How We Learn
There is a psychological dynamic that happens when you make your own discoveries as a learner. The stuff they told me at school belonged to the teachers, a kind of official knowledge they already knew and was already in the textbooks and they insisted that I had to know it too. Even when I memorized that information for tests, it never really belong to me, it always seemed to belong to them. But my private learning was this subversive and surreptitious learning, not sponsored or imposed by parents or teachers. Here I explored and learned things because I wanted to know for myself. It became my own learning and I could proudly claim it for myself. Does this sound odd to you? Surely I am not the only person to ever feel that way?
I am trying to make the case that people should not only know what helps them instrumentally to get a job and make money. Even if that job or central activity is being a potter or ceramic artist, to limit your own awareness and knowledge to only those things that have immediate relevance to just that one human activity, however special and creative, is to limit the growth and development of your own range of abilities and capabilities. I think great curiosity about the world and the manifest richness and diversity of both the natural environment and human culture can naturally lead to a focus on particular activities. But that does not mean you have to give up the rest and limit yourself just to one corner of the garden. As you go through school, there is increasing pressure for you to narrow your interests to an isolated area of knowledge that might have some practical ability to someday help you get a job and make a living. But I don’t think school on any level, including college, should become a job-training program for just one kind of work. We should resist being put in a box, even if that is a pottery box, and you know how I love pottery. We are not just one kind of person, we are all many- splendid creatures and we cannot be totally explained by any one single identification.
Quality of Life
John Ruskin, the 19th century British writer, said, “there is no wealth but life”. He meant that we need to encompass the totality of life within our grasp and comprehension, that no isolated or specialized area or activity can contain the essence of life itself. Vaclav Havel, the Czech playwright, courageous leader in the fight against communism in his country and former president of that country has this say about how we misdirect our energy and efforts and squeeze out the really important things in our lives,
“The dictatorship of money, of profit, of constant economic growth, and the necessity, flowing from all that, of plundering the earth without regard for what will be left in a few decades, along with everything else related to the materialistic obsessions of this world, from the flourishing of selfishness to the need to evade personal responsibility by becoming part of the herd, and the general inability of human conscience to keep pace with the inventions of reason, right up to the alienation created by the sheer size of modern institutions – all of these are phenomena that cannot effectively be confronted except through a new moral effort, that is, through a transformation of the spirit and the human relationship to life and the world.”
Well, that sounds like a big undertaking and an even greater challenge. Havel is indicating that what we need right now is moral knowledge and new kinds of relationships with each other and the earth. According to Havel, we need more intimate caring for each other and the environment and we need to further develop and apply our moral conscience. Where do we learn about that? How do we learn to become successful human beings as well as being successful in our careers? Do ceramic artists and potters have some wisdom about these issues? Did they make choices in their youth that said the quality of life was the real wealth of life? And that quality of life had to involve creating beautiful things and celebrating that beauty as an intrinsic part of their lives? I have this to say about William Morris and his friend and mentor, John Ruskin, in my book, “Searching for Beauty: Letters from a Collector to a Studio Potter”, in relationship to Havel’s quote,
“To understand the stained glass windows, wallpapers, and tapestries of William Morris, you must understand the aesthetics of John Ruskin. As we know Ruskin never made stained glass windows, wallpaper or tapestries. Why did Morris bother with Ruskin? To understand William Morris and John Ruskin, two privileged members of the English upper class, you have to understand why they organized seminars and presented lectures to industrial workers, even though those workers could not afford to travel to Italy with Ruskin or buy the wares of Morris. Havel would understand, it was to share ‘…that transformation of the spirit and the human relationship to life.’ We are all ordinary and remarkable, and we are all eligible for that transformation.”
Waiting for the Future
There are many benefits in pursuing interests that you don’t necessarily add to your job resume. Everything you know and everything you have experienced in life enriches you and makes you more complicated. You might well retort, particularly in these perilous times of recession and high unemployment, that preparing for a good job is all important and comes first. It is easy for me to ruminate on these things, after all I am retired and I have my pension and health plan. It is even more difficult to take advice from someone born to wealth, such as John Ruskin, already quoted above, who had a great influence on the Arts & Crafts movement there. I quote Ruskin many times in my book. I found and used in my book this quote of Ruskin’s in a wonderful biography of Ruskin, “The Wider Sea: A Life of John Ruskin” by John Dixon Hunt. Here is what Ruskin has to say about the benefits of pursuing knowledge in difficult times,
“…does the pursuit of any art or science, for the mere sake of the resultant beauty or knowledge, tend to forward this end? That such pursuits are beneficial and ennobling to our nature is self-evident, but have we leisure for them in our perilous circumstances? Is it a time to be spelling of letters or touching of strings, counting stars or crystallizing dewdrops, while the earth is failing under our feet, and our fellows are departing every instant into eternal pain?”
