Land Art: David Shaner

Namita Gupta Wiggers

“Great things are done when men and mountains meet.”
— William Blake

“Some people like to climb mountains. I like to walk through meadows of wildflowers.”
— David Shaner

“What is there about this mundane material that makes us want to build monuments”
— David Shaner note on card, unattributed

Earthworks, also known as the Land Art Movement, describes works from the late 1960s and 1970s by such artists as Michael Heizer, Walter de Maria and Robert Smithson in which art and the landscape are inextricably intertwined. Typically located in remote natural settings, such works are simultaneously monumental and ephemeral, experiential rather than collectible, and best known through photographs. Interest in Land Art has flourished in recent years, as evidenced by an increasing number of pilgrimages to Earthworks sites, exhibitions revisiting and redefining Land Arts, scholarly research and publications and interdisciplinary curricular programs.¹ Such projects continue to expand the scope of what is considered Land Arts today, clearing space to reconsider craft as part of a broader cultural conversation about the landscape as a space where humans and nature meet. It is in this clearing that Land Art: David Shaner aims to generate dialogue about how we might consider the relationship between contemporary craft and Land Arts today.

To juxtapose the work of David Shaner and that of Earthworks artists may seem a surprising study in contrasts. Whereas Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), for example, is a grand, sweeping and theatrical gesture, David Shaner’s ceramic works offers the viewer a smaller, quieter yet equally contemplative experience. Shaner’s Garden Slab (1964, Collection of the Museum of Contemporary Craft) is a sensual, personal and physical response to Glen Canyon, Utah: a harsh, dry landscape spotted by tranquil pools. Created during his tenure as resident director of the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts, Helena, Montana, Shaner shaped his materials in Garden Slab to convey the mass and heaviness of this landscape, using puddles of glaze as liquid relief. While Smithson, one of the more vocal of the Earthworks artists, “directly opposed himself to craft, and instead sought to operate at the scale of industry,”² notes Glenn Adamson, Shaner, on the other hand, was an object maker who deliberately worked within a ceramics tradition and at a domestic scale. In other words, Shaner’s practice appears to be precisely the kind of artistic tradition against which Smithson positioned his own work within the context of Earthworks as the movement of a particular group of artists is understood. However, within the more recent frameworks of new land-based practices, both approaches to the land through art may be simultaneously engaged as examples of a range of types of Land Arts in contemporary practice, creating a space where those working through craft may not be examined in new cultural contexts.

For avant garde artists of the sixties and seventies, the American West offered great expanses of inexpensive land, remote locations where one could mark into or “draw” onto the land without reproach from the New York art scene. Working in such sparsely populated Western locations, Earthworks artists extended painting through heroic, expressionistic gouges into the landscape, as well as sculptural explorations involving “massive terrestrial rearrangements.”³ Creating monumental and mythic works in their own right, Earthworks artists engaged a long history of visions of the “Landscape of the American West,” including work by painters such as Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran, and photographers such as Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. Furthermore, as Suzaan Boettger notes, “In mid-century popular culture, the desert was particularly associated with western movies, many of which began with a sweeping landscape.”⁴ Between the grandeur of the imagined frontier and the bravado of the cowboy braving the harsh desert terrain, Earthworks artists countered urbanity through bold, physical and conceptual moves.⁵ As Boettger argues, Michael Heizer linked “Pollock’s rural western-bred bravado, which Heizer brought into the sixties and returned to the West. With his California background, excavation experience, and taciturn cowboy mien, Heizer epitomized the avant-garde sculptor as western dirt-slinger.”⁶

