Hans Theys

 

 

 

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Hans Theys

 

 

The Thinnest Slice of Space

 

Manuel for reading a bachelor machine

 

 

 

Ceramics

 

Ceramics break. Making art with ceramics means taking this into account, as we can see with Sterling Ruby or Tamara Van San. The first one does it by including the broken parts, the second by stretching the limits of building towers without making elongated ash trays. Wang Tianjao does it by trying to make her ceramics as thin as possible. The dream would be to make ceramics as thin as paper. Which is impossible. The thinner you get, the more it cracks. At the same time, one can try to make the surface as large as possible without making the ceramics thicker. 

These attempts to stretch the limits of a craft form the core of a complex, layered installation that includes numerous other variations that are barely perceptible.

On the left, against the wall, we see experiments with size (surface), glazing and inscriptions. How thin can glazing be? How about one brush stroke with a very thin liquid? How about baked dust? How small can an inscription be? Where is the difference between an inscription and a crack, an accidental irregularity?

On the wooden structure, we find another set of variations consisting of cracked sheets that were cut to the largest non-cracked surface. Some with polished borders, others without. Some soiled with the dirty water of the uncleaned cutting machine, others not. They are arranged horizontally and vertically to create a slope, a landscape: the negative shape of the balls on the floor.

The shelf as a poetic and political machine

Ceramics require craftsmanship and control. What happens if you let go of control?

Before they are baked, clay artefacts that will become ceramics have to dry. Very often, shelves are used for this. In the public space of a ceramics studio that is used by many artists, the shelves also become a precarious waiting room, where your work can be damaged, pushed aside, forgotten.

Because success with the very thin sheets depended on hundreds of experiments with different clays, flattening techniques and drying times, Wang Tianjiao started to use the shelves as a tool. Before one can bake ceramics, one has to wait. The clay must dry. But the final results are different according to the temperature, the degree of humidity, the ventilation, the number of drying objects etcetera. So, to speed up the process of learning and trying out, Wang Tjianjao placed her paper-thin ceramics on all heights of the shelves, between the other works, close to the oven or far away. She also started making more and more sheets, knowing that most would break, but that some would accidently survive as well. The shelf became an experimental machine, symbolising the lack of control one has over ceramics and the random way in which everything in the universe has come into existence.

Trained as an architect in China and graduating within the department In Situ, Wang Tjianjao saw her life in the ceramics studio as an emblematic existence, demonstrating how one can cope with the limitations of a craft, the laws of physics, the habits and character of the other artists and the rules, regulations and power dynamics of an institute. In her belief, one thrives if one does not fight a controlling system, but tries to find ways to get along with it. Trying to make such fragile works in this public ceramics studio was not only a poetical exercise but a political as well.

The shelf in Wang’s installation reminds us of the situation in the ceramics studio. It reminds of the drying process, but also of the function of the shelf as a production machine.

As an exhibition prop, it evokes the storage, the archive, the museum, the shop: architecture, public space.

 

Architecture

 

One can read this installation as the result of a Bauhaus principle: to think architecture through craft.

The minimalist artist Donald Judd wrote somewhere that sculptors and architects never think about space. The only one who has given it any thought, he writes, is Giacometti. Judd goes on to suggest that we start thinking about space. I quote from memory. “First you take a stone,” he writes, “and you wonder where you can put it and how. Then you take a second stone and wonder where you can put it and how.”

Think of the thinnest slice of space, the thinnest texture, transparent structures, veiling and unveiling, voids, holes, frames.

 

Landscapes

 

Traces of the passage of dirty water in a cutting machine create nearly invisible landscapes, manmade interventions, accidents, signs. 

 

Public space, organisation, rules, codes, precariousness, loneliness

 

Very often ceramics are made in a public space, requiring the utmost respect for each other’s work. As such, it becomes an image for every institute or political and social organisation. One needs cunning, patience, and trust to survive, to create, to be true to oneself, to exercise vulnerability. One can fight a system or go along with it. Use it as camouflage. Deflect it slightly to be able to breathe.

If one thinks of graffiti, with regard to this installation, we start seeing more. We see subtle graffiti, delicate scratches and inscriptions, unsightly interventions, nearly invisible texts, nearly imperceptible differences in texture, a nearly invisible use of stencils. 

Dust gathering, almost absent glazing, tape ghosts, wiped stuff, atmospheric applications of spray paint.

 

A green rose

 

A key to read this installation is an awareness of the Eastern Asian appreciation of selflessness. This also goes for artistic matters. Poets and painters are not loud, but nearly invisible. Colours are soft, nuances are very subtle. During one period the favourite colour of some emperor was not gold, yellow, red or black, but the colour of water. One can paint with ink, but also with water tinted with a memory of ink. Tea was invented by the Emperor Chen Nung during an afternoon nap: a tea leave dwindled into his usual cup with lukewarm water. Upon his awakening, he discovered the wealth of tea, as the memory of a taste. Once I was strolling through a rose garden, where all the plants were labelled. Suddenly I saw a green rose without being able to read the label yet. This rose can only be Chinese, I thought. And indeed. In the west one would try to create a blue or a black rose, in China a green one (not too green, a very pale, whitish tint of this colour).

 

Gender and identity

 

To me this bachelor machine is a baroque riddle about gender and identity. I have not spoken about this with the artist, because I would consider this to be rude. 

I see it. I can read it. The installation is political and poetical at the same time. It is also funny. It is playful. And it takes play seriously. It is sensuous and sensual. It is sexually charged. 

At the core of this evocation of desire and gender struggle, i.e. of an almost imperceptible appearance of self, are the gelato and the gelato drippings. The male sex organ energises everything, but it is hidden behind a black veil. It returns in the skeletal presence of the shelf. It returns in the shape of tiny stencil. It is present everywhere, be it in the presence of a smudge. 

We feel a desire: the basic energy that brings life, thought and beauty into being. The Chinese call it Qi or Chi (氣). The Greeks called it Eros. Nietzsche called it, for lack of a better term, the will to power. It is the drive that makes matter take on a shape, it is what propels natural evolution. The first desire is to be seen. Things grow towards the sun. People grow towards people.

Natural evolution is set into motion by the need to be seen. Accidental forms are saved and accentuated because they augment the possibility to mate. But also the possibility to be eaten. For this reason, female birds generally have been given camouflage colours. Females survive by being invisible, males thrive by being noticed.

Some birds are both male and female. They want to be seen and unseen. They want to survive and thrive, but they don’t want to be eaten. They have to become artists.

 

 

Montagne de Miel, 22 June 2024