I don’t know exactly what the ‘perilous circumstances’ that Ruskin was talking about in this comment. Maybe something to do with the awful living conditions in Britain for workers during the industrial revolution, maybe some war the British Empire was waging somewhere at the time. The point is that there are always excuses and reasons not to do what you yearn and dream of doing and learning. Things always seem bad, the economy always seems in trouble, war or the threat of war is always on the horizon and there is never enough money in the bank account to pay for those special things after you pay the mortgage and I am not even going to talk about the price of gas. So we often put our dreams on the back burner as being unrealistic or impractical. Our dreams might include exploring, engaging and discovering new creative realms and experiences, traveling to foreign lands and experiencing different cultures; learning about some subject or theme that has always intrigued you but you never had the time to explore; all these adventures somehow never seem convenient, never easy.
Many of us delay our real life adventures and learning about new or different things to some day in the distant future. We promise ourselves that we will do all these things when the kids grow up; the nest is empty or when we retire. Then we will finally have the time to actually do what we have always dreamed about. But when that day finally arrives, all too often people find out they don’t have the energy or even the desire anymore. They waited too long. What is left is a lot of time that they don’t know what to do with. There is nothing they want to know and there is nothing they want to do. The windows to wonders beyond their own immediate lives were closed a long time ago and they don’t know how to open them now. Retirement has been a blessing for me. But I know others for whom it has been an empty void they don’t know how to fill.
Sometimes the best things in life are really free – or nearly free. What are the things you do and the things that you learn about just for the sheer pleasure and joy these things bring you? I bet some of them don’t cost a dime. Do some of then, as Havel stated, involve “transformation of the spirit and the human relationship to life’’? Here I think that artists and craftspeople have a wonderful advantage over many others. I don’t believe that many of you walk into your studio with a sense of dread at having to be there and work with clay. If you can truly integrate what you want to do and what you want to know into your daily life, and even make some kind of income as a result – then you are indeed very fortunate and among the relative few able to pull that off. We can enjoy more than one kind of experience and more than one kind of knowing. There are many ways of knowing. I join you in the pleasures of being wide-awake and alive in the world. We use all our senses, all our energy and abilities to engage the world. Some of us even try to add something to that world – maybe a pot or maybe a page of thoughts or ideas. We are indeed a community of learners and makers. I think I am in very good company.
Tags: about Richard, arts and crafts movement, craftsman, education, Garden, knowledge, learning, life, mentors, richard jacobs, school, searching for beauty
Laguna Community Blogs
Buy "Searching for Beauty" from Axner.com
Hi Richard,
I just found your blog, and I see I have a whole lot to catch up on! I recently purchased your book of letters to Christa Assad and am at least a few chapters into what looks like an extremely exciting read. Thanks for putting all these good thoughts out there for us to consider!
Anyway, I need to reread this post to make a more intelligent comment, but several aspect of the topic are things I have been wrestling with for a number of years now, and I was hoping you could address them specifically or point me to where you have already done so. The thing that has concerned me is that we potters (and perhaps a majority of working artists) put our work out in the public as a personal expression, and while it evolves over time, quite often the changes are glacially slow, predictable, or extremely limited in scope. And this narrowness seems to contradict the huge variability of who we are as people: While we and our worlds are in a state of enormous flux our art stands apart, almost uniquely, as a stable point of reference.
I understand that there are outside pressures of the marketplace that encourage honing a particular artistic vision into a ‘signature style’. This seems like a good enough reason on the face of it. And there may also be internal pressures that promote sameness as an expression of control in a world that largely defies us. But this is neither inevitable nor necessary. And yet there are so many artists who can’t wait to put themselves in these neat little boxes, to NEVER venture outside the parameters, and who justify the practice as somehow being ‘authentic’ to themselves. Because of our changeable nature, it seems that pulling this card out only plays to the hand we had when we first moved in that stylistic direction. Everything else about us may since have changed.
In the end I hope potters can get more clear and honest about the words we use to support our actions, but I’m really more interested in that we have built up an excuse not to experiment outside the lines. Our creative output takes on the garb of our most steadfast habit, an addiction to a cause. We repeat ourselves ad nauseum or tentatively edge up against the fence of our tiny cage in lame and unadventurous exploration. We applaud ourselves for our conviction when the whole rest of possibility is a waiting opportunity. Where creativity should mean the freedom to explore, to cast off chains, most potters have settled too easily, too comfortably, into these tiny niches that end up defining us in a way that nothing else does with as absolute determination.
So I’m a bit confused and disappointed. I want artists to aim for more than they do. I want individual creativity to be an expression of unbounded imagination, and not something that gets fast tracked into tidy little boxes. But I also realize that seeing the problem is not the same thing as overcoming it. I’m not immune to some of those pressures and habit inducing circumstances in my own work. But I do try to occasionally pick up in new places and head off into different directions where possible. I try not to get stuck merely for the sake of continuing in a direction that already has its own momentum. I purposely try to jump the tracks every so often.
