Post #10: Scoring Points

My neighbor Vanessa, who runs an organic farm up the road, has been following this blog, and though she is not intimately familiar with the Art v. Craft debate, I consider her a fairly sharp reader.  At my son’s twelfth birthday party last Saturday she pointed out that although my “Love Fest” (post #7) was a clever piece of writing that snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, she was less sure than I that “Garth’s Response” (post #6) was an altogether friendly piece of writing.  She had a good point.

Let me address some of what might be called “rebukes” from “Garth’s Response”  (Post #6) as I prepare to deconstruct some of his central points in his larger argument: “How Envy Killed the Craft Movement: an Autopsy in Two Parts.”  This pre-deconstruction will be conducted in the next two posts, but I will refrain from addressing every point he makes as some of them are close enough to his central points in “Envy” that I plan to refute later.  

I will work more or less chronologically through his "Response" (post#6).  Let me start here:

“Imagine if I saw just one pot of yours and from that single object decided that that you disliked art, were narrow, smug, and that the pot was made for profit and had no deeper motive”  --Garth Clark, post #6

I don’t think this analogy works.  It assumes that some randomly selected and possibly bad pot that I made can represent my work.  It cannot.  If I put a pot or two of my choosing into a public space to represent me, then yes, I think the analogy would be better.  “Envy” is a carefully constructed argument that was taken very seriously by its author and presented in a public space (Portland Museum of Modern Craft), which means that Garth was allowing this address on some level to represent his critical thinking.  And as such, it is my right to criticize and refute it on its own merits and lack thereof. 

The last bit about my pot being made only for profit and “having no deeper motive” is Garth’s way of calling me out for comparing him to a stockbroker in post #4.  Fair play Garth.  I agree that you have much deeper motives than mere profit in your “Envy” piece.  However, in that you have played the district attorney prosecuting the case that the craft movement committed suicide, I must faithfully perform my role as the public defender who claims that the craft movement not only didn’t commit suicide, but is in fact still alive.  It is my obligation to point out that the district attorney has an apparent conflict of interest, which may cloud his judgment or prevent him from being perfectly objective.  You have profited from writing favorable criticism for those artists whose work your galleries sold.  Your favorable criticism is still sincere and valid.  We can strike my point from the record though there is some risk that this may backfire, bringing that point more directly to the jury’s attention.  This is not a personal judgment.  I am simply fulfilling my responsibility to my client, the craft movement.

“Your comments suggesting that I would not like Ohr shows just how superficial your understanding is of my work.” –Garth Clark, post #6

I encourage all readers to go back and look at post#2 more carefully.  I state very clearly in my fourth and seventh paragraphs that I think Ohr is a potter that I think Garth and I would agree is among the greats of the 20^th century.  Then I go on to mock Garth for not seeing the sentimental aspect of Ohr's work.  I admit I am caught out on a limb here, as I didn’t realize that Garth was one of the three authors of the definitive text, The Mad Potter Of Biloxi (which I love), and haven’t had time to re-read.  But I think my point here is that I never stated that Garth “would not like Ohr,” but rather that we would both find him to be one of the most significant potters of the 20^th century.

This next one is a bit of a doozy:

“It’s the same line that has been coming out the traditional pottery world since Leach began pontificating…  you are still loyally parroting dogma…   clinging to the past, uneasy with your own times.  I have heard it all before.”  --Garth Clark, post #6

Does that sound condescending to anyone besides me?

I have not read Garth’s essay on “Leach’s Orphans” yet, and I will likely have more insight when I do, but these words and the tone implicit in them must be addressed here and now.  So Garth, if I may be so bold as to parrot a somewhat lesser man than Leach: 

“Don’t Misunderestimate Me.”  --George W. Bush

(who may well have been parroting a vastly smarter man than himself)

Leach died in 1979 shortly after I turned eight years old.  Cardew passed away four years later when I was twelve.  I have never met Warren MacKenzie, though I have been to his workshop in Stillwater, MN (where I purchased a nice little yunomi on the honor system for $4) in 1993.  I bring up MacKenzie because he was a student of Leach's in the 50s and was quite influential in the development of my first teacher Mike Thiedeman, who was the professor of Ceramics at Earlham College, which I attended during his tenure.  Mike was certainly drawn to Leach and encouraged his students to read Leach, but he dutifully warned us about the Leach rhetoric trap and exposed us to all of the Modern ceramicist craftsman of the twentieth century that Garth finds so compelling.  I like these folks too intellectually, though I am more drawn to functional traditions by my heart.

My next two mentors were Todd Piker and Mark Hewitt who were both apprenticed to Michael Cardew (Michael Cardew was one of Leach's very first pupils) in the 70s when Michael was an elderly man.  From them I learned much of the ins and outs of how to make pots, run a workshop and develop a business, and for these contributions to my knowledge and skill and confidence, I am eternally grateful.  I could digress (and I have in my notebooks about the flaw and virtues of these two teachers), but lets put the cards on the table:

Leach does not speak for me.

Cardew does not speak for me.

MacKenzie does not speak for me.

Thiedeman doesn’t speak for me.

Piker doesn’t speak for me.

Hewitt doesn’t speak for me.

I speak for me.

I “parrot” no one.  The above influences represent a small group of voices that I pick through like a child on a landfill in a third world country looking for the bits that are of use and leaving the rest where it is.  But these voices seem small when I look through the entire history of pottery (I am referring to traditions of functional pottery that stretch back to the dawn of civilization).  I look particularly hard at the pottery of the Carolinas, the classical periods of Chinese pottery (form and brushwork) and the centuries of  reinterpretations of these patterns by European potters who found inspiration there.  A potter cannot be fully understood by his or her genealogical tree, any more than a person can be predicted by his or her ancestry.  Each person or potter must use what knowledge he gains from his forbearers and forge his own skills and patterns as he responds to the unique challenges of his own time.

I will pause here to mention one particular voice who I love and has served as a very deep personal hero.  A native of South Carolina curiously enough named David, presumably after the very same shepherd boy, who became a hero in the bible story “David and Goliath,” I am speaking of David Drake as he was known after emancipation or “Dave the slave” as he was called before the civil war.  Dave was a literate slave in a time when literacy among slaves was prohibited by law.  But he had the audacity to challenge the “Goliath” of his time (the fundamentally unfair and humiliating institution of slavery) by boldly writing couplets on the side of his pots and signing his name and the initials of the master he served and sometimes a date or an inclusive “Baddler” (the name of the man who labored at turning the wheel for him) when he made larger wares.  From the lowest rung of society, he challenged the ignorance and condescension of his “betters” with humility and dignity.  

I can't make out the words 100% on this, but I think Dave's couplet here reads:

"I made this pot all of a cross,

if you don't repent you will be lost"  --Dave "the slave" Drake of Edgefield, S.C. 

Garth I think you have misunderstood me and perhaps other traditional craftsman, and you have underestimated us too.  Please don’t misunderestimate us again.

to be continued…

--Matt Jones