In September of 2011 North Carolina wood fire potter Matt Jones, as he fired up as his kiln, sent me an attack e-mail. He had just read my article “Bernard Leach’s Orphans,” then he listened to the podcast of my lecture at the Portland Museum of Craft and Design, “How Envy Killed The Crafts.” Intrigued by his passion, I dodged the musket shots and took Jones up on the suggestion that our exchange of opinion be made pubic on his blog. Let’s make it a spectator sport. The following is a quote from round one, “Critique of a Critic: Rising to Garth Clark’s Bait.”
“My beef with Garth Clark is that he is playing the intellectual provocateur who feels he has earned the right to frame the debate. He does not have that right. I also find his tone to be self-satisfied (perhaps he has earned that much) and condescending. He pretends not to live in a glass house while he criticizes and implies that hardworking and sincere craftspeople don’t know what they are about. He has fattened his bank account on Ceramic Artists (which is fully his right) and has generously turned to piss on the potters (with whom) he cannot make as good a profit. He has called us insecure, self-loathing and envious of the status and wealth that ‘art’ has afforded people like him. We ‘overdosed’ on nostalgia and communist rhetoric, therefore we are the losers in a socially Darwinian Art paradigm.”
To some extent I was bemused. I can understand ire at “Orphans,” it was a button-pusher. But “Envy” supported the identity of enclaves like the traditional potters of North Carolina. The suggestion was to take this fight on the road, face-to-face. Jones organized a one-week tour in North Carolina in the fall of 2012 with a conference, lectures and panel debates in Charlotte, Raleigh and Asheville.
I am a compulsive pot lover so unsurprisingly after Jones and I ironed out the semantic kinks in our arguments, we were more in agreement than not. But we still had some strong divides in opinion. He had some excellent points, though, and much as I professed my admiration for traditional pots, Jones got me to realize that this statement had become a slogan more than a reality. I had given little time to thinking about it. I had not written positively about the genre in some time. I lacked intimacy with the makers. It was time to renew.
The first stop, a day long conference at the Mint Museum in Charlotte, was packed to the rafters and it turned out to be one of the most exciting, productive, warming meetings I can remember in my long career. There was little anger. Most of what I think has been leeched out, (pun intended) by Jones’ blog. But there was a lot dark humor and concern. How would NC pottery survive a new era?
Mark Hewitt, the leading potter in NC, kindly referred to the tour as a “watershed moment.” If it was, then my role was certainly (sorry Matt) playing the intellectual provocateur. One earns the right by being meaningfully provocative and if you do not deliver you simply lose your audience. But the success of the event was due to every participant and to the superb opening papers by Jones and Hewitt. Issues were raised that were long overdue and our conversation traveled throughout the state.
Part of my reason for going to NC was was political. NC had just passed a state amendment that robbed the gay community of any right to become a family, including civil unions. The goal, it seems, was to make NC the new Uganda and- short of the death penalty- they are making progress.
I began my talk with Cardew (appropriate because he is the God of NC pottery and my first and most most influential mentor) and introducing them to Michael’s black lover, Koffey Atthey. I asked them to imagine living in a white picket-fenced cottage in Charlotte, sans civil rights. It did not have the impact I had hoped. Judy Garland was not burnt in effigy. The ceramic audience tended to be more liberal than most.
The other reason was to announce that Tanya Harrod’s book, after over a decade in gestation, had been born. The review (long time coming) is in this issue. It is a remarkable study of a complex man and, as Harrod’s writing often is, in a class of its own.
This year the Mint Museum invited Jones to return to present his opinion about the impact of that 2012 tour. As part of his talk (which will be published in full later) I was interviewed by Jones. That too is part of this week’s issue.
By chance an auction is coming up of an exceptional collection of British and American studio pottery in the Leach-Cardew-Hamada tradition.
Mark Hewitt has written about his 1978 visit to Abuja and the pottery school Cardew founded.
Marty Gross, who has made of a career of saving, restoring and making the films of Leach and the Mingei movement, has launched a new project.
This issue has become almost by accident a focus on modern traditional pottery and I hope this topic will fill the comment boxes with discussion. Lastly, a thought from Michael Cardew on the subject: tradition, he said, is a living thing yet most of those who practice it do not grow and change but merely imitate the past and “take measurements of the corpse.”
That leaves us wondering if traditional pottery has a life in our new century and if so, how it will need to adapt to avoid becoming a cadaver.
Garth Clark is the Chief Editor of CFile.
Above image: A sketch by Matthew Causey of Garth Clark speaking at the Back To The Future conference in Charlotte, NC, October 16, 2012.
