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Art Identity and Anonymity |
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A paper by Harry Davis published by
the Potters' Society of Australia in the Spring 1972 edition of
Pottery in Australia (Vol. 11. No. 2).
In another essay called "An
Historical Review of Art Commerce and Craftsmanship" I
tried to focus attention on the way commerce came to corrupt the other
two in this trio. This essay is intended to be a sequel to that
statement, and here I am attempting to focus attention on the way in
which four centuries of ever increasing preoccupation with commerce
and profit has moulded our attitude to art today.
I must stress, however,
that diagnostic statements of this sort lack point unless accompanied by
practical comment on attitudes to technology and work. This is particularly
true in the case of the potter. I have tried to show that Art is an
expression of the quality of a society. It is a product of experience, as
John Dewey so rightly stressed, and clearly an artist needs some insulation
from the aberrations of his society in order to work, and not become one of
the aberrations himself. His work, even if he does succeed in standing
apart, may be a deliberate emphasis of the chaos and absurdity which causes
the aberrations, and this will give his work a social connotation quite
apart from its aesthetic content. It may become a reflection of chaos and
absurdity and nothing more; in fact to appear to reflect this may even
become the fashionable thing to do, which is where we are now.
In an art such as that of the potter
this inevitably results in an abdication of the potter's essential
role. If he does not wish to abdicate he has to face the technological
and practical implications of insulation, and take a hard look at the
chaos and absurdity which he is trying to avoid. Our society's
principal aberration is its runaway technology and the moulding of the
entire environment required to maintain it and its dependent
economics. If a potter wishes to fulfill his essential role -that is,
to make pots-then alternative attitudes to technology and work have to
be considered. This is why these two statements began as lecture
material which was used to accompany a number of technical and
practical lecture themes stressing novel approaches to various sides
of pot making. These it was felt offered a measure of freedom from the
compulsions of commerce and the rat race of modern life, with a little
hope that Art might blossom here and there in the natural context of
living and working as it once did with primitive people.
In juxtaposing identity and anonymity I
am trying to relate them to the thing we call Art. There is clearly
much more to be said about identity than about its opposite,
anonymity. Anonymity is a term we use in reference to work, the
authors of which have been forgotten and whose names perhaps were
never recorded. We also use it in reference to work done by writers
under a pseudonym, but this is not very common and rarely hides the
identity of the author for very long. There are several aspects of
identity which concern us profoundly as craftsmen, as potters, or as
artists. Identity has its valuable manifestations as well as its
deplorable ones. When someone seeks to inflate their identity in order
to gain prestige and economic advantage over others, it is a
perversion.
Unfortunately this is the form of identity which our society does, in
fact, hold up as an aim and symbol of success. There are, however,
other forms of identity which are not perverted. For instance, a sense
of identity among one's peers is a psychological necessity, and such a
sense of identity is a prerequisite to finding an ability to identify
with something beyond the ego, something greater maybe than the ego.
This ability to identify with something leads to what is often called
a state of losing oneself, and it is only in this condition, I
believe, that great things are done; and I would add, that things
stand a chance of being done for the right reasons.
I think it was because of some vague
awareness of all this that, without having actually met the man
himself, I so greatly admired Shoji Hamada when I first heard about
him in the early thirties. Here was a man who took a novel stand on
the matter of signatures. He seemed to be defending a state of
anonymity which, of course, I now realise he was not. However, he did
not sign his pots and I found this most admirable, and I followed
suit. I have not signed a pot since, but nothing noticeable has been
achieved. In fact Shoji Hamada is perhaps the most identified potter
alive today and he seems to be involved in subtle alternatives to
anonymity which seem to suggest that he might as well have signed all
his pots. Something similar seems to be happening to me.
A man named Nicholas Fyodorovich, a
Russian writer and contemporary of Tolstoy, took a similar stand and
did very nearly achieve his purpose. Nevertheless, even he is talked
about and written about, and here am I referring to him. The relevant
point to note in this situation is not that anonymity is shown to be a
futile quest, but that a deliberate striving after fame was rejected,
and that some men were admired for this. Shoji Hamada maintained that
a signature was redundant and that the personality of the man would be
evident in the pots. I think this is probably true, but one must hand
it to him that he had his priorities in the right order. If fame is
the outcome of excellence, that is another matter. The sad thing is
that we have been inculturated to seek fame like we do money, and
worse still, often as a means of getting money. The degree to which
modern society is obsessed with this idea of identity was drummed home
to me by the fact that the resolve - or what I thought was the resolve
- of a man like Hamada could be cancelled out so quickly. It was a
disillusionment and a disappointment to me to discover as early as
1946 that this process of cancellation was already taking place. At
that date I saw in the museum in Truro Cornwall a pot made circa 1923
labelled "Shoji Hamada made at the Leach pottery".
