Tonight's lecture is Skin and Absence. The Radical Ceramics and Poetry of the Enslaved.
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,
the notion that there is something called art, often with a capital A.
And as a quarry, Larry,
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.
And I couldn't agree more. The vibrancy of art so often derives from our ability to connect with the mind of the imaginative
artist whose exceptional skill brings forth an idea that he or she is at freewill to express.
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.
Art history has privileged, especially in Kennan's after the Renaissance, individuality and innovation as the highest artistic merit.
This is precisely why it is so necessary to speak about artwork made by enslaved Africans and
African-Americans in the period before the U.S. civil war as the property of their enslavers,
they were understood as having no freewill whatsoever because of the racist assumptions upon which slavery had been established.
A slave mentality was assumed to be retarded and inferior to that of whites.
And an enslaved person's imagination, so to speak,
would similarly have been regarded as like a child's given to its basest desires and in need of regulation and containment through punishment.
And an enslaved person's labour, no matter how skilled, was inevitably divorced from his personhood,
since he was understood economically to exist as property, but not socially as an individual.
So that brings me to my first question. What is the art of the enslaved or indeed of any black American before legal emancipation?
Often we can find an answer in looking to cultural artefacts, what might be called material culture in the antebellum period,
because black Americans were not infrequently employed as skilled craftsmen on both sides of the north and south divide.
But this is also a challenge since the archive favours those artists who had access to the traditional
means of expression and left behind the so-called paper trail that might allow their work to be known,
studied, collected and exhibited. A painting like this one by the free black painter Joshua Johnson might have a signature, but an ornamental.
He painted black and gilt chair made by African-American artisans in Baltimore in the 18 20s or 30s will almost certainly not.
Within our history, some have attempted to take an ethnographic approach, seeking to find African precedents to African American expressions.
Indeed, this is an important step since it acknowledges that the fact that exchange and hybridisation are salient features of the colonial encounter.
But this, too, is not without its own biases.
Based on what the West understands to be culturally worthwhile in its study of designed objects from the lands outside of its purview.
For example, Basketry is one of the best known black craft traditions in the South, with obvious roots in African design.
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.
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.
On the one hand, we seek to restore to the official record a history of enslaved makers that has been unaccounted for.
A project that is not without merit.
On the other hand, the apparent lapses and losses in the historical record would seem to announce themselves the most loudly in the Endeavour.
So as nearly to become the entire focus.
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.
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
makes a seemingly unlikely appearance in the spectacle of American landscape painting by one of its most important practitioners,
Thomas Cole. This week, I wish to introduce you to an enslaved artist by the name of Dave Potter, whose remarkable large stoneware vessels,
splendid glazes and poetic inscriptions provide a different perspective on the presence absence question by understanding
the structures of economic power that dictated the conditions of slavery and the racism that was at its root.
We can more precisely construct a picture of the past and follow those resonances of the past into their present urgency.
Dave was born into slavery in South Carolina in 1881 and was first mortgaged at the age of 17.
Sales records place him in the Edgefield, ACON district.
The location of one of the worst world's richest deposits of Khail night and what would become in the early 19th century.
Distinguished for its production of alkaline glazed stoneware,
South Carolina pottery operations were small enough to be controlled by a very few number of families.
The Drakes, the Simkins, the land drums and the miles who consolidated their businesses through intermarriage and the trading of property,
including real estate and slaves. Although, well, the Edgefield district was nevertheless politically important and wealthy.
The home of several state governors and tied to the business speculation of prominent politicians until the Civil War,
the existence of pot operations in Edgefield was unusual in the South as a whole.
The North, and especially New England, had an established professional class of merchants,
traders and artisans who modelled their industries on the type of work they knew in Britain before the American Revolution.
By contrast, the South was agricultural.
South Carolina was settled, for example, by plantation owners from Barbados, and the working class was enslaved.
Dr. Abner Landrum discovered kailin deposits in Edgefield in 1889 and set out to learn
the business of ceramics manufacturer of the materials made from heated Kaylin.
Porcelain is the one held in the highest esteem for its whiteness, delicacy and translucency.
Europeans had for hundreds of years admired Chinese porcelain with the first domestic examples produced in Florence in the 16th century.
With the expansion of wealth in modern Europe came the enjoyments of elegant hospitality.
In turn came the demand for more varied and refined types of tableware,
decoration items for the kitchen, pie dishes, bread pans, cake moulds, casseroles and so forth.
Britain, that European white where manufacture such as iconic names as Chelsea, Bo Royal, Worcester Wedgwood and Spode.
By 1810, Landrum had reported that his kailin deposits rivalled Edgeworth operations near Liverpool.
