ANTON CU UNJIENG: The potter-as-historian

ANTON CU UNJIENG
The potter-as-historian

Opening reception: Sat, Nov 23, 2-4 PM
Exhibition: Nov 23 – Dec 21, 2024
Hours: Thurs – Sat, 12-5 PM

For preview or sales inquiries, please contact Wil Aballe, wil@waapart.com

Remembering the future and the task of the potter-as-historian

“nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost to history.” – Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin famously observed that all “cultural treasures” are “documents of barbarism” both in their production and in their transmission. But he was very far from advocating the destruction or abandonment of these documents. This was because he held out hope for a future, for a humanity he described as “redeemed.” This redemption would have been the condition of a new relationship to history: “only a redeemed mankind is granted the fullness of its past.” But the future did not happen. In Adorno’s words, “the attempt to change the world miscarried,” and we live in the wake of that failure. For the cultural producer working in the flattened time of the eternal neoliberal present which simultaneously imposes forgetfulness and forecloses alternative futures, what relationship to the past is necessary?

Bernard Leach published his A Potter’s Book in 1940, the same year in which Benjamin drafted his “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In so doing, he gave to the studio pottery movement a new and forceful ideological coherence. A key problem, for Leach, was that industrialized capitalist manufacture had tended overwhelmingly to create wares “so false and ridiculous … as to be in itself an indictment of our popular half-culture.” A potter working in his day was therefore “constrained to look to the best of the earlier periods for inspiration.” Leachianism, therefore, based itself on an imagined relationship to the past called “Tradition.” For Leach, this was a tradition whose transmission had been interrupted and broken by modernity. At the same time, modernity – in the form of what we would today call colonialism and globalization – had “looted and disturbed” the tomb-mounds of the world and, in so doing, had made the traditions of all nations potentially available as sources of inspiration. If this potential for universality has been conquered by an insatiable imperialism, he seems to suggest, then the least that can be done is to make good use of it. Modernity threatened Leach’s generation with a different universality: the deadening, shallow universality of a global capitalism. Leach saw in these artifacts not just colonial loot, but the bearers of a different standard by which to critique the present – the sincere assimilation of which, he hoped, might lead to a shared synthetic culture capable of precluding imperialism.

There is much to disagree with in Leach, and it is no surprise that those who still give his ideas allegiance are few and far between. So, where once he was the major influence upon the potters of the Gulf Islands, he was not even a ghost in Salt Spring Island, BC when I came there to work at Judy Weeden’s studio. But I cannot help feeling very keenly that Leach’s hopes – modest, naive, and utopian as they were – did not come to pass any more than did Benjamin’s. And I believe there may be something after all to Leach’s peculiar traditionalism. It is the traditionalism of the potter-as-historian. As Daniel Bensaid has said, the task of the historian is never to be the “notary of the accomplished fact,” but to remember otherwise, to seek in the past paths not taken or left behind, to be the archaeologist of buried possibilities. The ware of the potter-as-historian are the emblems of those possibilities. They stand, to borrow Leach’s words, “outside the normal flow” of a complacent present unwilling to imagine a different and better world, waiting in anticipation of the day that those possibilities may prove to have been not yet played out. As Benjamin also insists, to remember is always to trace a future that may be, against every present indication. Benjamin writes of the need to fan “the spark of hope in the past,” as though we might set the present aflame with their frustrated desires, as though our own yearnings for what might be could find a sudden affinity and answer among the defeated of history. In that sense, we can remember in the future tense.