Good pots have errors

[imomus]

Well, after nearly three years of Click Opera we're still to publish our first piece about pottery or ceramics. I thought today might be the day to set that scandalous oversight right with a piece, inspired by an interesting radio programme, about the great Bernard Leach. Now, some of you may well look at what I have to say about Leach -- the fact that he was a British person highly influenced by his own idiosyncratic take on Japanese culture, or that he was an individualist who advocated anonymous craftsmen and collective tradition, or that he celebrated errors and mistakes -- and say that in fact this isn't an entry about pottery at all, but a retread of some old thematic pots we throw here week in, week out. Maybe so. The thing about a pot is that it's never just a pot. It's a way of looking at the world.

That's the thing. If you aestheticize something as simple as a pot, by extension you aestheticize everyday life. Leach "created the artist-potter simply by being it", but he did it not by devaluing his own status, but by elevating the work of humble craftsmen to a kind of religious philosophy, and honoring his errors as hidden intentions. He cites Zen ideas a lot, but later apparently became a Ba'hai. (Lovely gentle people; at university I befriended a knot of them in the creative writing group -- Ian Stephen, Angus, Joy... and yes, there was something pottish about them, that same devotion to simplicity.)

Leach's orientalism was earned (he was born in the East, lived as a child in Japan, came back and studied there, and married a Japanese wife) but also learned. It meshed Zen ideas with William Morris-type British arts-and-crafts beliefs about the value of simplicity and artisanal labour as exemplified in the peasant pottery of Japan and Korea. "I came to believe that we can re-learn from the East much that we have lost in our industrial revolution, for the machine leaves out the heart of labour, feeling, imagination and directness of control. The craftsman is the only worker using heart, hand and head in balance."

One of the Zen ideas Leach embraced was the principle of emptiness or non-intentionality, mu, as central in the making of mingei pottery as it is, for instance, in the music of John Cage:

"There is in Zen belief a quality called mu, a quality attached neither to positive or negative. It is a quality we most admire in pots, and it is that rare condition of which we catch glimpses in men and women when the spirit of life blows through an open window. It is the treasure of the humble craftsman and the haven of the greatest artist." (Rosemary Hill is slightly sarky about this; "Like many who extoll the virtues of the anonymous craftsman," she says, "Leach was in fact a towering personality with a huge ego".)

As for error-as-virtue, that comes of course from Japanese craft tradition too. It's in wabi sabi, and it's also in raku, the low-temperature kilncraft part of yakimono. (Correct me if I'm wrong, I'm not really a pottery expert.) As Edmund DeVahl explains, British critics in the 1920s saw Leach's pots as flawed. But in raku the low temperature means the glaze doesn't turn to glass, there are cracks and imperfections, bumps and lumps. You're invited to touch the imperfections, feel the cracks, see all this as personality rather than error.

Leach was on a Japanizing mission, thinks DeVahl: he saw pots as part of an evangelical project to convert an English audience to see the beauty in unevenness, mottled hues, quiet, solid tones of glazes, tactile qualities you can only discover by handling the objects, turning them over, looking at the detail on the underside. It's a very Japanese aesthetic, but it can be connected to the British arts and crafts movement philosophy, and that's what Leach did in his influential book A Potter's Book.

Rosemary Hill suggests that Leach's emphasis on imperfection was quite different in the British context than it would have been in Japan. Whereas Japan needed some emphasis on humble materials and asymmetry to counterbalance a tradition of exquisite high quality finishes, Britain probably needed to develop sophistication; adopting the rough raku aesthetic wholesale was a way of passing off typical British incompetence as a virtue. It was, she suggests, reassuring for Britons caught up in World War II to read Leach's book, concocted in bomb-blasted London "like an egg hatched in a thunderstorm". (He later relocated to St Ives.)

I think maybe the only time I have mentioned pottery on Click Opera was talking about Tori Kudo of Maher Shalal Hash Baz. Tori throws raku pots (and records his music) in his Shunji Pottery workshop at Tobe, Ehime prefecture, and you can hear the "deliberate imperfection" trope in his music as well as in the pots he once demonstrated to MTV's This is our Music series. I love that little clip, and I love the idea that making a hash of things ("always unsuccessful" is Tori's motto) could be a virtue, especially in this age of shiny shiny digital surfaces. But maybe I'm just being your typical British Japanizer. They can do both rough and smooth, we can just do rough. They're slumming it, but slums are all we have.

Then again, although Tori Kudo's parents were both potters, he learned his skills at Barnet College, North London. Repaying Bernard Leach's debt, perhaps.

Comments

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

Yakimono was one of things I loved most about Japan. I think the fact that I lived in Uji - the green tea capital of Japan - helped a great deal. I frequented a shop there where the proprietoress taught me a lot about tea-drinking and ceramics. A tea-pot, for instance, becomes more valuable as it gains tea-stains and as the cracks in the glaze become more visible because of the tea that has seeped into them.

And the imperfection of Japanese pottery is, I believe, enormously difficult to achieve. I don't think it's just a matter of saying "Oh well, that will do." Not at all. I remember making a purchase of a rather rough little pot at a market stall, and the Japanese people I was with wondering why on Earth I had bought it. I thought I was valuing its imperfection. Comparing it with some other 'imperfect' pots later, I realised there was a world of difference. The one I had bought was just not very good.

But was Leach really of the 'just not very good' school? I don't know that much about him (have read a little), but I imagine he at least knew enough to realise that satisfying imperfection is hard won. What I've seen of his stuff looks pretty good to me, too.

There was also a calligrapher who exempified the hard road to imperfection, but I've forgotten his name. I've a feeling it might have been something Yo'ichi. Maybe someone can help me out here. He said something like, "Heta wa hontou no umai."

There is definitely something in all of this of the Zen progression from simplicity to complexity and back to simplicity. There's the old saying that goes something like, "When I was young in the way, mountains were merely mountains, rivers rivers and trees trees. When I progressed in the way I came to see that mountains were not mountains, rivers were not rivers and trees were not trees. Now I am old in the way and I understand that mountains are merely mountains, rivers rivers and trees tres."

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I think it's really hard to know good-bad from bad-bad. For instance, are there "good-bad" and "bad-bad" performances of Cage's 4'33"? There must be, but in a sense they're all the same piece, and the idea of not distinguishing good from bad is built into it.

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

I think that's very true. I was thinking afterwards that perhaps it's very different (for instance) to think that a tree is just a tree before thinking it's not a tree than after. That would be the difference between good-bad and bad-bad. But maybe you only make such a distinction if you're at the trees-are-not-trees stage. Well, like you say, it's very hard.

[akabe.livejournal.com]

-- good-bad from bad-bad.

not really, if so it's basically because that [Mu] is simply the art of receding while we habitually know and distinguish and measure things projected. tuning in a bit the receding things become differentable and classifiable/judge-able.

[fishwithissues.livejournal.com]

are there "good-bad" and "bad-bad" performances of Cage's 4'33"?

In class, Alvin Lucier would often recall the infamous performer who feigned a cough during a performance of 4'33"...

I think this kind of openly imperfect work demands a certain amount of high seriousness from the maker or else you're left with just a big wink to the audience, like, haha, isn't this crap? it's the difference between a dogme film and curb your enthusiasm.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Good point regarding imperfection. There is a difference. The nature of the failure itself matters greatly.

potty or potter?

[niddrie-edge.livejournal.com]

You never in the past mentioned Grayson Perry?
He mentions that craftsmanship was seen as a sign of preciousness when he was at Art College although he always loved attention to detail.
He also seems to be Big In Japan now.
Just loving his biography.
It has the same lettering and frisson as Rhona Cameron's biog "1979"

Re: potty or potter?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I don't think I have mentioned Grayson Perry. Although actually the other day I made a Click Opera stub to mention his Print for a Politician (http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-images/Arts/Arts_/Pictures/2006/03/31/perry_big.jpg) in some context or other. Oh, I think I just did!

Re: potty or potter?

[niddrie-edge.livejournal.com]

Mentioned that very work in a reply to your "narsty carnt" debate.
http://imomus.livejournal.com/249519.html?replyto=9062063

[charleston.livejournal.com]

I love pots, I love Bernard Leach, & I loved this post best of all your posts this year. As always I have nothing intelligent to add, but thank you for giving me something interesting to read everyday, merry holidays new year etc & a pleased round of applause.

[(Anonymous)]

What an interesting article, I have personally always had problems considering pottery making as an art form. Art to me is something which challenges your intellectual understanding and perception of the world.Pottery doesn't quite do this for me and I consider it -at it's creative zenith- to be an elevated artisanship- extrapolating from this that perhaps artisanship of a particular standard is equivalent to and occasionally transcendent of art. Art being something which many -myself included- place on too high a pedestal above other human endeavour.I would be curious to read other posters viewpoint on these ideas.
Regards
Thomas Scott.

[cheapsurrealist.livejournal.com]

passing off incompetence as a virtue.

omg. my life has just been summed up in a single sentence.

i have more in common with george bush than i thought.

I haven't created a bloody quagmire though.

not yet anyway.

[akabe.livejournal.com]

Didn't Leach end up praising korean potery over japanese basically because koreans just get that imperfection right, straight, whereas in japan it's always overwrought - don't know the source of that but i know - maybe his book. occasionally thought the same myself in regards to certain trad design/food.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Leach "created the artist-potter simply by being it", but he did it not by devaluing his own status, but by elevating the work of humble craftsmen to a kind of religious philosophy, and honoring his errors as hidden intentions.

