Heinemann and the art of slowness
Ceramic artist chooses to live in a realm of cool detachment
What does it mean to be contemporary, anyway? It depends on who you ask, and when.
In the art world, contemporary has shifted, and quickly, from cool, heady conceptualism to a raucously spleenful shouting match, whether about politics, identity, race, class, gender and virtually every other potential point of division that has, for centuries, carved us arbitrarily up into have and have-not.
About time, I would say. Contemporary should be less a category than a literal term — an idea the art world has been particularly good at ignoring, choosing for much of the 20th century to instead sidestep broader social realities to have a conversation with itself.
So what, then, to make of Steve Heinemann, the near-peerless Canadian ceramic artist that now occupies the showpiece top-floor galleries of the Gardiner Museum? Neither conceptual nor au courant (you won’t find the slightest nod here to any of the divisive politics that now define our nearly every move), Heinemann chooses instead to live in a realm of cool detachment and obsessive detail: a slave to the endlessly mutable mysteries of material and form.
It all conspires to make him appear a bit of a throwback, in more ways than one: a high-order Modernist, guided by forces not subject to the particulars of the day. But as high-volume shouting now has the upper hand over quiet contemplation, being detached in the here and now skews dangerously close to the edge of irrelevance.
For a museum like the Gardiner, which has laboured mightily — and convincingly — in recent years to reframe itself as dynamic, contemporary (there’s that word again) and part of the conversation, it’s a perilous brink to skirt. The museum has pushed back against the dismissive notion of ceramics as mere craft, however expertly plied, and no medium for capital-A art.
Exhibitions with artists such as An Te Liu, Clare Twomey, Kent Monkman, Shary Boyle, Chris Curreri and, most recently, Janet Macpherson, interrogated the medium itself and challenged its decorative, domestic reputation with thought-out rigour. Their efforts reframed both ceramics and the museum itself as vital, dynamic and pliably powerful in a rising conversation about urgent social concerns in an ever more fractious world.
So it’s with a knowingness that curator Rachel Gotlieb — who presided over virtually all those timely displays — returns the museum to its medium-centred roots. Heinemann, she writes in the catalogue, had first intended to go to York University for Fine Arts in the ’70s, only to find it had no ceramic department (“his first lesson in the hierarchies between art and craft,” she writes, after acknowledging “art history and criticism have generally been unkind” to the medium).
Nonetheless, the show provides both its own challenge and some relief. With Canada’s sesquicentennial having prompted less backslapping than a much-needed eruption of self-critique, the Gardiner seems to be saying: Pax, 150. Can we remember, please, that beauty can be its own reward?
If you believe that (I’m on the fence), then Heinemann’s show is for you. There is nothing radical here, though the museum does its best to frame it as something more than a solipsist’s journey through material obsession. They title it Culture and Nature, a nod to a core ethic of Modernism’s primalist view that material itself — whether stone or wood or, apparently, clay — contained within it a volition toward form, coaxed forth by the artist’s hand (nature intertwined with culture, the organic in collaboration with intent).
It’s a poetic notion, however naive it may now seem, that nonetheless still holds water if you’ll pardon the pun (among the dozens of pieces here are an array of Heinemann’s majestic, delicately thin-walled bowls).
Essentialism is at the root of Heinemann’s deeply monastic practice, moored in contemplation, silence and slowness. The last of a series of untitled discs, an earthy terra cotta crackled like a parched desert floor, took 14 years to complete.
Working largely alone, first in a basement in Richmond Hill and for the past decade in a converted barn near Cookstown, Ont., Heinemann can seem Canute-like, holding back the tides of an increasingly complex, fractured reality.
In an era where disasters large and small explode in a flash and vanish, replaced by the next, he chooses instead close, languorous examination of the world close at hand: photographs, of the drape of snow over a frond of a Scotch pine, or the faint tracks of waves left on a beach inform his textures and forms. It’s as though he means to contain time itself.
He is unequivocally virtuosic; slim sheafs of material set one inside the other seem to mirror an organic process a human hand could only dare to achieve. There’s an intensity to his craft, a labour so densely implicit, the world can fall away, at least for a time. Given the cascading disasters of the current moment, there’s a place for that kind of contemporary too. Steve Heinemann: Culture and Nature continues at the Gardiner Museum to Jan. 21, 2018. See gardinermuseum.on.ca for information.