Mark Churchill: Working Dwelling Thinking
By Tom Pazderka
On a moonlit night in Meiners Oaks we sit by a fire, the flames slowly lapping at the metal grating. The warmth is slowly seeping into our clothes and then into our bodies. We’ve been discussing Mark Churchill’s work for quite some time and Chruchill has a lot to say. Clearly, he’s thought a lot about what he does and the subjects he’s presenting. His ceramics will soon be on display at The Basic Premise, encased in the reified light of the gallery, waiting to be mentally prodded and hopefully sold to enthusiastic clientele.
But here in the setting of the studio-slash-home these pieces form the background alongside all the paraphernalia of every-day existence—so much so, they are in some way embedded, enmeshed into the surroundings. It feels strange that they’ll be seen outside of this comfortable space where they are formed, built, interrogated, glazed, fired and finalized. So much so do they form the space.
Mark Churchill, “I Had a Vision.” Photo: David Sanchez
What is a tool and what is work? And how does one approach a tool and work? Pottery and ceramics are rarely thought of in philosophical terms. Often their relationships are structured around the notion of teleology, a goal-oriented means, as in the use of a tool to mold a material, such as clay, into a shape, a clay pot, through the method of work and repetition.
This goal-directedness structures the very abstract means that effectively comprises the work itself, it is at once a method, a mode or production, and a ritualistic practice—a methodological, spiritual practice—of spinning, throwing, repetition, carving, discarding and waiting.
The use of a tool is as ancient as humanity and forms the basic ontology on that which makes humans human, namely the purposefulness of what humans do. Far from simply satisfying basic bodily functions, humans have a spiritual need for inner fulfillment and tend to fill the gaps between the minutiae of every-day life with meaning. But meaning as such does not arrive fully formed and one can shape a pot endlessly without arriving at meaning.
Ritualized work may act in this way, not as a substitute for spiritual meaning, but as its supplement, and Churchill certainly uses the essence of work to derive meaning where there may be little, realizing something out of nothing through pure practice.
ABOVE: Mark Churchill, “Poco Moon” and “Snow Moon.” Photos: David Sanchez
Why any of this is important may appear elusive at first. Our modern world conditions us, prepares us, for a meaningless existence outside of religion, dogmatic politics and social hierarchies which constantly renew their coordinates of social relations. Work is one of the antidotes to this strange, one-dimensional world we’ve all been thrown into. Not just any work, but meaningful work, because work in and of itself does not necessarily have the qualities to bring about a desired outcome of a meaningful existence.
We’ve entered Churchill’s studio and I have the feeling that we’ve entered a world out of this time. Churchill is not a man of this decade, or even this century. Steeped in the tradition of ceramics, tracing its heritage to 16th century Japan and Korea, he shares a hardwork ethic and common language with his teachers—who have made their way to his studio and he to theirs over the course of many years—but also with Martin Heidegger, the German phenomenologist, most famous for developing the concept of the Dasein or ‘being-there’ and his almost nauseating exegesis of tool use.
Heidegger used notions of the mundane, the basic and specifically of work, to tease out the meaning of existence. His tools were the paper and pen, and his tool kit was his brain. Here in the presence of the ‘thingness’ of the artist’s studio, the breath of Heidegger is clearly discernible—handmade tools lying among the various objects of the trade, shelves lined with books and images, a wooden ladder leaned into a corner, ceramics small and large among clothes, crates, pots and pans, drop cords, a spinning wheel encrusted in clay, small shavings underneath a makeshift table, everything lies and interacts in and around the conglomeration of buildings, rooms and bespoke spaces of Churchill’s studio.
Out of this ordered chaos, Churchill draws his work, by doing work. It is the ‘doing’ that is key, the doing that in effect does the heavy lifting of the teleology itself. Heidegger’s central thesis in Being and Time is the one with which he begins the book, and that is that ‘man’ (a human, a person, an individual) is ‘thrown’ into existence.
