Projects
From things to readymades
An art history sub-project by Jorunn Veiteberg
Making art from things challenges the distinction between valuable and worthless. In her book Craft in Transition (2005), Jorunn Veiteberg used Kjell Rylander’s piece Untitled to illustrate this problem. It consists of an anonymous mass-produced cup linked together with a richly decorated coffee pot from a doll’s service. The two objects are of the same size, but does that mean that they are worth the same? Many people would probably say that the memories associated with an object from their childhood make it more valuable to them than the anonymous cup they drink from in the canteen every day. Value is a subjective concept, therefore, based on individual feelings and taste.
There are no clear-cut dividing lines between trash, things and readymades in the artistic context, but the three terms nonetheless carry very different cultural weight. A discussion of what these terms mean and the social capital imbued in them will be important in relation to understanding their function. Trash was used in the art world for most of the 20th century, from Pablo Picasso’s use of bicycle handlebars via Kurt Schwitter’s use of tram tickets and other wastepaper to Christian Boltanski’s and Kimsooja’s use of piles of second-hand clothes. Mapping different strategies and reasons for the choice of readymades as artistic raw materials will therefore be a key part of the project.
Jorunn Veiteberg will examine in depth questions relating to trash and art, recycling and recontextualisation, not just in relation to the traditional art history of the 20th century, but also with special focus on the major changes that have taken place in ceramics during the past 20 years. While studio ceramics was previously the antithesis of industrial production, new forms of industrial production and a new type of craft have evolved, which has resulted in a situation in which the dichotomies between industry and craft and industry and art no longer apply. This is due in part to the fact that the industry has started to produce exclusive, unique products or small series based on ideas from freelance designers and artists, and in part to the fact that ceramicists and other artists have started to use mass-produced industrial goods as raw materials. The extremes in this context are Dutch designer Hella Jongerius, who demands that traces of individual fingerprints be left in the mass-produced vases she has designed for IKEA, and British Neil Brownsword, who uses all kinds of waste from the ceramics industry as materials in his installations. This kind of practice has not just led to new thinking about the things that surround us in our everyday lives, but also to a new type of ceramic objects and new forms of ceramic art and design. The questions that arise in this context are both about seeing what is ignored in our culture and about the new meaning and status that results from making the invisible visible and the transient permanent. Other questions are related to theories about how low culture nourishes high culture and about the exchange and renegotiation that continually takes place between high and low practice.
In addition, however, this kind of practice also raises questions that are particularly relevant to an art college. What consequences will this shift in what are seen as relevant artistic materials have for an artistic discipline that is defined in terms of the materials it uses? What techniques and artistic methods should tuition be based on? To put it briefly, how should we manoeuvre in the expanded field of ceramics and craft, and where is the boundary beyond which categories and values collapse into watered-down meaninglessness?
Mishmash and trash
A museum-based sub-project by Anne Britt Ylvisåker
In late autumn 2004, the Arts Council Norway offered the West Norway Museum of Decorative Art the opportunity to take over a work of art, Lounge by a group of artists called Temp. The work was a large-scale installation put together from hundreds of individual objects ranging from furniture to unique ceramic objects, via second-hand books, periodicals, pages from newspapers, sketches, photographs, cardboard boxes, paper notes, food remains and smashed ceramics. A lot of this could be associated with trash. The museum declined the offer. Not because the piece was necessarily irrelevant to the museum or worthless as art. On the contrary, the museum regards Bergen-related ceramics as one of its priority areas and has followed Temp with interest. What it said ‘no’ to was the work of art as a museum object. While the piece as a whole was seen as valuable in the ceramics context, the museum regarded it as too impermanent to be preserved, since it would not be possible to present it in a meaningful way in future on a par, for example, with the museum’s collections of Chinese porcelain. Only parts of the piece could be preserved for posterity, and then only as individual items that, on their own, were uninteresting in the museum context. The work as a whole would be lost forever as soon as it was dismantled.
In her sub-project, Anne Britt Ylvisåker will examine in depth the questions this episode raises concerning works as art and works as museum objects. In particular, she will investigate what it means for the collections of museum of decorative and applied art as a whole to omit works purely on the grounds that they are unconventional in substance. And she will also raise the question of whether a virtual collection would be the ideal solution, allowing a work of art to be included in the collections of, for example, the West Norway Museum of Decorative Art as a museum object fully on a par with the physical objects the collections otherwise contain.
