Traditions and Trends.
by
Philippe Barde

"No testament preceded our inheritance !"
René Char

To move forward in a profession, we have to work in a different way than what happened before us.

Traditions and Trends.
When Janet asked me to give a lecture I immediately agreed. A few days later when she asked me if the title «Traditions and Trends» suited me, I assured her that it was perfect and fitted my preoccupation.
It is only after some reflection that I thought of adding «Traditions and Trends: a point of view”. I am neither an art critic, nor an art historian. My approach comes from my experience as a man, an artist and a teacher.

Ceramists like tradition.
The word tradition in the field of ceramics evokes immediately Asia: China for its origin, Japan for its continuation and Korea for its sensibility. I would add that, beside the formal aspect of these influences, a more romantic idea of Asian philosophy impregnates totally the European way of perceiving ceramics: the Zen attitude, a pure gesture and a mystic approach of the material.

I could now show you beautiful celadon pictures or of red copper and relate the triple history; philosophical, historical and technical of these enamels. The history associated with celadon, research of jade or the history of captive light or how this enamel has travelled, evolved and been interpreted throughout the centuries. I believe that we all know these stories. If a ceramist likes tradition, this word means nothing for a contemporary artist. Tradition is to be done with a know-how.  Tradition has to be done with the history of art.  Does a history of know-how exist?

The sea.
Should I find an image to illustrate trade and tendency, I would privilege the sea.

1. its sediment deposit as a universal resource: it is our history;
2. its submarine currents are the tradition;
3. its swell due to external forces, but with a certain memory of  the under-water movement is the tradition;
4. little waves and especially the foam.  Foam means putting air into the water !  Don’t we speak about new or last wave  ?  It is the fashion.

When defining and reflecting on these notions, I wish to outline the possibilities to keep alive ceramics.  Ceramists should renew their practical experience as well as their thoughts   We are not personally affected by such a danger, but IAC as a group, should think about the continuity of ceramics from the ceramist point of view.

In the past, the tradition was the trend.
Tradition is initially connected with a master.  So that  the principles are linked with a knowledge and its transmission.  To understand the tradition, we should learn its codes and rules.  Beauty is objective.  It depends only on the rules observation.  The work is characterized by the model, permanent, closed and dogmatic, an extreme conception which leaves out novelty or relegates it to the rank of variation or shade.
Tradition is also linked with a culture or a country, China being a living proof.  One Ming bowl lives only because I connect it with China and reciprocally.  The form tells us, in this case, about the sophistication of this country and the aesthetic values of this period.  This bowl  talks about tradition as well as trend.

Tradition or classicism.
Last winter, I was in Mali to organise an exhibition around the discovery of the “so-called” world most ancient ceramics – 12-15000 years.  During my different trips, I met the Malian artist Fofana.  Even if he shows his works in the most contemporary events like Cassel, I was particularly interested by his position about tradition.  For him, the word tradition has a pejorative connotation because it is usually connected with an outside look on another culture meaning that it is static and perpetual.  No art form may recur, and even less remain eternally fixed on its basis.   On the contrary, he says that tradition constantly evolves.  He prefers to talk about classical rather than traditional.  Classic means for him the definition of codes and liberty to interpret them, all this outside a specific culture

Newness.
Before being a question of art or science, newness is a fundamental question of our spirit.  We are not born with finished knowing.  Our spirit is awfully incomplete.  There is a great difference between newness in science and art: the first one gives the discovery, the other the invention.  A discovery is replaced by a new one; each artistic invention is unique and meant to stay so.  Art keeps up, art sediments, it is our sea bottom.

Opposed to classicism, the fashion.
For humanists, light comes from the past and is linked with the model.  For the moderns, hope is looking towards the future.  Past and present are inferior, time becomes an actor.  We are seized by an ever lasting acceleration.  Future is in the speed and speed in the art, this is the newness.  It is perfectly clear that, at the end of the 20th century, our institutions have all become merchandised and don’t hide their taste for newness which eventually will be the final sale argument.  Fashion is definitively linked with trade and its fleeting nature is too far from our ceramics practice.

