1 00:00:00,360 --> 00:00:06,840 Tonight's lecture is Skin and Absence. The Radical Ceramics and Poetry of the Enslaved. 2 00:00:06,840 --> 00:00:19,930 Dave Potter. The first sentence in the introduction to Martin Kemp's Oxford history of Western art reads to someone educated in the Western tradition, 3 00:00:19,930 --> 00:00:24,910 the notion that there is something called art, often with a capital A. 4 00:00:24,910 --> 00:00:26,770 And as a quarry, Larry, 5 00:00:26,770 --> 00:00:38,230 there are artists is so taken for granted that the making of art is assumed to be a universal or constant feature of human existence. 6 00:00:38,230 --> 00:00:47,680 And I couldn't agree more. The vibrancy of art so often derives from our ability to connect with the mind of the imaginative 7 00:00:47,680 --> 00:00:57,160 artist whose exceptional skill brings forth an idea that he or she is at freewill to express. 8 00:00:57,160 --> 00:01:07,360 Many artists in the Western tradition have worked in a Tele's or within institutions in which their skills and ideas had the pleasure to be shared. 9 00:01:07,360 --> 00:01:19,790 Art history has privileged, especially in Kennan's after the Renaissance, individuality and innovation as the highest artistic merit. 10 00:01:19,790 --> 00:01:25,790 This is precisely why it is so necessary to speak about artwork made by enslaved Africans and 11 00:01:25,790 --> 00:01:32,960 African-Americans in the period before the U.S. civil war as the property of their enslavers, 12 00:01:32,960 --> 00:01:43,070 they were understood as having no freewill whatsoever because of the racist assumptions upon which slavery had been established. 13 00:01:43,070 --> 00:01:48,800 A slave mentality was assumed to be retarded and inferior to that of whites. 14 00:01:48,800 --> 00:01:52,880 And an enslaved person's imagination, so to speak, 15 00:01:52,880 --> 00:02:03,480 would similarly have been regarded as like a child's given to its basest desires and in need of regulation and containment through punishment. 16 00:02:03,480 --> 00:02:10,770 And an enslaved person's labour, no matter how skilled, was inevitably divorced from his personhood, 17 00:02:10,770 --> 00:02:19,830 since he was understood economically to exist as property, but not socially as an individual. 18 00:02:19,830 --> 00:02:29,490 So that brings me to my first question. What is the art of the enslaved or indeed of any black American before legal emancipation? 19 00:02:29,490 --> 00:02:37,590 Often we can find an answer in looking to cultural artefacts, what might be called material culture in the antebellum period, 20 00:02:37,590 --> 00:02:45,690 because black Americans were not infrequently employed as skilled craftsmen on both sides of the north and south divide. 21 00:02:45,690 --> 00:02:52,800 But this is also a challenge since the archive favours those artists who had access to the traditional 22 00:02:52,800 --> 00:02:59,730 means of expression and left behind the so-called paper trail that might allow their work to be known, 23 00:02:59,730 --> 00:03:09,840 studied, collected and exhibited. A painting like this one by the free black painter Joshua Johnson might have a signature, but an ornamental. 24 00:03:09,840 --> 00:03:22,650 He painted black and gilt chair made by African-American artisans in Baltimore in the 18 20s or 30s will almost certainly not. 25 00:03:22,650 --> 00:03:31,770 Within our history, some have attempted to take an ethnographic approach, seeking to find African precedents to African American expressions. 26 00:03:31,770 --> 00:03:42,390 Indeed, this is an important step since it acknowledges that the fact that exchange and hybridisation are salient features of the colonial encounter. 27 00:03:42,390 --> 00:03:45,840 But this, too, is not without its own biases. 28 00:03:45,840 --> 00:03:55,950 Based on what the West understands to be culturally worthwhile in its study of designed objects from the lands outside of its purview. 29 00:03:55,950 --> 00:04:06,920 For example, Basketry is one of the best known black craft traditions in the South, with obvious roots in African design. 30 00:04:06,920 --> 00:04:16,690 But skilled iron work in places like New Orleans, Savannah or Charleston seems to the untrained eye to be relatively more European and its aesthetic. 31 00:04:16,690 --> 00:04:27,460 Although it was cast by slaves and a Gambian people and exhibits a Creoles to design, the casualties of this history of art are remarkable. 32 00:04:27,460 --> 00:04:35,830 On the one hand, we seek to restore to the official record a history of enslaved makers that has been unaccounted for. 33 00:04:35,830 --> 00:04:39,100 A project that is not without merit. 34 00:04:39,100 --> 00:04:48,520 On the other hand, the apparent lapses and losses in the historical record would seem to announce themselves the most loudly in the Endeavour. 35 00:04:48,520 --> 00:04:52,330 So as nearly to become the entire focus. 36 00:04:52,330 --> 00:05:04,090 However, it would seem to me that visibility and absence are two sides of the same coin and can collide in the mind in a moment's notice. 