The title for this exhibition, “Ceramics in the Expanded Field,” is drawn by Susan Cross, Curator of MASS MoCA, from Rosalind Krause’s influential essay on sculpture—published in an earlier form in this magazine in 1979—which was initially inspired by John Mason’s ceramic installations. Returning to ceramics, Krause highlights the medium and suggests that it has transcended its own limits as a category, as Krause has written of sculpture. The gallery features eight artists working in clay drawing on issues of history, identity and tradition, particularly the question of the use of porcelain.
The most impressive work on display is Linda Sormin’s gigantic conglomeration of interlocking clay tubes, more than a dozen video screens of varying sizes, a section of a spiral staircase, a dragon’s head used in Chinese festival dances, and crumbs curving in the air in and around a winding metal frame. Although stable, the shape suggests profuse movement, like a fire hose. Creation at first glance may seem like the end of the world, the triumph of chaos. On the contrary, its title, Stream (2020-21), highlights video images of flowing water and abstract patterns as well as the general fluid air composition of the sculpture, recalling the acrobatics of flying dragons in Chinese mythology and arts.
No other business here holds quite that power, though most of them have their own. Anina Major also combines clay, video and structure in a work titled We all come through water (2021), refers in part to the African diaspora. The title appears in neon at one end of a wooden pier rising from a space of ceramic shards evoking medium shells; On the other end are three large pots, two of which are grouped like baskets. On a video screen above a smaller adjacent dock, hands with long blue nails demonstrate the process of plaiting clay slats, carefully manipulating soft and flabby matter into a container shape. Except for the title, there’s nothing spoken about traffic or labor, but the viewer can feel the pain of longing in the distance between this intimate act of industry, like braiding hair, and the dislocated look of sidewalks on tattered ground—a tension emphasized by the video’s literal separation from the Greater Marina.
View “Ceramics in the Expanded Field,” 2021-2023, showing Rose B. Third countdown (2021), a portrait of Rose B. Simpson, Marya (Custom 1985 El Camino, 2014).
Courtesy MASS MoCA
Rose B. The work is beautiful, but it is an act of homage, not an invention; She is more convincing countdown (2020), composed of three eight-foot-tall ceramic figurines whose foreheads lean on a pillar, balancing each other and seeming to share some state or sentiment. Huge and strong, decorated with lacquer and necklaces, they are also painfully weak, and lack arms and feet. Armando Guadalupe Cortés presents a collection of 2017 videos bound in a different way. Standing with earthen pots tied to his long braids, he swings his head so that they break or holds the pots so that his arms explode and the pots collide. It is an enchanting activity – the dance of pain and endurance – but is his point of view to honor traditional form and utility, or to destroy it? The exhibition flyer claims that the videos provide a critique of gender work, but this is not visible.
Ceramic works by Nicole Cherubini, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, and Francesca DiMatio have received great interest in New York galleries. However, in the context of this exhibition, everything seems to be straining. Cherubini adds photographs and plants in pots to her pots, and Hutchins uses her disjointed sculptures, furniture, and terracotta as sets for music videos and performances featuring damaged objects and crawling objects. DiMattio creates three wild but playful figures – combined with a teddy bear and Lego – plus a whimsical chandelier and a nonchalant mural like 1992’s Anne Agee, but less clever than her. Lake Michigan bath mural. While DiMattio vigorously combines the traditions of decorative tile from many cultures, Agee’s gentle images adopt the popular blue and white pattern of ceramics to present industrially produced sanitary ware.
Clale Landscapes by Robert Irving is the least satisfactory contribution. In front of a wall-sized digital sky print, he displays tiled “floors” on low or table-high platforms: street rubbish, newspaper clippings, posters, cigarette cases, and found ceramic objects set in the mud. Elaborately set up in color and typography, the titles may suggest a search for place or identity, but the combined material is so diverse that this seems like a case of throwing it all away in the hope that something might stick.
Clay ultimately serves here as an icon symbolizing heritage (Simpson, Major, and Curtis) or environment (Hutchins and Irving), or challenging official tradition through exaggeration (Dimatio and Cherubini). The irony is that nearly all of these works succeed on their own terms, but their placement in a medium-focused gallery raises the question of how clay retains its meanings in this expanded field.
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