Finding the extraordinary in the everyday - Japanese folk crafts; various artists, various galleries

Art in America, Nov, 1996 by Janet Koplos

The Mingei philosophy was syncretic: Yanagi had read Carlyle and was familiar with William Morris's ideas, but his goals were different (Morris aimed to revive handcrafts, although that entailed making expensive items for wealthy patrons; Yanagi hoped to perpetuate dying traditions but concentrated on encouraging the appreciation of artifacts already in existence). The Mingei celebration of "unself-consciousness" relied on Buddhist ideas, and, in addition, the Buddhist practice of accumulating merit through repetition (copying sutras, for example) seems to underpin Yanagi's endorsement of mass hand production. (His spiritual base is evident in essays in which he constructs a "Kingdom of Beauty" parallel to the Kingdom of Heaven, and equates self-conscious art and unself-conscious folk crafts with the self-power and other-power routes to nirvana.)

A selection of folk crafts from the Mingeikan--to which Yanagi donated his entire personal collection--makes up one of the current traveling exhibitions. The other show is drawn from the collection of Jeffrey Montgomery, an American who resides in Switzerland. The existence of his substantial collection, so far from the place of origin, illustrates the success of Yanagi's proselytizing over the years. Yanagi spoke and wrote indefatigably about Mingei. He was a visiting lecturer for a year at Harvard (1929-30), where he told the students that "a history of art without heroes is the very one which I should like to write!"(6) He founded a folkcraft association that in a revised form still exists, published Kogei, a high-quality monthly magazine of crafts, for 20 years, and wrote for English-language magazines on Asian art.

In America, he is remembered by a generation of ceramists now in their 60s and 70s for a nine-month odyssey across the U.S. in 1952-53 with his friends Hamada and Leach, including a stay at Black Mountain College, where Yanagi talked and the two potters demonstrated a Zen-tinged "natural" approach to clay.(7) The Mingei esthetic has played a part in the postwar crafts boom in the U.S. and Britain.(8) Yanagi's ideas are best known in the West through the book The Unknown Craftsman: A Japanese Insight into Beauty, a collection of his essays translated into English and published posthumously under the editorship of Leach.

Although, to Yanagi, Mingei was an expression of cultural consensus rather than individual will, there was room for personal variation. Take, for example, the farmer's rain capes (mino) in the Mingeikan show. These were made by the farmers themselves from easily available materials such as grasses and seaweed. A rain cape, tied over the shoulders and worn with a conical hat (as sometimes seen in the prints of Hokusai), was an eminently practical garment for field work during the summer rainy season, when any closed coat would be too hot. The two capes suggest the possible variety of detailing within a standard form. Both are garment-shaped cascades of straw and seaweed finished with a decorative yoke and a knotted-cord tie. One features strong contrasts: it consists primarily of twisting strands of dried black seaweed, with three horse/ail-like pendant clumps of pale golden rice straw, plus red and green bands in the yoke. The other is more subtle: most of it is greenish-yellow straw, with russet straw at center front and at the shoulders, while the black-meander-on-yellow of the yoke is set off by a short fringe of black seaweed.