The Shape of Clay
Jay Potts Fall 2021 HTS3: Gravity Matters with Catherine James AA School of Architecture, UK
Introduction It seems two questions have always underwritten the history of humanity: where do we come from? And what is our purpose? Where ontology relies perhaps on subjective interpretation, the causality inherent to genealogy lends itself to more ‘objective’ modes of inquiry.1 As such, the search for life’s origin has consumed the minds of scientists and theologians alike for centuries. One could imagine the science-versus-religion debate on this topic as deeply divisive, but this has proven the contrary in recent years. On the one hand, scientists present an empirical argument steeped in Proterozoic bathwater. Opposite lies creationism’s provocative chronicle of life shaped from wet earth into the divine image of a higher being.2 However differing these accounts may appear, both acknowledge the role of a primordial substrate in the origins of life. In recent years, this understanding has led to a narrowing of ideological difference, in part due to the proposition that clay minerals played an active role in abiogenesis.3 We are thus left with one crucial ingredient; the basis of all life; and the focus of this essay: clay. The assertion that there exists only one thing is by no means radical. “Energy,” “the
universe,” and “a higher power,” are old monist concepts rooted in materialism.4 Before beginning, it is important to establish what is meant by materialism, since various modalities are studied in the subsequent chapters. Base materialism, which is the principal concern of “clay,” explores the dynamic, gnostic energies inherent in matter. It follows Georges Bataille’s definition of an “active principle.”5 By engaging the “formless” as a means of declassifying matter, Bataille attempts to extract matter “from the philosophical clutches of classical materialism, which is nothing but idealism in disguise.”6 In psychoanalysis, Gaston Bachelard, evokes “the material image of an ideal paste,” to describe a relationship between the self and the world mediated by the “material imagination.”7 Finally, new materialism examines the capacity for human-made objects to exert agency outside of human influence.8 “Thing power” can describe the “vitality” of actively decaying matter, a “vibrancy” that persists long after an object is subjugated to our will.9 “Dust” makes visible these entropic forces, but also precedes the congelation of matter, and so plays an essential role in both the annihilation and formulation of all things.
The Shape of Clay
Clay Clay cannot be metaphorically displaced because it is without form and is thus irreducible. It exists as what Bataille calls “base matter.” Unlike the “dead matter”10 of empiricism, base matter is an “active principle,”11 which “permits the intellect to escape from the constraints of idealism”12 by way of its “incongruity.”13 Clay never truly exists in a fixed state, but rather in various states of metamorphosis, and as such cannot be said to assume a fixed meaning. By way of its irreducibility, clay gains a gnostic quality. To quote Jonathan David York: Base matter rests at the primal node where spirit initially unfolded itself, becoming world, and therefore provides the purest link between body and spirit, flesh and consciousness.14
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Uncovering meaning in nature does not equate to a rationalization, but rather an emptying. It is in rejecting our posteriori—our interpretation of the world, our form—that allows us to see nature as it is; a base materialism of which we are constituted. Clay thus becomes representative of a priori, of knowledge accrued without experience: a base understanding of the world. Through this lens, it is then feasible to understand why virtually every ancient culture positioned clay at the centre of their creation, or rather emergence myths. Where creation is procedural, emergence acknowledges the transcendence of something taking form. It is with this definition of emergence that we might begin to categorize the rituals of American artist Charles Simonds. Birth is one such ritual. Performed for the first time in 1970 in Sayreville, New Jersey, Simonds describes his own self-burial and subsequent emergence as a frightening baptism by clay in which “birth and death were forever conjoined.”15 This fear, not unlike witnessing the sublime, is from revelling in the inner mystery; the core affliction in being human; the mysterium tremendum et fascinans. To search for answers, Simonds had to exit his body. To be reborn, he had to reduce to nothing.
Figure 1. Prometheus Creating Man in Clay, sketch for a fresco circa 1845 by Constantin Hansen. Creative Commons.
Figure 2. Charles Simonds, Birth, 1970. © Charles Simonds
It is only once clay is shaped by an external force that meaning emerges. Such is plainly the case with creationist myths, whereby inert material is shaped, then animated, and finally given autonomy to self-define. By assuming a form, clay therein adopts an ontological quality in becoming human.