So even though I have something that might be considered a ‘style’ it only runs through some of my pots. I feel I want to have the pots judged each on their own, standing separate from what went before and what will come after. I want each pot to be the best it can be, whatever that may be, rather than merely one expression of a style that includes many similar expressions. And while improving requires a certain amount of honing one’s ability, of ‘perfecting’ an idea, it seems there can and should be end points where the added benefit of chasing the same idea only leads to diminishing returns and boredom. The work itself may suffer and become stale expressions done by rote rather than living investigations into an idea.
So I would like to see an artist’s work present a picture where all the dots don’t connect to the same image. Is that crazy of me? Am I courting an artistic schizophrenia? Am I risking the alienation of my public in not ladling out my wares according to their established expectations? I am confused, but seeing the bars of the cage for what they are I am even less comfortable taking up residence inside the confines merely for the sake of security and keeping food on the table. Though that may change of necessity…. And all that aside, I AM grateful when an artist continues to hammer out variations on their signature theme because this often means I have access to it in ways that would not be possible if each expression stood alone and unrelated to the overall output. As a fellow collector of pots I am grateful that I get to own so many fine examples of beauty that only repetition makes possible. Can this be reconciled to fear over an artist’s suffocation and creative straight jacketing? I’d love to hear what you think!
Dear Carter,
Thank you so much for your positive response to my blog. And the fact that you purchased my book increases my emerging fondness for you and your obvious good taste. I do want to respond to your response to my blog.
The first idea you talk about is this idea of having a signature style. I think most outstanding craftspeople and artists have a unique and recognizable style. This does not necessarily mean they are stuck in a rut or attempting to market a bread and butter style than has sold in the past and since is what they are known for, they play it safe by endlessly repeating it. Variations on a theme can provide reiteration without becoming just repetition. If each piece has some aspect of distinct character, be it in the form or the glaze than the crafting of that piece was not an automatic process of duplication but rather an act of aesthetic integrity. Some potters who create domestic ware might even make the argument that you want to achieve a symmetrical sameness in domestic ware meant for the dinning room table. In that sense, multiple artifacts placed on the same table are part of a family of objects in close relationship with each other and should have great compatibility in form and appearance.
Your idea about the slow or static quality of your craft compared to the dynamic changes in our lives is a most interesting one. I think a stable frame of reference is largely a good thing. I have been in the same house for over thirty years, working in my garden over the decades, slowly evolving what is now a truly lovely garden, slowly changing a suburban tract house into a charming cottage filled with ceramic treasures. My sons were young children when we first arrived, they are now in their forties, with families and lives of their own. I had just obtained my first university teaching position, having just secured my Ph.D. Now I am an old man of 77, retried over 15 years ago. I guess I am trying to make the point that our life cycle does not calibrate or slow down to keep in step with our other interests. I think that our fixed mortality provides inspiration to make our lives as rich and productive as possible. When I am reading a book, an activity which I engage for several hours each day, I look rather sedate, sitting in my big wooden chair, feet propped up on a big foot stool, a stack of books on the left arm of the chair. But this appearance is quite misleading. My mind is racing along with excitement as I read down the page, and I am actively engaged in making sense of things, of integrating what I am reading that moment with everything else I already know and everything else I have already experienced. Reading is an active engagement, not a passive one. I think that you work at the potter’s wheel would also qualify for that kind of intense activity. While the results have an obvious relationship with previous work, hopefully each artifact represents a unique attempt to hone and improve on all previous work and efforts. Often you can see these subtle and sublime changes in your work even if others can’t.
In saying all this, I agree with you about the dangers of reducing your work to commercial commodities for sale and in doing that, adopting stale formulas for organizing the outcome to achieve that result. I think constant experimentation and innovation is important and worth defending. But I think there is a problem here too. In my opinion, Much of the experimentation today is an attempt to produce ‘ceramic art’ that is popular and profitable if one can be successful in making the transition from potter to ceramic artist. The pressure from galleries to provide spectacular or novel results can be every bit as invidious as the need to keep doing the same old thing again and again. Sensational or vulgar results that can grab the attention of a trendy art market can be as toxic to aesthetic integrity as the automatic duplication of a very tired ceramic recipe. I think your remarks about trying to escape the “tidy little boxes” and “jump the tracks every so often” reflects a balanced attitude of disciplined experimentation that keeps the creative process real and stimulating. I fully agree that you have to take chances – you have to take risks and put yourself in jeopardy – in life as well as the potter’s wheel. We have to be constantly reinventing ourselves as well as our work.
The risk might indeed be real. You indeed might alienate some of your fans and friends who expect one thing and get something very different from you. I have always been a risk taker and have sometimes paid dearly for the consequences. You just can’t have it both ways. Most of all, you have to live with yourself. We can maybe fake it or bluff our way through with others but we should never attempt to fool ourselves. My definition of courage is an existential one – and that definition requires the attempt to activate a choreography of actual behavior to conform to the stated rhetoric of personal beliefs and principles. That congruity of behavior and principle, despite the risk and cost, reflects the kind of person whose work will always possess those same qualities.
Thank you again for your response and I look forward to further exchanges with you.
Richard
[...] so much for your response to my other comment! I am so scattered these days that I haven’t quite gotten around to properly digesting the [...]