withoutKim Dickey. Mille-Fleur. 2011. Aluminium, glazed terracotta,silicon and rubber grommets.Courtesy Kim Dickey and represented by Rule Gallery, Denver.

IN THE EARLY 1980S, WHEN POSTMODERN DECONSTRUCTION o f

the avant-garde began to look like something morethan merely a Dadaesque diversion from the main

impetus of art and more than just another dialecticalturn within the avant-garde itself, the New York art worldindulged in an early effort to resuscitate artistic noveltyas a value. This was no naive attempt to resurrect themodernist dogma of originality and progress; rather,an effective substitute Afor the avant-garde, a Apseudo vanguardismpropped up by primitivism, was sought entirely out-side of the official art world on battered subway carsand the grimy walls of real-world ghettoes. Graffiti Artbecame the new 'new' - something that at least lookedrevolutionary, despite the demise of revolution in art;that seemed to escape the deconstruction of originalitybecause it was not just tendentiously original; and, mostimportant, that fulfilled the need of dealers, curatorsand critics for something on which to hang a propri-etary shingle.

Is contemporary ceramics destined to become thegraffiti art of the early 21st century? By adopting a titleevocative of the Rive Gauche in the 1920s or Tenth Streetin the 1950s, the Denver Art Museum's Overthrown: Claywithout Litnits made that question unavoidable. For any-one familiar with contemporary ceramics over the past20 years, the exhibition's implications of things over-thrown was clearly overblown. While the exhibitiongathered some of the most important figures in con-temporary ceramics, their works - mostly large instal-lations - were not categorically different from anythingseen years ago in exhibitions such as Cooled Matter,Columbus College of Art and Design, 1999; Beyond thePhysical: Substance, Space and Light, University of NorthCarolina Galleries, 2001; or Material Speculations, H«SrR

Block Artspace, Kansas City, 2002 - to name only a fewexamples.

Why the need to conjure avant-garde clichés justbecause contemporary ceramics were on display in amuseum of art? No doubt to some degree the evocationof revolution was just a standard showman's strategy:a stand-by of what the critic Harold Rosenberg oncecharacterised as a "vanguard academy, placeless andtimeless and inspired by the fiction of continuing revoltand novelty". In the context of ceramics, however, somedisturbing implications are invoked by such a strategy.

The suggestion thatGlen R Brown some kind of «-««f-

garde or its functionalequivalent exists in contemporary ceramics, when therest of the art world laid that modernist ghost to restmore than 30 years ago, betrays a primitivist vision ofcontemporary ceramics, as though ceramists practicedtheir craft in the jungles or urban wastelands beyond thepale of art-world events. Moreover, through the truismthat the exception proves the rule, a rhetoric of revoltapplied to contemporary ceramics, caricatures the fieldin general as hidebound, restricted by limits that onlygood, museum-worthy ceramics can overthrow.

These aspersions were no doubt cast unconsciously.The exhibition itself, after all, was more of a showcasefor outstanding contemporary ceramics than it wasany kind of attempt at polemics about the field. In fact,through its inclusion of at least two examples of workthat few would consider particularly new in style, form,or genre, the exhibition at least did not entirely under-mine contemporary ceramists' own understandings oftheir field as one that expands rather than progresses,that keeps alive everything from the past, both recentand distant, even as it absorbs and utilises new tech-nologies, materials and ideas. It is ceramics artists' con-ceptions of a living history of forms and a continuityof materials and techniques that makes them ceramicsartists, not the amount of clay that they might or might

104 Ceramics: Art and Perception No. 87 2012

Left: Neil Forrest. Flake. 2011. Stonercare, automotive lacquer, lead glaze, urethanc fittings and slaiiiless steel cable. Assisted by AndyBrayman with thanks to Dave Fredrickson and Yusef Dennis, Nova Scotia Tourism, Culture and Heritage and the Canada Council for the Arts.

Right: Del Harrow. Wedgewood Black Hive/Hole. 2011. Slipcast black porcelain.Above photos by Jeft^ Wells.

Left: Tsehai Johnson. To Dust She Returns. 2011. Porcelain, feathers, paint and hardware. Courtesy of Plus Gallery, Denver.Right: Walter McCcnnell. Itinerant Edens: Hermetic Garden. 2011. 4,800 pounds of moist clay in plastic enclosures, plyu'ood, polystyrene,

figurines and light. Assisted by students from the University of Denver and the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design.

Left: Installation Case at Overthrown. Various Artists.Anders Ruhwald. Like the New Past. 2011. Glazed earthenware and mixed media. Courtesy of Gregory Lind Gallery, San Francisco.

not include in their work or the degree to which theymight choose to utilise new technologies and materialsor engage new genres.