Edgeworth is not now a household name for porcelain, but would have been to men like Landrum in the American South.
Owing to Liverpool's expensive role in the international slave trade, Edgeworth was the readiest example to American plantations.
White China and black bodies were amongst the many commodities that ferried across the Atlantic in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Although British comics remained the standard for taste in use in dining and entertainment,
there were some experiments in the young United States centred in the Philadelphia area.
They did not contain 10.
Landrum went there to meet with John Vickers, a Quaker potter known for a particular type of China called Pennsylvania Queens, where,
despite being a religious minority, Quakers in the United States are regarded as diligent, dependable and inventive workers by meeting with vicars.
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.
Instead, Landrum and his cohort produced alkaline glazed stoneware, which was brown, denser, resistant to scratching and less expensive to make.
In addition, the utilitarian stoneware is what was more greatly in need in the agrarian south as vessels for meat,
fat and preserved food and jugs for water and oil.
Landreaux encounter with Vickers is an important one, so please remember it and I will return to it shortly.
Mortgages and collateral, including humans, moved around significantly between the intermarried families of the Edgefield Estates.
Dave's first enslaver was Harvey Drake, who mortgaged him to Eldard Simpkins.
This mortgage was followed by a second to Amos Landrum, the brother of Abner Landrum,
about whom we just spoke, who was also Airfield's newspaper publisher.
Amos settled the first mortgage debt on the collateral sale of another slave,
a woman named Eliza, and paid off the second mortgage through cash and transfer of real estate.
This indicates to us that Dave was extremely valuable to Amos,
most likely because he had already proven himself to be the most important potter at the land from Killam during the eighteen thirties.
Dave moved between other branches of the Drake and Landru families and in eighteen forty nine came under enslavement to Lewis Jay Miles,
whose wife was Mary Landrum, where he laboured until he was freed.
Since Dave dated his muscles, we know he continued as a potter at the Miles Mill through the eighteen fifties.
As a skilled worker rather than a field slave, Dave would not have been indiscriminately sold or traded away.
But this should be balanced by the view that his family could easily be sold away from him without a second thought.
In the eighteen thirties, records indicate the slave Lydia, who is either Dave's sister or wife,
and her children were taken to Louisiana by various members of the Drakes who had relocated there to pursue the lucrative cotton agriculture.
Dave, however, did not go attributable not only to the fact that his labour was specialised to the Edgefield kilns,
but also because he was physically disabled. Around the time that Dave's family was being removed for him,
he had his leg amputated as the result of an incident in which he had been hit by a locomotive.
Although we do not know the details. One local newspaper, the Georgia Constitutionalist of the 3rd of January 1834, printed a letter,
oddly enough, from a visiting northerner detailing a train collision with an enslaved black man.
The tone of the letter and its inclusion of the responses of other witnesses reveals the author's abolitionist leanings,
which the newspaper publisher probably printed as an example of Yankee interference in affairs that Southerners guarded as their own.
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,
but a mink mangled mess of blood and dust and bones.
Do you think you will ever be worth anything again? Cried one. How much will he sell for now?
Do you suppose? Said a second. What became of the wounded black.
I could never again learn.
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.
But a slave, you know. And then in spirit, scarecrow's has no soul.
So motive be the accepted explanation based on all history,
is that Dave had been transporting a keg of rum for Rubin Drake and it skimmed off a portion for himself,
gotten drunk and passed out on the tracks and being intoxicated.
The sound of the oncoming train was not enough to wake him.
Certainly Dave's disfigurement might have been purely accidental.
But as we discussed last week, slave self-harm was not unusual as a means of resistance against mistreatment by the enslaver.
Since he was a young man and therefore strong, Dave might have fetched a higher price as a field slave working in cotton.
If he had been transported, England and picking cotton was one of the most tortuous and difficult types of labour.
And Edgefield was located 60 miles from Lewisville, Georgia,
the site of one of the largest illegal interstate slave markets in the country, sending slaves to work in cotton.
In the end, we will never know how Dave was injured or whether he injured himself,
only that he had one leg and that for the rest of his life relied on assistance to help him.
The Potts in the studio. The most distinctive features of Dave's vessels are their textual inscriptions, poems,
anecdotes and especially his signatures included on the surface of his large stoneware vessels.
But here, it's important to know that in the antebellum South, slave literacy was strictly prohibited.
Slaves that could write were a threat because their enslavers worried that they could forge papers saying that they were free,
which could be remitted to authorities if they were successful in escaping to the north.
South Carolina had anti literacy laws as early as the seventeen thirties and many places in the South renewed commitments to enter literacy.
