The Secrets Of Ceramics: One Of The Oldest Forms Of Art In Human Record | Perspective

paper was light gold in medieval times [Music] i want tobacco sugar [Music] that everything we thought we knew about the world might turn out to be completely wrong [Music] they are windows into the secrets of the past ceramics are often used as a gauge of human civilization how sophisticated is a culture can often be told and seen from the sophistication of its pottery they reveal details of a time and place the way no other artifact can the ancient maya pieces have many many secrets there are many more questions and there are answers they were some of the most valuable treasures of their time only occasionally would a few pieces of porcelain come to the shores and then it was treated as this extraordinary precious substance they really had seen nothing like it before but the secrets do not reveal themselves they need to be unlocked when you know their secrets they become much more interesting it's up to museum curators to unlock the secrets of the exhibit industrial espionage bribery and corruption the best sort [Music] this beautiful painted plate dates back to the ancient maya civilization in guatemala in the 1st century a.d [Music] it was considered a nice piece of maya pottery until the hieroglyphics surrounding the rim were deciphered only then did it come alive with meaning this is with the yellow sue jeffries is a curator at the gardner museum of ceramic art in toronto canada and was there when the surprising discovery was made the ancient maya pieces have many many secrets and it's very very interesting and one of our great piece is a beautiful maya plate that has writing all the way around it we discovered having thought that it was really talking about the origins of the maya people the mythology and their beliefs but when it was deciphered it was a great surprise to everybody that it said that this plate was used for venison tamales all i laughed and laughed because that's what something you'd expect to see today so not exactly what we were expecting to hear and that's where the research is so important after the discovery about what the maya hieroglyphs were telling us of course that opens a whole new area of discovery and there are other pieces in the collection where you see figures on the vases handing tamales to important royal visitors so that once you uncover one secret it just leads to a desire to know more about these pieces and then you you discover more and more more secrets there are many more questions and there are answers such as the power of ceramics one of the oldest known forms of art and human record since the clay in each object is unique to the place it was made scientists can determine where it is from because the decoration on each object reflects the culture that created it we learn about the society that lived on that soil therefore each piece of pottery acts as a fingerprint of a particular time and place it's up to the archaeologist or researcher to unlock the clues hidden within each object and the fact that most ceramics have survived the ages grants them special status in the eyes of historians ceramics seems to be sort of halfway between life and art in many many eras and it's very reflective of what people believed and it tells us what they wore how they looked whether they tattooed their bodies what kind of rituals they used what kind of dancing they did hierarchies language there's so many stories on each piece of ceramics and they become absolutely vital to archaeologists and in the case of the ancient americas because so many things were destroyed when the spaniards arrived in the americas that's what we have left as evidence of these ancient civilizations and of course as opposed to wood and textiles which tend to disintegrate in certain climates ceramics may break but you can always usually piece them together so it's a very important record ceramics are often used as a gauge of human civilization if you think of archaeologists when they look at for example ancient man when they have a look at neolithic man when they first begin to bring together fire and clay and make early pottery it's fairly crude but it's wonderful that they're doing it first of all they can use these things to cook with and also store things so it's a really key moment of of technology and in human development and then as things go on clay is in fact used in many different ways the ancient sumerians use clay tablets as a way to mark their first writing so all our early writing is recorded in pottery from there on we go from step to step from the development of glazes the development of colors things become increasingly sophisticated as society becomes sophisticated and it's a wonderful way of being able to look at things how sophisticated is a culture can often be told and seen from the sophistication of its pottery perhaps that says a lot about us today doesn't it when you think of i don't know plastic now and aluminium foil being used instead of ceramics i know wonder what people in the future will think of us what is certain is the ceramic discovery happened independently in different parts of the world the first evidence of fired clay is this small female figure found in the former czechoslovakia dating back approximately 25 000 years her discovery is astonishing in that it predates the first ceramic pots found by about 14 000 years the origins of ceramics are difficult because with every new excavation the evidence is always changing and the middle east certainly has a very very old ceramic tradition as does japan and in our collections our oldest pieces are about 