There is now the classic story which
records Shoji Hamada's response to a report that another potter was
copying his designs and exhibiting, but, I presume, not signing his
work. The reply was that this did not matter because this man's best
pots would be attributed by posterity to Hamada and that Hamada's
failures would be attributed to this other potter. This was thought to
be a very funny story when it was first reported, but it is a
revealing story on several accounts. It shows incidentally that the
ethos of the age was already causing Hamada to entertain thoughts
about posterity with regard to himself. It would perhaps be a wonder,
seeing what that ethos is like, if it did not.
Secondly, it reveals something which
stirred Katherine Pleydell Bouverie to considerable ire when I told
her this story. Her reaction was that Hamada should sign "his damn
pots and accept responsibility for his failures". Looked at this way,
the story is not at all so funny. There are of course other cases on
record where the best unsigned work of a student has been attributed
to the master. There certainly is a case for accepting responsibility
for what one does. We have always used a workshop seal at Crowan and
Crewenna for this reason, and one reacts like K. Pleydell Bouverie did
to the habit very prevalent in New Zealand of writing letters to the
newspapers under a pseudonym.
I was much impressed by something Paul
Goodman once said about the importance of doing things for the right
reasons, and how rare and difficult this seemed to be in the sphere of
international politics. It seems to be just as rare and difficult to
achieve on more mundane planes as well, and I have come to attach
great importance to this idea in general. This may be because I
believe in the principle that means condition ends and the related
idea that motives govern the quality of actions and ends. It is in
fact often very difficult to distinguish between the motive and the
end. There are a variety of possible reasons for doing most things.
Circumstances may indicate which reasons demand priority, and this
leaves one with a choice so that one has to choose an order of
priority among the good reasons. There is always an array of bad
reasons which can often be very attractive, but nevertheless these
have to be rejected.
Ours is such a complex society and men
work in such narrow specialized spheres, so remote from simple human
needs, that the true reasons-the sane and simple reasons for doing
things - are indeed difficult to discover. Much of the complexity
derives from the supreme emphasis which is put on money values as
opposed to ultimate values. This situation has built up gradually over
the centuries, but it is now so all-pervading that it requires
exceptional clarity of thought and determination even to discover the
simple reasons which lie behind the smoke screen of money values.
Man has created something he cannot
control which destroys his vision of the simple purpose of things
including his own, and as is now becoming apparent, his environment as
well. Ninety-five per cent of us live in cities, dissociated from the
source of materials we use and the things we eat. Men see these cities
mostly as a triumph and as objects of pride, unaware that in their
present form they are a creeping fungus produced by man's paramount
remaining reason for existence- commerce. They are seen as the fruits
of progress, but few stop to think how meaningless that word has
become. Change is automatically called progress, and this is
automatically assumed to be change towards something better. Such
change is invariably the outcome of commercial enterprise and is
better defined in terms of jobs and profit. The preoccupation with
progress is a striking example of an actual motive hiding behind an
alleged motive.
Not that to engage in commercial
enterprise and competition is claimed to be altruistic. Profit is the
declared aim and is always cause for jubilation. Economists used to
talk about enlightened self interest, but at least the hypocrisy of
the enlightenment has been dropped. It is now taken for granted that
what leads to profit leads to progress. It is in the nature of this
syndrome that inventiveness is directed mainly towards profit and not
the betterment of the human lot, whatever is in fact claimed. In some
cases the outcome is a betterment in human terms, but in the main the
human lot is an irrelevancy and a loser. Credit is claimed for
abundance and cheapness as a service to the public, but this is
achieved by an inexorable process whereby profitability is maintained
by recourse to increased scales of activity and ever more
sophisticated equipment. The whole process has the quality of a
chain-reaction culminating in automation and a traumatic condition
called either leisure or redundancy. Those with the talents and
qualifications required can continue to derive a sense of purpose
through their nitch in all this, but for the rest the sense of
purposelessness is tragic.
It is extraordinary how much is done
for one reason while quite different reasons are in fact the motive.
This tendency runs right through our social and political structure.
Democratic process is continuously bedevilled by this. Despite the
strongest case in favour of a particular action, no action can be
taken because an election is pending. Expediency dictates that in fact
the reverse shall be done.
