Dirty Tricks: The relevance of skill, expression and authenticity in contemporary clay-based art

Abstract

This thesis addresses the renewed interest by contemporary artists in clay and ceramics, situating this phenomenon in the wider trend in current art of reconsidering traditional and overlooked forms of cultural production. The author proposes that this interest in clay can be argued to be the result of a decay of confidence in progressive post-conceptual and post-minimal contemporary art, a return to traditional skill, expression and authenticity that is a critique of the pervasive relativity of the post-critical condition where nothing really critical is possible. It is proposed that this return can be read as a heritage issue, a recognition of cultural value, an attempt to retrieve traditional practices and prevent the loss of knowledge, and also as a utopian project fuelled by Studio Pottery’s rustic dream linked to a contemporary desire for sincerity and personal expression. Nevertheless, these positions of reengagement with tradition are shown to be open to the critique that they are reactionary moves, a naïve search for certainty that can be seen as politically dubious. Within these complex conditions of ambiguity and reaction, it is argued that an attempt at reconnection to authentic practices is at least a positive, creative and affirmative alternative. The artists discussed in relation to these questions include Urs Fischer, Daniel Dewar and Gregory Gicquel, Richard Prince, Tino Sehgal, Ugo Rondinone, Thomas Houseago, Arlene Shechet, Nicole Cherubini, Rohan Wealleans, Sterling Ruby and A. A. Bronson. The theorists referred to include Edmund de Waal, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Georges Bataille, Glenn Adamson, Rosalind Krauss, Glenn Barkley, Hal Foster, Johanna Drucker, Marcia Tucker, Christos M. Joachimides, John Zerzan, William Morris, Victor Li, Ann Stephen and Andrew McNamara, Friedrich Nietzsche, Slavoj Zizek, Tanya Harrod, Yuko Kikuchi and Soetsu Yanagi.