Preface: Glenn Lewis and I

The first time I visited Vancouver was in the spring of 2004 – a professional visit in preparation for an exhibition of Vancouver art I was to organize in close collaboration with my colleague Scott Watson, director of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at the University of British Columbia. This exhibition came to be known as Intertidal: Vancouver Art & Artists, and included work by many different artists, some whose names had long been familiar to me as dependable purveyors of a certain ‘Vancouver’ aesthetic or set of aesthetic concerns – artists working in film and photography primarily, who produce artworks of breath-taking pictorial beauty, often steeped in high-brow cultural references. Indeed, I very much remember naming ‘clarity’ and ‘intellectual rigor’ as the two cardinal virtues of this strongly localized artistic sensibility. So in retrospect it continues to bewilder me that the one exhibition I remember most vividly of that very first visit (I have gone back to Vancouver many times since) was a show of pottery – ceramics.

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An early ceramic vessel by Glenn Lewis c. 1964-1965
Curated by Scott Watson and organized at the aforementioned Belkin Art Gallery, the exhibition in question was called Thrown: Influences and Intentions of West Coast Ceramics, and it also included the work of Glenn Lewis, the actual subject of the current essay – not that I remember ever reading his name back then, as Thrown was definitely not about remembering names (for me, that is): it was simply too confusing a spectacle, too disorienting an experience for that. And that is probably why I remember it so vividly – because the surprise of seeing a show of ceramics is precisely what etched it in my mind with a measure of stubborn permanence appropriate to the irreverent materiality of the work on view: a far cry indeed from the reigning photo-and-film aesthetic which my narrow, biased European perspective, at once jaded and naïve, was there to examine and map. [Glenn’s work was included in Intertidal in the end, but in a somewhat prefatory ‘archival’ fashion, drawing attention to Lewis-the-performance-artist (and co-founder of the Western Front) rather than Lewis-the-potter; my co-curator’s passion for the subject notwithstanding, there were no ceramics on view in Intertidal.]

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Now I should probably add that Thrown really only started to haunt me three years or so after Intertidal went up (and down again), when I was putting together a very different kind of exhibition, this one called The Thing – the curatorial conclusion, so to speak, of a year-and-a-half worth of work done while researching the emerging field of ‘thing theory,’ a subject which, inevitably, made me think back to my initial startling encounter with pottery. And when late in 2008 I once again found myself in Vancouver, and was invited to speak on the very subject of thing theory at UBC’s art history department, a mere handful of yards away from the Belkin Art Gallery, a circle appeared to be closing itself with the same effortless perfection of a Japanese tea bowl of Lewis’ making.

[Parenthesis: Glenn Lewis’ work is connected to my interest in the subject of thingness and thing theory in yet another way, incidentally: in the spring of 2005, I visited the Belkin Satellite in downtown Vancouver where one chapter from a series of exhibitions curated by David Bellman and Meirion Cynog Evans and titled 1 + 1 = 1 was on view; this particular chapter, titled Stucco Floor Divided consisted of only two works, both by Glenn Lewis – in the small front room, a single ceramic bowl sat enthroned on a Plexiglas pedestal, the base of which contained a mirror, which allowed a full view of the bowl’s exquisite material execution. Here again was an image that would continue to work its bizarre magic in my curatorial imagination, and when in 2009 the exhibition The Thing acquired its final shape, one of the artworks in it bore a strong resemblance to the aforementioned piece at the Belkin Satellite11.I never asked the makers of this particular work if theirs was a veiled homage to Glenn Lewis.]