We are conditioned to disregard the
ultimate purpose for the things we do, and we seem to have lost all
sense of directness and consider only the immediate purpose, which is
mostly the financial or business purpose. John Dewey had a term for
this. He called it an act of postponed living. Whole lives are spent
as acts of postponed living, working for security at an age when it is
time to die. Eric Gill used to point out how the sale of stocks and
shares is carried on in that vast substructure of our economic life
without reference to the kind of goods produced. All that is relevant
is that their production shall be profitable. They may in fact fail to
profit mankind at all, or even be a positive disservice to it.
The essence of all this is expediency.
One might call it the art of doing things for the wrong reasons. There
is no place for this kind of motivation in the Arts; they cannot
function in terms of expediency. Here one would have thought was a
field where things really were done for the right reason. There are,
of course, artists who do, but they are rare and they function outside
that phenomenon which A. Alvarez contemptuously refers to as the art
industry. A thing blended of playfulness and whimsy and an element of
reverence for something greater than the individual ego, no matter
which of these is dominant, is marred if excessively made to submit to
the dictates of time and routine and profit. Art is a mood-dependent
phenomenon, and it must dictate its own time and place and routine and
have its own motive. This is in such total contrast to the discipline
of a single-minded pursuit of work and profit and all the rigid
unrelenting submission to time and place and routine which is the
world of business. This is what makes Art the veneer phenomenon that
it is. It has no natural place in a socio-economic situation which is
almost totally materialistic. It can only get a foothold in such a
society if it can be seen to add a cultural aura for the successful in
this discipline of cupidity. If it does not add this aura it is
rejected utterly. There is no place for it except as a veneer and
perhaps as an investment.
Among primitive peoples artistic
expression could find a place in almost any mundane activity. This is
simply not tolerable to modern man in his obsession with output and
his greedy reluctance to give of himself. The evolution of attitudes
to identity and what is thought to have been anonymity in pre-literate
societies shows how art came to reflect the qualities of the kind of
society we live in.
In non-literate societies only the more
exceptional exploits of heroes and warriors would have been deemed
worthy of recounting to future generations by oral repetition. In the
case of a carving, the fact of its continued existence would have been
proof enough of the feat of its creation, and the name of the man who
carved it would have become unimportant. Once literacy and other
social changes had revealed the possibility of making authorship known
beyond the life span of the artist, and this had become a habit, as
indeed it did, and even became an ambition, which it also did, the
whole tendency began to assume, I suggest, the characteristics of a
drug. To gratify ambition for personal fame beyond the artist's own
life span calls for much advertisement, even self-advertisement,
during the lifetime of the person concerned. There you have the first
sinister side effect of this drug, a quite unwarranted drive to boost
the personal ego. In conversation recently with a well-known potter,
the subject of the relative merits of group exhibitions, as opposed to
the "one-man show", were discussed. I was a bit staggered to hear the
"one-man show" openly defended by a well-established potter on the
grounds that "we all need a boost for our egos". Here we go again, I
thought, and reflected on what I know of people in simpler societies
whose arts do not run on this kind of stimulant. The attitude seems to
suggest that the ego is like a rubber balloon with a pinhole in it,
and in need of continuous reinflating. There is something addictive
about this which fits the drug analogy rather well. With this habit of
thinking, the successful build-up of the fame of living artists was
bound to reveal its commercial possibilities. The beginnings of this
were already evident in 16th century Italy. This is something that
could happen to artists, that is sculptors and painters, but not to
athletes and warriors.
The need to advertise, or the discovery
of the advantages of so doing, is typical of modern commercial
society. The esteem in which an artist's work is held during his
lifetime does obviously affect his capacity to earn a living, and it
would be surprising if this were not exploited. The sad thing is that
this calls for subtle forms of self-advertisement which in any other
walk of life would be considered quite offensive. This is also
psychologically a perilous procedure because, like all forms of
commercial advertisement, however laudibly concerned to inform, they
are always partly concerned to deceive. On the personal level of the
artist there is the added risk that he will deceive himself, which he
often does. This is something which does not happen to a Limited
Company. When by the nature of social and economic circumstances this
situation is forced upon the artist, the outcome is an expression of
personal claims to excellence which acquires the unattractive quality
of boasting.
The psychological effect of this is real and deplorable, but it should
be remembered that for the individual artist our society makes this
emphatically a condition of his professional and economic survival.
