Industrial Chinoiserie

8/12/2019 Industrial Chinoiserie

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Gfowth Fruits of Labor Series.2 6 Ceramic and fivind

purchased) object

DirkStaschke

[ndustrialChinoiserie

Article by Glen R Brown

HrNA LOOMS LARGE IN THE ENTREPRENEURIAL

imagination. Industrial titan of the contemporary w orld, it is land of opportunity where

glinting spires of glass and steel rise through veils ofwhite smoke hanging in the air like an unearthly fog;a place where labour is still astonishingly cheap andits instruments re legion; place where factory uponfactory glows and fumes and clanks and squeals,churning out the endless array of products on which vast global consumerism feeds like an insatiablebeast. China s goods are destined for dispersion toevery home and business in every city in every cornerof the earth. Its familiar export stamp graces every-thing from plastic toys and inexpensive clothing toengine parts and high-tech instruments; a millionthings that the world cannot do without or at any


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stack Fruits of Labor Series. 2006. eramic a nd fotiitd purchased) object 114 x 30.5 x 25.5 cm.

rate, would not wish to. In this sense, China is more

than a co untry. It is the beating h eart of a vital systemof prod uction and trade that encircles the globe.When American ceramic sculptor Dirk Staschke

who have travelled to China in recent years, he wasnot on a tour of famous ceramics-related sites. Norwas he bound for residency at Yixing or Jingde zhen .Though he spent some time as a visiting artist at theCentral Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, his stay wasrelated principally to busine ss that his wife was con-ducting for one of the myriad foreign companieswith pro duc tion ties to China . As a conseq uence, h isreflections during his travels turned as much to-ward global commerce, especially the thriving tradebetween East and West, as toward ceramics. Aboveall, he was interested to see that international com-mt.TCe had carried W ester n influen ces to Ch ina asextensively as it had brought Chinese goods to theWest. The seed of an idea began to grow in his mind,and he considered the way s in which this re lationshipof mutual influence through trade might be ad-dressed in a scries of ceramic wo rks.

The first part of the answer was relatively simple.While China's foreign trade has escalated to unp rece-dented scale since the 1980s, there have, of course,been other periods in history wh en the Chinese haveengaged in extensive exportation of goods, both toother p arts of Asia and fo coun tries in the M iddle East,Europe and the Americas, As every ceramist is aware,dur ing the Ming and Qing dyna sties some of the mostlucrative of these trade goods were porcelains, bothtableware and objefs d'art. For a time, Chinese blue-and-white and, later, overglaze-enamel wares were

the most prized possessions to adorn the mantels,sideboards and dining tables of the great palaces andman or hou ses of Europe. During fhe Ming period, thelower-grade so-called kraak wares even fed impor-tant middle-class markets in countries such as thenew D utch Republic.

While the extraordinary appeal that Chinese porce-lain held for the 17th-century European consumer nodou bt de rived first from its rarity and second from thephysical qualities of the paste - the ringing hardness,translucency and above all (he milk-white puritywhich had no parallel among Western wares - therewas clearly something else that worked its subtleinfluence over desire. Chinese porcelains generallybore examples of the Chinese aesthetic: somethingexquisite, exotic and eminently useful for visuallycorroborating the stories of sfrange, far off landsencountered by European explorers and traders.From the fluid linear motifs and delicate patterns onChinese porcelain wares, the aristocracy of Europedeveloped its faste for chinoiserie, a whimsical, fan-tasising and largely unprecedented style of decora-tion that reached the peak of its popularity in themid-18th century .

For Staschke, chinoiserie carries implicationsdirectly relevant to the present as well as the past. It


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globalisation. Europeans began imit-ating the Chinese wares and the Chi-nese soon figured that out and beganmaking imitations of those imitations inorder to better serve the foreign mar-ket. The result of this mutual imitationwas a series of strange new forms thathad developed largely out of attempts,often wildly imaginative, to address adistant and different other, Chinoiseriewas neither truly Chinese nor whollyEuropean but rather an acknowledge-ment on both ends that tbe world wasnot monocultural and that there wereinnovative ways to take advantage ofthat fact in the production of aestheticobjects. For Staschke, the historical ex-ample of chinoiserie suggested someintriguing possibilities for hybrid formsin a series of contemporary ceramicsculptures embodying the themes ofglobalisation, industrial manufacture,international commerce and the rolethat ceramic objects still piay in theinteraction of cultures.

The result, the year following his tripto China, was Staschke's introductionof his current series. The Fruits of LaborConsisting of contemporary under-

glaze blue-and-white Chinese exportporcelain vessels that have been com-bined witb slipcast and constructedwhite stoneware elements, the sculp-tures are, significantly, half commodi-ties and halfcreativeresponses to thosecommercial objects. In this series ofstrange but oddly attractive sculptures,Staschke has taken the modem counter-part of the Ming export vase andnegated its utility. In its new exclusivelyaesthetic and metaphorical role the ves-

sel has become not only a ba.se for de-corative extension and elaboration of alarger work but also, and more impor-tantly, a support for a generalisingvision of the otber. Stascbke has, inother words, utilised the contemporaryChinese mass-manufactured porcelainvessel to represent a certain perceptionof the conditions of its making. Although this percep-tion is of an anonymous, efficient but alienating fac-tory system of production, it parallels - as part of afantasised vision of a distant culture - the 17tb-cen-

tury perception of China as a tranquil natural par-adise inhabited by solitary scholars in lofty mountainretreats and exotic beauties wandering among gar

U / . t

Amalgam ruits of Labor Series. 2006 eramic andfound and fired object 76 x 25 5 x 25 5 cm