The idea of a virtual museum does bring the old definition of a museum into doubt, however. In the Code of Ethics of the International Council of Museums (ICOM), a museum was previously defined as follows: ‘A museum shall acquire, conserve, research, communicate and exhibit the tangible evidence of people and their environment.’ Acquisition was defined as one of four core areas, and the collection of material objects also governed developments in the other three areas. But what if objects cannot easily be collected, conserved and exhibited, or if they are not at all tangible? For many years now, contemporary art museums have also had to confront the issue of conserving transient artistic work such as performance art and temporary installations.
In 2004, ICOM revised its Code of Ethics and, in that connection, the idea of acquiring collections was left out: ‘Museums preserve, interpret and promote the natural and cultural inheritance of humanity.’ Equally importantly, however, the revised code included the notion of preserving a cultural heritage that is not necessarily tangible. Because the virtual museum will also consist of collections, just not collections of tangible objects. What do we really mean by a virtual collection and a virtual museum? Ever since the internet started to become widely available in the early 1990s, museums have explored how it can be exploited for their benefit. The internet has been tested in all kinds of ways, but most efforts have been aimed at attracting the public to the ‘real’ museums, for example by publishing practical information about the museums on the internet and perhaps also providing a digital overview of the tangible collections.
What Anne Britt Ylvisåker wishes to explore, however, is the idea of a collection that does not have an equivalent in the real world, as Werner Schweibenz, for example, has discussed (2004). Her research will include historical, practical and theoretical-analytical components.
The historical part will contain a professional analysis of the 120-year-old acquisition practice of the West Norway Museum of Decorative Art. This will form the basis for addressing the question of whether the challenges the digital society entails require change and new approaches.
The practical part will consist of establishing a virtual collection of contemporary ceramic art. Making the concrete selection and finding methods for the virtual design will be a useful practical experience that can form the basis for further theoretical discussion of two questions in particular. The first concerns the value of museum objects that only exist in a virtual museum context. Will they still enjoy the same status and ‘aura’ as are attributed to the physical museum objects that are selected and found worthy of being included in a collection for all eternity? Or will they only exist as documentation? And is it always possible to draw a clear distinction between museum objects and documentation in an age in which the narrative strands surrounding an object are often seen as being as important as the object itself? The other question concerns the storing of museum objects. Museums have a mandate from society to preserve the cultural heritage for posterity. The main field of interest of museums of decorative and applied art has traditionally been design and craft relating to the domestic sphere and, in substantive terms, such museums have faced few challenges when it comes to preserving their collections for posterity – dominated as they have been by objects that have been well-made from robust materials. This applies in particular to ceramic materials, which, as a result of the firing process, are virtually everlasting and are thus among the least degradable objects of all. It is only when a ceramic object is broken that it changes and its physical existence as a museum object ends. But what should museums do when artists replace this everlasting raw material with an impermanent one and ideas and processes become as important a part of the work of art as the physical object itself? Can a virtual collection pave the way for the collection of a group of objects that would be very difficult to include within the traditional object-oriented framework of a museum of applied or decorative art?
Through this historical, practical and theoretical-analytical research, Anne Britt Ylvisåker hopes to gain insight that can be used to evaluate whether the virtual museum is a dead end or the natural way forward, and, if the latter proves true, whether it is suitable for a particularly challenging material like fleeting ’trash art’, or whether it has benefits that can be applied to museum objects in general. In such case, will a virtual collection replace the traditional museum, serve to supplement it – or prove to be something different altogether?
The End of Art, the Rise of Craft, and the Institutional Theory
A philosophy of art sub-project by Søren Kjørup
Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte? (’The End of the History of Art?’) was the title of a little book published by the German art historian Hans Belting in 1983. When he published a revised and expanded edition in 1995, the question mark in the title was left out. It was no longer a matter for debate that the concept of art was not just historically given in the sense that it arose at a specific point in time – around 1400 AD, according to Belting – but also in the sense that art history, the specific art history project, had reached its conclusion. On the other hand, it was not necessarily a fact either. Instead, this statement of fact must be seen as an invitation to really get to grips with the theoretical implications of what is happening on today’s aesthetical scene, in the art institution, the artworld.
