Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
CO Bites: Toshiko Takaezu's "Closed Form," with Glenn Adamson
24 Plays1 year ago
This week Glenn Adamson returns to the pod to discuss an exhibition he co-curated at the Noguchi Museum in Queens, New York. Worlds Within: The Art of Toshiko Takaezu focuses on the work of the Okinawan-American ceramicist, which bridges the gulf between art and craft. In this inaugural installment of Curious Objects Bites—bingeable conversations about fascinating things for the busy listener—Adamson details a “closed form”: a Takaezu pot that confines a bead that rattles around inside.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Recommended
Transcript
00:00:09
Speaker
Hello,
Introduction to Curious Objects Bites
00:00:10
Speaker
and welcome to Curious Objects, brought to you by the magazine Antiques.
00:00:13
Speaker
I'm Ben Miller.
00:00:14
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.
00:00:24
Speaker
We're doing something a little bit different today.
00:00:26
Speaker
Actually, we're kicking off a new kind of episode that we're calling Curious Objects Bites.
00:00:31
Speaker
The
Conversation with Glenn Adamson on Noguchi Museum Exhibition
00:00:31
Speaker
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.
00:00:38
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.
00:00:45
Speaker
But we're going to try to get straight to the point of what makes each object special and interesting and fun.
00:00:51
Speaker
And for the first ever Curious Objects bite, I couldn't think of anyone better than Glenn Adamson.
00:00:57
Speaker
He probably needs no introduction, but Glenn is a recurring Curious Objects guest.
00:01:02
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.
00:01:10
Speaker
So let's give Glenn a call.
00:01:17
Speaker
Hi, Glenn.
00:01:18
Speaker
How are you?
00:01:19
Speaker
Hey there, Ben.
00:01:20
Speaker
Great to hear from you.
00:01:21
Speaker
It's been a while.
00:01:22
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.
00:01:31
Speaker
But you've been all over the place since then.
00:01:35
Speaker
Yeah, and we're back to ceramics, I guess, which was my first love.
00:01:38
Speaker
So
Focus on Toshiko Takezu's Ceramic Art
00:01:39
Speaker
always happy to come home to pottery.
00:01:42
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.
00:01:53
Speaker
So just shortly after we're publishing this episode...
00:01:58
Speaker
And it's an exhibition featuring the work of a single artist, Toshiko Takazu, who's this really fascinating Japanese-American ceramicist.
00:02:07
Speaker
And we'll talk about it.
00:02:08
Speaker
She worked in other mediums too, but ceramics is certainly what she is known for.
00:02:14
Speaker
What is the curious object that we're nibbling on today?
00:02:19
Speaker
Right.
00:02:19
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.
00:02:26
Speaker
But it's a piece that
00:02:27
Speaker
Toshiko Takezu made probably in the 1970s or 80s.
00:02:31
Speaker
We don't have an exact date for it.
00:02:33
Speaker
She wasn't much for dating her work.
00:02:35
Speaker
But what's special about it is that Osama Noguchi himself owned it.
00:02:39
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.
00:02:45
Speaker
So of course, we've included it in the show.
00:02:48
Speaker
And it's a smaller example, only a few inches high.
00:02:51
Speaker
But I just had the pleasure to hold it in my hands yesterday and give it a shake.
00:02:55
Speaker
It's got a rattle inside, another thing we could talk about a little bit, and experience it myself for the first time.
00:03:01
Speaker
So it's very much uppermost in my mind.
00:03:04
Speaker
So what does it look like?
00:03:05
Speaker
You say it's quite small.
00:03:07
Speaker
Yep.
00:03:08
Speaker
It's ovoid.
00:03:09
Speaker
It fits very comfortably in two hands.
00:03:12
Speaker
And it is blue, very striking blue.
00:03:14
Speaker
It's a
00:03:16
Speaker
glaze that she would have associated, I think, with the landscape in Hawaii.
00:03:20
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.
00:03:33
Speaker
And that landscape was always extremely important for her.
00:03:36
Speaker
So the sky, the sea, the volcanic landscape, you see that as a constant frame of reference in her work.
00:03:42
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.
Advertisement Break
00:03:58
Speaker
As a raider scavenging a derelict world, you settle into an underground settlement
00:04:04
Speaker
But now you must return to the surface where ARK machines roam.
00:04:11
Speaker
If you're brave enough, who knows what you might find?
00:04:15
Speaker
ARK Raiders, a multiplayer extraction adventure video game.
00:04:19
Speaker
Buy now for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S and PC.
00:04:23
Speaker
Rated T for Teen.
00:04:25
Speaker
I
Takezu's Philosophy and Historical Impact
00:04:25
Speaker
came across this quotation from her, which I really loved.
00:04:30
Speaker
She said, In my life, I see no difference between making pots, cooking, and growing vegetables.
00:04:37
Speaker
It's so gratifying, and I get so much joy from it.
00:04:39
Speaker
It gives me many answers in my life.
00:04:42
Speaker
And...
00:04:43
Speaker
You know, pottery is one of the oldest forms of craft and decorative arts.
00:04:51
Speaker
It has filled a really essential survival function in human society for so long.
00:04:57
Speaker
It remains a daily utilitarian experience for so many of us.
00:05:03
Speaker
Apparently, she actually cooked food in her kiln.
00:05:07
Speaker
which I thought was really remarkable.
00:05:11
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.
00:05:24
Speaker
This curious object that we're talking about today can't be filled with anything because of that tiny aperture.
00:05:31
Speaker
You know, how do you make sense of that relationship?
00:05:35
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.
00:05:52
Speaker
She would have understood all of that as being in a continuum with her artistic practice.
00:05:57
Speaker
So she was a very holistic thinker.
00:05:59
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
00:06:29
Speaker
hold in our mind and that we need to somehow transport ourselves to through the wall of the pot, as it were.
00:06:35
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.
Innovative Elements in Takezu's Work
00:06:46
Speaker
A moment ago, you mentioned that this piece rattles when you pick it up.
00:06:49
Speaker
Could you tell me a little about that?
00:06:51
Speaker
That's right.
00:06:52
Speaker
And that's crucial to the phenomenon I was just describing.
00:06:56
Speaker
So this actually happened accidentally at first.
00:06:58
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.
00:07:10
Speaker
so it became kind of an accidental musical instrument you could say.
00:07:13
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.
00:07:26
Speaker
And that is true of this object, this example we've been talking about that was in Noguchi's collection.
00:07:32
Speaker
So what it does is to make it into a kind of kinetic sculpture
00:07:36
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.
00:07:44
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.
00:07:55
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.
00:08:04
Speaker
with these closed forms, trying to understand their capabilities as musical instruments or noise makers.
00:08:12
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.
00:08:22
Speaker
So it's a kind of activation with all the senses, not just sight alone.
00:08:27
Speaker
And
Cultural Connections and Exhibition Significance
00:08:27
Speaker
Takeizu had relationships with a lot of creators, artists across different media.
00:08:34
Speaker
I was interested to learn that she knew Shoji Hamada at
00:08:39
Speaker
the Japanese potter who worked closely with Bernard Leach in the early to mid 20th century.
00:08:49
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.
00:09:01
Speaker
It's fun to see that kind of lineage of aesthetic interest
00:09:07
Speaker
But I wonder about the relationship with Noguchi.
00:09:12
Speaker
Why is this exhibition happening at the Noguchi Museum?
00:09:16
Speaker
Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned Shoji Hamada because Takeizu had a lot of important relationships with Japanese ceramists.
00:09:23
Speaker
Kaneshi-gei Toyo would be another example.
00:09:28
Speaker
Whereas Injin, she had a very important trip that she undertook in the mid-1950s.
00:09:35
Speaker
to Japan and she met both the avant-garde and traditional wings of the Japanese ceramic world then.
00:09:41
Speaker
And it remained a very important aspect of her work going forwards.
00:09:46
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.
00:09:56
Speaker
So that wasn't one early important encounter, sort of indirect.
00:10:00
Speaker
And then she became a friend of his.
00:10:04
Speaker
would see him socially and they did exchange work as we know from this object.
00:10:10
Speaker
So she was very interested in him and vice versa.
00:10:14
Speaker
And that's unusual, actually.
00:10:15
Speaker
Noguchi didn't actually
00:10:18
Speaker
have an interest in many other artists.
00:10:21
Speaker
He was quite selective in his own attention to what his colleagues and peers were doing.
00:10:26
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.
00:10:36
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.
00:10:45
Speaker
I think each of the closed forms that
00:10:48
Speaker
Takezu made is in some ways a microcosm trying to encapsulate a vast experience of time and space.
00:10:58
Speaker
You might say time and space as such, rather than just a particular piece of it.
00:11:03
Speaker
And that was absolutely true of Noguchi as well.
00:11:05
Speaker
He would have thought of his work as existing
00:11:08
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
00:11:32
Speaker
both the technical connection between them and interest in ceramics and the history of that medium in Japan.
00:11:39
Speaker
But then you also have this kind of poetic and philosophical connection that goes very deep for both.
Exhibition Details at the Noguchi Museum
00:11:47
Speaker
Well, I'm not sure we can get much more profound than time, space, and the cosmos.
00:11:51
Speaker
So I think we'll leave it there, Glenn.
00:11:53
Speaker
But thank you so much for the introduction to this very curious object.
00:11:59
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.
00:12:13
Speaker
That's right.
00:12:14
Speaker
And I hope people do have a chance to come and see it.
00:12:16
Speaker
It looks absolutely spectacular in those beautiful galleries.
00:12:18
Speaker
So it really is something to be experienced in person.
00:12:21
Speaker
Fantastic.
00:12:21
Speaker
Well, thank you, Glenn.
00:12:23
Speaker
Thanks, Ben.
00:12:23
Speaker
So great to see you as always.
00:12:27
Speaker
Today's
Podcast Credits
00:12:27
Speaker
episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati with social media and web support by Sarah Bellotta.
00:12:33
Speaker
Sierra Holt is our digital media and editorial associate.
00:12:37
Speaker
Our music is by Trap Rabbit.
00:12:39
Speaker
And I'm Ben Miller.
00:13:00
Speaker
The Burlington Coat Event is back.
00:13:02
Speaker
Buy a coat now through November 29th and get $5 off your merchandise purchase of 25 or more from December 6th through December 24th.
00:13:10
Speaker
Plus, Burlington is donating 50,000 new coats to help those