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Etymology: Glenn Lewis and ‘Throwing’

Potters and ceramics aficionados (of which there are in fact remarkably many – or at least I found that their numbers continue to grow, much like those of lovers of oriental carpets for example22.Ceramics and textiles are two ‘applied’ art forms that have enjoyed a remarkable comeback in the contemporary art arena in recent years; I have argued elsewhere that, market motivation notwithstanding, the critical revaluation of certain notions of craft (along with the very emergence of such an academic field of study as ‘thing theory’) is inextricably linked to a growing sense of discomfort with the techno-jingoist rhetoric of digital culture and its tireless insistence on dematerializations of all kinds. So whereas it may of course be tempting to cynically dismiss the reawakened interest in pottery, weaving and woodcarving as a mere fad or a regressive return to the production of auratic commodities that bear the unmistakable stamp of authorial genius (and hence are certain to command higher prices on the art market), one should be mindful of this movement’s critical impetus as well. Without a doubt, my own interest in Lewis’ work was sparked by the critical possibilities afforded by the reconsideration of ceramics (and other types of ‘craft’) in the thoroughly digitized context of contemporary art production. And in any case, doesn’t ‘digital’ originally mean ‘of or relating to the hand’?) know what ‘throwing’ means – it is an act of creation, not the destruction (say, of carefully sculpted but failed pots, thrown out of the window in a fit of frustrated rage for example) that I initially associated with the term: ‘throwing’ a pot literally means ‘making’ a pot. At the same time, for philosophy students such as myself, the concept of ‘throwing’ and ‘thrown’ resounds with a not so different kind of coming-into-being, with mankind’s emergence in the world – I am referring, of course, to the Heideggerian concept of Geworfenheit (literally: ‘thrownness’), which the controversial German Meisterdenker used to summarize the tragic essence of the human condition: that of an inanimate lump of clay thrown into the world, where he or she must invent (‘animate’) oneself, give form and shape to one’s own Dasein or existence. Here is how Heidegger put it himself, in characteristically gnomic fashion, in his magnum opus Sein und Zeit:

This characteristic of Dasein’s being – this ‘that it is’ – is veiled in its “whence” and “whither”, yet disclosed in itself all the more unveiledly; we call it the “thrownness” of this entity into its “there”; indeed, it is thrown in such a way that, as Being-in-the-world, it is the “there.” The expression “thrownness” is meant to suggest the facticity of its being delivered over.33.Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (trans. John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson), New York: HarperCollins, 1962, p. 174. Elsewhere in this baffling book, Heidegger also notes that “[Dasein] is thrown possibility through and through”, p. 183, and that “to Dasein’s state of being belongs thrownness; indeed it is constitutive for Dasein’s disclosedness.” p. 264.

Man himself may not be doing the throwing in Sein und Zeit – indeed, who or what exactly ‘throws’ man into the world? – but Heidegger nonetheless shrewdly exploits the creative undertones of the verb in question, and this individuating alignment of throwing and creating is exactly what interests us here.44. There is more to be said about etymology in this regard: the Latin word for throwing, iacere, lives on in a whole string of concepts and words intimately linked to the grammar of cultural production, from ‘object’ and ‘subject’ to ‘project’ (or ‘projectile’) and ‘abject.’ In fact, the literalized German equivalent for project, ‘Entwurf,’ is another key term in Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit
Ceramic metaphors would continue to reappear in Heidegger’s thinking and never really relax their hold upon the philosopher’s artistic imagination: when in 1950 he delivered his epochal lecture The Thing, he really only spoke of one example of thingness, namely the jug. And so this felicitous convergence of the ceramist’s idiom with the depths of existential philosophy paves the way for a more detailed discussion of one work (‘project’) by Glenn Lewis in particular, the appropriately named Artifact, to which we shall now turn.

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Diary: Glenn Lewis and Glenn Lewis

So much like the pot, jug or bowl, indeed much like the work of art generally speaking (pots, jugs or bowls aren’t the oldest arte-facts known to man – perhaps weapons are – but they come pretty close nonetheless), man is ‘thrown’ into this world, and ‘inventing’ his or her own existence in this precarious condition of ‘thrownness’ quickly and inevitably acquires a certain aesthetic dimension, an element of literally embodied, lived-through craftsmanship – the most self-conscious, or persistently self-reflective expression of which is probably the diary as a paradigmatic document of the creative process of self-fashioning.

