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- Title of Abstract:
Philosophy and myth ? The place of poetic evocation in creativity, with special regard to the firing of ceramics (Ref #180)
- Date:
- 20-10-2006 15:56:08
- Status:
-
Accepted with revisions
- Rating:
- 6
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Details:
- In this paper I shall conduct a critical investigation of the relevant place of theory and evocation in the understanding of contemporary craft practice, with particular reference to fire and the firing of ceramics. Firing is a liminal activity ? it sets a boundary that is crossed by the clay, after being transformed in the kiln; it can no longer retrace its steps to mud and it has become part of our ?civilised world?. It can act as a metaphor for our own transition from one state of being, understanding or awareness, to another.
As potters we talk at length about ?kiln gifts? - accidental qualities, noticed and searched out, effects which we try to plan for, but only rarely achieve. It is an awareness that sometimes the work can come out of the kiln better than it went in. We too are trying to effect a balance between intended results and unconscious and unforeseen results which can make or mar a piece. And all this can also be in the eye of the beholder. The audience is the final arbiter that tells us whether the fall of ash on a rim was fortuitous or a disaster. Leach used the mysticism of his own Baháï religious beliefs, to see the range of accidents as God-given blessings to the work. Duchamp perceives a more modern interpretation of phenomena and an interplay between conscious and unconscious manifestations, while Bachelard creates a psychological and phenomenological poetics.
Duchamp?s thinking is expressed in a highly poeticised form and might be seen to be very close to the position of Leach; when Duchamp says: ? the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his way out to a clearing.? We recognise the idea of the artist-as-shaman acting as a go-between to enable the coming into being of something else ? a new way of thinking about the everyday and enabling something magic to enter our consciousnesses. That ?sense of magic? surrounding the act of firing and the fired, transformed, object is at the heart of much of the everyday transactions concerning fired ceramic, and is also a phrase that has been uttered by many of the ceramicists I have spoken to about the nature of ?the fired?.
1 ?Fire and heat provide modes of explanation in the most varied domains, because they have been for us the occasion of unforgettable memories, for simple and decisive personal experiences? Bachelard, G. The Psychoanalysis of fire. P7
2 In ?The Creative Act?, Marcel Duchamp states that, ?the personal 'art coefficient' is like an arithmetical relation between the unexpressed, but intended, and the unintentionally expressed.? Duchamp, M. Lecture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, October 19, 196
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