3rd July 2020

Caroline Knighton, Independent

A scientist one time said there is no such affair as time. So mayhap we practise not exist in time as we know information technology. We cannot hold on to the by or grab onto the future, and the present is ever gone . [1]

– Beatrice Forest

In the acknowledgments of her aptly titled memoir I Shock Myself (1985), the celebrated 'Mamma of Dada' and internationally renowned ceramist Beatrice Wood (1893-1998) draws a compelling comparing between the forms and functions of autobiography and the processes of pottery, both of which she embarked on later in life, and remained preoccupied past until her expiry at 105. While the substance of ceramics is 'clay and chemicals', she muses that the 'stuff of life is most certainly people', the autobiographic certificate reimaged as 'a large pot, shaped, designed, and filled by the people 1 has known and loved'.[two] Pushing Forest's analogy further than functionality, we tin see that both practices also involve the crafting of raw material into recognisable forms, and the compression of circuitous temporalities.

As a record of a life from beginning to stop, autobiographic time might, initially, seem pretty straightforward. However, the interlacing of narrative and identity key to autobiography continually confounds this sense of chronological time and teleological evolution.[three] In a sequence of more complex superimpositions, autobiographic writing instead involves the non-linear interplay of past, nowadays and time to come every bit the writing-self revisits and revises a personal history intersected by other familial, socio-political and cultural histories.

The pot, similarly, is an object that 'has taken shape in time'.[4] Throwing on the wheel or mitt-building takes fourth dimension: shaping the wedged, wet dirt involves the body in an intensely concrete, durational action every bit the potter adjusts the force per unit area and shape of her hands on the dirt, the speed of the wheel, or the angle of her torso to it. At that place are rest periods as the clay dries leather-difficult, cogitating moments where the dirt shrinks, changes; perchance information technology cracks. New, unexpected forms might emerge, and repairs or alterations tin be made before the newly shaped body of malleable clay is chemically and materially transformed in the kiln, glazed, and fired again.

Beatrice Woods at the bicycle. From the Beatrice Wood Papers held past the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.

Beneath this sense of measurable 'clock-time' involved in working with clay, other temporal patterns are also at play. Important objects of archaeological record, earthenware bowls, vessels and decorative or figurative objects are amongst the earliest examples of human invention. Uniting East and West and Neolithic to Modern, the fundamentals of pottery have remained unchanged beyond millennia, emphasised in Wood's own practice by her encompassing of the figurative and the functional, and her experimentation with the metallic and optical qualities of lusterware glazes. Rooted in techniques employed in ancient Islamic ceramics, the luminous colours and surface qualities associated with lusterware glaze are created by specific reduction firing techniques where metallic pigments react with the clay body every bit the oxygen is absorbed. Inherently unpredictable, the Dadaist element of chance involved with lusterware glazing certainly appealed to Woods, whose delight at tossing other elements such as straw or mothballs into the kiln is palpable in Tom Neff's 1993 film, 'Beatrice Forest: Mamma of Dada'.

Beatrice Wood, Luster Urn, 1987, earthenware. From the collection of Lenny and Jerry Berkowitz.

In shimmering golds, bright flashes of turquoise, radiant coppers, greens and opalescent pinks, Woods's beaded vessels, luminous chalices and decorative platters are inviting, tactile objects whose liquid surfaces appear to bend and change with the low-cal. Anaïs Nin famously commented that 'water poured from i of her jars will taste like wine', and certainly in that location is something of the alchemist to Wood as she stands surround by dusty shelves of pigments and powders, absorbed in her transformation of the shape and land of her materials that seem to come to life in these shifting colour rhythms.[v]

Blending science and magic, this sense of the alchemic links Woods to a vein of modernist experiment interested in automatism, chance and the occult. As Leigh Wilson has suggested, contemporary occultism understood magic as 'a discourse of the material world rather than necessarily related to the metaphysical or transcendent'.[vi] As Wilson goes on to describe, the infamous occultist and co-founder of the Theosophical Lodge Madame Blavatsky called the move a 'synthesis between religion and science', a belief organization that engaged directly with the materiality of the world through 'the methodical gathering of the results of empirical observation'.[7]With titles such as 'Blue Moon', 'Ruby-red Crystalline' and 'Crackle vii' and combinations of 'flint' with the more categorical 'F. 3191', Wood's detailed glazing notes capture this blend of magic and scientific discipline. It is meaning that Wood remained a fellow member of the Theosophical lodge from 1923 until her decease, bequeathing her habitation and studio to Annie Besant's Happy Valley Foundation in Ojai, where she had moved in 1947 to exist a part of this burgeoning spiritual and artistic community, and to learn from the sage Jiddu Krishnamurti who was based there.

Emanating from the Absolute and without beginning or end, Blavatsky's writings on time as duration must have struck a chord with Wood, whose autobiographic self, like her pots, echoes the sentiment that:

The real person or affair does not consist solely of what is seen at any particular moment, but is composed of the sum of all its various and changing weather condition from its appearance in the fabric course to its disappearance from the earth.[8]

While her lusterware clearly plays on making 'the ancient art of pottery a modern art', her decorative tiles and witty 'sophisticated primitives' at one time invoke those ancient experiments with figuration in clay, and selection up themes and motifs from her own early Dada drawings.[9]

Beatrice Wood, Un peut d'eau dans du savon, 1977. Glazed Earthenware, heart-shaped bar of soap, Francis One thousand. Naumann Fine Art.

In 1977, around the time that Woods was start to experiment with forms of life-writing, she returned to the 1917 multi-media composition that she is probably best known for, Un peut [sic]d'eau dans du savon. Ridiculed by the press and attracting throngs of visitors daily, Wood'southward submission to the 1917 Independents Exhibition proved to be the well-nigh controversial exhibit after the rejection of 'R. Mutt's' Fountain. Collapsing the altitude betwixt 'and then' and 'now', past re-modelling this limerick in clay Wood reclaims her part as a cardinal artist in the New York Dada move, countering the tendencies to render accounts of the women of the historical avant-garde as passive muses and love-objects from the outside, instead reshaping the business relationship on her own terms.

For Wood, the relationship between the autobiographic and the ceramic was finally fused with the instructions left upon her decease to mix one-half of her ashes into a lustre coat to be bonded to the clay bodies of three vessels.[10]As the renowned Dada scholar, collector and shut friend of Woods, Francis Naumann (who, rather appropriately is in possession of one of these objects) wrote: 'the concepts of infinity nevertheless derange me, but information technology is evident that Beatrice Wood embodies the quality of timelessness – right here on earth'.[11]

Sources:

[1]Marlene Wallace, Playing Chess With the Heart: Beatrice Wood at 100, (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1994), p. 68.

[2]Beatrice Wood, I Stupor Myself: Beatrice Wood, Career Woman of Fine art(Atglen, PN: Schiffer Publishing  Ltd, 2018)

[3]James Olney, Retentiveness and Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writing  (Chicago: University of Chicago Printing, 1999)

[four]Jens Brockmeier, 'From the end to the beginning: Retrospective teleology in autobiography', Narrative and Identity: Studies in Autobiography, Cocky and Civilization, ed. Jens Brockmeier, Donal A. Carbaugh (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2001) pp. 247-218, p. 247.

[five]Anaïs Nin, 'Beatrice Wood', Artforum, January 1965

[6]Leigh Wilson, Modernism and Magic: Experiments with Spiritualism, Theosophy and the Occult(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Printing, 2015 ), p. four.

[7]Ibid., p. 6

[viii]Helena Blavatsky, The Hole-and-corner Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion and Philosophy, vol 1, (1888) (Pasadena, CA: Theosophical University Press, 2019), p.37.

[9]From the printing release of Wood'south 1961-62 exhibition at the Sir Visweswaraiah Industrial Museum, Bangalore, reprinted in I Shock Myself, p. 189.

[10]See Alexxa Gotthardt, 'The Forgotten Legacy of Beatrice Wood', Artsy, August 1, 2016.

[11]Francis Naumann, in Beatrice Wood, I Shock Myself, p. thirteen.