The warmth and texture of the clay became that of his own flesh; his body, home, and land becoming “one and the same.”16 Simonds, seeing no distinction between his body and the earth achieved an illumination, which Joseph Campbell describes as “the recognition of the radiance of one eternity through all things.”17 Here, Simonds’
The Shape of Clay
rebirth in body and spirit becomes a transcendent act, not unlike Jesus’ ascension to Heaven in human form; a foundational myth which embodies Buddhist enlightenment.18 Lumpy and formless, but charged with a profound awakening, Simonds finally emerged from the earth and began to redefine himself and his artistic practice: “ever since, I build ruins, I give birth, create places of absence, abandonment, and death.”19 By turning back into clay, Simonds becomes the creator of his world; shaping everything from his own flesh. The capacity for humans to self-redefine can also be understood through the principles of neuroplasticity. Defined as the “brain’s ability to modify, change, and adapt both structure and function throughout life and in response to experience,”20 neuroplasticity can begin to ground Lacan’s description of human subjectivity. To Lacan, human subjectivity arises from the identification of the self through the other, using language.21 Since language is exterior to the self, this distinction is always insufficient. Identity is thus a product of compounded experiences and identifications, which are sought by the restless desire of the fractured self to become whole.22 This “constitutive historicity of the brain” is exactly what is implicated in neuroplasticity.23 With this reading, like clay, the brain is both formless and formative. It is something we can shape, and something which shapes us; an “ideal paste” that is neither too hard nor too soft.24
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Brick Clay hardens when it is exposed to time and heat. Heat, like time, flows in an irreversible direction.25 Once “cooked,” clay solidifies, adopting a fixed, yet fragile form. While clay is analogous to the raw subject, brick becomes representative of the cooked subject. The cooked subject is hardened by the dogma of empiricism. Dogma compounded by the “hard sciences,” from which modern culture receives most of its knowledge.26 However, this knowledge represents the limits of what we know, not the extents. Empirical certainty is constantly at the risk of being overturned by scientific advancements, so it becomes impossible to derive meaning from.27 The illusion of certainty gives rise to attempts at constructing solids hard enough to resist erosion, which in fact make them more brittle. “My (haircut/outfit/job/ new car) is who I am,” being prime examples. This futile act only compounds the cooked subject’s fear of entropy; the decimation of their hardened ego by inevitable forces. Mass marketing has cleverly exploited this lack of meaning by promising self-actualization through consumption as opposed to divine transcendence. Today, shops have become neutral congregations; cathedrals for the cooked subject. In America, some “mega-churches” have gone so far as to unabashedly adopt the typology of malls; amphitheatres to entertain
Figure 3. The Psychopath’s Guide to Conservation, 2022, drawn by the author.
The Shape of Clay
customers of the gospel. Sacred arenas where we pay to pray. And so, the cooked subject is estranged, floundering for meaning in commerce courts. It no longer speaks of nature, except in devising its exploitation. It is one among many, an individual shaped and stamped, churned off the production line. Engulfed in the insatiable appetite of consumer capitalism, personal growth is reduced to the momentary pleasure of attainment. Restlessly striving becomes restlessly consuming. Change isn’t real change, it’s a moiré delirium of trends rapidly interfacing, disappearing, and resurfacing endlessly. However illusory, this turnover is the only certainty. In this way, the goals of the hardened subject should not be conflated with a will for permanence. Change is sought after. The hardened subject fetishizes solids—temporary solids which promise to remain paradoxically liquid.28 Like a new trend, they are actively sought and quickly discarded. They are “fetishists in practice, not in theory.”29 The brick is one such fetish object, especially here in England, where brick-watching is a national pastime. I confess my own fascination for bricks but realize the problems therein. Here, the humble brick champions an aestheticization of cultural values, which is ostensibly vapid. No better image can be conjured than that of the demolished building whose brick façade remains. This gruesome act is not a celebration of heritage, it is rather a fetishization of it: the obliteration of its insides and the mummification of its flesh.
Figure 4. An example of façadism in Spitalfields, London.
