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    • XVII

      • Colleen Asper Labor with Rectangle
      • Dushko Petrovich & Roger White Monument Working Strategies LLC: Structuring Creative Freedom
      • Triple Candie Exhibition Preparations
      • Sean Raspet 2GFR24SMEZZ2XMCVI5L8X9Y38ZJ2JD…
      • Owen Kydd Handheld
      • Dan Levenson Notes From Jessica
      • Julia Rommel Easy Tacker
      • Jordan Kantor MAN(ET/DE)GAS
      • Sreshta Rit Premnath The Last Image
      • OJO The Adventures of Nuclear Wad & How He Learned To Stop Dreaming
    • XVI

      • Julia Sherman Re-Claiming Susan B. Anthony
      • Robert Hult Hasidic Street Posters in Brooklyn
      • Runo Lagomarsino Pedro’s Story: An Unsuccessful Transatlantic Traveller
      • John Houck Pine Ridge: An interview with Jim Houck
      • Brian Zegeer Dragoman of Little Syria
      • Sidney Russell Kuna Yala Swag
      • Desirée Holman Outer Spaces: Part I
      • Faith47 The Unexpected Present
      • Carmen Winant Personal Best
      • Philip-Lorca diCorcia Red Bull Snake
    • XV

      • Jessica Green & Tom Griffiths Terra Incognita (A Video Game Folly)
      • Prem Krishnamurthy The People’s Representation: On Staged Graphics in Klaus Wittkugel’s Work
      • Cian O'Day N/A, or On the Dark Stores of Brian Ulrich
      • Yasmeen M. Siddiqui Avatar Gone Analog: Musings on The Bridge Project by Do Ho Suh
      • Emily Larned ARTS 02–2011: The Artist-Created Institution as Art Practice
      • Yoonjai Choi & Ken Meier Interview with Metahaven
      • Aaron Kunin Space and Place in Two Video Installations by Amie Siegel
      • Tom Griffiths Interview with Barbara Griffiths
    • XIV

      • Colleen Asper & Justin Lieberman In Conversation
      • Dushko Petrovich & Roger White Report To The Committee On Periodical Group Exhibitions
      • Ryan Mrozowski & Mike Womack Before-Biennial-After
      • Kay Rosen Waiting for Michael Asher
      • Kate Gilmore Drag
    • XIII

      • Talia Chetrit Van Hanos’s Harlem Studio
      • Mieke Marple The Lives of Objects at The Suburban
      • Laurel Nakadate Island Light
      • C.D. Parker Draw Me a Pie Chart Powerfully
      • Alan Reid Despondent Babysitter
      • Lucy Kim & Leeza Meksin Art Crimes
    • XII

      • Anonymous On Looking at Nature: An Untitled Petition on Crapomimicry
      • Paul Huf Musical Box with a Dancing Ballerina
      • Lance Wakeling Voluntary Sculptures: Photographing the Unmonumental
      • David Kennedy-Cutler Possession Obsession
      • Nine Budde Stopping by at a Friends’ Place
      • Cody Trepte Untitled (Something Clever Here)
    • XI

      • Adam Helms Hirschhorn at Gladstone Gallery
      • David Scanavino Fact or Fiction
      • Jason Tomme The Voodoo of Robert Irwin
      • Kristin Posehn The Rocks of Rocklin
      • Joanne Greenbaum Decorating the Void: On Clay and Dirt on Delight

      • I went to Philadelphia to see Dirt on Delight: Impulses that Form Clay, at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. The show consists of work by twenty-two artists, most of whom use clay as their primary medium.

        My interest in the show sprung from the fact that I know what clay feels like, and I know how easy and how hard it is to do something good with it. I have been studying and looking at ceramic art for a while, and since 2003, I have been making ceramic sculpture in addition to my principal activity, painting. I began working with clay furtively in my studio and then in a ceramics studio in New York, where I work collectively with a bunch of other people. Having no experience in clay or sculpture made me fearless in how I approached it. I began small with Sculpey, making very rudimentary forms in bright colors, and later switched to ceramics. Playing with basic geometric shapes and having no preconceived notions, I worked from a place of trust and innocence.

        I am constantly amazed by how my work in clay has influenced my painting, and vice versa. My paintings had begun to look like fictitious structures—things that could, in fact, exist if someone was crazy enough to make them, so I wanted to try doing that.

        Images courtesy of Joanne Greenbaum

        Creating forms inspired by the paintings, I noticed that the sculptures almost always had bases, and I started to incorporate this format into my two-dimensional work by making paintings that had a base or table to enclose or hold up the painted structures.

        The fluidity and open working time of clay offered a new way to think about oil painting, as well. Because of its malleability, clay allows for an incorporation of changes or mistakes into the final result of a piece. This integration of deleted moments in the work was a concept that I also started to use in my painting. When it was time to remove a passage on the canvas I did not like, the blotting out of the area became the next stage in the work.

        Dirt on Delight has many artists who cultivate destruction in this way. Lucio Fontana destroyed his paintings by cutting into them, and he treated his ceramic work similarly, making pieces and then razing them, with the result becoming a hybrid of ruin and recovery.

        Joanne Greenbuam’s studio.

        The work of Arlene Shechet.

