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- Title of Abstract:
Authenticity: repositioned familiarity and the contribution to expansion.Ceramic practice and the digital interface. (Ref #233)
- Date:
- 31-10-2006 12:43:11
- Status:
-
Accepted with revisions
- Rating:
- 7
-
Details:
- The notion of ceramic authenticity can certainly be acknowledged as being challenged where, particularly, conceptual elements are evident and, more significantly, where non-ceramic media become employed. In this case the ceramic artist becomes prominent as instigator specifically when the familiarity of ceramic discourse is repositioned within contemporary practice. To consider a ceramic work as authentic within ceramic discourse is to suggest that predominantly an artwork should reference the origin for that authenticity. This would notably be directed towards the identification of the material clay in the pursuit of this notion, with this in mind, is the issue of authenticity so critical to the development of contemporary ceramic discourse?
The question of authenticity becomes perplexed when ceramic is positioned at the digital interface, and most significantly where new media is integral to the artwork. The reading of ceramic both in conjunction with and through another medium, obviously, distorts familiarity where previously interpretation and critique has been applied exclusively to the material first-hand.
The use of video in particular can be evidenced as an emergent and growing spectacle within the ceramic domain, where its location moves beyond documental significance to claim an integral position within practice. Contemporary observations can be made towards the ceramic artist that engages video, most notably when the video image captures either the movement of, or change in, the material clay, this often visually presents the alteration of clay as a material and addresses the notion of time-based activity as well as the temporality of material and object. These elements can be acknowledged to clay that has the potential to change, a notion that extends beyond the familiar subject of immortalised fired clay. The association, therefore, with the familiarity of the stable ceramic object becomes fluid, where essentially the movement, alteration, or deconstruction of clay, essentially time-based activities work to distort the notion of familiarity that has been constructed within ceramic discourse. This challenge to the materiality of clay through time-based activity suggests, a form of conceptual practice that integrates the artist, medium and idea within the language and arena of ceramic discourse. The absence of the physical ceramic form, presented through representation suggests that clay has become somewhat dematerialised within the familiar taxonomies of ceramic discourse. If the physical form has become dematerialised how then might a medium such as video be interpreted within the discipline of ceramics?
Personal practical and theoretical research engaging a digital interface will be used to examine the repositioning of familiarity towards an expansion of authenticity.
Reviewer Comments: