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

[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.