Ceramics and beauty have always been intertwined – which might be the main reason the Western art world has perennially circled around the medium with suspicion. In ancient Attica artisans inscribed their wares with the words kalos or kale – “beautiful,” praise for the lithe young men and women depicted on the pots. In the 18th century pottery designer and pioneering industrialist Josiah Wedgwood declared, “I think the instinct for beauty and all the desire to produce beautiful things … is a kind of sex quality, not unlike the song of birds or their beautiful plumage.” In 1940 British studio-pottery godfather Bernard Leach wrote, in his landmark A Potter’s Book, “[I]n looking for the best approach to pottery it seems reasonable to expect that beauty will emerge from a fusion of the individual character and culture of the potter with the nature of his materials.” It’s no accident that one of the most celebrated couplets in English poetry is about a particularly sharp-looking pot: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,” say’st Keats’ Grecian urn.

Clayton Bailey calls bullshit on all that. When one of his students painted the slogan “Think Ugly” on the wall of the ceramics studio at what’s now the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, the pupil was echoing a teacher in the process of rejecting thousands of years of aesthetic history. Bailey literally built the Whitewater clay program from the ground up in the early 1960s, constructing kilns and kick wheels from scratch. He went on to teach at the University of South Dakota and California State University, East Bay – and to found the First Psychoceramic Church, whose purpose, Bailey’s official chronology states, is “disseminating crackpot ideas.” It’s no surprise the man has earned a reputation as a mad scientist and a rouge as well as one of the most seminal characters in modern ceramic art.

In the ’60s Bailey helped inject the rapidly changing field of ceramics with a much-needed dose of humor – and, perhaps more importantly, with a sense of humor about itself. From the beginning he followed his own path, content neither to make purely functional pots or ceramic sculptures in the prevailing mode of the day, which was hulking forms influenced by abstract expressionism. Instead, Bailey produced pots and sculptures that were lumpy, bumpy, and – gasp – even sloppy. His work combined the lowbrow, grotesque caricatures of Ed “Big Daddy” Roth with an obvious love for his material. Along with Robert Arneson and David Gilhooly, Bailey helped to create what became known as the Funk movement.

On a sunny late-April day my wife, Claire, and I took the winding road to Bailey’s studio in Port Costa, California, about an hour’s drive north of the Bay Area. We drove past a hulking C&H sugar refinery, then into an idyllic rural landscape that hugs the banks of the Carquinez Strait. After driving for a while without seeing any houses, afraid we’d taken a wrong turn, we finally spotted Bailey’s studio, which doubles as his Wonders of the World Museum. There’s no mistaking that the place is Bailey’s: It’s guarded by dozens of ceramic gargoyles crouched on fence posts and keeping a watchful eye on passing traffic.

Even at the age of 72, Bailey cuts an imposing figure. He’s compact, muscular, and looks much younger than his age. The first thing you notice about Bailey is his signature mustache, which hangs in thin, wavy curls to middle of his chest. The artist’s persona and work are hopelessly tangled together – and that’s entirely the point. His mustache is styled after the one worn by George Ohr, the self-proclaimed Mad Potter of Biloxi, who in the late 19th century broke boundaries with wares that were anachronistically (and masterfully) twisted and folded. Ohr was also a brash personality who knew that a pinch of showmanship could help his career immensely.

Bailey’s studio/museum, which he’s been working on since he moved to Port Costa in the early ’70s, is an environment every bit as encompassing as Howard Finster’s Paradise Garden or Donald Judd’s various properties in Marfa, Texas. Inside the gate is Bailey’s kiln yard, which is dotted with all types of kilns, from commonplace electrics to superspecialized soda kilns that were built to achieve special glazing effects. The kilns are interspersed with more gargoyles sitting on pedestals of kiln bricks and the results of 40-plus years of artistic experimentation.

