To regard something or someone means to look not too closely but rather awry, from a distance - as in gazing. In a momentarily gaze, the symbolic history of an artwork can be regarded or sublimated. Aesthetic reception follows sublimation.
REGARDING THE VASE is a collection of large hand-built, earthenware ceramics simulating the shapes of 17th century Chinese porcelain vases. Intended as simulacrum, the work on exhibition has no functional value – the vases are not real – instead, the vase is represented as symbolic gesture.
After being the first European potter to receive formal training in Japan, Bernard Leach, together with master potter Shoji Hamada, brought a new ceramic aesthetic to the West, in the 1920’s. Their influence shifted aesthetic perspective from industrial reproduction of classic shapes to the studio potter as artist. My focus is on the traditional Japanese decorating technique of nagashigake (dripping glaze), employing it as anamorphic palimpsest.
In contemporary aesthetic theory, both artist and content are bracketed while form and reception are foregrounded. In linguistic terms, the signifier has privilege to the signified and signification. In literary terms, metafiction exemplifies. This lack of content in postmodern art allows for the brute, primordial to return to the field of aesthetics. It returns as inassimilable content and psychoanalytic object of desire. My focus is on the anamorphic palimpsest as primal object of desire.
By bracketing the hand of the master potter and releasing the brute chemical element to flow and drip by gravity, my postmodern rendition of nagashigake is nothing more than an anamorphic stain – an obscene vitality sputtering and ejaculating over the threshold rim like lava from a volcano.
When looking too closely at the indeterminate spilling residue, the body of the vase dissolves, goes out of focus, and one is consumed by an awkward primal gesture. The optic eye is captivated by the anamorphic stain because it lacks symbolisation. In itself, the brute dripping blot is nothing; objectively, it is inassimilable and rejected by the modern ceramic index.
The distant gaze, on the other hand, is lured by the pleasure of subliminal simulacrum. Mediated and coordinated by the fantasy of ceramic convention, the gaze distorts the anamorphic stain for the promise of symbolic inclusion. In the movement of desire, the gaze embodies the anamorphotic palimpsest and a semblance of nagashigake comes from nothing.
J.J.S.15.10.18