Shaner, however, did not place himself with this avant garde art movement, or within the confines of art history as defined by European traditions.⁷ Perhaps more in sync with the prevailing counterculture of the San Francisco Bay area immersed in “environmental politics and cultural identification with the land,”⁸ Shaner’s reasons for living on sixty acres in Big Fork Montana near Glacier National Park followed another quintessentially American approach to the land. As he explains, “I left the East Coast purposely wanting to leave all that tradition behind, as Thoreau said, I went into the woods to see what life had to teach, not come to die and realize I hadn’t lived. And so I wanted to come out here and sense all of this, and get away from all that tradition and that approach to art, I guess. I mean, I love the Renaissance paintings, and when I go to cities I love going to art museums, but I began to look at that sort of thing as being kind of dead, and I was more interested in an art form which would be more personal to me and the time in which I lived.”⁹ Clearly distancing himself from both the “left” of his day and the weight of longstanding art traditions, Shaner also did not follow concurrent prevailing ceramic trends in the 1960s and 1970s of creating Japanese-influenced ceramics,¹⁰ executing expressionistic performances in the style of Peter Voulkos and his followers,”¹¹ or creating pop-culture puns like West Coast Funk artists Robert Arneson or Howard Kottler. Shaner is described by Jenni Sorkin as working “amid a peer group of potters who, like himself, came from elsewhere and settled in the West, adopting its quiet, rugged ethos through a back-to-the-land lifestyle embodied by huge parcels of property, hand-built wood kilns, and a distaste for university-based ceramics programmes, getting on by sales and personal grit.”¹² Hardly utopian, Shaner chose to live in a pastoral and bucolic, challenging and rigorous setting that enabled individualism and the chance to inhabit the Western landscape on his own terms.¹³

For Shaner, art, life and the environment were inextricably intertwined. Drawing from the Shaner Family Collection, the collections of Catherine and Mike Gilbert, Patty Canaris and the Museum, works on view in Land Art: David Shaner were selected specifically to bring attention to the range of ways in which Shaner used ceramics to express a symbiotic relationship and personal response to the landscape in which he lived and worked. Some works, such as several Garden Slabs were chosen because, as Janet Koplos has eloquently described, each piece “so compellingly speaks of the earth that one might forget that someone made it.”¹⁴ Others were chosen as examples of works reminiscent of pyramid shapes, piles or the patterns of crop circles in the landscape that inspired Earthworks artists.¹⁵ Classic ceramic slab forms show surfaces that recall twisted ribbons of a river viewed from above; layers of mountains bathed in shades of hazy purple and pink, or crackled glazes that evoke water-starved earth. Shaner’s last series before his death in 2002, Cirques, show how nature provided inspiration that resulted in work that was referential, but not derivative. Based on a term which describes where “a mountain range forms into a lake,” Shaner explains, “I never had any particular mountain range in mind; I just had all the mountains in mind when I made them.”¹⁶ Last, but not least, are the ceramic rocks mixed in piles with actual river rocks that embellish the fireplace hearth and other places in the Shaner home, mixing collections from nature with objects inspired by nature.

The exhibition is designed to mimic the scale and proportions of a home, calling attention to the domestic scale of the work and “David Shaner’s worldview; a life so intertwined and assimilated with the natural world that the boundary between the two disappeared.”¹⁷ For an artist who deliberately worked in a realm somewhere between the street fair potter and the artist making work for the gallery-driven art market, displaying the work in a typical white cube format seemed counter to Shaner’s personal approach. Rather than display the work on pedestals, this mixture of functional and sculptural ceramics are installed on functional furniture by Sam Maloof from the Museum’s collection, as well as open box shelves made to match those in the Shaner home. The Museum’s glass cases are installed to echo a fireplace mantel flanked by “built-in” shelving as one might find in early twentieth century bungalow homes.

A keen observer of nature and ideas, further glimpses into Shaner’s philosophical outlook are available in a study area. Here, selections from hundreds of photos taken by Shaner throughout the years reveal some of the textures, forms, and surface patterns which captured his imagination and later revealed themselves through his use of clay and glazes. These photographic prints are from slides Shaner used in lectures and workshops, explained Ann Shaner, David’s widow. Rarely printed, the images were captured with his camera, processed, and then put away. In other words, the act of photographing sufficed as the internal shorthand necessary for Shaner to translate the image into an object.¹⁸ Last, but not least, is a small selection of note cards from a stack several inches high on which Shaner wrote notes for decades—unattributed quotes, personal notes and observations which reveal his philosophical approach to the relationship between nature and his work.