3000 bc from ecuador many people think that they lined a basket with clay and then left it too close to the fire it fired and vitrified and then could hold water that's one of the beliefs for the origins of clay clay is a special kind of earth found all over the world it's easily worked when moist can be hardened with exposure to heat and made waterproof with the addition of glaze there are many different types of clay and the way we talk about clay in the gardener really is low-fired and high-fired the low-fired clay is generally called earthenware and it will only fire up to a certain temperature and then it will melt and then we have high-fired clays like porcelains and stonewares and they will fire to a much higher temperature and then there's everything in between clay actually varies by the geology of the area that it's taken from so there'll be trace elements of minerals that can color the clay and can do all sorts of different things in the firing clay is unique in that it has such a wonderful viscous nature it's so tactile clay is very plastic it remembers what you tell it with your hands but yet it is easily manipulated in a way that wood and stone is not it can be changed it can respond it can tell you things every artist i've ever talked to tells me how much they learn from the clay itself clay is constantly in a state of flux what i loved when i first encountered clay was the extreme plasticity of the material with a drawing one's used to using an eraser to rub out mistakes and with clay you just need to run your thumb over the area and you've got a blank sheet of clay again and you can rework it and also the touch the sensation of working with a soft sort of squidgy doughy substance it's pleasurable there's not a massage involved in the work with clay every tool whether it be fingers or bits of wood or metal that you bring to bear on the material create a totally different surface texture and the immediacy of the jest and the the nervous energy is translated into the material very directly the clay hasn't changed over the centuries that's what's interesting we may buy our clay instead of mining it ourselves and we may have electricity for our wheels but in terms of actual techniques and the material they are much as they've always been and the chemical makeup of fired clay is an invaluable research tool because it acts like a snapshot of a time and place which means a single piece of broken pottery can open up a world of hidden secrets siobhan boyd is an archaeologist who specializes in the ancient americas this little piece i have probably from mexico is broken and because it's broken we can learn more scientifically about it often the clay is mixed with something called temper and if it's from a shell source we can we can determine um maybe what shell was used and therefore where it came from and something like that would be important for pieces that weren't excavated by archaeologists by looking at the different contents of it we can determine um where that piece came from we can figure out when somebody was buried if a piece of ceramic was buried with them by doing a thermoluminescence testing technique where we take a little portion of the ceramic and we're able to tell the last time it was fired over time everything like from a crystalline form like ceramics absorbs radiation and the longer it is exposed to that radiation the more that it has now when you fire something or when you cook it in a kiln it sort of resets that absorption to zero sort of starts it from the beginning again so by using thermoluminescence when you take a piece of the ceramics and you put it in this machine which then tells you how much radiation is in that piece you can sort of go backwards and figure out when the last time it was fired you only need a small amount but you have to remove part of that ceramic and then sort of reset it and see how much energy it emits and that's the way you can tell how old an object is and then if we find other ceramics that fit that same style or the same shape or the same color we know that those pieces are within that same time period and therefore we can then use the ceramics we do find to be able to date a burial or um date the time period where a temple was built what's particularly special about the gardner museum is its specialty in itself in that it is a museum devoted only to ceramics and there are very few of these museums in the world founded over 20 years ago on the passion of toronto philanthropists george and helen gardner who collected ceramics the gardner museum has been described as a jewel box of ceramic treasures within these walls there are many secrets to uncover amongst its collection of ancient pots and decorative porcelain the philosophy behind the gardner collection is very interesting because it's based on a private collection and a private collection which is in fact very idiosyncratic when they were collecting ceramics they decided not to try and make a collection which looked at ceramics from the beginning of time till now with sort of a little piece representing every different age and every different civilization instead they focused on great moments of ceramic art it reflects the tastes and passions of the collectors but it also reflects great moments of ceramic history and in particular great moments of ceramic technology and the development of technology and so in essence what the gardening museum is is a collection of collections it has many different very specific areas that have been collected in depth from early civilizations through to modern times there are many interesting and revealing secrets to learn by