In the wake of the revolution in Haiti and increasing slave revolts in the eighteen twenties and
thirties worried that slaves and persons would foment rebellion by sharing written news or conceit.
Which is totally ridiculous because they would have known about this by word of mouth.
Certainly Charleston, South Carolina was the site of one of the most developed slave uprisings in the 19th century, led by Denmark Baozi,
a slave who had the rare fortune fortune of being able to purchase his freedom, who earned his money as a skilled craftsman.
The aftermath of the court proceedings against Vaizey noted that the increase
in slave rebellion was attributable in part to the increase in slave literacy.
Thus, the white fears of insurrection seised South Carolina right at the point at which Dave was probably himself learning to read.
For many years, scholars assumed that Abner Landrum, the founder of the Edgefield Mills,
was a man of strong Christian faith who might have taught Dave to read the Bible.
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.
And perhaps this is also where Dave learnt to read.
But now there's new evidence to suggest where Landrum might have received his more liberal views.
John Vickers, the Philadelphia Serah. Mr. Vickers, as we know, was a Quaker and Quakers.
In addition to their industriousness, we're staunchly opposed to slavery and were amongst the most radical abolitionists.
Vicars Ceramics Shop was a well-known stop on what was called the Underground Railroad, a secretive network of pathways,
homes and businesses that harboured escaped slaves as they journeyed into the free states and Canada.
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.
A recently uncovered 1888 memoir by Arthur C.
Smedley on the subject of abolitionist activity in Pennsylvania details the
appearance of a young man named Landrum at the Vickers home in Chester County.
According to Smedley, one morning Landrum saw Vickers sister setting the breakfast table, befuddled.
He asked Vickers, Do you ladies in the north wait on the table here?
Vicker says, Oh, yes, we have no slaves.
Having seen a black child coming out of Vicar's home with a book under his arm, Landrum enquired, Is he going to school?
Vicker says, Yes. We think coloured people need education and are entitled to it.
Landrum. I never thought of such a thing as educating the coloured race.
But I declare the idea pleases me to Smedley's.
Recounting of the meeting is in the tone of a conversational narrative,
since Landrum apparently kept his slaves, including Dave, rather than granting them freedom.
We can speculate that Vickers example was not taken wholly to heart.
But now it seems clear that Landrum taught Dave to read and that the idea came
from a conviction learnt from a Quaker radical abolitionist in the north.
What is rather outstanding about this encounter is that it gives historians a more exceptional understanding of how abolition
manifested across the north and south and the many unexpected professional relationships that facilitated this exchange.
How Dave used his literacy and so publicly is all the more interesting in what follows.
I would like to argue that Dave's vessels are inspiring and radical forms of expression.
They're amazingly Botley artefacts and have meaning that exceeds their utilitarian function.
Their textual inscriptions reveal Dave's active imagination.
But ultimately, and perhaps most importantly, Dave's vessels are political acts.
They yearn to disclose their maker's presence in a time and within a culture that understood him as having no such agency.
So let us investigate one such vessel, the Luker Trash Jar of 1857, in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Its surface is sumptuous, smooth, palpitating fields of warm terracotta colour, cool brown and lighter green, glaze buttery and glassine.
The ash and lime based glaze was Landreaux invention by way of the Vickers Shop in Philadelphia based
on composite ME methods of glazing rooted in centuries of Chinese tradition brought through Europe.
Glazing stoneware was primarily for the purpose of waterproofing and making the vessels easier to clean.
But the patterning of glazes on Dave's vessels is quite unlike other stoneware from the region on the Lucara trash jar.
There's an eight inch long vertical strip in which the natural colour surfaces on the oblique side.
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.
Green glaze concentrates mostly at the rim on the left.
Pooling on the top surface of the flat handle and dripping downward in layered veils of colour.
But the reverse side of the jar contains few or no striations of the celadon hue.
This type of patterning reveals that Dave made an intentional decision about applying the glaze or what we might call an aesthetic choice.
There are other places where Dave is similarly decorative.
The shape of the jar is squat and cylindrical, with your form slab handles symmetrically positioned on two sides.
Even though the pot may seem truncated owing to a five degree lop to the left,
Dave still emphasises the vertical orientation in the penmanship of conscription.
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,
which we're looking at now, which stand in contrast to the other Loopt letters.
L and incidentally, is the initials of his enslaver at the time.
Lewis smiles. These vessels are unremittingly physical objects.
One thing I noticed when I stood in front of it position as it was on a museum pedestal
is that it very nearly corresponded to my own torso from its base at my navel,
careening upward and rounding off up the throat. At its widest, the jaw measures approximately 20 inches on the vertical.