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Glenn Lewis, Artifact, 1970, 176 glazed ceramic tiles. Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver Art Gallery Acquisition Fund. Photo Erik Hood

Artifact is an exact example of such a diary, and a self-portrait, one could venture, of the artist tussling with both ‘throwing’ (as the specific form of ‘creating’ he is most familiar with) and ‘thrownness’ (as a specific trait of the human condition in general). A mural that was originally commissioned for the VIP lounge inside the Canadian pavilion at the 1970 Osaka World Fair, the work consisted of 176 ceramic tiles, each measuring a foot square gridded to eight by twenty-two feet, one made every day (more or less) for twenty-two days from June 23 to July 14. Eight salt shakers were made each day, except for two when narratives were introduced. Most tiles were marked by one recurrent motif which Lewis, through trial and error, appears to have been intent on mastering: a simple set of salt and pepper shakers, many of which ended up slouching helplessly and ingloriously to their glazed supporting surfaces like flaccid penises.  (It is the blatant genital imagery, incidentally, which apparently so rattled the Canadian pavilion’s Commissioner General that the work was never shown inside the structure for which it was originally conceived – a case of preemptive censorship on ‘moral’ grounds.) The dream of mastery of a given craft or art very consciously undermined, in other words, by conflicting, insistent images of personal disaster, of incapacitation and, indeed, failure: already then and there, Lewis understood the possibilities of pottery as a dependable medium for ‘casting’ doubt as much as for ‘throwing’ perfectly shaped objects of detached aesthetic contemplation.

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Glenn Lewis, Artifact, 1970, 176 glazed ceramic tiles (detail). Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver Art Gallery Acquisition Fund. Photo Erik Hood
Casting doubt, failing, questioning received notions of mastery and artistic authority by way of a trying-and-erring experiment in the aestheticized practice of everyday life: here, Lewis’ Artifact was very much a product of its time – an era in art marked by losing, self-effacing or underachieving propositions of all kinds, from Bruce Nauman’s failure to levitate in the studio, Richard Long’s line made by mere walking and Vito Acconci’s blindfolded catching (Acconci in particular sought to load the spectral figure of the loser with a sexual charge) to Lee Lozano’s despairing attempts at extricating herself from the art world, Keith Arnatt’s progressive burial of the self, and Bas Jan Ader’s various self-deprecating escapades and exercises in escapology. (Ader’s entire oeuvre has resurfaced in recent years as an awesome monument to doubt and loss – it is intriguing to witness the current beatification of a figure so long deemed peripheral to the established doxa of post-conceptual art history).55.This is of course a very sketchy, reductive view of a complex art-historical question which cannot possibly be addressed within the confines of the present essay. Suffice it to say that Lewis’ connection to this once-heterodox conceptual art history can also be located in two additional nodal points – one being the theme or topic of the attempt (essai, test, trial), the other the very nature of the diaristic. Diaries and diaristic projects of all kinds litter the fringe of post-minimal art, the most obvious example being On Kawara’s entire lifework, which is equally steeped in an anti-heroism of sorts. Diaristic projects of this type (one could also think of Sol Lewitt’s Autobiography) often appeared in grid-like formation, and formed one reason why the arch-modernist figure of the grid continued to thrive even after the onset of conceptual art’s post-modern onslaught; the grid, of course, is yet another crucial feature of Lewis’ Artifact. Interestingly, however – and this is where Lewis’ training in ceramics proved so crucial – the chosen path of these self-styled anti-heroes was invariably of a type that pointed upwards, towards the dematerialization of the art object (a tactic that would, ironically, quickly petrify into a new orthodoxy), whereas Lewis’ critique of the romantic myth of artistic genius was always a decidedly material affair – a matter of dealing and coming to grips, quite literally, with matter’s essential messiness and submission to gravity (cue the slumping phalli in Artifact). Earthy, that is, in both senses of the word: consisting of ‘earthenware’ on the one hand, and down-to-earth, i.e. operating horizontally, on the other. This conflation of erotic and/or scatological imagery (which of course helps to redirect our discussion of ‘thingness’ towards the all-important notion of the fetish: the salt and pepper shakers could just as well be read as feces, for instance) on the one hand, and the notion of a bodily critique of craft operating, as it were, from the ground up – radical base materialism à la Bataille, in clear opposition to the idealism of the aforementioned dematerializers, so enamored with air and verticality – inevitably reminds me of a chapter from Peter Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason, both one of the funniest and most profound philosophical tomes of the last forty years, namely “Concerning the Psychosomatics of the Zeitgeist.”66.Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason (trans. Michael Eldred), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, p. 147-152. This brief survey of the diverging philosophical careers of the various parts of the human body starts with the tongue (“stuck out”), moves downwards, along the breasts, to conclude with a ribald consideration of asses (crouching, i.e. “stuck out”), farts, shit, and genitals – all in the name of restoring the original Cynic spirit of Diogenes to its long-lost centrality in philosophy and cultural criticism, a spirit which is not terribly difficult to discern in much of Lewis’ work as a whole. With regards to the asshole, Sloterdijk writes:

