Anders Herwald Ruhwald

Anders Herwald Ruhwald: Mining Histories, Waking Dreams

Shelley Selim

Off the southwestern bank of Inle Lake in central Myanmar there is a complex of Buddhist pagodas built between the 15^th and 18^th centuries. They are in various states of restoration and ruin: Many of the Nyaung Ohak stupas—the grouping closest to the village of Inthein—rise like timber from dense brush, their crumbling stone and stucco walls throttled by vines. They have soaring spires, many of which are pierced through by the crowns of the trees that grow within them. They are beautiful.

A photograph of one of these stupas hung on the wall of Anders Herwald Ruhwald’s Chicago studio when I visited him on March 13, 2020, one day before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down travel and businesses across the United States. The image was one of many affixed to the wall in thoughtful clusters: ceramics by Axel Salto, engravings from Ennemond Alexandre Petitot’s Suite des Vases, the Venus of Dolní Věstonice, Cochiti Pueblo effigy vessels, Carlo Bugatti’s Cobra Chair, a John Stezaker collage. The vast history of art, architecture, and design is a constant presence in Ruhwald’s practice—whether a shape, a formal relationship, or a specific place, disparate narratives and objects occupy his mind in a very transmutative way where one concept begets another, usually at the same time he throws, coils, and treads through the clay with his hands. It is an abstract process that develops in tandem with the corporeal act of building concrete things.

THE NATURAL WORLD

These particular images informed the 2020 exhibition Anders Ruhwald: Century Garden, a group of ten newly commissioned ceramic sculptures that populated the historic gardens at Newfields, the campus that surrounds the Indianapolis Museum of Art. It was mounted on the centennial of the formal landscape designed by Percival Gallagher, who was hired by Jessie and Hugh McKennan Landon to plan the gardens of their private estate. After changing ownership to the Josiah K. Lilly, Jr. family in 1932, the property was donated to the Indianapolis Museum of Art in 1967 to be used as the site of its new museum building. Ruhwald likens walking through a historic landscape or a period home to “inhabiting a realized dream of another person who’s no longer there. What are these deeply personal architectural forms and how do they continue to exist?”[1] In the Newfields gardens, Ruhwald observed “dreams coming to fulfilment, trees being fully grown, the garden being highly functional…It feels exactly as the family would have intended it.”

Century Garden was an intervention of dissonances, Ruhwald’s approach to “inserting noise in the garden’s rigid systems.” The monumental sculptures—varying in height between three and six feet—stood enigmatic and amorphous, bathed in unctuous, kaleidoscopic glazes. He collaborated with the Newfields horticulture staff to situate the artworks within staged botanical vignettes that framed and augmented them, producing flashes of color that disrupted the otherwise staid, manicured grounds. Their jarring presence highlighted the intentionality of the garden’s carefully maintained historic design and aroused questions of how a landscape might evolve as its purpose changes from a presentation of genteel prestige to a site of public recreation.

Ruhwald has developed site-specific installations in historic homes for nearly a decade, but this was his first entirely outdoor exhibition. It prompted him to consider the natural world, a time-honored source of inspiration for artists of all cultures and eras. One such artist was Axel Salto, the Danish ceramicist Ruhwald has long admired. Salto is best known for his vases in the self-described “budding” and “sprouting” style, and was undoubtedly influenced by French philosopher Henri Bergson’s theory of the élan vital, or vital impulse, an inherent life force that unified all organisms and fueled growth, evolution, and creativity.[2] Many artists saw Bergson’s theory as a unifying spiritual connection between humans and nature and attempted to capture that energy in their work. Salto’s own creative philosophy spoke to this idea: “It is of greater importance for an artist to create in the spirit of nature than to imitate its exterior.”[3]

Ruhwald approached Century Garden with this in mind, and the exhibition proposed a profound integration between humans, the built environment, and the natural world. In his studio, these sculptures were at once holistic artworks and still inchoate. Once placed within the garden, however, they naturally assimilated with their environs. Throughout the exhibition’s five-month run, surrounding blossoms and foliage unfolded, transforming the sculptures into overgrown relics, like shrines to long forgotten gods of nature. Many of the sculptures functioned as planters, and birds built nests in the soil of their containers.

