Chris Clyburn on thu 5 feb 04
Mel,
As one of the younger generation (30 years old and only been involved in
claywork for the past 4 years) I have to say that at least in this part of
the country, students are still mixing glazes by hand from their own recipes
mostly. At least in the ceramics aspect we learn about Leech, Hamada,
Voulkos, Soldner, Coleman, and many other less known potters. We are taught
our history from the rough and albeit sketchy origins of clay work to
modern ceramics.
I think a lot of problems with students having the desire to learn about
past artists is that we see so much of the "art" descended from Marcel
Duchamp's "Ready Mades" and how much praise is given for work of such little
effort (never mind that the Dadaist's like Duchamp menat that type of "art"
to be seen as a farce and a statement against the artistic sensibilities of
the Acadamies) that it is frustrating when we see little connection to what
we are making and what is currently accepted. The Art community is the one
that seems to be ignoring its roots, becoming caught up in media hype and
crass shock value (note such exhibits as "Piss Christ" and the plasticized
corpses created by that German doctor and shown in the British Museum)
Many students I talk to are in awe of the artists who actually tried to make
aesthectically pleasing art. Most of my generation that I talk to arefed up
with shock value art and wish to see a return to the values of the older art
traditions.
I think if you talked to people of my generation that are artists because
they couldn't imagine living as anything else, instead of those that are
enamoured with the allure of "the artist" and the potential for fame, you
will find a generation obsessed with tradition, not to imitate it, but to
know where we came from so we can see where to go from there.
Tradition is not dead, nor is our society, but rather it is only hidden
underneath a veil of hype and fads. If you look hard enough, you will find
the next generation's Leeche's and Hamada's and you will find them most
assuredly grounded in their past. Tradition never dies, but fads do, and
someday, we will have a new paradigm shift when the public has had its fill
of needing a novel length artist statement to be told that the piece of
refuse (litterally, not figuratively) holds some deep esoteric meaning that
in reality was only intended to shock. A rose by any other name is still a
rose, the same could be said of things hauled from a junkyard and placed in
a museum with a lofty title and lengthy artist statement.
Have hope Mel, we are still out there, still making glazes, still making
clays, still studying the elegance of form, function and design, and what we
learn will be passed on to the next generation, as the previous generation
did for us. Like the clay on a wheel it is an endless circle, tradition
passing from one turn to the next as it has for the past 10-30,000 years, so
it will continue, time without end
Chris Clyburn
Passes the soapbox to the next in line :-)
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