Delivering the Promise   1      2      -      PRINTER VERSION

Published in The Studio Potter, 21(1), December 1992, 38-39.

When I returned from Japan in 1978, I heard so many derogatory things said by people in the crafts establishment about so-called Japanese-influenced ceramics that I hesitated to say that I had studied there. The work these people derided, however, bore no resemblance to the ceramic work I was accustomed to seeing exhibited in Japan. The criticism was not only superficial in its formal relationship to Japanese ceramic art but also seemed to be totally devoid of the kind of conceptual under-pinnings one finds in the work they mimic. What really surprised me, though, was that many of these people, who I thought were intelligent and curious, seemed content to believe that these rather shallow and poorly executed copies of Hamada Shoji and 16th-century Bizen and Iga ware were the "real thing", that they were, in other words, the breadth and depth of Japanese aesthetic thought in ceramic art. Would the same people, for example, judge the state of Kentucky by what they think of their local Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise?

This prejudice has been remarkably persistent. Only a few years ago, a critic told me he was not interested in seeing an exhibition of work by a Japanese potter because the critic thought his kind of so-called traditional work was "irrelevant" to American life. Another critic, trying to explain away his disagreement with a writer over a review of an exhibition of American ceramic art, said the other writer "had spent too much time in Japan." I cannot help but wonder if the former critic would have said the same thing if the potter in question had been from England or Germany; or if the latter critic would have explained away their disagreement by saying the other writer had spent too much time in France or Italy.

When I went to Japan in 1974 to attend Kyoto City University of Fine Arts, my view of Japanese ceramic art was typically romantic and colored by my readings of Leach and Yanagi. I mistakenly believed that I could learn everything I needed to know by apprenticing to someone and immersing myself in the "how to" of making pottery. Fortunately, Yagi Kazuo was there to disabuse me of this simplistic and naive notion. Yagi was called the "father of modern Japanese ceramics," and I was aware of his reputation as an Avant Garde ceramist. When he approached me one day after l had finished firing at school, I was understandably nervous about what he might say. I was quite pleased with the work I had made, because I had been able to more or less duplicate in an electric kiln a number of traditional types of Japanese pottery. Yagi began arranging some pine branches in a pseudo-Iga vase; and when he had finished, he retrieved a sleek butane lighter and placed it on the table next to the vase and asked me which I thought was the best or most successful object. I, of course, had an opinion (the vase was better because for one thing it was made by hand and for another it was asymmetrical, which I thought gave it more "life") but I said none of that and mumbled something noncommittal. Yagi, after explaining his many reservations about the vase, said that he felt the lighter was more successful because it delivered on what it promised. That is, it was well designed and functional and made no other pretense. I, on the other hand, was making art: I was trying to make something far more important than a lighter and had not been able to deliver.
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