37 00:05:04,090 --> 00:05:12,340 For instance, last week I introduced the idea that representation of suicide was coded within the history of the enslaved and that such an image 38 00:05:12,340 --> 00:05:19,840 makes a seemingly unlikely appearance in the spectacle of American landscape painting by one of its most important practitioners, 39 00:05:19,840 --> 00:05:31,840 Thomas Cole. This week, I wish to introduce you to an enslaved artist by the name of Dave Potter, whose remarkable large stoneware vessels, 40 00:05:31,840 --> 00:05:40,780 splendid glazes and poetic inscriptions provide a different perspective on the presence absence question by understanding 41 00:05:40,780 --> 00:05:49,240 the structures of economic power that dictated the conditions of slavery and the racism that was at its root. 42 00:05:49,240 --> 00:06:00,020 We can more precisely construct a picture of the past and follow those resonances of the past into their present urgency. 43 00:06:00,020 --> 00:06:07,610 Dave was born into slavery in South Carolina in 1881 and was first mortgaged at the age of 17. 44 00:06:07,610 --> 00:06:11,330 Sales records place him in the Edgefield, ACON district. 45 00:06:11,330 --> 00:06:18,260 The location of one of the worst world's richest deposits of Khail night and what would become in the early 19th century. 46 00:06:18,260 --> 00:06:23,720 Distinguished for its production of alkaline glazed stoneware, 47 00:06:23,720 --> 00:06:30,380 South Carolina pottery operations were small enough to be controlled by a very few number of families. 48 00:06:30,380 --> 00:06:39,200 The Drakes, the Simkins, the land drums and the miles who consolidated their businesses through intermarriage and the trading of property, 49 00:06:39,200 --> 00:06:48,800 including real estate and slaves. Although, well, the Edgefield district was nevertheless politically important and wealthy. 50 00:06:48,800 --> 00:06:58,130 The home of several state governors and tied to the business speculation of prominent politicians until the Civil War, 51 00:06:58,130 --> 00:07:04,100 the existence of pot operations in Edgefield was unusual in the South as a whole. 52 00:07:04,100 --> 00:07:09,230 The North, and especially New England, had an established professional class of merchants, 53 00:07:09,230 --> 00:07:17,360 traders and artisans who modelled their industries on the type of work they knew in Britain before the American Revolution. 54 00:07:17,360 --> 00:07:20,930 By contrast, the South was agricultural. 55 00:07:20,930 --> 00:07:29,780 South Carolina was settled, for example, by plantation owners from Barbados, and the working class was enslaved. 56 00:07:29,780 --> 00:07:36,710 Dr. Abner Landrum discovered kailin deposits in Edgefield in 1889 and set out to learn 57 00:07:36,710 --> 00:07:44,120 the business of ceramics manufacturer of the materials made from heated Kaylin. 58 00:07:44,120 --> 00:07:53,030 Porcelain is the one held in the highest esteem for its whiteness, delicacy and translucency. 59 00:07:53,030 --> 00:08:02,450 Europeans had for hundreds of years admired Chinese porcelain with the first domestic examples produced in Florence in the 16th century. 60 00:08:02,450 --> 00:08:09,290 With the expansion of wealth in modern Europe came the enjoyments of elegant hospitality. 61 00:08:09,290 --> 00:08:14,780 In turn came the demand for more varied and refined types of tableware, 62 00:08:14,780 --> 00:08:23,750 decoration items for the kitchen, pie dishes, bread pans, cake moulds, casseroles and so forth. 63 00:08:23,750 --> 00:08:37,340 Britain, that European white where manufacture such as iconic names as Chelsea, Bo Royal, Worcester Wedgwood and Spode. 64 00:08:37,340 --> 00:08:47,570 By 1810, Landrum had reported that his kailin deposits rivalled Edgeworth operations near Liverpool. 65 00:08:47,570 --> 00:08:56,030 Edgeworth is not now a household name for porcelain, but would have been to men like Landrum in the American South. 66 00:08:56,030 --> 00:09:05,000 Owing to Liverpool's expensive role in the international slave trade, Edgeworth was the readiest example to American plantations. 67 00:09:05,000 --> 00:09:15,590 White China and black bodies were amongst the many commodities that ferried across the Atlantic in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. 68 00:09:15,590 --> 00:09:21,320 Although British comics remained the standard for taste in use in dining and entertainment, 69 00:09:21,320 --> 00:09:28,050 there were some experiments in the young United States centred in the Philadelphia area. 70 00:09:28,050 --> 00:09:29,780 They did not contain 10. 71 00:09:29,780 --> 00:09:39,920 Landrum went there to meet with John Vickers, a Quaker potter known for a particular type of China called Pennsylvania Queens, where, 72 00:09:39,920 --> 00:09:49,700 despite being a religious minority, Quakers in the United States are regarded as diligent, dependable and inventive workers by meeting with vicars. 73 00:09:49,700 --> 00:09:59,420 We learnt that Landrum may have aspired to turn out a range of ceramic products from his kiln, but no porcelain was made in the south. 