Transcript
Speaker: Hello, and welcome to Curious Objects, brought to you by the magazine Antiques.
Speaker: I'm Ben Miller.
Speaker: This is the podcast about art, decorative arts, and antiques, the stories behind them, and what they can reveal to us about ourselves and the people who came before us.
Speaker: We're doing something a little bit different today.
Speaker: Actually, we're kicking off a new kind of episode that we're calling Curious Objects Bites.
Speaker: The way it works is I give someone a call, hit the record button, and we have a quick chat about an object they've been thinking about.
Speaker: It'll be shorter than our normal episodes, so it might be less of a whole commute thing and more of a quick walk around the block kind of lesson.
Speaker: But we're going to try to get straight to the point of what makes each object special and interesting and fun.
Speaker: And for the first ever Curious Objects bite, I couldn't think of anyone better than Glenn Adamson.
Speaker: He probably needs no introduction, but Glenn is a recurring Curious Objects guest.
Speaker: He is editor-at-large for Antiques Magazine and a writer and curator of many exhibitions, one of which I wanted to ask him about.
Speaker: So let's give Glenn a call.
Speaker: Hi, Glenn.
Speaker: How are you?
Speaker: Hey there, Ben.
Speaker: Great to hear from you.
Speaker: It's been a while.
Speaker: Last time you were on Curious Objects, we were talking about leather and the Material Intelligence magazine, which was a great deal of fun.
Speaker: But you've been all over the place since then.
Speaker: Yeah, and we're back to ceramics, I guess, which was my first love.
Speaker: So always happy to come home to pottery.
Speaker: Yeah, well, I wanted to talk to you about this exhibition that you've co-curated at the Noguchi Museum, which is opening on March 20th.
Speaker: So just shortly after we're publishing this episode...
Speaker: And it's an exhibition featuring the work of a single artist, Toshiko Takazu, who's this really fascinating Japanese-American ceramicist.
Speaker: And we'll talk about it.
Speaker: She worked in other mediums too, but ceramics is certainly what she is known for.
Speaker: What is the curious object that we're nibbling on today?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So I thought it would be interesting to talk about a closed form, and I'll say a little bit more later about what that means.
Speaker: But it's a piece that
Speaker: Toshiko Takezu made probably in the 1970s or 80s.
Speaker: We don't have an exact date for it.
Speaker: She wasn't much for dating her work.
Speaker: But what's special about it is that Osama Noguchi himself owned it.
Speaker: So he acquired it along with a couple of other pieces and had it in his collection and it's now in the museum.
Speaker: So of course, we've included it in the show.
Speaker: And it's a smaller example, only a few inches high.
Speaker: But I just had the pleasure to hold it in my hands yesterday and give it a shake.
Speaker: It's got a rattle inside, another thing we could talk about a little bit, and experience it myself for the first time.
Speaker: So it's very much uppermost in my mind.
Speaker: So what does it look like?
Speaker: You say it's quite small.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: It's ovoid.
Speaker: It fits very comfortably in two hands.
Speaker: And it is blue, very striking blue.
Speaker: It's a
Speaker: glaze that she would have associated, I think, with the landscape in Hawaii.
Speaker: She was actually of Okinawan immigrant heritage, so often called Japanese American, as you say, but maybe more specifically, we could say she's Okinawan American and born and raised in Hawaii.
Speaker: And that landscape was always extremely important for her.
Speaker: So the sky, the sea, the volcanic landscape, you see that as a constant frame of reference in her work.
Speaker: And that's even true in this very small example that you have the sublime breadth of that amazing natural environment somehow captured in this very compressed object.
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Speaker: I came across this quotation from her, which I really loved.
Speaker: She said, In my life, I see no difference between making pots, cooking, and growing vegetables.
Speaker: It's so gratifying, and I get so much joy from it.
Speaker: It gives me many answers in my life.
Speaker: And...
Speaker: You know, pottery is one of the oldest forms of craft and decorative arts.
Speaker: It has filled a really essential survival function in human society for so long.
Speaker: It remains a daily utilitarian experience for so many of us.
Speaker: Apparently, she actually cooked food in her kiln.
Speaker: which I thought was really remarkable.
Speaker: And yet, you know, she's known as, and you're now putting together this exhibition of her work as art, as a purely aesthetic object.
Speaker: This curious object that we're talking about today can't be filled with anything because of that tiny aperture.
Speaker: You know, how do you make sense of that relationship?
Speaker: So this gets to the heart of why this is such a compelling object and why she's such a compelling artist, really, because you're right that she would have understood her other daily activities, including cooking, including gardening, spending time with friends.
Speaker: She would have understood all of that as being in a continuum with her artistic practice.
Speaker: So she was a very holistic thinker.
Speaker: um but we could also think in a more particular way about the way that she was understanding the interior of her pots of her closed forms in this case as being in dialogue with the historical significance of ceramics in daily life so you know here we have a withdrawal of that interior that would normally be used for storage or for eating drinking and she's rendered it into a purely imaginary space something that we can only
Speaker: hold in our mind and that we need to somehow transport ourselves to through the wall of the pot, as it were.
Speaker: So there's a sense that, as she's put it, the dark air that you cannot see inside the object is really the subject of the object.
Speaker: A moment ago, you mentioned that this piece rattles when you pick it up.
Speaker: Could you tell me a little about that?
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: And that's crucial to the phenomenon I was just describing.
Speaker: So this actually happened accidentally at first.
Speaker: She was making a pot and a little bit of clay fell into it and didn't fuse to the interior of the vessel, which meant that when she fired it and picked it up out of the kiln, it actually made a sound.
Speaker: so it became kind of an accidental musical instrument you could say.
Speaker: And she really loved this effect and then intentionally cultivated it by wrapping little beads of clay and paper so that they would remain free in the interior and they would roll around once the piece was fired.
Speaker: And that is true of this object, this example we've been talking about that was in Noguchi's collection.
Speaker: So what it does is to make it into a kind of kinetic sculpture
Speaker: and also to give you another means of access to that interior that you can't see, a tactile access, obviously access through sound.
Speaker: And for this reason, we worked very closely with my co-curator, Leila Hua Lanzalotti, who together with Kate Weiner and myself actually made the show.
Speaker: And Leila Hua is a sound artist and a composer, a musician, and she created a series of what she calls etudes, almost like a Chopin piano etude, if you will.
Speaker: with these closed forms, trying to understand their capabilities as musical instruments or noise makers.
Speaker: And hopefully people will have a chance to look at the video that we have online that shows her using this particular object and seeing what it can do.
Speaker: So it's a kind of activation with all the senses, not just sight alone.
Speaker: And Takeizu had relationships with a lot of creators, artists across different media.
Speaker: I was interested to learn that she knew Shoji Hamada at
Speaker: the Japanese potter who worked closely with Bernard Leach in the early to mid 20th century.
Speaker: Bernard was actually a strong influence and creative inspiration for someone who was recently on Curious Objects, Tom Lawler, a friend of mine who's also a ceramicist.
Speaker: It's fun to see that kind of lineage of aesthetic interest
Speaker: But I wonder about the relationship with Noguchi.
Speaker: Why is this exhibition happening at the Noguchi Museum?
Speaker: Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned Shoji Hamada because Takeizu had a lot of important relationships with Japanese ceramists.
Speaker: Kaneshi-gei Toyo would be another example.
Speaker: Whereas Injin, she had a very important trip that she undertook in the mid-1950s.
Speaker: to Japan and she met both the avant-garde and traditional wings of the Japanese ceramic world then.
Speaker: And it remained a very important aspect of her work going forwards.
Speaker: And Noguchi is crucial to that story because he had been in Japan himself and had made a series of quite avant-garde objects that remained very influential on the scene there.
Speaker: So that wasn't one early important encounter, sort of indirect.
Speaker: And then she became a friend of his.
Speaker: would see him socially and they did exchange work as we know from this object.
Speaker: So she was very interested in him and vice versa.
Speaker: And that's unusual, actually.
Speaker: Noguchi didn't actually
Speaker: have an interest in many other artists.
Speaker: He was quite selective in his own attention to what his colleagues and peers were doing.
Speaker: I think perhaps the reason that Takezu was working in ceramics, which was a medium he had experimented with, but not technically mastered necessarily, that was probably quite interesting to him.
Speaker: But then there's a very deep and profound connection between them as well, which has to do really with their attitude to the cosmic.
Speaker: I think each of the closed forms that
Speaker: Takezu made is in some ways a microcosm trying to encapsulate a vast experience of time and space.
Speaker: You might say time and space as such, rather than just a particular piece of it.
Speaker: And that was absolutely true of Noguchi as well.
Speaker: He would have thought of his work as existing
Speaker: within and articulating uh you know an enormous sublime undifferentiated span of time and space temporality and spatiality itself and so that was a deep profound aspect of their work very much inspired by and informed by east asian philosophy as well as art practice and that was absolutely something that they shared so you know you have
Speaker: both the technical connection between them and interest in ceramics and the history of that medium in Japan.
Speaker: But then you also have this kind of poetic and philosophical connection that goes very deep for both.
Speaker: Well, I'm not sure we can get much more profound than time, space, and the cosmos.
Speaker: So I think we'll leave it there, Glenn.
Speaker: But thank you so much for the introduction to this very curious object.
Speaker: Again, listeners, you can see the exhibition that Glenn has helped to curate at the Noguchi Museum in Queens here in New York City from March 20th to July 28th.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: And I hope people do have a chance to come and see it.
Speaker: It looks absolutely spectacular in those beautiful galleries.
Speaker: So it really is something to be experienced in person.
Speaker: Fantastic.
Speaker: Well, thank you, Glenn.
Speaker: Thanks, Ben.
Speaker: So great to see you as always.
Speaker: Today's episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati with social media and web support by Sarah Bellotta.
Speaker: Sierra Holt is our digital media and editorial associate.
Speaker: Our music is by Trap Rabbit.
Speaker: And I'm Ben Miller.
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