It was the American philosopher, art theorist and writer Arthur Danto who launched the concept of ‘the artworld’ in 1964, thereby becoming one of the inspirations for the so-called ‘institutional theory’ of art. Twenty years later, he came to realise that what he had actually described was ‘The End of Art’, which he used as the title of one of his essays in 1984. The fact that this was in the middle of the biggest boom the international art market had ever seen is in itself proof that the idea of the end of art does not mean that art is no longer being created, exhibited and sold. What the idea says is that art has ended because art no longer has a purpose in itself or a clear direction. ‘When one direction is as good as another direction,’ Danto concludes his essay, ‘there is no concept of direction any longer to apply.’
It is ideas like those we find in Belting and Danto (and many others – for example Gianni Vattimo and the contributors to the anthology by Berel Lang in which Danto’s essay was originally published), that form the backdrop to Søren Kjørup’s sub-project. Both aspects of these ideas, mind you, i.e. both the fact that the classic concept of art and aesthetic creation have broken down so that ‘anything goes’, and the fact this is far from meaning that the aesthetic field is in the process of withering away. On the contrary, ‘the end of art’ has opened up a wealth of developments in the creative field in general – not just in visual art, but also in craft – including the use of trash and readymades.
And perhaps the idea of ‘the end of art’ also provides an opportunity to rethink the whole relationship between art and craft – and the entre history of the aesthetic field – within an institutional framework. Art arose as an institutional phenomenon at a specific point in time – but what existed before that? And if art is now approaching its end, what will succeed it? In general, we regard craft as a peripheral phenomenon in relation to art. The idea of the end of art is an invitation to turn this relationship on its head, i.e. to see art as the cultivation for several centuries of certain specific aspects of aesthetic craftsmanship. Perhaps art today can best be understood as a peripheral phenomenon or a specialist institution in relation to something more general, namely what we, for want of a better word, must call craft?
The idea of art as an institution was launched around 1970. In Scandinavia, Søren Kjørup himself was the first to think along these lines, in his book Æstetiske problemer from 1971, i.e. at the same time as the American philosopher George Dickie launched his famous voluntaristic concept of art as (slightly abbreviated) ’an artefact upon which some person or persons ... has conferred the status of candidate for appreciation.’ Kjørup’s concept was completely independent of this, however, and it was completely different in character. Kjørup’s concept did not present art as something that ‘is instituted’; for him an institution is more a set of rules for people’s behaviour, in this case behaviour in connection with the objects and actions that are understood as art.
The idea of the end of art also raises the question of the historical conditions for the rules that our traditional artistic institution has cultivated. Various forms of social and relational art – or trash art and readymades – presuppose, for example, other perceptions of the autonomy of art and other forms of respect for individual works than the classics do. And part of Kjørup’s ambition for his sub-project is to analyse and discuss the institutional rules that are emerging for the aesthetic areas that will follow the end of art and, not least, for our dealings with the newest forms of craft, and ceramic art in particular.
Kontentum. A ceramic project concerning cultural value and material status
A practice-based sub-project by Kjell Rylander
The ceramic objects that surround us in our everyday lives are the point of departure for my project, which comprises three main lines of inquiry which I will reflect on and compare with each other. The main lines of inquiry are popularity/the value perspective, working methods/technique and object/space.
The working title of the project is Kontentum, a term taken from film production, where it refers to the application (use) of atmospheric sound, the ‘natural’ sound that exists in the place where a scene is recorded (birds singing in a park, a car in the distance, the rattling of coffee cups). In my project, Kontentum refers to the background noise that surrounds us in our everyday lives. This noise is so natural to us that we hardly hear it, but it is the result of human activities and interaction. A ‘humming of voices’ exists around ceramic objects such as cups, plates, jugs and pots, a buzz that accompanies their use (rattling, breaking, slurping, scraping etc.). I will use this anonymous background noise to examine the value perspective surrounding ceramic utility articles.
Kontentum serves as a metaphor for the social dimension, the atmosphere that results when ceramic articles are transformed into artistic objects.
But it also functions as a metaphor for what is in the background, what is anonymous.