The artworks were executed at human scale, all bearing the traces of Ruhwald’s fingers and palms as shadows of his process; a transference of his energy to the clay. One grouping, Objects for a Body (A Proposal for Reintegration), doubled as a set of chairs, the “proposed reintegration” being the introduction of humans into the sculptural composition which was itself contained within a cultivated natural landscape. Index (Person) #2 and (Child) was a parent and child figure, relating to the formal experience of human subjectivity. They emerged from a pool of water representing the kernel of life. Ruhwald observed the way his own children moved through the world, assigning human personalities to natural objects and sculptures, flowing freely through the boundaries of reality, imagination, and dreams.

THE INTERIOR

In 2014, Ruhwald purchased a three-story apartment building in Detroit. Over the course of the next five years, he transformed the interiors of one apartment into a permanent art installation. Unit 1: 3583 Dubois is a surreal progression of seven charred and lead-blackened rooms, furnished with abandoned detritus and artworks of his own creation. In the hallway, hundreds of salvaged iron window weights hang suspended from the ceiling. It leads to an austere ceramic sculpture standing centered in an octagonal cell, radiating heat. The whole bathroom is caked in a thin layer of petcoke crystals. The floor of another room clad entirely in black tile slopes upward in an unsettling forced perspective redolent of Dr. Caligari’s spectacle. In the library, the final chamber in the progression, five giant egg-shaped ceramic forms commune together, as if grasping for the sliver of sunlight that slips through a solitary window. Their presence is indecipherable; the sensation of weaving between them feels like science fiction incarnate.

The building was filled with the prior occupant’s personal possessions when ownership was transferred to Ruhwald. He catalogued objects that felt meaningful, but surviving relatives weren’t interested in taking them. He kept one item: a framed photograph of Diamond Head on the Hawaiian Island of O’ahu that now hangs in the front entryway. It is dated February 6, 1941, and Ruhwald posits that it was likely taken by a military serviceman who was stationed at Pearl Harbor.

If a period home is a site carefully maintained and conserved by virtue of its owner’s perceived significance, then Unit 1: 3583 Dubois honors the countless extraordinary memories left behind by ordinary people. They manifest in the abandoned houses dispersed throughout a city blighted by years of mass exodus and economic decline. His installation is not a glorification of the “ruin porn” that characterized Detroit after 2008, but a mournful recognition of the city’s industry and the citizens whose municipal systems had failed them. It is also a hopeful tribute to its recovery. The charred walls and heated sculptures recall empty buildings consumed by fire. Lead was used extensively as a sealant in the city’s automotive plants. In southwestern Detroit, petcoke billowed in clouds of black dust for years, wafting from an uncovered pit used to store the material by Marathon Petroleum. Unit 1’s materiality embodies the fabric of its city, and it stands as an offering of residence for the phantom dreams and memories of its denizens.

Ruhwald’s first interrogation of the domestic interior was six years earlier, in 2013’s The Anatomy of a Home. It was staged at Saarinen House, the residence Eliel Saarinen designed for himself and his family on the campus of Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Saarinen, an established architect in Finland and recent émigré to the United States, was hired by Cranbrook’s founder George Booth in 1925 to design the educational community’s campus. He would spend the rest of his life living and working there, eventually heading the school’s architecture department, becoming president of the Art Academy, and maintaining his own private practice.

Saarinen House was completed in 1930 and is an Art Deco Gesamtkunstverk, combining modernism’s clean lines with the folk traditions of Saarinen’s Scandinavian heritage. Rich with the textures of rugs designed by his wife Loja, handcrafted furniture inlaid with exotic woods, and analogous color schemes that transition from warm to cool, it is a vessel preserving Saarinen’s creative vision and a space primed for conceptual fantasy. Ruhwald situated original artworks throughout the house as an investigation of the period home as a concept, as well as the lives and family dynamics that ensued within its walls.