investigating ceramic art through the ages when we return we reveal more secrets of the ancient american potters and we go behind the scenes at the gardener to witness the detective work involved in ceramic restoration and conservation this small earthenware female figure was originally found in an ancient burial tomb in ecuador she's approximately two thousand years old to scientists she is a time machine a window revealing the history culture and rituals of an ancient civilization as is nearly every item in the gardner museum in toronto canada a showcase for the world of ceramic arts but the museum is also in the business of restoration and conservation and it's here beneath the exhibit floors where the most intriguing work happens it's very much a process conservation you the first thing you would have to do would be sort of put on your detective hat how old is it where did it come from and what kind of materials it's actually built out of what sort of things are you seeing that are disturbing the piece so quite often you'll say what's wrong with the feel of this why does it have a tinny sort of ring to it if you touch it that can talk to you about previous repairs damage things like that it's wonderful i mean there is a dialogue between the patient and the doctor and science steps in not only to help reveal the origins of a ceramic object but also to help determine its authenticity fakes and forgeries are an occurrence and it's a problem that can happen and people that are usually responsible for doing that it's people who are trying to sell them as being the real pieces this piece i'm holding here is from our education collection it's from colima mexico so it's from a region where a lot of our west mexican pieces are from this is a double-headed dog effigy vessel and it's supposed to represent a dog you find in mexico maybe a chihuahua or another type called sholowitz quintly which is a hairless dog that was often represented in ancient ceramics and this is a reproduction so it's not passed off as a fake it wasn't sold to us as being a genuine piece but it was made to look like some of our pieces and this is similar in the way that some fakes and forgeries would be made if you look at the little black marks on this piece in the past people just thought it was a decoration it was black paint or something but recently they've noted that the black speckles on our west mexican pieces are actually manganese oxides which leeches into the ceramics from being buried underneath the ground for a long period of time on fakes or forgeries or copies it's actually paint so just by looking not too deeply into the piece but looking at them under a microscope you can tell right away if a piece has had the black dots added to it sometimes they even take real pieces and think by adding the black dots then people would buy them even even more regularly science has been important in looking at the maya culture we have a lot of cylindrical shaped vessels which we call cacao vessels and cacao is chocolate or cocoa we actually get the english word coco from the yucatec mayan word which is cacao these pieces have hieroglyphic writing around the top rim and say things like this vessel was used to serve cacao now people over the years don't always necessarily believe everything you read so what they've done is they found a vessel with a lid on it a couple years ago from a site called rio azul and it they took the lid off and inside they found some residue they found something called theobromine and caffeine and those are the two main ingredients in chocolate so it sort of proved that in fact the vessel was used for chocolate archaeologists use ceramic innovations to gauge the complexity of the civilization in question a closer look at select objects of the ancient americas reveals a technically sophisticated use of clay these are our oldest pieces we have in the museum and we can learn a lot about the technology that these people use to make their pieces based on their ceramics it's pretty sophisticated some interesting things to learn about some of these pieces in our exhibit is the ones from the maya area that perhaps have something we call maya blue on them it's a specific color for years scientists can figure out how they made this blue color they tried to reproduce it they would get the right color but it would fade over the years whereas you look at some of our pieces and they're about 1500 years old and they still have that bright blue color so i think it took them about 50 years to figure out how maya blue was made and it's a combination of a plant extract from indigo mixed with a fine white clay and then heated various times in order to make that color permanent if you were to look at our west mexican pieces some of them have a high gloss on them and we call those burnished wears what they did basically is they would have taken a piece they would have made it out of a sort of a slab technique they wouldn't have used the potter's wheel they would have allowed it to dry to a leather heart state and then they would have collected something smooth like a river pebble and taken that pebble and run it all over the piece to create a high gloss and that high gloss would have helped make the piece less water permeable just having that sophistication and that knowledge knowing that by rubbing the smooth river pebble over it it would line up the particles of clay and make it more water resistant i find it amazing especially if you're excavating somewhere and you're pulling something out of the ground that hasn't been looked at or seen in 2000 years and they still maintain that high gloss or maybe