Ceramics in a Post-Internet State of Mind

Now what? WTF am I even supposed to do with this stuff these days; does any thing actually matter any more?  Sure, probably more so than ever!  Get it?  Things? Matter? Anyways...

I’ve been asking myself for a long time why I constantly feel compelled to make with my hands in clay in today’s internet based everything life.  It seems so ironic, messy and stupid to me.  It’s frustrating and exciting at the same time.  Every time I open up a bag of fresh clay or scrape some out of the pug mill I become excited for the possibilities that the malleable material suggests.  Now I know that may be due to some prolonged exposure to clay and the ceramic process.  It’s ingrained in my psyche, its who I am, its how I think through new situations and about the world.  Sure, but todays world, as it is vastly distinct from my late 1970’s through 1990’s upbringing, is increasingly immaterial.  I lived it; I watched it happen, I’m Generation X, Generation Crossover.  As an object maker, that is huge, and probably true for most people born in the same time frame or earlier, to comprehend that change in some way that makes sense to them; it may take some more time.  Solid things are now virtually, and therefore mentally, being replaced by digital versions of themselves, coded copies, archived, ready for up and downloading upon your command.  

The state of the object is just at the beginning of its transformation according to Bruce Sterling in his book Shaping Things.  From tangible Artifacts to three-dimensional printed Spimes and bio-nano-tech Biots, Sterling intelligently speculates our object oriented future, asking us gear up and adapt to rapid change.

So why make with clay still I ask?   

 Robert Smithson thought about geologic and immaterial things intensely and his awareness of comprehending two seemingly different states of consciousness still hold true today.  Heres a quote from, “Fragments of an Interview with P.A. Norvell, April, 1969”.

“To be located between those two points puts you in a position of elsewhere, so there’s no focus.  This outer edge and this center constantly subvert each other, cancel each other out.  There is a suspension of destination.  I think that conceptual art which depends completely on written data is only half the story; it only deals with the mind and it has to deal with the material too... There is no escape from matter.  There is no escape from the physical nor is there any escape from the mind.  The two are in a constant collision course.  You might say that my work is like an artistic disaster.  It is a quiet catastrophe of mind and matter.”

Smithson, of course is writing about the budding conceptual art movement in the late 1960’s and early 70’s, the height of immaterial thinking as art, as a thing, presiding ideas over objects, and by that I mean data and information having importance and meaning over formal concerns.  (I wonder what Smithson would have thought about three-dimensional printed Spime objects?)  He suggests that there is no escape. 

Messy and stupid is who we are and clay personifies that exceptionally, as it has for a long time now.  As my ceramic practice is part of my make up, I suggest it is also part of humanities, it’s who we are as a species.  A material relationship created over numerous civilizations and a few thousand years will be hard to just right-click delete.  And yet, I feel a disingenuous life creeping up in our near future, hygienically so, possibly puritanical.  In denial of our upbringing, our species strives for further advancements in technologically supported purification.  As a maker, some one who identifies by the work of their hands, the duality between a genetically imbued tactile comprehension of the world and one that is more and more removed from touch, continues to confound.  That may just be the state of things these days, but unlike Smithson’s description between immaterial and the material  knowledge, the line that divided the two is becoming more and more blurred through a hyper-reality of what is consider possible today.

It is easy to take a reactionary stance to all this, consider the Sloppy Craft label that was being thrown around a few years back.  What reeks of humanity more than drippy lumpy fucked up-ness?  Probably all consuming discussions about identity.  If I had a completely malleable virtual avatar of myself who’s aspects I controlled most every day of my life online, so too would I have the same expectations IRL.   

The idea of a post-internet culture/ society, what have you, is refreshing to me.  The concept is in its infancy, possibly premature for the masses, but it gives me hope that we have not thrown everything, and by that I mean what we used to consider everything, down the drain just yet.  My hope is that a post-internet mind is aware that there may be limits to our understanding of the tangible word, not everything can be converted, that may still we need some stuff around.  We need things to make for the act of making.  That is why art makes the most sense to me, of all things to make.  Ikea makes fine dishes and I quite like them, as an artist with a ceramic based practice, I know I could make something equally functional, but why would I?  We just don’t live in that world anymore. 

