From the October 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
In 1965, Roy Lichtenstein made a series of ‘crockery sculptures’ in collaboration with the ceramicist Ka Kwong Hui. They’re indisputably art objects – crockery castings from commercial moulds, reassembled in precarious stacks – and joyful ones at that. They invoke the mess left behind after a long dinner; they’re bright, emptied, used.
The process of making the sculptures, and the long-standing relationship with Ka Kwong Hui, was generative, and in 1966 Lichtenstein designed a six-piece place setting for Jackson China. An advertisement for the set that appeared in Art in America began, ‘For breakfast after the Happening. Dishes by Roy Lichtenstein.’ It continued, ‘Here’s a limited edition of china dinnerware, designed inside and out in black and white by Roy Lichtenstein. There are only 800 of these signed place settings. Each is individually boxed as a six-piece place setting, and includes one dinner plate, one salad plate, one bread and butter plate, one soup bowl, one cup and saucer, plus a numbered certificate. The dishes cost a great deal. $50 per place setting. Available at the Leo Castelli Gallery, 4 East 77th Street, New York City. Add $2.50 freight charges east of the Mississippi per place setting, and $3.50 west of the Mississippi’. There’s something goading about the wording of the ad – ‘the dishes cost a great deal.’ It’s like they’re daring you to use them.
Advertisement for Roy Lichtenstein’s six-place setting that appeared in Art in America in 1966
If Lichtenstein’s sculptures are art about plates, then these are plates about art. The set teeters precariously on the edge of two worlds: It’s a functional set of dishes, made – ostensibly – to be used. Like ‘normal’ plates, they could be ordered and delivered, but like ‘art’, they are noted for their provenance and expense. Playfully, as ever, Lichtenstein pushed that precarity further: the dinner set is decorated to look like a dinner set. Any of the six items could have been plucked straight out of a comic strip or, of course, one of Lichtenstein’s paintings. They’re functional, three-dimensional objects, designed to look like two-dimensional representations of those objects. A surprisingly elegant reverse trompe l’œil.
At the auction of Picasso ceramics that took place this summer, Christie’s displayed several of the plates as place settings on a laid table. Like Lichtenstein’s advert, it was provoking. ‘If you were rich enough you could,’ the display seemed to say. It also spoke to the defining characteristic of a plate – its potential.
The difference between a painting on a plate versus one on a board or canvas is only, really, its potential for use. But with use comes risk. A plate on a wall or plinth is far less likely to break than a plate on a shelf or table, whose every journey between table and sink could be its last.
In an exhibition called ‘Meander’, which took place at Belmacz, London in 2021, Paul Kindersley displayed a dinner plate on a wooden table. Then he put a lemon on top. Kindersley’s ceramics are fine art objects. They’re not reproductions; they’re handmade. The artist has painted and drawn on them as he would a piece of paper. The introduction of food to the plate (fulfilling its potential; using it for its purpose) in a gallery setting was audacious. Kindersley says that he loves it when people use his work, that he likes making art that’s useful, even if it’s just a way to alleviate the guilt that comes with making more stuff to add to our already stuff-filled world.
An ethical quandary is not the only reason for an artist to turn to the plate. Asger Jorn used his work with ceramics as a way to release himself from the restrictions of high art. Jorn’s plates have an unrestrained immediacy not found in his other work, for the plate does not come with the same expectations as the canvas. And others have enjoyed this freedom too. At one point or another, everyone did plates. Georges Braque did plates. The other CoBrA artists did plates. Tracey Emin, Fernand Léger, Jenny Holzer, Marc Chagall, Salvador Dalí, Henri Matisse, Andy Warhol and Joan Miró all did plates. I could go on.
The six-place setting designed by Roy Lichtenstein in 1966 for Jackson China. Courtesy the International Museum of Dinnerware Design, Promised Gift of Susanne and John Stephenson
Lichtenstein’s fascination with the plate culminated in an edition (of an unknown quantity) of screenprints in which, in three colours, he printed his plate motif (closely resembling the dinnerware) onto paper plates. These are extraordinary ordinary objects: a one-to-one scale representation of a representation of a plate, on a paper plate. A functional (if single use) object made from a traditional fine art material. Crucially, to fulfil its function would be to destroy it.
The thing about wasted potential is that it’s inherently sad. By virtue of being a plate, the plate is asking to be used – it is laboriously dried and glazed and fired so it can be used. But the value and significance of the fine art plate inhibits it. To load your Picasso platter with roasted parsnips, to toss salad in your Jenny Holzer bowl, would be to take too great a risk. So, instead, we mount them and hang them. We close them in cabinets or lock them in safes. We try to eliminate the risk of ruin. In doing so, we ruin the fundamental joy of the plate itself – the joy of hospitality, fulfilled potential and the greatest joy of all, dinner
From the October 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.