Bailey giddily led us into an area of the yard where he was conducting his latest inquiry, which consisted of finding our what would happen with he combined local clay from a defunct brickyard with a “special” ingredient to make it bloat to more than three times its original size when heated. He’d been throwing pots out of the clay, then putting slip and glaze on their surfaces before firing. The results are a little bit like David Banner after he’d turned into the Incredible Hulk, with the original glazed surface of the pots hanging like scraps of clothing on the pots’ massive, bloated forms.

Then Bailey showed us the Solar Pyrosphere, a large Jules Verne-styled ceramic vessel with a hole in one side and a cyclopean magnifying lens on the other. This machine records the movement of the sun by focusing a beam of light onto a two-by-twelve. Immediately after Bailey inserted the wood into the vessel, a wisp of smoke began to emerge – and that day’s time recording had begun, in the form of a thin line burned into the wood. “Each day,” Bailey’s website explains, “the new line is burned just above or below the previous day’s line, as the sun’s path across the sky raises or lowers with the changing of the seasons. A sunny day is represented by a continuous burned groove across the plank; a partly cloudy day by an intermittent groove, or one of varied depth. Rainy days leave a ridge of unburned material in the recording medium.”

Other alchemical experiments take up other spaces around the kiln yard. One is a series of large crucibles and pots stamped with the names of the rare earth elements contained within. “Claytonium,” which gives Bailey his artistic superpowers, is one. “Unobtanium,” the rarest material in the Bailey arsenal, is another. It’s permanently sealed into its one-of-a-kind container, a bottle whose neck has seemingly been tied into a knot.

We then toured the Museum of Kaolithic History, a sort of museum within a museum containing artifacts that Bailey “uncovered” on the grounds of his studio after a freak mudslide: a bigfoot skeleton, a cyclops skull, the fossilized remains of tiny Homus ceramicus industrious. According the Bailey, the kaolithic bones are “formed when the buried remains are entirely replaced by clay compounds which have been shaped through digital contact, compaction and impaction by unnatural forces. When the remains are exposed to high temperatures in a kiln, thermal metamorphosis occurs and the kaolithic fossilization is complete. The entire process can happen within a few days. By applying the scientific method to the visual and tactile examination of these thermally metamorphised mud pyrofacts, we have unearthed or created previously unknown animals from the Pre-credulous era of the Bone Age.”

That text is a great example of Bailey’s lifelong collaboration with his alter ego, Dr. George Gladstone, an authority who frames Bailey’s discoveries within a proper scientific context. Gladstone also develops sophisticated devices to authenticate and legitimize discoveries such as the kaolithic skeletons. Contemplating the projects that Bailey and Gladstone work on together is like peeling away the layers of a particularly pungent onion. What might at first seem legit, if far-fetched, soon reveals itself as part bunkum, part satire, and, deep down, part fundamental truth – or at least truthiness.

Bailey’s public performances are equally idiosyncratic. He’s always hated doing ceramic workshops in which the “master” demonstrates his work while chatting with a group of worshipful students. In the ’70s he worked up a series of public lectures and pseudoscientific demonstrations in which he held forth on various ceramics-related topics. For one conference he sent letters to top museums around the country asking if he could break pieces from their ceramic collections in the name of “compression strength testing” them. He didn’t get any takers – although he did get several irate letters from museum directors – so he went ahead with a staged demonstration using a compression machine and some convincing fakes.

Another performance used a pot form that Bailey cast out of latex. He placed the deflated form on a wheel and surreptitiously connected it to a canister of compressed air, then announced to his audience that he was going to demonstrate his “mentalist” throwing techniques. He concentrated hard – while secretly releasing an air valve – and gradually turned a brown blob of latex into a stunning pot without the use of his hands. By focusing the psychic energy,” his website in-jokes, “microscopic particles of clay can be Forced to ‘slip.’”

Curiously, Bailey is perhaps best known for his nonceramic work. He assembles elaborate robots out of cast-off kitchenware, old car parts, and other detritus that he keeps neatly arranged on shelves in his workshop. Each robot is imbued with a Pixaresque level of characterization and a back story worthy of Greek mythology. Bailey wires the robots with blinking lights and working clocks, but he prefers to make them immobile – so, obviously, they don’t rampage through their owner’s home.