Twelve at the mouth and 10 at the base.
So it is smaller than I, but its shape enhanced by one's sure sense of its weight, makes it seem especially trunk like.
In a way the surface itself seems to in place 18th centuries.
And they are especially a feature of Dutch painting and even on rare occasion
represented black skin with an added glossiness as a special feature of its visibility.
Well into the 19th century, when slaves came to market, traders regularly rubbed oil or grease onto their skin to enhance their shiny nose.
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.
But more importantly, shined skin made the enslaved human seemed consistent with the lustre of marketable commodities.
It is what, in Thompson's words, made black bodies both hyper visible, but their humanity.
Invisible. Bringing us closer to our subjects today.
The paradox of visibility and invisibility persisted and pervaded 19th century American chattel slavery.
And there is no better example than the runaway slave notis popular prints and ephemeral since the
very earliest decades of the 19th century represented slaves as flattened and one dimensional.
Literally, runaway notices were printed dozens to the single page in the same newspaper section as other lost property, including livestock.
These non particularised engravings totally denied depicting real individuality of the slave.
However, at the same time, the runaway notice had also to return to the slaves.
Individualising characteristics so that they could be identified and apprehended.
Such information was included in the accompanying text, with marks such as scars and skin colour, amongst other physical attributes.
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.
Notes about scarring were very useful, in fact,
to the abolitionists in the early 19th century as written evidence of the immense suffering of the enslaved.
Inside the corporeal brownness of black people seeing it and describing it was in his vital to
understanding the representation of slavery in general and explicitly linked to the status of the slave.
As property in particular. But reading this information back on to one of slave Dave's vessels is perhaps almost too convenient.
Certainly the attractive exterior of the vessel in all of its resplendent brown ness
might suggest its own emergence onto a market of goods in which Dave was also a part.
But here I would actually like to suggest that the interior of the vessel is at least as equally as important as the exterior.
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.
The notion of 10 gallons has to do with the very practical way in which the space inside the jar.
Perhaps even more than the way it looks on the outside, would have dictated its price.
Consider Dave's earliest recorded couplet on a vessel of clay which reads Put every bit all between.
Surely this jar will hold 14 here.
Dave instructs the user to stack the contents of the jar tightly in order to attain its maximum capacity.
Naturally, a more capacious jar is more expensive because more labour and more material is required in
the technical process for someone who is himself commodified based on his own capacities.
I think Dave would have understood this acutely. We have concerns the abstractness of money and value data had many opinions revealed in
Inscribe vs. referencing material wealth on several of his of his surviving tussles.
The Luker trash jar provides only one convenient example for Funt inscription incised with a
thin stylus and stretching between the handles on the swelled area approaching the mouth reads,
I made this jar for cash, although it's called lucre,
trash lucre meaning corruption or filth associated with pecuniary gain was a reference to St. Paul's.
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.
It reads, A bishop must be blameless, not given to whine.
No striker, not greedy, filthy lucre, but patient, not a brawler, not covetous, one that ruled his own house.
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?
St. Paul provides an attractive version of authority, presiding over a sober and benevolent, benevolent household.
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.
It's in Dave's couplet is a loose article. However, though it's called Lucre Trash.
Does it refer to the jar, the cash or something else entirely? What's the part that is the trash?
I think it's highly unlikely that he's referring to the jars since his presence is everywhere infused into it, he tells us.
I made this jar refereeing, referencing himself in the first person he dated the Dussel, placing himself in history,
and he signed his name, claiming authority over its production, its own precious evidence of Dave's making.
At a certain point in time, the trash, therefore, is cash, and Dave's words are an admonition against greed.
On a separate vessel dated the twenty seventh of June 1840, Dave wrote.
Give me silver or either gold, though they are dangerous to our soul here.
Dave venturer, the quizes, the enslaver accepting payment and therefore the warning against selfishness points back to the chattel buyer as well.
Beyond the fact that Dave's literacy was in and of itself a radical act of resistance,
we could also see Dave's words as incisively critiquing the institution of slavery and even the capitalism underpinning it.
Deve of the compulsion toward gain that brought out the very worst in humanity,
that which deprived him and those like him of their own sense of being that rendered them property.
In short, that which made their human skin a thing to be bought and sold.
As you can see, Dave's text serves as a verbal accompaniment, an enhancement to the surface aesthetics of the brownstone,
where a vessel that the poetry often reiterates the making or the physical characteristics
of the jar itself suggests a dense relationship between words and material,
between the poetic imagination and the market bound commodity, a market understood to be personally resonant for the artist.
