Art as Social Enterprise

I wrote this short essay in response to a reading by art critic Polly Ulrich, which focused on the role of Functional Ceramics in the world of Contemporary Art. I took great deal from it in terms of questioning what we can define as contemporary art and how the establishment is opening up to a new way of thinking about the functionality of art in society. This is interesting to me as it's something I regularly question in relation to my own choice and efforts to make art for a living.

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‘The meaning of something is in its use, not in itself.”

John Cage


Here Cage asserts that we can find profound meaning not only in abstract ideas,
but more often through the effective, relational and ordinary activities through
which we conduct our lives.

Increasingly artists tap into diverse sources for their practices, often aiming to
bring aesthetic experience closer to practical lived experience,
understanding that, even while working in a field full of disembodied work
practices, abstract language and virtuality, that it is still the sensuous qualities
which give art its emotional power.

Functional craft art has always been unacknowledged and remains a kind of
primal, subterranean field underlying the variable trends in our visual culture.
Functional Ceramic work finds it’s main foundation in it’s relationship with the
body yet we should not forget that it maintains a simultaneous relationship with
the abstract world of concepts: such as social meaning, tradition, culture and
connection to history. As literary critic Bill Brown commented-

‘There is no such thing as a dumb object’.

The art establishment has long ignored the practice of functional ceramics as, for
one, it de-stabilises where art is expected to be located, placing it in everyday life
situations, away from the white cube gallery or museum space. This situation
however, has long been the goal of avant-garde artists, and increasingly we see
art works emerging which are based on encounter and a recognition that art should engage embodied perception, as an endlessly evolving relationship between one’s body, one’s mind and the environment in which we live. In other words, art that reflects the dynamic model of human existence.

Classical Greek (carried on by the Enlightenment) ideas about the superiority of
reason and logic over the experience of the senses are being reconsidered in the
post-modern world we live in. We now hold a more nuanced understanding of
perception and the world around us, thus our attitude towards what constitutes
an artwork must change also.

Functional Ceramics could be seen to operate at the centre of Contemporary Art
as it brings us closer to actual experience through it’s location in the social
context of daily life. Since Duchamp’s ‘Fountain, in 1917, we have seen the avant-
garde try to push art out into the world. The Western-European attitude that
defines artefacts by whether or not they should be placed in a gallery or museum
is one which has been learned and maintained so this practice should not be seen
as being intrinsic to art itself.


The example of Joseph Beuys planting 7000 Oak Trees in Kassel, Germany can be
seen as an illustrative example of revolt against this kind of elitism, here Beuys
is aligning his art with a useful purpose, a clear social goal and placing it firmly
outside of the gallery context.

Art works do not just represent reality, they create reality: they create images,
narratives and points of view which we absorb, and in doing so we are led to the
constructing and reconstructing of our own beliefs.

Art that deals with experience, social interaction and that which is located in
daily life, owes a great deal to the aesthetic traditions of functional ceramics as it
is an art that implements both body and mind. It stands as an art form of
humanizing values and acknowledges the importance of both knowing and doing
in the making of things.


Image - Rirkrit Tiravanija- contemporary artist residing in New York. He was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1961. His installations often take the form of stages or rooms for sharing meals, cooking, reading or playing music; architecture or structures for living and socializing are a core element in his work.