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To witness a brick or stone building from the Victorian era is also to witness a great emptiness somewhere else. A deep quarry, a mine, a once arable land laid barren. We envision a colony whose wealth has been stripped from the ground and the enslaved people toiling on lands that are not their own. A romanticism of the Victorian building is a romanticism of stolen wealth, and of an enduring image of Empire that mocks our futile efforts to dismantle it. When we talk about the nostalgic value of heritage, it is those colonial beliefs we uphold. Brick, however native to Britain, is a product of destitution elsewhere. Instead of preserving our buildings, we ought to remember the people and the landscapes, now lost, dredged, and battered at the hands of the colonial project. But, this is inherently unsexy. It does not make for seductive Real Estate prose. And so, it is largely excluded from the annals of our buildings. Many cities, including London, have perfected the administration of diet-history to the modern, white subject, who can consume “Victorian values” without wallowing in its dark, colonial history. The liquefaction—that is, the smelting and forging of a more easily digestible narrativefor the modern consumer30—is perhaps best examined through the way heritage today is marketed. Agents, driven by consumers who seek pleasure free from the encumbrance of critical reflection, use tag-lines like “Bohemian,” “quirky,” and “grunge-chic,” to gloss over the fact their 19th-century cotton-millflat-conversion once employed child labourers.31 The real value of heritage in our modern world thus wades in waters muddied by its distorted cultural significance. It would seem antithetical to discuss the contemporary gratification from temporary solids in the same breath as building heritage, but I must remind you that to the cooked subject— the hardened capitalist—heritage is not an asset, but an obstacle. Heritage is something which stubbornly endures. It represents a slowing of modernity to the point of stagnation. So, it is actively, and sometimes passively, eradicated. It is demolished, or left to rot. In the UK alone there are over 1200 listed heritage buildings at risk of perpetual deterioration through a lack of maintenance.32 This decay is concurrent with a
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quiet erasure of history to negate its associated traumas. The inaction towards this erasure comes from a place of privilege. For, it is only those with privilege who have the means to faithfully preserve a historic site, and so their unwillingness to do so is an act of violence. Instead, they sit idly by, uttering such banal platitudes as: “time heals all wounds,” and “just move on.”33 Itemized, atomized, and stripped from carefully laid contexts, bricks are fundamentally commodities. Raw earth, moulded and fired, becomes a usable and durable object, which is then bought and sold. In the same way, humans become hardened labourers, trading sweat for goods. Bricks have a function, but also an exchange value mirroring monetary currency. The “frog” is a depression in the broad face of the brick, usually where the maker would stamp their name and/or mark.34 This minting practice ensures the quality of the product in the same way the Queen’s image ensures the value of one pound sterling. Strangely dimensioned bricks become obsolete in the same manner of obscure denominations. Like the farthing, odd bricks have no place in our modern circulation. The circulation of bricks also ensures their value. Movement is a core tenet of the brick because labour is what fundamentally imbues it with value. Although the raw material is basically “free,” it costs money to extract.35 The movement of clay to the kiln; the hand placing the brick; all these actions produce value because they are “socially necessary labour.”36 The brick building becomes the embodiment of labour. An accumulation of time; the eternal act of placing and place-making.
Figure 5. Promotion: Effective Brick, 1993, M&CO (Tibor Kalman) © Museum of Modern Art
Figure 6. Dwelling in Venice, 1981, Charles Simonds. © Charles Simonds
Simonds’ Dwellings are born from similar sentiments. Built from 1969, Dwellings are homes for “Little People;” a nomadic race of imaginary citizens whose traces we see only in the spaces they leave behind. Like miniature Mesa Verdes, Simonds stacks pea-sized bricks in the cavities of crumbling walls, on window-ledges, and in other disparaged and forgotten urban fissures. Spaces of absence become animated by memory. But it is an imagined memory, a long-lost homeland, continually searched-for, but impossibly distant. We stumble upon these dwellings long after the Little People have disappeared, and so we continually project them into the past. Their stillness precedes us, and we realize in our transient moment of observation we are more expendable than they.37 Simonds’ impulse to make a dwelling is the desire to find a home for his Little People. To anchor their imaginary in our temporary existence. This desire is futile, “a Sisyphean expenditure of time and energy” for the sake of the gesture more than the sake of building something to last.38 Place-making is operative rather than enduring. It stimulates an imagined history without imposing a narrative. A history which is both true and false because nothing “real” proceeds the thought. To be “hardened” is to dwell in these imagined spaces for too long. Often, these Dwellings became anchors in the real, compelling certain city-dwellers to protect them at all costs. To do so is to preserve the fantasy of “lasting solids,” a project which is principally self-interested. The juxtaposition between the “smooth space” of Simonds’ nomads and the “striated space” of