they have a very bright color on them so here i have um it's a reproduction of a musical instrument that comes from peru it's the salinar whistling vessel and it's very similar to one we do have in our collection and this is actually a water whistling instrument so if i fill it with water through one side um it is made out of clay and it is meant to be a reproduction it's not meant to be a fake fill one side with water and then i can just take the piece and tip it backwards and forward so if i tip it forward it makes a sound and we think that it was probably used to imitate the sound of an animal i can change the sound and again maybe crickets or frogs and maybe it's supposed to imitate the animal that it represents here there's also holes in the cheeks and the ears and the chin if we cover those and we tip it forward again it changes the sound so this could have been like something to help them with hunting to call an animal or it could have been used for some kind of ritual or celebration some kind of purpose like that we don't know for sure but this is a mold-made piece just like the piece we do have in our collection which dates to about 2500 years many objects in this museum are mysteries to be solved for example the history of this two thousand year old earthenware figure is largely unknown so it's wilson's job to play detective and see what clues this ancient ecuadorian lady can reveal in order to learn more about her this particular piece that i'm looking at has two holes at the collar bones just under the necklace and those are very interesting sometimes in the case of ancient american pieces holes were drilled to kill the spirit of the pot before they were put in a tomb you're not going to start filling this hole it's part of the story of the piece it's uh it's something interesting about it you know she had multiple strands of necklaces she had a fabulous nose ring she was wearing a turban a ladies turban that almost looks like a helmet-like thing she would have been very brightly colored in sort of an orangey ochre a yellow and a green red that shows up as like traces of pink the feet had fallen off they've been repaired or put together for sale and you can see additional chipping on the bottom around the foot material loss replacing it with some sort of material is not going to look that great it's not going to make the story of the piece any better it's not going to you know improve the way she looks she looks just fine the way she is but we would reattach the top of her head so that the whole story is told this piece has been very carefully preserved in a tomb for almost 2 000 years and has been passed through a lot of fingers in the last 50 and from what i can see somebody obviously found the pieces and put it together probably in the last half of the 20th century because i can tell that from the glues that were used but in a tomb the various media the material of the tomb even if it was originally a cavity could have shifted due to earthquake due to tomb looting anything like that and so things coming out of them quite often were in pieces but of course the local people being very candy usually do put them together and i have seen pieces mismatched with you know different handles put on various pieces just to effect a sail if i want to show you with this knife here's the original and here is glue and you can see that it looks just like carpenter's glue it's all over the place and it's taking a lot of that original material off so this sort of thing you would entirely take off there's another problem too this is the back of this turbine on this head for example somebody had tape all over it and you want to get rid of all of the adhesive carrier that was here it's not only does it saturate the surface there and make this awful tape line but it is it is just not a great thing to have those kind of chemicals and 20th century chemicals on the surface of this piece doing anything like that we largely will be removing this i've chosen to use acetone and if i do this very carefully look how that saturates the piece you can see that little cloud that is evaporating out very quickly because acetone has is very volatile very quick to evaporate and i'm getting quite a bit of stuff off on my stick there i'll blow on it i'm getting rid of a lot of this adhesive and hopefully minimizing how much is retreating into the actual object let's see if i can get a nice piece here and you see it's it'll probably be a full day before it entirely dries off to look say like this area here but there is ongoing debate on how an item should be restored in order to best present its story to the public it's very rare to find a piece in such great condition when you pull it out of the ground usually as an archaeologist i'm used to finding pieces and fragments and then if there's a significant story behind that piece and they'll be restored to what they might have looked like nowadays people are sort of looking at restoring the piece but not adding to it whereas in the past i know it was sort of like to make it look new again fill in those blank places sort of continue the picture that is painted on it nowadays i think people are sort of pulling away from that because they don't want to give the audience a false impression of what the piece actually is because they might be off they might be wrong when you look at a piece you really sort of have to justify what you're going to do with it there should be a good reason to actually complete pieces that are missing so the piece is respected so that the original is seen the way it should and just as different civilizations evolved so did the art of