Wombs and Bombs

Going through the pages of the lovely The Art of Toshiko Takaezu: In the Language of Silence, a newly released, posthumous survey of Takaezu’s works, edited by Peter Held, I immediately began to sense a kinship. Her process-driven creativity produced a remarkable array of objects, ceramics, pottery, paintings, tapestries, and other works that seem, even on the flattened reproduced photograph, alive and resonant. I have journeyed with traditional Nihonga art (Japanese-style painting tradition) and attempted to blend the ancestral method with new, even avant-garde, forms of expression; similarly, Takaezu created a unique hybrid of Japanese ceramics and contemporary expression. Through the book, I was introduced to her world, as I had not seen her works firsthand and the photographs were my entry point; even so, I began to see profound overlaps between what I have intuited as an artist and Takaezu’s language of art. I read that many of her vessels are famous for being “closed,” meaning that she only left a pinhole on top to allow heated gas to escape during firing and the object is rather useless. Her works refuse to be categorized, causing many museums to be confounded as to where to place them; likewise, my works hover between contemporary and traditional, modern and medieval. Perhaps I had never heard about her precisely because she is so hard to categorize; there is simply no easy mechanism to gain an audience for works such as this. I know that battle all too well.

The Art of Toshiko Takaezu: In the Language of Silence

Peter Held (Editor)

The University of North Carolina Press

160 pages

$149.99

Takaezu’s large ceramic “pots” are englobed unto themselves, an impossibility of a pot, completely mute to the world. In such “uselessness,” her works instinctively explore the origin of what art can and could be. They stare into our propositional, utilitarian culture. If you are lucky enough to hold one of her works, you’ll find that they turn into bells: sound echoes out of them as you shake them. There is a small picture on the opening page of this book which shows Takaezu standing with, and almost embracing, a large ceramic piece as if the object was a friend. I imagine her gently tapping the surface of the piece. The gentle reverberation spreads out into the world and disappears, and somewhere in the woods behind her studio in Quakertown, New Jersey, the vibrations are still echoing.

Those faint echoes persuaded me to make a trip to Princeton myself one hot summer day, where Cary Liu, the curator of Asian Art at the Princeton Museum, took me for a tour. Takaezu taught at Princeton for some time, receiving an honorary doctorate in 1996; thus, the Princeton Art Museum became the logical place to hold her last retrospective while she was still alive.

Cary Liu wrote an essay for her retrospective catalogue (an excellent essay which, unfortunately, is not included in this book). “In Zen Buddhist and Daoist thought,” Liu reminds us, “it is in emptiness that usefulness is found. A ceramic bowl in and of itself is useless; only its empty center, where substances can be collected and shaped, provides function.”

Takaezu’s works are like Zen’s koan: they pose questions more than give answers. Encountering her ceramic pieces forces us to reconsider the notion of what a work of pottery or ceramics really “ought to be.” Her works are metaphysical questions, imposing but delicate, stubborn yet welcoming, allusive and weighty.

What are these objects, if not utilitarian ceramic pieces?

Are they wombs, or bombs?

In the cooled storage unit of the Princeton Art Museum, I stood in front of these loaded questions, now neatly placed on shelves. Cary told me that Takaezu is known to have written words inside of the each pot, but to her last days, she never revealed what she wrote. Her message is inside out, outside in. William Blake wrote in Jerusalem: “There is a Void, outside of Existence, which if enterd into Englobes itself and becomes a Womb.”

Takaezu’s pieces are wombs of silence.

In the Language of Silence is a beautiful book.

For artists like Takaezu, deeply attuned to the embodiment of the created object, and with particular emotion invested in the imperfections of surface and materiality, the challenge lies in the printed and digital documentation and reproduction of such work. An inherent frustration resides in the translation of the painting, sculpture, or installation into a photographic, flattened representation of the work. I consider it an artistic success as a painter when the photographer who takes photos of my paintings utters, “this is impossible to photograph!” I’ve decided that such a frustration is part of my goal: to create a surface that is impossible to flatten. Though a good reproduction, paradoxically, recognizes the inherent frustrations and limitations of the editing process, translating the work to a page or digital image is comparable to the way that a good translator navigates from one language to another.

A true work of art is created not to be reproduced but to be experienced. Van Gogh’s Starry Night, now reproduced a billion times over, still needs to be seen with the naked eye because the mystery imbedded there escapes reproduction. Andy Warhol recognized, embraced, and commoditized this gap in translation: his Last Supper is not even a direct photograph of the da Vinci masterpiece; rather, it is a photograph of a kitschy, ten-cent reproduction of the masterpiece (thus a photograph of a photograph), which could have been bought at Woolworth’s. By magnifying and multiplying the famed image of an image hundreds of times over, Warhol intentionally addressed the problems and the limitations of representation. Today, every artist has to deal with this cheapened realm of image reproduction.

