The Art and/or Craft of Ceramics
Is ceramics art or craft? It’s an age-old question. The obvious answer is both, but there are several ways to look at this question and I wanted to take some time to explore the subject.
Since I’ve been doing ceramics, I’ve been struggling to define these terms. What makes an object an art piece? According to Duchamp, a urinal can be art if put in the right context. I’ll note in passing that this urinal is made out of ceramics… Art needs craft to exist. All arts have a craft side, and art probably originated from bored craftspeople: you can paint a room with white paint or the ceiling of the Sistine chapel, you can cover a bathroom with uniform ceramic tiles or create a mosaic, you can make doors out of wood or create a wood sculpture, you can make windows out of plain glass or create a stained glass window. At the opposite end is art for the sake of art, completely useless original creations like a sculpture. Somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, art and craft meet with a huge overlap. The word artist and artisan are so similar because they’re basically a continuum.
Fountain, by Marcel Duchamp (1917)
Roman Mosaic ( TimeTravelRome, Vichten Roman Mosaic (51188075985), CC BY 2.0 )
Bathroom tiles (Bart Everson, Mid-City New Orleans Bathroom - Fully Grouted, CC BY 2.0)
Being an artisan or craftsperson is not less admirable than being an artist. Ceramics requires a tremendous amount of technique, knowledge and experience in order to master the craft. It also requires physical strength and dexterity.
I recently came across two quotes by the French painter Pierre Soulages who died recently that helped me grasp the difference better (and made me laugh at the same time):
“An artisan knows very well what s/he wants to do and knows how s/he is going to do it. I’m the opposite. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I know vaguely how I am going to get there because I know a lot of possibilities but I don’t know which ones I am going to use.”
Library at the University of St Gallen with a tapestry by Pierre Soulages (Universitätsarchiv St.Gallen | HSGH 022/001509/02 | CC-BY-SA 4.0, Studierende in der Leseecke HSGH 022-001509-02, CC BY-SA 4.0)
Craftspeople know what object they want to create and how they’re going to do it. Artists don’t know either of those things.
The other quote that I think completes the last one neatly to explain the difference between art and craft is – of all things- about rugby:
“At the start what I liked about rugby is that the ball was oval. It seems stupid but it is capital because in the shape, there is the unexpected, and the unexpected is what interests me. It interests me in the art of painting every day. When I start a painting, I don’t know what I am going to do.”
True artists love the unexpected, they get taken on a ride by their creative spirit and have no clue where they will end up. They plan something and then the plan evolves or gets thrown away. True artisans hate the unexpected. They want to create reliable products that conform to their standards. They rely on technique and experience. It is a fundamental difference.
Another is how you apprehend the work. Is it a job (craft), or something you can’t help doing (art)? If you have to create, are curious to try new things and always push the boundaries of what you can do, then you behave like an artist. If you want to make a beautiful copy of what you or other people have done before, you’re not.
A further difference that defines craft is reproduction. When someone starts doing ceramic, they always want to create a set of matching plates, or matching mugs, or- why not- an entire dinner set. They realize soon enough that it’s almost impossible without a machine to create matching ceramics. Yet, some potters can produce what appears to be exactly the same mug over and over. I find that admirable. I could never do this. My crafts(wo)manship is not good enough. Also, after making two or three of the same pieces and finally getting it right, I find it boring and want to try something else, maybe only slightly different but still new.
Nobody ever asked Claude Monet to reproduce the same painting. He created series of similar paintings: water lilies, the front of the Rouen’s cathedral at different times of day, but they’re never identical. For some reason potters are expected to create identical pieces over and over, but reproduction kills the art.
Water lilies by Claude Monet (Claude Monet creator QS:P170,Q296, Monet - Water Lily Pond, 1917-19, 1982.825, CC BY-SA 4.0)
The other hint that you’re doing craft and not art is whether you’re making something so it can sell, even more if you are making multiple copies of it. And, again, there is nothing wrong with this. We all need to make a living. But as soon as you create a piece because it will sell well, you’re not doing art. Art is about creating what you need to create for yourself, and not for others. I interviewed an older potter (Rabun Thompson) at the Ceramic Showcase in Portland last year. When I asked him if he thought of himself as an artist, he said no, because he was creating ceramics so they would sell. I was taken aback at the time, because his pieces were amazing. Now I realize it was both something he was proud of – he had been a self-supporting potter since the eighties – and frustrated by- he couldn’t create what he wanted.
The truth is that most artists are doing both. We create for ourselves, and we also create to sell. Artists will often get famous for one type of art, and then they become trapped into it, making the same kind of art over and over because it sells well. Money is hard to ignore. The artists who can afford to create art and only art usually have another job, either completely unrelated or teaching their art, sometimes both. In some ways, the more famous the artist, the more pressure s/he gets to produce art that the public expects. I saw a documentary about a famous German artist, Alice Kwade, who creates monumental sculptures with hanging blocks of rocks. She was complaining that people expect her to do the same sculpture over and over again. Reproduction is the enemy of art.
What about meaning? Should art “mean” something when craft is just a beautiful object? Fellow potter Shelly Fredenberg once told me that for the longest time she didn’t dare calling herself an artist because she thought art was supposed to make a social commentary of some sorts and she was creating snails out of clay. Then she realized her definition of art was too narrow. Art can be political but it doesn’t have to be. It’s about creating what you need to create. Monet’s waterlilies do not make a social or political statement, and yet they revolutionized art history. Sometimes art is about the technique you use more than the actual object.
In any case, we shouldn’t pit art and craft against each other. They work hand in hand to fight the evils of capitalism and mass-produced cheap plastic crap. Creating unique or limited series of objects, whether you call them art or craft, goes against uniformization and consumerism.
While researching this topic, I discovered William Morris. He initiated the Art and Craft movement in England in the nineteenth century. William Morris was fascinated by the Middle Ages and disgusted by the industrial revolution and the cheap ugly objects that were churned out quickly by British factories. He believed in good craft and beautiful objects. The amount of things he dabbled in in his life is astounding. He wrote fiction and non-fiction books, created a printing press and even used calligraphy to reproduce entire books by hand. He and his friends and collaborators created furniture, tapestries, paintings, fabrics, stained glass windows and more. He wanted to combine art and craft, creating beautiful objects for the home. These “craft” objects are now in museums.
William Morris and two of his craft pieces: a stained glass and a calligraphic manuscript.
William Morris was also a socialist and wanted to create a better life for workers. He believed they would be happier creating beautiful objects than be cogs in a factory. But what about buying them?
If you’re poor, you can’t justify buying something useless and very expensive like an art piece, but you might be able to afford something cheaper and useful like a craft object. People often complain that handmade ceramics are expensive compared to mass produced mugs, but if you compare the price of a handmade mug you can use every day with the price of a useless sculpture or painting, mugs are a lot more affordable.
There was an ad campaign in France in the seventies for a supermarket called “Prisunic” that sold art prints and design furniture for cheap. Their slogan: “the beautiful at the price of the ugly”. Craft is the art of the poor, the beautiful at the price of the ugly.
Cover image attribution: Ekaterina Kvelidze, Ceramics in Meknes, CC BY-SA 4.0