Contemporary Ceramics and the Past
“We are forced to that fundamental question of history: whether … similar images arise far apart in space and time according to common types of human needs, reverence, and desire, or whether there was some vast stone age diffusion long ago”
Vincent Scully
“That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art”
Walter Benjamin.
Of all the revolutionary transformations in human development perhaps the greatest is the least known: the global transition from the hunter, gatherer and fisher — dependent on the chance provisioning of nature to the reproduction of nature — through the husbandry of animals and birds and the cultivation of plants. But wherever, whenever, and whatever the pace of this transition, pottery is already present, flourishing as the invention and achievement of the semi-sedentary egalitarian community, raising its ability in wresting a surplus from nature by new means.
Pottery is present at so many points of this multi-form transition in so widespread a manner and out of such a great diversity of geographic conditions — the plateau of Anatolia, the lakes of central Mexico, the scattered settlements of the Middle Yellow River
