You can’t quite see in this picture how beautiful Jay
Strommen’s ceramics are. The picture shows
color, shape and texture – even the contrast between clay and glass, earth and
translucence with all its gradations and flaws might be visible in high resolution
-- but depth is hard to show.
Strommen says these tablets were inspired by the view of the
river from his studio window at the Bridgeport Arts Center. So yes, that must be Bubbly Creek, an abused
slip of muddy scenery, given some gravity here. The watery surface is made from a ground glass
powder called ‘frit,’ he collects it by the bucketful from an industrial
user. In the kiln it vitrifies, as it
cools it crazes, so it’s crackled with light.
On the wall, its depth is changeable, depending on the light and where
you’re standing. If you hold it, it has
weight.
Strommen studied fine art at the School of the Art Institute
of Chicago. He honed his craft at Shigaraki, one of the ancient kiln sites of
Japan. So his work embodies two major
tendencies in post war pottery. One is abstract
expressionism, with its painterly concerns with the vision of the artist. The other brought with it a different set of
concerns – with tradition, humility and accident, the nature of the materials
and how they react in fire and air.
Strommen points to a shelf of vessels on the wall. “Someone familiar with pottery could look at
those pots and tell you what period in Japanese ceramics they trace back to. People have written dissertations about
traditional techniques.” But Strommen
says he was brought up short during his studies in Japan.
The kilns at Shigaraki were anagama kilns, wood fired
chambers built on a slope into the hillside in the 16th century,
using technology that dates back to the 3rd or 4th the
century AD. Firing them could take 2 to 12
days, stoking the fires was a collective endeavor. The kilns were packed artfully, the pieces
inside were unglazed, or else the glaze was spattered on in irregular
patterns. They would be painted with
fire, with melted ash and volatile salts, depending on how the fire hit them as
it roared up the kiln.
The collective aspect of keeping those fires stoked seemed
important, the results were beautiful in their unpredictability as much as
their rustic forms. But at some point it
struck Strommen that he couldn’t expect to participate in all that as
completely as the Japanese potters did. “They’re
burning wood that grew from the clay they’re firing in the kilns,” they were
part of an ecological unit.
So he came back to Chicago and established the Chicago
Ceramic Center, in an American setting. The studio has been built in an adapted
warehouse, the gas fired kilns inhabit a giant elevator shaft for ventilation. It’s art pottery, but also a small scale manufactory,
a school for teaching students, and a gallery to show pottery as both craft and
fine art.
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| The Dolni Vestonice Venus |
Pottery has depths in pre-history – it counts among man’s
earliest efforts to manipulate the elements into durable forms. Clay figurines of voluptuous women like this
one, dug from ash in the Czech Republic, are thought to be about 30,000 years
old. That’s roughly the same age as the world’s oldest paintings, glazed in
calcite over centuries, deep in Chauvet cave in France. Though archaeologists count them in different
industrial eras -- such periods don’t advance everywhere in the same way. More recently they’ve evolved as different
categories of art.
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| Paintings from Chauvet Cave |
Pottery has long been as much a technology as an art. The heat required to effect the ceramic
change, where it can’t be softened back to clay anymore, is roughly equivalent
to the heat you need to cast bronze; the heat for making stoneware could cast
iron.
In Europe, potteries were among the first crafts to be
industrialized. The English potteries at
Stoke on Trent employed some 20,000 workers by 1785. Potteries were also part of the movement that
arose against the industrial revolution’s impoverishing effects. The arts and crafts movement wanted to
restore a mode of labor where independent workers design what they make, and an
appreciation of handmade objects, over fancy goods that could be cheaply mass
produced.
In a 20th Century retrospective of British art
pottery, curator Oliver Watson used the term ‘ethical pot’ to evoke the cult of
the simple vessel, lovingly made by traditional method. Both the labor of the potter and the pot
itself embody a spiritual and moral dimension.
John Ruskin helped set the stage for the arts and craft movement
in the 1850s, in his writings on architecture, and especially his romantic view
of European Gothic. He claimed that he
saw a life in its decorative effects that was absent in the symmetry of Classical
structures. He thought it reflected the
independence of the medieval craftsman to express the vitality of his
imagination, where classical architecture had been built by slaves laboring to fulfill
a more static vision.
