Pottery: a users guide
Dr Simon Baker
Curator of Photography and International Art, Tate.

Archaeologists and Aesthetes are interested in the container and not what it contains; in the pastoral scenes, the animals on the circumference and not in the milk falling directly from the udder; in the colour of the terracotta and not in the odour it can impart to milk…they will admire the form of a handle, but they will studiously avoid studying the attitude of the drinking man and asking themselves why, among many peoples, it is shameful to drink standing up…They will say that these things are transient and that their reconstruction belongs to the domain of the imagination…[but]…there is an infinite field of observation open to the reasonable mind: present-day humanity, whose beliefs, and even techniques regarding pottery have, on the whole, evolved so little since the world began…

Marcel Griaule, ‘Pottery’, Documents 4, 1930[i]

Pottery is, perhaps, among the less obvious topics for treatment by an avant-garde (even sometime-surrealist) magazine like Documents, published by Georges Bataille and others in Paris for two short years from 1929-30. However, beneath and within its headline rubric comprising Doctrines, Archaeology, Beaux-Art, Ethnography and Variety (popular culture), ran the magazine’s spinal cord – the so-called ‘critical dictionary’ – an auto-deconstructive key to the magazine itself. The dictionary, which, according to Bataille, was intended to begin ‘from the point at which it no longer gave the meanings of words but rather their tasks’, contained entries as diverse, and obtuse, as Architecture, Black Birds, Camel, Debacle, Eye and Formlessness. Each entry (written by the various contributors to the magazine) seemed aimed against received wisdom, and driven by an aggressive impatience with the very discourses heralded as those most central to the magazine’s cultural terrain and competence.[ii]

For an ethnographer like Griaule, impatient with the restrictions imposed by the classical, and often reactionary, training of his still-nascent discipline, writing about material culture entailed what Denis Hollier has termed playing ‘the entropological wild card’ – constituting a subject only in the process of describing its imminent and productive atomisation.[iii] Perhaps the most (or even the only) consistent aspect of the dictionary entries was an emphasis on the concept of use-value, over and above aesthetic and philosophical appreciation – the normative conservatism of the archive, library, museum and art gallery. Even the museum itself, which is linked, in its dictionary entry, to the development of the guillotine (a symbolic object with a relentless and undeniable ‘use-value’), can only properly be understood in terms of its users:

‘Galleries and objects of art are no more than containers, the contents of which are formed by the visitors. A museum is comparable to the lung of a great city: every Sunday the throng flows into the museum, like blood, and leaves it fresh and purified…The museum is a colossal mirror in which man contemplates himself, in short, in all his aspects, finds himself literally admirable and abandons himself to the ecstasy expressed in all the art journals.’[iv]

Griaule’s ‘account’ of pottery should be seen in the context of these ideas, and those in similar magazine essays, like Andre Schaeffner’s review of ‘Musical Instruments in an Ethnographic Museum’, in which the problematic dichotomy of form and function is brought to bear on the rhetoric of display. How much can we learn about a musical instrument displayed on account of its form Schaeffner asks, when everything that is vital and ‘instrumental’ about it, is determined by its use: the way that it is played, the sounds it makes, and the occasions on which its music is required.[v] In future expeditions to Ethiopia and the horn of Africa, especially the Dakar-Djibouti mission celebrated in the surrealist magazine Minotaure, Schaeffner (a musicologist) would accompany Griaule, and the two would attempt to resolve these issues with annotation, sound recordings, photographs, and, eventually, film.[vi]

At this earlier point, however, the critical dictionary, it seems clear, was much less a recipe for remedies than an accurate diagnosis of the symptoms of a cultural malaise; the ‘delightfully coloured cloak’ of civilization that Michel Leiris described elsewhere in Documents as ‘ready to disappear at the slightest turbulence, to shatter at the least impact.’[vii] Griaule’s account of the intellectual deficiencies epitomised by the analysis of pottery in 1930, however, while fitting this principal aim, is further complicated by the images that accompany (but importantly fail to illustrate) the ethnographer’s text.

The notion of ‘illustration’ was something of an on-going problem in Documents, as, for reasons that seem unclear to this day, article were frequently accompanied by seemingly irrelevant images, which in turn, were often paired in ways that had no straightforward connections. A perfect example being a review of an African American dance group, ‘Lew Leslie’s Black Birds’, illustrated with a nineteenth-century photograph of the Canaque people of New Calendonia: the official tour photograph of the Black Birds turns up a few pages later, concluding a subversive, ambiguous, never-satisfactorily-explained picture essay which seems somehow implicitly to suggest the dangers of iniquitous cultural exchange.[viii] Griaule’s ‘Pottery’ is counter-intuitively ‘illustrated’ in this way too, with a series of photographs of kinds of ‘pottery’ as diverse and contradictory as to suggest, at the very least, that the word needs some qualification, and at worst, that the term might, in fact, mean nothing at all. The photographs of pottery, shown as a small grid-like montage, include anthropomorphic Mexican cups, painted vases from Peru, a giant rococo garden urn, and work by a contemporary ceramicist, Jean Besnard, whose smiley-faced figurines offered unwelcome parodies of their ancient ancestors. But then, as Bataille was at pains to point out prior to his subversive stint ‘editing’ Documents: ‘the world is purely parodic…each thing seen is the parody of another, or the same thing in a deceptive form.’[ix] And the visual examples of ‘pottery’ chosen, as well as putting the term that they illustrate under question, also raise the problem of use-value: in ancient times functional objects may appear decorative, whereas contemporary examples of decorative or ‘aesthetic’ objects have no apparent or even potential use-values.