In a sense I attempt this with clothes and books--poke fun at my failure to attain a ludicrous ideal--but then I wouldn't want to get it right. It's in the diaspora of a fossilized archetype where the living forms are; the archetype itself is to be referenced, but not actually embodied.

Anyway, here are some American organicists. They were mass-produced in the early 1900's, albeit by hand. In some ways, this repetition freed up the workers to make little mistakes or experiemntations with glaze and forms.

I love the pots of W. H.Grueby, (http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/antiques_and_collectibles/85724) whose company was based in Massachusetts. Grueby was inspired by the matte glazes used by the French, who were in turn emulating the Japanese. While they are depictive and lack the blankness of Japanese pottery, I do love the graceful botanical forms. Very restful to the eye:



Fulper, (http://www.fulper.net/lamps.htm) a ceramics company outside of Trenton, NJ made curious, mushroom-shaped lamps with odd glass windows and Japanese raku-inspired glazes. They have this clunkiness--an artlessness that is humorous, bold and pleasurable. Odd how they look like a lamp that could have been on the desk of Dr. Zaius:



I like them almost as much as I love my Brazilian house shoes. Never wear them outdoors:



I enjoy contemporary art, but I think to exclude other arts and crafts that perhaps don't have some big idea at their center is somewhat puritanical--as if pleasure for its own sake had no use! It's in the absence of a big idea where things get interesting, where one is generously granted the opportunity to fill in the blanks--it's the gap in the conversation graciously left to the viewer by the artist. I tend to choose aesthetics over art these days; the deeply shallow is far more interesting to me right now (I'm also more interested in the forms and textures of living things rather than static sculpture or awkward technological simulacra, but that's another rant altogether).

What is it that great French gastronome Brilliat-Savarin said? Something about "a new recipe does more for humanity than the discovery of a new star"? I'm inclined to agree.

[petit-paradis.livejournal.com]

these shoes are amazing!

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

My favorites. Got 'em real cheap at Daffy's. Never ventured beyond a carpet.

[(Anonymous)]

So recipes now equate with art, once more a discourse ends up with a peep into Whimsy's relativist wardrobe.
Thomas Scott.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Well, it depends on the approach, doesn't it, Thomas (isn't there a performance artist who actually cooks meals for gallery patrons)? If an artwork doesn't equate with a recipe, chances are it's the artwork that needs to catch up. To my mind, art meant for a flowerbed or a kitchen table can be more rich and humane than art on a pedestal. Not a huge Japanophile myself, but I do think the Japanese are onto something as far as the "diffusion of holiness/resonance throughout all spheres of life" thing goes.

(Wait until you see my pocket squares.)

[(Anonymous)]

I appreciate your response but I cannot take seriously this -to my aesthetic reasoning- fantastical notion that food for the kitchen table can be considered as art. It is this extraordinary relativism and extension of parameter that reduces art to the infinitely prosaic.
(It also gives unmerited credence to a host of ego-on-sleeve TV chefs mediocrities also.)
I applaud your sartorial sensibilities and I'm sure I could get more aesthetic gratification from viewing your pocket squares than I have from some of the flim-flam I have seen in galleries but that does not make them art. My issue Whimsy, is not with what one gets greater aesthetic pleasure from -be it flowerbed or sculpture- but rather with how art is defined.
My regards.
Thomas.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Fantastical? I find the sensibility very down to earth. Metaphysical abstractions like art with a big "A" can be taken too seriously, and become universalist in tone. And that's when the fun ends, and the living art dies.

It is this extraordinary relativism and extension of parameter that reduces art to the infinitely prosaic.

Exactly. It can also take the prosaic and make it art, you silly ole goose, you.

A Happy Christmas, sir.

[(Anonymous)]

We still haven't established quite what are the parameters of your definition of art you silly old gander and I fear we must agree to disagree.Nonetheless I enjoyed the discourse.
On this side of the Atlantic it's approaching the wee hours and I have to go now and play Santa Claus to my offspring.
A Happy Christmas to you likewise.
Thomas.

George Ohr

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

George E. Ohr, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_E._Ohr) the mad potter of Biloxi:



The second is a nice blend between serendipity in the glaze, but utter control in the throwing.

"A notable feature of Ohr's pottery is that many items have thin walls, metallic glazes, and twisted, pinched shapes. To this day potters marvel at Ohr's porcelain-thin walls and unusual glazes. No one has been able to replicate them. Ohr dug much of his clay from a local river known as Tchoutacabouffa, which translates to mean "broken pot."

"Ohr's work is now seen as ground-breaking. During his lifetime he was considered a lunatic and a boasting eccentric and was not accepted by his peers on the national art scene, who nonetheless had a hard time ignoring him. In the early 1900s, the Arts and Crafts Movement and its leaders (such as William Morris) advocated that an artist should display control and perfection in all art forms. George Ohr displayed little obvious perfectionism in his art or control in his person, antagonizing art leaders nationally and political leaders at home."

And his facial hair was good fun, too.