17 Steps / Scores ¹ : A Tracing of and the Persistence on the Value of Handmade Ceramics

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SCORE 1: Enter through the glass door.

                  Tucked in a corner in Tandang Sora, Quezon City you will find a studio. It is three stories tall, painted cream on the outside. Just before you enter the glass door of the studio, you will see a shelf with ceramic works decorating it. Once you step foot, a row of pottery wheels facing a mirrored wall and shelf full of student works will greet you. As you move further inside, there is another shelf full of handmade ceramic works for sale. This side of the studio usually becomes the spot where people take pictures post-workshop.

_{1 These series of events scores are inspired by Fluxus group – which are in a sense propositions or instructions, highlighting mundane events as something to be re-encountered and re-evaluated through performance.}

SCORE 2: Feel free to hold the pieces and inspect them.

                – “Mahal pala.”
                – “I can buy a cheaper mug at the mall.”

               We’d sometimes hear these remarks on handmade ceramics either within the walls of the studio from guests or people passing by our booth in art fairs. My intention in writing this article is not to look down on or reprimand people for deeming these handmade pieces as too expensive but rather to ask why people have this perspective or feeling. SCORE 3: Look through the mirror wall, see the wall opposite it, imagine the other side of that wall.

               I want to elucidate the tension between the buying capacity of customers and the necessity to financially sustain ourselves and also ensuring that the intensive labor we put into each piece is compensated fairly. How this tension also exists within a history of political economy of valuation, in which handmade ceramics straddle between being commodity, craft, and artwork – in which the potter or ceramicist has to navigate the fluctuations of value of their works alongside the degree of agency they have. Rather than proposing a linear approach to “value” which translates to price under our economic structure and maintaining the dichotomization between craft and art, I want to highlight that the common denomination of these categorizations and value production is labor – effort, time, and energy – which is often under-valued and remains largely invisibilized all the while product-commodity and consumption is valorized. SCORE 4: Enter through the garage door – the other side of the studio.

             If you enter through the garage door, you’ll immediately be greeted by a kiln, parallel to it a big white sink and shelves for the various tools we use in the studio. There is a pile of sacks of clay just before the stairs, a wedging table on the opposite side and to its right we have huge drum containers containing clay for reclaiming, and in between the wedging table and the kiln there are plaster bats we use to reclaim clay. You’d be lucky if the kiln is not in use since then it wouldn’t be too hot. Most days, I was in the studio, it was a losing battle to keep the garage tidy.

            During the weekends, the studio is fully booked with workshops so there is the constant flow of tools and wooden boards to be cleaned, and clay to be reclaimed. During weekdays, we take advantage of the low traffic and so the workshop space is filled with production pieces. Production work overflows to the rooftop or the third floor, where you can find the second kiln, a big worktable, and a kick wheel. SCORE 5: You touch the murky water, you grasp for clay. Transferring it from the deep drum container onto the flat surface of plaster. It absorbs the excess water.

            Resil Mojares in Artist, Craftsman, Factory Worker: Concerns In The Study Of Traditional Art roughly traces (1) “under what conditions was the folk artist transformed into the craftsman and the craftsman into the factory worker?” and;

(2) what were the “long-term transformations of structure and relations” specifically of “the control of the means of production, the nature of exchange and distribution, and the character of reward for work” (Mojares 177). SCORE 6: It’s your first dance with the clay. You knead into it. Repetitive and uniform circular motions. You hear the unseen bubbles bursting and popping. You feel the clay becoming more solid, more ready to take a form.

            In the Philippines, before ceramic wares became items of trade and commodity, they were first produced for domestic use, integrated into an agrarian way of life used to store grains and other agricultural harvests. Mojares casts the pre-mercantile and pre-industrialization potter/folk-artist as being “a part-time craft specialist, combining pottery-making with agriculture and other subsistence activities” (179) and as having “free access to raw materials, owned the tools, presided over the making of the whole product, possessed valuable knowledge, had opportunities for artistic play, and exercised control over the value of his work” (178). The household was a self-sufficient and autonomous production unit. SCORE 7: You coil clay, build a bowl layer by layer – blend the layers to each other.