Mark Churchill, “Tea Bowl.” Photo by David Sanchez
It is this being thrown-into that is important, because Heidegger posits that all of us, whether we like it or not, arrive in this world as empty vessels, clean slates, yet already fully formed. We are thrown-into being and we will remain until our death. We do not choose this being, nor can we escape it, but it is entirely up to every individual to derive meaning from this existence, and in some way exercise control or will over this being.
There is a troublesome end game to this method of thinking that I’ll leave to the side in this discussion. Heidegger was a troubled personality to say the least, but perhaps his reputation precedes his contribution to the area of thought. According to Heidegger, the individual must do the hard work of coming to grips with their being and what he calls their ‘throwness’ which was a term he used to identify a state immediately following the act of being ‘thrown-into’ existence, otherwise the whole of existence would be meaningless.
The double meaning of the act of throwing a pot is crucial here. It is as if the pot is also thrown-into existence and only then is it possible to realize the form or shape, the meaning of the pot. The potter does have an ‘out’ however and that is in the form itself. The basic shape of the pot may dictate what the pot is, what it is or what it can be used for, what is its basic function or non-function. Here Churchill brings up the form of the moon jar, a highly reified shape from Korean culture, the best of which were designed and made for the emperor.
Made of two separate parts and joined at the middle in a seamless joint, the moon jar’s structure and material makeup, especially ceramic, make it one of the most difficult objects to make by hand, and Churchill has a great example of a ‘failed’ moon jar. Looking like an exploded dinosaur egg, the failed moon jar did just that. The water content was too great for the firing process and what Churchill ended with was an egg shaped, upside down pot that he could either discard or reuse. Churchill opted for the latter and the result is a fascinating work that forms the bridge between his ‘old’ and more traditional pottery and his most recent body of work, most of which resembles totemic and monolithic objects which make visible a trajectory in the method of thinking and working through the subject in tool-like forms.
ABOVE: Mark Churchill, “Set Anye (The Bear).” Photos by David Sanchez
Work titles “Rama,” “In an Aeroplane over the Sea” and “I Had a Vision” suggest hammers with handles—not surprising when you consider Churchill’s relationship to his work, his tool use and tool making, his thinking and dwelling on the subject-at-hand.
The abstracted forms and drips pay homage to Churchill’s early exposure and influence of Abstract Expressionism. It is no accident that Churchill speaks of spirituality as related to the practice of work. The two go, and have always gone, hand in hand. The ‘work’ of the monk at a monastery is two-fold. First, there is the actual work of physical labor: cleaning, sweeping, picking up, cooking and so on, all of which constitute the daily order of things as such and are found in countries like Japan to have also become ritualized forms of every-day activities, like the tea ceremony. The ordinary passes into the extraordinary seamlessly, it passes from the real to the symbolic. Or rather, the ordinary is thus included within the extraordinary.
Second, there is the ‘work’ of the inner psychic realm, the phantasmatic core that constitutes spiritual or religious experience. Again this ‘work’ is included within the actual physical work, it cannot be separated in that the ‘work’ is needed in order to pass from the real to the symbolic, from belief to faith, so to speak.
The Abstract Expressionists that were closest to this form of work and method were Ad Reinhardt and Mark Rothko. And it is Rothko that is Churchill’s greatest influence when he speaks of once experiencing the enigmatic power of his paintings at SFMOMA. Rothko’s influence thus cannot be understated. Brought up in a religious atmosphere of Catholic Lithuania but of Jewish descent, the work of Rothko included basic religious undertones throughout his life, passing from mythological subjects, (which Churchill also adds to his work, often overtly with titles such as “Set Anye (The Bear),” “Sun Dog,” “Snow Moon” and “Rama”) to the grand gestures of vast color spaces accented with veils of darkness interspersed throughout his end-of-life output that recall the Baroque religious paintings of Caravaggio and Peter Paul Rubens.