74 00:09:59,420 --> 00:10:12,770 Instead, Landrum and his cohort produced alkaline glazed stoneware, which was brown, denser, resistant to scratching and less expensive to make. 75 00:10:12,770 --> 00:10:20,780 In addition, the utilitarian stoneware is what was more greatly in need in the agrarian south as vessels for meat, 76 00:10:20,780 --> 00:10:26,480 fat and preserved food and jugs for water and oil. 77 00:10:26,480 --> 00:10:35,480 Landreaux encounter with Vickers is an important one, so please remember it and I will return to it shortly. 78 00:10:35,480 --> 00:10:43,160 Mortgages and collateral, including humans, moved around significantly between the intermarried families of the Edgefield Estates. 79 00:10:43,160 --> 00:10:49,100 Dave's first enslaver was Harvey Drake, who mortgaged him to Eldard Simpkins. 80 00:10:49,100 --> 00:10:54,020 This mortgage was followed by a second to Amos Landrum, the brother of Abner Landrum, 81 00:10:54,020 --> 00:11:00,050 about whom we just spoke, who was also Airfield's newspaper publisher. 82 00:11:00,050 --> 00:11:04,520 Amos settled the first mortgage debt on the collateral sale of another slave, 83 00:11:04,520 --> 00:11:11,210 a woman named Eliza, and paid off the second mortgage through cash and transfer of real estate. 84 00:11:11,210 --> 00:11:16,310 This indicates to us that Dave was extremely valuable to Amos, 85 00:11:16,310 --> 00:11:25,280 most likely because he had already proven himself to be the most important potter at the land from Killam during the eighteen thirties. 86 00:11:25,280 --> 00:11:33,980 Dave moved between other branches of the Drake and Landru families and in eighteen forty nine came under enslavement to Lewis Jay Miles, 87 00:11:33,980 --> 00:11:39,710 whose wife was Mary Landrum, where he laboured until he was freed. 88 00:11:39,710 --> 00:11:50,860 Since Dave dated his muscles, we know he continued as a potter at the Miles Mill through the eighteen fifties. 89 00:11:50,860 --> 00:11:58,510 As a skilled worker rather than a field slave, Dave would not have been indiscriminately sold or traded away. 90 00:11:58,510 --> 00:12:06,670 But this should be balanced by the view that his family could easily be sold away from him without a second thought. 91 00:12:06,670 --> 00:12:12,820 In the eighteen thirties, records indicate the slave Lydia, who is either Dave's sister or wife, 92 00:12:12,820 --> 00:12:24,520 and her children were taken to Louisiana by various members of the Drakes who had relocated there to pursue the lucrative cotton agriculture. 93 00:12:24,520 --> 00:12:33,340 Dave, however, did not go attributable not only to the fact that his labour was specialised to the Edgefield kilns, 94 00:12:33,340 --> 00:12:41,080 but also because he was physically disabled. Around the time that Dave's family was being removed for him, 95 00:12:41,080 --> 00:12:47,560 he had his leg amputated as the result of an incident in which he had been hit by a locomotive. 96 00:12:47,560 --> 00:12:57,820 Although we do not know the details. One local newspaper, the Georgia Constitutionalist of the 3rd of January 1834, printed a letter, 97 00:12:57,820 --> 00:13:04,930 oddly enough, from a visiting northerner detailing a train collision with an enslaved black man. 98 00:13:04,930 --> 00:13:13,510 The tone of the letter and its inclusion of the responses of other witnesses reveals the author's abolitionist leanings, 99 00:13:13,510 --> 00:13:23,530 which the newspaper publisher probably printed as an example of Yankee interference in affairs that Southerners guarded as their own. 100 00:13:23,530 --> 00:13:33,760 So I'll read it for you now. A chill came upon my nerves as I saw blood streaming profusely from his right foot and his left one, 101 00:13:33,760 --> 00:13:39,430 but a mink mangled mess of blood and dust and bones. 102 00:13:39,430 --> 00:13:45,280 Do you think you will ever be worth anything again? Cried one. How much will he sell for now? 103 00:13:45,280 --> 00:13:50,560 Do you suppose? Said a second. What became of the wounded black. 104 00:13:50,560 --> 00:13:52,370 I could never again learn. 105 00:13:52,370 --> 00:14:01,720 And why the engineer never saw him upon the rails or did not stop the engine in time remains to me still a matter of mystery. 106 00:14:01,720 --> 00:14:06,280 But a slave, you know. And then in spirit, scarecrow's has no soul. 107 00:14:06,280 --> 00:14:13,450 So motive be the accepted explanation based on all history, 108 00:14:13,450 --> 00:14:20,620 is that Dave had been transporting a keg of rum for Rubin Drake and it skimmed off a portion for himself, 109 00:14:20,620 --> 00:14:25,510 gotten drunk and passed out on the tracks and being intoxicated. 110 00:14:25,510 --> 00:14:31,000 The sound of the oncoming train was not enough to wake him. 111 00:14:31,000 --> 00:14:35,020 Certainly Dave's disfigurement might have been purely accidental. 112 00:14:35,020 --> 00:14:44,410 But as we discussed last week, slave self-harm was not unusual as a means of resistance against mistreatment by the enslaver. 113 00:14:44,410 --> 00:14:52,360 Since he was a young man and therefore strong, Dave might have fetched a higher price as a field slave working in cotton. 114 00:14:52,360 --> 00:15:00,490 If he had been transported, England and picking cotton was one of the most tortuous and difficult types of labour. 115 00:15:00,490 --> 00:15:05,530 And Edgefield was located 60 miles from Lewisville, Georgia, 116 00:15:05,530 --> 00:15:13,810 the site of one of the largest illegal interstate slave markets in the country, sending slaves to work in cotton. 