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Handcraft Pottery Whence and Whether |
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The text from
Harry Davis' lecture to the CPA (Craft Potters' Association) in 1984.
Handcraft Pottery Whence and Whether
The craft revival movement
of the nineteenth century began as a protest movement against
commercialism and for a return to a less mercenary time, but this
never came about. To understand why this was so and what the resulting
direction became, one needs to take into account the combination of
social forces that coincided and gave the movement its peculiar ethos.
The founding fathers were inevitably influenced by the values and
characteristics of the culture into which they were born, and one must
keep in mind how class dominated that culture was. To further this
understanding one must define the main strands of that culture which
caused them to orient the handcraft revival in the direction they did.
The first strand, and probably the
dominant one, derives from Post Renaissance attitudes to what is
understood today as fine art and the general acceptance of art as a
thing separate and apart from the rest of life, particularly apart
from technics. This, I must stress, was not always so.
The second strand arose out of the fact
that art appreciation and the acquisitive cult of collecting art
became an essential element in the life of a gentleman and a
deliberate and self-conscious duty. The education of a gentleman was
incomplete without a study of the classics, the grand tour of Europe,
and a visit to Florence. These were all very much part of, and a
buttress to, the class system that also required that a gentleman
should not concern himself with manual, physical, and technical
things.
The third strand was that element of
social protest which gave rise to the handcraft revival in the first
place. This was short-lived. It was swamped by the egocentric and
well-established tradition inherent in Post Renaissance thinking. That
is, the replacement of a tradition of anonymity by the competitive
quest for individual recognition and fame, which is now so inseparable
from the arts. William Morris was the dominant figure in this protest,
which was a two-pronged gesture, as much concerned about working
conditions in nineteenth century factories as with aesthetic
considerations including the general absence of opportunity for
creative expression for the people working in those factories. One
should note here that the protest came from a middle-class
intellectual element and not from the factory workers who were quite
unconscious of this aspect of their lot. It came in fact from a class,
the members of which aspired to the status of gentleman.
This same class generated within the
handcraft movement a feature which greatly moulded its character. This
was a fear of machines. Those drawn to the handcraft movement
associated the materialism and sheer bad taste of much of the
industrial production of the time with the idea that machines were the
evil influence behind all that they deplored. Out of this grew the
rejection of machines which became a characteristic of the movement.
This attitude toward machines was strengthened by the fact that their
class background insulated them from any contact with tools and
machinery.
A fourth strand that greatly influenced
the character of the pottery handcraft revival was the role played by
the art schools. The influence of William Morris was still flickering
in art schools after World War I. Some very halting pottery classes
were functioning in the 1920s. The school that I attended had one, but
interest centered much more on figurines than on pots. Pottery classes
increased during the '30s, a fact that was much influenced by the
advent of Staite Murray as head of the Ceramic Department of the Royal
College of Art in London during that period. After World War II the
teaching institutions and pottery courses multiplied rapidly and
finally expanded to include many secondary schools and even
universities. All this became a decisive element in separating the art
from the technics and facilitated the massive dependence on ceramic
supply companies now so prevalent.
The final strand concerns the setting
up by Leach and Hamada in 1920 of a pottery at St. Ives in England.
Given unlimited technical scope it is rare that restraint and good
taste will prevail, and this is where Leach and Hamada's special
contribution comes in. They were inspired by elements of austere
restraint in the work of potters of the past, Chinese, Japanese, and
Korean, restraint essentially imposed by technological limitations.
Leach and Hamada must have been conscious of this, and it stands to
their great credit that they accepted these limitations as a form of
self-discipline in the aesthetic which they sought to re-create.
Unfortunately this was carried over into the fields of practical
technology which were not relevant to the aesthetic.