As Land Art shifts from a focus on “ ‘bad boys with big bulldozers’ to a much broader contextual approach of examining our past, present and future relationship with the environment.,”¹⁹ the space to consider how craft engages broader cultural interests alongside other art forms continues to widen. As explored in the most recent issue of Art Lies, “The Back Forty,” editor Anjali Gupta and guest editor Chris Sauter focus on how critical examination of the intersection of man and nature might, today, be different from “a nostalgic return to the pastoral—far from it, in fact. It is a re-siting of points of creative genesis in response to an uncertain world, a smudging of the line between center and periphery that suggests territories need not be conquered in order to be understood.”²⁰ It is here that Shaner, who preferred to walk amongst rather than to move mountains can be examined, connecting a ceramic continuum to the Land Arts of contemporary times.

Namita Gupta Wiggers, curator
Museum of Contemporary Craft in partnership with
Pacific Northwest College of Art

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1. From the packed-to-the-doors “Land Use in Contemporary Art” panel at College Art Association, Los Angeles, 2008 chaired by Kirsten Swenson, University of Nevada to the six-month-long LAND ARTS/New Mexico project, Bill Gilbert and Chris Taylor’s “Land Arts of the American West” programs, to personal pilgrimages to Earthworks sites documented in Spiral Jetta by Erin Hogan, interest in Land Arts prevails today.

2. Adamson, Glenn. Thinking through Craft, London: Berg Publishers, 2007, p. 134.

3. Boettger, Suzaan. Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002, p. 103.

4. Ibid, p. 110.

5. Ibid, p 110.

6. Ibid, 109-110.

7. Oral history interview with David Shaner, 17 June 2001, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

8. Boettger, p. 108.

9. Oral history interview with David Shaner, 2001 June 17, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

10. Oral history interview with David Shaner, 17 June 2001, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Shaner: I could have gone to Japan if I’d really wanted to, but I noticed early on that with a potter [that] goes to Japan, two things seem to happen: either he makes Japanese pots after that, or he quite making pots at all. And so I was always in tune to nature and simple things, and subtleties, and I thought, if I go to Japan I’m going to get more of that, and so I never really put it on top of my list to go to Japan like I did to Peru.

11. Troy, Jack in “David Shaner: A Quest Worth Sharing,” http://www.jacktroy.net/writer/essays.html

12. Sorkin, Jenni, “David Shaner,” http://www.frieze.com/shows/review/david_shaner

13. Adamson, p. 105-6

14. Koplos, Janet writing about Garden Slab (1964, Collection of the Archie Bray Foundation, not on view) in 2001, as quoted in Peter Held, Following the Rhythms of Life: The Ceramic Art of David Shaner, Phoenix, AZ: Ceramic Research Center, Arizona State University Art Museum, p. 34.

