Ceramics

Blank Forms, 2023. Hardcover with embossed jacket, 8.5 x 11 inches

New

Following last year’s presentation of Tori Kudo’s ceramics at our Brooklyn gallery space, Blank Forms publishes the exhibition’s accompanying limited-edition catalog. With images captured on film by musician and photographer Lary 7, Tori Kudo: Ceramics documents the work displayed in the artist’s first exhibition in the United States. Designed by Alec Mapes-Frances and available exclusively at Blank Forms, this hardcover art book features thirty color photographs of the vessels with Kudo’s commentary on their forms and functions.

Ceramics, Tori Kudo says, is a “half-guaranteed chance operation.” Kudo, who once described himself as the “king of error,” regards relinquishing all expectations for his work as the foundation of his artistic output. For the past five decades, he has eschewed any pretense of control in his highly-improvisational music—assembling ragtag groups of untrained musicians to perform as his Maher Shalal Hash Baz ensemble, playing in a series of blink-and-you-miss-them psych-punk and noise bands in the ’70s and ’80s, and, he says, borrowing instruments for gigs from anyone who happens to be near the venue. In many ways, Kudo’s improvisations are controlled chaos, and this modus operandi stems, certainly, from his radical anarchist roots. But it is from this chaos that Kudo finds form, in both his sound and ceramics.