The project I will carry out as part of the ‘Creating Artistic Value’ project will touch on questions relating to society and eternity, the individual and the moment. These may sound like big and pretentious words, but it is about attitudes to work and existence. To live, to be, to exist and not just to do, bring about and perform. How do I visualise words such as society/eternity and the individual/the moment in a ceramic work? I do not know yet what my new pieces will look like, so I will use the piece Ear-Brick, which I worked on almost ten years ago, to illustratethis. I designed it as an equation in which the ceramic mass was the solution. After some work and reflection, society/eternity were represented by a large brick the constituent parts of which have been shaped by nature’s eternal erosion. The individual/the moment were represented by the handle of a coffee cup, a coffee break, a moment, a slice of existence. I then worked on how the brick should stand, i.e. which of its six sides should be placed on the base, e.g. a table, but also on how the handle should be placed on the brick in order, if possible, to further imbue the piece with expressive/interpretative dimensions. The object was later purchased by and now belongs to the National Museum of Decorative Arts in Trondheim.
By describing different values perspectives in everyday situations, I will investigate whether I can create new or different values through my objects and sculptures. By a values perspective I mean, for example, how I more and more often skip drinking coffee at home in the private sphere and instead buy a coffee in a paper mug on my way through the city, in the big public domain. By everyday situations, I mean everyday routines such as meals, but also what I do in the kitchen or in areas in our everyday lives where ceramic materials are present in some way or another.
Even though my objects and sculptures are often called conceptual craft, I personally am wary about reducing pieces to mere illustrations of an idea or to symbols. The way I work does not consist of talking about things but through things, and my objects and sculptures are not intended to be answers or solutions to my questions, but perhaps more resemble question marks. As I see things right now, I find it difficult to envisage that my finished work/objects will be my conclusions. However, during the project period I expect to explore in more depth, or become more conscious of, my role as an artist and/or craft maker. The art critic and author Peter Cornell refers to craft as the overlooked middle child. And yes, I admit I want to wrestle and argue, but also listen and learn, in my siblings’ (art, design) room. These are boundaries that I would like to investigate. As the middle child, I am a caretaker, a conflict resolver or, perhaps even more, a mediator of the attentive and reflective type.
Perhaps I am a bricoleur, the dexterous type described in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s classic work The Savage Mind from 1962. Lévi-Strauss describes the bricoleur as someone who sets to work with his/her own hands, using other means than a professional would choose. The bricoleur’s ground rules are to make do with ‘what is at hand’ and with what he or she has gathered together on the basis of ‘taking what you can find’. Working with one’s own hands constitutes the core of craft. Can I give up working with my own hands and still remain a craft maker? Is there a limit? This is a question I want to explore. I wish to reflect on whether the way of working I have chosen is compatible with craft, and how it influences the cultural status of the material and the field. Certain work methods and techniques have had and perhaps still have a very central role in and in relation to craft.
Why is it that there is often so much talk about work methods and techniques compared with the functional or artistic values of the object? By putting things together in new ways and reorganising things and materials, the message they convey can be changed and made accessible in other ways than before. The new element that I wish to include in my work is the investigation of new materials such as textiles, paper and wood.
These materials represent other emotions, assessments and norms than burnt clay.
Textiles: my approach to textiles goes through the realm of the kitchen and materials such as towels and tablecloths associated with the use of china. Paper cups and plates/cartons are frequently used, and traces of that food culture can be seen in our streets and squares as more and more people choose to buy a cup of coffee on the way to work instead of drinking one at home in the morning from a china cup (perhaps to save time), a way of rationalising one’s time or…
I have previously worked with photography, first building up settings and then photographing them before applying bits of porcelain to the pictures.
The new materials will be linked with the ceramics. I will mainly work with second-hand objects, things that have been affected by time and whose origins are often anonymous, having been mass-produced industrially, things that have moved between and crossed geographical and cultural borders. Everyday things. The things that, to paraphrase Peter Cornell, live a hidden life and are already imbued with meaning. In his poetic book Things. On the visibility of things (1993), Cornell writes about the everyday anonymous things that can suddenly appear to be filled with meaning. They are unveiled to our attentive and wondrous gaze and become visible to us as they are torn from their context and their normal use. The working title ‘Kontentum’ aims to re-establish the connection with things by relating them to the ‘buzz’ (the background noise) from users who have imbued them with cultural meaning through everyday use. Valuations that originated in the kitchens of private homes come into contact with the public sphere in exhibitions in galleries and museums. Since I started working on the project in January 2009, I have been working on porcelain/paper. My point of departure is paper cups that I have seen on the street, crumpled up and trampled objects devoid of all value. I think about my own attitude to my morning coffee…I make sketches where I combine different parts of porcelain cups with the trampled paper cups.
