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‘Monument’
Possibilities and Losses-Transitions in Clay 22 May - 16 August 2009 mima, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art
Possibilities and Losses was an exhibition featuring four artists who work with clay presented by mima and the Crafts Council: the exhibition was curated together with Clare Twomey and her work featured alongside works by Keith Harrison, Linda Sormin and Neil Brownsword. Each of these artists challenge traditional perceptions about clay practice and its relationship to the historic model of craft, they present certain possibilities for clay as a specific media, while at the same time recognizing that change is inevitably at the expense of that which came before. The exhibition offered an insight into the experimental large-scale clay work emerging from these contemporary, contextually aware, ambitious and material-specific artists, and included major new commissions that responded directly to mima’s gallery spaces.
A Fragile Existence
A monument in the classic sense of the term commemorates a person, event or action; it can refer to a written record, a sepulchre, a boundary, or the remains or remnant of something. Dawn Ades1
In Monument, broken tiles, plates, cups, jugs, mugs and other ceramic shards possessing ghostly traces of everyday domestic life are stacked on top of one another: shattered domestic objects assembled on a monumental scale. Characteristically, Twomey places materiality at the heart of the work. The brittle fragility of fired ceramic renders Monument precarious, at odds with the permanence of imperishable materials such as stone, bronze or steel ordinarily associated with the making of monuments or municipal sculptures – materials which, according to Ades, ‘guarantee eternal fame, while reminding the spectator of mortality’.2
Twomey’s precarious, broken monument threatens to break further, collapsing in a landslide of broken china. This threatened collapse appears all the more likely when we consider that Twomey’s works often undergo destructive transformation during their time bound existences – porcelain tiles are broken down (Consciousness/conscience 2001-4) and unfired clay flowers dissolve into the earth (Blossom 2007).
In Monument, this destructive transformation is iconoclastic in potential: Twomey deliberately sets up a tension between the threat of obliteration and the title of the work, for the purpose of a monument is to make someone or something permanently visible. This latent fragility combined with the everyday nature of these broken objects imbues Twomey’s Monument with pathos, defying the heroic narrative of the ‘monumental’. As Simon Groom has observed, ‘works that make the very fragility of the material their subject often exist in a state of extreme tension that itself threatens a kind of violence’.3 The encounter with this mountain of broken china evokes an overwhelming sense of loss, of trauma.
Monument was conceived following Twomey’s encounter with a ‘pitcher pile’, a vast heap of broken china, at the Johnson Tiles factory in Stoke-on-Trent. Consisting of factory seconds from companies across the Potteries region, the pitcher pile is made up of objects that are less than perfect or have been damaged in some way during the manufacturing process. Some objects are glazed and painted, others are plain. Johnson Tiles acts as a recycling centre for the whole of the Potteries area, grinding down this ceramic waste and using it to create new tiles. In this way these broken pots, denied their user-value in this lifecycle find redemption for future use. However, by presenting us with a mass of broken objects instead, Monument undermines what we ordinarily think of as valuable or useful, and at the same time mourns a loss of function.
Combining approximately twenty cubic metres of broken ceramics from the Stoke-on-Trent factory with around ten cubic metres of broken tiles from the Zuiderzee collection from different dates and in different styles, Monument is largely monochromatic, animated by occasional flashes of colour.
Sometimes this colour comes from the Delft pieces, flashes of history and an almost-obsolescent method of production. Sometimes these chromatic interruptions are from the painted or glazed factory remnants, a reminder of what is currently at stake in the pottery producing regions of both the UK and the Netherlands. Framing this within the context of the present economic crisis, we can interpret Monument as a monument to a dying industry, to dying skills – on 5 January of this year, it was announced that Wedgwood had gone into administration.4 | 
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Founded in the heart of the British Potteries in1759 by Josiah Wedgwood, ‘the Father of English Potters’, Wedgwood is synonymous with both British pottery and the Staffordshire region. The local newspaper, The Sentinel led with the headline ‘Wedgwood: Worldwide pottery icon can’t just disappear’, echoing the words of Mark Meredith, elected mayor of Stoke-on-Trent, who issued the following statement: ‘Wedgwood is a worldwide symbol of the design and manufacturing skills of our people, and we must not allow that to disappear.’5 At over eight metres tall, Twomey’s timely Monument answers this call to action, making the pottery industry and its associated skills visible on a monumental scale. However, the materiality of the work and its seemingly precarious construction threaten to crumble and potentially disappear.
Grief at the waste of skill and a desire to commemorate dying skills is also present in Twomey’s Blossom 2007, which comprised thousands of fragile, handmade, unfired clay flowers which were ‘planted’ at the Eden Project, Cornwall. Exposed and vulnerable, the flowers deteriorated and disintegrated over several weeks. Hinks China, the company who made these delicate flowers has now closed; the skills and women who worked there have disappeared like the clay flowers themselves which, over time, vanished back into the ground.
Towering at 8 m tall and just visible from outside the museum compound Monument’s subtle presence is silent and threatening. Twomey’s ominous ceramic pile simultaneously occupies both the barn-like museum building and its surrounding courtyard. Broken industrially manufactured everyday objects from the domestic realm transgress into the museum and are mixed with historic tiles from this public museum collection – that which should be contained and cared for inside the museum now spills out onto the cobbles. It is shocking to see so many broken objects in this institutional context. Twomey subverts the role of museum: caretaker of precious objects and the arbiter that defines in historical terms an object’s use, function and significance. In this way, Twomey plays on Zuiderzee’s status as museum and its relation to history, her artistic intervention refashioning its architecture as a site of historical witness.
