I turn now to the consideration of ceramics as an art form. This is a vast topic, with countless examples of ceramic art starting as early as the perhaps accidentally fired figures from the Paleolithic site of Dolní Vestonice (in the current Czech Republic):
and with an astonishingly early artistic pottery tradition beginning in the late Paleolithic approximately 14,000 years ago and lasting over 10,000 years in Japan.
As with my previous consideration of textiles, I’ll proceed by first summarizing Gottfried Semper’s placement of ceramics among the art forms; then, restricting myself to ceramic pottery, consider the basic actions and elementary kinds of meaningfulness of pots; then consider an example of artistic pottery at full stretch, a bowl by the Tiwa-Hopi potter Nampeyo.
As stated in my previous post, Semper approached the question of the broadest categories of visual art through the characteristics of the materials used, which he divided into four classes: the pliable; the soft and malleable; the stick-shaped; and the strong, densely aggregated. Associated with each of these material qualities were super-classes of art forms: textiles; ceramics; tectonics; and stereotomy (masonry) respectively (Semper, 109-10). So ‘ceramics’ includes any art form whose primary materials are soft and malleable, and so pre-eminently clay. Because clay is ‘fired’, that is, hardened through sustained exposure to extremely high temperatures, the worked clay must not just be malleable, but also maximally homogenous, so as to reduce cracking and keep shrinkage uniform. Clay can be shaped into forms ranging from simple rectangular bricks to elaborate figurines, though here I limit the discussion to ceramic pottery as an art form, one which is not a human universal but which is attested across a great range of cultures on all inhabited continents.
The ur-act of pottery is forming a vessel with clay, most typically through laying coils of clay in a circular pattern one atop another until the desired height of the vessel is reached. The resultant shape is the ‘ur-pot’, which inclines towards one of two paradigmatic forms; as Philip Rawson put it, “[t]he ‘ur-pot’, or primal form, is a lump of clay with a hole in it, pinched out into a rudimentary container. From this shape the first two directions of development are towards the ‘jar’ and the ‘open basin’” (Rawson, p. 93). Alternatively, with the introduction of the potter’s wheel, the placement and pressure of the potter’s hands gives the clay the desired height, width, and shape. In artistic traditions the ur-pot is subsequently decorated with further clay elements and/or colors. One way that is very broadly attested geographically and historically is to decorate the pot so that it embodies a corporeal metaphor: pot-is-head and/or pot-is-human body (or human-like body in the case of divine beings).
Another broad stream of decoration is quasi-geometric, where the pot is sub-divided by bands and patterned decoration is introduced, whose repetitions introduce a rhythmic quality of repetitions of varying units; again as Rawson puts it, an “aspect of all ornaments is their value as rhythmical element, punctuating and structuring the external or internal space of the pot in terms of metre or rhythm, often in bands.” (p. 170) A final basic division in the artistic elaboration of pots is between those kinds of decoration that do not exploit the physical features of the pot (its shape, its roundness, its orientation, its size, its structural divisions into base, body, neck, lip, etc.) and those that do. The former kinds of decoration are most typically pictures painted or printed onto the pots, and whose artistic values if any are largely indifferent to their physical support. The latter kinds of decoration, that is, those that do recruit features of the pots into the artistic values and meanings of the ceramic artwork, are characteristic of most of the world’s greatest ceramic traditions, including the aforementioned Jomon, as well as the Susa ware of ancient Iran and the Minoan pots of the late 3rd millennium to mid-2nd millennium.
As explicated early in the book, the recruitment of aspects and conceptions of an artwork’s materiality is a basic kind of artistic meaning-making exhibited across art forms, and can be readily conceptualized as one, though only one, of the ways in which the fundamental self-referentiality in artistic meaning arises. For example, as Rawson again notes, in Susa ware the conical shape of a beaker may supply a basic motif for variations in its graphic decoration (p. 151).
Similarly, Henriette Groenewegen-Frankfort in her classic Arrest and Movement describes the typical patterns of Susa ware as consisting of elements--“the horizontal bands, the circles (interrupted and unbroken), radii, vertical strokes and triangles”--, and which elements, together with the patterns they form, “were suggested by and in turn were meant to articulate the actual vase form, the elements of its structure, the character of its plastic movement.” (Groenewegen-Frankfort, p. 146) Similarly, in taking up and developing the stylistic analysis of Minoan pottery given Friedrich Matz, she notes that in early Crete the physical form of the pot, together with motifs suggested by its production on the wheel, were recruited into the art form’s basic kinds of meaningfulness: “the Cretans emphasized both centre and circumference and thus produced a circular and dynamic pattern, a whirling movement in the design.” (p. 191)
And the much earlier Jomon flame-style pots similarly recruit the process of making as aggregating coils into their decoration.
