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.
No comments:
Post a Comment