Solo Exhibition by Eugene Hön: ‘and the ship
sails on’
A solo exhibition of ceramics, jewellery,
drawings, artists books, projections.
Elegance Jewellers, Melrose Arch Johannesburg
Exquisiteness
There is
something compelling and disturbing about beauty. Beautiful objects; ‘idols’ are made to be
self-contained, self-referential, self-sufficient. They are valued for their
own sake rather than for their function or utility. An object imbued with beauty detaches itself
from its function and ultimately from its maker and in the process makes itself
complete asserting its autonomy. For
this reason, objects that possess beauty have an uncanny hold over human beings
because they, like us seem autonomous. Idols, unlike fetishes and totems, as
WJT Mitchell argues in his book What Do
Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images , are objects so beautiful
that they possess extraordinarily seductive powers, the ability to make demands
on us humans. They entice their viewers, collectors, owners, lovers. Idols want
more than just love and fidelity. Like the deities they often represent, idols crave
worship and human sacrifice! One would guess, following Mitchell, that objects
of extreme beauty appear to us humans as quintessentially self-aware which
makes them powerfully seductive. It is
no wonder then that throughout history exquisite objects have fascinated and
seduced and ultimately posed a threat to the authority of the rich and
powerful. What better symbol to encapsulate the power of the exquisitely beautiful
image, the image as idol, the sublime capacities of terrible beauty than the archetypal
Chinese Dragon? And what better art to
embody the idea of beauty, idolatry, autonomy and self-containment than that of
ceramic practice? Eugene Hön latest body of work is committed to and celebrates
this idea of the power of beauty.
 |
Launch of the video, and the ship sails on.
Animator Lukasz Pater.
Videography: Hannes Botha.
Editing /sound design Mocke J Van Veuren. |
Fascination
What
strikes one in engaging with Hön’s work is his fascination with the creative
process. This is especially evident in his sketchbooks where the artist’s
marks, notations, visual references comingle into painstakingly rendered forms
that are pregnant with symbolism and beauty. The process of drawing for Hön is
analogous to a crucible for form making or better yet the work of the kiln. The
exquisitely cross-hatched ball point sketches seem to evolve automatically (in
the Surrealist sense) with each skein of mark-making carefully overlaid with
the next to produce an enigmatic form. Paging through his books it is as if the
symbols and forms congeal and manifest on page through the chemistry of heat,
wind and water. Hön’s sketchbook forms
remind one of the way in which currents the movement of water, wind, fire shape
forms. The forms on these pages, although they are ‘designed’, appear to have
manifested from natural processes reminiscent of Da Vinci’s seemingly
effortless studies of water, knots, plants and clouds. And the ship sails on, a ceramic installation first presented at
the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture Collaborations/Articulations
exhibition in 2012, now reformulated as a projection provides a generous
insight into the artist’s modus operandi (Follow link to view video at You Tube).
Hön is able to integrate all of elements of his practice: sketches,
formal designs, ceramic practice and now motion into seamless, aesthetic
wholes. Whether Hön is experimenting
with the ceramic surface, designing jewellery, his work is a testament to
fascination provoked by beautiful forms.
Neglect, regeneration
However,
that being said, it may be argued as Peter Dormer has, in his introduction to The Culture of Craft that crafts such ceramic
practice, are modes of human endeavour that are largely neglected today because
of industrialisation, mass production, modernity and more recently post
modernity. Under the spectre of modernity, the ceramicist thus seems to signify
a certain arcadian nostalgia and loss; a yearning for time when art was linked
to authenticity, truth, beauty and virtue.
For many, the crafted object epitomises John Ruskin and William Morris’s
‘old world’; a time when consumable objects were not the product of alienated
labour or the machine, when there was a possibility that the beauty and
embellishment monopolised by the aristocracy could find its purchase everywhere.
Specifically, the ceramicist today emblematises through the complexity of their
individual labour a time when the relationship between human and object was
more direct, unaffected, immediate and sensuous. One thinks here, for example, of Jose
Saramago’s humble, elderly potter character Cipriano Algor in The Cave who, in the face of the
proliferation of inexpensive plastic kitchenware gives up his practice, retires
and and moves to the metropolis and ultimately alienates himself from his own
existence. Similar to this is A.S. Byatt’s tempestuous character,
the master ceramicist Benedict Fludd who, in The Children’s Book, is plagued by violent self-doubt because, as
the novel implies, his identity as a ceramicist has been made redundant by the
emergence of art Nouveau, the fashion industry, the industrialisation of
culture, mass production at the turn of the 19th century. The title of the exhibition registers these difficulties
with resonance. And the ship sails on,
as a title, is at once an assertive and a resigned statement. On the one hand it
laments the disappearance of craft and ceramics in an industrial society and on
the other hand it assertively resists this.
Craft, rhythm and
disruption.
For Hön,
ceramics must ‘sail on’. However, for
him, it seems, in order to do this it must somehow simultaneously retain its
commitment to humanity and history and evolve to address a new set of societal
conditions where mass production, standardisation, high technology and cultural
fragmentation are the norm. It is no surprise, given his optimism around an
expanded practice of ceramics, that Hön evokes the symbol of the Dragon, an
image that, in essence, represents the generative principle of life (creator of
rain, fertility, the lengthening of warm days, rhythm), the pure product of
imagination (bird, snake, pig, rainbow, water, deer, demon, crab, carp, ox); a
symbol that is known to unite opposites- pattern and chaos, death and life, the
old and the new, creation and destruction, anima and animus within itself. It
is notable that in his ceramic installation And
the ship sails on the dragon is cast as a playful, trickster figure that
enters into the static, duck decoy ceramic configuration and disrupts the
uniformity of the ceramic installation with its playful and rhythmic
embellishments. In a simple gesture, Hön dramatises the dragon as a figure that
disrupts tradition, in this case the tradition of surface decoration in ceramic
practice. Hön’s recent interest in animating the ceramic surface and employing
ceramic thinking as a catalyst for other forms of form-making such as body
adornment, photography, the artist’s book speaks powerfully to Hön’s commitment
to the relevance of beauty and craft in contemporary society.
Written by Brenden
Gray
He is a lecturer in Graphic Design/Communication Design at FADA (Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture) at the University of Johannesburg. He is a practicing artist, arts writer, arts critic and published researcher. In 2010, Gray was awarded his Masters in Fine Art from Wits University (cum laude) in which he investigated the dialogical potential of drawing in informal settings.
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