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the city evokes a tension within the guardian.39 The vulnerable Dwelling and its imagined history become surrogates for the brittle self, which must be constantly cared for to resist their collapse. The cooked subject justifies their own identity in relation to such fabrications. Cultural histories, dressed in images and myths, are apparitions that appear real. These myths are meant to ground the subject in being but are constantly misconstrued to ground “being” in the “real.” The “real” which is flimsy and fractured at best, because it negates the transcendentalism of “becoming.” This “becoming,” as we have explored, is the foundation of being human. So, hardening implies a certain death. A death by erosion; the pulverization of the hardened subject. Dust Eventually, all things turn to dust. This evokes the image of a great equalizer. And a cinematic one at that. One cannot imagine the copy for an end-ofdays film without it. Let me show you: Soon after the eradication of culture, but long still before the implosion of our sun, you will be asked: to what do you plead guilty? You shrug. Surely, I am not at fault. You’re the modern them. A foot soldier in the Third War against fossil capitalism. Your soaps contain no sulphates. Your plastic is made from fermented plant starch. Your meat contains none. Was conscientious consumption not enough? Well, no. The law of entropy states the universe tends towards chaos; apocalypse if you fancy the biblical. All things end. This is one of the few assurances of existence. Soon, the whole world will be draped in ashes like a Pompeian wilderness. Erosion is slow and persistent; demolition without a bang. But I digress. Right before Simonds steps away from a Dwelling, he lightly showers it in sand, creating a “velvety image…aged with dust.”40 Like dressing a movie prop, his arenaceous touch is just so that suddenly his diorama exists in time. As dust settles on the Dwelling, it seems to have always
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existed. And perhaps it has, if only mentally, as a psychological folly. The Dwelling appears as quickly as it disappears. A hologram in the streets. It is fleeting, but to the observer, it is evermore. A glance is a snapshot in time, and dust is its operative agent. Like light rays cascading through dense atmosphere, dust materializes ephemera. With it, we can witness the passage of time; something which we are otherwise absorbed in and so cannot observe. We live in the eternal present, ignorant to time, like fish unaware of water.41 This perhaps explains our fear of dust. It represents aging, the “gradual perishing of beauty.”42 It also signifies the great stasis of the industrial machine. Dust is modernity’s natural foil and so is made to disappear.43 The modern subject is preoccupied with dusting and sweeping, frantically resisting oblivion.44 Pulverization is eternal unbecoming. Just as clay is the forming of matter and brick is its hardening; dust is the reduction of matter. We do not talk of a dust. We talk only of it en masse; when it is observable. A dust is invisible to the unaided eye. It gathers in groups and dances wistfully in formless clouds. Just as we seek to tame it, it changes form, disappears and settles elsewhere. It is the spectre haunting our homes; ubiquitous and restless. It is an irritating reminder of our own mortality. Interior dust is said to be roughly composed of 50% dead skin cells. We erode like the walls that enshrine us. And when we die, our ashes are scattered to the great beyond. Like all natural things, dust belongs to a cycle. Wet dust becomes clay, when fired turns to brick, and weathered reduces back into dust. Birth, like death is a departure. So, dust is a new beginning. And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” - Genesis 2:7 This cycle is paramount to human life. Perceptually formless, we exist first as particulate matter drifting in embryonic uncertainty. We then emerge from the world, wet and lumpy, our brains primed for change. Eventually, we form our own beliefs, our skin thickens, and our sense of self solidifies. Those who resist this pull
The Shape of Clay
remain eternally young. But all matter is subject to entropy. Our light slowly fades until it is a candle flicker, one stiff breath from eternal nightfall. In our passing, we are returned to the earth and restart our process of becoming. First, humbly, as worm fodder, then perhaps as the buds of a cherry blossom or the bark of a sturdy redwood. Our bid to remain modern is a constant battle to remain underdefined.45 We leave space for the changing world to enter us, rather than fill the world we hope to occupy. The clay myth gains a certain gravitas in a world of abundance profoundly lacking in meaning. When we look at clay—and I mean look deeply and soulfully at it—we see ourselves reflected in its dull sheen. We see the possibilities of existence, of lost worlds, and dead matter dancing on its surface. We acknowledge it is of us and we are of everything. My flesh was once earth and soon it will become earth anew. This is neither a death not a birth. Matter cannot be created nor destroyed, and so meaning does not need to be created because it already exists. We might find grounding in the realization that all things comprise a single totality, and that life does not require justification in a balanced universe. And so, the shape of clay is not. It is of things to come, and of things long vanished. All the world and nothing at all. So too are we.
