LouisKatz | Main / EdgesRefinementInnovation

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I believe, based on my current philosophical beliefs that sooner or latter I am likely to truly unify refinement and innovation as manifestations of the same quality. However for the moment I see refinement as inward looking, clarification, elimination of extrainious details, distillation.

Innovation seems different. It is a broadening at the base, a search for new ground, not distillation but the looking for new relationships, new qualities. Innovation happens at edges, and the innovator is always looking at the edges of ideas, concepts, modes, and at their intersections. The innovator sees blue and green not as separtate colors but as a continuim . The difference between handbuilding and throwing is the same. There are no separations. Distillation is an anathema to this continuous view of the world.

Perspective is the understanding of an object from multiple viewpoints, the understanding of an object in more dimensions than are currently viewable. Perspective as we use the word normally denotes viewing from two or more different points, or historical perspective, the understanding of how something appears at different times. Political perspective is something as a society we need more of. It allows the search for common understanding and goals. As humans we have some aspect of spatial persective built in. We have binocular vision and our limited parallax allows a bit of depth to an otherwise flat world.

But I mostly am interested in conceptual perspective in the arts. I want a broader understanding of what ceramics is. I seem to have always wanted it. I want function to be defined beyond pots for the table. It should contain tile, tubs, insulators, cement, ceramic capacitors and chips, . Clearly beauty is a function and valued as such. "Interesting" "informative" "communicative",confrontational, and upsetting are also functions. Function is a question more than an answer. That we all make or strive to make functional objects seems a given and an idea that at least most clayers who study at universities have arrived at, even if they have discared the idea as worthless.

But who we are is a similarly artificial and is normally a limited idea. As ceramists, do the brickmakers and toilet factory workers count? What about the chemists who make ceramic earth pigments? Do we include those that cast cement, make insulators and capacitors? And do we count those that sell pots, or write about them. Aren't these people or perhaps some of these people part of "us"? There is a beautiful quote somewhere that every time we separate "us" from "them" it is an act of violence.

It is my belief that the very conceptuallizing, categorizing of reality is violent. It is necessary but it rips a continuous analog whole into descrete digital categories. It is dualistic. The necessity of dualism however, is best illistraaated but the dualist nature of the word dualism. It is an absurdity that, "Either you are a dualist or you are not."