Rothko was a man both of his time and out of time, using old-world techniques of oil and egg tempera to produce absolutely modern works. And yet these ultra-modern works that even today are seldom equaled in their contemporaneity are as old as the dark red hues on the walls of the ruins of Pompeii.
It was both work and ‘work’ that steered Rothko on the trajectory of using the language of paint to implement a subtle distinction between what is and what happens to be. Rothko’s paintings are, in a way, complementary visual elements to the Heideggerian Dasein. Rothko’s way of ‘being-thrown-into-the-world’ is found in the way he had always wanted the viewer to receive his message, by enveloping the viewer in color and scale, in effect he wanted the viewer cast as ‘being-thrown-into-the-painting’—and to dwell there.
Mark Churchill, “In an Airplane over the Sea.” Photo by David Sanchez
It is out of this notion of dwelling and working that Churchill takes up the mantle of the ‘modern unknown craftsman’ a reference he used more than once during our evening-long conversation. Again, we must go back to Heidegger, because he, like nobody else before or since, illuminates and explicates the very idea of dwelling as work or ‘work.’ It is no accident that the title of this essay is Working Dwelling Thinking. It is a direct complement to Heidegger’s well-known essay “Building Dwelling Thinking.” In this essay, Heidegger asks two basic questions:
What is it to dwell?
How does building belong to dwelling?
But while Heidegger uses components of language, especially German, as relating to the way we are to understand the notions of dwelling and home, to be at Churchill’s studio/home, is as if to experience this Heideggerian notion. There is virtually no separation between work and home, ‘work’ and dwelling. One gets the sense that these activities take place everywhere at once and cannot be separated one from the other, thus the fact that the work that will be eventually be on display, separated by an invisible line in the gallery, is found here completely a part of the background, on the ground, table tops, dressers and among the paraphernalia of every-day dwelling.
Churchill even says that the ideal way to view much of his work is here, the ‘here’ where the act of work happens. Admittedly, there is something enticingly correct about witnessing the vessels, made and intended for every-day use, strewn about in a haphazard way throughout the dwelling.
The studio visit experience itself is a quasi-religious one. It is a glimpse into the inner regions of a mind at work, a place one is not supposed to see. It is the magician’s secret put out on full display. The danger is that one will discover that there is no rabbit in the top hat. Yet I don’t believe that this is the case here. What is interesting however is that even if one knows this secret, and there is no rabbit in the hat, it nonetheless does not diminish the magic illusion. In some ways, the outing of the secret makes the illusion even stronger because it bares the phantasmatic core of the illusory world in which we find ourselves each day.
Mark Churchill, “Sun Dog.” Photo by David Sanchez
As we struggle to come to grips with the (ir)reality thus presented to us, another world is open to our exploration. This is the basic component of the world of conspiracies and secret power plays. As soon as we find that there really is no center and nobody is in charge, the substitute of the new-world-order conspiracy comes into view. But this alternative view is nonetheless not incorrect.
There are indeed new-world-order conspiracies that need illuminating. What we do see however is the process in reverse. It is not that because there are conspiracies that we must shed light on them, but that throughshedding light on our symbolic order and fantasy world that appear to us as patterns, that conspiracies emerge.
Conspiracies, like patterns, are inscribed into the symbolic order itself. Conversely, it is because the eye can see that it can be tricked by the magic illusion and not the other way around. The magic act presupposes that we have eyes and brains to see, that we understand that we are being actively deceived, but that precisely because of this, we are deceived by the magical act itself.
In a homologous way, the artwork functions on this basic assumption. The artwork is at once imbued with the quality of the artist’s fundamental moral and ethical assumptions, theoretical work and emotional baggage and emptied of it at the same time. The object is at once full of meaning and an empty vessel to be filled with more or different sorts of meaning. It is the magical act par excellence.