Any thoughts about this post? Share yours in the comment box below.
Read our review of Tanya Harrod’s book
Read our interview with Matt Jones
Read about the auction of British and American studio pottery
Read Mark Hewitt’s account of Abuja
Read about Marty Gross’s new film project about the Mingei folk art movement in Japan
Having read the two comments above, both of which demonstrate in-depth knowledge of philosophical and literary influences, I’m hesitant to admit that my memory of the Charlotte program morphed into the more practical aspect of being a studio potter: how to support a family (earn enough money) when the “collectors” of yore are returning to dust, without having left a younger collector to continue the necessary support for these artists. Mind you, I am old, came to that wonderful discussion prepared to go to war with you, and left feeling refreshed and energized instead! To you, to the organizers, and most importantly to the potters, THANK YOU! Would that it could be an annual event (Matt, I missed your return, regrettably). There was great humor, great openness, great frustration, and lastly even greater bonding. May each and every one of you soar!!
Nice piece Garth. But just to nit-pick, I don’t think Cardew is a God or even a patron saint in the NC community. Hewitt is the only potter here to have studied with him, and while those within the more traditional end of the pottery community here certainly have respect for him, there are plenty more who have never heard of Cardew. Pottery families with members still turning pots today were making pots here several generations before Cardew was born. The similarity between there shops and Cardew’s practice are an example of evolutionary convergence not imitation. Cardew was imitating the country potteries of England, and these and similar German potteries were the ancestors of our pottery traditions here in NC. With all of that said, we did introduce you to several of Hewitt’s former apprentices and all of us have been deeply moved my the achievements and intellect of one of the great neo-traditonalists of the twentieth century. Thanks for this post.
Tradition and the continuum goes on, we only need to be more conscious of our origins and our philosophies in order to be better practitioners.
I am one who believes that the role of the traditional pot is a metaphor for a much larger philosophical goal. And that goal is based upon an interiority of contemplation which comes to form after many years and as an ascent to an understanding, thus the ability to make good pots.
Warren MacKenzie, like Hamada, Leach and Yanagi who came before him, has always expounded the idea that the traditional
pot could transform the commonplace by a quickening of our consciousness and the conversant role the pot assumes with its user.
Likewise, it should be remembered that a’ living tradition’, as similarly expounded in the context of literature by T.S.Eliot in 1919, is one in which we are all, as clay people, indeterminately connected to each other. Its is within this tradition that the ceramic gallery artist as well as the craft fair potter, the liberal and conservative; that these different disciplines have a definitive place, without anyone being the finer elite. Some will have more or less influence, some whose oeuvre will have more or less gravity, will be appreciated in context.
However, Tradition should demand that we evaluate our pottery in their proper context and perhaps in a broader anthropologically based method to evaluate our origins and present sub-cultures, critical as that may be.
Given that, it is perhaps disheartening to find anyone stating about NC pottery “…Intellectually there are few aspects of it that I find tempting but overall it has little to do with contemporary art, my main professional focus.”
Would that apply as well to Minnesota pottery and the St Croix River Valley, or even the fertile and historic Hudson Valley of New York State? It would be too simplistic to assume that Tradition is only passing down from generation to generation what was once previously learned before.
I would direct you to the words of Ananda Coomarswamy who so elegantly wrote of the origins of comparative traditions in the backdrop of Perennial Philosophy.
“Art, from the Mediaeval point of view, ….was not called “art”, but an “artifact,” a thing “made by art”; the art remains in the artist. Nor was there any distinction of “fine” from “applied” or “pure” from “decorative” art. All art was for “good use” and “adapted to condition.” Art could be applied either to noble or to common uses, but was no more or less art in one case than in the other. Our use of the word “decorative” would have been abusive,…. Perfection, rather than beauty, was the end in view. There was no “aesthetic,” no “psychology” of art but only a rhetoric or theory of beauty, which beauty was the attractive power of perfection.
….The artist was not a special kind of man. But every man a special kind of artist*
Of course this would begin to change with the advent of the Renaissance. However I mention this here because it demands an appreciation of the spirit of the Middle Ages, which is its proper context. In this regard, I am not certain one can define tradition of which we speak, without having some conduit to its practice. Furthermore, I would have to agree with Coomarswamy’s notion of a Perennial Philosophy of which he pointed out that St. Augustine spoke of as a “Wisdom, that was not made, but is now what it always was and ever shall be.”
This I believe to be an essential form of Tradition.
*Ananda Coomarswamy Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art,
Chapter V1 p 111 – 114 The Nature of Mediaeval Art