Introduction To Ceramics.

Art School ceramics students primarily learn the craftsmanship of the ancient art of pottery. They will work primarily in the teacup and bowl genre. Ceramics exhibits are usually very minimalist and the artists present these teacups as art, rather than what they really are: vessels that are sometimes fancy. For many, clay tiles are about as abstract as it gets.

Sometimes a renegade ceramics student will shock everyone by taking the medium outside of the realm of utility. They might do one of the following:

  • combine porcelain slip with photographic elements
  • performance art 
  • make strange organic forms that serve no function

This is against the rules! Form over function is too…sculptural…for them to feel comfortable. Ceramics professors prefer to keep ceramics and sculpture mutually exclusive. Occasionally they will belittle the sculpture department for its frivolity, and bring everyone back to basics: you’re there to make interesting teapots.

Unlike painting, the artist statement for the ceramics student does not focus on lofty, pretentious name dropping. Instead, ceramists write folksy anecdotes about “drinking tea with their grandmothers” or “choosing a glaze that reminds them of New Mexico sunsets.”

Don’t be fooled by this. Ceramics may appear to be the philosophical antithesis of painting; but upon closer inspection, you will realize that in both fields, the professors’ collective mindsets are identically narrow.

Art School As Religion.

Although most art students traditionally identify themselves as “Buddhist,” “agnostic” or “atheist,” most fail to observe the similarities between art school and places of worship. In reality, the religious “world” and the art “world” are quite similar. As Roman Catholics have CCD class and Jewish scholars study the Torah and Islamic pupils pour over the Koran, art students devote their lives toward a perfection that may not exist except in the work of their chosen “idol.” Usually it’s someone in the Saatchi collection.

Art students live similar lives to those of monks and nuns: ritual fasting, public declarations of devotion, the creation of icons, pouring over books about the disciplines that capture their hearts and minds, eschewing the cheapening of their belief systems by ‘selling out’ (Jesus in the Temples; Andy Warhol?)

Art students aspire to live the cliché perfected centuries ago by the Cistercian order of monks: the endurance of constant suffering to remind them of their devotion, which in turn rewards them with a place in heaven/article in ArtNews. For both, this will involve fasts, clothing made out of hair (both to wear in suffering and to display in a gallery), and self-inflicted bodily mutilation.

In art school, the equivalent to religious sects are your chosen discipline:

 Painting/Drawing = Roman Catholicism

 Ceramics = Buddhist

 Photography = Judaism

Graphic Design = Mormon

Printmaking = Quaker

Metalworker = Hindu

Sculpture = People’s Temple of Jonestown