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Because of the horrific events of 9/11,
the bounce-back of the populace, the resilience of the infra-structure, and even the stellar performances of certain officials,
the Big Apple for once has became a subject of sympathy and admiration. Maybe it really is true that New Yorkers have more
get-up-and-go, more spirit, more grit. As the unofficial world capital it attracts a constantly renewed population of creative
risk-takers. New York has a middle name and that name is ambition.
I am writing this more than six months after the
World Trade Center attack. I still can’t get the images out of my dreams. Stranded at the tip of Manhattan at the Bowling
Green subway station, three levels underground, I smelled what I thought was wires burning and contrary to orders issued through
speaker static, got-the-hell-out-of there, as the saying goes.
After what seemed like endless flights of stairs—the
escalators were dead—I was greeted by a silent world of slowly falling “snow”. As far as I could see, which
wasn’t all that far, everything was covered with a layer of ash—parked cars, trees, streets, sidewalks and gutters.
That snow was eerie; it was drifting down at the speed of white flakes in a snow-dome. Ashen “zombies” in white-face
were slowly walking towards the East River, shirts, collars, rags, or whatever, held across their mouths and noses, headed,
it turned out, to the East River where we walked patiently north and silently, except for comrades still trying to get their
cell phones to work.
Only when people, breaking the rhythm and the silence, suddenly came running down one of the alley-like
streets did I get a better picture of what had really happened. “The second one is coming down!” they shouted.
However, not knowing that the first tower had imploded, my quick calculation of tower height compared to my proximity made
me a bit concerned. The second tower also imploded.
Next, since the air clearer as I walked north through and past
the “snow”, eventually I could see thousands crossing over the East River on the Brooklyn Bridge , slowly marching
black silhouettes against the beautiful blue sky.
When my hike uptown was over, I like everyone else in the world was
glued to the TV screen. The repeated TV images of the first and then the second jet airliner crashing into the World Trade
Towers—like an animated Andy Warhol “disaster” painting— has become the collective nightmare. In terms
of my blizzard hike, I now think everyone was simply numb: the businessmen whose pin-stripe suits, hair and faces were now
ashen, the African Americans who were “white,” the clerks, secretaries, countermen and morning-shift waitresses
and cooks, the legion of financial district workers. Everyone was “old.”
We now know that there were a surprising
number of foreign nationals who died at Ground Zero. The World Trade Center was a global workplace in more ways than one.
How many artists? Only one verifiable artist but the count will never be known because many artists moonlight at day jobs
to pay the rent. New York is not only the financial world capital, it is still the art capital, with a larger pool of artists
than any other city, ever. Actors, musicians, composers, playwrights, poets, dancers, painters, sculptors, and, yes, ceramists.
Because of 9/11, like many others, I myself have changed some of my priorities: write more, paint more. Would a high-level
sampling of artists working in clay in New York City reveal other priority changes? What experiences did these artists have?
Did 9/11 make them want to leave New York? That’s was my first cluster of themes.
My second cluster of themes
for this series of short profiles was centered around urban-based ceramic art. I was born in New York, grew up in New Jersey
and got back as soon as I could. What brought my ceramic friends to The City? Are there advantages to working here? Too often
institutions, craft alliances, the general population, and even artist themselves think people who work in clay are mostly
hippies out in the woods. This is not the case.
There is nothing wrong with living and working in what is still referred
to as Appalachia, an area still associated with the crafts. Of course, you will probably need an MFA like other local craftspersons
who have elected the “natural” lifestyle. And unless you can get into local history, ramp festivals, and long conversations
with your UPS delivery man, you will die of boredom. I love the ancient hills of the Blue Ridge Mountains and I happen to
love wild garlic, but identifying craft with now rare bucolic drop-outs is as condescending as associating it with the illiterate
and uneducated.
There are many smart people working with clay and some of them are in our cities, even New York City.
One artist I talked to suggested there might be a New York School of Ceramics. I’ll come back to that in my conclusion.
[Interviews
with Anne Agee, Marek Cecula, John de Fazio, Marc Leuthold Jeffrey Mongrain, Steven Montgomery, Sylvia Netzer, Joyce Robins,
Neil Tetkowski, Marja Vallila, Betty Woodman and Arnold Zimmerman are available in the print version of this text in the
next issue of American Ceramics.]
* * *
Conclusion:
For
the most part, the artists I interviewed are going to stick it out. New York City is important to their lives and their careers
and most cannot imagine working elsewhere, even with all the difficulties of logistics that New York presents. Everywhere
else is exile. As an art critic, poet and artist myself, I concur.
What other city has 100,000 working artists? Each
one of them a competitor but each one of them also a potential ally. What other city has 600 art galleries and 87 museums?
What other city is home to the major art magazines and three craft magazines? Plus most of the design and architecture publications?
For that matter, what other city has Kim’s Video where you can walk in and rent a masterpiece of world cinema like Where
Is The Home of My Friend? as well as Chimes at Midnight or I Was A Teenage Wolf Man? Buy an art magazine or have an egg-cream
at 3:00 AM?