            Mojares comments on how this agency of the folk-artist gradually eroded with the shifts and transformations in structure and relations. First, when ceramic production became centralized by wealthy chiefdoms and expanded into mercantile foreign trade, which was marked by the specialization of various processes of pottery production (Mojares 179-80). He also noted how this expansion in the market was marked by “the appearance of low-quality, mass-produced goods manufactured in the Asian mainland (in the case of trade ceramics) or in rising Philippine craft centers (in the case of native pottery)” (Mojares179). SCORE 8: You kick a wheel, it starts to spin; not too much speed and not too little. It is hypnotizing. Inner thigh aching from exertion. You learn to feel for this clay body, to listen to it – it listens back to you.

            Icasiano supplements this historicization with her discussion on the development of craft and fine arts dichotomization starting the Spanish colonial period. During this period, crafts production catered to the needs of chiefs, social elites, or general population and craft schools for carpentry, iron works, drawing, painting of images, cutting and sewing of altar cloths, designing and sewing of altar pieces, textile weaving, and other forms of practical arts were also established in convents (Icasiano 60), following the ordinances of the first Ecclesiastical Authority Mons. Salazar.

An example of these craft or trade schools could be found in Parian parish just outside of Intramuros wherein Sangleys or Chinese immigrants and traders were taught astrology, painting of images, sewing altar clothes, etc by the Dominicans. Additionally, the Parian was a center of artisanal trade – wherein hundreds of Chinese silk shops and small shops of tailors, cobblers, painters, bakers, confectioners, candlemakers, silversmiths, apothecaries, and other tradesmen” could be found. These craft schools came to an end with the introduction of the Academia de las Bellas Artes in 1785 – which also marked the relegation of crafts to a more inferior status than the fine arts with the dichotomization of functionality and pure aesthetics (Icasiano 60-61). Risley also noted that the height of ceramic development was during the Spanish colonial era when bricks and tiles were used extensively (2). SCORE 9: You step on a pedal and the wheel turns. You push down on the clay, you lift it into a cone. You concentrate for a stable core and stable arms, for agile fingers. You lift the clay once, twice, thrice, following a specific profile, a form emerges.

            During the American colonial period, crafts education peaked in the country as it was integrated into the public educational system alongside industrial work for livelihood (Icasiano 61). Like high-fire trade ceramics were imported from mainland Asia, mass-produced ceramic wares with the advent of industrialization were and still are also mostly imported into the Philippines. Craft schools and livelihood centers persist today. Most Philippine potters continue to use traditional methods of using low-fire earthenware clay, paddle and stone for shaping, and open pit firing (Risley 2). She also links the slow development of the present-day ceramic industry to the underdeveloped mining industry of the country and the lack of accurate and complete survey of existing ceramic materials (Risley 3).

_{2 Bazaco 1953, 61 via Flores 143, in Painting History revisions in Philippine colonial art
3 Corpuz 1989, 259 via Flores 152} SCORE 10: You wait for the clay to dry. You do not rush it, you pray for good weather – for an alchemy of things beyond your control to just be right, you pray it won’t crack.

            Today, Philippine contemporary potters and ceramics artistic practices pull from and use techniques and materials both from and outside “native” materials and “traditional” techniques found within the country. Ceramic artists negotiate with the category of sculpture/vessel. Local pottery traditions and communities persist as means of livelihood. Pottery in some areas such as Vigan, Ilocos Norte has also become part of the tourism industry.
SCORE 11: You open the kiln, carefully you place the fragile bone dry pieces inside. You close the lid. You can no longer see these fragile bodies.

            Mojares laments on the degradation in the value of human skills, the loss of identity of craftsmen, the break in the traditional ties between producers and users, the workers lost of control over his work – its value demeaned by being measured in terms of market-dictated wages, and lastly, the loss of intimate connection between the practice of a craft or trade and a whole way of life (186-7).

Within Philippine ceramic, we see the persistence of local community potters despite struggling financially. Though the ceramic industry is underdeveloped, local traditional potters alongside practicing ceramicists and potters compete against mass-produced ceramic wares which are sold at a much cheaper price. Additionally, traditional potters from the regions in the Philippines see plasticware manufacturers as another competitor in which they respond by having to devalue their handmade works for as low as twenty to forty pesos for a two hundred milliliter or extra small palayok, in order to be competitive. SCORE 12: Clay has memory. Do you think it remembers the hands that have molded it, held it?

