Searching for Beauty

I am going to take the next few blogs to explore my thoughts and feelings during the last 35 years of my life as a collector of pottery.  I recently went through my book, “Searching for Beauty: Letters from a Collector to a Studio Potter” and pulled out all the references I could find that relate to collecting pottery.  Actually this passionate obsession of mine that has resulted in nearly a thousand ceramic artifacts housed in my modest cottage was a central theme of the book.  Are potters really interested in collectors?  I mean besides the profit derived from the sale of pottery to them?  I want you to love me for myself, not just the contents of my wallet or bank account.  Do you care about what we do with your pot after we buy it?  Do you act toward those who purchase your pottery like any store clerk would act in making a sale from behind the counter?  Is it just another commercial transaction or can this contact between pottery and collector also bring a kind of communication and relationship that in itself can be rewarding and deeply felt?  Can our mutual roles as advocates of pottery play a vital role in defending and preserving ceramic art?

I go to a lot of craft fairs and pottery exhibits, often seeing the same potters that I have seen before.  Many of them remember me and some don’t.  The ones that remember me tend to be the ones from whom I have purchased more than one pot over the years.  Some potters have become friends over those same years.  I even occasionally send a letter I have just finished writing to a potter as a personal gift.  They make pots and I write letters, both creative acts that require different skills and talents.  As I have often stated before, perhaps in one of these blogs, I believe that the aesthetic act of engaging the ceramic artifact is as complex and demanding as the creative act of making it.  This is what I have spent most of my lifetime honing and developing.  I am still seeking at this late date to further deepen and develop this capacity to fully experience the object before me.

I would like to feel that the maker and the collector are natural partners, even collaborators in working to assure that there is a future for ceramic art and that the creation of the ceramic artifact remains as one the core activities at the heart of human civilization.  I have developed my voice in order to articulate these views as a writer.   This accumulation of excerpts from several years of writing letters to a potter is my tribute to the work potters create and to the contributions they have made throughout centuries of ceramic achievements. Through a collector’s voice, these letters give testimony to pottery as passion and pottery as property.  There is an irony here.  I have epiphanies of joy as I experience them aesthetically and take delight in them.   But I am also the custodian of these physical objects and so have developed a rigorous routine of caring for the pottery as material property.   Long ago I decided to take responsibility for their care, trying to preserve my pottery for the next generation and after.  I am the willing docent and curator for those ceramic treasures that find their way to my home.  I take that role very seriously.  To see me dusting my pottery, while not exactly poetry in motion, waving my long handled dusting wand and caressing each object and the shelf around it, forms a unique choreography and a most unusual dance for this old man totally unlike my behavior on any other occasion.

I am going to begin with my very first letter, dated July 31, 2002 and mailed to Christa Assad, the young potter I had recently met at her gallery/studio in San Francisco.  This initial mailing occurred almost five years before the first forty letters to her were published as a book.  Here it is,

“I have always been a risk taker, and at this point perhaps you might think this communication somewhat eccentric.  Even intrusive in seeking some exchange beyond the commercial transaction that is the only evidence of our previous relationship.  In your note you indicate appreciation for supporting your career.  However modest that support, I do acknowledge that it is a function from which I derive much satisfaction.  I do think your pot was worthy of my purchase – and I am pleased that you directly benefited – but again self-interest played an important part.  I do not mean some calculated financial investment for future gain – indeed I frankly do not care if your career eventually inflates the value of that vase.  Nor do I celebrate the acquisition of a commodity that increases the inventory of my private possessions.   Your pot contributes daily to the enrichment of my domestic life.  I house it in order to meet it each day.  The true aesthetics of art do not reside in highly refined and esoteric discussions of critics and academics.   The engagement of an artifact with human sensibilities is a pedestrian and ordinary event – I wash the dishes, take out the trash, and engage my pottery.  They are all necessary actions and behavior to maintain my life and sanity.”

As you can see, I wanted to establish the fact that what I had purchased in her studio was not just another commodity to fill up some space on a shelf in my home.  Rather these objects, housed in a domestic setting, were vital elements in a quality of life that had the transformative and compelling ability to enrich my very existence.  At the same time, by placing them in my home, not a museum or gallery, they were my daily companions and their presence made them family members. The amazing grace of pottery is that its lacks a pretentious and inflated self-importance.   Pottery is precious to me but remains the common accomplices of my ordinary, everyday life.

