ceramics uncontained—mutual affection: the victoria schonfeld collection @ everson museum & radical clay: contemporary women artists from japan @ art institute of chicago.
The pots, urns, mugs, and vases in the Victoria Schonfeld Collection and the Radical Clay exhibitions long to be more than vessels. They want to be the thing itself, not the container for the thing. They bend, turn, gyrate, twist, laugh, scream, wilt, gesture, almost seem to break. They dance. Sometimes they seem to hold something inside that they refuse to show you. Other times, they reveal their most interior dimensions. Some are silent. Some give you lip. Some are cold and stony. Others seem full of hot air, preening for your eyes. They mug for the viewers eye. Some feel like they want to protect. Others seem to want to bump into you, to break out from their brittle, fired, frozen state. Some accost you aggressively, while others feel like they are running away from your gaze. Some are gentle and nurturing, others are violent and extreme. Some are interested in your eyes, maybe even in your touch. Others glaze over at the thought of human interest.
Do these objects have genders? Not really, but like all sculpture, sometimes they feel like they want to mess with the relationship between body and identity, between hands and dirt, between the cultural and the biological.
My favorite moment in these exhibits of ceramic glory is Steve Tobin’s video, Bang, in which he uses firecrackers to pop, blow up, and shape clay. These are the sounds of something soft but sturdy surviving, something beautiful emerging from explosive heat, something capable of capturing the pressures of the world without melting away. It is a video about creation, edited in a sonic and visual rhythm of fast and slow motion to reveal the meeting of elements to create motion from stillness, the impact of air on earth.
In the end, what are any of us but vessels, fragile holders of ideas, not so much forged like steel as cooked in kilns, shaped by our worlds, capable of containing multitudes, eventually cracking up into shards? Ashes to ashes, clay to clay—but first, there are stances to take, poses to critique, things to carry.