ceramics next we cross oceans and move up in time to explore the secrets behind the technical innovations that changed the face of the art form and led to a ceramics revolution in europe and if you like it's the equivalent of finding the secret of plastic today but despite all best intentions the secret got out and it happened because of industrial espionage bribery and corruption the best sort this ceramic bowl was made in china during the tang dynasty in the 9th century it is one of the earliest examples of true porcelain brilliant white translucent and very strong a miraculous substance to all who saw it for the first time the invention of hard-paced porcelain is china's greatest contribution to world ceramics but it would be almost 900 years before the europeans learned the secret of china clay this porcelain represents a fingerprint of a time and place a window into the history culture and rituals of civilizations gone by and it's the role of the gardner museum in toronto canada to unlock the secrets inside these objects and share them with us curator meredith chilton specializes in european ceramics from the time of the italian renaissance through to the 19th century one of the most important developments in ceramic history was the first introduction of porcelain which happened in china in about the 8th or 9th century a.d and why this is important is it's a brand new material that could hold boiling water without cracking or breaking and so you have a parallel development in the use of tea hot boiling tea in teapots and little tea cups with the development of porcelain itself by the 17th and 18th centuries large amounts of porcelain objects were being imported into europe from china by portuguese british and dutch traders it was deemed so precious so valuable it was called white gold but european attempts to reproduce it would remain elusive for more than a century porcelain was really treasured by europeans because it was rare and precious when it first hit europe i think you have to imagine for example in the elizabethan period in england when there is very little trade with the far east only occasionally would a few pieces of porcelain come to the shores and then it was treated as this extraordinary precious substance they really had seen nothing like it before it was translucent it was brilliantly white often it was painted with exquisite underglazed blues consequently europeans were very interested in developing their own porcelains because it was a radical new material it was the plastic if you like of the age and they didn't know how to make it and they struggled to try and make this material without knowing what its ingredients were [Music] in the late 14th century a new type of white tin glazed earthenware known as maolica appeared in italy originally an islamic invention it was an attempt to imitate the pure white shine of porcelain this technique of tin glazed ceramics was really created because they wanted to imitate they had seen chinese porcelain and they couldn't produce it and they wanted that white background which gives you such a beautiful canvas for painting maolica pottery reached its height during the italian renaissance in the 15th and 16th centuries and reflected a bold new artistic style at the same time that columbus was discovering the new world really great things were happening in italy in the world of ceramic history their color technology was just exploding from very simple origins of using lead glazes tinted with a few colors they were then suddenly able to control and use colors of yellow orange even of reds which are very difficult beautiful blues greens and they use these colors on the pottery surfaces almost as if they were canvases to create beautiful pieces of painting on dishes the renaissance ceramic decorator or painter was really one of the most skilled ever in the history of ceramics i mean they could really paint on this very difficult surface because the tin glaze tends to absorb rather like blotting paper the colors and they can diffuse so to get a crisp line to get a really beautiful picture was very very difficult what's also very special about this pottery is that it has not faded at all the colors that you see on italian renaissance majorica are exactly the same as they were when they first came out of the kiln in the 16th century and this is because the artists used metallic oxides which they painted onto the surface of the glaze and the oxides and the glaze were then fused together during the firing process and they cannot now be separated and they cannot fade at all so you're seeing original brilliant color a convincing imitation of chinese porcelain known as soft paste porcelain was developed in the medici court in florence in the late 16th century but it would be another century before the secret to true hard-paced porcelain was discovered and manufactured here we are in the mice and gallery at the gardner museum and this porcelain represents the earliest hard-paced porcelain made in europe a great moment in the history of ceramics this prestigious honor belongs to the germans it happened at micen in saxony and was to have a profound effect on the entire european ceramic industry the secret of chinese hard-paced porcelain or true porcelain was cracked in europe in the year 1709 by a young man called johann friedrich berker and he's a fascinating character because he was an alchemist who was set to the task of finding the secret of making gold he never found out how to make gold but he did find out how to make porcelain the first person to get their hands on the secret was in fact buttga's patron his name was augustus