The robots are displayed in his studio next to various pieces of equipment for testing kaolithic fossils, repelling demons, and all manner of other unlikely tasks. Our tour of the Wonders of the World Museum wouldn’t have been complete without some hands-on demonstrations. We also got to see legendary pieces like Bailey’s Urns for the Unconceived, vessels that playfully address fundamentalist Christian values by memorializing the vast numbers of sperm and eggs that are “wasted” each year.

I took a lot of memories and lessons back from my visit to Bailey’s studio. It struck me that Bailey should be thought of as a seminal figure not just in the world of ceramics, but in the field of craft in general. He pioneered the sort of humor, contextualization, and experimentation that have become hallmarks of both contemporary studio craft and “indie craft.” He’s capable of astounding feats of chemistry and craftsmanship, but he often opts for simple, direct solutions. When I asked him about the huge gulf in craftsmanship between some of his funkier pieces and his “old master” work, he replied that his approach has always been to give each object as much craftsmanship as it required – no more, no less. And his work has always reflected exactly who he is: alternately playful, cynical, and mystical.

The art world finally seems to be coming around to a greater appreciation of Clayton Bailey, which is a great, great thing. The Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, California, which has long been a supporter of Bailey and the Funk movement, is currently putting together the first major retrospective of Bailey’s art. The show opens on October 22, 2011, and will run through January 15, 2012. During my visit to Bailey’s studio, I imagined white-gloved art handlers from the Crocker carefully “excavating” kaolithic fossils from his backyard and crating them for shipment. I can only hope those handlers use the same care to return those crazy old bones to their original home, so others can have the same experience that I did.

Attic amphora by the Andokides Painter, 520-510 BCE. (Image from the Yorck Project, 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei, DVD-ROM, 2002. Reproduced under the GNU Free Documentation License.)

When did the handmade movement become more than just people making and selling stuff? When did it become a cultural force and an economic power, something your parents had heard of and the New York Times wrote about? That’s easy: When the men stepped in.

I’m joking, of course. But, sadly, I’m also not. Etsy, the tech start-up that launched a thousand shops, was founded six years ago by three men. By the time the Times took notice, in 2007, the site had around 70,000 sellers – “about 90 percent of whom were women,” the paper reported. Etsy refuses to release more up-to-date statistics, citing privacy issues, but even the quickest perusal of the site reveals that its shops are dominated by female makers.

Men have a long history of developing and taking advantage of technologies that have made the dissemination of handicrafts more efficient – even if they haven’t always had a long history of making those handicrafts. Take the potter’s wheel. We don’t know exactly who came up with it, but one thing is certain: Once it had been invented, the men who used it quickly superseded the women who’d been coiling pots by hand since time immemorial. Making pottery on the wheel became a competitive, male-centric activity in places such as ancient Greece, where artisans, like so many swaggering hip-hop MCs, inscribed their wares with taunts aimed at their rivals.

Whenever the stakes have been high enough, it seems, men have conveniently taken over craft traditions from women. Medieval tapestry guilds were dominated by men, who handed down their knowledge and privileges from father to son. Women were allowed only to spin fibers into thread. All of the weaving was taken care of by men. Were the spinning jenny or the power loom invented by women during the Industrial Revolution? No: The inventions that “liberated” women from weaving by hand in the home were created by men.

Of late plenty of crafters, most of them female, have been rediscovering and reclaiming the “women’s work” of their ancestors. Knitting circles (my favorite: Booze & Yarn, which meets in a bar on the Lower East Side) have sprung up throughout the United States. The online knitting community Ravelry recently topped 1 million members. “Men till; women weave” goes a traditional Chinese proverb – and nowadays that’s not just because the latter’s “economic activity must be such that it can be carried out concurrently with child care,” as anthropologist Judith K. Brown has explained the origins of women’s traditional roles as cloth makers, pot formers, and household managers.

