A year and a half ago, I wrote a catalog essay for ceramicist Alex Reed’s exhibition at Marta Gallery in Highland Park. I have rewritten it and extended it here, adding reference images and a new prologue.
Alex trained as a ceramicist at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. He later worked at the Rookwood Pottery in Ohio, at Heath Ceramics in California and now has an independent studio in Los Angeles.
There is a particular ambition in Reed’s work to exceed the expectations, implied domesticity, and scale of his chosen artistic medium, clay. That reminds me of the late Ken Price’s work. Price is one of my favorite artists and a fellow surfer. He also studied at the New York State College of Ceramics, in 1958/59, before returning to Southern California, where he became part of the Ferus Gallery scene.
Price’s dazzlingly luminescent bronze composite sculpture Bulgogi was shown posthumously in LA at the Matthew Marks Gallery in September of 2012, the same month that a 50 year retrospective of his work, with exhibition design by Frank Gehry, opened at LACMA. You can see Bulgogi here.
Reed is currently collaborating with architect Dutra Brown on a series of cross-disciplinary projects.
No Place Like Utopia1
Prologue
Since I was an undergraduate, I have been interested in artists and designers who nimbly leap between different forms of creativity, merging and blending mediums, scales, and audiences, like the rare polymaths Ray and Charles Eames.
My father worked for the Eameses in the early 1960s in their warehouse studio on West Washington (now Abbot Kinney) Boulevard in Venice Beach. He loved to regale me with stories of his time there, working on exhibitions like the IBM Pavilion at the NY World's Fair, as “Ray and Charles” effortlessly commingled film, graphics, furniture, and architecturally scaled projects. Stories of long walks on the beach, taken with the entire Eames studio (at least according to my father), hunting for seashells, driftwood, and well-worn sea glass stuck with me. When he described the Eames Studio, he spoke of the joy of working in a collective, not the labor and toil of working for a singular genius. In fact, he had ‘shipped over’ to California from Australia, on a freighter— literally mopping the decks from the South Pacific all the way to LA— to work for Richard Neutra, a preeminent singular genius. I think he lasted less than a week in Neutra’s Glendale Boulevard office, perhaps put off by the modernist’s European demeanor and demanding character.
When I was in my second or third year of architecture school and quite impressionable, I worked as a model maker for Tom Kovac. Tom is now is the Director of the Advanced Architecture program at the School of Architecture and Design at RMIT, my alma mater. His work includes furniture design, interior design, homewares for Alessi, buildings, and digital design. In the 1990s, he was represented in Japan by Sy Chen, the founder of Creative Intelligence Associates, CIA, a branding firm. On my first trip to Tokyo in 1992 to hand-deliver some drawings, I met Teruo Kurosaki at IDÉE, an influential furniture manufacturer. IDÉE was working with another Australian designer, Marc Newson, who originally trained as a jewelry maker. At the beginning of his career, he had recently expanded from furniture design to restaurant and retail interiors in Tokyo and elsewhere. Newson, who has cited the Eameses and Ettore Sottsass as influences, went on to design aircraft and automobiles, homeware, products, interiors, furniture, watches, shoes, and clothing. You may remember Newson’s Lockheed Lounge from Madonna’s 1993 video for Rain (with Ryuichi Sakamoto, Jenny Shimizu, and Rika Ohara.) He made the prototype by hand in Sydney out of surfboard foam, fiberglass, and hand-beaten, hand-riveted aluminum sheet. A later version was auctioned for £2,434,500 by Phillips in London in 2015. The Gagosian Gallery currently represents Newson, one of the first recent designers to make the lines between art, architecture, and design more than a little fuzzy.
If I digress here, all of this is to say that since my trip to Japan, but maybe earlier, I have been intrigued by artistic practices that break down or hybridize disciplines and interrogate creative boundaries, to use a few very tired 90s terms. So, since Alex Reed’s emerging works gently and quite humorously bridge art, urban design, architecture, and product design, I was delighted to write this short catalog piece for his first solo show.
