Marcus Herse

Catalog publication on the occasion of Sample Platter - Contemporary Ceramic

Silvie Auvrey, Mary Beyerle, Joshua Callaghan, Armando G Cortés, Michael Dopp, Kiko Fukazawa, Phyllis Green, Roger Herman, Orr Herz, Dave Kiddie, Jasmine Little, Emily Marchand, Tony Marsh, Simphiwe Mbunyuza, Jude Pauli, Roni Shneior, Emily Sudd, Tam Van Tran, Shoshi Watanabe, Pilar Wiley

February 3 - March 15, 2020

Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman University, Orange, CA

Antibodies 

The English word “information” apparently derives from the Latin stem (information-) of the nominative (informatio): this noun derives from the verb informare (to inform) in the sense of “to give form to the mind”, “to discipline”, “instruct”, “teach”. Inform itself comes (via French informer) from the Latin verb informare, which means to give form, or to form an idea of. Furthermore, Latin itself already contained the word informatio meaning concept or idea, but the extent to which this may have influenced the development of the word information in English is not clear.

The ancient Greek word for form was μορφή (morphe; cf. morph) and also εἶδος (eidos) “kind, idea, shape, set”, the latter word was famously used in a technical philosophical sense by Plato (and later Aristotle) to denote the ideal identity or essence of something (see Theory of Forms). ‘Eidos’ can also be associated with thought, proposition, or even concept.

from Wikipedia

As I write this brief text-sketch in early March 2020 for the catalog of the exhibition Sample Platter - Contemporary Ceramic, a variety of other ceramic shows can be seen in college galleries and some commercial galleries in greater Los Angeles. While ceramic in Southern California has been a widely used medium since the days of The Cool School and Peter Voulkos’ experimentation, its visibility has increased in recent years. It is unclear to me if the actual number of artists that are working with the medium has surged or whether the impression results from an increased interest in ceramics in my personal environment. It is evident however that ceramic currently receives more exposure and interest in the art world at large than it has a decade ago. But why exactly does it emerge right in this moment in the public eye and the collective consciousness? Some guesses: 

With the beginning of the virtualization of our lives, we have entered a phase of global sociopolitical upheaval. This can be seen in the degree to which information freely flows legally and illegally in all possible directions and pockets of interaction; be it our professional or private communications, the way we increasingly learn and teach about the world, but also about technical and intellectual skills; be it recipes, music and films, instructions for shoe repair, news or research of destinations for the next vacation; be it the data scandals of financial companies, the big social media companies and the misuse of consumer data by those who get their hands on this information or even by the companies themselves; or be it ultimately the propaganda and disinformation campaigns that rain on us from many political and geographical directions. The global political shift to the right and its associated new tribalism are the direct answer to the fears and uncertainties created by this new mobility and pace, but also a reaction to the possibilities of a refined observation of complex systems, in which the whole range of human life is included. (Global warming undoubtedly plays a major role, but to keep my remarks brief I won’t consider it in this text). In 2020, our interactions with others and with the world are largely secured and determined by our devices.

This access however is not one into the wide world of forms and phenotypes, but rather first of all to a piece of technology itself; to an object (whether it is the computer, the tablet or the phone) that I spend hours with every day. The news that I read here, the “activities” of my friends and acquaintances, celebrities and public figures I may follow, are abstract and aesthetic information, curated, designed, and intellectually, but not directly experienceable. I am more involved than my parents and grandparents were in a constant routine of processing image- and text-information and in an equally constant practice of representing the “self” in a mediatized form. I stretch out my intellectual pseudo-pods to an outside that I do not grasp - at least not in the literal sense of the word. I don’t reach for things. While the device grants access to a wealth of information, the degree of depth of interaction with the world always remains the same, namely one mediated by the apparatus. The haptic, the surface feel that I experience is always that of the mirror-smooth, roughly palm-sized display. The visual experience is always that of photography or computer-graphics and -text in such and such a resolution. (At least for the moment, until holography and the digital imitation of textures using communication technology not yet suitable for the pockets of the masses catch up. The same applies to sound). No matter how colorful my iPhone case is, adorned with stickers and widgets, with which I express the cohesiveness among myself and the device while emphasizing my own individuality, the utensil steps back, disappears, becomes invisible by showing me the wide world. And I gratefully disappear into it and its apparent extent. But it IS not actually this extent. The device only presents, only points to this vastness. What it IS, is actually the operation of digital graphics and animation, information design, containing the research done to enhance direction of attention, which I see here in all its facets. The simple comparison, in which instead of googling a particular artist I grab and flick through an exhibition catalog: Instead of an amorphous list of text and images, which adapts to the screens’ orientation and size, I consider an integrated object I can truly grasp. The catalog I hold is one of the myriads of possible formats that all feel different in my (and again different in your) hand. Consider the variety of textures that the cover could have had, the layout, the choice of card stock, the money available for production; record of the conditions under which it was created and the decisions that led to this expression, defined and definitive. The composition of the catalog is already part of the communication about the conditions of the art I want to look at, its creation, the reception and mediation of the work, the location of the exhibition. The design holds personal and regional characteristics that communicate to me on a rudimentary level the framework of the exhibition and the work on display. I really experience these peculiarities of the real object in the real world. The object (the exhibition catalog) and I inhabit the same world in which we encounter one another. The recent growth in popularity of theme parks and live concerts attest to the fact that a real experience, even a real experience of an artificial situation, is still a whole-bodied and not purely retinal-intellectual event.