In order to show artistic meaning at full stretch in ceramics, I turn to two pots from the Hopi-Tiwa ceramicist Nampeyo (c.1860-1942), who Is widely viewed as among the most skilled and accomplished of Native American potters.
The two pots are seed jars, whose distinctive characteristics are a squat, wide, symmetrical vessel with a single large hole centered in the top. The major variation within the form is whether and what sort of neck is given, that is, whether the hole opens with a slight rise from the major upper contour, and so seems cut into the top, or whether with a more salient rise a more complex outside curve is created by having a longer rise of a convex neck form. Whether or not the pots have salient necks, Nampeyo arranges two major paired motifs symmetrically around the hole. The immediate effect of this is to introduce a canonical viewpoint directly above the pot wherein the radiating symmetry is most salient. And so from the canonical viewpoint the lower part of the pot is unperceived as it curves rapidly downward under the occluding furthest width of the pot. To single-point vision the minimally necked pots are like the decorated undersides of upside-down bowls that hover a short distance over the ground. By slight contrast, the pots with necks relieve something of the horizontality and squatness of the minimally-necked ones, and so introduce a secondary viewpoint, or rather viewing area, from 3/4s side-on, so that something of the particular proportions and complex curvature thereby introduced can be appreciated. In all cases the decorations seem very much applied to a solid monochromatic ground, usually brownish-yellow. Maintaining a sense of the continuity of the ground seems a central imperative for Nampeyo, as she avoids any sense of the small-scale figure/ground reversals so common in the world’s ceramic and textile decoration. And here seed jars also lack much sense of somatic resonance, that is, the metaphorization of the pot as part and/or all of the human body. Instead she conceptualizes the pot more as an instance of a decorative art on the way to becoming a pictorial art.
To see the particular artistic meaningfulness of the individual pots, consider Nampeyo’s varying treatment of the eagle motif in two of the pots with short necks. Both show four heraldic ‘tailfeather’ motifs radiating symmetrically from the centered hole, with symmetrically opposed curvilinear ‘claw’ elements between each tail-feather. In both cases the claws come close to, but do not touch, any other decorative element, so the sense of the yellow ground as continuous underneath them is maintained; likewise, Nampeyo never encloses the ground color within a figure. The particularities of the tail-feathers in particular differ: in the upper space one has a fretted swastika, the other a complex polygon whose angularity suggests an origin in textile decoration. A mesh of cross-hatchings surround both these sub-motifs. The variations between the two pots, and indeed the variations across Nampeyo’s oeuvre, can be seen as the result of a seemingly impossible task that she has given herself: to seek for pot after pot different solutions that admit rich decorative patterns, but where the sense of visual coherence of the of the pot is secured through maintaining strong continuity of surface—and so the avoidance of corporal metaphorization, figure/ground reversal, and the sense of strong enclosure of the decorative elements. Like a number of other roughly contemporaneous modernist artists (Monet, Picasso, et alia), in many cases the primary locus of artistic meaningfulness is not the individual artwork, but rather the series of works (compare, for example, Nampeyo’s serialization of problem-solving with Picasso’s in Femmes d’Alger, a series based upon a painting by Delacrois.
The assumption that artistic meaning is given as it were in individual artworks taken one at a time is perhaps a largely unexamined prejudice that might block access to a broad range of the world’s arts, especially those usually included among the technical or industrial arts (in Semper’s sense), or the ‘crafts’ in the modern period.
For the final post of the first draft of my book, I turn to the world’s greatest visual art form that is primarily performative, namely masking.
References and Works Consulted:
E. H. Gombrich, The Sense of Order (1984)
Henriette Groenewegen-Frankfort, Arrest and Movement: An Essay on Space and Time in the Representational Art of the Ancient Near East (1951)
Tatsuo Kobayashi, Jomon Reflections: Forager Life and Culture in the Prehistoric Japanese Archipelago (2004)
Philip Rawson, Ceramics (1984)
Gottfried Semper, Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts, or, Practical Aesthetics (2004)