But Ruskin was no champion of equality among men, or their
labors. He believed a healthy society
was a hierarchical one, where each man applies his gifts according to his
station in life. “My continual aim has been to show the eternal superiority of
some men to others,” he’d once written.
He believed that fine art, especially painting, is the expression of the
spirits of great men, and can only be fully appreciated by their peers.
The distinction between the humble honor of rustic crafts
and the visionary authority of the painter has been persistent in the modern
west. Though the stature of the rustic,
in pottery at least, would take nuance from encounters with Japan.
The most famous proponent of the ethical pot was the
Englishman Bernard Leach. Though Leach
didn’t coin the term, and he wasn’t born in England, he was born in Hong Kong
in 1887. He studied fine art at
England’s Slade school, but he returned eastward in 1909 and lectured with the Shirakaba
Group, which was trying to introduce western art to a Japan that was opening
its doors to foreign influence after 250 years of isolation.
In Japan, Leach met Yanagi Soetsu, the father of the
Japanese mingei movement that would emphasize the beauty of everyday objects,
made by unknown craftsmen with traditional techniques.
Soetsu’s mingei
aesthetic was partly informed by a trip he made to Korea in 1916. He described what he found there as a “beauty
of sadness” that he traced to Korea’s long history of foreign invasions. He thought the Korean potter expressed it
naturally in the “sad and lonely lines” of his pots.
In the 1920s, Leach returned to England. He built the first anagama kiln in England
and taught Japanese techniques, but he also expounded on pottery as a
philosophy, a way of life. Decades later, some scholars would question Leach’s legacy
as interpreter of eastern craft for the west.
Edmund de Waal would argue Leach’s encounters had been limited to a few
educated Japanese, that they had created something hybrid, informed by western
arts and crafts as much as Japanese tradition.
De Waal also saw nationalist sentiments in the mingei movement, like the
nationalist ideals supported by folkish theories in Europe.
Aesthetically speaking though, mingei seems to echo an
appreciation for the rustic, in pottery at least, that traced back for
centuries, persisting as an alternative to the polish of porcelain, even after
Japanese potters had mastered both.
The Japanese have had a long standing respect for the skill
of Korean potters, and Koreans helped advance both aesthetics. It was Korean
immigrants who brought anagama kiln technology to Japan in the 3rd
or 4th century, and introduced Sue Ware, a high-fired stoneware,
barely glazed with ash, that came out of them. It was Korean potters brought back by Japanese
invaders in the 16th century who found the first kaolin deposits in
Japan, enabling a Japanese porcelain industry that would supply Europe when
Chinese ports were closed.
Sixteenth century Japan was restless with internal warfare
among competing strongmen and their samurai.
The mobilizations of war actually improved lines of transportation and
communication across Japan during the period, they channeled patrons to new merchant
and artisanal guilds. They also coincided
with a resurgence of Buddhism, with its understanding of impermanence and
suffering, and its capacity for tranquil acceptance.
The 16th century was disruptive in Europe too, with
the Protestant Reformation and the savage wars of religion that ensued. Enlightenment
thinkers determined they needed more reliable sources for their beliefs about
the world. Descartes concluded that
authority had to start with himself, as a thinking subject. Some say the turn to European modernity
started there, with a dramatic change in self understanding. The modern subject gave up trying to orient
himself in alignment with some divine or cosmic order, mediated by tradition,
and became self-determining. Or he
believed he did.
His perspective on the world would become cooler, he’d become
expert in objective observation and instrumental analysis. But he’d also place great value on self
expression, and the artist, as visionary, would climb to the top of that new
self regard.
In Japan, Buddhists pushed cultural change a different
way. Their vision of impermanence and suffering
inflected their vision toward emptiness, and the absence of self. They used the term “wabi,” first to describe the
loneliness of the isolated seeker, living in nature. Over centuries, wabi came to connote
simplicity, quietness, even an aesthetic of understated elegance.
Zen masters practicing the quiet, ritual intention of the
tea ceremony preferred the humble Korean tea bowl to the sophistication of
Chinese porcelain. They found wabi in
the roughness and asymmetry of pottery that came from the anagama kilns.
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| Japanese Sue Ware Bottle |
Strommen says pottery took off in the United States after
World War II, and that several leaders in the movement were U.S. servicemen,
back from the war, who went to art school on the GI Bill. The towering example of the returning GI
turned art potter is Peter Voulkos. He’s
credited with starting the American “clay revolution.”