From the time of Josiah Wedgewood's
rise to fame in the second half of the eighteenth century and
continuing through the nineteenth century, the traditional handcraft
potteries of the English countryside underwent a steady decline. By
the end of World War I, very few were left with a viable socioeconomic
role or a credible aesthetic. Some, however, survived by switching to
the gift and tourist souvenir trade, and a number of establishments
came into being to exploit this new development. It was a totally
unrestrained and undisciplined phenomenon that used every available
resource twentieth century technology and chemistry could offer,
without sensitivity or restraint, and the social idealism and
aesthetic sensitivity of William Morris played no part in it.
When I was sixteen I worked in such an
establishment as a decorator. There I also acquired some of the
potter's basic skills including throwing, but none of the values
taking root in, the embryonic pottery craft movement. I was in fact
unaware of its existence. However, there was an element in my
background which rendered me susceptible to those values when I was
finally confronted with them.
My home was an incredibly cluttered
place. The emphasis was on "art" with Victorian overtones. My father's
first wife had been a portrait painter of some standing and my father
was a prolific Sunday painter with the result that every inch of wall
space was covered with oil paintings in elaborate gilt frames. My
mother was Swiss and so I was able to glimpse the interiors of
mountain farms in that country, and I liked their honest simplicity,
so unlike my home. This aesthetic simplicity became something of a
yardstick for me and has remained so ever since.
My confrontation with the pottery craft
movement came after the economic slump of 1929 when I was unemployed.
I received a letter from my former employer telling me that a Mr.
Bernard Leach was seeking trainees for a pottery project about to be
established at a place called Dartington Hall in Devonshire and that,
if interested, I should write and apply. This I did. This was a
wonderful opportunity for me and a major turning point in my career as
a potter. It was also an important educational experience, but it is
paradoxical that this turn of events should have been the outcome of
experiences of such negligible worth. I had, however, learned to throw
from a skilled old-timer and it was that which made me acceptable as a
trainee in a setting, incidentally, where throwing skills were not of
a high order. Michael Cardew used to denigrate his skills as a thrower
remarking that there was at least one thrower less competent than
himself and that was Bernard Leach.
Dartington Hall itself is a beautiful
manor house dating in part from the twelfth century. It struck me at
the time as another instance in which great beauty was the consequence
of technological limitations peculiar to the times in which it was
built. It had, and still has, a magnificent and austere simplicity
conceived in stone and slate and wood and blends perfectly with its
beautiful surroundings. The hall had been restored by Dorothy and
Leonard Elmhirst to become the vortex of a group of industries and
crafts and at the same time a centre where the arts could be fostered
for the benefit of all those participating in these developments. The
concept was that of an antidote to the drab and unaesthetic congestion
of industrial cities and had affinities with the social and cultural
concerns of William Morris. I felt excited and privileged to be able
to participate in this. After a short period of work at Dartington I
was required to go to St. Ives where Leach and Hamada had set up a
pottery a decade earlier.
Thus at the age of twenty I was
introduced to an altogether different sort of pottery in which those
qualities of aesthetic restraint and austerity were cherished. This
time that familiar but sordid preoccupation with the making of things
solely because it was assumed they would sell, seemed to be absent.
Bernard Leach, saturated as he was in aspects of Oriental pottery and
mainly familiar with high temperature ware, was much committed to
certain austere qualities which that implied. His home reflected this
too; its furnishings were simple and sparse. There were rustic beds
that Hamada had made, and such pictures as there were, were few and
well placed. The house itself repeated that respect for ungarnished
stone and wood and slate peculiar to another and less developed age. I
was impressed with the way it contrasted with my own.
Bernard Leach was an inspiring
interpreter of the work of potters in widely separated periods and
places. He was also a brilliant draughtsman in the Augustus John
tradition, having worked at the Slade School of Art about a decade
after John was a student there. This gave his decorating on pots and
his drawings a stamp which I greatly envied and admired. He introduced
me to pots in a way entirely new. for me, and I began to see things
that I had not seen before, including pots that were unfamiliar in
England at that time.
Then in 1935 something momentous
happened, especially for me. There came to London an exhibition of the
arts of China through the ages. A gathering of potters and pottery
students was organized, and we all met in London at Burlington House
to spend several days looking at this wonderful collection together.