117 00:15:13,810 --> 00:15:19,270 In the end, we will never know how Dave was injured or whether he injured himself, 118 00:15:19,270 --> 00:15:24,920 only that he had one leg and that for the rest of his life relied on assistance to help him. 119 00:15:24,920 --> 00:15:35,330 The Potts in the studio. The most distinctive features of Dave's vessels are their textual inscriptions, poems, 120 00:15:35,330 --> 00:15:42,260 anecdotes and especially his signatures included on the surface of his large stoneware vessels. 121 00:15:42,260 --> 00:15:50,270 But here, it's important to know that in the antebellum South, slave literacy was strictly prohibited. 122 00:15:50,270 --> 00:15:57,830 Slaves that could write were a threat because their enslavers worried that they could forge papers saying that they were free, 123 00:15:57,830 --> 00:16:03,650 which could be remitted to authorities if they were successful in escaping to the north. 124 00:16:03,650 --> 00:16:13,340 South Carolina had anti literacy laws as early as the seventeen thirties and many places in the South renewed commitments to enter literacy. 125 00:16:13,340 --> 00:16:19,100 In the wake of the revolution in Haiti and increasing slave revolts in the eighteen twenties and 126 00:16:19,100 --> 00:16:26,630 thirties worried that slaves and persons would foment rebellion by sharing written news or conceit. 127 00:16:26,630 --> 00:16:31,310 Which is totally ridiculous because they would have known about this by word of mouth. 128 00:16:31,310 --> 00:16:40,750 Certainly Charleston, South Carolina was the site of one of the most developed slave uprisings in the 19th century, led by Denmark Baozi, 129 00:16:40,750 --> 00:16:50,120 a slave who had the rare fortune fortune of being able to purchase his freedom, who earned his money as a skilled craftsman. 130 00:16:50,120 --> 00:16:55,310 The aftermath of the court proceedings against Vaizey noted that the increase 131 00:16:55,310 --> 00:17:00,440 in slave rebellion was attributable in part to the increase in slave literacy. 132 00:17:00,440 --> 00:17:11,810 Thus, the white fears of insurrection seised South Carolina right at the point at which Dave was probably himself learning to read. 133 00:17:11,810 --> 00:17:17,270 For many years, scholars assumed that Abner Landrum, the founder of the Edgefield Mills, 134 00:17:17,270 --> 00:17:23,510 was a man of strong Christian faith who might have taught Dave to read the Bible. 135 00:17:23,510 --> 00:17:33,170 You will recall that Landrum was also the publisher of Edgefield newspaper, and he had hired Dave from his brother Amos for help in the print shop. 136 00:17:33,170 --> 00:17:38,180 And perhaps this is also where Dave learnt to read. 137 00:17:38,180 --> 00:17:44,660 But now there's new evidence to suggest where Landrum might have received his more liberal views. 138 00:17:44,660 --> 00:17:53,000 John Vickers, the Philadelphia Serah. Mr. Vickers, as we know, was a Quaker and Quakers. 139 00:17:53,000 --> 00:18:02,000 In addition to their industriousness, we're staunchly opposed to slavery and were amongst the most radical abolitionists. 140 00:18:02,000 --> 00:18:10,700 Vicars Ceramics Shop was a well-known stop on what was called the Underground Railroad, a secretive network of pathways, 141 00:18:10,700 --> 00:18:18,740 homes and businesses that harboured escaped slaves as they journeyed into the free states and Canada. 142 00:18:18,740 --> 00:18:29,900 Landrum, on the other hand, was a man whose entire life and livelihood was based on the economy of slavery and the subjugation of blacks. 143 00:18:29,900 --> 00:18:33,980 A recently uncovered 1888 memoir by Arthur C. 144 00:18:33,980 --> 00:18:39,710 Smedley on the subject of abolitionist activity in Pennsylvania details the 145 00:18:39,710 --> 00:18:46,850 appearance of a young man named Landrum at the Vickers home in Chester County. 146 00:18:46,850 --> 00:18:53,720 According to Smedley, one morning Landrum saw Vickers sister setting the breakfast table, befuddled. 147 00:18:53,720 --> 00:18:58,910 He asked Vickers, Do you ladies in the north wait on the table here? 148 00:18:58,910 --> 00:19:02,990 Vicker says, Oh, yes, we have no slaves. 149 00:19:02,990 --> 00:19:12,080 Having seen a black child coming out of Vicar's home with a book under his arm, Landrum enquired, Is he going to school? 150 00:19:12,080 --> 00:19:17,960 Vicker says, Yes. We think coloured people need education and are entitled to it. 151 00:19:17,960 --> 00:19:22,910 Landrum. I never thought of such a thing as educating the coloured race. 152 00:19:22,910 --> 00:19:27,680 But I declare the idea pleases me to Smedley's. 153 00:19:27,680 --> 00:19:33,230 Recounting of the meeting is in the tone of a conversational narrative, 154 00:19:33,230 --> 00:19:38,570 since Landrum apparently kept his slaves, including Dave, rather than granting them freedom. 155 00:19:38,570 --> 00:19:44,000 We can speculate that Vickers example was not taken wholly to heart. 156 00:19:44,000 --> 00:19:49,430 But now it seems clear that Landrum taught Dave to read and that the idea came 157 00:19:49,430 --> 00:19:54,710 from a conviction learnt from a Quaker radical abolitionist in the north. 