15. See Boettger, “The Motif of the Pile,” Earthworks: Art and Landscape of the Sixties, p. 136-147.

16. Oral history interview with David Shaner, 2001 June 17, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

17. Held, p.9.

18. Discussions between Ann Shaner and Namita Wiggers, Shaner Family Home, Missoula, Montana, December 8-9, 2009.

19. The Evolving Genre of Land Art in New Mexico, http://www.collectorsguide.com/fa/fa128.shtml

20. Gupta, Anjali, “Editorial Statement,”Art Lies, Issue 56, http://artlies.org/issue.php?issue=65&s=0&p=statement

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Bibliography

Adamson, Glenn, Thinking through Craft. London: Berg Publishers, 2007
Beardsley, John. Earthworks and Beyond: Contemporary Art in the Landscape. New York: Abbeville Press, 2006
Boettger, Suzann. Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004.
Gilbert, Bill and Chris Taylor. Land Arts of the American West. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2009.
Gupta, Anjali and Chris Sauter, ArtLies, Issue 65 (Spring 2010), http://www.artlies.org.
LAND ART/New Mexico website, http://www.landartnm.org.
Oral history interview with David Shaner, 2001 June 17, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Nanette L. Laitman Documentation Project For Craft and Decorative Arts in America, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/oralhistories/transcripts/shaner01.htm.
Jenni Sorkin, “David Shaner,” (22/09/07), http://www.frieze.com/shows/review/david_shaner.

The Blunt Camaraderie in a Dry Land

Daniel Duford

“You know also that the western landscape is more than topography and landforms, dirt and rock. It is, most fundamentally, climate—climate which expresses itself not only as landforms but as atmosphere, flora, fauna. And here, despite all the local variety, there is a large, abiding simplicity.”
—Wallace Stegner from Thoughts in a Dry Land

Take a look at this platter. It is simultaneously soft and hard, bone dry with a single puddle of green glaze—a residual lake. The platter appears formed by natural caprice, the artist’s deep intention masked by a seeming disregard for ornament and skill. It is nakedly itself—a slab formed of vitreous earth and fire and melted silicates—like a chunky tablet of sandstone streaked with wind. It is a platter by the late potter David Shaner. It is important to use that term, potter, because that is what he called himself. Potters are small time industrialists who create vessels of domesticity. Shaner made a living making pots from his rural Montana home. His pots were simple affairs, stripped to their essentials. These vessels have a monk-like workmanship. They reflect someone who meditates on the transcendent through material manipulation. His pots are the highest example of a particularly American strain of ceramics: a homesteader’s pragmatic materiality meets Modernist design (via Abstract Expressionism), filtered through Japanese Zen aesthetics.

Shaner was one of many American seekers and pioneers that headed west in the late fifties and early sixties. These travelers (including followers of the “back-to-the-land” movement, the Beats, seekers of Buddhist philosophy, etc.) had many different reasons for casting off the yokes of conformity to East Coast ideals. Mostly they share a utopian desire to reinvent their own lives. The westward trail was still warm from the previous batch of Manifest Destiny-driven homesteaders. The arid and intermontane region of the Western continental United States could still be a place to start over. Shaner came from the East Coast via Illinois in 1964 to direct the Archie Bray Foundation in Helena, Montana, but he also came for something deeper—a potter’s life.

Anyone who has absorbed the writings of Bernard Leach, Michael Cardew and Soetsu Yanagi know the call to the “ethical” life of a craftsman. An unexamined assumption that threads through “Twentieth Century Ceramic History” (from Vivika and Otto Heino and Glen Lukens, to the faculty at Alfred University who helped shape Shaner and all the way up to our present day) is that living a semi-rural life making pots is in some way an antidote of resistance to the machine-driven present. What does this ethical life look like? It is a life spent in quiet work, meditating on material and process and community. It is subscription to the belief that it is better to work in a workshop rather than a studio—a perspective that studios are for urban and suburban artists. A workshop suggests daily work akin to a farmer or a rancher. Work and life are merged. Shaner exemplified this life; humility guided him. As a young ceramist I wanted desperately to live this kind of life. I made my own western exodus to New Mexico in the early nineties following a vague trail of freedom and possibility. Doubt derailed me.

