page 2
Editor’s Notes

*=*] desperately need articles and clay news
from you. Witness che emphasis on pictures
in this month's edition. The people I
usually cajole into writing are getting a little
surly under the burden. So send, drop off
or email your thoughts and facts on clay-
Please!

***The article on monkeys a5 art makers
(see page three) was pretty interesting ta
me. Is this a door into the first artists in our
species! | wish | knew af the monkeys had
patneons that they repeated and if they were
more pleased by some decorations than
others. Was there any evidence of colour
choice or preference! And is there a
Leonardo of Monkeydom, our in the jungle
somewhere, too busy hunting for food and
aveiding leopards to make art? Or is art a
by product of simian boredom? Is it a
response to the sterile cages of che monkey's
imprisonment?

These questions make me think of the
women. of Afghanistan, cruelly restricted in
the name of Islam (as interpreted by che
ruling Taliban}. These women are caged in
their heavy robes and veils, allowed outside
only to purchase food, forbidden to talk ta
any male whe is not family, nor are they
permitted work or education. The widows,
of whom there are many after two decades
of war, suffer particularly hard under these
insane strictures. And do the caged women

De the designs for their carpets become
especially brilliant when rigid
fundamentalism jails them? Are the
exquisitely designed tiles that covered the
walls of Persian palaces a resule of captive
imaginations?

We all know how much easier it is co
buckle down to the clay on a day when
rain holds us a temporary prisoner. We
have the great literature thar came out of
the Soviet gulags. If the body is chained,
the mind seeks freedom. Perhaps the
women beaten by their mullahs for
wearing white socks (sexually enticing,
you keow) may become far more
dangerous thinkers than they ever were
when they walked freely.

eee Act & Science are two diametrically
opposed fields of study today, Bur only
one hundred years ago, chey mixed freely.
The scientists of the nineteenth century
were also artists, the ability to draw a part
of their recording lexicon. [ was flipping
through a biography on Charles Darwin
and chere was a photograph of him
leceuring to his students. A beautiful and
accurate drawing of a gorilla skull was
visible on the chalk board behind him.
The drawing contained both information
and spirit.

Go back a few hundred years more, and
you see that many artists dipped, at the

very least, a toe into the pool of science.
Remini, a sculpeor, designed much of

the vatican, overseeing the construction,
having an intimate kawowledge of his
materials. Painners had co know che

science of mixing pigment, as well as cy

geology and anatomy. Later, early
machines of the industrial age had a
qualiry of arc co chem. My parents have a
typewriter built in the 1890's. Ic scill
works, I've cyped letters and resumes on it
The keyboard is high, each key a piece of
Hack ebony with an ivory inlay for the
letter, Doric columns wreathed with
gold ivy support the keyboard. This is an
artful machine. [f you live in old house,
look az your tadianors; buried beneath the
layers of paint you can see the ormare

floral patterns thar were the pride of the

manufacturer.

Art teday often seems suspicious of any
object that is well made. It equaces busy
hands with alazy mind, The social

position of the blue-collar worker, a maker

of objects, is nowhere near as prestigious

as that of a lawyer, a worker in ideas,

Craft often occupies the same posigon 35

the blue-collar worker. We are, if you

read © magazine or Art in America, the
useful, likeable, bur dimmer cousins of thy
pure art producers. Nacurally, [ disagree
with this attitude. But what the hell, we
have a lor more fun and pleasure in
producing our work. And the older | get,
the more iraportanc that seems.

Karen Opas

ot Afghanistan make art!

ee ee ee ee ee ee ee ee ee ee ee ee ee ee ee
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