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Jeannie Mah: Kamares Ware Cup
Sèvres
The Kamares Ware Cup with backward c's has elements of design and style that seem to
refute its apparent simplicity. This deceptively simple cup is elegantly flared; its walls give
illusions of thinness and delicacy. So ... even in prehistory, thought I, a utilitarian cup is
more than a utilitarian cup. Embued with socio-historical values, this commonplace object
satisfied physical and aesthetic needs. Hmmmm.
The cup itself was found in a cave and rich attention was paid to its
fabrication and decoration. This indicates that the cup may have been used for more than at
first may appear. Possibly, the cup served in some part of a religious rite or perhaps it was
a decorative piece for a merchant or noble. The Kamares cup was made by the Minoan Culture of
ancient Greece. Located on the Isle of Crete, this matriarchal society was known for its
remarkable cities, large trading empire, writing, and its art. The epitome of Minoan art is
Kamares pottery which Jeannie Mah has opted to quote in her own work. Click here for more
information on Kamares
Ware or here for another
example of Kamares Ware.
This, however, was not the discourse that sprang full-formed to mind in 1982. The
Heraklion Museum in Crete is filled with splendid, exuberant Minoan ceramics, but I was in
the mood for a mindless holiday. I breezed through the museum as a tourist rather than as a
serious student. A few scribbles made on the backs of the ticket stubs are all I now have of
what has become important research material.
Jeannie Mah originally intended just to visit the museum but, came away
with an important reference for many different artworks and exhibitions. The cup has been
referred to in both her Dunlop Art Gallery exhibitions; Chiaroscuro
and Ouvrez les Guillemets, in her permanent installation in the
Regina City Hall, and her Videos.
Sèvres teacup Photo: Ed Jones
The Sèvres teacup
The French tea cups were another matter. I share the Anglo-Japanese pottery aesthetic
of many of my friends, and these pots are my daily ware. "Good china," while
enjoyable, was never what I aspired to possess. With these prejudices firmly in my mind, and
with dread in my heart, I trooped off to Sèvres as a dedicated student of ceramics, but
sure that I would hate it all. Much to my surprise, I found objects that delighted me. The
handles on the teacups and pitchers were playful and imaginative, the decoration had an
irregularity within its imposed symmetry. These cups are the prototypes for the china cups
that we continue to use today. While mass production has coarsened the construction,
decoration and often, material (bone china or white earthenware rather than porcelain), the
form and sensibility have remained constant.
The Sèvres teacup has also been a strong influence on Jeannie
Mah‘s work. Contrasting with the elegant simplicity of the Kamares
cup, this cup is about the decadence experienced in the court of King Louis the XIV. The
teacups are made at the Sèvres Royal Factory near Versailles. Production began in 1756
although the production of hard paste porcelain, for which the factory is renowned did not
begin until 1761. In 1761 Jean Halet, a chemist working at the factory discovered the secret
of hard paste porcelain, at this point it received its royal patronage thanks to King Louis
XV‘ mistress, Madame de Pompadour. Madame de Pompadour was very interested in porcelain
and frequented the factory often, it is from her presence that glazes like rose de
pompadour and bleu de roi were created. The factory was a also a home to many
artists like Etienne - Maurice Falconet, who worked in the Rococco style. A very decadent
and frivolous style favoured by the court. For more information on Sèvres try Sassoon or Birmingham for another example of Sèvres
porcelain.
At first, I was shocked by my attraction to this work -- how could I be so enchanted
by such decadence? I observed myself watching myself as my disgust turned to interest; this
solo two-step dance could only produce overly self-conscious pots that are all too aware of
their patrimony.
I was in Paris to study French. The learning of a language is a humbling experience;
one is at once plunged into the preverbal state of childhood. Perhaps, in this vulnerable
situation, was I more receptive to appreciate that which was "foreign" to me? Or, had my daily
walks through the city and my constant visits to museums prepared me to approach an
understanding of this work in a belated context? Indeed, walking through Paris is like walking
through history, especially in the Marais, where we were living, the aesthetics of seventeenth
and eighteenth-century architecture invade the senses. Or, could it be that the examination of
the structures of language and literature opened me to an acceptance, indeed, a loose
understanding of ...? While I have not sorted all this out, I do know that being there was
important.
Although each cup, Kamares and Sèvres, had a profound influence on her and her artwork, both cups are
often used in conjunction to develop the work she has today. It is by blending and combining
the cups that Jeannie explores ideas like personal history, ceramic history, craft versus fine art and
quotations from film
I suppose that the crux of my fascination with these two specific historical objects
is that I see them, or rather, I have set them up, as prototypes. I pick on them because I
like them. Perhaps it is only within my constructed mythology of "the cup" that their
lineage is linked. My cups are their rebellious offspring.
At first, I understood their relationship to be oppositional: the utilitarian versus
the decorative, the handmade object versus the industrial product. Now, upon further reflection,
it may well be that it is the decorative found within the utilitarian that intrigues me. Yet,
having only seen them in museums and never in use, could we ever fully understand their utility
or their status? Louis XIV employed Sèvres cups as trophies of favoritism. Nobles had their
portraits painted with their novelty cup, which symbolized the good grace of the King. The
Kamares cups were found in a cave; was it a tomb or a religious site? were they also a
ritualistic rather than a practical household item?
I will never understand the pots in their "true" context. Rather, I bring to
them my experienced, values, and beliefs of my own historical moment, which, because I am out
of my familiar context, are also in the process of changing. Perhaps in this moment of flux,
seeds of ideas are planted, awaiting the proper time to germinate, to evolve or to mutate. I
am the carrier who will import ideas which may materialize in another from, in another land.
My physical presence weighs in this equation of (re)production.
Balanced on the cusp of a fine arts education, I insist on working in a medium which is
considered to belong to the decorative arts. I plunder the history of ceramics to focus in the
domestic realm so as to seek out the vestiges of art in our daily lives, and I usurp the cup as
subject into a fine arts practice. I mean to study the construction of boundaries between the
utilitarian and the decorative, so that contradictions might be revealed between the image and
the object, so as to expose unspoken societal values.
Having studied ceramics through the filter of museums in foreign lands (objects and self
out of context), my ceramic practice juxtaposes artifacts from different historical periods with
self-reflexivity. Intertextual references make transhistorical leaps from cup to cup, and even
within the same cup. The exaggeration of size proportion, delicacy and decoration announces a
critique of the perceived image, while form parodies as it pays homage to its historical
referent. My rearguard glance at the historical object is filled with neither romantic nor
nostalgic longing for a kinder, gentler past. Refusal of a fixed reading of historical references
denies neither their historical moment nor ours, but hybrid creations may reveal contemporary
preconceptions of aesthetic and monetary concerns which are rooted in another time.
The history of the porcelain industry and its hierarchical value system lingers on
today. The china cabinet is our domestic museum, an ideological remnant of the nineteenth
century creation of museums (after colonialism), and we still feel compelled to "collect
treasures" when we travel. This intriguing link between the private and the public museum
holds traces of our ideals of art. I study museums and department store with the same fervor:
both hold similar attitudes toward utilitarian "everyday ware" and "the good
china." While an "upstairs/downstairs" split reveals a class gap in our
societal/domestic consciousness, the mug and the teacup meet on this domestic front, as the
utilitarian and the decorative merge to fulfill aesthetic and bodily needs.
Jeannie Mah
Felipe Diaz
Gallery Facilitator |
