Bobby Silverman is an artist-turned-designer, and now owner of Alsio Design based in New York City. Originally trained as a potter in Japan, he has seen a variety of working methods and career paths that brought him to where he is today.
Silverman says that the forms he throws are not directly referencing any particular pot or style in general, but that he is attracted to a certain look of proportion inspired by these traditional Asian vessels. Because of his early training in pottery in Japan, traces of that experience come into his throwing inherently; his forms may not fit into a particular style but techniques he learned lend themselves to having “Asian-like” forms in a general way. As for the coloration of the pieces, Silverman says, “Chinese ceramics is about the whole idea of their ability to create extremely beautiful surfaces and particularly how the rims of the pieces are white. These vessels are definitely a homage to Song Dynasty monochromes and the way they pull away from edge and create a beautiful white line along the rims of the pieces. It is ceramic phenomena for these details to happen.” He also adds that Asian ideas about beauty are evident in his overall belief about what a vessel should be: “The whole philosophy about what is not there is as important as what is there; the fact that it is minimal, clean, elegant and refined.”
I got the opportunity to speak with him over the phone and ask a few questions. I noticed Bobby's work first in a alumni show at the Kansas City Art Institute celebrating 25 years of graduates from their renowned ceramics program. His alluring tiles were on the wall next to an installation by Jesse Small, a favorite contemporary ceramicist currently working in Jindezheng, China. I was interested in the tiles, as well as Asian Ceramics particularly at the time, and Googled Silverman. Not much came up except for a small thumbnail of Beyond Memory, an installation from 2000 using vessel forms, and his website, alsiodesign.com where I could see some obvious Asian influences in his work.
Ceramic phenomena is really what his work is all about. What inspired him most from contemporary Jindezhen ended up not being the vessels in their form and glazing, but tiles. The artist traveled to Jindezhen a few times in the 1990s, and there he saw huge ceramic tiles being produced in the factory that opened up a new possibility in his mind. He saw that large tiles could be a canvas for more expressive work and going beyond the utilitarian use for a tile and make it into fine art. He wanted a vehicle to begin expressing himself in an artistic manner and it also lead him to making commercially available design objects that he is primarily producing now through his company, Alsio Design.
His tile pieces use one or more 24”x24” porcelain tiles with vibrant all-over glazes, with black letters or characters that are obscured by pooling and dripping of the glaze. The tiles feature words or phrases that are partially legible, and at points completely illegible. The actual subject matter was inspired by Persian ceramics dating back to the medieval era. Calligraphic pottery would be commissioned by wealthy patrons that read sayings like “bless this happy home.” However, the potters were normally illiterate and when they were given words and phrases to transcribe, you would end up with pieces that were sometimes legible, partially legible, or completely illegible. Paralleling this idea, Silverman also looked to the Greek poet Sappho whose poems date back to about 600 BC for inspiration. What intrigues him about the poet's writings is that she literally wrote the texts on papyrus, and when these writings were found, due to the nature of disintegration, parts of them were missing. When books of her poems were published, they were essentially edited by nature and process and published “as-is.” Silverman then began his investigation of these ideas of natural processes by personally editing a poem of hers (which had first been “naturally” edited over time), then transcribed it on tiles. He left it in the nature of ceramic material to the edit his poem, specifically through the use of gravity and kiln positioning. He says of his investigations, “It really has to do with ceramic material and the phenomena of ceramics; how the glaze moves and what that can do. It has to do with the history of ceramics. When calligraphers were writing on bricks of buildings and needed to fit in a brick afterwards, or needed to write something extra and would wrap the text around in order to fit the architecture the text would lose its meaning.”
In his art, he is interested in the “space between what is decorative and narrative.” By introducing a language system, whether it be braille, barcode, English text, or morse code, the artist is further restricting the viewer by their possible limited knowledge of language systems.
The separation from meaning on an intellectual level as well as the degradation of the text physically on the tile lends the image itself to be a formal investigation of words, while there is still a remaining curiosity of intellectual meaning. He sometimes brings us back by using English titles alluding to the original idea or concept behind the letters used on the tiles, but it could make it even more obscure as to what the purpose of the writing was in the first place whether it be intellectual or formal. “The piece could be a poem with a particular yellow, and the title would be a quote about yellow by van Gogh. There is some sort of text in the title related to what you see in the image. The text relates to the object itself.” Especially with the tiles that say “yellow” on a yellow tile, or “red” on a red tile, is compounding modes of expression alluding to formal qualities of the work. In his Proposal for the MTA, where there is an installation of hundreds of tiles, Silverman says they feature “Morse Code Translations of the 160+ nationalities that live in Queens and the floor is made of Braille translated stories of various immigrants stories of coming to America.” In this piece again there is a strong formal presentation in the copper red glaze and the beautiful striations of the black glazing, but there is actual meaning that is embedded in the conception of the pieces that is important in complimenting the architectural space.
Concluding that the tiles muse be mass-produced based on their uniformity and availability on the artist's website, I was questioning the importance of the mass-produced tile to the concept of the degradation of words in Silverman's work (similar to the idea of copying one image over and over that is begins to lose clarity and integrity). Mass production of vessels and decorative objects lowers the standard for functional ceramic pieces in general as far as quality (handmade is considered more appreciated) and what a large audience is expecting out of their intimately used objects. By using mass-produced tiles, is Silverman making a statement about the function of mass-production in a fine art sense, similar to how he used the traditionally craft-oriented vessel in a gallery installation in Beyond Memory? Silverman says about tiles “the most non-art object you could imagine” but taking that and making it into art was simply utilizing a vehicle. When I asked him about what mass production meant to him, he said that he had tried time and time again to achieve the same result that the factory in Jindezhen was achieving in regard to producing large-scale porcelain tiles. Due to the nature of porcelain and the associated shrinkage rate and propensity to warp in the kiln, he was unable to make a satisfactory tile and ended up ordering them in bulk from a manufacturer south of Jindezhen. Now his tile pieces are all mass-produced tiles underneath his individualistic and artistic glazing. “Really does have much more to do with the ease of working than the concept.”
Silverman has forged a successful business through that provides commercial tiles for consumers, as well as markets his own fine-art. Using techniques that combine the two makes it satisfying both financially and creatively I'm sure
-Maret Miller