The memory of it stands out as a landmark in my development. There I
met Michael Cardew for the first time. He too was seemingly
overwhelmed by the simplicity and the exquisite combinations of vigour
and refinement. That exhibition was a most exciting and stimulating
experience; I was amazed that so much delicacy and sensitivity could
be expressed with a floppy brush or a bit of bamboo. Here we thought
we saw a prototype or a model of vigour and sophistication appropriate
to the needs of our time and therefore a yardstick for what was
theoretically going to happen at Dartington. But somehow it never did.
I began to realize we were involved in
some sort of a protest movement, almost a crusade to rescue the
potter's craft from the clutches of mammon, to show a way out of
enslaving uncreative commercialism. I was swept along by the eloquent
social criticism of people like Eric Gill and R.H. Tawney, and I was
young enough to anticipate a tremendous impact from writings of that
calibre. But who knows or even mentions either of them today. There
was also the record of earlier protesters like William Morris and
Ruskin who, one knew, had cried out in vain. Now one thought, albeit
naively, that something radical was about to happen to recapture the
spirit of less mercenary times. Even Michael Cardew was optimistic
enough to go up to Stoke-on-Trent and challenge the high priests of
commerce and tell them they should stop and look where they were
going. He would show them, he thought, what real pots were and what
design was about in human terms. But they only laughed, though they
did let him do his thing-hoping, I presume, that, when he had done it,
he would go away. Such is the naivety (or is it the arrogance) of
youth, but I admired his courage tremendously.
For me it was a most stimulating period
as we set our sights on imagined events about to take place. But all
the talking never brought us to concrete plans, nor to the sheer
practicality of ways and means. The sweat and chores of background
work were scarcely mentioned. I worked with Leach on two of his bouts
of hectic preparation for London exhibitions of his work, but I did
not yet appreciate the significance of the seemingly total centrality
of this side of things.
Here a glance at strand one will remind
us of something which has affected every level of our culture for a
long time. One that is still not widely understood. I refer to events
which took place about five hundred years ago when a coterie of
successful autocrats, businessmen, and bankers in Florence attracted
to their circle some outstandingly talented craftsmen and elevated
what they did into a new category which became known as Fine Art, and
these talented men and their descendants were henceforth known as
Artists. This period, one may say, marks the point at which the great
split began, between the practical side of life for the commonality of
people associated with the arts of man, and the imaginative and
creative side.
Although the word "art" had been in
general use for a very long time, it had had a different connotation.
Prefixed with the word "fine," it acquired that exclusivity difference
which has dogged it ever since. This was summed up with telling
relevance and clarity by Walter Gropius. He referred to what he called
"a fatal legacy from a generation which elevated some branches of art
above the rest, as 'Fine Art,' and in so doing robbed all arts of
their basic identity and common life." In the 1930s the potter was
about to develop similar ambitions.
Here we are touching on a theme that
underlies so much of contemporary thinking about what is art and what
is craft. Perhaps one should not call it thinking, but rather
pigeonholing; a process of thought by cliche that facilitates quick
categorization but fails to take into account that boundaries are not
always clear-cut and sometimes are even nonexistent. Andre Malraux has
indulged some specious thought in this direction to separate the
artisan from the artist. The gist of the idea is the artist is one who
creates forms and the artisan is one who executes them.
This formula ignores the effects of the
employer/employee relationship, primarily a social division and only
secondarily a separation by talent. This is really what separates the
artisan from the artist. Employee status requires repetition and
obedience, and no innovation and no complaints. This relationship has
been consolidating for half a millennium. The story of the weavers of
Florence in the fourteenth century is symptomatic. They had the
audacity to down tools and to make complaints, in other words, to
strike. To quell this revolt the immense power of papal authority had
to be invoked. The weavers were threatened with excommunication if
they did not go back to work. Clearly, they were artisans, not
artists. No question of artistic license and idiosyncrasy there. Even
then, an artisan was expected to do what he was told. Also worth
noting in this context is Josiah Wedgewood, some three hundred years
later, who promptly dismissed workers who dared to ask for material
improvement in their lot. There again artisans were obliged to do what
they were told with no freedom to create forms.