Between classic tradition and fashion, the trend
Hanna Arendt. in her book “Between past and future”, familiarized us with the concept of a breach between of a breach between the future and the past, this strange in-between where the things are not anymore or are not yet.  This is what I call the trend. Tradition is classic and moral, fashion is pretentious, trend is prophetic.

Whatever the quality< of the traditional ceramic scene, only the concomitant existence of a contemporary cultural landscape can give it an attractiveness.  Since the fall of communism in Eastern Europe and September 11th, we find ourselves in a time which rethinks our cultural identity.  The question is: should the ceramic art keeps its specific cultural values or, on the contrary, universal values of civilisation.

The ceramic art I stand for pursues, of course, these two objectives: registered in tradition but faced with a contemporary vocation.

Separate the wheat from the chaff
What separates trend from fashion ?  Fashion is superficial.  It follows the rules coming from outside.  It is passive and often late since it follows.  Comparison with the surface waves here makes sense as it moves all over.  When I feel somebody pissing on my heels, I change my way, so says Picasso.

In contemporary ceramics, one can easily find some fashion themes: representation of animals, for example, the rabbit being the most successful.  Humour and mockery are also willingly used.  Even if it is an attitude, this lightness seems to be appreciated.  The new graphics are like a decor.  The young graphic designers, who want some new supports for their work, looked for it in the particularly the kitsch of the plate collector.  As much as in tradition, the past is a source of respect, as much, it is now a source of irony.  Mockery is not far.  Project missing, quotation seems the only possible attitude.  The porcelain support, inevitably delicate, guides their inspiration.

Neo-figurines are all right in the contemporary world.  People appreciate to be looked at.  In their home, new collectors accumulate objects they like which reflect their taste and phantasms.  Ancient collectors have objects following quality criteria, new ones following their own navel

The new tableware implies a new conception of the meals   The old one was meant to stay for ever.  The new fashion implies a “flying dinner”.  Conceptually we find table sets sculptured from thrown away objects and transformed  into eternal objects.  Also in adjustable containers being cumulated in trophy so that they could be used at any moment.  Finally, art for art, a laboratory for an unique moment of indulgence, the new creators love to share their dreams, their expectations, their taboos so as to dispense their personal interpretation of the use and the décor.

Finally kitsch and anti-kitsch.  The kitsch object, denying the authentic in which tradition was founded, exchanges the idea of beauty for the idea of pleasure, thus creating an immediate happiness.  It is a production to please and which avoids all aesthetic risk.  The anti-kitsch is, of course, a reflection on the collapse of the good taste.  It draws us apart from the oriental precepts of Bernard Leach and revisits the great European tradition of porcelain, more particularly the Sèvres.  It isn’t any more the art of happiness but something disturbing.

Trend is more subtle to define and identify.  It is the subterranean current of fashion.  Waves produced by the subterranean current   One feels but it is difficult to be fully conscious.  Since we zap, we do many things at the same time. And this has changed our perception of time  This acceleration forces us, as visual artists, to think of more complex objects, without making the indigestible.  To try to catch the first look by an apparently simplified approach et thus allow to grasp other levels, seems to me to be a attitude specific of our time.

New objects moved from the museum to the home.  All the new productions of designers, but also from artists, seem to have for target the everyday and the private space.    The moving from the institutional to the private does interest us.  This is where the trend is fascinating.

In the design, the mapping and swapping of plastic towards the noble medium that are ceramics are very present.  At first, it looks like the fashion phenomenon.  But, in a finished world, one is not surprised to see designers change and recuperate objects.  This is the reflection of our consumers’ society.

Ceramists wish to create art, artists wish to create ceramics
Ceramics are again the fashion in contemporary art.  The artist who uses enamelled earth instead of ceramics shows us the new values he wants to update.  The direct contact with the material, a certain humour and in all cases spontaneity in the touch, the return of narration, liberty  in references, the nearly absence  of models in history, the use of industrial enamel, the bad taste, the updating of dowdy material, make a new playground for the young contemporary artists.  For them, ceramics seem to be between a playground and the conceptual art, being the material which better corresponds to our times.

