height as the terracotta figures in European Field.

So what do we have from this welter of images, this pull between the bodily immersion in clay and its formal ordering. I hope two things. First, a sense of the possible value of interrogating the past with passion and affection. Secondly a sense of how much there remains to be done for us as a community of makers, writers and teachers to keep alive the expanded field of possibilities that is already there for us, but is sometimes buried beneath the banal, the ahistoric, the arrogant dismissal to handle, look, read, travel.

To work.