Academia Art Free-For-All Radical Ceramics

The Bollocks Is Bolted On

July 30, 2024 by David 168 Comments

Further to this, and also via Charlotte Gill, let’s visit the world of politically radical tableware. Specifically,

Whiteness is a location of structural advantage, of race privilege. 

Because this is what you need to know when taking a class in ceramics:

For those deeply intrigued:

Participants will gain an understanding of the history of whiteness as a racial and social construct and discuss how it continues to embody and uphold white supremacy today. 

Well, obviously, you can’t just learn how to make plates.

Participants will be able to reflect on how highlighting whiteness in this way is crucial to any antiracist social justice work. These workshops are inclusive and open to all and will create a sensitive and supportive environment in which to develop our racial awareness. 

And hey, who wouldn’t want some of that lovely racial awareness? Or, less coyly, practised question-begging and pretentious racial guilt. Or unearned racial resentment, depending on how brown you happen to be. I mean, you can’t just go through life interacting with people as individuals. You have to cultivate a neurotic habit of seeing people as avatars of some supposedly put-upon racial group. Or conversely, as oppressors, as proven by their pallor, their deplorable whiteness.

And a fragrant utopia will surely follow.

The creative titan behind the project – named, inevitably, Working With Whiteness – is Victoria Burgher, a self-styled “artist from a colonising country,” for whom pretentious, and rather invidious, racial agonising has been a path to many grants and awards. Ms Burgher, we’re told,

uses porcelain as a ceramic material and investigative tool to reveal and challenge the hegemony of whiteness in relation to the values and legacy of British colonialism.

You see,

Porcelain, cherished as it is for its ‘purity,’ becomes an apt material and concept to embody, expose and contest social, cultural and historically constructed ideologies of whiteness.

And,

Her practice-based research explores how the properties of porcelain – its fractiousness and vulnerability when raw, its strength, whiteness and translucency when fired – can challenge terms such as fragility and innocence explored through ideologies of whiteness.

Strained metaphors are very in, it seems. Along with teetering piles of assumptions. Also, Bad Whitey. It’s all terribly original. Very daring. Not at all conformist.

It occurs to me, however, that Ms Burgher’s contrived, modish waffle may make a kind of sense if you think of it as an attempt to add social heft to the otherwise pedestrian art that she actually produces.

For instance:

“From The River To The Sea… #2 (2023). Porcelain, cobalt, gold lustre and glaze, 27cm.”

And,

“White But Working On It (2022). Glazed porcelain ceramic badges, 5-6 cm.”

And,

“Whiteness (2018). Ink on bagasse (sugar cane fibre), fabric, pins, 14 x 14 cm.”

It would, I think, explain a few things. As it often does.

Update, via the comments:

Regarding the unattractive objects shown above, and others very much like them, Martin D adds,

What kind of f*cked up people would think these were cool? Or even well made?

A fair question. One worth pondering.

Ms Burgher approvingly cites Ms Robin DiAngelo, the peddler of neurosis mentioned here, the L Ron Hubbard of wokeness, and whose devotees, as we’ve seen, are often wildly unhinged and nakedly malevolent. Which probably tells us much of what we need to know about Ms Burgher and her racial affectations. The mindset she wishes to inflict on others. And by extension, those who succumb.

And so, Ms Burgher makes her unattractive tat, and calls it art, and treads on ceramic eggshells, and calls it performance art, while listing the hallucinatory evils of having pale skin. And while telling those sufficiently credulous that “whiteness is oppression,” the source of all that is wrong, a basis for eternal shame, and that white people should “not behave white.”

You see, we will purge the world of bigotry by embracing wholesale the mental habits of the bigot.

So, yes. Someone quite fucked up.

Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.




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