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The growing season is over and I haven't had the time or been inspired to write in a while. But the Occupy Movement has been going on: Americans have been calling attention to corporate greed and control over government, asking for a return to democracy. And, as the winter holiday season approaches, I've been thinking about my pot-making and pot-selling processes and motivations, wondering about the vast commodification of art - what it means to make art for art's sake, as opposed to buying and selling...as I visited our nation's capital....

Voulkos, 1976, at the Renwick. Clay for clay's sake.
It's even better to smash your head up against the wall and see exactly where his thumb went through.
(Why don't museum curators ever let you see the feet of pots!?!?!)

Wedgewood creamware with decals, middle 1800s, at the (controversial) DAR.
 Doctor's container for leeches.  On the right, it says "Prosperity to the United States of America"



Warhol's Shadow Paintings, 1979. It was the first time it had been shown in totality, and when displayed in the round Hirshhorn walls, it felt like walking through a film strip. Warhol refused payment for these.

The group is interdisciplinary, defying categorization, focusing on veterans, homelessness, growing food, access to land, gazettes and bulletins, environmentalism, liminal photography and dancing gophers. Wikipedia informs that a "liminal situation" can also be applied to entire societies that are going through a crisis or a “collapse of order.”

Going in the camera obscura/liminal camera/truck/darkroom

The most exciting part of the exhibition was going into the giant pinhole camera/developing studio.  It was a truck!  This video below is taken inside the truck and someone is explaining how easy it is to make your own camera obscura. For a while we just sat and watched people walking upside down on the mall. It became remarkably apparent what a bounce we have in our step as we try to defy gravity - that force that keeps us connected to earth.

In their writing, they mentioned their photographs in relationship to an influential 1936 Walter Benjamin essay on the aesthetics of art entitled "The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction." Benjamin was trying to wrap his mind around how the appreciation of art would change under the influence of photography and film, 'mechanically reproducible' mediums that can essentially exist without an original. He was a Jewish Mystic writing at the time of great upheaval in Germany, without realizing his ideas were prophetically predicting the power that film would have in nazi propaganda. Unfortunately, in  his essay he discounts the much older mechanically reproducible mediums of bronzes, terra cottas, and woodcuts as not being legitimate art.

Our culture has a need to separate things as either 'art' or 'craft.'  The Museum of Contemporary Craft in Manhattan changed its name to the American Craft Museum and most recently to the Museum of Art and Design, eliminating the word craft altogether. Warhol could have cared less about categories! Of the Shadow Paintings, he said, "Someone asked me if they were art and I said no. You see, the opening party had disco. I guess that makes them disco décor.”  Funny.

This notion of how we define and categorize things was expressed at a large exhibit of Mel Bochner at the National Gallery of Art. He uses words in different kinds of visual constructions.  An early exhibit of his was called "Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed As Art." His work makes one wonder if it is poetry or art or just visible things on paper!

Self Portrait, 1966

It doesn't matter what category something fits into, what matters is how you respond to it.

In the spirit of Bochner, here is my word construction for "pottery":

pottery, art, craft, fine art, traditional
art, ceramic art, design, utilitarian ware,
functional pottery, decorative art, folk art,
outside art, production pottery, studio pottery,
earth dirt clay mud fire glaze transformation
identification realization resonate
spark understanding 

nourishment
fulfillment 
a vessel to hold leeches

Japanese clay basket at the Freer-Sackler, to express snow on the mountains. Breathtaking to me.
 Unfortunately, I didn't get the name or date, I think it was 18th C.

At the end of our visit, Ruben pondered, "how can it be that people are so smart and so stupid at the same time?" He was referring to how we can make space ships and great art, and yet not know how to stop damaging the earth and each other.

No answers for Ruben, but Trey Flemming and Annie Baum-Stein of Urban Apiaries and Bill Shick at SHARE Food Program are not being stupid. In the video, learn how there is No Honeybee Colony Collapse Disorder in Philadelphia!!!  (Friday Arts is a local program absolutely not hindered by categories)

Watch Extended interview with Trey Flemming on PBS. See more from FRIDAY ARTS.