The most complicated relationship was undoubtedly that of father and son. Eero Saarinen, whose renown as an architect would ultimately eclipse that of his father, worked for Eliel’s firm for over a decade, and later remarked, “A better name for architect is form-giver and until his death in 1950, when I started to create my own form, I worked within the form of my father.”[4] In Anatomy of a Home,that sentiment was typified in Ruhwald’s Lamp (Gottleib’s Gaze). The rigid table light cast a stark glow directly onto a melting, ambiguous base that epitomized the younger Saarinen’s affinity for the biomorphic. Ruhwald channeled Salto’s budding style in the master bath’s The School of the Flower to capture Eero’s stifled energy—an elongated, nebulous body strained with combustible anticipation. It stood on two metal bases modeled after the Jetson Chair by Swedish furniture designer Bruno Mathsson, who himself was trained by his father, cabinet maker Karl Mathsson. In the studio, The Flight of the Crane—a woven textile and ceramic pairing that was created collaboratively between Ruhwald and his mother—further emphasized the generational relationship imparted through craft.

Bowl (For a Timeless House) stood centered on the dining room table, its seemingly liquified glaze dripping up towards the heavens as if suspended in motion. It was an evocation of a house painstakingly restored to be frozen in time; an enduring temple for its owners, their dreams, and the elusive memories that cannot be contained.

THE VESSEL

I have a fading memory of late autumn in 2013, when I met with Ruhwald in the ceramics storage vault of Cranbrook Art Museum’s Collections Wing. Cranbrook carries a prominent legacy in modern and contemporary ceramics, and its holdings are impressive. Dozens of significant works by former Artists in Residence such as Maija Grotell, Toshiko Takaezu, Jun Kaneko, and Richard DeVore mingle on towering shelves among hundreds of other artworks by former students, established artists, and masters of twentieth-century clay. I was a curatorial fellow at the time; Ruhwald was the head of the ceramics department at the Art Academy. The museum had recently been gifted a vase by Carl-Harry Stålhane, and I wanted Ruhwald’s opinion. It was demure—less than seven inches high—but had the distinctive yawning mouth Stålhane espoused during his early years as a stoneware designer at Rörstrand. Vertical ridges accentuated its swelling form, and Ruhwald was captivated by the glaze. The mottled, crystalline pattern was a technically demanding effect, and over the grooved surface it evoked the periostracum of a tulip shell.

This meeting instigated a years-long obsession for Ruhwald, who until that point was unfamiliar with Stålhane. He began voraciously researching his oeuvre and slowly amassing a collection of small production pieces. Ruhwald adopted Stålhane’s habit of pulling from a limited index of basic form archetypes to experiment with complex glazes, which eventually culminated in the Glasur Stykker series. Ruhwald approaches this project as a “venue of possibility,” a way for him to test the formidable and often ungovernable process of developing glaze formulas that inform his larger conceptual works.

For Ruhwald, Glasur Stykker is more of an exploration than an approach to a preconceived final product; each piece operates as an automatic drawing that opens new material and theoretical possibilities. In a contemporary art market that grows increasingly saturated by multidisciplinary artists dabbling in ceramics, Ruhwald feels drawn to surveying the techniques that require a substantial command of the medium. He has now spent nearly two decades traversing the annals of art history; conjuring collective, individual, and imagined dreams and memories; transgressing the boundaries between craft, design, and conceptual art. It is fitting that to expand new avenues of his practice he has now returned to every potter’s paradigm—the vessel.

[2] See Duncan Macmillan, “The Force that Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower,” in Axel Salto: Master of Stoneware, eds. Susanne Bruhn and Pia Wirnfeldt (Middelfart: Clay Museum of Ceramic Art, 2017), 45 – 52.

[3] Axel Salto, Den Spirende Stil (Copenhagen: 1949), 58, quoted in Ibid, 47.

[4] Eero Saarinen, quoted in Aline B. Louchheim, “Now Saarinen the Son,” New York Times, April 26, 1953.