That being said, the things that post-internet artists are making or are having made I find utterly lacking in interest.  The work feels blasé, like they did all their art history reading, research is automated, then shrugged and gave up; creating for irony over any other human impulse.   Regardless of the thing produced, regardless of the form that is presented, the concept is still the same, nullifying individuality completely.  I suppose that’s what the internet did, it has rendered all its users ubiquitous, copy and past, hash tagging, reproducers.  That sucks if that is where we lead humanity, I don’t want any part of that, and yet here I am dealing with it as I write this.  My hope is that all this is a fad, we accept that yes, we outsourced our passions, but the desire to make is still within us and it is necessary to do so, let us mature as a species.   

From a ceramicists point of view, I propose that this sticky situation of “to make or not to make”, can be better understood if we take the time to examine the material qualities of the substance itself.  A formal approach I admit, but I think that’s my point of this rage essay. To be clear, I am discussing the material qualities of clay and not ceramic.  As one comes before the other, as soft clay is being interpreted, we may be able to shed light on the continuing desire and impulse of haptic comprehension.  

Clay, moist malleable ground with the potential for permanence, is in its most potently creative state right out of the box, mixer, or pug mill.  At that point it urges use, it seduces us.  Suggesting forms already, the freshly mixed clay, pulls at our imagination and insists we do something new to it. Clay is responsive. We play with a poke, a jab, possibly a good punch, before we bag it up or slam it into a heavy plastic tub for keeping.  There it waits for further instruction, taunting us.  When it is time, we haul out a lump, ten or twenty pounds, divide that into smaller portions and wedge.  An exercise affirming connection between mind and hand, imagination stirring in potential.  Clay is easy.  A child can do it, and as the adage goes, so many of us try to remember that the more our practice grows.  

Clay is a mimic.  It can’t be pinned down.  I think it is wonderful that clay, once fired, still confounds professionals and the public alike.   That such an old medium, a mere geological substance, can continue to stir up speculation and controversy, says more about our humanity than anything else.  Clay successfully dodges labels with each unique incarnation of form it takes; in the twenty first century that is a rather amazing thing to be able to say.  Clay is political.  The subject doesn’t take sides, the people do, creating a tension that will only spur discussions between the convictions of future generations.  The debate will never die, it is not in clays material nature.  It is messy and stupid, and constantly in motion, just like we have always been and should never forget to be.  From that point of view, we can make anything and should.   

The Philosophers Stone, Virtual Light, Nothing Left to Resist

In his book, Earth and Reveries of Will, An Essay On the Imagination of Matter, Gaston Bachelard considers the physical world in a state of hard and soft.  “The dialectic of hard and soft governs every image with which we picture to ourselves the inner nature of things.   This dialectic animates every image through which we participate actively, ardently, in the interiority of matter.  Hard and soft are the primary qualifiers of the resistance of matter…”  I find that observation of the world utterly mind-blowing, so simple and also so exact.  As a ceramist, I am quite familiar with Bachelard’s notion of the world, and yet consider other possibilities. 

Leather-hard is term ceramists use to categorize clay in a firmness state between soft and hard. It is a material state with in the making process that has numerous possibilities. At first it is a difficult condition to understand, one has to gain a tactile sensitivity to drying clay and that is only learned through extensive making.  Often the first few attempts to execute an intended project end in disappointment due to not having gained the sublets of leather-hard clay.  There are varying degrees of leather-hard as well.  With each tick on the scale of firmness, water moisture escapes clay and thus losses plasticity.  What was once pliable, slowly renders to crumbles.  After some experience a ceramist becomes attuned to the varying leather-hard states of clay and realizes that each one is moment when something can be done to a work in process.  Leather-hard is a making moment, when decisions in form can be executed; they are charged moments.  Between clay’s soft and hard state is the moment of potential.   It is no longer held by its weight to the conditions of gravity as it is when soft, also, it is not yet to be handled lightly as it is fragile when in a completely dry and hard state.  Leather-hard is a third state of thinking about things. For me the leather-hard state is a moment of consideration, clay is at its most limitless in form.

Considering that material qualities inform thinking about the world, and using the concept of leather-hard as a theoretical jumping off point, I would say that the world now consists of other states of mind, between the physical and the virtual.  Over the past twenty years I have spent exceedingly more time on-line.  Just as the material conditions of the tangible world have informed my thinking, so too have the immaterial conditions of virtual space. 