But where does this leave men? Should we be content as behind-the-scenes coders and financiers? Should we be happy with our 10 percent? We certainly shouldn’t bully our way into anyone else’s craft tradition again – even though our own traditional roles as tillers and hunters can seem a little removed from many folks’ experience. Can there really be urban “New Age cavemen,” as another New York Times story described the emerging subculture of people who “seek good health through a selective return to the habits of their Paleolithic ancestors”?

Richard VanderHoek of the Alaska Office of History and Archaeology demostrating the use of an atlatal and dart. (By Flickr user Travis S. Reproduced under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic License.)

Maybe. There’s a growing community of enthusiasts who have revived the gear and techniques used by prehistoric hunters. The World Atlatl Association has helped several states, including Mississippi and Pennsylvania, legalize hunting using ancient spear-throwers. And there’s the wired-in bunch of folks who congregate at FlintKnapping.com, where they discuss the, uh, finer points of creating arrow- and spearheads with Stone Age tools and techniques. I don’t have up-to-date sex-specific stats for that site, either. So I’ll just point out that its gallery and forum are dominated by people named Brent, Chuck, Dave, Ken, and Vernon.

But selling an obsidian knife on Etsy isn’t exactly like yarn bombing your local park – or is it? Is it part of the craft manguard? I believe it just might be.

I’ve written a lot over the years on Extreme Craft and in other venues about my own reasons for being involved in the craft community. I grew up with a clutch of Popsicle sticks in one hand and a bottle of Elmer’s glue in the other, on a farm in Nebraska where we fixed our own tractors, canned our own food, and made our own macramé planters, thank you very much. I’m not going to pretend that I’m some alpha male who can MacGyver anything together with duct tape and a multitool. That would be my father – or my wife, who can instantly plan and build just about anything.

I’m just a late-30-something college professor with a ceramics degree. I can certainly work with my hands when I’m called to, but I’m not exactly repairing agricultural machinery on a day-to-day basis. When I’m not in the classroom teaching, I’m probably in front of a computer clacking away at paperwork or a writing assignment. In a way I feel like I’m letting my father down. As self-sufficient frontier types go, I’m definitely on the Nellie Oleson end of the scale. Still, I love the feel of a good DeWalt drill in my hands, and I still harbor a fantasy of building furniture for my children someday.

I’ve spent most of my life as a poor example of masculinity. So why do I get such a thrill I get when I wear tweed, drink scotch, or watch a football game? Why can doing something that men have been doing for ages feel just as subversive as doing something that women have been doing for ages?

Rosey Grier (From LukeFord.net. Reproduced under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic License.)

I’m definitely not a gender theorist, but lately I’ve been cracking open some theoretical texts to help me figure things out. One is Judith Butler’s 1990 book, Gender Trouble, a touchstone of postmodern feminist and queer theory. This is a gross oversimplification, but Butler argues that all gender is performative – that the countless little gendered actions we perform every day create the illusion of a stable gender identity. She suggests that if we want a more genuine life experience and a more egalitarian society, we’ve got to engage in acts that blur the boundaries of gender roles.

In other words: Men must feel as free to make throw pillows as to make atlatls – something that crafty guys have known for a while. The early 1970s gave us two classics of handmade gender trouble. In 1972 came The Manly Art of Knitting. True, Dave Fougner’s 64-page pamphlet, with a front cover that shows a Marlboro Man-esque cowboy knitting on the back of his horse and projects that include a blanket made on a garden hose, is a bit tongue-in-cheek. But it’s also a genuine how-to book, with easy-to-follow instructions covering basic kitting techniques. One year later, legendary football player Rosey Grier released Needlepoint for Men, an instruction manual and pattern book that has inspiration rather than comedy as its central goal.

The early 21st century offers up incredible biodiversity when it comes to male crafters. Josh Faught has not only challenged gender stereotypes in the fiber world, but has also ushered in a “sloppy craft” revolution that values raw emotion over craftsmanship. Erik Scollon is a San Francisco-based potter who routinely confronts societal norms by using his work to create unique social situations. Whether he’s giving away porcelain sex toys at museum shows or installing his work in the urinals of a gay bar, gender, sexuality, and provocation are always at the heart of his work.

