Craft and Art : Skill
and Anxiety.
Craft is logic, and art
defies it. The defiance is what makes art. The serenity of the
artisan lies in her knowledge that it can all be done again. The
anxiety of the artist; lies in knowing that if it is done again, she
has become an artisan. (Gopnik,2014:7)
Edmund de Waal is a
maker of objects with imagined histories. (Gopnik,2014:11)
Atemwende : A
breathturn.
Edmund de Waal.
The Great Glass Case of
Beautiful Things:
About the Art Of Edmund
de Waal
Adam Gopnik. 2013.
‘Actually, I still
make pots, you know’ Edmund de Waal.
The Sensuality of the
Clay Body.
‘You have to work
quickly and with definition, and your ideas have to come into focus
with enormous rapidity.’ Edmund de Waal, on working with the
different presence demanded on ones mind and hand whilst throwing
with porcelain. The practice of porcelain forced a change in colour
and finish in his work. New glazes, shimmering celadon and shiny
black, arrived to catch the light and send it back. (Gopnik,2014:9)
The throwing of pots
still remains central to his practice. ‘The material goes down,
gets wet, is pulled open by the hand, spins- and then produces, as if
by magic, the most transcendently human of all made things; volume,
inner space, an interior, the carved out air that connects the
morning teacup with the domes and spandrels of San Marco. There’s
nothing there but clay and air, then there’s defined air.
(Gopnik,2014:6)
Ceramics and
Architecture.
Exhibition Spaces of
the Enlightenment
The Porcelain Rooms
The pot, ancient as it
is, is the first instance of pure innerness, of something made from
the inside out. Building objects upwards is, in its way, an obvious
and brutal thing; it derives from piles, and makes pyramids. Turning
objects inward, on the wheel, is a subtler one, and derives from our
need to have a place to put things in. (Gopnik,2014:7)
Together these new
porcelain vessels collectively produced by De Waal are an experience
of possessed space.
These collections of
vessels in their Modernist vitrines seem to be both an expression of
the architecture of a collection and simultaneously an affirmation of
an interior space that can hold the singularity of a breath within a
small pot.
‘ The ceramic module
that he uses, the small pot, is deliberately made as non-functional
as possible.’ (Gopnik,2014:9)
‘Even if we insist on
seeing them impersonally, the sheer force of their numbers creates
the poetic sense inherent, as Homer knew, in all inventories. They
gang up on us.’ (Gopnik,2014:9) These groupings of objects placed
together produce their own narratives, their own relations, and lines
of inquiry. In so doing their ordering of the space around them
brings meaning to those spaces. This is reinforced through the poetry
and metaphor of the effect of ceramic vessels on space, as cited by
De Waal himself through Wallace Stevens’s “Anecdote of the Jar”
1919.
‘The Jar, the
elemental made thing, takes dominion over the unmade world. The air
around it suddenly looks “slovenly,” insufficiently jar-like.
Made things remake the unmade world. (Gopnik,2014:10)
Gopnik comments that we
can’t look at hollow things without sensing their hollowness, as he
notes we perceive haptically as aptly as optically. This allows us to
read these vessels through both our sense of sight and our sense of
space. The result is that we feel these objects; we can sense the
heft of them made from their weight, shape and size. We become aware
that we can feel objects as much as we can see them.
De Waal’s work brings
about a sensuality and an empathy manifested between the strict
ordering of his presentation through his vitrines and cabinets and
the fragility and grouping of his porcelain vessels. This empathy
promotes our interest with the interior parts of his groupings, with
the interior emptiness and mystery of things we can only sense. His
control and command of the geometric spatial relations found in his
installations is juxtaposed by the multitude of diminutive interiors
and negative spaces.
The relations of the
architectural and those of the vessel are in constant flux, held in
some sort of spatial narrative that seems to meditate stillness, like
the museum these vessels are protected and intact, yet strangely they
are held hostage by their surroundings.
The empathy we feel for
their emptiness is perhaps choreographed, staged and ultimately
forced, these are not just pots as De Waal admits but pots that have
been by design rendered as non-functional as possible although they
still bare the marks of his franchising. This neutering of his thrown
clay forms into the realm of perhaps a purely sculptural object that
is itself now a mere component in his Minimalist cabinets. What
remains is a hollowness, but a contrived hollowness that speaks of
spaces designed not made; unlike his Signs and Wonders intervention
for the V&A, these works feel orphaned and cut adrift by their
surroundings.
Does? ‘His art takes
a familiar grammer of display and turns it into a poetry of memory.
Inside a room, a great case filled with rows of porcelain pots.Along
each row, a story. Inside each pot, a breath. (Gopnik,2014:11)
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