Takaezu, however, did not join in this postmodern dance. She even seemed oblivious of the contemporary obsession with reproduction. This anachronism is perhaps why this book shines so brightly and speaks so eloquently. Impossible to reproduce in a two-dimensional format, Takaezu’s works remind us of their untranslatability even as they enjoy a surprising reprieve—a forced excellence in another dimension. This book, full of two-dimensional images, is now what one would hold instead of her pots, as a descriptive pause, an antidote to the culture that demands easy answers and quick reads. Takaezu’s pieces are beautifully photographed mute objects, somehow speaking in thousands of tongues at the same time. This book, too, somehow multiplies the depth and weight of her works into a shared experience. To Takaezu, her creativity was a gift alive with possibilities, and In the Language of Silence is a perfect tribute.

Takaezu was born in 1922 to Japanese immigrant parents in Pepeekeo, Hawaii. After studying at the Honolulu Academy of Arts, she continued her studies at Cranbrook Academy of Art, studying under Maija Grotell, who has been called the “mother of American ceramics.” Takaezu ended up teaching at Cranbrook later in her life, as well as at Princeton University.

Taking a pottery class at Princeton must be, one might muse, relaxation fit for élite students needing a breather between hard classes. But Takaezu developed a reputation over the years as “the most difficult grader on campus.” She was known to take a hammer and destroy any pieces that were not satisfactory to her.

Making an object of art, teaching—whatever she was doing at the moment, Takaezu regarded it as part of an integrated process of creativity, requiring patience, commitment, and dedication. “In my life,” she said, “I see no difference between making pots, cooking, and growing vegetables. They are all so related. However there is a need for me to work in clay. It is so gratifying and I get so much joy from it, and it gives me many answers in my life.” Her students were invited not just to a classroom to be instructed, they were invited to share her life. She was tough on herself, and seeking the highest level of excellence was simply a way of life. Perfectionism was not the goal; what mattered was the process of seeking the greatest joy. To seek joy was to collaborate with the imperfection, whether it be in clay or in her students, and simply to claim the journey as a gift.

“A work of art is a gift, not a commodity.” Are these words from Lewis Hyde merely a utopian fantasy, or do they get to the heart of the matter? Whether it be the commissioned art of the Renaissance, or kitsch art in the malls of today, Hyde’s point is that what endures transcends the marketplace of its time. Let’s assume that he is right, that enduring works of art desire to reside in the precinct of the gift, rather than the marketplace; then such enduring objects of contemplation will gravitate toward, and even redefine, what a gift ought to be. Takaezu put it this way:

I never thought my work as beautiful. I thought it was okay, that’s all … [but] I realized that the beauty was coming from something outside of me; a power that was passing through me; an intangible source that I can’t pinpoint. So I felt that in a way, I couldn’t take the credit. But since it wasn’t only me that was involved in making them, it felt alright to say that they were beautiful.

She saw herself as a vehicle for this “beauty” to pass through, first receiving the gift herself and then offering it in turn to the world.

What resonates in these passages is a missing link in today’s art-world conversations. If we speak of a contemporary work of art in the same way Takaezu speaks of her works, we will be asked to define what we mean by “beauty.” Her intuitive language includes assumptions that the contemporary art market, filled with cynicism and ironic distance, rejected long ago. And yet, rather stubbornly, Takaezu paved a path not taken by others. Janet Koplos, in a descriptive, insightful essay in the book, writes:

Narrative art attracts critics who want to talk about sociopolitical matters in specific terms, but Takaezu’s works elicit poetic and emotional responses because of their openness and refusal to commit declarative statements. The consequence is that the work is sometimes described as spiritual.

Critic Irving Sandler, the last remaining critic from the heyday of abstract expressionism, came to one of my recent exhibits and told me, “I don’t know what it means by ‘spiritual,’ but your work is certainly very spiritual.” Such words can be dimissed as evasive and dreamlike in the contemporary art world, even nonsensical, and therefore to be avoided. But Takaezu’s pieces force us to reckon with “poetic and emotional” responses, circumnavigating the labyrinth of the contemporary “sociopolitical” language of art.

Just as her unflinching hand would destroy her students’ work, her own hands generated work suggesting metaphors of destruction. Her larger works are literally shaped like bombs, a threatening presence of imposing size and color, reminding one of the shape of the atomic bomb dropped from the Enola Gay. I have decided, after seeing many of her pieces both in Princeton and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, that Takaezu’s works are both bombs and wombs. They do not just circumnavigate the contemporary malaise, they are meant to be dropped right into the darkest arena of the arts. They are dropped as a gift into a world that has lost the habit of contemplation, and they implode silently within our anxious hearts, but as an intruding force of life. We are to be englobed by them, and are meant to wonder if art can reverse the curse.

After being asked by Princeton University to provide something for the 9/11 memorial there, Takaezu chose a bronze bell that she had created. She could have chosen any of her works. They are all her laments for an ideological age, filled with trinkets and propaganda called art. They are both wombs and bombs.

Makoto Fujimura, an artist based in New York, is the founder of the International Arts Movement. His illuminated edition of The Four Holy Gospels was published by Crossway in January.