Two things with regard to these obvious observations point toward their significance: 1. The breadth here described with which we have entrusted the organization of our lives to the devices and apps. And 2. the addictive nature of the devices and apps. As common with addictions, they partially, or at times completely, replace the experience of reality with a substitute that is then fully experienced as a world. I’m not saying that everyone who has a smartphone automatically becomes a data junkie, although certainly this is often the case. The difficulty in putting down one’s phone proves the conceptual proximity of apps to games of chance and gambling which developers and tech companies are aiming for. Here the psychological addiction of the individual on the one hand and the economical need for a global society communicating in real time on the other merge into one complex. These two factors remarkably make the device almost completely disappear from my perception while at the same time the experience of the world through and within this technology appears to be self-evident, and in a twisted way, appears to have become essential. An object of art, a painting, a sculpture, an installation also shows something, is also a medium that can transmit information, an image-object. But at the same time, the painting or sculpture IS the record of its creation. It is what it is. It never disappears. Experiencing the piece of art in the world, not only as a retinal-intellectual description, but as a thing in space and time to which I have a relationship, is more than just understanding its information content. 

Through our devices we encounter the world and today much of the art we see, we encounter in a tidy, ideational way; in a way that is longing for the disembodiment of experience. Art in this space consists only in its worthiness of and ability to be used rhetorically; in that a thing takes on a certain function in a certain conversation at a certain point in time and influences other artists and thus art and its course; like some kind of conversation. Joseph Kosuth and many others advocate this thought, as inferred in his essay Art after Philosophy - the infamous speech of discourse. Even if this is not wrong on a transactional level with regard to art business, exhibition trends and focal points that can be found in the art world, which can indeed seem like a conversation, it is not the whole truth. The production of the art object, its coming into the world, is not a translation of an ideational concept into the object world. This object world already has an existence and validity before I interfere. It is a mutual shaping between the involved bodies, in this case the artist and the clay. The activities of two entities are at play, not just one of them using the other to actualize some ‘inner’ vision. Incidentally, there is great skepticism about the word “translation”. It pretends something like a translation exists, that is, a meaning that can appear in this or that form. It is a word to describe the attempt to maintain meaning within different frames of reference. But meaning is different in each frame of reference and arises directly from that frame itself. Thus, translation is never complete or exhaustive, but only an approximation between systems of reference. The, let’s call it Kosuthian view, sees the art object and our access to it exhausted in its linguistic value, and language itself as mere code. The fact however that my experience of the world is an integrated one, and that we are bodies ourselves and that this quality is untranslatable do not matter. Material is only important insofar as it is readable. But material is not only read and not just text and image information, but has an ontological truth and is a condition of our being here. This information-based disembodied view, which has been raising its hand since the beginning of our ability to record and (re-)produce information electronically, which meanders through structuralism and post-structuralism, and which sees linguistics and semiotics as the ultimate teaching, is now reaching a preliminary climax in my daily use of the smartphone and the machine of operations of administration that my interactions have become. 

To come back to the initial question of why ceramic emerges right in this moment in the public eye and the collective consciousness, my guess is: It is precisely its physicality that leads to the fact that ceramic is more suitable than other classical media for an alternative program to the infiltration of our experienced world by the realm of virtual ideational information. Direct access to the material and processing with human hands as the main tool create a direct connection between the body of the artist and that of clay (and that of the viewer), which does not require the extension through additional tools. As antibodies to the disembodied intellectual understanding of an administered outside world and the resulting experiential deprivation and loss of connection, each of the objects is a world that must be understood in itself. Describing bodies of clay metaphorically as antibodies posits them as a means of defense against and healing from the alienation from an experienced world. While I have been posting regularly about this exhibition on my Instagram account (and thus taken part in some form of discourse) and don’t assert a life without the device, a world that does not require excessive administration is quite desirable and points towards a different economy, even if at this moment it is almost unimaginable. Working with clay also contains a direct connection to Earth, the first and most immediate of the worlds in which we move, and which constitutes our fundamental condition. Clay is not made by us. Little to no process is required to refine clay. We take it from the ground, use water to shape it and fire to make the shaped permanent. These connections of the material and the elements on a for humans fundamental basis, which has accompanied us from the very beginnings of our species, make ceramic and the possibilities it holds an ideal control group for the real time experiment of digitally interwoven societies, which live more intellectually than physical, more ideationally than experienced. In dealing with this age-old material, art and craft, lies the possibility that we reunderstand and rethink our virtual selves.