The Influences and Use of Japanese Tradition   1      2      3      4      -      PRINTER VERSION

>> The result, a glut of lackluster ware, has fueled the criticism by many in the field—mainly ceramists in academia—that Japanese ceramics has little to offer modern potters and that it is too culturally specific to be relevant in the West. Those who hold this view, by the way, seem to find nothing incongruous about Seiji Ozawa conducting the Boston Symphony in the performance of 18th- and 19th-century European music. Nor do they question the ability of this music to move an audience in Tokyo today. Cultural specificity, it seems, is a door that swings only one way.

These critics also see the emphasis on tradition and the repeated references to works from the past as an abrogation by Japanese-influenced potters of individual aesthetic responsibility. They demand pottery that "is of our time", that reflects society's trends and preoccupations no matter how banal. Now this obsession with being modern is as shortsighted as the belief of some potters that ceramic art should be judged entirely by the prescribed standards of 17th-century Japanese tea masters. Ceramic artists from both extremes will always dogmatically insist that their particular "ism" or tradition has a corner on significance and relevance. Either course, if followed, would leave generations of ceramic artists with a visual language incapable of expressing much more than fashionable twaddle or nostalgic tripe.

The challenge, then, for American potters is not to exorcise all visual clues of the Japanese influence; nor is it to Americanize Japanese forms. It is instead the challenge of expanding that visual language through the search for and exploration of their own subject. What ultimately matters is not that an artist is influenced by the past or a particular culture, but what he or she does with that influence.

There is another equally important challenge these American potters face in contemporary Western culture. It is one of convincing skeptical curators, critics and other power brokers that pottery is capable of the same kind of serious expression usually expected of painting and sculpture. David Hamilton, head of ceramics at the Royal College of Art, London, in a 1978 review of works by Henry Hammond and David Leach in the British Crafts magazine, wrote:

"In this century ceramics in general and pottery in particular have not been a vehicle for expressing intellectual originality or fundamental truth. Unless or until it becomes a major cultural force, and by this I mean expressing some exalted intellect or exposing an unrevealed facet of the human condition, words like genius and greatness are inappropriate."

Hamilton's culturally biased view of pottery and the aspirations of potters is a common prejudice having just enough relative truth to make it seem believable. What Hamilton does not understand is that there is a modern, industrialized culture—one of the top economic powers in the world, in fact—that has historically expected and continues to expect "intellectual originality and fundamental truth" from pottery. That country, of course, is Japan. In Japanese culture there is a presumption that pottery can express the human condition as sublimely and articulately as any art form, and this presumption is one of the principal reasons so many Americans are drawn to Japanese ceramics in the first place. Another reason is that this art form employs a complex visual language with numerous examples of eloquent statements that range from the seemingly unpretentious and rustic Bizen and Shigaraki ware to the ostenta-
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