Ceramic, 14”x 14” x7, 2014
The bars to production are lowered every day. It has been said that 3-D printing will “democratize the object” with the promise that everyone can be a maker. Everyone may translate an idea into a physical object through strokes on a keyboard, directing a computer to methodically deposit layers of material until the three dimensional form comes into being. Yet the process echoes the 30,000-year-old practice of coil-building ceramics, the artist’s hand building up successive rows until the form is realized. While they yield similar results, one is limited to tidy interaction with a disconnected tool, while the other involves dirty hands in communion with the very material of the object at all points, the evidence of which is inevitably left behind in fingerprints (and imperfections). The world changes. The rules of value are perpetually in flux. Newer replaces the new and nostalgia occupies ever-decreasing increments of time. Perhaps nothing is lost in the new methods, but this piece questions at what point “Art” occurs.