This deliberate attempt to confuse and undermine distinctions produced by the discourse imposed upon an object, (but in all likelihood alien to the objects themselves), is exemplified elsewhere in Griaule’s writing in a short essay called ‘Gunshot’, in which ethnography is described as; ‘interested in both beauty and ugliness, in the European sense of these absurd words’; but is also, according to Griaule, ‘inclined to be suspicious of the beautiful – a rare and consequently a freakish event within a civilization.’ Ethnography, moreover, Griaule concludes ‘considers the pottery of the average bourgeois to be the result of a choice determined by social deformation over thousands of years…’[x]

Documents, it would seem, from our contemporary vantage point, some eighty years later, seems to have been perversely and peevishly determined to pick at the fragile surfaces of academic and aesthetic discourses that have resolutely refused to settle over time: and the idea of the rhetorical frame – exemplified even to this day, in physical terms, by the museum vitrine – continues to dominate questions of reception, and the intellectual ‘uses’ to which material culture may be put. In a sense then, Griaule’s argument about pottery can be seen as having been directed against precisely those historic collections and displays of ancient artefacts, many of which have long-since disappeared, but which are exemplified by the Petrie Museum in London. And if the vitrine can be said to stand, in institutional terms, for a neutralising intellectual frame (the ability of an academic discourse to demonstrate its ability to objectify and abstract things from debased circuits of use-value and exchange-value), then surely, the camera makes claims to these same uncanny abilities within the discourse of representation. To photograph a vitrine, then, is to overlay one apparently (but misleadingly) transparent rhetorical frame over another: a process of doubled, and cumulative abstraction for an ostensible ‘content’, (pottery perhaps), that slips ever deeper into the shadow cast by its re-presentation.

Towards the end of the run of Documents, Georges Bataille, the most aggressive and disruptive thinker to have participated in its production, wrote ‘The Modern Sprit and the Play of Transpositions’, a pessimistic attack on the rhetoric of the image, accompanied by close-up photographs and microscopic slides of dead flies: ‘to reveal’ as he put it ‘the extent of the current powerlessness’ of image-production and the fetishism it provoked. For Bataille, ‘the relative paucity of interest that these illustrations represented’, marked, in his view, ‘the impasse in which, those who today, for one reason or another, find themselves, having to manipulate and transform the sad fetishes destined to move us.’[xi] Bataille’s conclusion is not that it is impossible to make an image in ‘the modern spirit’ or even, ‘the modern era’, after all, he was perhaps the most perceptive and imaginative avant-garde writer to respond directly and effectively to visual material. Instead, what Bataille asks, demands perhaps; alongside Michel Leiris describing civilization as ‘the thin greenish layer…that forms on the surface of calm water and occasionally solidifies into a crust’;[xii] and Marcel Griaule evoking genii-like spirits of Arab magic known as the ‘children of bottles’; is that we recognise the fraught relationship between discourse and content; or, to return to the language of museums and pottery with which we began, the container and what it contains.

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[i] R. Lebel & I. Waldberg (eds.), Encyclopaedia Acephalica, Atlas Press: London, 1995, pp67-8
[ii] For more on Documents and the critical dictionary, see Lebel & Waldberg, op. cit.; and D. Ades & S. Baker, Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and DOCUMENTS, Hayward: London & MIT Press: Cambridge Mass., 2006; see also the two volume facsimile of Documents, published by Jean Michel Place, Paris, 1991.
[iii] See Hollier’s essay in Ades & Baker, op. cit.
[iv] G. Bataille, ‘Museum’, Lebel & Waldberg, op. cit., pp64-5
[v] Documents 5, 1929, see Ades & Baker, op. cit., p146
[vi] Minotaure 2, Paris, 1933
[vii] M. Leiris, ‘Civilization’, Documents 4, 1929; Lebel & Waldberg, op. cit., pp93-4
[viii] For a fuller account see S. Baker, ‘Civilizing Race’, in Ades & Baker op. cit.
[ix] G. Bataille, ‘Solar Anus’, A. Stoekl (ed.), Visions of Excess, Minnessota: 1985, p9
[x] Lebel & Waldberg, pp96-8
[xi] Documents 8, 1930, trans. Ades & Baker, op. cit., pp240-243
[xii] Lebel & Waldberg, op. cit., p93.