Quotations from: Mathieu, Paul. “Object Theory.” In The Ceramics Reader, edited by Andrew Livingstone & Kevin Petrie, 268-76. London: Bloomsbury, 2017.

Object making is probably the oldest making activity of humankind and we can speculate that it preceded the development of language and the making of images. (268)

Yet the history of art is still largely the history of images, of things that are visually experienced, or visual art. Objects are quite simply ignored. (268)

An image, in the narrow yet specific definition I am using here, is a cultural (as opposed to natural) phenomenon experienced through sight alone, visually. A painting is an image, a photograph is an image, a sculpture is also an image, a tridimensional image but an image nonetheless. (269)

In the world of material/visual culture (all those things humans do to nature), there is another category of things that are not experienced solely through sight, visually, and which do not necessarily necessitate language either, but which require other senses, primarily but not exclusively touch, for a complete experience and full understanding. These things are what I call here “objects.” (169)

If there is a remaining place where ignorance, prejudice, discrimination, segregation and censorship still exist within the experience of art, it is specifically where handmade objects are concerned, and although this is slowly changing but there is still a significant way to go for parity. (269)

This visual experience is one of distanciation, of removal, of separation. Sight establishes difference as rupture, as an oppression. This is even more truth within representation. (270)

Objects are of two main types: TOOLS, which are active (the conceptual aspect of tools is function) and CONTAINERS, which are receptive (the conceptual aspect of containers is containment; that is to say, they establish a transition between interior and exterior, but it is important to keep in mind that this transition does not imply an opposition but a continuity). (270)

What is the main characteristic shared by all objects (with the exception of those objects which are primarily tools) in whatever form they take, independent of materials, of the process, tools, equipment and technologies used in their making, or even when and by whom they where [sic] made? My answer is that at the CONCEPTUAL level, all objects are CONTAINERS. They are articulated around the transition between exterior and interior. Containment has to do with the relationship between the object and its environment. Containment bridges an object with its environment. (270-71)

Objects are always inherently material, inherently abstract and inherently conceptual and these three aspects are equally important and thus, they resist hierarchisation conceptually, beyond market value and consumerism. Of all material practices, ceramics is the most intimately informed by this theoretical and conceptual framework, in its conflation of a volumetric form with a distinct surface. (271)

Here again ceramics is particularly sensitive to this relation to time, in its amazing permanency as possibly the best archival material ever devised, as the memory of humankind. (274)

Handmade objects contest the contemporary and void the apparent cultural consensus. In handmade objects we find the last traces of what we use to call “work” (beyond agriculture, yet for reasons as vital as producing food) and the last place where effort in use still exists, non-mechanical and non-mediated. And the last place where contestation and subversion is still possible in the cultural sphere. To make an object by hand is a profoundly political act. (275)

[Objects] imply a complexity that exists beyond language and beyond theory, this beyond the reach of those who are confined by language and by theory. Images are complicated, they need to be explained, to be fictionalized and they are thus the privileged domain of theory. Objects are much less complicated but much more complex. And this complexity resists language and resists theory. Yet a theory of objects, and object theory remains essential if we are to reexamine and reevaluate , reassess and reposition the important role played by objects within culture. (275)