the strong and he was elector of saxony and the king of poland augustus the strong imprisoned burka in a tower on the banks of the river elb and told him he had to make porcelain and when porcin was discovered he founded the micen factory in 1710. this is the first factory in europe making hard-paced porcelain and we're sitting here now in the gallery at the gardening museum showing mice and porcelain some of the very very early pieces from the production of the factory are here and right up to their great moments of glory in the 1730s and 40s when they were making brilliant colored grounds like the yellow grounds so well known from this museum and others that ravished the whole of europe but it should be of no surprise that the mystery of porcelain production became europe's worst kept secret when there's a will there's a way and it didn't take long for another enterprising official to establish his own porcelain factory augusta strong considered the discovery of porcelain so important that he established the micen factory in an impregnable inaccessible craggy rock in a castle he wanted to guard the secret and if you like it's the equivalent of finding the secret of plastic today this was something remarkable but despite all his best intentions the secret got out and it happened because of industrial espionage bribery and corruption the best sort the viennese ambassador was involved in this and he allured with the promise of untold riches important workers from the micen factory to come to vienna which they did in 1719 and so the second poison factory that of claudius innocentius du pacquiao was established by imperial privilege in 1718 and started production shortly after that the gardner museum is particularly blessed because not only does it have a very important collection of mice and porcelain but it has one of the most important collections of dupakio and so here that small factory is extremely well represented you can also see how different the two factories are in their sense of style and also of palette one of the most interesting pieces in among the mycen collection is a little bowl it might look really insignificant when you first look at it but in fact it was one of the very special secrets and great discoveries that we had here at this museum this bowl was probably used for discarded tea leaves but in fact it has a much more important history it has two scenes on it that her show people dressed in northern looking costumes on one side and on the other side another pair of people holding up animals and a cornucopia of vegetables and fruit it's quite unlike anything i had ever seen painted on a piece of micen before and i was really intrigued by this when i first saw it and over a number of years all through libraries in europe whenever i happened to be there i would have a little look and see whether i could find the engravings that inspired the artist to make the scene no luck at all but it so happened that one day i was in the university library here in toronto which is just down the street from the museum looking at a book of costumes from the 18th century and as i turned over the leaf i found the scene and i screamed when i found it and it said it's really amazing because not only was it exactly like the scene on the bowl but in this in the the top part of the engraving there was a scroll and it said new amsterdam new york and then i turned the next page and there was a scene of this painting on this bowl and in the sky it said davis strait hudson's bay hudson's bay of course that great area in northern canada and also the name of the hudson's bay company which was established very early on as a trading outpost between north america and england and so here we have i realized as i sat there in the library that in fact we had the earliest examples of north american scenes painted on european bosom here at this museum so from a small insignificant bowl it became a treasure for the whole of north america [Music] porcelain was not used only to make dishes and tea sets the production of porcelain figures elevated the art form some of the greatest ceramic modelers of the 18th century are represented in this collection of comedia dellarte figures the commedia was a popular form of italian improvisational theater best known by the famous harlequin character in my hands i've got one of the icons of the gardner museum perhaps our best known piece it is called the greeting harlequin and you can see he's bowing to say hello to you and he was made at the micen factory in about 1740 by the great johann joachim kendler the factory's greatest master modeler who was the great rival of herald to the colorist these figures were most likely used to decorate the dessert table in the 18th century and they replaced the use of sculpted sugar and they were marvelous they were permanent you didn't have to break them up afterwards they could be colored brilliantly and of course they were extraordinarily expressive as well primarily decoration these whimsical porcelain figures also acted like a mirror of 18th century societal moors in a humorous often scandalous way these small porcelain sculptures may not look very important but in fact when you know their secrets they become much more interesting especially when we can interpret their costumes and their gestures here you have a pair of figures also made at mice and also by candler and you can see a harlequin here and a woman on the other side well they look as if they're having fun and they are but i'm going to interpret their gestures it was only through research that we found in fact the language of gesture as well as the language