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Pottery and Politics

Yes, as Michael unkindly reminded you—and thus me—I promised some weeks back to return to questions of political activism. A problem, because I can’t remember what I was planning to say.  Michael’s more prominent, but not completely dominant (how boring would that be? plus fatal for a hockey player), kinder and gentler side has handed over the blog to me for the next week or so for my swan song.  I have a bunch of things on my mind that I am going to unload on you in four or five posts over the next ten days (after which you are all invited to my house for Thanksgiving dinner if you promise to bring some wine along with your charming selves).  Among those things are thoughts about political activism, but they are fairly scattered and random thoughts so I think I’m going to end up backing into them.

My wife and I were in London for ten days at the end of October and I learned nothing of moment during that time.  We went to see Schiller’s Mary Stuart and Ibsen’s Pillars of the Community, and took advantage of surprisingly good weather to walk from one end of London to the other, ducking into various museums for an hour or two for a breather.  Didn’t read a newspaper or a blog the whole time.  And thus I discovered what is either my inner aesthete or the aesthete that I was at age 20 but have long since ceased to be.

That I can’t decide which seems to me significant.  Scratch an English prof hard enough—even one as distanced from literary criticism as I now am—and you’ll find that hard core of devotion to, belief in, and reverence for “art.” We went to the Tate Modern and I hated it.  All that conceptual art, based on bad ideas, and with no faith at all in the power of images to communicate (the pieces are all at pains to explain themselves, almost always using words), and offering nothing that arrests the eye.  The stuff of the work isn’t sticky (in the world wide web sense of that word); it doesn’t hold the eye because it is only there to serve the idea.  Give me Mondrian or Ellsworth Kelly.  Art too smart to have any ideas.  Color and pleasure.  That’s what I want in an art museum.

The week after we came home, Jane and I went to hear master potter Mark Hewitt (an Englishman descended from three generation of porcelain makers who now lives in North Carolina) talk about his own work and the work of North Carolina’s great potters from 1850 to the present.  I have this fantasy, one that attaches to various people at various times, about people who are at one with their lives.  Someone who has found an occupation that is completely enthralling, challenging, pleasurable, and satisfying.  The person pursues this occupation with single-minded devotion for the whole of a life, each new step on that journey producing a new problem to be solved or a new way of seeing the whole enterprise.  But, meanwhile, there is also the satisfaction of things achieved along the way.  The life well lived as a career in making.  An honorable life devoted to producing things that the world values.  (No, I don’t’ experience my own life that way.  It feels like constant scrambling, with each thing done a messy compromise between what was aimed for and what time, circumstances, and personal limitations made possible.)

Mark Hewitt seems a good candidate as the embodiment of that fantasy.  In his own sphere, he is wildly successful.  He can’t make pots fast enough for all the people who want to buy them.  And he remains challenged by what he does, while also showing a great appreciation for and desire to celebrate the work of other potters. Mark has written a book about North Carolina pottery, and he has written lots of articles about pottery around the world.  His lecture introduced us to various forms of folk pottery—from Nigeria to Korea to Japan—that have influenced him.  Worries about a larger world that one cannot influence would merely be a distraction.  Clear the mind and focus on the difficult and worthy task at hand.  That’s the ticket.

Except, of course, it can’t quite be done, unless one cultivates a tunnel-vision that would be blameworthy.  In that most unpolitical of settings, addressing an audience of fans, Hewitt could not avoid reflecting, even if mostly through short side comments, on the fact that the “folk” in Africa and Korea from whom he had learned so much when visiting them in the 1970s no longer practice the art that has made him relatively rich and famous.  Manufactured goods have now replaced the hand-made pottery of those villages.  By a path as inevitable as the one followed by Ruskin and Morris (whom Hewitt actually mentioned briefly), an attention to the arts leads one to politics—and leads one to recognize the privileges that place one in a position to be an artist or to visit museums.  There’s no space of unconscious devotion to one’s art, untroubled by the social forces and structures that make any kind of devotion to art possible in the first place.