Utopias
In the 18th and 19th centuries, North Americans and European new arrivals created utopian worker societies. Communities like New Harmony, Indiana, sprung out of the agricultural Midwest. Those early socialist cooperative experiments aimed to simultaneously create better working conditions for industrial factory workers while also building communitarian factory towns.
Robert Owen, the Welsh textile manufacturer who founded New Harmony on the banks of the Wabash River, imagined an idyllic worker’s paradise in which families lived communally in large shared structures that supported industrial production, child-rearing, and education. New Harmonites established the first free library in the United States and created a school system open to men and women.
In the early 20th century, Europeans and Russians experimented with creating utopian design schools like the Bauhaus and Vkhutemas.
At the Bauhaus, teachers and students replaced old notions about decoration, male-only guilds, and craft with new ideas about group work and mass industrialization. Vkhutemas, where Constructivism and Suprematism were born, was established by decree by Vladimir Lenin "to prepare master artists of the highest qualifications for industry, and builders and managers for professional-technical education."2
A revolutionary spirit in architecture, art, and design appeared, giving birth to novel aesthetics inspired by new political ideas and emerging technologies. However, after World War II’s catastrophe and traumas, many Bauhaus members were forced to re-establish themselves as teachers and makers in postwar America. Annie and Josef Albers created the foundations of modern art education at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, teaching color theory to Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly. Walter Gropius would help set up the Harvard Graduate School of Design. His Bauhaus colleague Mies van der Rohe accepted a position at the Armour Institute (later IIT) in Chicago before transforming North American cities with various renditions of the minimalist glass skyscraper.
Whole Earth
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the West Coast counterculture gave birth to other communal, utopian living ideas. Amidst Vietnam War protest marches and broader social unrest, communal living, dawning digital technologies, and new age spirituality emerged in places like Silicon Valley and the Esalen Institute. Simultaneously, the spirit of DIY, ecological design, and proto-open source design would become the basis for Stewart Brand’s iconoclastic The Whole Earth Catalog.
The first issue of The Whole Earth Catalog., published in 1968, was divided into seven sections: 1/ Understanding Whole Systems; 2/ Shelter and Land Use; 3/ Industry and Craft; 4/ Communications; 5/ Community; 6/ Nomadics and 7/ Learning. Brand’s vision of a grass-roots approach to the distribution of skills and tools would then find its way into Apple Computing and architect Christopher Alexander’s human-centered design thinking.
Alexander’s seminal book A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, written at Berkeley in 1977, enabled non-designers to create buildings and cities using what would later become known as “open-source” patterns. In turn, the book would inspire Richard P. Gabriel to write Patterns of Software, Tales from the Software Community, linking parallel processing to design patterning to create collective-knowledge databases, the precursors of online community platforms like Wikipedia, Facebook, and the Google search engine.
Today, many of the ideas promoted by Stewart Brand— such as free access to technology and off-the-grid communes— still exist. However, they have been perverted in ways that would make them unrecognizable to the founders of the psychedelic counterculture. Instead of free access to technology, ride-sharing companies offer a vision of “community” not driven by a love of freedom but by gig-worker exploitation. In the place of communal knowledge-sharing, Q-Anon conspiracies, anti-vaxxing, and right-wing insurrection movements cross-contaminate each other in a dark, toxic alt-right online counterculture. And, “turn on, tune in, drop out” free-spirited communes have morphed into “co-living,” expensive pay-as-you-go yoga-kibbutzim divorced of any real political agency or much spirituality.
As computer scientist Jaron Lanier noted, our rush to advertise and collectivize (read monetize) our social activities “...is like trying to get nutrition by connecting a tube from one’s anus to one’s mouth. The body starts consuming itself. That is what we are doing online. As more and more human activity is aggregated, people huddle around the last remaining oases of revenue.” Nihilistic social media end-games, like other forms of fake collectivity, Lanier suggests, will be fed ass-to-mouth, “…constantly diffused [into] a global mush ...[an] embrace [of] mundanity.”