The second side-effect of this drug
began to develop when it was realised that the work of a living artist
might have startling commercial possibilities after his death.
Inevitably the commercially minded, having seen the possibility of
this, realised the importance of augmenting the mystique of any likely
candidates for this treatment. The investment value of stock-piling
the work of such persons would also be foreseen, as we all well know.
If such an entrepreneur is unable to stockpile for himself, for one
reason or another, he can use this tempting commercial bait to
encourage his private customers to stockpile and there you have a
further ramification of a side-effect-the Collector. Few people
believe that collectors always pursue their hobby, as they like to
call it, for a thing called the "Love of Art" - in fact, I sometimes
even wonder if there is such a thing. In this context it is perhaps
worth referring to a news item which appeared in the N.Z. papers This
referred to an art dealer from Atlantic City who celebrated his
birthday by inviting all his friends on a four-day trip to Paris-Paris
presumably chosen as a Mecca of the Arts. The interesting bit was the
detail about expense It involved the hire of two 747s and a total
outlay of $250,000. The paper made no comment and no one was
surprised, it seemed. It was just a reminder of how things work in the
world of Art connoisseurship.
Side effect number three is the
misleading consequence of the reliance on a signature, which causes
the layman, and I often suspect the professional authority as well, to
withhold value-judgments on the intrinsic merit of a work until
certain of the identity of the artist. The signature-or the name-gives
the cue for approval or disapproval, according to accepted patterns
and accepted fashion trends.
Closely related to this is the
influence of price on judgments about merit We are so steeped in the
ethos of our society, which insists on putting a monetary valuation on
all things, that a high price automatically implies for most people an
indication of high merit. This fact is of course exploited frequently
and without shame as a lever to fame-by both artists and dealers. It
becomes a yardstick and in the bewildering array of "wayout" work most
people jump at such a supposed indicator of merit. Journalists are no
exception. Utterly at a loss to assess work exhibited, they attempt to
convey something to the reader by mentioning that the work of the
artist in question will fetch prices in the order of such and such,
and quote the astronomic figures. A great many people are very much
aware of the role that a name plays in all this, but they do not
realise what a distorting mirror it is. Everyone knows the opening
conversational gambit which runs -"Of course, without a name you
cannot. . ." There are many variants and I used to hear several from
my father. Every business-oriented citizen knows-or thinks he
does-that the paramount concern of all young artists is "how to make",
not a pot, nor a picture, or a piece of sculpture, but "a name".
An amusing incident occurred recently
in our showroom. Two Australian visitors were noting in some surprise
that our prices were lower than some prevailing in Australia. Knowing
nothing about us, and unaware that we have a longstanding policy of
trying to hold prices as low as possible, they mentioned an Australian
potter by name and said: "So and so-yes, he is very pricey, but of
course you're only paying for a name." It is then just a matter of
Jonesmanship whether you pay up or not.
The person who functions in the
frontier zone between art and non-art is a very vulnerable person.
Most potters function in this zone. The lure of fame and status exerts
a great pressure on the potter to cross it. So many factors drive him
to do so and with every step taken in that direction the impulse to
switch from a concern with the simple inherent merit of what he does
to a concern with the impact he may make on other people increases. He
is ever reminded of the status-factor associated with his position,
relative to that frontier.
Not many people know that agencies
exist which will, for a fee, chase your public image for you and send
you cuttings from the Press, so that you can assess the level of
acclaim which is coming your way. Yes, there are artists who are that
much concerned to know the shape of their public image. There are
other artists, and I suggest they are the authentic ones, for whom the
idea of hiring the services of such an agency would simply be
unthinkable. Can you imagine, to take what I think is a good example,
Van Gogh doing such a thing?
Once this switch has taken place,
unselfconscious and spontaneous expression is liable to give way to
conscious expression of something - or almost anything - which it is
thought will produce a suitable public image. The word "gimmick" does
not appear in any of my dictionaries, but the word is now part of the
language and must soon be officially included. Its definition, I
suggest, will run something like this: "A thing sufficiently out of
step with established and currently accepted norms to be likely to
yield a quick and ample applause from the avant garde without being
seen by too many people for what it is-a bid for acclaim and hard
cash." But let me be emphatic about this. Not every breach with
tradition is in the category of gimmickry. There are real
revolutionary steps taken for the right reasons, and there are phoney
ones which are not. Debussy's use of fifths in defiance of the musical
establishment did him no material good, but he insisted and one
admires him for it. What we now have to keep in mind is that breaking
with tradition has become fashionable, and that last year's rave is
this year's old hat. The social ethos which prompts the gimmickry and
also requires the annual re-styling of car bodies is an inherent part
of the current way of life, and it would be surprising if art were not
infected by this. There is plenty of genuine innovation, but the cycle
of innovation is accelerating at such a pace-now much faster than the
re-styling of car radiators-that there really isn't time to
distinguish between the sham and the genuine before the next new thing
is upon us. It is not always easy to distinguish between these two,
and in any case one should remember that counterfeit banknotes are not
meant to be easily distinguished from real ones.