of costume which in a way cracked the secret of these porcelain sculptures so that we could understand them now as they had been understood in the 18th century so here you have harlequin and you can see that he has his hand placed on the hat which is resting on the lady's knee well in the 18th century the knee was an area that you just did not touch especially if you were a man in fact you never showed it you might be more likely to show your bosom but never your knee and so this is a very overt and sexual gesture in fact when he's putting his hand out maybe on a hat but it's still on her knee and what else is he doing he's showing her a sausage well i don't need to go into that it's very explicit and she is not exactly saying no you can see that she is flirtatiously holding out her hand as if to take off his mask and reveal him for the scoundrel that he is and she's also going to slap him with her slapstick as if to say get off with you so you can see naughty tricks are taking place in this one to the people seeing this at the table this might remind them of a performance of the comedia de larte that had just taken place before dinner it might also talk get them talking about perhaps a little scandal that was occurring at the time certainly it would make them smile and it was a good little sexual joke porcelain was really the purview of princes in the 18th century it was considered so special and so precious that many princes had their own private porcelain factories it was in a way an expression of the age itself now this changes in the 19th century because porcelain is now becoming wanted and and sought after by the middle classes and in order to do this new bodies are developed like bone china which are much easier to produce they've been mass produced and they're less expensive and as we move forward into the 20th century porcelain and bone china are both being made both for functional use but also they're transformed by contemporary artists into really wonderful new and creative ideas in the same way an earthenware pot can reveal secrets about the culture and rituals of an ancient civilization or an 18th century porcelain figure is able to reflect the politics of the day this massive clay relief sculpture tells a detailed story about more modern events this battle is a drama it's a fabulous epic story full of rich anecdote and detail so my idea was to tell the story in sculpted pictures when we return we explore how the art of modern ceramics draws from the examples of the past while simultaneously looking to the future these ceramic sculptures were created in 1956 but they were made to look a bit like these which were crafted in italy sometime in the sixteen hundreds but if you look closely you will see something else in the negative space between the containers there is an outline of a girl and a boy facing each other modern artists continue to push the envelope of this medium that's one way ceramics reflect the culture of our time you can find many leading contemporary pieces at the gardner museum which showcases great movements in the history of ceramics ceramics is not a dead art some of the most exciting pieces are being created today and i felt that those pieces had such relevance to our historical collections and i felt that they could enliven the historical collections and the historical collections enliven our contemporary pieces and normally contemporary is seen in a you know museum or a gallery on its own and i wanted it to be integrated as part of a ceramic continuum so contemporary artists are very aware of ceramic history and they often draw on it in very funny ways because it is an art form where earth is made into art ceramics are a perfect snapshot of time place and culture that has made them extremely useful to archaeologists and it continues to make the medium popular with ceramic artists today contemporary art can be divided into three categories sculptural functional and conceptual but it that also can be misleading because you can see beautiful pieces such as the steve heinemann double black bowl which is theoretically functional because it is a bowl but it's very very sculptural and intent and is conceptual contemporary artists like to challenge the limitations of clay both technically and philosophically this means our culture and technology is reflected in the work of modern artists so you have adrian sacks a california artist who worked at sev in france which is famous for its 18th century collections and so he does a riff on this he does a torso very classical looking torso and the name of the piece is called denial d apostrophe nile about west nile disease which he thought he had and was in the hospital for a couple of days with so you have these airplanes which were used in la with pesticides to get rid of various pests and then you have these rococo handles and their faux rococo and faux silver in other words fake and very exuberant and fun but of course adrian took that right from his time at sev and with the sort of california a twist to it and we have an artist named karen dahl who made these trump loy pieces that look exactly like something else you can find trompoy examples in the 18th century so everyone they think that the playing cards are real they think the string is real they think the piece of wood is real but it is all clay basic materials haven't changed that much since people started making things out of clay but the types of objects being made has changed a lot especially in the last half of the 20th century the big push for modern and contemporary ceramics was certainly the beginning of this century and then after the second