I've already acknowledged Dave's way of indicating the interior measure of his vessels with non literary marks such as dots,
but where there is demarcation.
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.
As we've seen on a vessel dated the thirty first of July 1840 located at the Charleston Museum,
Dave wrote, Dave belongs to Mr. Miles, where the oven bakes and the pot boils.
Here, Dave not only calls out his own enslavement, but stresses a link between slavery, labour and boiling heat.
Labour consistently appears as a motif and an overarching context for Dave's poetry.
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.
Volcanic mountain. How they børge in this couplet.
Dave creates a metaphor between an imagination of a girl in the prime of her youth.
Note the interplay here between Virge and its misspelling to resemble the word virgin.
And a volcano about to erupt.
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.
It is an unpredictable process, and especially in the very humid climate of the American South.
Any pocket moisture inside the clay would cause a violent effusion of steam,
and thick walled vessels such as those created by Dave were especially susceptible to this type of accident.
He links this to his imagination of a volcano, which is not a biblical image persay.
And so might have been otherwise derived from slaves sharing information gleaned from overhearing
wealthy white Southerners speak about Mount Vesuvius after a trip to Pompei on the grand tour,
which we know frequently happened. But the overt sexuality in Dave's couplet is really the most compelling.
In order to rhyme with Virge, he contracts the final verb verbruggen to Børge, meaning budding were shooting forth,
which may reference the girl being on the brink of womanhood, or indeed his own sexually exuberant response to seeing.
Such a bold assertion of his manhood would have been strictly prohibited within slavery and its institutionally ingrained emasculation.
We already know what the enslaver could demand sexual access to any of his female slaves at any time.
But Lewis Clark, an ex slave who successfully reached Canada in 1841,
ruled in his autobiography that seeing the rape of female slaves took its toll on male slaves,
as well as they were unable to protect their mothers, wives and daughters from such atrocities.
Any perceived force against the authority of the master would have been met with unapologetic punishment, beatings, whipping, gagging and worse.
Furthermore, owing to the antagonised relationship between the white mistresses of the House and
the female slaves who were forced to comply with the sexual advances of the master,
male slaves who were known to be the husbands or relatives also suffered arbitrary retribution,
severe punishment, splitting of slave families or even death awaited enslaved men who were even alleged to have had
sexual contact with white women and the children resulting from such unions were suffocated at birth.
Thus, in the eyes of whites,
the sexuality of the enslaved black man was contained to the single purpose of forced reproduction with enslaved black women.
That Dave would write so freely about his experience of attraction, transgressed and deeply such deeply entrenched repressions.
There are other tempting examples of vessel dated the 10th of February of 1840.
What's better than kissing while we both are at fishing or the twenty sixth of August 1840?
Another trick is worse than this. Dearest Miss. Spare me a kiss.
The sweetness of flirtation, even light-hearted, was no doubt experienced by enslaved people.
But we must take this on balance with the ongoing trauma of violation as the main condition of slavery.
Beauty and charm can be suddenly conceived subversions against such bizarre terror.
Finally, the radicality of Dave's writing can be summed up in a single word ponder.
This is the inscription on a vessel attributed to 1858. Ponded Bossidy is a non word pariah, perhaps referring to the word ponderous,
which is something of very great weight, certainly applicable to Dave's impressive clay jars.
The mastery of multisyllabic words was a feature of spelling primers in the 19th century,
and so the word may unto itself stand for the whole project of literacy and its extraordinary importance today.
As an artist, I am tempted to think of it as a clever play on words which Dave frequently did,
including in Pretty Little Girl Jar and in for Mr. John Munday of 1857, swapping the surname Mundey and U.
N d y for the day of week Monday on which Dave made the jar looking for double significance.
Then Ponder Osity brings us tantalisingly near the word ponder meaning to think,
especially to think about something carefully or at length, thus linked full of material and full of meaning.
Ponder Cosseting is the magnet between ceramics and poetry, the animating characteristic of Dave's outstanding artworks.
It is estimated that about three quarters of Dave,
the Potter's vessels are gone or destroyed and the remaining examples outside of music museums face the ravages of time.
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,
Boston. Of course, the original purpose did not demand their historical continuity.
But now we comprehend them as precious. A rare opportunity to meet Dave's mind, to give us an individual's name, a presence,
an index to instruct us about black achievement that has always been present in the history of American art.
Even such under such precarious conditions.
After the end of the civil war, when the sweetness of freedom came to the four million enslaved African-Americans in the South,
we know that Dave remained in Edgefield as a potter. But on the evidence.
There are no more examples of Dave's poetry nor his signature inscribed into jars.
After 1865, although perhaps he didn't need to.