Pottery does Matter

摘要

Valerie Reardon begins her essay 'Transfiguring the Pot: Clay in a Contemporary Context', which introduces the catalogue of Northern Devon Ceramic Events 2002 (pp4-7), with a quotation from jean Baudrillard: the empirical 'object' given in its contemporary form, colour, material function and discourse …is a myth…the object is nothing. It is nothing but the different types of relations and significations that converge, contradict themselves and twist around it. The purpose of the quote is to disabuse the reader of the 'myth' of the 'real' object in-itself and to assert in its place culturally determined 'relations', 'significances' and so on; this allows Reardon's disassociation of clay from the 'mundane, material realm' and 'mere matter'. She goes on to assert a 'mastery of form over material' which has been demonstrated by the history of studio ceramics and to propose that, in a postmodern context, 'the historic division between art and craft' has been 'laid to rest'.