In my third letter, dated August 17, 2002, I talk a bit about my motivations in collecting pottery and the fact that I do not actually use most of them in my kitchen or dining room but rather place them throughout the house as objects of pure delight.  I know a lot of potters who make functional pottery are disappointed that I don’t actually use them as intended.  I do of course use some for their intended purpose as plates, mugs, and vases.  But also in these letters I try to make the case that they have sufficient aesthetic value that they don’t need to justify their existence by having just a utilitarian role.  Beautiful pottery well made and a delight to observe has every right to be celebrated on their own intrinsic merits as works of art and craft.  Here is a brief excerpt from my third letter,

“What is the fate of the pot?  You make them and I collect them.  What responsibilities does the potter and the collector have to the pot?   I do not pour from them, few rarely hold flowers.  Containers without content – objects without objectives.  They sit in rows on shelves, splendid and quiet friends who make little demands of me and reward me each day by their very existence.   No rare trophy pieces here for investment purposes, rather an electric and inclusive collection that documents my great affection for hand made craft.   I partially justify my collection by offering custodial protection.  They are safe.  I dust them weekly and bravely await the next California earthquake, knowing that museum wax secures them to the shelf.  I have an alarm system and punch in the numbers on the small keyboard on the hallway  wall each time I leave the premises.  I do not know what this says about our culture, or the low state of the criminal mind, but I suspect that thieves would sooner swipe silverware and computers.  I take caution anyway, assuming their might be the one criminal with good taste in the vicinity.

And, by God, I do enjoy them.  I invite in neighborhood children and take them on tours of the cottage.  Each pot has a story of acquisition, many in some far-off land.  Each pot contains memories of associations with people and places that form the vita of my last twenty five years on earth.  At some point, I don’t remember when, they replaced  the camera snapshots that used to record my adventures in the world.  Some are antiques, and like a true Californian, I join their youthful reverence at anything over twenty five years old.  I assert to my young charges that indeed some are even older than me, and despite their incredulous response, share their wonder at these objects who preexisted before our time and who might survive after our demise.  Like the California Redwood tree, ceramics has historic durability that is not typical in our disposable consumer culture.”

I am a modest and humble collector.  I never had a vast personal fortune to spend on purchasing pottery.  I am not a retired CEO of some big corporation.  I was a school teacher, later a professor at a state university.  For the last 15 years I have been retired, spending much of our discretionary income on pottery.  We live primarily on my pension, social security, a bit of money stored away in a tax sheltered annuity accumulated when I was a professor.  I have distinguished ancestors in the long history of legendary collectors.  I must compete for glory with the Popes of the Holy Roman church, European kings of vast empires, the nobility and members of the landed aristocracy, wealthy robber barons of the 19^th century, generals and their armies who  looted countries under their occupation in various wars, and industrialists who used their vast fortunes from ownership of railroads, gold mines or oil to purchase vast warehouses of artistic riches to fill their vast mansions.  Then there is me and my cottage in Glendora.  I have indeed the ability and resources to occasionally invest in an antique teapot or a  ceramic vessel from a contemporary potter and have done so with great pride.

Is collection a pathology?  Some kind of sickness that results in an obsessive need to collect beyond any reasonable need to do so?  How can I explain and defend this primary activity of mine over the years?  Here is what I said in my 9^th letter, dated November 30, 2002.

“I do not need to justify my motivation.  I know a need from a want.  I want pottery because I have an obligation to support human imagination and creativity in a world where human destruction and tragedy often appears to be triumphal.  I need pottery because I am daily enhanced and enriched by the presence of pottery within the domestic chambers of my family life.   Surely history proves that art is an endemic activity shared by all groups.   I can only offer my own testimony and experience that the celebration and appreciation of art is as natural and necessary as its creation.  Collecting cannot be explained, since it is not a rational pursuit and depends on an unlikely duality – obsession with beauty and a lust for private ownership of beautiful things.  Bankruptcy becomes a distant danger if this obsession cannot be controlled.  Who can tell you when you have enough French Impressionist paintings or sufficient pots?  When is enough really enough?  The finite shelf or wall  space in your home cannot be the measurement of your appetite.  That would represent a cruel limitation.  Mortality is the great unspoken curse of the collector.   The inevitable approach of that mortality sharpens the race,  a monopoly of some category of art must be achieved before you falter and weaken, this is the great contest that energizes memorable collectors.  It is simply good sportsmanship to donate the collection  when  your demise becomes evident and unavoidable.  I must be realistic.  There are no collectors genetic link in succeeding generations of family members.  I will pass on to them the pots, but cannot provide them the passion for collecting them.”

I have a lot more to discuss with you about how we collectors make our way in the world and how we approach the maker and the artifact created by the maker.  In the end, I can only speak from my own idiosyncratic view.  I am afraid there is as much diversity and differences among collectors as among ceramic artists.  Summer is a good time to appreciate one’s collection.  It is too hot right now to go out in my garden.  I stay inside and walk the corridors and rooms of my home.  I have much to see and engage on the shelves of these rooms.  I really do think a collector’s lot in these circumstances can be a very happy one.