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

Art in America, Nov, 1996 by Janet Koplos

Hauser also describes the economic impact of the shogunate's requirement that regional warlords (daimyo) spend alternate years in Edo (Tokyo). The expense of travel and of maintaining two residences encouraged the warlords to develop special products as new sources of income from their regions. A rudimentary banking system developed to transfer the funds of such trade as well as the profits from seeing the rice that the warlords received as land taxes within in their territories.

[6.] From Yanagi Soetsu Zenshu (The Complete Works of Soetsu Yanagi), Tokyo, Chikuma Shobo, 1982, vol. 20, p. 61, quoted in Teiko Utsumi, "Mingei and the Life of Soetsu Yanagi," Mingei: Two Centuries of Japanese Folk Art, Tokyo: The Japan Folk Crafts Museum, 1995, p. 23. [7.] Warren MacKenzie, emeritus professor of art at the University of Minnesota and a well-known potter who apprenticed with Leach in St. Ives, Cornwall. at the end of the '40s. has often spoken of the scientific approach to ceramic studies he had experienced at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where students wore white lab coats in the studio. The more spontaneous and casual style demonstrated during this tour, especially by Hamada, had an explosive impact on the American clay community, augmenting the influence of Leach's A Potter's Book (1940). The Japan-influenced pottery produced by MacKenzie and several generations of his students has lead to his state jokingly being called Mingeisota. [8.] Yanagi propounded what Oliver Watson of the Victoria and Albert Museum has called the "ethical pot." Watson has written, "When lovingly made in the correct way and with the correct attitudes, it contains, for those who are open to the message, a spiritual and moral dimension. It is in effect, an `ethical' pot. The ethical pot is remarkably successful and persistent. It is what characterizes the `craft' of pottery and distinguishes it from pottery as fine-art." From Studio Pottery, London, Phaidon Press Limited, 1990, p. 15, quoted in "Yanagi's America: Soetsu Yanagi's Two Extended Stays in the United States and Their Impact on America," by Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere, in Mingei: Two Centuries of Japanese FolkArt, p. 54. [9.] Hauser, "Mingei and Japanese Society," p. 11. [10.] Notes to Soetsu Yanagi's "Proposition on Mingei," Mingei: Two Centuries of Japanese FolkArt, p. 4. [11.] This is the subject of Lost Innocence: Folk Craft Potters of Onta, Japan, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1984, in which the English anthropologist Brian Moeran describes the transformation of this folk-pottery community. [12.] Sori Yanagi managed to insert an example of modern design into the Mingeikan show, at least as it appeared at the Peabody Essex Museum near Boston, its first U.S. venue. There, in a back corner of the exhibition has, was a gleaming Japanese motorcycle. [13.] Soetsu Yanagi, "Seeing and Knowing" (1940), in The Unknown Craftsman: A Japanese Insight into Beauty, Tokyo, Kodansha, International, 1982 [originally published 1972], p. 110. He advised: "First, put aside the desire to judge immediately; acquire the habit of just looking. Second, do not treat the object as an object for the intellect. Third, just be ready to receive, passively, without interposing yourself. If you can void your mind of all intellectualization, like a clear mirror that simply reflects, all the better" (p. 112). [14.] The bilingual Mingeikan catalogue focuses intently on the life and philosophy of Soetsu Yanagi, with the artifacts discussed only in notes to the plates, at the back. The Montgomery Collection catalogue includes somewhat testy remarks on Yanagi and the Mingei Movement by its three essayists but provides a consideration of the social and economic milieu in which Mingei objects were produced, extended explanations of the motifs, and a considered discussion of the range of textile items. Both catalogues are flawed: one of the Montgomery essayists writes simplistically, while the Mingeikan catalogue could have used more thorough proofreading. But because of the different approaches of the two publications, together they provide an uncommonly thorough treatment of the subject.