Molding Space, Forming Sense:
Clay Works by Marla Ziegler

. . . the sign bears general significance, but having attained form, it strives to bear its own individual significance; it creates its own new meaning; it seeks its own new content, and then endows that content with fresh associations by the dislocation of familiar verbal molds.

Henri Focillon 1

These seven clay works by Marla Ziegler are elegant, enigmatic, quietly eloquent objects of contemplation. Neither functional vessel forms nor typical sculptural works in clay, but objects at once both vessel and sculpture, Ziegler's works problematize and decenter these conventional classifications of clay works. As loci of contemplative engagement, these works are at once the focus for and the mirror of the viewer's regard.

Ziegler's clay works are formed from industrial molds originally used for manufacturing castings for nuclear submarines, shifted by a détournement 2 to the facture of artworks. Earthenware slabs are shaped in the half-molds, dried and joined together, and combined with thrown and hand-built elements. Fired and glazed, the objects sometimes receive a subsequent thin application of acrylic paint. The result, a color and surface between graphite and steel for many of the pieces, for others, as Cynthia Mills has noted, "a cold industrial patina occasionally streaked with bronze-green and rust." 3 For all the resemblance these works might be supposed to have to the intended industrial products of the molds Ziegler uses, the forms reference but do not simply replicate in the guise of clay simulacra the industrial castings that were the original function of the molds. Both through the combination of component segments, and through the installation and presentation of the objects, a transfiguration obtains. 4 What perdures of the industrial origin in these pieces is a geometry echoing Cézanne's admonition, 5 the ur-structure of the sense of order and composure given by Ziegler's work. In their geometric character, these works reference the constructivist 6 tradition; this referencing entails neither parody, nor acedia, 7 but rather an implementation of a vocabulary.

The forms of the several component pieces of Ziegler's works are self-contained objects, enclosed volumes. For the most part, the objects do not disclose their interior volume except implicitly; in this, they are not traditional vessels in which the utility of the vessel depends on the accessibility of the interior. 8 Visual inspection alone cannot determine whether the objects are solid or hollow. As the status of the objects as vessels is obviated, so also their ostensible functionality, though this is retained in the bottle forms of Parallel Stories, and referenced in Grand Vizier.

While many of Ziegler's earlier works have included text, 9 sometimes a single word of one or two syllables, sometimes a long narrative incised into the clay, these works have textual reference obliquely, only through their titles and their structures. The perduring dialectic of image and text is attenuated in the works in this exhibition. In 10 common experience, texts on vessels typically denote the contents of the vessel. 11 As a title, associated with but distinct from the art object, though a part of the artwork, the text is a synecdoche mediating between part and whole. 12

On the wall surface as a relief, Lessons From the Rosetta Stone consists of eight small elements installed together. Consisting of mechanical cylindrical forms, a flattened and bent pipe segment, and half bottles, the group approximates a horizontal cartouche. Cartouche-like Lessons From the Rosetta Stone may be, but it differs in consisting in a single representational system, rather than the three languages of the Rosetta Stone, thus requiring not a Champollion but a Ventris. 13

Grand Vizier, swelling from a smaller cylindrical foot to a larger, grooved cylindrical body, tapers smoothly to a small neck and separate terminating cylindrical stopper. The surface is unified with a grayish light yellow green glaze with streaks of rust. As the title suggests, Grand Vizier references the vessel form as sculptural metaphor for the body, with the nuances of its form inflecting its content.

Four Plumb Bobs is a variable work; the number of plumb bobs open tovariation with the circumstances of particular installation. For this installation, four clay objects are suspended on aircraft cable from a steel tube, itself hung on steel rods pendent from structural members above the suspended ceiling of the gallery. Hanging in a row at different heights, the plumb bobs define a plane recapitulating the plane of the wall before which they hang. A row of bisque-fired white clay `shards', cut for the purpose from a leather-hard clay slab, manifest the line at the floor at which the projected plane of the plumb bobs cuts the floor plane. The graphite-black of the sharp contour of the plumb bobs reads in strong contrast against the gallery wall. The darkness of the forms of the plumb bobs obscures the subtle modulation of their individual form and the physical texture particular to each. The shadows produced by lighting the piece with multiple light sources at once rest on the wall plane, and through their variation of value, dissolve the solidity of the wall, atmospheric and distal in distinction from the high contrast of the plumb bobs and wall.

Obscured Notation as installed in this exhibition consists of fifty eight discrete objects defining a vertical rectangle on the wall to the right of Four Plumb Bobs. The largest objects are at the top, graduating to the smallest at the bottom. This reversal of the perceptual expectation of diminution with distance renders the larger, more distal objects perceptually as proximal as the smaller objects below, resulting in a relative isomorphism of scale. Appearing half in the viewer's space, the implicit other half of the objects is hidden, as if the objects are bisected by the plane of the gallery wall. While the objects vary considerably in shape, they are unified by the similar graphite-black glaze. One might suggest, were a literary analogy wanted, a similarity in the coherence of the separate objects comprising Obscured Notation and the coherence of the separate peoms comprising Charles Olson's Maximus poems. 14 To the right of Obscured Notation, Mind and Matter consists of two cylindrical forms, each terminating in a hemisphere at one end, joined with their axis offset at their other, flat, ends. Gray, with a slight almost convoluted ripple texture from the brush application of the glaze, the two sections suggest the two hemispheres of the brain joined, albeit offset, along the lateral commissure.

