I trust that the reason most of us write and speak out on critical matters in ceramics is to incite debate, not to achieve consensus. With that in mind Mark Del Vecchio and I are thrilled that our visit to Australia has produced so much debate, written commentary and in particular that our views have been contested. The most recent critique comes from Damon Moon (Bobbing for Apples). There are several issues Moon raises with which we agree. Fine art ceramics is not a panacea and we do need to revalue and encourage the craft pot, provided it can find a contemporary voice. But there are a few of his comments that require rebuttal.
Moon tells us that he does not take notes. He should, particularly when writing for a publication. I did not 'send up' Rose Slivka's 'The New Ceramic Presence' as he says. I have credited her in print, maybe as many as fifty times, for writing this article, one of the seminal documents of that time. In 1978 I included her article in my anthology of major ceramic writings. The publication I actually referred to was her first book on Peter Voulkos, which ended up being more about her personal attraction to Pete than his work. Voulkos deserved better.
Moon's spirited defense of Bernard Leach and dismissal of my criticisms as 'silly' reflects one of the cultural differences we noticed during our stay: the high esteem in which Leach is still held down under. In New Zealand he is practically considered a saint and there my comments were greeted with shock and disbelief. It was as though I had just mugged Gandhi. But high esteem is not a description of Leach's reputation elsewhere not even in his homeland.
Moon argues that Leach did not blunt progress but was 'open-minded enough to open himself up to the transformative potential of another culture.' This is only partly true. By 1920, when he set up shop in St Ives, Western artists, and in particular, ceramists, had already been exploring Asian aesthetics for well over seventy years by then so Leach was a Johnny-come-lately. Also Leach was born and grew up in Asia. Reaching out to Asia was hardly a radical act. It was his home. There is also consensus growing among some scholars that Leach's view of Asia was poorly informed and anything but open-minded. Nor are Leach's pots, by any stretch of the imagination, innovative or modern.
The impact of cross-cultural encounters is measured by the degree to which they result in transformation, not mimicry. If one contrasts Leach's rather dull transference of Asian classicism with that of Christopher Dresser, who converted his love of Japanese ceramics into 19 th century proto-Modernism, or William Staite Murray, who applied it to create stately, magical vessels that were shown with Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and other artists, it is not a flattering comparison. Juxtaposing Leach's pots with the paintings of his friend, the Seattle-based painter Mark Tobey, who took Zen and Japanese calligraphy and converted this into his groundbreaking and magical 'white writing,' with almost no literal evidence of its original inspiration, dramatically reveals Leach's aesthetic bankruptcy.
He becomes even more of an anachronism when one contrasts him to the movers and shakers between 1920 and 1940 in other media. Painting got Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, and Wassily Kandinsky; sculpture got Constantin Brancusi, Alberto Giacometti, and Isamu Noguchi; photography got Man Ray, Edward Weston, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy; and architecture got Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe. We got Bernard Leach! There is no prize for guessing which medium got the short end of the 'new' stick (and the one-way tickets out of the modern world and back to the Sung and Koryu dynasties). Leach was both out of their league and out of his time. As Michael Cardew explained, he was 'a perfectly preserved Edwardian' and never grew beyond that dusty velvet-draped era even though he lived through the entire Modernist movement.
Clearly this earnest polymath was an inspirational figure and those who got to know him more intimately revered him for his character if not for his art (except for his much praised draftsmanship). But as much as we may praise Leach for his dedication, his kindness (as long as you were not one of his wives or children) and his undisputed love of pots, he and his often more conservative followers brought on decades of artistic constipation, delaying our engagement with the contemporary.
Moon inadvertently provides us with his own example of 'blunting the new' when he writes; 'Mark Del Vecchio asserts that "touchy-feely handcrafted and physical characteristics" are not very twenty-first century. Rather, we must seek the intellectual weight of the vessel, how it is exploited to give another layer of meaning to the artists' exploration of contemporary issues such as AIDS, globalism, consumerism, the factory and our preoccupation with technology.' Moon is skeptical and comments, 'Quite a tall order for a vessel, I would have thought. Just what the artist would achieve by exploring globalism in a pot is beyond me, but I suspect it might have something to do with money - or was that the pot that dealt with consumerism?'
This is the Achilles heel of the Leach school. When it strays from its narrow little world of 'doing Asia,' it is actually profoundly pessimistic about the vessel and its ability to speak more broadly to other issues, other styles, and other content. Non-traditional potters, and younger ones in particular, simply want the same freedom as other artists to speak about or explore any subject that energizes their work.
If the 10th century mathematician and poet Omar Khayyam could use the vessel as a metaphor to question the existence of God, and if the Mimbres Indians a thousand years ago could employ the bowl as a portal to heaven, then trying to speak about current concerns that affect our everyday life through the accessibility of pottery, does not sound unreasonable. And yes Mr. Moon, pottery can carry that weight of information. Do not underestimate the power of a pot. It can contain a lot more than just space.
I doubt that Moon would question a painter's freedom to explore global subject matter nor Picasso's freedom in Guernica , to comment on the Spanish Civil War, nor object to them selling their work for handsome prices. But potters do not seem to have the same rights in Moon's world. They had better stay in the kitchen, where they belong, earning hardship wages, throwing useful pots that our society no longer needs, and only a few still want. As for the cynical view that a potter would only explore ambitious ideas for money, I have a question for Moon, 'do you give your pots away for free?'
Lastly, Moon worries about our gallery being a negative influence, a Trojan horse that will bring an East Coast American disorder to Australia, a cultural virus that might be as destructive to local art as Californian ceramics was, in his opinion, decades ago. He may well be right on the latter point. Revolutions tend to flower most effectively on native soil. But he needs not fear.
Firstly, New York is the least American place in the United States. We jokingly, but accurately, refer to Manhattan as an island between America and Europe. Secondly, we are not an American gallery but an international one. There have been many years when exhibitions by artists from abroad have far outnumbered the Americans and we took a lot of flack from the US ceramics community for not being more nationalistic. This year is our 25th anniversary and we will have shows by and with, artists from at least fifteen countries, and yes, that includes Australia. All we export is energy, innovation and diversity, hardly a corrosive mix, unless you fear the new.