158 00:19:54,710 --> 00:20:02,090 What is rather outstanding about this encounter is that it gives historians a more exceptional understanding of how abolition 159 00:20:02,090 --> 00:20:12,970 manifested across the north and south and the many unexpected professional relationships that facilitated this exchange. 160 00:20:12,970 --> 00:20:19,720 How Dave used his literacy and so publicly is all the more interesting in what follows. 161 00:20:19,720 --> 00:20:25,700 I would like to argue that Dave's vessels are inspiring and radical forms of expression. 162 00:20:25,700 --> 00:20:32,140 They're amazingly Botley artefacts and have meaning that exceeds their utilitarian function. 163 00:20:32,140 --> 00:20:37,390 Their textual inscriptions reveal Dave's active imagination. 164 00:20:37,390 --> 00:20:42,700 But ultimately, and perhaps most importantly, Dave's vessels are political acts. 165 00:20:42,700 --> 00:20:52,660 They yearn to disclose their maker's presence in a time and within a culture that understood him as having no such agency. 166 00:20:52,660 --> 00:21:02,410 So let us investigate one such vessel, the Luker Trash Jar of 1857, in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 167 00:21:02,410 --> 00:21:13,050 Its surface is sumptuous, smooth, palpitating fields of warm terracotta colour, cool brown and lighter green, glaze buttery and glassine. 168 00:21:13,050 --> 00:21:20,470 The ash and lime based glaze was Landreaux invention by way of the Vickers Shop in Philadelphia based 169 00:21:20,470 --> 00:21:28,720 on composite ME methods of glazing rooted in centuries of Chinese tradition brought through Europe. 170 00:21:28,720 --> 00:21:36,880 Glazing stoneware was primarily for the purpose of waterproofing and making the vessels easier to clean. 171 00:21:36,880 --> 00:21:45,730 But the patterning of glazes on Dave's vessels is quite unlike other stoneware from the region on the Lucara trash jar. 172 00:21:45,730 --> 00:21:52,030 There's an eight inch long vertical strip in which the natural colour surfaces on the oblique side. 173 00:21:52,030 --> 00:22:01,620 This kind of guedes pattern is a matter of pure contingency due to the amount of smoke present in the kennel at the time of firing mitre ash. 174 00:22:01,620 --> 00:22:05,050 Green glaze concentrates mostly at the rim on the left. 175 00:22:05,050 --> 00:22:12,550 Pooling on the top surface of the flat handle and dripping downward in layered veils of colour. 176 00:22:12,550 --> 00:22:18,460 But the reverse side of the jar contains few or no striations of the celadon hue. 177 00:22:18,460 --> 00:22:28,090 This type of patterning reveals that Dave made an intentional decision about applying the glaze or what we might call an aesthetic choice. 178 00:22:28,090 --> 00:22:32,290 There are other places where Dave is similarly decorative. 179 00:22:32,290 --> 00:22:40,960 The shape of the jar is squat and cylindrical, with your form slab handles symmetrically positioned on two sides. 180 00:22:40,960 --> 00:22:47,020 Even though the pot may seem truncated owing to a five degree lop to the left, 181 00:22:47,020 --> 00:22:53,440 Dave still emphasises the vertical orientation in the penmanship of conscription. 182 00:22:53,440 --> 00:23:02,380 Notice, for example, the attenuated tail of the G in August and the column of the L in L m on the back of the pot, 183 00:23:02,380 --> 00:23:07,570 which we're looking at now, which stand in contrast to the other Loopt letters. 184 00:23:07,570 --> 00:23:11,290 L and incidentally, is the initials of his enslaver at the time. 185 00:23:11,290 --> 00:23:18,740 Lewis smiles. These vessels are unremittingly physical objects. 186 00:23:18,740 --> 00:23:24,200 One thing I noticed when I stood in front of it position as it was on a museum pedestal 187 00:23:24,200 --> 00:23:29,990 is that it very nearly corresponded to my own torso from its base at my navel, 188 00:23:29,990 --> 00:23:39,500 careening upward and rounding off up the throat. At its widest, the jaw measures approximately 20 inches on the vertical. 189 00:23:39,500 --> 00:23:42,800 Twelve at the mouth and 10 at the base. 190 00:23:42,800 --> 00:23:51,680 So it is smaller than I, but its shape enhanced by one's sure sense of its weight, makes it seem especially trunk like. 191 00:23:51,680 --> 00:23:56,430 In a way the surface itself seems to in place 18th centuries. 192 00:23:56,430 --> 00:24:00,260 And they are especially a feature of Dutch painting and even on rare occasion 193 00:24:00,260 --> 00:24:08,090 represented black skin with an added glossiness as a special feature of its visibility. 194 00:24:08,090 --> 00:24:18,560 Well into the 19th century, when slaves came to market, traders regularly rubbed oil or grease onto their skin to enhance their shiny nose. 195 00:24:18,560 --> 00:24:31,850 Before inspection by customers in the pens, creased skin, hid scars and gave the illusion of health, thereby fetching a higher price for the trader. 196 00:24:31,850 --> 00:24:41,630 But more importantly, shined skin made the enslaved human seemed consistent with the lustre of marketable commodities. 197 00:24:41,630 --> 00:24:48,840 It is what, in Thompson's words, made black bodies both hyper visible, but their humanity. 