The atrocities of the twentieth century, particularly the Holocaust, have called into question the nature of ‘monuments’ and their ability to adequately commemorate unspeakable loss. The ensuing debates around proposals for a German Holocaust Memorial set against the backdrop of twentieth-century European history, specifically the affinity felt by the totalitarian regimes of that period for monuments and heroic monumental aesthetics, have resulted in a discourse of monument versus counter-monument, the latter term coined in the 1990s by the historian James E Young. With the term ‘counter-monument’, Young proposed a radical departure from the traditional iconography of monuments, placing absence at its heart. By replacing a solid monolith with a space for contemplation, by staging a ‘disappearance’ of the physical monument structure, the idea was to encourage critical recollection and responsible remembrance.
The monument versus counter-monument debate has a counterpoint in two psychoanalytical models exploring the relationship between trauma and representation. The first, an essentially Freudian account, explores the way in which ‘representation returns us to trauma, at the same time that it facilitates a gradual assimilation of the traumatic event’, offering a theoretic understanding of the commemorative monument6. The second, an essentially Lacanian account, posits that there is no relationship between trauma and representation – trauma is unspeakable, unrepresentable, underlining the pertinence of absence in the construct of the counter-monument. Twomey’s Monument hovers between monument and counter-monument, between representing a trauma and self-destructing in order to deny that representation, a monument in name and physicality but a counter-monument in potential. Art historian Isabelle Wallace problematizes this dichotomy as follows: ‘Is it possible that representation’s relation to trauma is not a matter of representation’s ability to present again, that it is not a matter of trauma’s assimilation or inassimilability as facilitated or precluded by the representational act? ... After all, isn’t it by now clear that certain representations are, in and of themselves, traumatic events?’
Confronted with this mass of broken ceramics, we experience an overwhelming sense of vulnerability and loss, the china shards recalling objects we have broken and the emotions we experienced. Mark Currah explains: ‘the breaking of china is usually a moment for regret and, in the case of a much-used and well-loved domestic item, one of great sadness.’8 There is a simultaneous presence and absence of traumatic narrative in Monument – we can see these objects are broken but are denied the narrative of how they were broken or even what they were, who they belonged to. In its accumulation, Monument questions how we lament broken objects – do we ever really recover from their loss or do we stockpile these traumatic experiences like the Staffordshire pitcher pile? Rather than the catharsis perhaps promised by a ‘monument’, Twomey’s Monument threatens to come crashing down at any moment, exposing us to this trauma of loss and regret all over again.
The uncanny nature of these lifeless objects disturbs us – they appear simultaneously familiar yet unfamiliar, broken but their forms still recognisable, the colour drained from this ghostly monochromatic mound. This becomes more disturbing when we consider the historic, cross-cultural understanding of the ceramic vessel as a visual metaphor for the human body in the context of Twomey’s use of fragmentation as a visual strategy. In Mourning and Melancholia, Freud describes the potential transformation from a state of mourning to one of narcissistic identification with that which has been lost and the consequent transformation of object-loss into ego-loss.9 Art historian Lisa Saltzman summarizes Isabelle Wallace’s exploration of our own mortality as being at the heart of experience of art as trauma in paintings by Edward Manet and Jasper Johns: ‘Wallace pairs the paintings in order to characterize the experience of art itself as a traumatic one in which the spectator is exposed to the mortifying image of a lifeless object that uncannily resembles but nevertheless fails to restore its ostensible referent.’10 The trauma experienced at the heart of Twomey’s Monument is that of an encounter with our own fragile mortality, our understanding of these broken ceramic vessels as our own fragmented bodies, the heap of broken china becoming a pile of broken bodies.
1Dawn Ades, ‘Art as Monument’ in Dawn Ades, Tim Benton, David Elliot, Iain Boyd Whyne (eds), Art and Power (Hayward Gallery, London, 1995), 50. 2ibid., 56. 3Simon Groom, ‘Terra Incognita’ in Simon Groom (ed.) A Secret History of Clay: From Gauguin to Gormley (Tate, 2004), 22. 4Wedgwood Waterford also owns Royal Doulton, and other British luxury china brands. This also follows the demise of Spode last year. 5Quoted in The Sentinel, 7 January 2009. 6Freud’s ideas as laid out in ‘Repeating, Remembering and Working Through’ (1914) are succinctly summarized in Isabelle Wallace, ‘Trauma as Representation: A Meditation on Manet and Johns’ in Lisa Saltzman and Eric Rosenberg (eds), Trauma and Visuality in Modernity (Dartmouth College Press, New Hampshire, 2006), 3. 7ibid., 4. 8Mark Currah, text on Clare Twomey for Approaching Content exhibition at the Crafts Council Gallery, 2003. 9Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (first published in 1915, revised in 1917) in Angela Richards and Albert Dickson (eds), On Metapsychology, Volume II (Pelican Books, London, 1991), 258. 10Lisa Saltzman and Eric Rosenberg’s Introduction to their Trauma and Visuality in Modernity (Dartmouth College Press, New Hampshire, 2006). | |