Hans Coper : Pots that are 'Worlding' that situate a certain fidelity, a willingness to survive and endure.

Hans Coper : Potter, "the experience of existence" 

CRAFTS STUDY CENTRE.
FARNHAM, SURREY. UK
RUSSELL MORETON

russellmoreton.com

“I become part of the process, I am learning to operate a sensitive instrument which may be resonant to my experience of existence now.”

Hans Coper, Artist Statement 1969.

Hans Coper’s iconic assembled ceramics frame the later part of the twentieth century with an ambivalence of both alienation and reconciliation. His pots reveal differences that have resisted the homogenizing effects of the culture of the time. They embody and are a physical testament to what the potter himself has reflected on his life, “endure your own destiny”1 within the space and time of the human condition.
Born in 1920 into a prosperous middle class background, his childhood years were spent in the small town of Reichenbach in Germany. In 1935 his father Julius, is singled out like many other Jewish businessmen for harassment and ridicule under National Socialist Party. This would result in the Coper family moving frequently to escape the attention of the Nazis. Tragically in 1936 Julius takes his own life in an attempt to safeguard the future of his family. The remaining family, Erna Coper and her two sons return to Dresden. In 1939 Hans at the age of 18 leaves Germany for England, the following year he is arrested in London and interned as an enemy alien. He spends the next three years first in Canada then returns to England by volunteering to enrol in the Pioneer Corps. In 1946 a meeting with William Ohly who ran an art gallery near to Berkeley Square, brought about an opportunity for a job in a small workshop run by Lucie Rie, a refugee potter from Vienna. Hans Coper now began earnestly through his engagement with ceramics to reveal a continental modernity “whose work seemed uncomfortably abrasive to the traditionalists.”2
Hans Coper and Lucie Rie worked together at Albion Mews for 13 years forming a friendship and a working relationship that was mutually reciprocated through practical concerns, innovation and experimentation. There is a creative synergy in place through their mutual sharing of process and experimentation within the practicalities of the studio space. A documented instance of this reciprocal inventiveness is in the appropriation of the technique of “Sgraffito” which Lucie Rie employs after being inspired by some Bronze Age pottery at Avebury Museum bearing incised patterns, which are displayed with some bird bones, which may have been used as tools to incise the pottery. These “dark bowls of Avebury”3 are transposed through the use of manganese engobe and a steel needle into Lucie Rie’s ceramics, Hans Coper although not present appropriates the bird bone for the engineered steel of a pointed needle file and uses the action of an abrasive hand tool to remove layers of the manganese engobe. In this way Coper is enacting onto the surfaces of his ceramics, the very agencies that Modernism was acting out in the realms of architectural space and surface treatment of materials. In 1959 a move to Digwell Arts Trust would bring to a close his working relationship with Lucie Rie. Coper now became involved with a number of architecturally based projects through the Digswell Group of architects and building professionals. Coper’s engagement with the Digwell Group was not without problems and creative frustrations, but seen in retrospect it became an experimental period where Coper was strengthening his ability to bring his pottery into a spatial communion with the modernist architectural sensibilities of the time.  However it was a wartime friend Howard Mason who introduced Coper’s work to Basil Spence, from this introduction Hans Coper was commissioned to design the candlesticks for the new modernist cathedral at Coventry. The Six Coventry Candlesticks completed in 1962 explicitly reveal a sensitive and progressive spatial awareness to the architectonics of built spaces. The candlesticks delicately tapered and waisted are made in sections and assembled on site onto rods set into the architectural interior. These assembled thrown and fired towering forms seem to be more about a presence than their actual physicality. They appear to paradoxically transcend the monumentality of their setting through their very immateriality, their slight of form being perfectly balanced to accommodate a single candle and its temporal flame.
As a maker of pots he was in constant touch with his working process, an analogue process, a creative membrane that surrounded the agency of making and thinking. He was able to pursue his vocation “My concern is with extracting essence rather than with the experiment and exploration”4 His resultant works reflect what might be termed a “machining in” of a creative durability that is both ancient and modern that contains both tensions and fragility, and that above all seems to exist in a state of timelessness.