198 00:24:48,840 --> 00:24:55,020 Invisible. Bringing us closer to our subjects today. 199 00:24:55,020 --> 00:25:03,030 The paradox of visibility and invisibility persisted and pervaded 19th century American chattel slavery. 200 00:25:03,030 --> 00:25:09,810 And there is no better example than the runaway slave notis popular prints and ephemeral since the 201 00:25:09,810 --> 00:25:15,240 very earliest decades of the 19th century represented slaves as flattened and one dimensional. 202 00:25:15,240 --> 00:25:25,170 Literally, runaway notices were printed dozens to the single page in the same newspaper section as other lost property, including livestock. 203 00:25:25,170 --> 00:25:32,220 These non particularised engravings totally denied depicting real individuality of the slave. 204 00:25:32,220 --> 00:25:37,440 However, at the same time, the runaway notice had also to return to the slaves. 205 00:25:37,440 --> 00:25:44,190 Individualising characteristics so that they could be identified and apprehended. 206 00:25:44,190 --> 00:25:55,560 Such information was included in the accompanying text, with marks such as scars and skin colour, amongst other physical attributes. 207 00:25:55,560 --> 00:26:07,320 In the case of the enslaved and one, for example, the runaway notice makes note of his yellowish complexion as well as a burnt scar on his chest. 208 00:26:07,320 --> 00:26:09,990 Notes about scarring were very useful, in fact, 209 00:26:09,990 --> 00:26:20,270 to the abolitionists in the early 19th century as written evidence of the immense suffering of the enslaved. 210 00:26:20,270 --> 00:26:27,560 Inside the corporeal brownness of black people seeing it and describing it was in his vital to 211 00:26:27,560 --> 00:26:34,850 understanding the representation of slavery in general and explicitly linked to the status of the slave. 212 00:26:34,850 --> 00:26:46,790 As property in particular. But reading this information back on to one of slave Dave's vessels is perhaps almost too convenient. 213 00:26:46,790 --> 00:26:52,940 Certainly the attractive exterior of the vessel in all of its resplendent brown ness 214 00:26:52,940 --> 00:27:00,290 might suggest its own emergence onto a market of goods in which Dave was also a part. 215 00:27:00,290 --> 00:27:11,930 But here I would actually like to suggest that the interior of the vessel is at least as equally as important as the exterior. 216 00:27:11,930 --> 00:27:23,720 To that end, Dave marked the Luker trash jar as just one example with 10 small dots in two columns which indicated its Galán capacity. 217 00:27:23,720 --> 00:27:30,800 The notion of 10 gallons has to do with the very practical way in which the space inside the jar. 218 00:27:30,800 --> 00:27:38,090 Perhaps even more than the way it looks on the outside, would have dictated its price. 219 00:27:38,090 --> 00:27:46,700 Consider Dave's earliest recorded couplet on a vessel of clay which reads Put every bit all between. 220 00:27:46,700 --> 00:27:50,570 Surely this jar will hold 14 here. 221 00:27:50,570 --> 00:27:59,240 Dave instructs the user to stack the contents of the jar tightly in order to attain its maximum capacity. 222 00:27:59,240 --> 00:28:05,930 Naturally, a more capacious jar is more expensive because more labour and more material is required in 223 00:28:05,930 --> 00:28:13,430 the technical process for someone who is himself commodified based on his own capacities. 224 00:28:13,430 --> 00:28:26,470 I think Dave would have understood this acutely. We have concerns the abstractness of money and value data had many opinions revealed in 225 00:28:26,470 --> 00:28:32,910 Inscribe vs. referencing material wealth on several of his of his surviving tussles. 226 00:28:32,910 --> 00:28:39,430 The Luker trash jar provides only one convenient example for Funt inscription incised with a 227 00:28:39,430 --> 00:28:46,450 thin stylus and stretching between the handles on the swelled area approaching the mouth reads, 228 00:28:46,450 --> 00:28:50,680 I made this jar for cash, although it's called lucre, 229 00:28:50,680 --> 00:29:00,880 trash lucre meaning corruption or filth associated with pecuniary gain was a reference to St. Paul's. 230 00:29:00,880 --> 00:29:12,760 First, a pistol to Timothy, which we buy now, know that Dave was likely to have read at some point under the tutelage of the religious Abner Landrum. 231 00:29:12,760 --> 00:29:19,540 It reads, A bishop must be blameless, not given to whine. 232 00:29:19,540 --> 00:29:29,330 No striker, not greedy, filthy lucre, but patient, not a brawler, not covetous, one that ruled his own house. 233 00:29:29,330 --> 00:29:37,610 For if a man know not how to rule his own house, how shall he take care of the Church of God in this passage? 234 00:29:37,610 --> 00:29:47,320 St. Paul provides an attractive version of authority, presiding over a sober and benevolent, benevolent household. 235 00:29:47,320 --> 00:29:59,260 Dave would have been persuaded by the notion that a benevolent master of the house was also one who did not put money above humanity. 236 00:29:59,260 --> 00:30:04,690 It's in Dave's couplet is a loose article. However, though it's called Lucre Trash. 