Erik Scollon

And then there’s Mister Jalopy, a jack-of-all trades from Los Angeles with a massive home workshop and a mission to empower people to use their hands. The central tenet of his “Owner’s Manifesto” is “If you can’t open it, you don’t own it.” That is, if you can’t pop the hood and tinker with something’s guts, it will never truly be yours. It’s an approach that engages with somewhat newer technology than flint knapping does, encouraging participants to deconstruct and “hack” everyday items to solve problems and make art. A typical result is an iPod player made from a vintage console hi-fi, or a portable outdoor-movie-projection system mounted onto an old Schwinn tricycle.

Every month, Dudes of Craft will feature men who make all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons. I’ll delve into the passions (and issues) that drive us to do what we do. I’ll look at the graybeards who got the whole ball of yarn rolling and the youngsters who are pushing it in new directions. In short, I’ll trouble myself with all the gender trouble I can find. If you’re a man and you craft, I (performatively) raise this glass of scotch to you.

But for now, I’ll leave you with a bit of Ethel Waters’ 1928 song “My Handy Man,” which my wife, perhaps as an act of wishful thinking, put on our wedding mix:

Whoever said a good man was hard to find
Positively, absolutely sure was blind
I found the best that ever was
Here’s just some of the things he does
He shakes my ashes, greases my griddle
Churns my butter, strokes my fiddle
My man is such a handy man
He threads my needle, creams my wheat
Heats my heater, chops my meat
My man is such a handy man

I read about the Just Work collective over on Poppytalk last week, and I immediately knew I needed to write about them. Here’s why: I spend a lot of time talking about sustainable craft, but generally the focus is on the sustainable materials it is made from, not how the work itself is sustaining people, or sustaining community.

Just Work is a non-profit organization located in Vancouver, British Columbia (Canada),
that gives people, often homeless or facing mental illness or addiction, a much-needed creative outlet. These people want to work, and through Just Work have a place to come, connect with people, be creative, and eventually gain skills that may help them re-enter the traditional work force.

From their website: The studio’s mission is to provide studio space, instruction, support, and employment opportunities for people in the neighbourhood who, due to economic or social barriers, have no access to a creative space.

I think we all know, especially as creatives, how frustrating it can be sometimes to not have any kind of outlet, to not feel like you are being productive, or contributing or helping yourself. Fostering creativity, giving people the chance to make something from scratch—with their own hands—and giving people a place to feel good about what they are doing—all of these are valuable, commendable contributions to the surrounding community, and the products coming out of Just Work are lovely, to boot. I am so happy to know that there are places like this out there. Does anybody know of any others?

Spring brings the arrival of beautiful weather, lots of lovely blooms, baby animals to ogle and a whole slew of new episodes of all the television programs that I won’t be watching.

Let’s be honest here. Television sets are unattractive. Yes, especially the flat screen, super bionic ones.  They’re hideous.

Never fear! I have found a delightful bunch of televisions that you can be proud to display in your home.  And these TV sets are commercial free.

Above is a porcelain sculpture by Ava Haney.  I especially like the post-apocalyptic feel of this one.  It reminds me of a something straight out of the video game Fallout.

Ma Jun is a Chinese artist who makes highly decorated porcelain sculptures.  Check out more of his work here.

One of the great qualities of porcelain as a material is its ability to be translucent when thin.  Matt Ozminsky utilizes this with these super cool tv lamps.  I recommend keeping an eye on his etsy shop to snatch one when they become available again.

Jana Walliser’s teacups are another example of a nice use of porcelains translucence.  Lift up one of her cups and see an image in the clay of a woman drinking tea on tv.  Ingenious.

I love everything about this TV fire pit by Chris Crooks.  I especially appreciate the rabbit ear antenna.

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