Ceramic funk

There’s one constant that makes contemporary ceramics a kind of romantic, science-fictional hybrid that illustrates its equilibrium through its own antinomy. It’s a sort of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde of the art of fire, using good and bad taste, referring to art and craft, while at the same time making a great leap, one foot in a decorative arts museum display case and the other in the liners and pistons of a rocket engine. It has been able to satisfy the capricious and ever-changing fashions of interior decoration, while inventing the unique concept of outdoor immortality in flowery ceramic farandoles for tombstones. Hybrid and popular, it has never ceased to be present.

In the conquest of modernity over the past, there is the act of destroying ancient history, since it would only be made up of traditions. Modernity becomes the creativity of a moment, before being swallowed up by déjà vu. It’s a never-ending loop.

At ÉSAD Pyrénées, in the practice of contemporary ceramics on the Tarbes site, apart from the students’ personal research, Funk ceramics is proposed as a branch of disruptive ceramics. Funk ceramics are not modern ceramics that disrupt the past. It has nothing to do with chronology. It is timeless, in a kind of immanent present. Contemporary art takes note of this material in its entirety, with its off-field.

In this research programme, ceramics moves seamlessly from the tradition of the trinket to the revisiting of religious statuary. It can be processual and abstract on the one hand, figurative and grotesque on the other, and can go from hot to cold in a seamless Raku firing. It is a mixture of the times of its past, and from one temporality to another, it interests us for a pedagogy of the present: from its rhizomes something always grows. Student productions are sometimes full of borrowings and quotations from its history. But the relationship with time is more cinematic, with properties of elasticity, compression and stretching. Its hardness does not make contemporary ceramics a rigid material. Whether you’re a beginner or a more experienced student, every stage of the process has its own story of potentiality. The 1995 performance by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, “Dropping a Han urn” is a symbol, a modernist attitude towards China’s past. A never-ending cycle. In this action of breaking a Han vase, I like the practical sense of emptying the cupboards of a history while opening onto the immensity of a potential. This knowledge can only be measured in its very destruction. The paradox of ruins.

Historically, there have been fertile exchanges of ceramic techniques between traditions and continents, with Japan influencing Europe, then later the United States, before being influenced in turn by the West… This ‘globalised’ character of ceramics is a precursor of contemporary art. Global, like trade, like art, like the 2 wars. This is the story of an American veteran of the Second World War, Peter Voulkos, who benefited from a campaign to reintegrate him into society through all kinds of training. He chose pottery. And that’s how a hobby influences history. In less time than it takes to write it, he was recruited in 1954 to set up a ceramics teaching programme at the Los Angeles County Art Institute (now the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles). Peter Voulkos changed the destiny of ceramics in the United States by creating the Funk Art movement in the 1960s, with a ceramic practice known as ceramic funk. Funk influences have permeated artists such as Ron Nagle and Kenneth Price, as well as others who claim to be part of the movement, such as Robert Arneson and Clayton Bailey. Their work significantly shakes up the way we look at “what to do with the paradoxes of ceramics”, which are both refined and vulgar, moving from popular culture to learned mythology, from the low to the high, from kitsch to erudition. Ceramic funk is highly ironic and subversive, with narration and figuration playing an important role. Like other Funk works, Funk ceramics relayed the message that people shouldn’t take art or themselves too seriously. Although in very different contexts, funk art recognises itself in the Dada movement. Here’s an extract from the Dada manifesto: “We are not naive enough to believe in progress. We are only concerned, with amusement, with today. We want to be mystics of detail, tappers and clairvoyants, anti-conceptionists and literary grumblers (…)”.

That’s the power of the present. To be concerned only with today, with amusement. Gathering energies, provoking the making of ceramics, producing the ceramic act. To do this, we need to invent encounters. The idea of bringing artists into the studio as explorers, without projects, like so many other more knowledgeable ceramics professionals, who on the one hand open up ceramics at the risk of losing it, and on the other concentrate it at the risk of caricaturing it.