Troubling Messengers : Artfulness (Manning) becomes relational not some vague aesthetic notion.

 

What this movement adds to Troubling Messengers.

Artfulness becomes relational without becoming vague.

The work's capacities remain grounded in its actual material and spatial conditions: the slab construction, refractory body, surface, aperture, cavity, passage and firing. The more-than-human is not a poetic escape from material specificity. It becomes perceptible through that specificity.

Theory becomes a troubling body within practice.

Manning, Ingold and Barad do not simply explain the work retrospectively. Their propositions enter Moreton's thinking and making, where they encounter clay, spatial situations and other readings. The work can then return these propositions differently. Theoretical correspondence becomes reciprocal without suggesting that the ceramics illustrate any one theorist.

Artfulness becomes inseparable from an uncertain futurity.

The maker establishes conditions, makes decisions and remains responsible for the work, but cannot determine every relation through which it will subsequently matter. The fired ceramic persists as a body that may become consequential in ways not yet available to thought.

I would hold onto this final distinction: the more-than-human~inhuman is not what the artist adds to the work; it is part of what becomes perceptible when the artist's authority is no longer assumed to explain everything the work can do.

And this returns us to your immediate experience of unpacking the kiln: the simultaneous feeling of knowing and undoing knowing. The work has become materially present, but its presence does not resolve the inquiry. It makes the inquiry encounterable again, now through a body that has changed and that may, in turn, change the one who encounters it.