Synopses & Reviews
Ceramics had a far-reaching impact in the second half of the twentieth century, as its artists worked through the same ideas regarding abstraction and form as those found in other creative mediums.
Live Form shines new light on the relation of ceramics to the artistic avant-garde by looking at the central role of women in the field: potters who popularized ceramics as they worked with or taught male counterparts like Peter Voulkos, John Cage, and Ken Price.
Sorkin focuses on three Americans who promoted ceramics as an advanced artistic medium: Marguerite Wildenhain, a Bauhaus-trained potter and writer; Mary Caroline Richards, who renounced formalism at Black Mountain College to pursue new methods outside of academia; and Susan Peterson, best known for her live throwing demonstrations on public television. Together, these women pioneered a hands-on teaching style and led educational and therapeutic activities for war veterans, students, the elderly, and many others. Far from being an isolated field, ceramics as practiced by Wildenhain, Richards, and Peterson offered a sense of community and social engagement, which, Sorkin argues, crucially set the stage for later participatory forms of art and feminist collectivism.
Review
"Adamson again demonstrates he is a scholar whose ideas cannot be ignored; for readers eager to grapple with the identity of craft, add Invention to the required reading list." - Perry A. Price, American Craft Magazine
Review
"Glenn Adamson is a friend of craft, but in The Invention of Craft he has come to deconstruct the narrative and many of the beliefs ofboth the practice and the discussion of craft as it operates in the 21st century...His arguments are clever and natural but complex...But, that being said, he has made this book for arguing. Reading the last seven lines of the book, the reader sees not only that Glenn Adamson is a friend of craft but that he is doing everything possible to take us and the whole field further." - Leopold J. Kowolik, Studio Magazine "Adamson presents an array of contextual arguments grounded in rigorous research, which allow the reader to draw their own comparisons as one delves further into the book...By shifting between different centuries and fast-tracking to the present day, Adamson carefully illustrates how craft is not only rooted in modernity but also how it has constantly manipulated itself to remain relevant to contemporary technology." - Zara Arshad, DesignersandBooks.com"The work is written well and provides a thought-provoking take on the subject. Students and other scholars of art history and the philosophy of art will find many uses for this work…VERDICT Recommended for only the largest libraries and only where there is very strong interest in the academic study of art history" - Jennifer Naimzadeh, Richland Lib., Columbia, Library Journal "Adamson here offers an impressive, authoritative revisionist historical analysis of the origins of craft...Adamson understands the concept of craft as a modern invention...A wide-ranging, deeply informed, and occasionally brilliant book, this important contribution to clear thinking about things made and their makers will appeal to sophisticated readers. Summing up: Highly recommended. Graduate Students, researchers/faculty, and professionals/practitioners." - K.L. Ames, Bard Graduate Center
Synopsis
Glenn Adamson extends his ongoing theoretical discussion of skilled work back in time and across numerous disciplines, searching out the origins of modern craft. Locating its emergence in the period of the industrial revolution, he demonstrates how contemporary practice can be informed through the study of modern craft in its moment of invention.
Synopsis
Glenn Adamson's last book, Thinking Through Craft, offered an influential account of craft's position within modern and contemporary art. Now, in his engaging sequel, The Invention of Craft, his theoretical discussion of skilled work is extended back in time and across numerous disciplines.
Adamson searches out the origins of modern craft, locating its emergence in the period of the industrial revolution. He demonstrates how craft was invented as industry's "other", a necessary counterpart to ideas of progress and upheaval. In the process, the magical and secretive culture of artisans was gradually dominated through division and explication. This left craft with an oppositional stance, a traditional or anti-modern position.
The Invention of Craft ranges widely across media, from lock-making, wood-carving and iron-casting to fashion, architecture and design. It also moves back and forth between periods, from the 18th century to the present day, demonstrating how contemporary practice can be informed through the study of modern craft in its moment of invention.
Synopsis
There has been a recent move in art history to reconsider craft practices in light of their relationships to the twentieth-century artistic avant-garde. This book focuses on (1) how ceramics culture evolved in the US when Bauhaus artists and designers emigrated from Europe during the run-up to WWII and (2) the understudied role of women artists in establishing ceramics as a sophisticated medium in the post-War years. No surprise: Black Mountain College is at the heart of much of it. Throughout, Sorkinandrsquo;s concern is how ceramics came to influence what is today called andldquo;process artandrdquo; and performance (for example, Martha Roslerandrsquo;s video Semiotics of the Kitchen, 1975). In both, the act of making or producing dominates as andldquo;artandrdquo; over any resulting object. The book centers on three case studies of women who advanced ceramics as an artistic medium in this country: Marguerite Wildenhain, a Bauhaus artist who taught briefly at Black Mountain before starting an important pottery in California called Pond Farm and writing several influential books; M.C. Richards, who taught English at the University of Chicago and then literature and ceramics at Black Mountain College and who collaborated with Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, and their coterie; and Susan Peterson, famous for teaching a ceramics class on TV in the 1960s, but who also taught in New York and then at Chinouard where she established their distinguished ceramics program and trained artists John Mason and Ken Price. Mason and Price went on to work almost exclusively in ceramics, but they used the material to make sculpture rather than functional pottery
About the Author
Glenn Adamson is Head of Graduate Studies and Deputy Head of Research at the Victoria & Albert Museum. He is also author of The Craft Reader (Berg, 2009) and Thinking Through Craft (Berg, 2007).
Table of Contents
The Invention of Craft
Introduction
Part One: ManipulationThe Centre Holds
The Carved and the Flat
The Undisciplined Artisan
Poor Plain and Paltry: The Decline of Carving
The Cutting Edge
The Hands of Others
Part Two: MysteryThe Age of the Reveal
Porcelain: A Modern Arcanum
Sleights of Hand
An Elastic Age
Explained Away: Craft and Cultural Improvement
The Task of Re-Enchantment
The New Arcanists
Part Three: MechanicalAll Things But A Self
State of Nature
Replication and the Industrial Artisan
The Reproductive Continuum
Analogue Practice
In and Out of Touch
Part Four: MemoryCraft as Memory Work
Dismantling Ruskin
United and Industrious
Affective Relations
Stitches in Time
Index