 His assembled “pots” are constructed from thrown components, “throwing” as a process that he remarks on “I become part of the process, I am learning to operate a sensitive instrument, which may be resonant to my experience of existence now”. It is through the wheel, the body and the interplay between clay and air that the inner space that defines the form is created. Adam Gopnik writing about the art of Edmund de Waal describes what I might be termed a spatial sensibility “the pot-ancient as it is, is the first instance of pure innerness, of something made from the inside out.”5 Hans Coper further adds sensuality to this “innerness” when he encloses it in a skin that appears archaic through a deeply physical surface treatment of engobes, incised grooves and scratching of the raw pot; then when finally once fired the dry vitreous surface is further machined and abraded to give a graphite-like sheen.
Hans Coper’s pots speak in silence of this interior “architectonic” space that is itself reverberated through an almost archaic modernity. He seems to be able to tune the interior, to load its mass, its void.
There is a strong sense of the vessel, the concrete with the emptiness, even an analogy to corporality set in motion by his treatment of the surface and interiors of his pots. The pots themselves belong to ever extended families, to new familiarities created by the subtle interlays between the negative spaces created through the spatial awareness that has been crafted into their very making. The pots through proximity with each other are in a spatial communion, they act to define particular spaces by defining boundaries and creating thresholds between exterior surfaces and space. These pots are themselves are “encounters” they ask us to be attentive to the responsive sensory inner space set up in residence by the permeable world of the ceramic vessel.

1 Birks, Tony. 1983. Hans Coper. London. William Collins Publishers : p75.
2 Birks, Tony. 1983. Hans Coper. London. William Collins Publishers : p22.
3 Birks, Tony. 2009. Lucie Rie. Catrine. Stenlake Publishing ltd: p44.
4 The Essential Potness. Hans Cper and Lucie Rie 2014. Collingwood and Coper Exhibition 1969. Victoria and Albert Museum.
5 Gopnic,Adam. 2013. The Great Glass Case of Beautiful Things : About the Art of Edmund de Waal. New York; Gagosian Gallery : p6-7.

Selected Bibliography.

Birks, T. 1976.Art Of The Modern Potter.London: Country life Books.

Birks, T. 1983. Hans Coper. London: William Collins Publishers.

Birks, T. 2009. Lucie Rie. Catrine : Stenlake Publishing ltd.

Coatts, M. 2008. Lucie Rie and Hans Coper, Potters in Parallel. London:

Graves, A.2005. Hans Coper: Sculpture in Architecture. Interpreting Ceramics Issue

Gopnic, A. 2013. The Great Glass Case of Beautiful Things: About the Art of

Jones, J.2005. Keeping Quiet and Finding a Voice : Ceramics and the Art of Silence. London: Interpreting Ceramics Issue 5.

Edmund de Waal. New York : Gagosian Gallery.

Whiting, D.1996. Coper at Coventry. London: Studio Pottery no 20.

2014.The Essential Potness, Hans Coper and Lucie Rie.

BOUNDARIES AND JUNCTION POINTS ARE IN THE NATURE OF THINGS POINTS OF FRICTION

 BOUNDARIES AND JUNCTION POINTS

Lefebvre, The Production of Space.

Lefebvre in his chapter on Spatial Architectonics makes reference to the relationships established by boundaries and the relationship between boundaries and named places. These relationships promote significant and specific conditions or features to a space. This in turn results in various kinds of space. Lefebvre states that “every social space, then, once duly demarcated and oriented, implies a superimposition of certain relations upon networks of named places.”1

It is this superimposition of space that can within it demarcate other thresholds of experiences, within an existing demarcated space that interests me.

The act of “blocking in“ the dimensions of another space onto the floor of another create a temporal junction between a host space and a site within this host, a guest. This sets-up the notion of a temporal double occupancy held by the demarcation of a boundary and a site of proposal. This basic and temporal site marking could be said to have affinity towards some sort of anthropological marking, a territory. (Lefebvre defines anthropological marking as being at the stage when demarcation and orientation begin to create place and its social reality in archaic cultures)2. This activity also has associations with nomadic and agricultural-pastoral societies as they use paths and routes as spatio­ temporal markers or determinants.

