{"id":26435,"date":"2014-09-10T01:37:26","date_gmt":"2014-09-10T07:37:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=26435"},"modified":"2020-08-01T15:31:09","modified_gmt":"2020-08-01T21:31:09","slug":"inciteful-clay-at-the-woodbury-art-museums","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/inciteful-clay-at-the-woodbury-art-museums\/","title":{"rendered":"InCiteful Clay at the Woodbury Art Museum"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Across the room, Nuala Creed\u2019s \u201cLament for Fukushima\u201d looks like a child\u2019s well-worn doll, but up close he\u2019s seen to be an adult: one so rounded and smooth as to be mistaken for a child. He sits on the ground with his legs folded in front of him in the familiar lotus position. His right arm bends at the elbow, his hand held up next to his face, with the thumb and index finger touching in a circle\u2014what Westerners might read as the sign for \u201cO.K\u201d His left arm is relaxed, resting on his knee, where his hand makes the same sign. Standing behind him and shading him, as he sits in this classic pose of meditation, looms a cloud-like shape that suggests either a tree or a very large mushroom. It is, of course, both. The composition refers to Buddha beneath the Bodhi Tree, the traditional story of the first human enlightenment. Yet something is not right, and to understand what it is necessary to examine the materials and their treatments more closely.<\/p>\n

The Buddha is made of stoneware. In spite of the popular belief that the best ceramics are made of porcelain, which is used in making high-end consumer goods like teacups and bowls, Japanese artists have shown stoneware to be a more expressive and evocative material. They generally rely on techniques that foreground the human hand, the processes of making, and so encourage accidents that commercial manufacturers strive to avoid. To that end, Creed first stained and casually glazed her figure, then raku-fired him. This resulted in a timeless feel: old and weathered here, new and pristine there. As a final touch, she dunked his face in red glaze, producing a circular shape that recalls the way it was made, complete with an ambiguous drip. This red circle crosses the eyes, and dramatizes, in the restrained, formal manner of Japanese performance art, how this Buddha cries tears of blood. That, combined with the title, permit identifying the tree-like form above him as a mushroom cloud, symbol of the nuclear disaster that followed the tsunami at Fukushima. That the cloud is represented by roughly shaped and unglazed clay completes the allegory: the ancient, refined lives of the Japanese (and by extension of civilized peoples everywhere) are threatened by the unrefined, inchoate force of unleashed nature. It is the kind of artwork that, once seen, can never be forgotten, but grows in awareness day by day.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Probably the oldest known artistic medium, clay sculptures survive in European caves alongside painted animals and mysteriously carved bits of bone and stone. At the same time, as our contemporary artists demonstrate, clay can be as new as any other medium. Its plastic versatility allows it, in sufficiently creative or knowledgable hands, to mimic\u2014or at least disappear into\u2014seemingly anything, including the most antithetical materials. How many viewers will notice that the pitcher of Shalene Valenzuela\u2019s \u201cPurchasing Power II\u201d isn\u2019t, as it appears, reverse painted glass, with its embossed measurements floating over the imagery, but is actually earthenware? The title of the series it comes from\u2014Blending In<\/em>\u2014describes the medium as well as the message.<\/p>\n

There are two dozen artists here, each with a major object or, in one case, a body of work commenting on issues that particularly bedevil us today. The works are divided among five categories: Environment, Popular & Material Culture, Social & Human Conditions, War & Politics, and Gender. The last, perhaps because of its controversial nature, or simply because it\u2019s so new to broad recognition, is represented by a single work. In \u201cIgnorance is Bliss,\u201d Carol Milne projects a naive, almost clumsy quality perfectly suited to the reality of gender: that there are no clear precedents, no stable absolutes, but each person\u2014especially when young\u2014creates an identity without recourse to objective categories. While making thousands of largely clueless choices that add up to a unique identity, each of us must also function within other, far less nuanced roles. Compared to a similar pose carved, say, by Canova, and primarily concerned with the erotic response it creates in the viewer, this distinctly hand-made figure speaks volumes about a conflicted interior life spent in an intimidating world. Sensitive placement, alone in a large, otherwise empty gallery, emphasizes the isolation and, too often, the accompanying alienation.<\/p>\n

The problem of solitude isn\u2019t reserved for adolescents, however. Richard Shaw\u2019s \u201cGreat Divide Jar\u201d adapts the conventions of wedding cake for a witty comment on the too-frequent reality of adapting a compound connection to a one-size-fits-all institution. Here bravura manipulation of porcelain serves up the bride and groom figures as well as the cut sections of cake on which they stand, only to find themselves drifting apart like castaways on flotsam, or like newlyweds who find that hard work, not just romance, follows their happy event.<\/p>\n

