Lili Krakowski on tue 15 nov 05
Everyone is right about crazing. No one believes a crazed plate can kill
ya, (unless flung, Frisbee-like, at your head!) But a crazed plate or cup
or bowl made/sold/used for food related purposes in a technologically
advanced society indicates a lack of judgment, or skill, or ethics somewhere
along the way.
A glaze crazes under known circumstances. One of the most common is that
the clay on which the glaze has been applied remains porous, absorbs water,
and expands enough to crack the glaze. And many a glaze that comes out of
the kiln...never mind the dishwasher...crazed is so because the clay
beneath is not "right" . Now how many bacteria can set up housekeeping in
a porous clay body, I do not know. I DO know that this Summer I used a
crazed plate (ah, yes, purty ones I may keep for my own use) to allow a
Brie to ripen. Well darling Brie not only ripened, it oozed...and the
liquid got into the plate itself, and despite all my cleaning attempts,
including baking the dish in the oven, and putting it in the dishwasher
several times....I finally had to take the plate to the dump....It stank
that badly....
Having said that....of course crazing can be used for decorative purposes.
I have seen quite wonderful pots, Chinese celadon porcelain, I seem to
recall, that were crazed, and the craze had been stained and the pot refired
at least once....Fine, swell. That simply means that a clever potter used a
KNOWN GLAZE DEFECT for decorative purposes. And as porcelain is fully
vitrified, the clay itself was not affected....it did not absorb and then
release moisture....
This is the same idea as a hemline. We all learned from our mothers that a
hemline should be even and straight. That trouser legs should be the same
length, or to be more accurate "break" over the foot at the same point. OF
COURSE someone will wear a DELIBERATELY scalloped skirt hem, and maybe
different length trouser legs....But this is deliberate, this is
intentional....this is not a bad pot trying to sneak onto someone's dining
room table under false pretences.
Which reminds me of one of Hobart Cowles's maxims: a strong magnifying
glass is a basic potter's tool.
Now about degrees: what degrees, where degrees? Was it one of the Alsop
brothers, or Harrison Salisbury...some big New York Times guy...who had his
appendix removed in China with acupuncture as ONLY anesthesia? And lived,
happily, to write about it? The point being that us oldsters remember when
Westerner snickered at Chinese medicine, gurgled hysterically about
acupuncture and like that.....
That was a time when only degrees from Elite Western Universities --which
were totally bigoted in their admission policies--allowed one into the
Learned Professions. (Fortunately one still could apprentice to an MD and
one still could read Law with an attorney....) And this "restriction of
trade" is, I think, the problem.
The Academization of craft strikes me as self-contradictory. Academia,
used to be a precise-as-possible course of study,
teaching rigorous, narrow, unimaginative disciplines. (My Gentile PhD
friends studied Plato, and Kant,and Locke and Hobbes and like that...a dab
of Aquinas if they went to an RC college...but no Talmud, no Maimonides,
certainly
no Non Western thinker) Academia was meant to
perpetuate the status quo, to bring a certain control over education ...and
raise an elite to run things in/ for the ruling class.
And that, when it comes to craft, seems a contradiction. Because, I think,
craft is a physical skill from which imagination takes off. Schools, any
schools, teachers, any teachers, workshops, any workshops can teach these
physical skills. (Weren't the great Williams sisters taught tennis by their
father?) Great athletes learn their skills in non-Academic ways.....Where
I have a problem with Academia, is that Academic fees are charged, Academic
rules and criteria applied --to something that does not lend itself to that
kind of regimentation.
No, Vince, I am not picking on you, nor your school. I know little about
it, and am talking in generalities, talking about what I have seen and
heard. It seems to me that craft can be taught, should be taught as skill
and skill only. Aesthetics, theory, and all that has naught to do with it.
And this is my basic question/qualm: would a potter, a skilled potter, a
knowledgeable semi-literate potter without any degree, someone who can
teach, has a proven record with apprentices have an equal chance at teaching
at a college as an MFA with only a few years between degree and application
for job?
Lili Krakowski
Be of good courage
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