Lefebvre acknowledges that geographical space created through the body, through routes which were inscribed by means of simple linear markings. These first markings, paths and tracks drawn into the landscape would become the pores through “which without colliding would produce the establishment of places (localities made special for one reason or another).”3Within my practice drawing is used to form sites which contain visual information, evidence of temporal activities and traces of actual objects. These territories within other territories create fields from with boundaries form material relations, differences. My drawings are inside the temporality of site I have instigated and yet they propose a territory and a surface of light years which could accommodate the temporality of terrestrial space.

Interestingly Lefebvre comments “there is no stage at which ’’man” does not demarcate, beacon or sign his space, leaving traces that are both symbolic and practical.”4

1 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, (London: Blackwell, 1991) page 193.

2 Ibid.,page 192.

3 Ibid.,page 192.

4 Ibid.,page 192.

SENSORY THEATRE

EX MACHINA, Robert Lepage

While Legage continues to pioneer the use of technology, his work is imbued with an intimacy and humanity that few can match. Edinburgh festival 2015

ABBATOIR FERME, Jan Fabre (Troubleyn, Performing Arts)

A SOMATIC ARCHIVE, of subjectivities whose perceptions and environments are going to change forever; like the particularities of the analogue trace in photography that is now becoming a distant experiential condition, an orphan extinct from the subjectivities of its originating culture/organism.

The Waverley Inquiry

A Theoretical and Somantic search amongst Ruins and Archetypes Historical Perspectives

Dwelling/Poetics Heidegger Archetypes/Symbols Jung

Flesh and Stone, Richard Sennett

Flesh and The Logic of Sensation, Deleuze/Bacon Contemporary Spatial Practices

Feminist Geographies The Posthuman

Posthuman thought inscribes the contemporary subject in the conditions of its own historicity.

Posthuman Subjectivity ,Rosi Braidotti LIGHT into SOMANTIC SPACES

Continuum and Chora (light and the shadow of chora)

Life expresses itself in a multiplicity of empirical act: there is nothing to say, but everything to do. Life, simply by being life, expresses itself by actualiizing flows of energies, through codes of vital information across complex somatic, cultural and technologically networked systems. (Braidotti, 2013:190)

De Architectura, Vitruvius

Architecture consists of order, arrangement, proportion or eurythmy, symmetry and decor, and distribution.

Arrangement as an “Idea” refers to the Aristotelian notion of “Image­ representation” as phaantasia a precondition to drawing, effectively occupying and revealing a space between being and becoming.

Contents List from a folder in the Theatre of Research Chora Body and Building

Space as Membrane

Chora (Exhibition) 1999

Lessons of a dream. Karsten Harries Concrete Blonde: Joanna Merwood

A probe into the negative spaces where mysteries are created. Surrealist Paris : Dagmar Motycka Watson

The non-perspectival space of the lived city Body and Building : George Dodds

Essays on the changing relation of body and architecture. Sphere and Cross : Karsten Harries

Vitruvian refections on the Pantheon Type Body and Building : Marcia f. Feuerstein

Inside the Bauhaus’s Darker Side

Desiring Landscapes/Landscapes of Desire. George Dodds A Tradition of Architectural Figures: Marco Frascari Interwining Metamorphoses : Germano Celant

On the work of Guiseppe Penone Space as a Membrane : Siegried Ebeling

Unlike a Library the Theatre of Research is a working space that creates and crafts both theoretical and practical objects, things and documentation. Its reason for being is to explore the praxis for creative narratives between the Arts and The Humanities. It attempts through performance, fine art and architecture to collage qualitative and diffractive dialogues into new relational discourses, the results of which become exhibited or staged as open workshops engendering praxis, publication and production. In its fledgling state it is seen as being part of a University faculty that has interests in the Arts and The Humanities. The possible linking with other establishments could be investigated. The working space becomes operational as a studio or laboratory that is engaged with full-time research led activities . Separate yet collaborative spaces and activities promote an environment for inquiry and personal development. The Theatre for research becomes a space that allows for the Post Production of ideas into new forms of social interaction. The theoretical merging with the practical into a relational narrative or methodology that enriches the practices of others, forming both new creative environments that can contain innovative ecologies that can question global perspectives.