The arse is the plebeian, the grass-roots democrat, and the cosmopolitan among the parts of the body – in a word, the elementary kynical organ. It provides the solid materialist basis. It is at home on toilets all over the world. The International of Arses is the only worldwide organization that has no statutes, ideology, or dues. […] The arse crosses all borders playfully, unlike the head, to which borders and possessions mean a lot.”77.It could be said that it was such an instance of ‘crossing borders’ as viewed from the proverbial head (i.e. that organ “to which borders mean a lot”) that caused Artifact to be withheld from the exhibition across the border for which it had originally been conceived.

With regards to shit, Sloterdijk writes:

Here we come to the whole of the matter. As children of an anal culture, we all have a more or less disturbed relation to our own shit. […] The relation that is drummed into people with regard to their own excretions provides the model for their behavior with all sorts of refuse in their life.
And with regards to genitals, Sloterdijk writes: “These are the geniuses among the organs of the lower half of the body.” Indeed, geniuses – that talismanic concept that is so central to the Idealist (i.e. cerebrally inclined) philosophy of art: the reversal, in short, has been made complete.

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Glenn Lewis, Artifact, 1970, 176 glazed ceramic tiles (detail). Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver Art Gallery Acquisition Fund. Photo Erik Hood
Perhaps this is why the jarring ‘things’ that make up Artifact appear to be so jarring indeed: not content to churn out one approximation after the other of the ideal, Platonic bowl, Lewis here decided to put his considerable skill as a ceramist (in itself already a suspect practice in relation to avant-garde art, not in the least because of its atavistic relationship to ‘mother earth’ and its dependence on traditional notions of skill) precisely in the service, not just of abjection, but also of objection – that is, in the service of a critical counter-tradition not highly thought of in the anxiously policed realm of ‘real’ or ‘true’ (i.e. idealist, aerial) critique, where the faintest shadow of anything like ‘craft’ is sure to be demonized within the blink of an eye, if only for its incriminating relation to something as mundanely physical as the hand.88.Here, I cannot resist thinking back of a telling piece of pop trivia: the disembodied hand that works as a servant in the Adams Family – in other words, the very embodiment (no pun intended!) of the Freudian uncanny – is called ‘Thing’ after all. Here, the ‘thing’ reappears as art’s sinister other – the opposite, in a sense, of the mere object, that which is so easily enlisted in the service of ‘higher’ concepts and ideas: the thing returns ‘thrown’ – a spanner in the workings of art’s all-too-disembodied mind.

 

Dieter Roelstraete is currently the Manilow Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Roelstraete was previously the curator at MuHKA, Antwerp and studied philosophy at the University of Ghent. He co-curated Honoré d’O: “The Quest,” Belgian pavilion, 51st Venice Biennale (2005) and has curated the solo exhibitions by Goshka Macuga at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2012-2013), Roy Arden at the Vancouver Art Gallery (2007) and Steven Shearer at de Appel, Amsterdam (2007). Roelstraete is on the editorial board of Afterall and published extensively on contemporary art and related philosophical topics, including Richard Long: A Line Made By Walking (Afterall Books and MIT Press, London and Cambridge, 2010).