Minimalism & Made in England
Now and then I am going to look at a single piece of work, and explain the thought process behind its making. This week I am going to talk about my project Made in England. It is the first of five posts.
I often explain to students that their work is likely to be most effective if the means of expression are constrained. Strip away the excess, I advise them, and get to the heart of what you are trying to communicate. In contemporary art people might describe this as ‘minimalism’. ‘Minimal’ doesn’t mean there isn’t much to the idea. The reverse is probably true. The act of editing generally enriches what you are doing, and makes the visual experience more concentrated.
I wanted to demonstrate this idea practically for a book I was working on. I decided to make something with ceramic tableware. I’d been lukewarm about the use of pottery in mosaic. Maybe I even had the odd outburst of anti-pottery evangelism. Mosaic made from tableware so often looks confusing, excessive and frighteningly sharp. There are varied patterns, colours, surfaces, textures and qualities of reflectivity – so many differences that the work becomes hard to read. Chaos threatens to overwhelm expression. And when mosaics made with pottery are easy to read, it is often because they conform to a well-known model – breaking up a plate and sticking it together again, for example. I can see the fun in doing it, but I’m not entirely convinced of the appeal of the finished product for anyone other than the maker. Of course you might argue – some do – that chaos is at the vanguard of delight. Exposure to the hitherto jarring allows us gradually to enter a new enlightened state of pleasurable coherence. The incomprehensible becomes beautiful – like Schoenberg and twelve-tone technique. I don’t know how many Schoenbergs there are amongst us pottery-smashers, but if you are one, I apologise for my prejudice.
So a dislike of tableware in mosaic was the starting point for my experiments. I issued myself with a challenge – show people how to create something that used ceramic tableware and retained visual coherence. I wasn’t really certain it could be done.
My first problem was colour. If I wanted to employ a variety of randomly collected material – things students and friends had given me to use over the years – what would unify them? The answer seemed to lie in flipping the plates and using the backs of them. Plates may have glazes and decoration on their face, but reverse them, and they are generally white. The printed material on the back of the plates – what I thought of at the time as ‘marks’ and would now call ‘backstamps’ – was interesting, and a challenge to combine effectively. How could I get these to read – to become the content of the work? The answer, as I suggested at the opening of this blog, lay in constraint. Use minimal means.
I will expand on this theme tomorrow. In the meantime here is one roundel from the finished work in the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery, from the mecca of ceramic, Stoke-on-Trent.
Looking forward to this series, Emma.
Once in awhile I will see a mosaic made with plates that is really beautiful and cohesive, and I think, you see, it can be done! Some artists have a knack at it, I mean they have made a picture, not just something random. So, yes, it can be done, I love the feeling of old plates as it makes me wonder, who ate off of this broken plate shard, or where has it been? That is the true appeal of doing this type of mosaic, thanks for letting me comment, Louella
The complexity of minimalism, is that at the Southbank, it is brutal. It’s elitist in that it’s a way of keeping visitors out of the great institutions that lie south of the river. “We are ugly and we don’t want you.” (a variation of Millwall’s football chant – no one loves us and we don’t care).
I know that your appeal for minimalism is different Emma. You are writing about constraint in art and I am talkiing about architecture. For me minimalism means a Nazi-Soviet architecture reflected in the National Theatre. Lasdun, who built it, talked openly about buildings evolving and certainly he was constrained by having far less money than he wanted. He has produced a magnificent skeleton, which should last for a long time, and there is some evidence that the original committee men who were in charge of defending bones from any change, who combined miniaturism with minimalism are being succeeded by a new generation, who for example have allowed some planting and lighting. Hurray for evolution and organic growth.
Minimalism in the public realm may provoke vandalism and may have partly caused a huge increase in mental health problems. Constraint and simplicity in art is pure and beautiful. Minimalism in architecture is another matter. Apologies for muddling these two subjects, it’s just that minimalism in my neighbourhood looks like the car park from hell.