Is J.J. McCracken a ceramics or a performance artist?  Clearly she has had her eye on developments in both worlds. Given the history of ceramics and current education practice, this is not unusual. Yet interchanges between ceramics and the other arts are largely unexamined, for two reasons.

 

Ceramics tends to be a world unto itself, busy with itself, and charmed by itself. On the other hand, the other arts are afraid of contamination. Ceramics is dirt. Ironically, the usual form of ceramics privileges material and process, utilizing the vessel as both form and symbol. The crafts, although useful, were abstract before painting and sculpture.

 

Although fastidious painters and sculptors deny the ceramics template, influences in the other direction have been routinely confessed. We know that  Peter Voulkos' free-wheeling style was inspired by action painter Franz Kline,  with earth-shaking results for ceramics. After Abstract Expressionist ceramics came Pop ceramics and even some forays into Minimalism. Funk included ceramics, painting, and sculpture on a more or less equal basis. And then the influences seem to have stopped, or at least have not been adequately charted.

 

Process, however, is an invisible but ongoing crossover theme. Ceramics is not only material-based, it is also process-oriented. How something is made is equal to what it is made of.

 

That there are ceramics performances is not as surprising as why there are so few. The ceramics demonstration -- patently performative -- has a long history: Potters have routinely publicized their wares by public demonstrations, often quite theatrical. Proto-modernist George Ohr routinely offered wild demonstrations of his flamboyant skills at State Fairs  -- featuring his crushed and collapsed vessel as well as those that were paper-thin. Much later, the charismatic Voulkos converted a whole generation of potters to ceramic art by his  bare-chested, brawny battles with clay. Are ceramists now too shy or afraid to be accused of showing off?

 

And then there are sports: Jim Melchert, for instance, and later Neil Tetkowski.

I asked McCracken if she knew of Melchert's Changes (1972). Melchert -- who later became head of the visual arts department of the National Endowment for the Arts -- dunked his head in clay slip and, with several others, was filmed as the clay caked and cracked. Not only did she know of this obscure precedent, impressively she had sought out the artist. She also admires Tetkowski's Ground War (1991) clay protest-performance, in which he embedded live ammunition into wet clay, and admires his Common Ground Project (2000), which incorporated clay and handprints from 188 countries.

 

Though McCracken claims pioneer performance artist Carolee Schneemann as her primary influence, she also mentions ceramists with whom she feels kinship: Margaret Boozer, founder of Red Dirt Studios in Maryland and known for her Dirt Drawings (pools of clay left to harden and crack on floors); Andree Singer-Thomson, who has instigated full-body, clay-slip collaborative performances; Walter McConnell, who creates accumulations of unfired slip-castings of found toys and other objects.

McCracken, however, may be the first ceramic artist to make clay performances, which she prefers to call "active installations," the center of her practice. Performances? Well, they are mostly tableaux vivants, installations with a live component. Even her multipart Living Sculptures (2008) was as much about duration and changes over time as it was about simultaneity and/or multiple vignettes. Many of her works live beyond the theatrical moment as installations or objects that continue to change.

McCracken's preferred process is slip-casting, but she also explores unfired clay. In traditional ceramics, forms are preserved by the action of heat. Eschew firing, as McCracken does, and you uncover change and vulnerability..

 

How might one symbolically preserve unfired clay vessels? In plastic bags as in Stasis (2007), or in Mason jars, preserved in corn syrup, as in Nurture/Sustain (2006)? The Stasis vessels, bagged like toys or portions of candy, remain untouched in art galleries, but when shown in ceramics venues some are crushed by busy fingers determined to probe and squeeze. And of course, corn syrup is not the best way to preserve anything -- including one's health. The clay figures disfigure and begin to dissolve.

 

McCracken now continues her investigation of clay as food beyond utilizing techniques of food display (plastic bags) and food preservation (sealed jars).  She discovered that geophagia, or eating clay, is a hidden tradition, not only among poor African-American women from the South (particularly during pregnancy), but also in many cultures worldwide. Here, McCracken's background in anthropology comes into play. Eating "white dirt" is said to appease all aches and pains as well as alleviate nausea and intestinal irregularities. Men too sometimes crave clay, but if so, shamefully. Is this because it is associated with women's ailments and thought of as female food?  But I discovered that clay is mixed with sugar into edible patties called bon-bon de terre among the poor in Haiti, apparently without the gender taboo.

 

During McCracken's residency at Philadelphia's Clay Studio in preparation for her work at the nearby Painted Bride, she began to study inner-city hunger and how she could address it. The Hunger Project, filtered through her art vocabulary, is the result.

 

A banquet table of slip-cast, unfired-clay fruits and vegetables is periodically visited by clay-soaked performers at dinner time. In this monochromatic world, they slowly and methodically break off pieces from the duplicated fruits and vegetables and eat them. In contrast, on the floor above is a fully functioning garden, later to be donated to an institution serving the poor and hungry. In that way, mass-produced, sometimes less-than-nutritious food -- represented by the clay banquet -- is contrasted to homegrown edibles.

 

The first work I saw by McCracken was Stasis. In an all-white environment guarded by a punch-clock, performers in white produced perfect little clay vessels. These were sealed in plastic bags and then labeled and priced, thus presenting an example of the division of labor and a metaphor for products programmed to disintegrate. But the laboratory-like sterility was strangely beautiful. And poignant. Some of these deep themes are reiterated in The Hunger Project.

 

McCracken's complicated new work is not simplistic agitprop; in art or ceramics contexts, that would be like preaching to the already converted. We are all against consumerism; we are all against hunger. McCracken addresses those issues, but her work exposes additional meanings. Certainly she is expanding ceramics by deconstructing ceramics. But her critique is not only media-specific, it is oddly poetic. Loss is not a popular topic, and accumulation and decay are not the usual ceramic themes. Her work turns loss into art's gain. 

 

John Perreault 2010

for Clay Studio, Philadelphia