ARTS
Crafts
The dangers of vesselism
Tanya Harrod
Vessel (Serpentine, till 11 October) Alison Britton: New Ceramics (Contemporary Applied Arts, till 10 October) Vessel is worth a visit simply because it brings together art which usually inhabits different worlds. The exhibition is defined by its title and any contemporary British sculptor who has done something vesselish `Double pot', by Alison Britton at CAA.
recently — anything with an inside and an outside or even just a sort of hollowness is included. As so often with thematic shows, the general effect is incidentally pleasing, with some ravishing sculptures by Joel Fisher, Antony Gormley and Peter Kinley. Painters and sculptors who have had a stab at decorating and making containers are also there — John Hoy- land's splashes done at Fulham Pottery, Adrian Wiszniewski's Omega Workshop efforts, Barry Flanagan's essays in coiling, and artless little pots by that professional boundary-crosser (is it an apron or is it Art?), Stephenie Bergman. The proper potters, Alison Britton, Janice Tchalenko and Lucie Rie, do their best in very mixed company.
What do we learn from these juxtaposi- tions? In the craft world the word 'vessel' has somewhat sinister connotations. Amer- ican ceramics dealers use it to describe a large, expensive, non-functional pot re- plete with meaning and mythic associations — America has status-conscious craft col- lectors whose egos need constant atten- tion. While big can be beautiful, the arrival of 54 'vessels' at the V & A from the States in 1986 illustrated the dangers of vesselism. These American pots had the overblown air of giant hamburgers, partly because they were not meant to be picked up and held in the hand (one of the chief joys of owning pottery) but rather intended to hold their own in the airy spaces of an art gallery. Perhaps that is why our greatest living potter, Lucie Rie, looks curiously isolated at the Serpentine. She has never abandoned the domestic scale and form which she and the late Hans Coper per- ceived to be the proper province of potters. Her work has a modest beauty which for all her fame attracts few disciples these days. Especially after a visit to America, most potters speak thoughtfully of scaling up their work and doing something larger. Partly, therefore, for reasons of scale Alison Britton looks most at home in the Serpentine exhibition. This is not a critic- ism, as her ceramics possess so many of the qualities of good sculpture that it makes much of the conceptual work at the Ser- pentine look as remote from that stern discipline as video. A few welded steel sculptures by John Foster or Katherine Gili would have kept her better company.
Alison Britton is also at the CAA in a triumphant show which addresses all the problems of the vessel without looking in the least bit over-blown or American. Her bowls and jugs are constructed out of slabs of clay. At their simplest they resemble pots that have been plucked out of a Cubist painting. All have a multiplicity of viewing points, and as you walk about the gallery new delights continually reveal themselves. As well as having complex, ever-changing silhouettes these pots are also decorated in a bold abstract fashion: a flat surface will often reveal a superb little passage of painting. They are like the best, most thoughtful sort of sculpture somehow mira- culously married with painting. They repay lengthy examination but apparently they are not fine art: the Serpentine show notwithstanding, Alison Britton is looked on as only a potter.
Eager to solve these painful contradic- tions, potters, metal-workers, basket- makers and glass-blowers were to be found in Birmingham last weekend spending two sunny days indoors at something unbeliev- ably called 'The Vessel Forum — a Gul- benkian Craft Initiative'. We all know that the crafts are sick and have been so since the Renaissance; the Gulbenkian Founda- tion hopes to help with cleverly planned injections of cash. As conferences go this was lavish, but despite the chairmanship of the colourful poet Adrian Henri, initially the atmosphere was bleak. What could one honestly say about the Vessel? There was talk of symmetry and asymmetry, inside and out, flatness and hollowness, design and intuition and even maleness and fem- aleness. Everything appeared to be in pairs and Adrian Henri was all at sea. `Do you still go in for that throwing business?' he asked Alison Britton.
In the discussion groups grim practicality prevailed. How and where to sell vessels was the main topic in my group. 'Why are we here?' asked a potter called Henry Pim desperately. 'If you go away with one idea in your head I'll be happy,' said the Gulbenkian apparatchik soothingly. Dur- ing the after-dinner speeches on Saturday night dear old John Mallet from the V & A ceramics department suggested that pot- ters should keep their vessels small if they hoped to be in his collection. A small group walked out in protest. Josceline Dimbleby enthusiastically described mak- ing a stew in an edible vessel — a pumpkin. When our discussion group met early on Sunday morning everyone was cross about the dinner. After more talk of marketing, a percentage for art in building legislation and a museum of modern craft as an alternative to the limiting vision of John Mallet, our group disbanded.
Later that day Elizabeth Fritsch revealed what can be said about the vessel if you think hard. She invoked dance, Borges, jazz and Thomas Browne's Hydriotaphia. `I've never felt more superfluous in my life,' murmured the man from the Museum of Mankind, but went on to give a dazzling little slide show of the vessels in his more adventurous museum. This was more like it, and the Forum reached a peak of pleasure when Dr Patrick Nuttgens, in what was called a keynote address, talked volubly about the difference between Homo sapiens and Homo faber, between technology and science, between Zen and the art of motor cycle maintenance, and between pleasure and action. Although ideas were still coming in pairs, as we listened to this great communicator we seemed to soar up into an empyrean of Third Programme talks and recycled Brains Trust discussions and thankfully left the Vessel with all its circular contradictory arguments far behind. For with vessels, as with all art, it is really only the results which count.
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