Alex Reed’s International Ceramics Friendship Park
In contrast to Lanier’s dimly-lit reading of an end-of-days society, Alex Reed’s clever and slightly tongue-in-cheek take on creating a new utopian worker’s paradise founded around craft-making exactly inverts those Lanierian equations: connoting collective artisanal impulses with communal good and technologies like computer numeric controlled robotic manufacturing and 3d printing with personal freedom.
His project, “International Ceramics Friendship Park” or ICFP, is “...a proposal for an urbanism resulting from an imagined future...in which craftspeople have seized the means of production and representation of their … work and bodies.”
According to Reed, ICFP is a utopian city “...built for retired craftspeople, complete with housing, a pension tower, a monumental shard pile, a tomb, a pool, a hedge maze, and a kiln.” The artist proposes that the numerous objects that populate the gallery (a 4x4 foot urban site model, ceramic puzzles, small sculptures, wall sconces, and test tiles that also serve as show invitations) are not his work but the “the handiwork of the residents of this imagined city.”
Like a latter-day Jonathan Swift or perhaps a late West Coast member of Archigram, Reed provides us with a morality tale and fantasy-fable of sorts about an imaginary city-state populated by a cast of unusual and elegantly aging characters. His imaginary retired craftspeople's utopia is designed for a “post-work” future. Things like aesthetic production, interdisciplinary practice, and creativity are reinvested with newfound political energy and social meaning—an anti-retirement community village of sorts as if Marx and Engels ran Palm Desert.
The ICFP project reminds me of the tragic promise of Soviet urbanist projects like Ivan Leonidov’s design for Magnitogorsk, a “linear city’ planned as a chemical and metallurgical Stalinist worker’s settlement in the Ural Mountains. Perhaps intentionally, Reed is pointing out how far we have moved away from the romantic concepts promoted by enlightened 19th-century industrialists like Robert Owen since in Bezo-Musk’s anti-union, Amazon/Blue Origin/Space X/Tesla-America, to be a worker still, “…means only this: that the more speedily the worker augments the wealth of the capitalist, the larger will be the crumbs which fall to [her], the greater will be the number of workers than can be called into existence, the more can the mass of slaves dependent upon capital be increased.”3
Conclusion
Under capitalism, "private property" is not about the right to have your own home and belongings. It is about the right of elites to enclose and appropriate commons: forests, subsurface minerals, water, the atmosphere, public goods, even knowledge itself.4
Jason Hickel. Author, Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
We are living through an era in which collective freedom, identity, and even personal creativity are at risk— an age, as Reed notes, so rapacious that even “...our hobbies, are no longer safe from the “hustle” of late capitalism.” Lost in the transition to an interconnected but imbalanced society is a means of sharing equal access to resources, managing growth, fairly administering voting, enforcing labor laws and gender equality, and providing free healthcare, childcare, and education. These were all ideas that utopian-industrialists once considered practical and profitable in places like New Harmony, Indiana.
As a response to our circumstances, Reed’s ICFP project provides us with a wry diagram for rewiring and rebooting a D.I.Y. future, one in which we can anticipate something relatively new: the idea that we can once again invest labor and creativity with personal and communal meaning, even friendship. And, on that foundation, we can build a love for each other that we will share in the design and making of everyday, beautiful things.
Notes
With apologies to Peter Blake, curator of Industrial Design at MOMA (1948-1950) and Editor of the Architecture Forum (1952-1972). Blake’s book about the post-war lives of the European avant-gardes in North America, No Place Like Utopia: Modern Architecture and the Company We Kept, remains one of the few personal accounts of both the socio-political ambitions and the human lives that shaped and were shaped by 20th century Modernism.
https://archive.ph/20050503051137/http://www.cultinfo.ru/fulltext/1/001/008/007/304.htm