I was born in the late 1970’s.  My understanding of things was formed pre-internet.  To know things was to touch stuff, to get messy.  I was introduced to clay at a very young age and working with it has created a foundation of my understanding of the world, a tactile material knowledge.  When I was an freshman in college in the mid 1990’s the internet was made available and thus began my engagement with virtual space.  I was talking to unknown entities from who-knows-where in chat rooms, they could have been anybody.  I was going to webpages and buying things with money, a very risky endeavor back then.  The words to describe the internet were co-opted from real material things and places; this was the beginning of my confusion with the internet, but also my growing interest.  Peers in the freshman dorms thought I was a geek for spending so much time on the shared computer, now it is probably quite the opposite. Generation X became a generation of crossovers, of transition, from clay to code. 

A few years ago during graduate school, 2009-2011, I started playing with some form building software called Google SketchUp, and it had a major impact on my notion of materials, objects and spaces.  What I once knew to be hard messy hand-work was now neither soft nor hard, just mind-bendingly confusing, it was a complete 180 degree turn around in thinking about what a world could be made from.  The more time I spent working with those particular digital materials, the more my thinking about things changed.  Things that I knew to be concrete, both physically as well as psychologically, were no longer rendered in my mind as being from purely physical origins.  Objects became, before my very eyes, simultaneously immaterial and obsolete.  One was replaced by the other and not in the soft to hard transitions I previously understood about objects through my use of clay, a material that changed based on conditions of time and climate.  The objects I was creating online were no longer held by these same circumstances, they had been created by a new set of criteria in a new world.  

I spend more time on a computer and in a virtual world now than I ever did growing up.  That world, ever expanding, ever growing technologically, has radically altered how I think about things.  I still work with clay, I still make ceramics.  In a way, I think clay is the perfect medium for understanding this shift in thinking from the material to the immaterial.  Clay’s amorphous qualities allow me to adapt to new forms; it allows me to regain a perspective of the object with each leather-hard interpretation.  Each poke, each bend in the clay, keeps my mind as adaptive and plastic as  the material is.  Its limitless possibilities have helped me to become pliable when it comes to considering things, and as quickly as the nature of things is changing, that quality is of utmost importance  to have today.  Ceramics continues to serve a purpose.  Its material qualities serve to help our psychological transition from the soft and hard to the limitless and immaterial.  Ceramics continues to help us think about change.

My experience with the internet is ubiquitous these days, we have all had to acknowledge its influence on our lives.  It is a major conversation in many circles of thought, including art.  What I don’t see, is many ceramists talking about it, and that concerns me.  They are not considering the internet-mind.  If at all, the internet appears to be only considered as a marketing tool for self promotion, which it excels at, but the way it does so has its effects.  My mind thinks differently because of the amount of time I spend online.  I have witnessed that change in my thinking.  Connections happen instantaneously with clicks. Places are no longer a condition of static objects casting shadows.  Space is an infinite tundra of flat code.  Forms hover ominously at eye level.  The sun never sets, never rises.  Life and death merge into one continuous loop, if they exist at all.  Producing in virtual space, with digital materials, eliminates a resistance to material.  I can’t leave a lasting mark, I can’t carve out a space.  Labor defines nothing.

All of this would suggest the need for new forms.  I don’t see ceramics doing this as much as I think it can.  Ceramics appears to have given itself a pass, made itself exempt from the meta-modern post-internet condition of life that the rest of the world it trying to figure out.  Ceramics continues to re-create rather than innovate.  (Three-dimensional printing is merely individualized industrialization, a mere appliance, another gadget to clean up after wards.)

But what would a ceramicist make if the notion of the object is in flux? If a whole generation of young people consider objects and images equal?  What to make then? What would be the best design to exemplify our current formal situation? This has been my existential quandary for the past few years since graduate school.  I love making with clay / nothing physical has any meaning anymore.  And yet, I wake up every morning in the sunlight.  I still have to watch for cracks in the cement when I’m walking outside on my way to work.  The physical world never went away, just the context of how I look at it has changed.  Everything is fantastic these days, nothing material is taken for granted, I see labor in every object. I see misuse or care, and a story in every thing I can pick up and hold.  Everything has become a sculpture in a way. The internet-mind is a mental condition, a context which places everything in a virtual light.  That is the condition that needs to be told.  I believe ceramics has that possibility and needs to add its wisdom and experience.  It needs to look forward.  I continue to need its help.    

