Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 79-11(E), Section: A.

Adviser: Edward S. Cooke, Jr.

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This dissertation considers the intersection between studio ceramics and vanguard art practices in the 1960s and early 1970s. During that time, a number of artists who had been trained in ceramics, including Lowell Darling, Jim Melchert, and Stephen Kaltenbach, began working in experimental modes that often left aside the physical material of clay. Instead, they favored more ephemeral idioms such as performance, projection, and text-based artworks, but to varying degrees, they continued to draw from the metaphors and processes of clay. These activities constitute what I term expanded ceramics .

Expanded ceramics was significant for decoupling the medium from the physical presence of clay. For these artists, ceramics constituted not just an actual material, but also a set of strategies that could take shape either in clay or not. They engaged ceramics as an attitude, a position or state of mind they could occupy that opened metaphorical and thematic possibilities regardless of the material used. Further, ceramics could also function as a proposition, a conceptual or material foundation from which the work originated, but that in its final state bore little or no identifiable resemblance.

The chapters in this study focus on particular instances during this period where expanded ceramics intersected with other vanguard art. The first chapter analyzes experiments in the medium that emerged in the San Francisco Bay Area in the early and mid-1960s, proposing that artists expanded the field first by incorporating hobbyist approaches and then by integrating themselves within a rich cross-disciplinary milieu.

The second chapter examines how generational shifts in political awareness mobilized by the anti-Vietnam War movement created new possibilities for ceramics. It focuses on the nexus of Kent State University as the site not only of the generation-defining shootings of May 4, 1970, but also of works of expanded ceramics by Robert Smithson and Jim Melchert that same year. The third chapter analyzes the Brooklyn Museum exhibition Attitudes (1970) as a bringing together of Studio Craft and leading New York sculpture designed explicitly to reframe ceramics as a state of mind rather than as a material. The final chapter considers Lowell Darling's early ceramic projects, which unlocked raw clay as performative material for both himself and other artists who explored it as a time-based medium.

Expanded ceramics waned in the later 1970s in the face of the inward turn of the Studio Craft movement, yet its strategies have re-emerged strongly in the last ten or more years among makers across a wide spectrum. The artists and artworks examined in this study can thus function as an alternate, and previously obscure, genealogy for current artistic experimentation using clay in the broadest possible sense.