The Unknown Craftsman

[Ene Vinson]

This book challenges the conventional ideas of art and beauty. What is the value of things made by an anonymous craftsman working in a set tradition for a lifetime? What is the value of handwork? Why should even the roughly lacquered rice bowl of a Japanese farmer be thought beautiful? The late Soetsu Yanagi was the first to fully explore the traditional Japanese appreciation for "objects born, not made."

Mr. Yanagi sees folk art as a manifestation of the essential world from which art, philosophy, and religion arise and in which the barriers between them disappear. The implications of the author's ideas are both far-reaching and practical.

Soetsu Yanagi is often mentioned in books on Japanese art, but this is the first translation in any Western language of a selection of his major writings. The late Bernard Leach, renowned British potter and friend of Mr. Yanagi for fifty years, has clearly transmitted the insights of one of Japan's most important thinkers. The seventy-six plates illustrate objects that underscore the universality of his concepts. The author's profound view of the creative process and his plea for a new artistic freedom within tradition are especially timely now when the importance of craft and the handmade object is being rediscovered.

The British Museum holds a remarkable eight million artefacts in its vaults, which artist Grayson Perry has spent the past few months rummaging through for his latest exhibition. The cross-dressing Turner Prize winner persuaded the London museum to let him create a new exhibition by choosing objects from its archives and displaying them alongside his own work, which includes pottery, tapestry and a sculptural centrepiece - a rusted iron coffin in the shape of a ship, titled The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman.

Perry, who recently graced Wallpaper* HQ with his presence for a design discussion for his forthcoming Channel 4 programme, likened the experience of curating the exhibition - also called The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman - to being allowed to 'go mad' in the British Museum. He first narrowed down his pick of the museum's collection to around a thousand pieces, selecting work he was already interested in, before moving on to items that he found by chance or association.

The end product is 30 of his own artworks displayed alongside 170 pieces from the museum's stores, ranging from treasures of antiquity to contemporary items. With themes exploring the notions of craftsmanship and sacred journeys - from shamanism, magic and holy relics to motorbikes - the artefacts on show include Polynesian fetishes, Buddhist votive offerings, a prehistoric hand axe and a Hello Kitty hand towel.

'I invite you to view these artefacts by reading them through my lens,' Perry explains. 'I am not a historian, an archaeologist or an ethnographer. I am an artist and this is principally an art exhibition. I have made my choices of objects from the BM collection because of their connections with each other and with my own work. Sometimes the connection is in their function, sometimes in their subject, and often in their form. One thing that connects all my choices is my delight in them.'

Green glazed composition staff-terminal in the form of the god Bes sitting on a lotus flower with a monkey between his feet. Bes wears a feathered crown and cradles an infant Bes figure in his left arm. Egypt, BC664-332

The traditional boards preserved by the Bishop Museum have, over the past century, manifested the abstract concepts that Yanagi worked so hard to express. Without the presence of their makers, the boards themselves, simple and anonymous, have indirectly guided the evolution of modern surfing. This is the power of the unknown craftsman, the legacy of makers long gone and forgotten. George Freeth, Duke Kahanamoku, Tom Blake, Wally Froiseth, John Kelly, Fran Heath, George Downing and others who stood in the presence of those boards never knew their creators. But the boards spoke for themselves, and slowly but surely, those who sought them out fell under their influence.

It's a ship. It's about 2 metres long and three metres high, and it's made of pretty much all of it of cast iron. And I chose cast iron.
Because it's a material, it's not bronze. It has a more kind of workmanlike history. It's to do with Industry. It's supposedly like a coffin. It holds an anonymous individual who represents all of the people who made all of the monuments and artefacts of history that often you see in a place like the British Museum, but we have no name attached to them.
Because if you go to a contemporary Art Museum, every scrap of paper has a name attached to it. You know an individual who made this because they're an artist.

