Searching for Beauty

I am assuming that all readers of this blog are fully consenting adults.  I would require some kind of identification and confirmation of your adult status before allowing you to read further but my meager knowledge of computers and the way they work forbid such regulation.  We have the generic question – what is the role of passion in the creative process, in the arts, and in pottery in particular?  I will try to restrain myself and maintain my decorum and not embarrass myself or any reader of this blog in leading this particular discussion.  Passion in the widest definition of that term would mean any behavior or state of being that demonstrated great intensity of feeling, an exuberant emotional state that can take on physical and emotional dimensions in terms of aroused or celebratory behavior.

The Art of Passion

I am trying very hard to think of any passionate potters I know, but perhaps that emotion was thought best displayed elsewhere and not in my presence.  Can the pot show passion if the potter cannot?  What form does passion take both in the making of the object and in the final artifact that comes out of it?  Can passion be an innocent emotion devoid of sensuality or is passion displayed outside sexuality a very poor substitute or sublimation for the real thing?  I do hope you are prepared for this discussion.  Please put away anything that might distract you and really concentrate on helping me through this blog.  I might be mistaken but I do believe I have some very passionate pots in my pottery gallery.  It would be rude of you to inquire if this very old man responds in kind.  A lot of people think passion is an unseemly emotion for old people to display in any form or kind.

Passion’s Longevity

Is passion an ordinary emotion that all of us display in doing what we love to do?  I am a passionate gardener though I doubt that this emotion is visible when I garden.  Surely someone can see me every morning in the front garden, look at the spectacular, blooming results of my devotion, and realize my emotional investment.  First if all, there is a level of caring in passion, then joy in performing that function or performance, and finally results external to you that you are responsible for and fully justify your efforts.  I think all of us can locate in our lives such attitudes and activities.  Can such a demanding emotion in terms of energy and focus deteriorate into automatic habit?  Can you really spend years of your life with that soggy clay getting your hands dirty on the wheel and yet declare your continuing passion with that experience?  Sadly, we know that passion can dissipate and die when associated with other human beings, that has often been the stuff of great poetry. Can it also fade and decline in those things you do that once brought you the greatest joy?  How do you protect and preserve passion – with both people and pottery?

Can’t any burst of passion directed toward those objects and subjects of desire become a potential source of great pain and loss if that source of desire is not accessible or obtainable?  Isn’t it safer to play it cool, not get too invested, not to take a chance?  Doesn’t passion have to be in some sense reciprocal in order to bring personal satisfaction?  My garden, in late Spring, is now giving me, in return for my loving attention, the most beautiful and glorious flowers.  You have to take a risk when committing to your passions, and the outcome is always in doubt.  The bedrock of all passions is the fundamental passion for life itself.  I still have it though it has been severely tested at times during my life.

Creativity and Control

When applied to the creative process, does passion lead to innovation and vivid expression or does it distort the artifact by its excess?  Don’t most potters believe that they have to control the entire process, plan and design the result, ensure that everything remains predictable and reliable?  Doesn’t passion mean at least a partial loss of control; letting go and allowing previously unknown and unruly feelings play a role in the creative process?  Isn’t the very idea of mastery in craft defined by the conscious management of a supreme skill, which allows no irrational deviation?  How can you combine skill and passion?  Aren’t they very unlikely partners at the potter’s wheel?

Passion in the Past

Let us first examine the relationship of passion to sexuality and relate that to pottery.  If we go back to classical Greece, we can see vivid portrayals of nude men and boys on some of their pottery.  I remember taking a group of high schools students to the Getty Museum in Malibu, CA many years ago and walking them through the galleries that contained nude sculptures and pottery.  Sure enough, it didn’t take a few of the adolescent boys very long to locate that pottery that illustrated the aroused affection of those ancient Greeks of long ago.  As for Classical sculpture and contemporary pottery in regard to eroticism, this was what I said in my book, “Searching for Beauty: Letters from a Collector to a Studio Potter”, about this matter, ending with a quote from a book by Paul Mathieu,

“The nose and the penis are always the first to go.  Fortunately contemporary ceramics are replenishing the latter.  A quick perusal of the classical collection of Greek and Roman sculpture confirms my observation.  I have just finished “Sex Pots: Eroticism in Ceramics” by Paul Mathieu.  I hide the book from my grandchildren and guests, bringing back warm memories of the surreptitious concealment of certain magazines and illustrations in my adolescence.  I have obviously underestimated up to now just how exciting ceramics really can be.  I browse the book, with ceramic evidence of projected penis and dented vulva on countless objects across history and cultures.  I do continue to be concerned about the future durability of contemporary works with potentially vulnerable appendages.  I fully appreciate the importance of pottery and clay objects in human ritual and the analogous references to the human body in the form and function of ceramic vessels that connect ceramics to human sexuality.  Mathieu further explains this idea:

‘…ceramic objects and human bodies remain basically interchangeable as the metaphorical level, but also through somatic analogies within forms and parts.  Pottery forms are presentations, abstractly, of human bodies.  Through touch and direct contact, they are experienced intimately by bodies, and their inherent functions mimic as well as support bodily functions.  This emphasis on tactile aspects, on physical touch, differentiates objects from images, which operate solely at the visual level.’”

Admittedly, this is a major departure from the serving of tea in fashionable 18^th and 19^th century drawing rooms with an elegant porcelain teapot and delicate cups and saucers, all hand painted with bright periwinkles or other such pretty flowers.  We have established, both in classical culture and in contemporary ceramics, that pottery has been employed to portray human sexuality as inspired by the primal emotion of passion.  We simply cannot label these historical references of thousands of years of human civilization as obscene or vulgar.  Many are sublime homage’s to the regenerative capacity of humans to reproduce and others are in themselves ritual objects of that same fertility capacity as symbol and metaphor.

Passion – Gender Specific?

At one time in Western culture it was thought that the very existence, much less the expression, of passion was strictly a man’s prerogative.  In the same sense, it was once thought that women were reluctant participants in sexual activity, the price they had to pay for domestic stability and the attainment of motherhood and family.  Women who did demonstrate passion were thought limited to those who had become fallen women, devoid of respectability and not the type who married but were kept in another capacity.  We have largely forsaken these sexist notions in our society but the residue of these attitudes still haunts us today.  It is particularly ironic that women were once thought inherently emotional and thus inherently unstable.  Yet the one emotion they supposedly lacked by their very nature was the emotion of passion. In contrast, men were allowed to be emotional in their display of passion as an integral part of their manhood but socialized to suppress all the other emotions as unmanly.  When you think about it, this cultural construction of the emotional makeup of humans by gender didn’t make any sense for either men or women.

In the next blog I will continue this discussion.