In contrast, a person in a
nonspecialist tribal society was (and is) automatically both artist
and artisan, but we can no longer credit that it is perfectly possible
to be both. Many years of initiation and practice are required, even
for those born with what it takes-the talent. In our age of
specialization we train people for one or the other whereas so-called
primitive people with less sophisticated "ways had the time and
leisure to be both.
To return to the personal aspects of my
theme, Leach then suddenly went to Japan with Mark Toby, the painter.
This was a two-year trip financed by Dartington, ostensibly to gather
further stimulus and ideas for the forthcoming project. In the
meantime it was arranged, on the suggestion of Leonard Elmhirst, that
David Leach should attend a course of technical study at the North
Staffordshire Technical College, the teaching centre for the ceramic
industry in Stoke-on-Trent. The plan was an obvious indicator that
some doubts were felt about our capacity to handle the technical
aspects of the project. At the same time another prospective
participant in the project departed and I was left to keep the Leach
Pottery going with the help of the odd-job man, George Lunn, and the
secretary, Laurie Cooks.
At about this time Staite Murray was
made head of the pottery department of the Royal College of Art in
London. I know that this was something of a blow to Bernard Leach,
because he had been hoping the job would be offered to him. For some
years, Leach and Murray had been rivals as leaders in quest of fame
and status, both holding periodic exhibitions of their work in London
galleries. Murray, it seemed, had managed to make the bigger splash
and had landed the job at the Royal College. Murray's pricing, as
everybody noted, had been substantially more audacious than Leach's.
Gradually, and now in some alarm, I
became conscious of something which had at first not been apparent to
me. This was strand four, evident in the fact that my mentors hated
machines to a man, including Cardew. I soon realized this was because
they feared them and again because their ignorance of them was total.
Coming from middle-class backgrounds, they looked on tools as alien
things and on machines as something worse. They had no interest in or
understanding for either. While I worked for Leach (nearly five
years), there were no mechanical aids of any sort in the pottery. The
nearest thing to a machine was a potter's kick wheel. How Leach was
able to reconcile himself to something as sophisticated as a
crankshaft, I never did understand.
Slowly I became conscious of something
else which I found perhaps even more disquieting. This was the growing
preoccupation with status which was apparent in several ways. The work
effort rose to a feverish pitch in preparation for exhibitions, and
when they were launched things slumped into inactivity. They seemed to
be the real if not the only stimulus for making pots.
Michael Cardew was seemingly quite
unaffected by all this, or maybe he was as yet unaware of the
status-oriented twist things were being given. He had revived
Winchcombe pottery and was working away quietly as country potters had
done through the ages, and with admirable disregard for mercenary
considerations. His lifestyle was extremely simple and, when I visited
him for the first time round about 1935, he and his wife Mariel were
living in a loft in the old pottery building. When he finally did hold
an exhibition of pots in the Brygos gallery in the spring of 1937 he
made an interesting comment, which when reminded of it in the 70s, he
was to deny hotly. He said, "When they come at some future date to
assess this event, they will call it Michael Cardew's ambitious
period." I didn't press the point further but clearly he was fully
conscious of the turn that events had taken and his own involvement.
Long before this Leach had been saying
repeatedly that pottery and potters must be given the status and
prestige accorded to painters and sculptors. The title "artist potter"
began to be heard more and more, and it was clearly here that the
pathetic obsession with the whole sad business of the desire for
recognition began for potters. Staite Murray, now installed at the
Royal College, was soon saying that an artist potter must at all costs
avoid involvement with function. All this was gradually reflected in
the use of language. Things were renamed and acquired subtle overtones
of class. An apprentice became a student, a shop was called a gallery
and the potter's place of work became a studio. Recognition at any
price had become the rule.