237 00:30:04,690 --> 00:30:10,990 Does it refer to the jar, the cash or something else entirely? What's the part that is the trash? 238 00:30:10,990 --> 00:30:17,290 I think it's highly unlikely that he's referring to the jars since his presence is everywhere infused into it, he tells us. 239 00:30:17,290 --> 00:30:26,320 I made this jar refereeing, referencing himself in the first person he dated the Dussel, placing himself in history, 240 00:30:26,320 --> 00:30:33,670 and he signed his name, claiming authority over its production, its own precious evidence of Dave's making. 241 00:30:33,670 --> 00:30:43,600 At a certain point in time, the trash, therefore, is cash, and Dave's words are an admonition against greed. 242 00:30:43,600 --> 00:30:48,610 On a separate vessel dated the twenty seventh of June 1840, Dave wrote. 243 00:30:48,610 --> 00:30:55,570 Give me silver or either gold, though they are dangerous to our soul here. 244 00:30:55,570 --> 00:31:07,180 Dave venturer, the quizes, the enslaver accepting payment and therefore the warning against selfishness points back to the chattel buyer as well. 245 00:31:07,180 --> 00:31:13,420 Beyond the fact that Dave's literacy was in and of itself a radical act of resistance, 246 00:31:13,420 --> 00:31:23,210 we could also see Dave's words as incisively critiquing the institution of slavery and even the capitalism underpinning it. 247 00:31:23,210 --> 00:31:28,730 Deve of the compulsion toward gain that brought out the very worst in humanity, 248 00:31:28,730 --> 00:31:35,260 that which deprived him and those like him of their own sense of being that rendered them property. 249 00:31:35,260 --> 00:31:42,700 In short, that which made their human skin a thing to be bought and sold. 250 00:31:42,700 --> 00:31:49,750 As you can see, Dave's text serves as a verbal accompaniment, an enhancement to the surface aesthetics of the brownstone, 251 00:31:49,750 --> 00:31:57,280 where a vessel that the poetry often reiterates the making or the physical characteristics 252 00:31:57,280 --> 00:32:03,100 of the jar itself suggests a dense relationship between words and material, 253 00:32:03,100 --> 00:32:12,070 between the poetic imagination and the market bound commodity, a market understood to be personally resonant for the artist. 254 00:32:12,070 --> 00:32:20,950 I've already acknowledged Dave's way of indicating the interior measure of his vessels with non literary marks such as dots, 255 00:32:20,950 --> 00:32:23,560 but where there is demarcation. 256 00:32:23,560 --> 00:32:34,840 I also see excess not only filling up but also spilling out or exploding just like a glaze bubbles over the lip of a jar. 257 00:32:34,840 --> 00:32:43,030 As we've seen on a vessel dated the thirty first of July 1840 located at the Charleston Museum, 258 00:32:43,030 --> 00:32:50,500 Dave wrote, Dave belongs to Mr. Miles, where the oven bakes and the pot boils. 259 00:32:50,500 --> 00:32:59,590 Here, Dave not only calls out his own enslavement, but stresses a link between slavery, labour and boiling heat. 260 00:32:59,590 --> 00:33:07,570 Labour consistently appears as a motif and an overarching context for Dave's poetry. 261 00:33:07,570 --> 00:33:18,920 With that in mind, another example is the vessel of the 24th of August 1857, on which the couplet reads A pretty little girl on a verge. 262 00:33:18,920 --> 00:33:23,750 Volcanic mountain. How they børge in this couplet. 263 00:33:23,750 --> 00:33:28,610 Dave creates a metaphor between an imagination of a girl in the prime of her youth. 264 00:33:28,610 --> 00:33:33,830 Note the interplay here between Virge and its misspelling to resemble the word virgin. 265 00:33:33,830 --> 00:33:37,760 And a volcano about to erupt. 266 00:33:37,760 --> 00:33:47,390 What Dave would have known most readily about explosions had to do with the day to day operations in the kiln drying stoneware before firing. 267 00:33:47,390 --> 00:33:53,780 It is an unpredictable process, and especially in the very humid climate of the American South. 268 00:33:53,780 --> 00:33:59,930 Any pocket moisture inside the clay would cause a violent effusion of steam, 269 00:33:59,930 --> 00:34:08,180 and thick walled vessels such as those created by Dave were especially susceptible to this type of accident. 270 00:34:08,180 --> 00:34:13,880 He links this to his imagination of a volcano, which is not a biblical image persay. 271 00:34:13,880 --> 00:34:20,450 And so might have been otherwise derived from slaves sharing information gleaned from overhearing 272 00:34:20,450 --> 00:34:26,600 wealthy white Southerners speak about Mount Vesuvius after a trip to Pompei on the grand tour, 273 00:34:26,600 --> 00:34:37,190 which we know frequently happened. But the overt sexuality in Dave's couplet is really the most compelling. 274 00:34:37,190 --> 00:34:45,500 In order to rhyme with Virge, he contracts the final verb verbruggen to Børge, meaning budding were shooting forth, 275 00:34:45,500 --> 00:34:55,490 which may reference the girl being on the brink of womanhood, or indeed his own sexually exuberant response to seeing. 276 00:34:55,490 --> 00:35:06,050 Such a bold assertion of his manhood would have been strictly prohibited within slavery and its institutionally ingrained emasculation. 