There is no doubt that if one is working in ceramics exceptional dedication is required. Imagine the difficulties
of getting 200 pounds of clay up five flights of stairs, and I do not mean mini-flights like those in suburban two-story houses,
I mean cast-iron building mega flights, conforming to industrial ceiling heights. Imagine the laws governing kilns. Imagine
the art world hostility. On the other hand, there is the constant promise of success and the possibility of creative interface
with other artists—even across media boundaries.
No one I asked thought there was anything that could be called
a New York School of Ceramics—except for Marc Leuthold, and, after all, it was his idea. Betty Woodman said that people
were working in too many diverse ways, and besides, said someone else, there’s no room for Schools of art during a period
of pluralism.
I think it depends what you mean by “School of…” What was the School of Paris and what
was the New York School? In the first case, I see very little connection stylistically between Picasso and Matisse, and yet
they are both considered members of the School of Paris. In the second case, once they reached their mature styles, it has
always been difficult to put Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning in the same bed. In each case, the artists were in the
same city at the same time, knew each other (more or less) and influenced each other as well as competed with each other.
If we mean “School of…” as in School of Rubens, then forget it. The equivalent would have to be the
School of Woodman, which doesn’t exist. There isn’t even a School of Voulkos. That disappeared a long time ago.
Almost
all of the artists I interviewed know one another. They attend each other’s gallery receptions. They recommend each other
for one project or another. One could draw a very interesting socio-gram based on the question, what other ceramic artist
or artists would you like to sit next to at a dinner party? and come up with a very complicated map of an unseen, unstated
network.
There is no Club for weekly programs and debates as in the days of Abstract Expressionism, so there is
no sense of a public aesthetic forum but there is a club. If everyone is connected through a maximum six degrees of separation
and artists are connected by no more than three, than New York artists working in clay are linked by two degree. For instance,
I first met Ann Agee at a Betty Woodman dinner party; John de Fazio at a Garth Clark opening; Jeffrey Mongrain at a Sutton
Place birthday. There are various “connectors” other than artists: collectors, dealers, writers, editors, publishers.
If X does not know Y, he or she knows W who knows Y. Two degrees of separation is a club. If there is a club there is a School.
The
New York School of Ceramics is not about having a common style. Just look at the range covered here, from the minimal to the
funky and all stages in-between. The first common denominator is high ambition and the second is an easy interface with the
art world proper: ceramic artists in New York keep their eyes on what’s going on, know artists other than ceramists,
are—in their minds at least—competing with the heavy-weight painters and sculptors of the moment, rather than just
with each other. The high stakes encourage high risks.
* *
*
What is a New Yorker? Do you have to be born here? Bred here? Bred and born? Live here 365 days a year? What
percentage of the year do you have to live in New York to be a New Yorker?
The artists I talked to, in spite of their
use of clay, are New York artists subject to the collective wisdom. Based on the evidence of countless once famous, now forgotten
painters who bailed out before having a retrospective at MOMA, one can commute outside the city to a teaching job; one can
be away for a semester, even a year; but if you take a permanent teaching job outside of New York and give up on the city,
you might as well be dead.
This yields a paradox.
If you leave New York, to New Yorkers you are no longer a
New Yorker. Whereas to non-New Yorkers, you are always a New Yorker wherever you are and no matter how long you stay. It can’t
be the accent, because most New Yorkers have ironed down whatever accent they arrived with into CNN-ese, the new equivalent
of Mid-Atlantic. It can’t be the stubborn insistence that pastrami must never be eaten with mayonnaise; anyone who has
seen a Woody Allen film knows that. It can’t be the tendency to dress in black for all occasions; even gym. Angelinos
now wear black to beachside open air restaurants, film premiers, and to the drive-through car wash. It isn’t even attitude.
What
makes someone a New Yorker is cultural curiosity, hunger, toughness and—ask any tourist who asks directions in the street—a
willingness to be helpful and to have an opinion about everything, even the best way to get from Times Square to Lincoln Center.
If one person is giving someone directions, nine times out of ten a crowd will gather and there will be as many routes and
suggestions as there are people. I have seen fight break out amongst perfect stranger about the best way to get to Radio City
Music Hall.
On the other hand, because of 9/11, everyone everywhere is a New Yorker now.
Shortly after 9/11,
I was in Chicago for SOFA, the annual craft exposition on the Navy Pier. Bear in mind that Chicago isn’t even the Second
City anymore. Los Angeles is, when it is not the fifth Borough of New York. On my way to the Pier one morning, the cab driver
asked me where I was from, sensing a foreign accent I suppose. When I confirmed that I was from New York, he turned to me
and said. “We used to hate you, but now because of what happened we feel sorry for you and admire you.”
Gee,
thanks.
Copyright 2002 John Perreault
(Full text, including interviews is scheduled
for publication by American Ceramics in 2003.)
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