I referred earlier to the vulnerability
of people who operate on what I called the frontier between art and
non-art. I want to approach this from another angle. We are all
familiar with the film star's hysterical concern with his public
image, as the journalists interpret it for us. The personal
experiences I have had of people moving on the fringe of acclaim, and
the knowledge of my own reactions to this situation, have convinced me
that this can be a powerful inducement towards a switch from authentic
to false motives. It has also convinced me that this sort of egotistic
concern creates a severe psychological strain and can lead to
unattractive personality distortions as well. At its worst, this
strain seems to be quite capable of leading to suicide. The tragedy is
that the competitive element in our society propels artists towards
this perversion of motives and, as already pointed out, makes its
acceptance a condition of economic survival.
It is possible to rationalise all this
and accept it, and for those basking in a steady flow of public
acclaim it has agreeable hedonistic overtones, but nonetheless mostly
spurious one.
Quite apart from fame and glory, making
pots is a very absorbing and rewarding thing to do, and quite
obviously a great many people find this to be so. I have certainly
found it so, but, and perhaps because of this, I have noted over the
years what appears to me to be a surprising and extraordinary high
proportion of suicides among potters. Pottery is recognised for its
therapeutic value to people disturbed in consequence of the strain of
life in our rat-race world.
This in itself might account for a high
ratio of suicides among potters. I have not made any comparative study
along these lines-I am only saying that it surprised me that suicides
seemed to occur among the rather small community of potters which I
have known and not among those in other ordinary trades, among which I
must have known a great many more individuals.
I have tried to show that the
prevailing value-structure today is such that acclaim often becomes
more important than the creative act. The quest for fame puts one
artist in competition with another-not in creative competition, which
is patently an absurdity, but for acclaim, upon which hangs so much
materially. In fact, art is as involved in competition as business and
industrial manufacture, and monetary carrots are being ever more
persistently dangled before the artist to this end. It is as if the
point has been reached where it is accepted that even the creative act
can somehow be germinated by an adequate injection of hard cash.
Competitions are organised at every turn, ostensibly to select the
best work, but selection and rejection of persons or personalities is
an unavoidable corollary of this process. A process, incidentally,
which puts an artist's fate in the hands of pompous arbiters of taste
who may give him a ticket to stardom this year and a downright
rubbishing next year. The elimination of sub-efficient business
activity by this competitive method is one thing, but the elimination
of supposedly or allegedly sub-talented or sub-developed persons by
competitive methods is another matter altogether.
As one travels round the world briefly
in contact with art groups, and pottery groups, one becomes acutely
aware of a pattern of evolution in the role of the individual potter.
It is sad to note the declining order of amity and fellowship and
humility which prevails between the members of the purely amateur
groups on the one hand and that which prevails amongst those who feel
they have achieved professional status on the other. The amateurs as
groups and as individuals are in a state of wild excitement about
newly discovered fields of activity and personal expression. They work
in a mood of considerable humility and in a spirit of willing mutual
aid. The professionals, on the other hand, are incredibly divided as
individuals and as coteries. They seem to lose no opportunity to
denigrate a rival, while referring with bated breath to their trendy
idols of the moment. Mutual aid is noticeably more unpredictable,
despite its acceptance as a tradition among potters.
We humans are a tangle of psychological
quirks, which are the outcome of a host of complicated factors which
mould us from birth onwards. There are also many other factors in our
socio-historical background which mould us, and also the behaviour of
the group into which we are born, as well as the behaviour of the
group with which we choose to identify ourselves. Mostly we don't know
why we behave the way we do-as individuals or as groups. In our
gregarious habits we get involved with the current "in thing" which
our particular chosen group happens to favour. As social animals we
are deeply involved in a host of "in things", many of them deplorable,
which our history has consolidated as patterns to condition our
attitudes and behaviour in general.
It is important that we should
understand, or at least try to understand, why we behave the way we
do. This, I believe, is vitally tied up with the business of trying to
do things for the right reasons.
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