Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
Crafts Council Gallery, London 13 September – 28 October
Reviewed by: Anatol Orient
This year's Jerwood Applied Arts Prize is another open submission contest with an exhibition attached. Its real significance is the £15,000 prize for the lucky winner (Jerwood 'fine art' prizes are worth twice that, but we won't linger there). Unfortunately, those unfamiliar with ceramic practice might believe the Jerwood Foundation's claim, that the display reflects "the most outstanding and innovative contributions to ceramics over the past five years". The ten contestants were selected from some eighty applicants – from the evidence on show, they might have been picked blind from a hat. There was some work worth seeing, but overall, the exhibition reinforced a growing suspicion that the new institutional 'positioning' of craft within the Arts Council of England's visual arts policies is little more than book-keeping promoted with hollow rhetoric.
The prize is intended for work since 1996, so it was puzzling to see pots by Elizabeth Fritsch and Walter Keeler in the first gallery. Keeler continues producing strong pots, but his inclusion felt like an obligatory nod to utility and Fritsch's work has hardened into ungainly collections of pretension.
Happily, Alison Britton's latest vessels continue stretching the robustness she indicated in her last UK solo exhibitions. Not afraid to be unattractive, her mid-career work grows increasingly interesting. Carol McNicoll deserves a lifetime achievement award – her work always engages and you know she's enjoyed making it. This wasn't the best selection however, relying on kitsch, rather than using it, as we've come to expect from this adventurous maker.
The last contestant in the first gallery was Richard Slee. There's not space to detail his work, only to say that if he has not won the prize, there's no hope for fine art ceramic practitioners. Pack your bags, leave town, get another career.
Which brings us to the profoundly depressing rear gallery. About Felicity Aylieff's work there's little to say except how nice it might look on the floor of a Hoxton loft. Nicholas Rena's work left me cold – perhaps that's his intention. The surfaces are so thin they're repellent and the three non-vessel pieces leant on fine art ideas so old they collapsed long ago. No doubt the 'craftworld' is impressed. James Evans' table sculptures are simply ugly. Not ugly-with-meaning, just lumpen evening class efforts. Perhaps the judges thought they were looking at 'fine art'. They weren't. And this is the problem: the craft world as constituted cannot or will not distinguish between work of cultural significance and decorative products.
Lubna Chowdhary's Metropolis is presented as an installation of 1000 colourful objects, but its integrity is utterly compromised when you discover you can buy any one piece for £96.50. Think about it. The last finalist was Edmund de Waal, who 'installed' A Bad Day For the Sung Dynasty, a number of yawn-inducing cylinders cynically grouped together under a knowing title, with an £18,000 price tag. It must be Art. He also offered two large porcelain jars that showed no sensitivity to form, and whose ill-fitting lids denied any special skill at handling the tricky medium. But they, too, bore esoteric titles, that nowadays seems enough to impress.
Critic Pamela Johnson has written that significant art is always about the production, not the re-production, of knowledge. Seemingly, this is not the Jerwood view. We aren't to know who the other applicants were – we can only hope that talents like Gordon Baldwin, Neil Brownsword, Robert Cooper, Stephen Dixon, Kate Malone and Sara Radstone, did not apply. Nothing else could justify this shortlist. The most outstanding and innovative contributions to ceramics over the past five years? Not here.
Writer detail:
ANATOL ORIENT
is an independent curator, writer and lecturer.
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