That came through most clearly in Hewitt’s comic—but also forlorn—relation to the problem of art as pottery.  He insisted that pottery was a fine art in the sense that it took great skill to make good pots.  But he also, in another part of his talk, urged us to use every piece of pottery we own.  Don’t set it up on display; don’t move it entirely from the functional world of its origins in those village pots made for use into the entirely different world of “art.” Which suggests that the very notion of “art” is constructed precisely to offer us a space apart from a social reality that doesn’t bear much looking at.  I want, as much if not more than the next guy, to visit the land of art.  It’s a great vacation, just like a trip to London.  But it turns out you can’t live there.  If you did, it would be an entirely different place.

Posted by on 11/14 at 02:39 PM

  1. I have this fantasy, one that attaches to various people at various times, about people who are at one with their lives.  Someone who has found an occupation that is completely enthralling, challenging, pleasurable, and satisfying.  The person pursues this occupation with single-minded devotion for the whole of a life, each new step on that journey producing a new problem to be solved or a new way of seeing the whole enterprise.  But, meanwhile, there is also the satisfaction of things achieved along the way.  The life well lived as a career in making.  An honorable life devoted to producing things that the world values.  (No, I don’t’ experience my own life that way.  It feels like constant scrambling, with each thing done a messy compromise between what was aimed for and what time, circumstances, and personal limitations made possible.)

    I too harbor the exact same longings...although lately I’m trying to get to a point where it doesn’t make me feel so lousy/unaccomplished/myopic/self-loathing/envious/neurotic. I have to keep reminding myself that no one has it figured out…

    Posted by zoe kentucky  on  11/14  at  04:27 PM

  2. While I was introduced to the wonderful world of cultural studies through Carol Mavor at UNC some 15 years ago, I must admit one of my very favorite undergraduate courses was Charles Zug’s folk art course--read his “Turners and Burners” for local pottery.  If you really are into pottery, I hope you’ve been to Seagrove, NC.

    I disagree with you regarding the space and display “needed” to look at art.  But the disagreement hinges on what we might mean by use-value and functionality.  <Tugs uncomfortably at collar> I hate to say it but there’s a whole art historical literature on the political and theoretical issues surrounding display, distance and use of art.  (I’ll spare you all from rehearsing it here, but I’d be happy to pass along bibliography via e-mail.  Ok, maybe I’ll just include one:  see section “Societies” in Critical Terms for Art History, eds. Robert Nelson and Richard Shiff, 2nd ed, Chicago, 2003) Those Mondrians and Frank Stellas have a use beyond the boundaries of the canvas.  One use might be a social one, such as the caché of knowing who Stella is and being able to discuss the problematic of the frame with other intellectuals or connoisseurs. (Yes, I made the distinction on purpose).  So, the museum display or individual work might not have a tactile, practical use value, but I don’t think the social use should be discounted.

    Then again, I see nothing wrong with mounting a Stella painting on plywood, attaching some legs to it and using it as a coffee table. 

    If you want to see some good art installations in Chapel Hill, particularly ones that involve marionettes, look for exhibits by Victoria Ralston.

    Posted by  on  11/14  at  07:13 PM

  3. All hail the formerly-young aesthetes! Great grappling, John--and it’s not just grappling for grappling’s sake. Reluctantly leaving aside the attainment of personal/profession unity and nirvana, I want to suggest a different approach for the quandary of art’s relation to social reality.

    It may be sloppy thinking on my part, but while I long ago tried out the “untroubled” space for art and ended up squarely in the Ruskin/Morris camp, I’ve never really agreed with the purported reality of the quandary: that, as you put it so well, “the very notion of ‘art’ is constructed precisely to offer us a space apart from a social reality that doesn’t bear much looking at.” I hate to harken back to Pater and that problemmatic Conclusion of his, but I always liked his thought that philosophy helps us “gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us.” In a somewhat similar way, “fine” art may indeed be ultimately functional--in the individual’s incorporation of the contemplative or emotional or critical or whatever stimulative result into his or her social actions. I don’t mean to confuse the/a nature of art with the nature of experience, as in “it’s what you make of it afterward” sort of position.  But maybe I am, in my unwillingness to live outside either the land of art or the land of politics.