The potter's craft through the ages has
had a special quality in that it performed a double function. It
supplied a range of domestic and ceremonial pots essential to the
daily life of ordinary people, and at its best it enriched their
common life on a spiritual plane as well. Potters have done this for a
long time, and often in more sensitive mood, obvious joy was taken in
doing so. The pots (often quite mundane functional pots too) were
imbued with a beauty and subtlety of the highest order. As we all
know, the technique is an inexpensive one; the raw materials used are
abundant and common and therefore cheap. Thus delightful things could
become a life-enriching experience in anybody's daily life. Making
this benign contribution to the domestic and social scene has been the
potter's role and privilege for millennia, but to do this and do it
well, the potter had to be both dedicated and hard working, and to
have the wit to control his mixtures and kilns.
Suddenly in our day the potter became
ambitious and decided to make a bid for a place in the world of fine
art. In consequence everything had to change. The potter's social
status and the kind of pots made and the attitude to the repetition of
shapes and designs, together with the need for skill and training in
order to be able to do so, all underwent a rapid and total change. The
potter had to invade a new marketplace, and ingratiate himself with a
new clientele, and above all take an entirely new attitude toward
price. The new client was no longer of the common people, and price
was pitched at such a level that an ordinary home could no longer
afford the pottery. Instead it was destined for the collector's
drawing room or a museum. Skill, if not positively denigrated, became
unimportant. The extraordinary thing is that, despite all these
changes, the pots insofar as they remained pots (which in many cases
they soon ceased to do) were not one whit better than countless pots
made unself-consciously in other times and places by unknown peasant
craftspeople without pretence at status, either artistic or social.
The upshot of all this was that the
potters no longer needed to be aware in any practical, technical, or
functional sense. If the pots were Art the rest was for naught, and
price or a teaching job would take care of the rest. In fact the
none-too-subtle evidence that these aspects had been set for naught
often became the hallmark and guarantee that the work in question was
Art, which then was further underlined by the price tag. The same
evidence for some was also proof that the work was handmade and that
authorized similar special pleading.
There were thus two basic trends at
work together, both pulling in one direction, and both likely to have
the same sort of impact. On the one hand, there was the growing
preoccupation with status for both potter and pot, and, on the other,
there was this Luddite mentality rejecting machines and tools, which
seemed to sanction an indifference to practical and economic issues.
It is small wonder that, for many, making pots soon ceased to be the
aim, and the acquisition of skill as possessed by that Unknown
Craftsman so much admired in those days no longer held interest.
Similarly the more mundane needs of daily life (dinner plates, for
instance) could hardly be tackled, let alone given that extra shot of
vitality to enrich the experience of day-to-day living, without
pricing them as Art objects out of the reach of common people.
In the meantime, the Elmhirsts had
ceased to administer the Dartington Estate themselves and had
appointed a group of professional trustees to do it for them. The
trustees may have had reason to doubt the practicality of the scheme;
at any rate the dream project was quietly dropped.
Lewis Mumford has made an important
analysis of man's attitude to machines and the machine age in a book
entitled The Myth of the Machine. This has a bearing on attitudes that
have greatly influenced trends in the handcraft movement, especially
pottery-attitudes based on fallacies. Many eminent men have pointed
the finger on this theme, but mostly in the wrong direction. Ruskin,
William Blake, and J.J. Rousseau all had their mistaken rant about
machines. A machine can be a benign labour-saving device. Its misuse
is what makes it malignant. When people are made to tend its monstrous
and monotonous demands or starve, when it is used to get more out of
fewer people for less money, that is when it becomes malign. The real
foe, as Mumford makes historically so clear, is that great invisible
organizational machine called variously "the system," "the
establishment," for which Lewis Mumford has coined the phrase "the
Megamachine." The megamachine is that ruthless instrument of
collective coercion once used to build the pyramids under mortal
threat and more subtly applied in later times to man the factories for
a pittance, or starve. It is essentially a product of civilization,
and also the prolonged event that led to the widespread view that work
is a curse to be avoided if possible. Only when men were free to work
outside this megamachine or were given freedom to work within it was
creative craftsmanship a possibility and work a joy. For the fact that
at times this did happen we are grateful.