And yet you go to the British Museum and we know very few of the people who actually made the objects that we saw, and so I wanted to kind of make a celebration of them in the same way as the tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

In many countries they have a tomb of the Unknown soldier who represents all the soldiers that have fallen in battle for that country, and so it was a kind of honouring of craftsmanship

On the tomb you'll see hanging maybe 150 glass little pots, little vases, little bottles, and they sort of represent the sort of blood, sweat and tears really of the Craftsman and of the pilgrims. And that idea that you know we make offerings and often significant objects throughout different cultures throughout history have been what they call lie baited, they would pour things onto them so that that idea of sort of bringing a bit of the body into it almost and so.

I like the idea that it looks like it has a history. This thing if if one thing I am good at as an artist, it's faking authenticity.

Twenty years ago, on the occasion of my twenty-first birthday, my brother James gave me a copy of The Unknown Craftsman by Soetsu Yanagi. I had already inhaled Leach's A Potter's Book and was enthralled by all I had read. I knew that I had found my calling.

I felt like a youth going off to war, convinced that my cause was noble and just, and that my decision would help to make the world a better place. I had images of the Unknown Soldier running through my head. I was going to be an Unknown Craftsman, heroically doing battle with my culture.

Now, twenty years later, I have an opportunity to reflect upon the consequences of my decision, and to attempt to assess the impact of the Japanese folk craft movement on twentieth century American ceramics.
I think the direct impact has been minimal, contrary to the prevailing myth that the Leach/Cardew/Hamada/Yanagi school has a stranglehold on functional pottery in this country. There are, to be sure, a handful of noisy potters making pots within a very loosely-defined Mingei style, but the vast majority of functional potters today are influenced by a host of other styles, aesthetics and movements.

Applying a simple litmus test, I do not think there is anyone in America adhering strictly to all the underlying tenets of the folk craft movement. These tenets include: using locally available materials, making simple useful pots in large quantities by hand, working communally, and selling pots inexpensively. Yanagi suggested that under these conditions pots might be made that attained the highest possible aesthetic and spiritual values.
Stretching the rules a little, a case could be made for Native American potters in the Southwest, the horticultural ware producers in northern Georgia and elsewhere, and a few of the folk potters in the Southeast. By and large, however, potters in America don't adhere to these tenets, wittingly or unwittingly.

Firstly, rather than using locally available materials, American ceramics is dominated by materials provided by large companies that are mined far afield and distributed nationwide, if not worldwide. This has enabled potters to move beyond the constraints of geography and set up shop wherever they want, whether down-town, in the suburbs or in the desert. Instead of regional styles of pottery identifiable by the materials of those areas, now materials that are little more than brand names allow the same pots to be made anywhere.

There is an argument that since the world has become a global village that all the world's material are now local. That is like suggesting that the foodstuffs reconfigured from around the world at your nearest McDonald's are also local.

Instead of many local feldspars that a few potters in each particular location used, now there are just a few feldspars that everyone uses; one or two brands fit all. Instead of the delicious complexity of local clays, refined to greater or lesser degrees by the potters themselves, we buy airfloated, pre-mixed clay bodies from suppliers, blended from clays collected far afield, with names like "Rod's Bod'', "Brown Stoneware Clay" or
"Craggy Crunch".

Analogous to this might be a world in which no one produces wines in small independent wineries anymore. Their individual complexities and subtleties having been replaced by the bland monopoly of Gallo, there is nothing else to drink. Or, that there are no longer organic vegetables available, only flavorless, agribusiness produce. Changes in the wider world are reflected in our own. The giant hypnotizes the little guy. We might ask ourselves to what extent we have become a nation of MacPotters, our aesthetic sensibilities diminished by convenient, generic materials and equipment sold to us through relentless advertising. Our capacity for individual aesthetic expression has undoubtedly been magnified, but just how diverse can the quality of that expression be if we all use the same pure materials and standardized equipment?

The simple tools that produced folk pots have also been replaced by extremely sophisticated technologies. I have a kick wheel, but I also have an electric wheel whose power comes from a nearby nuclear power station. There are computer-controlled kilns, Giffin Grips, ram presses, sophisticated refractories - a panoply of labor-saving devices to ease our struggles. Needless to say, the quality of the work produced with these new refined, generic, sophisticated materials and equipment is very different from the quality admired by Yanagi.

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