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

Art in America, Nov, 1996 by Janet Koplos

Among the other types of Mingei are wooden shop signs with an almost iconic relief carving or sometimes writing to indicate the shop's merchandise. Both shows also offer examples of wooden chests, kettle-hook hangers and ornamental leveling devices used for cooking over open hearths, and carpenters' snap lines given fanciful shapes such as waves or animals. The Montgomery Collection also presents a number of toys, dolls and animal figures, both the purely decorative (such as a 17th- or 18th-century wooden crouching cat that looks like Brancusi gone sentimental) and the functional (a handwarmer in the shape of a whimsical rabbit). It also offers a substantial selection of lamps, hanging lanterns and candlestands. A wooden lamp is shaded with used paper, probably for reasons of economy, but the vertical rows of calligraphic writing can be appreciated as decorative by exhibition viewers who cannot read them.

A less-expected inclusion in the Mingeikan show is scholars' doro-e (literally, mud pictures), documentary renderings of scenery which show the influence of Western perspective. Both exhibitions include Otsu-e (Otsu pictures), popular travel souvenirs which began to be produced in the 17th century. The unsigned Otsu-e were cranked out by teams, often families, taking the same few motifs (the beautiful wisteria maiden, a devil, a falcon trainer and more), abbreviating representation in the interest of speed.

Although Mingei encompasses the souvenirs of past centuries, mass-hand-production souvenirs of the present day, such as Mashiko pottery, are held in low esteem and rejected as Mingei on a qualitative basis. This judgment introduces one of several problems with Yanagi's conception, for although its appeal has not faded over 70 years, careful thought about Mingei shows it to be riddled with inconsistencies. Quality is one issue. The historian William B. Hauser starts out the Montgomery Collection catalogue by arguing that Mingei goods were not, in fact, common, everyday items but the best of the genre, and that the makers were not innocents but highly developed specialists at their crafts.(9) The Mingeikan catalogue seems to agree by noting that "Mingei is the highest combination of utility and beauty."(10) Another problem is Mingei's supposed restriction to the goods of the common people. Yanagi' whose eye for beauty is praised by both his admirers and his critics, included some aristocratic items in the Mingeikan collection, apparently for purely esthetic reasons. Okinawan court textiles are a prime example.

Another dilemma is time frame: can there still be Mingei now? Yanagi's discovery in 1931 of a still-active pottery-production community on the island of Kyushu undermined the very thing he praised.(11) His writing about it led Mingei-appreciators to the site. They preferred certain forms and styles and thus elevated the work of particular potters, disrupting the community's seniority-based cooperation and leading to the discontinuance of some traditional forms, the introduction of new styles and an end to the anonymity of the work. There and elsewhere, traditional items are still produced today, but not by anonymous craftsmen selling at low cost. Mingei items now sell for high prices to a network of connoisseurs. Yanagi's son Sori, who has been the director of the Mingeikan for the last 16 years and is himself a product designer whose work was included in the recent Japanese design exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, argues that today's true Mingei is not handcrafts but designed industrial goods that are modest in price and made to meet the everyday needs of the community. His assertion, of course, is not popular among collectors of traditional pieces.(12)