Working with paper makes me consider what it means to be a research fellow. It will be a period in which I will write a great deal. In 2009, I participated in an exhibition that toured Sweden entitled Tingens talan i teoriernas tid (What things tell us in the age of theories), and I believe that I am also contributing to bringing craft closer to what some art is concerned with, namely that, in our age, we should take a textual approach to art, as the philosopher Sven-Olov Wallenstein has also argued. Yes, the title What things tell us in the age of theories tempts me to start working with my hands directly on the paper, to subject the material (paper) to noise of various kinds, noise connected with my attempts to create a textual mass that will cover the paper like a glaze. My investigations aim to unite things and theories in objects. In the background is the craft theorist Peter Dormer's preaching about the craft maker as a person with tacit knowledge and great bashfulness - yes, but also the work of the hand, and that is required to formulate written words.
Second Hand Stories - the ‘found’ object in contemporary material based art
A practice-based sub-project by Caroline Slotte
The subject of my study is the use of second hand objects within contemporary material based art. My point of departure is the currently increasing trend of using existing objects as raw materials. While this is a contemporary issue, I see that an in-depth discussion could have both general, social significance and topic-specific relevance.
Of interest to my own artistic work is the memory-bearing aspect of the ‘found’ object. In my analysis I will put special emphasis on questions relating to how used objects and their associated memories interact on an individual level. What role do the objects in our surroundings play in the creation of continuity in our lives, in the construction of a continuous life story? Objects in our private sphere stir feelings in us and connect us to our history. Some of these associations are personal; others are, if not outright universal, at least common for individuals in a certain cultural sphere.
These issues are directly related to my own creative practice, and I will explore them through A) artistic work, B) self-reflective analysis of the work process and the theme, as well as through C) theoretical studies. With this study my intention is to highlight the use of second hand objects as observed in contemporary, material based art – with special emphasis on the relationship between people, objects and memories. In my creative work I aim for a development towards clarity concerning my artistic motives and the issues I address.
The end result of my fellowship period will consist of three parts: 1) a collection of reworked objects, 2) two solo exhibitions (showing the objects) and 3) a final publication.
The manipulation of existing material is central in my work. I rework found objects, mainly second hand ceramic items, so that they take on new meanings. I base my work on the ability of these objects to turn our gaze to the past, to point back at their own life story. This symbolic connection with the past, manifest in used everyday objects, fascinates me. Like photographs, clothing and other remnants of lived lives, these objects are marked by an unknown subject. My aim is, through direct modification of the ceramic material, to indicate the stories contained in these objects.
Memory is a key concept. While it is not my own, autobiographical memories that are in focus here, memory as a phenomenon fascinates me: how human consciousness is shaped by the memories she bears. When I speak of memory as an aspect in my art, I also refer to the fact that human associations and reactions always build on previous experiences, on something experienced and remembered. In the associations that occur when encountering recognisable objects (and can thus be expected to occur when encountering art consisting of recognisable material), the viewer’s personal memory always plays a significant role.
A new perspective to consider in my artistic work is the role of objects within the private sphere as bridges, not only into the individual person’s memory world, but to a collective “memory bank”. As a result of that, what particularly interests me at the moment are objects that are widespread enough for an entire generation in a certain cultural sphere to have a relationship to them.
I have developed my own method of manipulating ceramic second hand material. With diamond reinforced drilling and sanding heads, I am able to reshape mass-produced items. This method of treating industrially manufactured ceramic items is, if not totally unique, at least unusual enough that it could usefully be developed. During my fellowship period I will continually experiment with this technique, looking for ways to improve and simplify my working methods and tools.
I’m interested in how the interventions direct or obstruct the associations of the viewer. The manipulated objects are characterised by a tension between the recognisable and the mysterious, the familiar and the unfamiliar. I rework the ceramics by cutting directly into it, by sculpting and sanding, and by combining elements from different objects. In this way, the work process becomes a way of questioning the material and highlighting stories contained in the objects.