277 00:35:06,050 --> 00:35:15,320 We already know what the enslaver could demand sexual access to any of his female slaves at any time. 278 00:35:15,320 --> 00:35:20,570 But Lewis Clark, an ex slave who successfully reached Canada in 1841, 279 00:35:20,570 --> 00:35:26,420 ruled in his autobiography that seeing the rape of female slaves took its toll on male slaves, 280 00:35:26,420 --> 00:35:34,580 as well as they were unable to protect their mothers, wives and daughters from such atrocities. 281 00:35:34,580 --> 00:35:46,490 Any perceived force against the authority of the master would have been met with unapologetic punishment, beatings, whipping, gagging and worse. 282 00:35:46,490 --> 00:35:52,610 Furthermore, owing to the antagonised relationship between the white mistresses of the House and 283 00:35:52,610 --> 00:35:58,490 the female slaves who were forced to comply with the sexual advances of the master, 284 00:35:58,490 --> 00:36:08,150 male slaves who were known to be the husbands or relatives also suffered arbitrary retribution, 285 00:36:08,150 --> 00:36:16,370 severe punishment, splitting of slave families or even death awaited enslaved men who were even alleged to have had 286 00:36:16,370 --> 00:36:24,350 sexual contact with white women and the children resulting from such unions were suffocated at birth. 287 00:36:24,350 --> 00:36:26,060 Thus, in the eyes of whites, 288 00:36:26,060 --> 00:36:37,430 the sexuality of the enslaved black man was contained to the single purpose of forced reproduction with enslaved black women. 289 00:36:37,430 --> 00:36:48,710 That Dave would write so freely about his experience of attraction, transgressed and deeply such deeply entrenched repressions. 290 00:36:48,710 --> 00:36:54,200 There are other tempting examples of vessel dated the 10th of February of 1840. 291 00:36:54,200 --> 00:37:01,580 What's better than kissing while we both are at fishing or the twenty sixth of August 1840? 292 00:37:01,580 --> 00:37:07,490 Another trick is worse than this. Dearest Miss. Spare me a kiss. 293 00:37:07,490 --> 00:37:13,610 The sweetness of flirtation, even light-hearted, was no doubt experienced by enslaved people. 294 00:37:13,610 --> 00:37:21,770 But we must take this on balance with the ongoing trauma of violation as the main condition of slavery. 295 00:37:21,770 --> 00:37:29,540 Beauty and charm can be suddenly conceived subversions against such bizarre terror. 296 00:37:29,540 --> 00:37:38,000 Finally, the radicality of Dave's writing can be summed up in a single word ponder. 297 00:37:38,000 --> 00:37:47,870 This is the inscription on a vessel attributed to 1858. Ponded Bossidy is a non word pariah, perhaps referring to the word ponderous, 298 00:37:47,870 --> 00:37:55,330 which is something of very great weight, certainly applicable to Dave's impressive clay jars. 299 00:37:55,330 --> 00:38:02,270 The mastery of multisyllabic words was a feature of spelling primers in the 19th century, 300 00:38:02,270 --> 00:38:09,320 and so the word may unto itself stand for the whole project of literacy and its extraordinary importance today. 301 00:38:09,320 --> 00:38:16,400 As an artist, I am tempted to think of it as a clever play on words which Dave frequently did, 302 00:38:16,400 --> 00:38:25,930 including in Pretty Little Girl Jar and in for Mr. John Munday of 1857, swapping the surname Mundey and U. 303 00:38:25,930 --> 00:38:33,920 N d y for the day of week Monday on which Dave made the jar looking for double significance. 304 00:38:33,920 --> 00:38:41,690 Then Ponder Osity brings us tantalisingly near the word ponder meaning to think, 305 00:38:41,690 --> 00:38:50,090 especially to think about something carefully or at length, thus linked full of material and full of meaning. 306 00:38:50,090 --> 00:39:01,430 Ponder Cosseting is the magnet between ceramics and poetry, the animating characteristic of Dave's outstanding artworks. 307 00:39:01,430 --> 00:39:04,190 It is estimated that about three quarters of Dave, 308 00:39:04,190 --> 00:39:12,290 the Potter's vessels are gone or destroyed and the remaining examples outside of music museums face the ravages of time. 309 00:39:12,290 --> 00:39:21,140 Obvious cracks and fissures are present in the choicest examples and in fine institutions such as the Luker trash jar at the Museum of Fine Arts, 310 00:39:21,140 --> 00:39:27,470 Boston. Of course, the original purpose did not demand their historical continuity. 311 00:39:27,470 --> 00:39:35,870 But now we comprehend them as precious. A rare opportunity to meet Dave's mind, to give us an individual's name, a presence, 312 00:39:35,870 --> 00:39:43,520 an index to instruct us about black achievement that has always been present in the history of American art. 313 00:39:43,520 --> 00:39:48,080 Even such under such precarious conditions. 314 00:39:48,080 --> 00:39:55,760 After the end of the civil war, when the sweetness of freedom came to the four million enslaved African-Americans in the South, 315 00:39:55,760 --> 00:40:01,370 we know that Dave remained in Edgefield as a potter. But on the evidence. 316 00:40:01,370 --> 00:40:08,090 There are no more examples of Dave's poetry nor his signature inscribed into jars. 317 00:40:08,090 --> 00:40:19,380 After 1865, although perhaps he didn't need to.