In Parallel Stories, twenty one cylindrical bottles are attached to a corner of the gallery wall. Touching at their edges, with similar diameters, the bottles form a plane bent by the corner they reiterate and which, by the mass of their assemblage, and by the variation of size and color of the bottles, negate the angularity of the corner. The effect of flattening in which this negation consists depends on the viewer's position in space relative to the piece, a position which the piece elicits. Unlike the defining example of Masacchio's Holy Trinity with the Virgin and St. John in Santa Maria Novella, the eliciting of the viewer's position by Parallel Stories does not rely on the use of the devices of linear perspective. Rather, the positioning of the viewer here depends on the viewer's adjustment to the enclosing extension of the work by the walls forming the corner and by the central mass of the assemblage itself: both conduce to viewing the work from a position bisecting the angle of the walls. With lateral and vertical positioning thus conditioned, the viewer confronts the work as an L having six bottles on the shorter left side and fifteen forming the longer right side. The variation of height of the bottles along the sides of the L is sufficiently random that any perspective effect from diminution of scale is negated. Similarly, the proximal and distal effects that might be expected from the variation in hue, value and intensity of the glaze on the several bottles is obviated by the randomization of the color variation. The effect produced by the variation in the glaze is rather an undulation of the apparent surface of the plane defined by the bottles. The base of the bottles form a line at the height of average eye level. Insofar as it approximates eye level, the lower edge reads as a horizon line rather than as two orthogonal lines converging to vanishing point.

Other Ways of Making Lists consists of a group of white geometric forms asymmetrically arranged on a steel table. Though glazed an off-white matte, the objects appear to be bisque-fired white clay body. The geometric character of the objects disrupts the association of functional ceramic ware with placement on the table top: these are not vessels for food, but for contemplation, a Morandi still life of white forms against the white ground of the wall.

Individually, and collectively in this installation, the effect of Ziegler's works is stillness, silence, centerings of a space for active contemplation. Eliciting one's engagement, these clay works bring into question the relations between part and whole, and the unity of form and content.

Marla Ziegler received the B. A. from McMurry University and the M. A. from Southern Meth- odist University. Recent exhibitions include Critic's Choice 1997 at Dallas Visual Arts Center, the NCECA 1997 Clay Exhibition at the Barrick Museum, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and Conjunctions at McMurry University. Ziegler is represented by Craighead-Green Gallery, Dallas, Texas.

This is the second in a series of annual exhibitions by Brookhaven College Art Department faculty members in the Studio Gallery at Brookhaven College. Each summer, a member of the Brook- haven College Art Department faculty will present an exhibition or site-specific installation in the Studio Gallery. This series of exhibitions serves several ends: to maximize use of the gallery space on a year-round basis by providing artworks as an instructional resource for summer classes, to provide an exhibition opportunity for and encouragement of professional activity by members of the Art Department faculty, and to present the work of our faculty to the college community and to the public in a greater depth than is possible in the Annual Faculty Exhibition, where the limita- tions of space and the group exhibition format precludes installation of more than one or a few works by each faculty member. Active professional engagement with the discipline is crucial to sustained effective teaching, and Brookhaven is fortunate to have a studio art faculty that main- tains a high level of professional activity; this series of exhibitions will make that activity more ac- cessible to our students and the College learning community, and to the larger audience in the communities beyond the College.

It is with pleasure that we present this exhibition of work in ceramics by Marla Ziegler. She re- ceived the B. F. A. from McMurry College, and the M. A. from Southern Methodist University. She has taught drawing, art history and art appreciation courses at Brookhaven since 1982. She is represented by Craighead-Green Gallery, Dallas.

During June through August 1998, Chong Keun Chu will exhibit recent work in painting in the Studio Gallery.

Sides and bottom, of which the jug consists and by which it stands, are not really what does the holding. But if the holding is done by the jug's void, then the potter who forms sides and bottom on his wheel does not, strictly speaking, make the jug. He only shapes the clay. No-he shapes the void. For it, in it, and out of it, he forms the clay into the form. From start to finish the potter takes hold of the impalpable void and brings it forth as the container in the shape of a containing vessel. The jug's void determines all the handling in the process of making the vessel. The vessel's thingness does not lie at all in the material of which it consists, but in the void that holds.

The dialectic of word and image seems to be a constant in the fabric of signs that a culture weaves around itself. What varies is the precise nature of the weave, the relation of warp and woof. The history of culture is in part the story of a protracted struggle for dominance between pictorial and linguistic signs, each claiming for itself certain proprietary rights on a "nature" to which only it has access.