          Within the studio, we consider handmaking ceramics as simultaneously being a traditional practice and craft which has been passed down and sustained by local potters; as a form of individual expression and an artform; and as being a source of income and livelihood. Whether as craft, commodity, or artwork, what coalesces these categories is the laboring it takes to make these handmade ceramics. Moreover I want to echo how the economic value – or more accurately the valuing of things or commodities – is socially constructed and asserted.

In The Social Life of Things, Appadurai states how economic value is more than just the commensuration of two intensities of demand, how:

_{“The form this commensurate takes is the exchange of sacrifice and gain… It is the exchange that sets the parameters of utility and scarcity, rather than other ways round, and exchange that is the source of value.” (Appadurai 4)}
  
     Rather than asserting a linear approach to value and, in turn, price, what I wanted to put forward is to build a relationality to the laborer and labor-ing of these handmade ceramics. Appadurai pinpoints exchange as the source of value – within exchange there is that possible encounter-ing of the labor of the potter/ceramicist. Furthermore, Appadurai “suggest(s) that consumption is eminently social, relational, and active, rather than private, atomic, or passive” – that is not only for sending social messages but receiving them as well (31). And so what message are we ready to receive? What story of labor do these handmade ceramic pieces tell?
SCORE 13: You open the kiln once more, clay bodies now porous enough for liquid glaze to settle on its surface.

          I am actually posing more questions rather than answers. Of how much value human labor, slow production, intimate knowledge of pottery traditions passed down from many generations, and intimate engagements with local materials have, amidst the accelerated shifts towards automation and even-more efficiency? SCORE 14: You brush and dip the clay bodies with underglazes and glaze, colors mined from the earth to be transformed and revealed by the hottest of fires.

          And rather than relegating factory labor and its coupling with machinic labor to an inferior status, I want to touch on how both human labor and machine have made new forms of this practice and other relationalities (whether human, gestures, form, environment, machine) possible. SCORE 15: You place the glazed bodies in the kiln once again, one more prayer, you surrender control.

          The prices you see within the ceramic studio is a treading of tension between accessibility, purchasing power, and also the necessity to sustain the operations within the studio financially. It cannot fully encapsulate the actual value of the piece from the years of training it takes to master the art and craft to the hours of studio preparation and work which includes the actual making and logistics of delivering the pieces. The price also does not fully reflect the weight of these handmade pieces and how it sustains and supports the various programs of the studio which aims to help preserve local pottery traditions and the passing down of knowledge and process of pottery. The studio also aims to support student-artists who have limited resources and financial support so that they can pursue their artistic practices. SCORE 16: You peer through the peephole, you see orange, you squint and see the bend of the cone.

          The value of the handmade pieces can never be represented by a numerical price. Its social life far exceeds that of simply being a commodity to be made and consumed. It goes through many hands even before it reaches its final form and it goes on to sustaining many more of these working hands. SCORE 17: The bodies have cooled.       
                    
                         You open the lid for the last time.

Some bodies are dotted with pinholes.

             Some cracks are revealed.

    Some pass the criteria of utility and durability.

<sub>References:

Appadurai, Arjun. “The Social Life of Things.” Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Flores, Patrick D. “Painting History: Revisions in Philippine Colonial Art.” Quezon City: UP Office of Research Coordination and the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, 1998.

“The Fluxus performance workbook.” In Performance Research 7, No. 3, edited by Ken Friedman, Owen F. Smith, and Lauren. 2002.
https://www.thing.net/~grist/ld/fluxusworkbook.pdf

Icasiano, Carmita Eliza J. "Philippine Traditional Crafts in Discipline-Based Art Education: A New Prospect." Asian Studies 45, no. 1, 2009.
https://www.academia.edu/download/33429121/Icasiano_2009_Philippine_Crafts_in_DBAE.pdf 

Mojares, Resil B. “ARTIST, CRAFTSMAN, FACTORY WORKER: CONCERNS IN THE STUDY OF TRADITIONAL ART.” Philippine Quarterly of Culture and Society 14, no. 3 (1986): 177–88. http://www.jstor.org/stable/29791893.

Risley, Mary Kring. “The Ceramic Industry in the Philippines.” New York: United Nations Technical Assistance Programme, 1954 https://books.google.com.ph/books?hl=en&lr=&id=wCey72Y7jwcC&oi=fnd&pg=PA2&dq=introduction+of+mass+produced+ceramics+in+the+philippines&ots=i5ifCDIwJK&sig=vzpwoRlmt5xucu2dygyEGDQBE58&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false</sub> 

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