When I am empty please dispose of me properly

I have collected ceramics since childhood. This Satsuma-yaki yunomi depicting a ripe pomegranate is one of my first pieces of Japanese pottery. I bought it from an old store in one of the covered malls in downtown Kagoshima over a decade ago. Two women, perhaps a mother and daughter, packed the cup and its mate in wood shavings and a hako. I still use it almost daily and to drink from this cup fills my mind with memories of this pleasant trip, and recalls the two women from whom I purchased it and the older woman’s ailing husband who painted it, probably now dead. The inscription on the base of the cup reads, hon satsuma, tegaki, “True Satsuma, painted by hand.” Beyond the beauty of the pomegranate reminding us of autumn, the presence of the painter’s brushwork establishes a human connection between he and I.

My first experiences with clay were as a child in ceramic classes. Later, as teenager I experimented with different kinds of firing techniques in an attempt to reproduce the style exemplified by the ancient pottery shards scattered across the landscape of the American Southwest. These experiences are now so long ago it seems like another lifetime. Since then academic pursuits have taken me further away from the actual production of things. What has remained though is a deep love of ceramic art.

In art history, ceramics are often placed in the category of craft. Even ceramic sculpture is seen as a second-class art in many ways. Utilitarian pieces are given even less coverage in survey books. Thus, pottery follows the standard divide where useful objects are crafts, while useless objects are fine or high art. This is partly due to the value that the West has traditionally placed on ceramic art, but it is also connected with the difficulty of talking about nonrepresentational art at a general level. I will come back to this issue later. However, in cultures where the dichotomy between fine arts and crafts is less evident or where the categories are different, pottery as a useful art has flourished. In the art history of East Asia and the Middle East, as well as in the ancient Americas, ceramics were and are a high value art. It is upon this base that some of the most technically and conceptually ambitious work is being produced.

I am interested in pottery because it destroys what I believe to be a false dichotomy. Through the dissolution of the high art/craft distinction “art” can more easily enter our everyday lives. It can be useful in other words. How much better it is to drink from a yunomi that has been with me for years than a polystyrene disposable cup. Does it not focus our attention to the act of drinking and the moment that we are in more intensely?

This is all well and good but in terms of aesthetic judgment does that really make any of these objects art? Not necessarily. But let us take the famous example of the Kizaemon Ido chawan pictured below. It is a Japanese national treasure, yet originally it was a simple Korean rice bowl. Yanagi Soetsu (1889-1961), one of the founders of the mingei movement, had this to say about this bowl upon seeing it.

When I saw it, my heart fell. A good Tea-bowl, yes, but how ordinary! So simple, no more ordinary thing could be imagined. There is not a trace of ornament, not a trace of calculation. It is just a Korean food bowl, a bowl, moreover, that a poor man would use every day–commonest crockery.

A typical thing for his use; costing next to nothing; made by a poor man; an article without the flavour of personality; used carelessly by its owner; bought without pride; something anyone could have bought anywhere and everywhere. That is the nature of this bowl. The clay had been dug from the hill at the back of the house; the glaze made with the ash from the hearth; the potter’s wheel had been irregular. The shape revealed no particular thought: it was one of many…. The kiln was a wretched affair; the firing careless. Sand had stuck to the pot, but nobody minded; no one invested the thing with any dreams. It is enough to make one give up working as a potter….

But that was as it should be. The plain and unagitated, the uncalculated, the harmless, the straightforward, the natural, the innocent, the humble, the modest: where does beauty lie if not in these qualities? The meek, the austere, the unornate–they are the natural characteristics that gain man’s affection and respect.

But we shouldn’t fall into the trap, as Bernard Leach and others possibly did, when for them functionality and a lack of self-consciousness became the touchstones of artistic success. This would confuse two relatively distinct issues and force us to exclude important work on the grounds of its uselessness–in essence we would simply be jumping to the other side of the useful/useless aesthetic dialectic. Our goal must be to transcend this dichotomy entirely.