In the late sixties, another group headed to the dry regions of the West, the so-called Land Artists.¹ While the potter makes small moves, allowing the slow accretion of material knowledge to flow over a lifetime, a Land Artist worked monumentally and quickly. The two groups would seem to have nothing to do with each other. One reason may be that the retrograde romanticism of the American Craft Movement was at odds with the hard-nosed theory of the Land Artists. Another reason for this seemingly mutual disregard is that the twentieth-century studio craft movement was founded on a position of resistance to the mainstream art world. Robert Smithson himself wrote of the dislocation of craft and the fall of the studio in favor of an expanded artistic practice.²

Take another look, however. David Shaner shared a material formalism with Michael Heizer and Carl Andre. The same philosophical crumb trail that led the Minimalists out of the bourgeois Modernist studio into industrially-produced outdoor sculpture was picked up by Land Artists out West to use the landscape as material and site. This crumb trail was made from the dried loaves of twentieth-century socialism, French theory and atomic horror. This pathway also led to the doorsteps of many potters, albeit with very different intentions. The conventional gallery, in other words, proved stifling and complicit. Shaner’s work alluded to a romanticized American landscape tradition via his titles, but his forms were all object. The pots and sculptures are distilled and physical, these are no mere depictions of landscapes but things to be regarded bodily.

Besides that formal rigor, let’s return to the question of time. The potter’s time is not only the slow, daily practice of making, but also the geologic. The black and wood-scarred forms that Shaner produced in the last two decades of his life were both signifiers and a product of geologic process. Potters work with the crust of the earth, with eroded and flattened eons compressed into ball clay and kaolin. Molten heat vitrifies those minerals in the mini volcanoes of kilns.

In contrast, Robert Smithson wanted to take the artwork out of the realm of the historical and place it into the glacial mind. Spiral Jetty (1970) and Spiral Hill, Broken Circle (1971) exist to show us not human history, but the bone memories of our bodies and the memories embedded in inert rock. Smithson insisted on the use of blunt tools—shovels, explosives, earth diggers—the mode of the contractor. He reveled in destruction as a kind of honest relationship to the land. The hole and the pile were evidence of potential.

Shaner and Smithson would not have been easy friends. Shaner drew inspiration from the landscape around his home, from regularly photographing rock formations and plants. The morphology of the bare-knuckle landscape re-emerges in the spirit of his pots. Most likely he would have taken issue with Smithson’s urge to dig and move earth. But ceramics are not a simple and gentle craft. The craft potter is merely working on the more primal end of the industrial spectrum. The harnessing of fire to chemically alter dumb earth contains within it the Promethean seed of all human technology. As a field, ceramics (if you include all of its applications) is as blunt and industrial as Smithson’s list of tools. There is nothing innocent about it. Smithson tried to create a complex dialectic between culture and nature. He was allergic to Victorian notions of anthropomorphized nature. And by making objects, objects that contain a solidity and thusness, Shaner in his own way created a similar dialogue.

So here we must return to the platter. When I moved from New England to New Mexico in 1991, I hoped to create an idyllic and idealized life. Absorbed by the high desert and dry mountains, I hoped to return to some essential way of living. Unfortunately, I am agnostic by nature. Or put differently, I believe deeply only after lots of questioning and internal strife. Even then, the belief needs to be scrappy enough to fend off my monkey mind. At one time David Shaner represented an aspect of the life I sought. I found Smithson instead. In all Smithson’s unresolved and pithy dialectics, I discovered a different model. I abandoned the dream of the potter’s life as limiting and naïve. But there is this platter, this hunk, this object, that won’t lie quiet. Because the platter is many things at once—a simple plate, a dialogue with the land, an artifact of a meditative life. It was born of dry land. Its abiding simplicity is a complex distillation. It is a proposal, a reminder that you must show up everyday. You must be quiet. You must listen.

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Daniel Duford is an artist and writer living in Portland, Oregon. He teaches at Pacific Northwest College of Art.

1. I should note here that “Land Artists” is a bit of a misnomer. The artists generally spoken of in this category, namely Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, Michael Hiezer, Robert Morris, Carl Andre et al. just happened to be working with similar ideas concurrently yet independently of one another. As these things go, they found and encouraged each other over time. It was not a conscious movement.

2. Smithson, Robert. “A Sedimentation of the Mind”, Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

Bibliography

Smithson, Robert. Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

Stegner, Wallace Earle. Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West. Modern Library pbk. ed. New York: Modern Library, 2002.