Untitled, by Alex Okenfuss (Photo by John Griswold)
The biannual Art & Design sale at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, in St. Louis’ Metro East, was as well-attended last weekend as usual. Visitors shopped in the atrium of the Art & Design building for ceramics as well as glass, metal, photo, and print objects. Proceeds funded the Wagner Potters Association, a student-led group that helps pay for conference attendance, art supplies, and visiting artists.
One couple chose three ceramic pieces from the long card tables covered in work by BFA and MFA candidates. They carried them to the row of student helpers at the cashier’s table, and an undergrad asked the woman if she wanted the pieces wrapped in newspaper. The woman thought about it and said she was just worried about getting the biggest one to the car intact; it was awkwardly shaped. A student wrapped the other two pieces and put them in a paper shopping bag with handles. She told the man he should be careful and hold his hand under the bag. This seemed to decide the matter for the woman, who said she would carry the largest piece in her hands. They left through the large, heavy glass doors, holding their purchases infinitely more carefully than eggs from a supermarket.
Ceramics are usually hardier than that, but I sympathized. In recent years I have begun to collect a few figures and pots, and I always worry about getting them home—that Longhorn Cowfish with its large and barely attached dorsal fin; my commissioned white whale; my son’s first piece, a dog sculpture with human dentures and a long ceramic tail. At home I suspiciously check my bookshelves now and then, lest they dump to the floor my little bowl and flower vase from the fifteenth-century Hội An shipwreck hoard.
Part of the beauty of ceramics lies precisely in its relative frailty, of course, and I have often viewed some colorful piece of pottery as a slightly-less-transient sand mandala. The resemblances with human life are poignant. People too get fired in the kilns of experience, and often we emerge flawed or get broken in time. Some are dun, some glazed or crazed, some repaired with stripes of gold. We are all sensuous as pots.
I had watched the couple handle an interesting piece that looked like a Victorian gasworks building with two smokestacks, but also vaguely like a teapot. They had a crisis of resolve and left it behind, as did another couple, and a lone shopper. I cogitated, toured the sale, returned. I bought it. The student at the cashier’s table asked if I wanted it wrapped and in a bag, and I thought about it too long and finally said I would carry it out to the parking lot in my hands so it would get to the car intact.
I was told the piece was by artist Alex Okenfuss, a BFA graduate who is using his final exhibit at the school to question the tension between the physical and the digital. His new work is brightly glazed ceramic fruit in odd, skeleton-like ceramic baskets. He told me he has not done the brickwork sculptures in a while.
My friend Larry gave me a hard time on the phone for my purchase. He said I paid a fair price (he sells art), but that the piece would never increase in value. I was surprised and said I did not buy it for investment. I called it my Barbie Dream House. Within a minute he admitted that if he lived near me he would fight me for it, he was so jealous.
Other responses to it have been interesting. “Looks like an elaborate bong,” my friend Dustin said. “Or an Edward Gorey incense holder titled ‘The Orphanage.’”
In finding a safe and prominent spot for it in my place, I discovered that one tiny brick was loose in its wall. When I touched it, it fell out on the table. Charming! Larry heard me on the phone, trying to get it back in place, then trying to convince it to stay there. Larry said the terrible noise of it—that scratching, ringing sound of ceramic on ceramic, soft but insistent—was the sound made by God after he had shaped the clay of the earth but could not stop fiddling with it.
