How Authentic can you Get?

Raku is a pottery technique involving removing the ware from the kiln when it is still red hot, a process difficult to control and producing unpredictable results. Raku is also the name of the family who developed the technique in the sixteenth century, and the family continues to maintain the tradition. During our short and memorable visit to Japan, In February 2016, we made a pilgrimage to the Raku museum in Kyoto, and I bought some postcards of the tea ceremony cups they have on exhibition there. Kind of by mistake, because I was working with clay that was too wet, I produced a couple of cups that might be seen as inspired by Japanese tea-ceremony ware, and it's odd and pleasurable to drink my morning coffee from them.

Today most potters in the West probably fire their work in electric kilns, often computer controlled. Some potters use gas kilns, which are, I've heard, more expensive to operate, but they produce effects in glazing, due to the oxidation of the chemicals in the glazes, which are impossible with an electric kiln. Certain more fanatical potters fire their ware with charcoal or wood in kilns they construct themselves, going to a great deal of trouble to emulate the methods of the earlier craftspeople. This drive to reach back into methods that date back thousands of years is totally understandable to me. I am thrilled by ancient pottery and by the feeling that, when my hands give shape to clay, I am placing myself in a human chain extending back about as far as human culture goes. However, I'm not tempted in the slightest to build a gas or charcoal kiln in my back yard.

I'm not entirely sympathetic with the drive for authenticity. I have often enjoyed hearing baroque music played on instruments of the age or modern replicas of them, and I respect the knowledge and devotion exemplified in these concerts, but I wouldn't say that Bach should only be played on a harpsichord, or that Telemann flute music shouldn't be played on a modern silver flute. No matter how carefully today's musicians may be to play baroque music on baroque instruments with precisely the ornaments that were used in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the ears that hear them today have listened to a great deal of music of many different kinds, so baroque music now is played in a context unimaginable to the composers and performers of past times. The original context, the society and culture in which the music was produced, is absolutely inaccessible to us. The inauthenticity, as it were, is built in.

Perhaps this is what the Chinese conceptual artist, Ai Weiwei, is alluding to in his transgressive disfigurement of ancient pottery. His often upsetting work is thought-provoking without ever telling us just what we should be thinking. I could never bring myself to ruin a piece of pottery that has miraculously survived for a few thousand years, because I respect the craftsmanship that it embodies, even if, in fact, it isn't (in this case) either particularly beautiful or rare. Interestingly, I don't mind at all when things that I have made get broken. They seem more authentic to me that way.