The Margins and Altermodern

The title of the 2009 exhibition - The Margins: A Theory of Resistance in Contemporary Ceramics wants to recognize ceramics as an expanded field and to dissolve the margins of an art (craft?) steeped in tradition. The introduction points to clay as a component that runs through the works, but the materials are chosen to best realize an intention and the interest of the works lies in broader discourse.

The following three essays create a discourse on the margins laying some groundwork and I highlighted a few references that were of interest to me. The first is the vessel in contrast to ceramics as a broader category of art. I am also interested in the mapping or framework of art. In the Big Bang article, the Dean of ceramic studies at SAIC, said that her intent as teacher was to investigate two things - technical traditions and the process towards expertise, as well as to develop questions that take students down a personal path to develop a voice. She describes clay as a material with specific characteristics, histories and associations so it seems like ceramics has three forces - the technical, the history, and the concept.

Just a jotting down of interesting ceramic tie ins: prehistoric female effigy figures in clay thrown into the fire by the thousands to explode (performative gesture on the female?), WW1 pilots dropping practice ceramic bombs filled with talc or plaster, George Ohr, the Group of Seven (Canadian), La Loie Fuller.

Altermodern was an exhibition curated by french art critic Nicolas Bourriaud at the The Tate Triennial 2009 at Tate Britain. It was also presented at the time a collective discussion around the premise that postmodernism is coming to an end, and we are experiencing the emergence of a global altermodernity. It seems like Bourriaud has coined the next art movement from modernism (rejecting the past but in a Greenbergian timeline) to postmodernism (reaction against modernism but in a constant loop) to now (in a spiderweb mapping).

I like the eight continents of modernism (see website).