Albert Camus wrote in his 1962 essay Creation and Revolution:

“Industrial society will only open the way to a new civilization by restoring to the worker the dignity of a creator; in other words, by making him apply his interest and his intelligence as much to the work itself as to what it produces…. Every act of creation denies, by its mere existence, the world of master and slave. The appalling society of tyrants and slaves in which we survive will only find its death and transfiguration on the level of creation.”

'Burned Again' from IN DUST REAL by Marek CeculaThis passage came back to me today as I visited the website of one of my favorite ceramic artists, Marek Cecula, which declares on the front page: “mass production is an inspiration for originality.” Ceramics, more than almost any other art form, is forced to confront this tension between the creative act and the means of production. Even among many sculptural ceramicists, we can see echoes of functionality in the work. This is fitting, since the world of ceramic art has been dominated until very recently by folk revivalists like Bernard Leach and Kawai Kanjiro, and before industrialization was a largely functional art form for thousands of years. (I know this is a simplification, but, after all, this is a blog). Cecula, who designs functional ceramics for mass production, is also a highly respected artist, and has confronted the tension between creativity and functionality head-on. In his most recent show at Garth Clark, he took traditional, industrially produced European tea sets and stacked them in various ways. He then re-fired them in a traditional Japanese wood-fired kiln, which melted the sets just enough to make them appear deformed, while coating them in dust and soot, and fusing the separate pieces together. The resulting sculptures are born of the clash between mass production and unique creation; but also between Western and Eastern (specifically Japanese) understandings of aesthetic value. Much of his other work explores this territory in other ways, and it is all worth checking in with – but I’d recommend starting with this PDF of the catalog for IN DUST REAL.