The building of machines in the benign
sense started very early. There is the record of the poet Antipater of
Thessalonica writing a eulogy of the waterwheel as a domestic
appliance relieving women of the burden of grinding corn. This was in
the first century of our era somewhere in the mountains of Greece
though waterwheels have a history much older than that. The real boost
came with the Benedictine monks in the sixth century. That order with
its working day of voluntary discipline divided into mental, spiritual
and manual duties had a vested interest in the invention of
labour-saving devices, if only because there was no place for either
slaves or masters in their way of life. Lewis Mumford has calculated
that the cumulative effect of their efforts bore such prodigious
fruits that by the time of the Norman conquest, England with its
population of only one million had the labour services of 8000
waterwheels. These he further estimates yielded energy annually far in
excess of the reluctant labours of the 100,000 slaves that the
Egyptians used to build the great pyramids. Such an achievement as
early as the eleventh century is impressive engineering, no matter how
negligible it may seem by modern standards. To have all that sawing of
wood and milling of grain done for them, to say nothing of devices for
harnessing a horse to chop or to cut, or to stir, enables one to begin
to understand how a town of 10,000 people could raise one of those
magnificent cathedrals without resource to slaves and the lash. That
was a cultural peak in the remote past, but proof enough that the
machine can be benign in the hands of free men. Since then the
megamachine has reappeared in a new guise and the words "wage" and
"industrial" have been prefixed to new and subtler forms of slavery.
Bernard Leach again saw clearly the
vicious break between the generations of potters associated with the
English slipware tradition, culminating with Thomas Toft in the
mid-eighteenth century, and the generations of industrial workers
starting with Josiah Wedgewood's employees, that followed. There
exists an amazing milestone to mark this event. This is a letter from
Wedgewood to his friend and public relations man Thomas Bentley in
which he writes of his dream and ideal, "to make of men, such machines
that cannot err." A century and a half later William Morris began to
protest at the social and aesthetic outcome of that "dream," so
effectively fulfilled, not only by Wedgewood but by others as well.
The craft revival movement was
essentially a gesture of protest from the start, based on a criticism
of things as they were at that time, contrasted with what had been in
other times and places. There was no isolating those contrasts from
the social conditions that gave rise to such startling results. An
awareness of the sordid dreariness of nineteenth century industrial
conditions and the tasteless ostentation of its products provoked
indignation and varying degrees of resolve to take some part in a
solution. That was the mood of the handcraft pottery revival as I
experienced it in the '30s. There was no escaping the fact that the
tastelessness was linked with unprecedented material wealth and that
anything artistically and aesthetically inspiring out of other ages
was associated with what today would be called poverty. What was the
factor producing such differences between the sterile quality of
artifacts in nineteenth- and twentieth-century urban life and the
aesthetic vitality of artifacts that came out of material poverty in
primitive tribal conditions at other times? My conclusion is that it
had to do with a social ethos which yielded or denied people the
freedom and satisfaction of expression in simple humble acts,
regardless of material rewards or status. The essence seemed to have
to do with simplicity and austerity, and many of us realized that to
recapture anything of that vitality would only be possible through a
voluntary acceptance of what some called poverty, but what others
called simplicity.
To me there was something contradictory
and repellent about striving for a simple and vital aesthetic in what
we made, and then selling it in places where only the wealthy would go
to buy it and, one might almost add, at no matter what price. Some of
us believed that vitality and simplicity needed to be brought back
into the humbler things associated with ordinary living and available
to all. Clearly price had a lot to do with this, and inevitably
competition even more.