Endnotes 1.
Not to be confused with the philosophy of genealogy, whose elements Foucault argues are without history. 2. Clay and the myth of creation begins with Sumerian creationism ca. 1600BCE and appears in Greek, Egyptian, Islamic, Jewish, and Chinese mythology, among others. 3. André Brack, “Chapter 10.4 - Clay Minerals and the Origin of Life,” Developments in Clay Science 5 (2013): p. 507. 4. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Duke University Press, 2010, p. x. 5. Georges Bataille, “Base Materialism and Gnosticism” in The Bataille Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, 1997, p. 162. 6. Yves-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide, New York: Zone Books, 1997, p. 53. 7. Gaston Bachelard, On Poetic Imagination and Reverie, trans. Colette Gaudin, Dallas, Texas: Spring Publications Inc., 1971, p. 81. 8. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, p. xvi. 9. Ibid. 10. Georges Bataille, Encyclopaedia Acephalica: Comprising the Critical Dictionary and Related Texts, London: Atlas Press, 1995, p. 58.
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11. Bataille, “Base Materialism and Gnosticism” in The Bataille Reader, p. 162. 12. Ibid., p. 164. 13. Ibid. 14. Jonathan David York, “Flesh and Consciousness: Georges Bataille and the Dionysian” in Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 4:3 (August 2003), p. 49. 15. Charles Simonds, Dwelling, Köln: Buchhandlung Walther König, 2015, p. 9. 16. Ibid., p. 10. 17. Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, United States: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2011, p. 204. 18. Ibid., p. 45. 19. Ibid., p.46. 20. Dynamic Brains and the Changing Rules of Neuroplasticity: Implications for Learning and Recovery, intro 21. Jacques Lackan and Bruce Fink, Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, New York: Norton, 2006, p. 76. 22. We know from Schopenhauer that restlessly striving is futile, but essential to being human. 23. Adriano Aguiar, “The ‘Real Without Law’ in Psychoanalysis and Neurosciences, Front. Psychol 9:851 (2018), p. 5. 24. Bachelard, On Poetic Imagination and Reverie, p. 81. 25. Steven Connor, “Michel Serres: The Hard and the Soft,” transcript of a speech given at the Centre for Modern Studies, University of York, 26 November 2009, https:// stevenconnor.com/hardsoft.html, p. 5. 26. Ibid., p. 4. 27. An idea expounded upon in one of many conservations with Ilka Gilvesy, circa 2022. 28. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000, p. ix. 29. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, London: Verso, 1989, p. 28. 30. Bauman, Liquid Modernity, p. x. 31. The Cotton Mills and Factories Act of 1819 permitted children aged 9-16 to work up to 12 hours a day in the UK, but children under the age of 9 could not be employed. These laws were largely unenforced until 1833 when the HM Factory Inspectorate was formed. 32. According to SAVE Britain’s Heritage. 33. David Cameron in 2015 infamously called for Jamaica to “move on” from the wounds of slavery. 34. Jupp, Edmund W, Brick Watching, Bristol: Intellect, 2003, p. 28. 35. Ibid., p. 12. 36. David Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Capital, United Kingdom: Verso, 2010, p. 20. 37. Simonds, Dwelling, 2015, 28. 38. Ibid., 27. 39. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, p. 474. 40. Ibid, 29. 41. See David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water” commencement speech parable. 42. John Ruskin,The Ethics of the Dust: Ten Lectures to Little Housewives on the Elements of Crystallization, United Kingdom: J. Wiley, 1872, p. 233. 43. Teresa Stoppani, “Dust Revolutions. Dust, informe, architecture (Notes for a reading of Dust in Bataille),” in The Journal of Architecture 12:4 (2007), p. 437. 44. Bataille, Encyclopaedia Acephalica, 1995, p. 43. 45. Bauman, Liquid Modernity, 2000, p. viii.
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