INDEX OF IMMATERIAL ARCHITECTURES Jonathan Hill 2006

The Psychoanalysis of Fire. Gaston Bachelard 1964 (1938)

AIR

NATURAL FORCES

The Architecture of the Air (blurs the boundaries of architecture and nature) Loose spatial orders suggesting a fluidity of space, matter and use.

The experience of space was not a passive activity, nor was it considered to be pre­ dominantly retinal. Klein defines his subject matter ‘space’ as sensual, spiritual and an immaterial expanse in which the body is active and immersed; he sought to engage all the senses and to liberate the mind, body and imagination.

Quixotic Gestures that capture the experience and the engagement with natural forces. Klein’s architectural focuses on imprecise boundaries and inconsistent materials in active dialogue with the user.

Space through dialogue/movement defines the user

Most buildings make a clear distinction between the unpredictable natural forces outside and the predictable domestic spaces inside.

The Fireplace is unusual, therefore in that it is a natural force contained within the building.

The fireplace is also paradoxical in that if uncontrolled it threatens destruction of the home.

Evolving Atmospheres, Not Models

Architecture is the affect and its phenomena gained from the experience of the constructed form.

Architecture is a sensorial response to definitions of spatial arrangements. Architectures and their interiors can be infinitely re-imagined through interventions that might not noticeably alter their external appearance.

Materials and Place. The Secular Retreat. Zumthor and Heidegger.

Peter Zumthor acknowledges his knowledge and affinity with Heidegger’s writings, see Peter Zumthor, Buildings and Projects 1998,( Sharr,2007:91) In particular his Vais Spa is of particular note for the way in which Zumthor has created ‘evocative sequences of spaces’ within ‘its exquisite construction details’. (Sharr,2009:92)

‘Zumthor mirror’s Heidegger’s celebration of experience and emotion as measuring tools; he also emphasises sensory aspects of architectural experience. He notes that the physicality of materials can involve an individual with the world, evoking experiences and texturing horizons of place through memory.’ (Sharr,2009:92)

The measurement of a house through things that have sensual qualities, creating a memory of place, and its evocative measurement that can be choreographed through selective materials.

‘Flamed and polished stone, chrome, brass, leather and velvet are all deployed with care to enhance the inhabitant’s sense of embodiment when clothed or naked. The touch, smell and perhaps even taste, of these materials were orchestrated obsessively. The theatricality of steaming and bubbling water was enhanced by natural and artificial lighting, with murky darkness composed as intensely as light. Materials were crafted and joined to enhance or suppress their apparent mass. Their sensory potential was relentlessly exploited. With these tactics, Zumthor aimed to celebrate the liturgy of bathing by evoking emotions.’ (Shan,2009:95)

Zumthor comments about his architecture for the Spa at Vais. 

‘In the bath there is a bit of a mythological sense of place, there are bits of theatricality, even the mahogany in the changing rooms looks a bit sexy, like on an ocean liner or a little bit like a brothel. They are where you change from your ordinary clothes to go into this other atmosphere. The sensual quality is the most important, of course, that this architecture has these sensual qualities. (Spier,2001:17)

He is trying to configure particular theatrical and phenomenal experiences in architectural form. It is only when the qualities of these prospective places emerge, can Zumthor begin to configure and design the particulars of the buildings construction.