I am astonished by the fact that artists and designers master the ceramic techniques.  They won a round.  To their artistic positioning, they add technical knowledge.  The good news is the inversion of snobbism.  The ceramists had the ambition to move from the applied art galleries and the ceramic galleries to the Fine Art galleries.  This movement is not necessarily shared by the new generation of artists who exhibits curiously indifferently where ever they have a proposal.  For example, Châteauroux, Vallauris., etc.

The bet of new ceramic centres
Lévi-Strauss describes the ceramist as conservator and jealous.  Perhaps he is too much bound to tradition.  That is probably why an idea is strictly anchored in these two latest decades: the renewal of the ceramic art will only be made by the artists, the designers or the architects.

Two or three European examples
CRAFT
Parkall, the artistic director of this centre tries to define the new fields for the ceramic application and especially the porcelain.  It includes the art and design fields, the architecture, the technology innovation, jewellery.  CRAFT infrastructure is linked wit the French tradition of Limoges.  Know how is present.  The manufactures which collaborate with it try to renew their old fashioned, even dusty image.  Other establishments as Bernardeau have created a foundation where thy invited contemporary artists to work in this field.

The Sèvres Museum, stronghold of the royal ceramics, opened in two steps to the contemporary art.  The first was to invite recognised artists to exhibit saleable works in the different boutiques of the manufacture.  Ceramist collectors, very conservative, attracted and secured by a perfect technique and quality, could then undertake more contemporary practices.  Secondly, the new director invited very young artists from the Fine Arts Schools of France so as to introduce a younger and more risky inspiration.  The joint produced editions by the galleries and the manufacture thus provide a better visibility of the presence of ceramics in the contemporary art galleries, Elsa, Clemence, Galerie Parrotin, Papillon, etc.

CERCO attitude
CERCO. a Centre of Experiment and Realisation of Ceramics in Geneva, now produces newly qualified Fine Arts students besides young ceramists.  The liberty of these students confirms the renewal of this practice allowing ceramics to find new fields.  Reflection mixes with practice, technique materialises reflection.

One way developed by CERCO is to find short ways like, for example, to place a “materiauthèque” with different stages of difficulty in the use of materials.  These techniques should be accessible to every one.  The idea is to be able to realise works in short laps of time.

A pedagogical concept comes by and by into life: visual art students are surrounded b< ceramic teachers and ceramists by artists.  So that everybody gets out of his habits and new exploratory territories will open.

And if the ceramists were to renew the ceramic art?
When speaking of tradition and trend, one often have the feeling that these two words are fundamentally different I have, on the contrary, the impression to be exactly between them.  What I try to say is that there is a space between these two words, in this famous gap.
In my work which received the first award at the Biennale of Korea in 2006, one finds a great tribute to the tradition.  The fact that I revisited old designs, Chinese and Japanese archetype, is more than evident. Trend consists in fact in updating the intention of symmetry and asymmetry with a revealing element.  A younger artist would certainly have added more humour.  My method was to add a sort of objectivity so as to make eliminate any trace of affect, even of personalization, so that the concept will come out.  In the present case, it is the juxtaposition of the photograph and the objects which is the starter. The fact that this work is addressing at the eye as well at the hand means that it follows the trend.

I don’t believe that one may teach without receiving a direct or indirect influence from the new generations.  Being conscious of if comes from the trend attitude.  Thus pimples are the fruit of a superposition of layers: photographic reference, thematic around the symmetry and sociopolitical reference.  Even if this short trip may seem rapid, hybridization may come out only during this century.  Proof is that the young artists who see this work do not all of them recognise any reference to Blossfeld; on the other hand they see either the sexual connotation or hybridization or else the classical laws of composition.  This triple interpretation opens ma work towards others fields than the ceramic art without for all that leaving it.

Here I come to the end of my lecture.  I hope that I have convinced you that the only way to keep the ceramic art alive is to be not only sensitive to the trend but also to become more open out to it.  As I told you, I am afraid that the ceramic art could disappear.  But even if I am not entirely sure that the new tendencies make sense, I can’t ignore them.  It is the only way to survive while waiting for better days when we shall again see and make the ceramics I like: traditional and open, sensual and conceptual.

Philippe Barde

"Bear River", click here to view the animation film