Voulkos went to art school in his native Montana and taught
in California, except for the fateful summer of 1953, when he taught at Black
Mountain College in North Carolina. He
encountered some influential Abstract Expressionists there, and followed them
back to New York in the fall. Before
that, his work was functional earthenware, “elegantly thrown,” according to a
review of a 2016 exhibit of his “Breakthrough Years” – the exuberance was all
in the brushwork and in decorative techniques borrowed from printmaking.
Afterwards, it transformed into something else. His sculptures were reminiscent of vessels --
he’d start with a shape turned on a wheel, then break through the leather hard
surface, slice, smash, crush them together.
This sculpture, called Sevillanas, is almost 5 feet tall, it’s one of
his breakthrough pieces, finished in 1959.
The original was destroyed in a recent California earthquake, Voulkos
remade it in bronze. Collette
Chattapadhyay calls it a “totemic mass of compacted and compounded pots” in Sculpture Magazine.
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| Peter Voulkos' Sevillanas |
Voulkos said he was particularly impressed by Jackson
Pollock, the action painter known for throwing paint on the canvas, for the way
he challenged academic tradition. “Voulkos’
bold handling of clay are provocative in a manner similar to Pollock’s handling
of paint,” Chattapadhyay observes. They
were both interested in art as it embodies process, in accident that mirrors
the role of chance in human life, in unconscious patterns expressed.
Though Chattapadhyay draws contrast in the course of their
careers. Pollock might represent the terminal trajectory of the artist as visionary,
pursuing self expression until it hits a wall. His paintings generated lots of sound and fury
in the 40s, but by 1952, the critic Clemente Greenberg thought he’d lost his
stuff, and Chattapadhyay says he had few direct successors.
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| Jackson Pollock in the Act |
Voulkos by contrast had a sizable student following, she
names at least 8 of his students who became “significant” artists in their own
right, and Voulkos’ own work stayed vital until months before his death in
2002.
She suggests the difference might be partly the artistic
climates of the west coast relative to the east, and also qualities of the medium
-- clay’s humble earthiness, its malleability and toughness, its inherent age.
She describes a 2001 exhibit of Voulkos’ work, including
buckets, bowls and plates, encrusted with chalky pigmentations and soot from
the firing process “like relics from some unknown prehistoric civilization.”
There are giant stacks of smashed pots, built from up to 50
pounds of clay, fired in industrial size kilns.
They only “allude” to vessel from a distance, up close you can see their
interiors, “dusty, deserted,” daylight filters through the fractures like it
might have entered cave dwellings from the distant past.
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| Jay Strommen Tea Bowl |
Strommen says the number of kilns in the United States has
multiplied a thousand fold since the 1970s.
He remembers accompanying his mother to her pottery class at St. Cloud
college as a kid. At the time, Japanese Raku
was a hot technique. Rakuware is heated
rapidly, pulled from the kiln quickly when it’s still hot. The exposure to air, and rapid cooling, changes
the colors of the glaze. Strommen still
remembers the elemental impression of watching those pots pulled out from the
fire with tongs.
Years later, he’d talk his way into a job at a pottery
manufactory in Florida where he made useful objects by the thousand until his
fingers “got very smart.” He made his way to Chicago through the School of the
Art Institute, studying with Bill Farrell, and to the Bridgeport Art Center,
partly through connections he’d made at school.
Today he’s interested in themes of community, inspired by the
collective processes of wood fired kilns, and of transmitting the craft, but
also with themes of mass production. The
anagama kilns had been designed for the mass production of objects for everyday
use.
The Chicago Ceramic Center started as a school, with some
interest in working as a pottery factory of some sort. He opened the Gallery in 2016, after the
Perimeter Gallery closed. It had been known
for crossing the unofficial divide between decorative and fine arts for 35
years.
Since opening, the gallery at the Chicago Ceramic Center has
featured some of the major potters of the Midwest, including Bill Farrell and
Warren Mackenzie. In 2018 Strommen plans
a new series of 3 exhibits featuring master and apprentice, pressing the
boundaries of art as craft, and expression, as they explore ways to scale up.
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| Jay Strommen Bowls - photo from Strange Closets |