In addition to the exhibit\u2019s thematic categories, several works share references in common to functional form. University of Utah art professor Maryann Webster was inspired by Renaissance basins, decorative works that invoked the forms of dinnerware to present idealized views of nature, in her exquisitely detailed \u201cDioxin Sea,\u201d in which meticulously rendered undersea life surrounds a fish with a chicken-foot fin. Michelle Erickson\u2019s \u201cParadise Lost\u201d similarly starts with the model of a 16th-century French fecundity dish, which would have featured a reclining venus and putti as symbols of fertility. Only Erickson\u2019s skeleton woman and her retinue all wear gas masks, while their surroundings refer to weapons of war, death\u2019s heads, and various symbols of nationalism and religious intolerance. Both works, in addition to their shocking details, contain underlying visual puns, references that add weight to their corrosive judgments.<\/p>\n

Webster\u2019s basin and Erickson\u2019s dish pay homage to the subdued, realistic colors of both their ceramic models and their updated subject matter. Not so Patti Warashina, whose \u201cDrunken Power Series\u201d invokes sentiments understandably\u2014if mistakenly\u2014ascribed to Mark Twain, though they were actually expressed by Laurence Peter in his 1969 book,\u00a0The Peter Principle<\/em>: \u2018Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it.\u2019 Warashina criticizes the disappointing incompetence with which humanity continually confronts its challenges; her \u201cSeeing Red\u201d sake set metaphorically indicts those who, drunk with power, afflict the future with erroneous political, social, and environmental choices and actions. The five bright red-orange cups (Japanese sets inevitably contain an odd number of vessels), shaped like rockets, surround a pitcher shaped like an intoxicated plutocrat, who wears a nosecone for a hat and cradles a bomb while he smokes a chimney-like cigar. Ehren Tool also works with functional wares, but he evidently wants those who receive his cups to actually use them. Into the malleable clay sides of these practical vessels he stamps the logos of today\u2019s major economic corporations, alongside images of the consequences he believes their actions produce. Even while he disseminates his recriminations in practical, useful forms that may spread far and wide, he gambles on something more; archeologists have shown that clay vessels are the most durable of human products to date, surviving effectively forever, even when broken. Tool trusts that, should pride or greedy deeds destroy our society as it has so many others, his art will remain among the ruins to identify the culprits as he sees them.<\/p>\n

Ehren Tool\u2019s explicit references, including petitioning President Obama through his art, which elicited a disappointingly political response from the White House, bring viewers up against fundamental questions about the role of art in society: in particular, whether the artist properly manipulates the visual world in pursuit of specific reactions from, or even actions by, the viewer. In centuries past, influential writers like Thomas Aquinas argued that the proper role of art should be limited to helping viewers apprehend creation\u2019s beauty, not to moving them to emotional or political action. Yet today\u2019s critics could reply that such scholars didn\u2019t really object to advocacy in the arts, so long as they agreed with what was advocated. Think of all those artworks depicting saints and sinners: can there by any question they were meant to influence their audience? Every artist then, here and elsewhere, could presumably make an argument for his or her work based on the principle of religious freedom, for each of these aesthetic statements also makes an ethical claim that dates from the origin point of spiritual identity. They urge their audience to behold creation under assault and challenge those responsible: even ourselves. The universal notion of human responsibility for the husbanding of living things and resources lies at the core of our cultural, social, political, and religious traditions.<\/p>\n

There is still a role in art for self-expression, if only in an artists choice of tone, or voice. While Judith Schwartz, the NYU art professor who initially curated\u00a0InCiteFul Clay<\/em>, includes \u201ccaricature, parody, satire, obscenity, erotica, and the grotesque\u201d among an artist\u2019s options, she reserves the more extreme voices for her book,\u00a0Confrontational Ceramics<\/em>. In this exhibit, meanwhile, she offers a gentler, what might be called a \u201cuser-friendly\u201d introduction to the potential for art to stimulate understanding, reflection, and philosophical mindfulness. Like the creamy hand grenades in Adrianne Crane\u2019s \u201cArtillery Field,\u201d artworks are less likely to explode than to open into multicolored lotus blossoms, the international symbol for peace.<\/p>\n

Ellice Taylor, a UVU student who was invited to contribute to what is primarily a traveling exhibition, celebrates the beauty of sunsets in her \u201cNight Skies,\u201d a set of tiles across which bold arabesques alternately rise and fall like dawn and dusk. While her statement recalls that rich colors in the sky sometimes result from pollution, her work leaves this fact for consideration by viewers. In his \u201cCows,\u201d Chad Curtis admits the increasingly artificial pressures on nature: his neon-colored animals live in an inverted space, where artificial illumination underlies natural light, yet his assemblage holds forth the hope that their original splendor may as well be enhanced as destroyed. And a few feet from Patti Warashina\u2019s cartoon outrage, the figures of two men stand calmly, side by side. Akio Takamori\u2019s \u201cGeneral and Emperor\u201d distills the outcome of a century of conflict in the Pacific down to two familiar visages and an increasingly familiar image. Here the winner, tall in his casually efficient fatigues, dwarfs the loser, whose mistakenly adopted costume suits him poorly. Like those meetings between former belligerents that have become a staple of formalized recollection, animosity is here replaced by inevitable resolution.<\/p>\n