‘The measuring of body and mind, the navigation by intuition and judgement which Heidegger makes sense in sparks of insight, these all become ways for designing, for imagining future places on the basis of remembered feelings. He feels that this process creates the contexts with which people will experience his architecture. (Sharr,2009:95)

The Spa at Vais was conceived to appeal to sensual instincts first, and then open itself up to interpretation and analysis, the spa should be tactile, colourful, even sexy to inhabit. (Sharr,2009:96)

‘Zumthor imagines experiences of the spa to be punctuated by things which evoke memories, which represent associations. He like Heidegger conceives of human endeavour in terms of traditions; Zumthor crafts spatial representations of those traditions by locating things in what he considers to be their proper place in time and history. Heidegger was also anxious to locate his farmhouse dwellers according to rites and routines longer than a life.’ (Sharr,2009:96)

Dwelling and livelihood, rites and routines, are all authenticated and located by design; the simple, sensual, primary and elemental associations that create traditions that both Heidegger and Zumthor can subscribe to. All help to root the spa in an agrarian view of the mountains that is associated with livestock and the necessities of shelter.

Zumthor shares with Heidegger ‘a sympathy for the mystical, claiming mythological qualities for moments in the spa’, and to champion’ the immediate evidence of experience and memory over that of mathematical and statistical data. ’(Sharr,2009:96)

‘ It seems that, for Zumthor, the Vais spa achieves his design intentions by locating rituals of dwelling in place with all the Heideggerian associations of those terms. By choreographing enclosure, mass, light, materials and surfaces, Zumthor sets up conditions from which he can propose a rich layering of place perceptions, by allow people to identify places through their bathing rituals and their associative memories.’ (Sharr,2009:96)

There is perhaps for Zumthor and other Heideggerian architects ‘the suggestion that design involves the choreography of experience’. He advocates a piety of building, of trying to develop a design in a away it wants to be, ‘of configuring physical fabric around real and imagined experiences’.

Heidegger notes of Western societies and their professional architectural regulations do much to ‘obstruct proper relations between building and dwelling by promoting buildings as products or as art objects’. (Sharr,2009:98)

Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture. Norberg-Schulz. Presents an opportunity for people to achieve an existential foothold in the world. Norberg-Schulz notes that inhabitation as like a layer over the architecture. In effect the architect designs, the contractor builds, and only then do the inhabitants build and dwell.

Zumthor with particular reference to his Vais project likes to perceive his architecture and the things within it as becoming associated with traditions, perhaps these become re-enacted as rich, operative histories made in and for the present.

Steven Holl shares similar working methods with Zumthor, he to is influenced by phenomenology on his thinking. He makes watercolour sketches in perspective, as a means of choreographing experience, painting itself is an intuitive act, which opens up spontaneous and unintended design possibilities.

Drawing processes and mapping that can re-imagine the spatial possibilities of architectural experiences.

The Choreography of Experience. A Manifesto.

Being attentive to atmospheres, moods and sites.

Being concerned with the social and political geometries of human gatherings. 

Being participatory to architectural tactics that enable informal gatherings.

Phenomenology and Politics.

Zumthor downplays the activeness of his role in design. The architect is keen to emphasise that he works instinctively with circumstances given to him. He claims a similar modesty in forming a rapport with site and locality. He is able to give the architectural idea a piety to become what it wants to be.

Heidegger’s problematic authenticity claims and the potential consequences of his romantic provincialism became more prominent in architectural debates about the merits of his model of building and dwelling.

Therefore ‘it remains a common assumption among architects that these positions are more or less in opposition. To caricature, phenomenology (at least in its Heideggerian incarnations) champions the value of immediate human experience over scientific, measurement and professional expertise, and tends to mytholize timelessness and situatedness. Critical theory, meanwhile, prioritises the political dimensions implicit or explicit in all human activities, and is opposed to monolithic claims of authenticity. (Sharr,2009:112)

Heidegger’s thinking, including that on architecture, is easily challenged from the perspectives of critical theory. The philosopher perceived the ‘essence’ of building and dwelling in authentic attunement to being, unapologetic about the tendencies of essentialism and authenticity to exclude people. His writings display little fondness for what he saw as the human distraction of politics. (Sharr,2009:112)

Heidegger’s work on architecture and, arguably, the architectural phenomenology which claimed him as a hero, has become a zero-sum game. Whatever it gives, its associations can also take away. Many architects and commentators have turned their backs on Heidegger in consequence although a few, including Zumthor, remain unswayed. (Sharr,2009:113)

Edward Casey, The Fate of Place. 

Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception.