The bowl hasn’t changed much since the Neolithic era, 4,000-10,000 years ago, said Julie Lasky, the deputy editor of the New York Times’ House & Garden section March 27. She was reporting that a small white ceramic bowl carved with the lotus blossoms had just fetched more than 2.2 million dollars at auction at Sotheby’s in New York. That was ten times more than the famed auction house expected. (But present day peoples have a habit of devaluing bowls generally, no matter how useful and striking they are.)
Lasky’s remark that bowls haven’t changed much for 10,000 years prompted others to say that bowls hadn’t really changed much for 200,000 years, when our nearest pre-historical relatives, Neanderthals, dominated Eurasia, and such utensils began to appear. These relatives of ours — about whom we are swiftly learning more (they were not ape-like monsters) – had the ingenious idea of creating “receptacles,” first by using the stomach and bladders of animals killed by hunters. Heated stones were placed inside. Neanderthals were versatile in making tools from flint, which lead to hollowing out stone to produce bowls. Also used were plate- and bowl-like bones of animals. Then came bowls made by hollowing out hard wood that caught fire slowly. This was followed by rough-molding and baking clay. This tends to make some paleoanthropologists see Lasky and other bowl aficionados as a bit too quickly dismissive. For those stocky, bulkily muscled relatives of ours soon began perfecting both a versatility and a subtle handsomeness in their receptacles — using sand to produce a variety of contrasting outer surfaces. A bowl became a tankard, a pail, a moveable vat, an indoor basin, a bathtub.
In more recent centuries a single unlikely seeming Korean tea-bowl has been considered the finest of its kind in the world, praised by ceramicists and artists in ancient and modern times. Yet the reaction to “common folk objects” in 1931 of Soetsu Yanagi, Japanese philosopher and an admirer of Korean art, on his first visit to Korea, is typical. He was stunned by the beauty of the utilitarian objects created by nameless and unknown craftsmen — and appalled that they were not valued. Yet as late as 1931, at Yanagi’s first view of what was considered an example of the finest of this art/craft — a tea-bowl known as the Kizaemon — caused him to exclaim “… my heart fell.” That was the beginning of a life-long education and the founding of the Mingei movement.This typical example of Korean tea bowls of the Edo (1603-1868) and Meiji (1868- 1912) was “a good tea-bowl, yes, but how ordinary!” “Not a trace of ornament, not a trace of calculation.” “... (I)t is just a Korean food bowl ... that a poor man would use ... commonest crockery.” “The clay had been dug from the hill at the back of the house ... the potter’s wheel had been irregular. The shape revealed no particular thought ... The work had been fast, the turning ... rough, done with dirty hands. The throwing room had been dark. The thrower could not read. The kiln was a wretched affair ... It is enough to make one give up working as a potter.” Yet it was to inspire Yanagi to not only look at, but to contemplate what he was seeing – and then to found the Mengei movement.
“Use and contemplation” was how Mexico’s great poet, cultural analyst, and Nobel Prize winner, Octavio Paz summed up his inimitable survey of folk craft as emphasizing that reality twines together of art and utility. “Firmly planted. Not fallen from on high: sprung from below ... The color of a sun buried a thousand years ago and dug up only yesterday ... The belly of a woman heavy with child, the neck of a bird. If you cover and uncover the mouth with the palm of your hand, it answers you with a deep murmur, the sound of bubbling water welling up from its depths ... It has many tongues: it speaks the language of clay and mineral, of art currents flowing between canyon walls, of washerwomen as they scrub, of angry skies, of rain. A vessel of baked clay; do not put it in a glass case alongside rare precious objects. Its beauty is related to the liquid it contains and to the thirst it quenches. Its beauty is corporal: I see it, I touch it, I smell it. If empty, it must be filled, if it is full, it must be emptied ... I lift it up, I tip it over a pitcher into which I pour milk or pulque — lunar liquids that open and close the doors of dawn and dark, waking and sleeping. “
Like the perfume and color of flowers, he says, “their beauty is simply an inherent part of them.” Such crafts are “beautiful things because the are useful things.” And we should understand that they “antedate the separation of the useful and the beautiful.” “Such a separation is more recent than is generally supposed.” he tells us. Many confuse the “modern” impulse for coherence among utensils. Useful and becoming, such crafted utensils fracture a world which insists on an assessment of life as an experience where beauty is an “isolated and autonomous value.“
Sor Juana de la Cruz, the brilliant scholar, poet and 17th Century nun, wittily and dangerously teased her pretentious male ecclesiastical and royal superiors about this near universal superstition: “A woman’s hand is white and beautiful because it is made of flesh and bone, not marble or silver; I esteem it not because it is a thing of splendor but because its grasp is firm.” Her quick mind and pen intimidated Mexico’s rulers who condemned her “waywardness.”
Indigenous Mexicans had been doing this centuries before that conversation. Archaeological evidence shows that the molcajete (mortar) and the tejolote (pestle) were developed well before 4,000 B.C. And it was only natural that Mexico’s various and often adversarial societies were crowded with gods and goddesses, as well as “palpable” magic, all of which took lively, colorful forms in the imaginations of competing cultures. The result: a rich variety of decoration shaping and decorating almost everything.
Thus, the example of the highly sought after — and very expensive — pre-Columbian art, which is now government-protected by people whose ancestors not long ago held it in contempt, called it the “devil’s work” and sought to destroy it.
In Jalisco, the work of two of Mexico’s internationally famed ceramicists, Ken Edwards, and his one-time partner, Jorge Wilmot _ both associated with Tonala and Tlaquepaque — embody this concept of beauty and utility. Their work was designed in its incipient moment of birth to embody the new (high-fired ceramics, including stoneware, was introduced to Jalisco in 1950-1960 by Edwards and Wilmot), and the timeless (the practicality of their pitchers, cups, plates, flower vases, etc). Handsome objects not solely because of their beauty, but because of their utility, an exquisite amalgam of Paz’s “use and contemplation” that antedates the separation of the utilitarian and the exquisite.
One sets out plates-full of Mexican cuisine, pitchers of jamaica for friends knowing one is offering something nourishing and becoming — and to the observant eye and the alert and nimble mind, a nearly “secret relation of the way a thing is made and the purpose for which it is made.”