    Posted by  on  11/14  at  07:29 PM

  4. Good to have you back, John. I suspect that more and more of us have felt the tug of art in the years since boy George started messing up things beyond repair. Like thousands of others, I was sickened with despair after the November 2004 elections and closed myself off to the world of politics for about a month--no blogs, no papers, no TV, no radio. I could only manage to read Rumi and the Daoists, poets who looked elsewhere for comfort and meaning than the corrupt world beyond their influence.  I confess I took great comfort from them (and not only by being reminded that others who came before us found ways to get on with their lives while beseiged by idiot tyrants). God, it felt good to enter the land of lethe (which I always thought was as much about art as it was drugs). I found myself thinking that despair without poetry would be intolerable. Whether it is the aesthete in me or not, I want to maintain that politics without art can be suffocating. And of course, as anybody who’s stayed in Lethe too long knows, art without politics doesn’t work either.  Remember Wm. James’s critique of the tender-hearted: a philosophy too “refined” to matter.

    Posted by  on  11/15  at  12:34 PM

  5. All that conceptual art, based on bad ideas, and with no faith at all in the power of images to communicate (the pieces are all at pains to explain themselves, almost always using words), and offering nothing that arrests the eye. 

    Thank you for saying that. Sometimes I think I’m the only person left on the planet who feels that art used to be about the artist communicating something, and that too much “modern” art has left that idea behind as impossibly bourgeois.

    Posted by Anne  on  11/15  at  01:11 PM

  6. really great post mr. mcgowan.

    But it turns out you can’t live there.  If you did, it would be an entirely different place.

    that is the issue in a nut. sometimes big cats in africa, while hunting, will lay there and pretend that they are not interested in their target, all the while keeping the goal in their peripheral vision - moving closer when they can; but reverting to nonchalance when they can’t.

    that works for art sometimes.

    still quantity and quality are wicked step sisters. timing is cinderella when it comes to communication, ideas and art.

    Posted by a-train  on  11/15  at  02:40 PM

  7. Wonderful post and discussion, and as a-train mentions, the timing is interesting.  I find out tomorrow evening if i have been chosen as a new board member on my local county/city Arts commission; it just seems a wise and proper thing to do during these retirement years.  We have a very active public arts program, with corporate involvement sponsoring numerous projects, pieces, exhibits, and so forth.  For this large a city (nearing 500K) the day to day contact and interest in art, public and private, keeps the local galleries and museums thriving (we also have a large regional pottery art community too).

    Public art is interesting in that pieces that contain the power to convey different ideas to different people, to speak and sing in different voices to the greatest diversity of citizens, are more empowering and useful than those that reflect a singular, more “formal” idea (although there is a need for these too).  I look forward to the chance to make these sorts of decisions.  And i thank John for opening this line of discussion about them.

    Posted by  on  11/15  at  04:44 PM

  8. Mondrian? How stodgy!

    Posted by John Emerson  on  11/16  at  11:07 AM

  9. The Tate Modern is old hat. Try the Saatchi Collection. That is radikewl.

    Posted by octagon  on  11/17  at  02:45 AM

  10. I’d think the Arts and Craft movement offers a wealth of literature on this topic. There, I think they tried to navigate between the Scylla of Art which ostensibly cannot be used and the Charybdis of supposedly mundane craft which is useful.

    And, of course, Dewey’s metaphysics was all about meaning as being realized in and through the uses to which, say, a piece of clay was put. To say that Art isn’t used is, on my view, a mistake.

    In sociology, we talk about how property is nothing more and nothing less than a set of social relations defining how something ought to be used. Calling something Art and saying that, by definition, it cannot be used in order to be named is still a set of rules defining what belongs to the Art World.

    Another way to look at it, I think, is via theories of why we create. We only think of work that we do for commercial purposes the way we do because it dosn’t seem as if we are doing it “for ourselves” or, perhaps, for the doing it and in and of itself. But, is that what an artist is doing anyway.

    see, for instance:
    <a href = “http://blog.pulpculture.org/2005/11/01/its-a-shame">It’s a shame</a>

    I guess as an avocational artisan and poseur professional Web designer, I don’t understand how the creativity involved in these practices isn’t Art. I’ve quizzed people time and again and the only answer I ever seem to get is that, if it’s useful and for commerce, it ain’t art.

    But how is the process I describe, here not the same thing that one feels as a Real Artist? (Which makes me uncomfortable, actually, since we don’t feel in our gut, as if our gut is impervious to social relations that help us makes sense of those feelings, so they’re not natural and outside of society, but that’s a whole ‘nother rant.)

    I live in the equivalent of a garret and make sh*t money, does that help? smile

    Posted by Bitch  on  11/19  at  01:55 AM

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