Within the artist’s studio, the artwork has meaning, that meaning that the artist decided to entrust into their work. When this artwork leaves the studio and arrives in the space where it will be shown, it is now completely empty of any attached meaning. We must therefore, as an audience, formulate our own meanings and attached them to this work or wait for the explication. The artwork is deceptive, but it deceives the viewer in so far as the viewer has eyes to see. Churchill is not unaware of this dichotomy at play as he gives his verbal exegesis to us. It is a self-aware, reflexive explication of the forms, shapes and materials that he gathers from local sources. It’s also an honest understanding of the process of symbolization and abstraction in which Churchill hands over these objects—to him imbued with meaning and history—to an audience that knows little to nothing about them.
Mark Churchill, “In an Aeroplane over the Sea.” Photo: David Sanchez
At this point we should perhaps stop and realize that the aforementioned notions of abstraction, symbolization and their relation to the ‘work’ and the thesis of Working Dwelling Thinking all coalesce into a larger notion of ‘artwork as symptom.’ How else could we explain such things as the gestalt nature of an artwork that looks like a tool, but one that is not in fact a tool, when we have seen the clear passage from one to the other? How else could we explain the inner workings of the ‘work’ itself if not by a coagulation of forms, such as method, technique, thought, into something that is real and tangible, if not by the overt, non-abstracted symptom?
The artwork as symptom here accounts for the act of making the inner world real. It affirms that which is at first hidden, even to the artist. It is therefore the very form of work, in Churchill’s case, an almost ritualized form of ‘work,’ that the symptom appears as artwork. The symptom is not meant to have a negative or positive connotation. Even in psychoanalysis, the symptom is simply that which is because it appears to us without judgement. It is not produced but it does arrive as a ‘result’ of some kind of inner process that is always ‘already there,’ included within the existing order.
When Churchill speaks about his work, one gets the sense of a world in which nothing matters and yet everything matters all at once, from the grand cycles that run our lives, day/night, sleeping/waking, sun/moon, to the turning of the spinning wheel on which he casts his clay. That which is above is as that which is below.
Ritual may therefore appear as a kind of attempt at a negation of the symptom, but one that ultimately reproduces it. All art is in some way an attempt at this kind of negation. We may see art that attempts to critique politics or social relations, art that critiques art itself, art that is ironic but also art that is absolutely committed to being what it is, all an attempt to negate, to explain away the symptom of the very thing art is trying to critique.
Mark Churchill, “Stone Eater.” Photo by David Sanchez
Perhaps the way to end this slightly bizarre attempt of mine to elucidate the experience of visiting Mark Churchill’s studio is through a quote from Slavoj Zizek’s seminal book The Sublime Object of Ideology and I do this because in some way I feel that the power of Churchill’s work lies precisely with his identification with his ‘work’ as such, not just with the objects that come out of his studio, that are somehow ejected out of his being, as in the famous example that Zizek gives in the same book of the little alien jumping out of John Hurt’s body, the ultimate expression of the “leftover of the maternal Thing which then functions as a symptom.” This Thing, which I can only compare to the Heideggerian Dasein, is already there, and it is through the process of our awareness of it that the symptom appears in clear view, otherwise it remains occluded or hidden, though no less powerful. To be in the presence of Churchill’s work is to be present with and included in his symptom, his own ‘cosmic’ inner self, which is then reinscribed within our own. I will let Zizek have the final word.
“That is why the final Lacanian definition of the end of the psychoanalytic process is identification with the symptom. The analysis achieves its end when the patient is able to recognize, in the Real of his symptom, the only support of his being. That is how we must read Freud’s wo es war, soll ich werden: you, the subject, must identify yourself with the place where your symptom already was; in its ‘pathological particularity you must recognize the element which gives consistency to your being.’”
“A Cloudless Sky a Dustless Earth” featuring new work by Mark Churchill is on view from March 14 to April 18 at The Basic Premise, 918 E. Ojai Avenue, Ojai.
COVER PHOTO: Mark Churchill at work in his studio. Photo by Scott Soens
