Theaster Gates: A Clay Sermon, Whitechapel, review: incoherent and intellectually undaring

If you’re not familiar with the name of the black American artist, Theaster Gates, you will be soon. The 48-year-old from Chicago is embarking on a project called “The Question of Clay”, the scope of which is pretty much unrivalled in recent memory.

It’s being staged over the next year across four London venues: the Whitechapel Gallery; the V&A; White Cube gallery; and the Serpentine, for which Gates will design its annual architecture Pavilion in 2022. Not all the details have been revealed yet, but – as the title suggests – what will unite the project’s parts is the inspiration of clay.

In this, Gates is returning to his roots, having started out his career as a potter. (He’s best known as an artist-activist, helping transform run-down areas of his home city’s South Side neighbourhood into busy, cultural spaces.)

“The Question of Clay” launches this week with an exhibition of more than 100 works at the Whitechapel: 66 made by Gates and 46 selected by him from international collections. From the V&A, he has borrowed two pieces that make for intriguing viewing side by side. One is a medallion made by Wedgwood in 1787, in support of the abolition of slavery. Depicting a black man on his knees, in chains, it bears the inscription “Am I not a man and a brother?”

The second work – made by another Staffordshire pottery firm soon afterwards – is a tobacco jar in the form of a grinning, black servant-boy polishing a boot. Such jars were once highly popular, and Gates’s juxtaposition of the two pieces confirms – if it needed confirming – that racial attitudes have never been straightforward.

Sadly, it’s hard to find connections between many of the other ceramics and sculptures on show. Apart from the base material of clay, that is – and potters have been working clay across the world for millennia, so that’s hardly any kind of focus. One can’t help but think that Gates erred by including works by so many other ceramicists: ranging from a Western Han dynasty storage jar (from 1st or 2nd Century BC China) to an Abstract Expressionist sculpture by the 20th-Century American, Peter Voulkos.

To be fair, many of Gates’s own pieces are engaging. The sculpture, Lady on Senufo Stool (2020), for example, harks back to the wood-carved, bolt-upright, ancestor figures of the Senufo culture of West Africa (much admired by Picasso). Gates’s twist on them is to work in brick – and to playfully have his figure bending drastically over backwards.

Would that he had chosen to exhibit only his own work. This is an incoherent show. As well as an intellectually undaring one: there’s little attempt to address the long-held tension between clay’s use for functional "craft" objects and for pieces of fine art.

Admittedly, three of the project’s four parts are still to come, but on initial evidence, “Feet of Clay” might have been a better title.

Sept 29 to Jan 9 2022; whitechapelgallery.org