InCiteFul Clay<\/em>\u00a0is, first and foremost, an exhibition of the state of ceramic art, and in addition to the high caliber of works discussed so far, there are several which might have been chosen as much for their supreme artistry as for their comparatively subtle content. First among equals is Bonnie Seeman\u2019s \u201cUntitled Bowl,\u201d which uses human and marine anatomy to plunge us deep into the beauty and struggle that characterize life. Arthur Gonzalez\u2019s \u201cWhat Tool Must I Use to Separate the Earth from the Sky\u201d uses some of the most accomplished, bravura craft to lend an appropriately realistic quality to a story about a story-teller\u2019s preparations to tell the tale of Pinocchio, a nineteenth century fable that has provided one of the most popular metaphorical images of the twenty-first century.<\/p>\n

Earnest intentions alone can\u2019t make a work of art good: craft and content must connect well and, if possible, powerfully. \u201cSchwitz\u201d (\u201cSweat\u201d in German) suggests that Verne Funk, the sculptor, hasn\u2019t yet made up his mind where he\u2019s going, an impression his statement confirms. There is more to ambiguity than not having thought a project through. Linda Cordell\u2019s \u201cChoke the Chicken\u201d is also technically competent, but feels tepid in addressing its likely topic\u2014industrial farming\u2014and bears as title a rude phrase she fails to connect to the work. Charles Kraft\u2019s \u201cSpone Forgiveness Beauty Bar\u201d suffers from the bane of so-called Contemporary Art: without the accompanying text, it fails to say what the artist means it to.<\/p>\n

In \u201cGods and Designers,\u201d Reinaldo Sanguino raises a host of issues that, again, fail to make the leap from statement to art work. When Tom Wolfe argued, in\u00a0The Painted Word<\/em>, that art was increasingly the illustration to critical texts, he failed to foresee that those texts might one day be provided by the artists themselves. By comparison, I found J.J. McCracken\u2019s \u201cDeformation is Permanent\u201d compelling, but unlikely in this context to draw viewers in far enough to appreciate its science-fiction frisson. Then again, if there is to be something for everyone, a dense, challenging work like McCracken\u2019s belongs alongside \u201cDebt Monster\u201d in which Cheryl Tall recaptures the playfulness of childhood, when clay was the powerful, protean toy that could provide both the castle and its inhabitants.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s at this point your writer discovers he may have saved the best for last\u2014if \u2018best\u2019 means anything in art so layered in subjectivity of both form and content. What looks like a second Buddha turns out to be Tip Toland\u2019s \u201cAvadhut,\u201d which belongs among the truly remarkable achievements in clay. An approximately life-sized human figure, he is covered everywhere except his teeth and the soles of his feet with gold leaf. His open mouth is not the first clue that this is no ordinary Buddha. As for the soles of his feet, where the ground he walks on has worn the gold away, one sees the texture of his soles meticulously captured in clay.<\/p>\n

And in case one final proof is needed that clay can do anything, the Woodbury staff invited a second ceramic student to participate in this show. Not long ago, disturbing photographs appeared in the environmental press, showing baby albatrosses\u2014close relatives of the sea gulls considered nearly sacred in Utah\u2014that had starved to death. Their decaying carcasses had broken open to reveal the cause: gullets full of plastic trash the parents had mistaken for food. UVU student Larry Revoir has re-envisioned this nightmare in \u201cMonster,\u201d in which the same horrid fate has befallen an iconic children\u2019s celebrity figure: a furry friend stuffed with deadly delights. Contemplating this horror, I felt an unexpected gratitude to its maker, and remembered why art matters.<\/p>\n

InCiteful Clay<\/em>\u00a0is at the\u00a0Woodbury Art Museum<\/a>\u00a0in Orem through October 20.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Across the room, Nuala Creed\u2019s \u201cLament for Fukushima\u201d looks like a child\u2019s well-worn doll, but up close he\u2019s seen to be an adult: one so rounded and smooth as to be mistaken for a child. He sits on the ground with his legs folded in front of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":847,"featured_media":26463,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,14],"tags":[1123],"class_list":["post-26435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-exhibition_reviews","category-visual_arts","tag-woodbury-art-museum"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/blogincitefulclay.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-27 05:23:01","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/847"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26435"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26435\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54352,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26435\/revisions\/54352"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26463"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}