Although, in the end I ask, what’s left? Ceramics can’t transcend its material state, its material qualities.  I am left with desires to make objects but wrestle with the permanence of that end product.  Making lives on as an innate human expression but objects appear to have become irrational or in the very least non-relevant, taking up space.  Ceramics and all things really, after considering the contemporary state of objects in todays post-internet world, appear to be nothing but takers-up of space, mere records of time obstructing my physical path.  Needless to say, and maybe this has been the case for many makers over many years, I struggle between the need to make with my hands and my logical mind, but will say that the post-internet context that continues to blur realities, exemplifies this struggle ten fold in very rational ways. Without the ability to work against matter, how do I know my place in the world?

Jason Lee Starin, 2015.

An email to a possible grad student considering the AC+D program

Dear Jason,

Hi! My name is ______ and I am contacting you hoping you might have a minute to offer me some feedback about your experience in the AC+D program. I am very excited about the opportunity, but am trying to weigh all my options carefully and get as much information as I can. Many thanks for your time!

I'd be happy to answer any questions you might have about the ACD program, please consider that it has changed a lot since I was a student in the first class of 2011, but I will try my best answering honestly.  Email works best, please just send my your questions.  

Best,

Jason

Thanks Jason. Any overall impressions would be appreciated. And any feedback about how grad school helped further your career or didn't help. I am grateful for you taking the time to write!

Well ______, grad school in the ACD program changed my life.  How's that for an over all impression? Just kidding. But it did really. In the ACD program we considered what I call everything known to human kind.  Allow me to explain.  the program is not specific.  It considers, in conversation with your student peers as well as in open dialog critics, art, craft and design. Those three disciplines are the umbrella for all human thinking and innovation including all of the sciences. In my opinion.

I considered the program vast in scope, our dialog was not art or craft or design specific.  There are many different teachers and students with different interests and backgrounds.  No one previous language is suitable to discuss all the different view points in the room.  At times this is freeing and at other times this is like treading water and gaining no traction for what you want to do.  At no one time did I ever feel that I had an ally in my group who had the same intentions or expectations in this program while in grad school.  

While the generalized language we developed over the first year opened up my mind to possibility in the things I make and what they could be, at no time did I find a focus.  Personally, only now, some 5 years later do I feel like I know what I want to make as well as gained a group of like minded people to help support those ideas.  And I had to move across the country to do so. I did meet one person during grad school to help with my current situation though. 

This may all sound like bad things, it is not.  I say if you want your practice expanded, go for it. It is the long road, you may not find your immediate group.  You will be exposed to one or two guest artists or mentors who you respond to and they may become helpful to you after school.  

The program is odd, it is what you contribute to it, it is very open in that way, you may feel empowered by this or you may feel isolated at times.  There is not much of a previous history of which to attach your anchor to. (there maybe now, as I said I was part of the first class, I had no anchor, but there are more current graduates who have looked to me and my class for support, I did not have that opportunity.) 

This may all seem pretty wishy washy, but I will end on this, if your graduate intention is to focus on a medium or a certain discipline, a certain way of thinking (for instance a specific interest in ceramic sculpture) consider another school, if your graduate intention is to loosen up and explore other ways of creative thought consider the ACD program.

FYI the ACD program has other things to take into consideration as well, there is a strong focus on branding, marketing and entrepreneurial studies.  This may or may not be of interest to you and therefor you may or may not find distracting to you creative interests. 

Grad school in the ACD program did not further my career, it confused the shit out of me, which I think is what all grad school programs are supposed to do.  Its called being a student.  I took in a lot of information, I considered a lot of other peoples interests that I had no interest in, I learned patience. I learned to look at the world in a more broad light, I can talk about the same thing from a few different stand points now.  I appreciate this greatly,  but I will say that most people don't appreciate this, people want specifics, they want to know what you do in one sentence, they want to be able to attach what you do to something they all ready know, they want to label what you make and what you do.  I find this annoying and limited in thinking about things today.  But I enjoy challenges and that won over my decision to go to the ACD program.

Sorry, there are no simple answers, (that's probably due to my education in the ACD program as well.)

Best of luck,

Jason Lee Starin