The question was: how to do anything to
counteract the characterless products churned out by industry with its
immense material resources. What one did would have to be the outcome
of a radically different approach. That the emphasis in motivation
must be reversed was agreed. It meant putting the emphasis on giving
and not on taking, something craftspeople worthy of the name do
anyway, usually with a generous mental idea about price. They may
never have tried to define this, but others have. In the days of the
cathedral builders it was called the "just price." What that is, is
not too easy to define either, but it differs greatly from that other
and more recent definition of price which postulates that "the price
of an article is what it will fetch," a yardstick soon to invade the
world of potters as well. This view of price was not overlooked by a
group of prisoners in an English gaol recently. They were given
pottery classes in the prison rehabilitation programme and were in the
habit of sending their pots home to their families with false
signatures on them. Someone took the next obvious step, and for a time
they managed to fool the famous London art dealers, who were well
versed in defining price by the "what it will fetch" rule, sometimes
to the tune of millions. The prisoners however overlooked one
important point-the exclusivity principle. They made too many Bernard
Leach pots.
The combined effect of the changed
attitude to status and the quasi Luddite thinking was soon to be
strengthened by educational circles. This area was already hopelessly
committed to the split between technics and aesthetics, technical
colleges to teach technics and art schools to teach art having long
been in existence. The craft movement should have been chiefly
concerned with bringing these two together again, but it was not and
the two continued to drift apart. I have already drawn attention to
what was in fact the central concern, which was that an artist potter
should avoid all involvement with function, as so outspokenly
emphasized by Staite Murray. That message spread rapidly through the
Anglo-Saxon world of teaching institutions at the time when the
teaching of crafts was about to undergo a tremendous upsurge. The very
multiplicity of the institutions and the great number of courses
introduced meant that henceforth the destiny of the craft movement was
to be in the hands of educational institutions and no longer in the
hands of working craftspeople. This ef-fectively diverted attention
away from the capacity craftspeople in previous cultures had for
avoiding a split between the practical and the creative, for keeping
them facets of a whole.
This rapid stimulation of activity
meant that the institutions had first to produce a generation of
teachers; they did not, and could not, produce a generation of
practical craftspeople. Whatever may be said to the credit of such
institutions (and I'm sure there is much that should be), it does not
include the making of a craftsman or a tradesman in the full and best
sense of those terms. The term "tradesman" is so irrevocably
associated in our minds with the idea of trade and commerce that only
when its archaic usage is brought to our notice do we realize that it
implied a certain dignity with ethical overtones. The prefix "trade"
had originally an altogether different and dignified meaning, which
was to tread or walk as in a calling. This was bound up with the trio
"apprentice," 'journeyman," and "master" and conveyed the idea of the
master craftsman treading on a way of life with a sense of mission. It
is interesting that in the German language the word Beruf, which
equates exactly with the English word "calling," is used to denote
what a person does whether he is a potter or a university professor
and carries none of the mercenary overtones. Undeniably, to tread, or
walk as in a way of life, stands poles apart from the idea of to trade
as in the marketplace.
In a class-ridden society like that of
England in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the loss of the
tradesman's dignity and the splitting apart of the two halves of a
craft could happen and not be noticed, even by thinking people. Given
the thinking of leaders of industry like Josiah Wedgewood, that
cleavage was inevitable. Equally inevitable was it that those more
sensitive people who became aware of this affront to human personality
and dignity were from among an intellectual minority that was
insulated from those lowly occu-pations dealing with the mere
practical and technical sides of life. When they stopped in their
tracks, as Morris did, saying "Hey, this must be changed. Craftspeople
once made beautiful things and now look what people are made to do,"
they were ill-equipped and their understanding of tools and technics
was minimal. Their background and education had given them instead a
grounding in Latin and Greek and some familiarity with what are called
the fine arts and literature. In addition, their thoughts were
coloured by a succession of thinkers who had misconstrued the very
nature of what they knew as the machine age. Educated gentlemen that
they were, they would have felt the influence of Rousseau, William
Blake, Ruskin and others, all of whom detested machines. Jean J.
Rousseau has even been described by one authority as the original
Luddite, but one and all confused the labour-saving benefit of wheels
and shafts and pulleys with the vicious organizational machine of
workers, foremen, managers and bureaucrats (to say nothing of
shareholders). That is what regiments the worker and leaves no room
for imagination and spontaneity, to say nothing of his growth and
dignity as a person.
