Last monday was spent cleaning, organizing, and getting new supplies for the studio. My ware boards had been a bit of a problem, as they were all made from old wooden planks. As they were repeatedly washed down, they warped, meaning that they didn’t leave a flat surface. This meant that any pieces that were placed on the boards would also immediately warp. This isn’t a huge issue for some pieces, but for things with lids, when it’s important to have an exact fit, it becomes impossible. So, I got some concrete board from home depot which I then cut up into usable sections.
The rest of the week moved in a rhythm of mainly throwing one day and mainly trimming the next. For the first half of the week, I was working on cups and for the second, gaiwan and gongdaobei. Gaiwan are covered cups that are used to brew tea and gongdaobei are what tea is poured into. From the gongdaobei, the tea is then poured into individual teacups, ensuring that everyone gets an even pour.
This had the bones of a very peaceful week. The mix of activities was good, they all provide interesting challenges, but, to be honest, I do feel a little bit like I’m still running in circles here near the starting line of this whole pottery operation. Add this feeling to an incredibly depressing week of news (was it? Or maybe every week’s been like that and I’ve just happened to notice this week), and the little haven of the studio felt closer to an amplification chamber of angst.
The next steps that need to be accomplished to move the pottery forward are to fire a load of work and to begin looking for places and ways to sell the pots. Until there is an entire arc from clay through to payment for completed pots, the ecosystem of the pottery will feel artificial and fantastical. It doesn’t yet support itself, and so, while the work I do there each day does feel meaningful, it also feels somewhat hypothetical, like, maybe this will end up sustaining itself, maybe I can call myself a potter. But only maybe. It’s certainly not clear yet. I think that sense of working a hypothetical job is weighing on me. Practically speaking, I am doing everything I can to produce work, fire it, and begin selling, but until that process starts to turn into a self-supporting cycle, I’ll just have to work through this bit of self-doubt.
Another part of this is figuring out how best to share the work. I want my ways of sharing the studio experience to feel genuine and personal. There are a lot of models out there of people selling pottery through instagram. The ones that really work come from people who have made the recording of their process into a meaningful part of their work. I’m still finding that voice. For one, relying on instagram as the main outlet for sharing and potentially selling my work doesn’t feel great. I recognize that spending time on instagram is, for me, something that happens usually in moments of deep fatigue and mental strain. I am rarely actually happy when I’m on the app. I have seen a lot of great pottery because people post in on instagram and I’ve kept up with many friends through the app. But if it weren’t there, I’m also sure I would have found information about potters in other ways, kept up with friends through different means. It’s an important part of the current artistic ecosystem and even just for maintaining friendships, but I also feel pretty strongly that it does more harm than good. I don’t really know what to do about that yet, but along with the self-doubt, that’s another shadow that’s been on me this week.
This website is an attempt to deal with some of that. I feel much less emotionally wrung out exploring someone’s website than I do scrolling through instagram, and so writing this I feel less complicit in that emotional wringing out of others. But I’m also reaching very few people here and I still need to figure out if and how this website changes shape into something that is an active aid to the development of the business as well as being something that’s grounding and personally meaningful.
Photographic representation is a big part of this, too. Photography is how people most readily share their work online. Susan Sontag has been a big influence on me this past year. She has a series of essays collectively called On Photography which explore the development of photography and have been coming to mind throughout the week.
Here’s just one fragment from that that gives name to part of the issue I’m dealing with: “The destiny of photography has taken it far beyond the role to which it was originally thought to be limited: to give more accurate reports on reality (including works of art). Photography is the reality; the real object is often experienced as a letdown.” (From the essay Photographic Evangels).
As the person making the photographs and developing the studio, I don’t want to be doing the violence to my own studio of making it into the letdown behind the photographic reality. And I understand what she’s saying: photos let us see the world in ways that are not possible in the flow of everyday experience. Photos aestheticize reality, they turn a room to be worked in into an image to be looked at. They create one order of beauty, but through that, they obscure the way that the space is experienced in time and with a body. The same goes for pictures of the pots themselves.
Sontag’s thesis throughout On Photography is that ‘photographic vision’ has become the baseline for how we evaluate and experience the world. She looks at how photographs have changed our relationship to history, to world events, how we process daily experience and form memories, and the type of structure we look for in life. Photographic vision creates a dislocated and fragmented reality.
The way of experiencing the world that Sontag describes in this book is one way of describing the social conditions broadly called post-modernism. Sontag was writing in the early to mid 1970s when post-modernism was first being articulated. These days, much of that fragmentation is taken for granted as the normalized way we experience the world. And the tools of photography are now largely situated within digital environments which are adding a different type of mediation to our experience of the world. Sontag was concerned about the ethical position that photography created: the position of the confused, distanced, and passive observer, reality (or realities) becoming something frozen within a frame. How are we supposed to feel ethically invested in the world when it is experienced through such an uncrossable barrier?
That basic ethical problem hasn’t changed. But as technology allows for the increasing personalization of a digital experience that is so much of our lives, the experience of photo-reality shifts from the total incomprehensible sprawl of post-modernity into the ultra-confined proximity of an algorithmically personalized digital world. Instead of a fragmentary look out onto a photo-frozen outside world, we get a distorted, financialized, emotionally elevated portrait of ourselves projected back onto us through a curated collection of images on apps like instagram.
People involved in craft based artwork, generally, are advocating for a very different relationship to the world. Reality has always felt far off and challenging to access. As a cultural critic, Sontag is articulating one of the ways Reality feels hard to access because of contemporary technologies. But Plato was articulating the same frustration in the allegory of the cave. Heaven, Freedom, Enlightenment, these are all different ways of saying that there’s some other state that’s more Real than what’s going on right now. Specific technologies like photography shape the experience of distance from the Real, but those technologies didn’t create the distance. Craftspeople tend to think that slow, intentional work done by hand is meaningful in its own right and that a life that allows one to make and use such objects has some ethically strong foundations. At the most blunt end of that spectrum is the sense that a job well done is its own reward: the labor is rewarded not financially, but through getting to commit oneself to such work. On the other end of the spectrum is the idea that this elusive Reality is approached through deliberate, caring action and that craft, as the accumulation of methods humans have developed for inhabiting the world is a way of living close to Reality. This is true both of the life of a craftsperson making these objects, and of someone using these objects regularly in daily life.
Sontag was also a novelist. Novels could be seen, like photographs, to create new mediated experiences of the world. To her though, art is a way of expanding our sensibility to the world. Art doesn’t draw us away from reality, it sensitizes us to it by exposing us to a wider range of expression. This is also a distinction between art and (at least functional) craft, where objects are integrated into the everyday life. Craft objects don’t act as models for experience, but as tools.
Photography as technological mediation, novels as expansion of sensibility, craft objects as guides towards the Real, these are all ways expressing and dealing with the inconsistencies of existing, the sense that there are more and less pleasant ways to live. And we’re all dealing with these feelings not only individually, but socially, recognizing that we are somewhat responsible for how other people effect our ways of being and that we are effected by the people, experiences, objects, environments that we live with.
So, I recognize a certain difficult responsibility to myself and others in terms of how I represent my pottery photographically. I personally believe that craftwork should connect people to their immediate surroundings, should make people care about what is happening now and here and feel directly involved in this present. I feel a lot of difficulty in making photography, particularly photography on social media, support that goal. But I also recognize that photography is itself a type of craft, one of the most practiced and consumed crafts in contemporary culture. So I’m going to keep working on finding ways to make the photographic processes of documentation and presentation of my pottery align with the ethical values I have for the pottery itself.