world war in north america and the u.s there was a real rethinking about ceramics and there was this sort of explosion of new ideas some of the most important ceramic artists of the 20th century are represented in the gardener's contemporary gallery a major figure of this movement was a sculptor named peter volkas who in the 50s started an influential ceramics program at the otis institute in los angeles peter volkas is an american ceramic artist who is very very highly regarded and he led a movement that was based on abstract expressionist painting an idea that you could take something like a vessel and all of a sudden have it explode and have no functional form he was a beautiful potter made absolutely exquisite things but that wasn't enough for him he wanted to take ceramics into another realm he started making what we call big stacks of clay again based on a rather conventional form but with an explosion of gouging and ripping and cutting out and these exciting forms meant a great deal to other artists who were working with him such as john mason and paul soldner and created an atmosphere that led people to think that they could reinterpret ceramics funk art was another exciting period in ceramic history there were these marvelous ceramic artists like bob arneson marilyn levine david gilhooley they were disturbed by the kind of honor that was given to the beautiful chinese ceramic vase they they found that uninteresting and they wanted to kind of poke fun at it and they wanted people to reconsider the position of clay that it could do something else and so they set out on this mission to reinvigorate clay and it had a parallel with the pop art movement in addition to these iconic examples of contemporary ceramics the gardener showcases different artists who continue to push the ceramic envelope today one area of ceramics that's very interesting at the moment is sculptural pieces and we invited paul day to bring his battle of britain exhibition over to toronto paul day is an english artist who is known for his massive high relief sculptures fully formed in terracotta clay the tradition of high relief and low relief is ancient but its ability to convey a sense of humanity is timeless day reflects modern urban life in his sculptures my main subject is urban scenes of you know contemporary life and relief allows me to capture an element of time because you have to walk past the sculpture there's a shift of forms which is the same shift that occurs when you walk through a city everything is in a sort of poetic sliding movement which gives me a sense of i think well-being and harmony walking along the worlds turning around me things are moving and sliding and i get this sense of space and shape and distance and so forth and relief sculpture allows me to add that component of time and movement into a static image the battle of britain monument is day's first public commission in his home country the battle of britain is like this mythic thing all the films we saw as kids as well that portrayed the second world war these the aeroplanes the raids the life in london at the time so my idea was to tell the story in sculpture in sculpted pictures and for me it was the human drama that was important and that human drama was not just the pilots going up and sort of shooting down aircraft it was also people working in factories stuffing gunpowder into shells families sheltering in the back garden under a pile of earth and a bit of corrugated iron it was a really rich tapestry of events so i've tried to honor everybody involved and celebrate really the work that was going on not proclaim victory over nazi germany [Music] throughout history i think people were all alike in many many ways and it's an emotional power that his work has it's evocative we see human faces in there with pain and fear and happiness and humor and i think that he's captured something that's totally universal we don't rely on visual artifacts to make sense of the world as prehistoric peoples would have done and and we don't imbue them either with a sacred or iconic status we treat them as purely images in a way so i'm looking in a way to create images which have some sort of universal link to other people that can show also meaning where most of us don't see any meaning or value in things that are too often overlooked a universal medium clay has provided the basis of functional and decorative ceramic wares in cultures all over the world from ancient times to present day ceramics continues to be a versatile art form with the power to mirror the richness of human history and reveal many fascinating secrets i think that ceramics tell you so much about the people who made the pieces and the culture that they lived in if you start looking at pieces with that in mind you will make incredible discoveries maybe discoveries that other people haven't even seen you'll understand things about how people dressed the traditions or rituals that they held dear you'll find out an enormous amount about what interested them what were exciting things that were happening at that time so because they parallel life they always give you such insights to the people who made them

Channel: Perspective

Views: 23,687

Rating: 4.8897891 out of 5

Keywords: Arts, The Arts, Theatre, Music, Full EPisode, Full documentary, documentary, performing arts, secrets of the exhibit, series 1, ceramics, mayan ceramics history, mayan ceramics, ancient ceramics, modern ceramics, ceramic art history, ceramic art documentary, ancient artforms, ancient art

Id: -HbHNamsVgQ

Length: 53min 4sec (3184 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 04 2021