As for myself, it was not until I was
thrown on my own resourcesin West Africa at the end of the 1930s that
I became conscious of the abysmal ignorance that prevailed among my
generation of revivalist craftspeople. Not just the ignorance that
defined my limitations as a potter, but my ignorance of so much that
men in other callings in the years of my early adulthood could have
bequeathed to me had I but asked. Those were opportunities lost
because when the second world war was over, those men were gone and
their workshops were no more. But long before that it became apparent
to me that the craft movement was confronted with a choice-either
acquire those supporting skills and get acquainted with some aspects
of more specialized fields of knowledge, or abandon the early ideal of
linking high quality in its broadest sense with moderate price. In no
other way can potters hope to fulfill the simple socioeconomic service
that was traditionally their role. The alternative is a great public
relations act of self-advertisement and much subtle manipulation of
language to create an illusion of exclusivity to justify inordinate
price levels beyond the reach of most.
For me in West Africa during the war
these choices became part of the day-to-day challenge. The war had cut
off all the normal sources of expertise and prepared raw materials, as
well as the range of ready-made equipment. Either one improvised
solutions from whatever was at hand or one capitulated. I chose to
improvise and carry on, and from then on my potting life has had what
in modern jargon would be called a "research department." For over
forty years a continuous side interest has been discovering ways and
means to strengthen a potter's arm in practical terms to compensate
for the disadvantages, albeit voluntarily accepted, of moderate scale
and hand-craft methods. This has added up to a vast amount of
information, both theoretical and practical, and for the last two
years I have been busy putting it all on record in a book which I hope
to publish.
Someone once defined an educated man as
a person who knows everything about something and something about
everything. This is, I think, an apt definition of a well-trained
potter. He needs to know everything about his chosen field and
something about even-body else's. As it turns out, his calling, as
defined before the industrial revolution, can scarcely be pursued at
all today without a partial overlap with other specialized fields.
This was brought home to me during the war in another sense as well.
The attempt was made by the authorities in West Africa to find me an
assistant from among the British servicemen stationed in the three
colonies, Nigeria, the Gold Coast (now Ghana), and Sierra Leone. The
opportunity attracted many applicants from men formerly in the pottery
industry, but one and all were qualified only in some minute fragment
of the skills practiced in that industry. They were all factory
workers, and there was not a craftsman in the full sense of the term
among them. Such is the scope for human fulfilment inside the
megamachine.
In short, what distresses me about this
story of fifty years of craft revivalism is the fact that handcraft
pottery with its complacent standards of doubtful competence and
extravagant pricing only flourishes because it is functioning in a
society of extreme affluence. That affluence is the direct outcome of
outrageous resource usage by the developed western world to the
detriment of less developed societies. There is a bandwagon quality
about all this which, I submit, is not what the hand-craft movement
was about.
So much for the "whence" in my title.
The "whither" is another matter. In my opinion the prevalent direction
is explained by the values and motives which guided the handcraft
pottery movement in its formative years. I have indicated what these
were and it seems almost certain that they will continue to dominate
its future despite the efforts of a minority struggling to find a way
to operate on a healthier value basis. The prevailing attitudes and
values have been instrumental in diverting the movement away from any
urge it may have had toward creative expression while meeting the
needs of the commonality of people. A heavy bias in favour of
aesthetics, as the only field of excellence worth pursuing, has for
most potters become an exclusive bias, and one often transparently
confused with a concern for fame and name. This is not new, but it has
culminated in an extraordinary complacency. In fact the movement has
become content with very low levels of skill and is positively
indifferent to practical considerations that could lead to a more
holistic and socially purposeful role, a role that need not mean a
loss of creative expression. This state of affairs could only have
come about in a society where the extreme affluence of a minority
wields an influence out of all proportion to its size. Worse still
this complacency renders the movement unaware of, and even indifferent
to, the basis of this extraordinary affluence which persists in spite
of recessions and much unemployment. All this is sad in a movement
which began in a mood of idealism with a broad social and human
concern.
Harry Davis
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