Due to his interest in tbe phenomenon of globalisa-tion, Staschke bas not employed his industrial chi-noiserie merely to comment on those contemporaryWestern perceptions of Cbina that have been formed


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Towers Fruits of Labor Series. 2006. eramic and foundand fired objec ts. 61 x 35.5 x 28 cm.

with traditionally Chinese aesthetic conventions.Western interests bave exerted their influence overcertain aspects of those prod ucts . Tbe work Slrttcturefor example, features a Chinese blue-and-white bowltbat serves as the base for a mish-mash of classicalEuropean architectural ornaments; a pastiche ofCorinthian acanthus leaves and ionic volutes thatrises upw ard likea m assive stylised flower. This curi-ous blend of culturally distinct deco rative traits is, inthe end, perhap s mos t interesting because it is as visu-ally rich as it is tende ntious ly synthetic. Tbe obvio usartificiality of Stascbke's cbinoiserie - unlike tbeostensible naturalness, even inevitability, of some

lt l i d t l b t lik th hi i i f th

effectiveness in orchestrating anaesthetic experience.

Tbe upper section of Structurecould clearly be called opulent,per hap s excessively so. Its mass ofornament threatens, visually andliterally, to overwhelm the rela-tively fragile bowl, even toppleand crush it tbrougb leverage andsheer weight. Contemplating thisbulky neo-classical hybrid, one isnot surprised to learn that in pre-vious works Stashcke employedarchitectural ornament as a meta-pho r for social oppre ssion , Soci-ety, he explains, is some thingthat we build collectively but areforced to experience individ ually.In those other works drew on myexperiences living in New YorkCity, a crowded place where youare almost more isolated than ifyou were living in a small town.In Structure however, Staschke'sintent in incorporating imposingmultifarious architectural elementswas so mew hat different. The Fruitsof Labor scries as a whole employsthe moulded white stoneware sec-tions more obviously as symbols ofabundance than oppression - al-though abundance, as the case ofnear-epidemic rates of obesity anddiabetes in contemporary Chinasuggest, can certainly have its per-nicious side as well.

Other w orks in the Fruits of LaborSeries more obviously signifyabundance through their conglo-

merates of moulded melons, apples, pears, squashand other natural foods tbat rise and billow likeclouds of smoke from factory stacks. The cornucopiaeffect of these moulded forms and the vessels thatbelch them forth makes unmistakably literal tbemetaphor of fruits of labor.

The contradiction between nutritious produce andnoxious fumes also obviously raises issues about thecost, in terms of environment and health, of unre-stricted industrial growth. Who could look at theseworks and fail to reflect on problems such as globalwa rmin g? W ho could m iss the irony that the fruits oflabour may contain the seeds of destruction? Ifpiquing fears and nettling the viewer's consciencewere the extent of Staschke's motivation, his sculp-tures would no doubt be effective enough. He bas,h l i d i hi k b l


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To understand that commentary, oneneed only recognise that the medium isnot incidental to Staschke s sc ulptu res.The found-object vessels play a crucialrole in establishing connec tions to chinois-erie of course, and they are equally n eces-

sary to the allusions to contemporaryChinese industry. Beyond that, however,they invoke the issue of labour and do sospecifically in the conte xt of ceramic s. Themass-produced vessels that Staschke in-corporates into his sculptures are of thelineage of the great blue-a nd-w hite p orce-lains of the Ming dynasty, yet they havebecome even more overtly the products ofanonymous workers. Ming decoratorsstill hand-painted their underglaze cobaltmotifs and, as a consequence, manufac-turers desires for uniformity were con-stantly thw arted by the reality of variationin the marks made by individuals. In thissense, Ming dynasty factory production,however unintentionally, still acknowl-edged the maker.

App lication of today s porcelain m anu -facturing and decorating technology has,however, diminished the traces of theindividual to the point where the productsof industry seem to emerge without the

necessity of agents. Transfer images anddecals hav e increasingly, if not absolutely,replaced the traditional hand work ofindivid ual d ecorato rs, and the result is ageneral decline of the factory producedceramic object from expressive form tomere thing , useful or attractive as it mightbe . How many viewers, upon encoun-tering one of Staschke s w orks for the firsttime would have immediately perceivedthe sculp ture as a prod uct of collaboration? After all,industrially produced ceramic vessels of the sort that

Staschke utilises as found objects hav e come to epito-mise the estrangement of the worker from the prod-ucts of labour. Cold and bloodless, they symb olise theloss of self-determination that, along with contam ina-tion of the environm ent an d deterioration of hum anhealth, has been an ironic consequence of the pursuitof abundance and a higher quality of life in the mod-ern world.

Dirk Staschke does not, of course, presen t any s olu-tions to the daun ting p roblems of environmental con-tamination and the social and somatic illnessesgenerated by the modern mentality of excess. Hisassemblages m ay, howev er, offer some glim meringsof hope for recovery of the mass-manufacturedceramic vessel as a vehicle of expression His indus

Structure Fruits of Labor Series. 2006. Ceramic unitfound purchased) object 50.5 x 28 x 28 cm.

Contamination of the environment is a global issue,yet one of the foremost among the factors that haveallowed it to take a death g rip on the planet h as surelybeen the failure to effect reform on a global scale.Today China may be among the most visible ofoffenders against the environm ent, but its preceden tsas an industrial behemoth lie in the West. Moreover,the influences of international consumerism andentrepreneurial zeal exercise their power overCh ina s indus try tod ay far more relentlessly thanever before. Stasc hke s in dus trial chinoiserie is areminder of these facts. Perhaps in some small fash-

ion it may even be a catalyst for chan ge.


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Industrial Chinoiserie

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