        Clay lends itself to a natural impulse to make a vessel, maybe because this is one of the first things we are taught, since it can seem (falsely) easy. The pieces in the show that worked with the idea of a vessel and its functionality were the ones I was drawn to most. Arlene Shechet makes vases, cups, or bowls that become sculpture with little relation to functionality. Her clay pieces are volumetric and are constructed with coils. She uses the clay to build forms in an organic process, allowing the pieces to evolve into something unplanned. Her surprising works, with their handmade ganglia of arms and trunks, are personal without becoming sentimental.

        Beverly Semmes works with corrupted vessels; commonplace items that become vehicles for her sculptural concepts. Her color choices, usually bright pinks and reds, contribute to the definition of form as color. The color is the form and the form becomes the color, not merely decorative or descriptive, but part of the communication between the two.

        Most pieces in the show are installed on large platforms. I have always been fascinated by still life as a subject, and the intimate architectural space created by objects on a table. This presentation format worked well for some artists, but not all. In this context, the works of Ron Nagle were difficult to view up close, which I wanted to, as their surfaces are delicately glazed and painted. Kathy Butterly’s work, on the other hand, is perfectly presented, in a glass cabinet alongside pieces by George Ohr.

        Ohr (1857–1918) made work that transcended its utilitarian origins. He would begin a cup or a bowl on the wheel, and then manipulate or destroy it by crushing or folding the clay, turning it into something else that, paradoxically, still functions as a vessel. Butterly’s pieces build on the traditional vessel as well, but go into fantasy and surrealism, making delicate whimsical statements. Butterly references the history of ceramics, using stereotypes of past styles to create hybrid period pieces that are idiosyncratic and very funny.

        Because of its ability to erase and retain memory within its pliant forms, clay lends itself to continuous editing and recreation. The works in Dirt on Delight revel in clay as an ideal material for realizing a process of interdependent creation and destruction.

        Joanne Greenbaum is a New York based artist. Joanne is represented by D'Amelio Terras, where she will have a solo show in September 2009.

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    • X

      • Jennifer Dudley Interview with Daniel Bozhkov
      • Dushko Petrovich & Roger White Report to the Committee on Decentered Practices
      • Shana Lutker Artists Are Not
      • Steve Cairns & Isla Leaver-Yap Blind Carbon Copy
      • Katarina Burin Rooms No One Lives In
      • Jonathan Bogarin What’s Your Context?
      • Sara Greenberger Rafferty Master of None
    • IX

      • Andrea Hill Fact, Factoid, Factotum
      • Nicholas Weist We’re Interested in Your White Horse
      • Tyler Coburn Ronnie Bass at I-20
      • Allison Kave Doa Aly and Juan William Chavez
      • Gillian Sneed Interview with Adam Pendleton
    • VIII

      • Jacob Hashimoto Interview with Luis Gispert
      • Lilly McElroy Guy Maddin’s Winnipeg
      • Kevin Zucker Thematic Apperception Test
      • Ian Cooper That’s What He Said
      • Colleen Asper Interview with Matt Borruso
    • VII

      • Mieke Marple Interview with Michelle Grabner
      • Farrah Karapetian Reframing Mirrors and Windows
      • Ruby Sky Stiler That’s What She Said
      • Spencer Finch New Zealand Light
      • Dana Frankfort John Walker: Text in/and Painting
      • The Editors Whitney Biennial 2008
    • VI

      • Katie Herzog Bay Area Figurative Language
      • Matt Connors Teignmouth Electron by Tacita Dean
      • Connelly LaMar New Photography 2007 at MOMA
      • Ethan Greenbaum Inside Lights
      • Matthew Lancit Cleaning Magritte’s Pipe
    • V

      • Roger White Jay Heikes at Marianne Boesky
      • Luke Stettner Interview with Michael DeLucia
      • Erin Shirreff Michel Auder: The Feature
      • Jessica Lansdon Interview with Brian Bress
      • Lisha Bai Suzanne Song at Michael Steinberg Fine Art
    • IV

      • Mariah Robertson Conditions in Time
      • Jacob Feige Psychopathia Pastoralis
      • Eric Golo Stone Interview with George Kontos
      • Skyler Brickley Keith Tyson at PaceWildenstein
      • Lumi Tan Curatorial Project with Jo-ey Tang
    • III

      • George Rush Wayne Gonzales at Paula Cooper
      • Jacqueline Cooper Margaret Wall-Romana at Bucheon Gallery
      • Ana Wolovick Robin Rhode at Perry Rubenstein
      • Skyler Brickley Nicholas Krushenick at Marianne Boesky
      • Luke Stettner Peter Young at PS1
      • Ethan Greenbaum Daniel Gordon Interview
    • II

      • Christine Frerichs Rebecca Morris at Karyn Lovegrove Gallery
      • Skyler Brickley Josh Smith at Luhring Augustine
      • Ethan Greenbaum Kristen Baker at Deitch Projects
    • I

      • Mark Barrow On Abstraction
      • Tova Carlin Superstudio
      • Julia Weist Johannes Vanderbeek at Zach Feuer
      • Skyler Brickley Wilhelm Sasnal at Anton Kern
      • Ethan Greenbaum Cement Garden at Marvelli Gallery