When ceramics artists such as Sadashi Inuzuka (notrepresented in Overlhroum) and Walter McConnellbegan producing unfired-clay installations more thana decade ago, the field in general responded positively

to the material and technical aspects of their work andreadily embraced the concept of raw clay as 'ceramics'.Like McConnell's contribution to the Overthrown exhi-bition. Itinerant Edens: Hermetic Carden, Clare Twomey'sCollecting the Edges, a site-specific installation of redclay dust deposited over lintels and in corners of theDenver Art Museum, implicitly acknowledged that

Ceramics: Art and Perception No. 87 2012 105

Left: Clare Twomey. Collecting the Edges. 2011. Red clay dust. Site-specific project for the Denver Art Museum supported by ]ana andFred Bartlit.Right: Jeanne Quinn. You Are The Palace, You Are The Forest.2011. Porcelain, glaze, lustre, wire, electrical liardware and paint.

ready embrace. Collecting the Edges implied the capacityof ceramics infinitely to reconfigure itself physically andconceptually, despite the consistent connection to a mate-rial. On a less abstract plane, the installation emphasisedthe long and intimate relationship between ceramics andarchitecture.

This was the case with other works as well. NeilForrest's colossal red-lacquer coated Flakes, suspendedfrom the ceiling by stainless-steel wire, drew inspira-tion from the tree-boring habits of ants and the evolu-tionary sociobiology of myrmecologist E O Wilson butalso, significantly, from Islamic architectural ornament,particularly glazed-ceramic tiles. The legacy of ceramicarchitectural ornament permeated the DNA of KimDickey's impressive freestanding wall, Mille-Fleur (thetitle of which evoked the horror vacui patterns on themost sumptuous Ching vases) and also inspired thedecorative porcelain units of Tsehai Johnson's To DustShe Returns, an installation/performance reflecting onthe behaviourist implications of "ornamentation andcontext of a space". Johnson's elegant forms, deployedto create tendril patterns on the gallery walls, recalled,among other historical examples of ceramic architecturalornament, the Buen Retiro garlands of the 18th centuryPorcelain Room at Madrid's Palace of Aranjuez.

Jeanne Quinn's intricate, illuminated You are the Palace,You Are the Forest suspended amid a torrent of glisteningwires, revived the elegance and intricacy of 19th centuryMeissen porcelain chandeliers, (such as those at SchlossLinderhoff) and recalled millennia of flickering lights onpottery oil lamps illuminating the world's interiors beforethe modern age. Connections to ceramics in more recentdomestic interiors were pronounced in Anders Ruwald'sLike the New Past, an orange-and-gray-checkered envi-ronment that vibrated optically in the jarring aesthetic

of a Martha-Stewart-meets-Bridget-Riley interior design.Set atop a tiled counter, aroughly fashioned, elongategray vessel - part washba-sin, part sink, part bathtub- recalled the humble utili-tarian character of the vastmajority of ceramic objects ofthe past 10,000 years as wellas ceramic fixtures in contem-porary domestic kitchens andbathrooms.

Modularity and multiplic-ity (two characteristics centralto ceramics since the earliestmoulded vessels and plaquesof Mesopotamia but onlyintroduced as theoretically

significant to contemporary art in the latter half of the20th century) were thematic in Del Harrow's V^edgwoodBlack Hive/Hole. Evoking through their shape the glazedhexagonal tiles used frequentiy in Islamic architectureand referencing through their material the distinctiveBlack Basaltes vitreous stoneware introduced by JosiahWedgwood in the 18th century, the modules of Harrow'ssculpture implicitly reflected on the historical produc-tion of ceramic multiples in both workshop and factory.Similarly, Heather Mae Erickson's modular Rail & Trackvessel set, while blending elements of Scandinavianmodern design with a Miró-Iike biomorphism, conjuredthe long evolution of industrial dinnerware manufacturefrom the days of Wedgwood's Queen's Ware. In fact,echoes of historical techniques, materials and aestheticand utilitarian forms reverberated throughout the galler-ies, confirming the continuity that persists at the heartof contemporary ceramics discourse and practice even asceramics artists eagerly embrace new techniques, formsand materials.

It would have been more accurate - and fairer to thework and the field of which it is a part - to emphasisethis continuity rather than pump up a deflated rhetoricof vanguardism and invoke the stereotypes of conven-tion and radical innovation that such resurrection entails.Nevertheless, Oivrthrown could in the end be called asignificant exhibition for what it revealed about contem-porary ceramics as a field. Happily, the sculptures, instal-lations and vessels composing the show, most of themsuperb examples of contemporary practice, seemed inlittie danger of succumbing to stratagems imposed uponthem. If Overtlirown was a reliable indication, contem-porary ceramics are not likely to conspire anytime soonwith the vestiges of a 'vanguard academy' or acquiesce ina role as the graffiti art of the early 21st century.

Glen R Brown is a Professor of Art History at Kansas State Univer-sity in Manhattan, Kansas, US.Review of The Denver Art Museum, 11 June -18 September 2011.All photos by Jeff Wells provided courtesy of the Denver ArtMuseum.

106 Ceramics: Art and Perception No. 87 2012

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