Sherman photo Peter Held / Mori photos Mary-Beth Buesgen.
expressions of function, and how artists
and designers have adopted industry’s
methods to further their own studio causes.
Now comes this exhibition at the ASU
Art Museum’s Ceramics Research Center.
With more than 120 works—depending
upon how you count the table settings-by
16 artist/designers, the show is smaller in
size and scope than the previous two. Fea-
turing works from such industry exemplars
as Rosenthal, Limoges, Kahla, Hakusan
and Nymphenburg, it focuses on the kitchen
and tableware that has long been industry’s
strength. Yet, in doing so, its curator, Bob-
by Silverman, director of the ceramics pro-
gram at New York’s 92nd Street
y ,
zeroes
in on an aspect of industrial production that
studio ceramists once considered a chief
weakness: the capacity to convey a compel-
ling sense of detail and touch.
Silverman, who began to see the poten-
tial of industrial design during several
residencies at the European Ceramic
Work Centre in the Netherlands, conceived
the exhibition, he says, as a corrective
to the anti-industrial and anti-functional
Opposite:
Barbara Schmidt for
Kahla Porcelain
Twin Set Touch!
Mug without handle
and café au lait bowl.
Below:
Cindy Sherman for
Artes Magnus with
Limoges
Madame de Pompadour
(nee Poisson), from
a 21-piece tea service.
Above left and right:
Masahiro Mori
for Hakusan
Fancy Cups
Two of six designs with
differently configured
handles or finger holds.
art schooling he and fellow baby-boom
potters received. “It was very much an
approach that played up the romance and
power of expressive pots made by direct
individual touch,” says Silverman. “But
it also ignored the whole range of explora-
tions and possibilities that industry and
function had to offer.”
Some of that range lies in enlisting brand-
name artists to produce limited-edition
dinnerware sets. The show’s sampling of
the dinnerware that Artes Magnus commis-
sioned artists to design for Limoges—in this
case, Cindy Sherman, Dan Flavin and Jo-
seph Kosuth—underscores industry’s ability
to translate sensibilities that initially gained
prominence in other media.
Sherman’s Madame de Pompadour (née
Poisson) 1724-1764, a 30-piece service with
a soup tureen and platter, for instance, con-
tinues her series of photo-impersonations.
In this vitrified version, she appears as Louis
x v ’s mistress in lavish, screen-printed
china-paint settings. Flavin’s For Andre
Raynaud, a 30-piece service, highlights his
astute eye for the subtleties of reflected
light and color. There’s a similar attention
to detail in jeweler Ted Muehling’s tromp
l’oeil porcelain delicacies of seashells, birds’
eggs and coral. Produced by Nymphenburg,
they convey the flawless, hard-shelled
translucency that has long been that manu-
facturer’s strong suit.
Some of the exhibition’s more interest-
ing works come from artist/designers who
sought to expand the vocabulary of func-
tional forms. In his delightfully braille-mind-
ed series of cups, produced by Hakusan,
the late Japanese designer Masahiro Mori
configured the handles and finger holds
as biomorphic combinations of innies and
outies, some burrowing into the walls as
if rubbed there by a finger getting comfort-
able with its grip, others protruding like
noses. The resulting abstract topography
is as beautiful in its purpose as a Noguchi
sculpture. In her Five Sense Touch! kitch-
enware for Kahla Porcelain, Barbara
Schmidt softened the grips for hands and
fingers by wrapping handles and areas
meant to be grabbed with vibrantly colored
felt-like fabrics (promised to be dishwasher
safe). Stephen Reed’s Radiator Mugs, as
the name suggests, feature heat-dispensing
vertical fins. Formed by the peaks and val-
leys of the undulating walls, the fins, or ribs,
maximize the cups’ surface area but mini-
mize the hand’s points of contact with it.
This degree of experimentation with
forms could accelerate, Silverman specu-
lates, as artists and designers become more
proficient with powerful new digital tools,
such as rapid prototyping. Allowing artists
to turn computer-designed models into
three-dimensional forms, these technolo-
gies are eliminating traditional divisions
of labor and moving rapidly toward giving
industrial designers a level of direct hand
control that was unimaginable in Leach’s
time. It isn’t difficult, for instance, to imag-
ine Dror Benshetrit’s Vases of Phases for
Rosenthal—fractured-looking black-matte
vases molded from pots that were broken
apart, then reassembled and cast—being
digitally produced directly in three dimen-
sions. What remains to be seen is, will the
power behind the intuitive ease of things like
the iTouch, iPhone and iPod one day make
studio ceramists want to extend their search
for new ceramic forms with an iPot? +
Edw ard Lebow directs the Phoenix Office
o f Cultural A ffa irs Public A r t Program.
aug/scp 10 american craft 031
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