I wrote the following piece as a means of sorting out my thoughts about the recent election.  

 

Crafting a Way of Life: The Hope & Husbandry of Joe the Potter

 

The election of 2008 is finally over. All of the campaign speeches, mailers, and robo-calls, all the rhetoric and ranting have again fallen silent, at least for now.  Our nation has elected the first African-American President,  who also happens to be a gifted, charismatic man with enormous possibility and appeal.   The world is enthralled in the hope of a new era in American leadership, or at least hugely relieved to see the end of the hopelessly incompetent Bush Administration. On election night, people the world over celebrated this watershed event. The televised images were striking. If these aren't signs of renewed hope, I don't know what is. Everyone seems to be able to feel it, but what does it mean?  What will this new hope look like?  As a young husband and father what do I want this country to concern itself with so that the lives of my children will be better served? As an aspiring artist, how will I be able to use my skills and training in new ways as a result of this election? As someone concerned with good food and farming practices, what will the impact be on American agriculture?  These are big questions, and we had better be clear about what it is we're hoping for.    

 

When I think of my hope for the future of this country, I think of a guy named Joe.  No, not THAT Joe. By now, regrettably, we are all too familiar with the "plight" of one Joe Wurzelbacher, the plumber from Ohio who questioned Mr. Obama on his tax proposals and the effects they would have on the plumbing business that he was hypothetically planning to buy. While taxation and small business development are of course legitimate concerns for public policy, this particular over-publicized campaign stunt (for that is what it became), seemed to me from the beginning to miss much of the point. I mean no disrespect to Mr. Wurzelbacher,  I'm sure he's a great guy, and I certainly mean no slight to plumbers. The skilled trades are a vital part of our economy and a pretty good line of work, all things considered. But what is lacking in the "symbol" of Joe the Plumber is a concern about something more visionary and comprehensive than the picayune bickering over marginal tax rates on net profits above a certain threshold.  I can only hope that Joe the Plumber, as a symbol, fades gently into the annals of forgettable campaign chicanery.

 

No, the person I think of is Joseph Bennion of Spring City, Utah.  Joe is a potter, an artist, which to many people I suspect will sound like an odd profession to think of as representative of the future of "the American Dream", but I think we would do ourselves a service to consider his example. And by this, I mean his example as a human being, and not merely as an easy symbol or a stand-in for ideology. Precisely because the most important things in life are ultimately the ones that make us most human and complex, we should avoid any quick and easy interpretation of "the American Dream". These concerns, the one's least reducible to some formulation of partisan politics or simple logic, the ones that involve responsiveness, affection, care, empathy and concern, are the ones that point the way to something different.  Ideas like husbandry (in every sense of the word), family, home, sense of place, service, neighborliness, productivity, creativity, respect, humility and joy. Joe Bennion is a man who has done some thinking on these things. He is someone who has taken his ideals, talents, skills, and affections and crafted from them a way of being in the world that is vibrant, considerate and adventurous.  But in order to explain why Joe gives me hope, let me back up...

 

There is a sentence that has preyed upon my mind for years,-- We are responsible for crafting a way of life.  It first appeared, as part of an undergraduate thesis I wrote for the College of Art and Design at Anderson University (Anderson, IN).  As students hoping to graduate, we were expected to produce an intelligible written statement of what exactly it was we thought we were doing by studying the arts.   For weeks we would hammer away at false starts, rough drafts, hypotheses and blind guesses.  A semester long process of drafts, critiques, re-writes and revisions ultimately ended with a public reading of our statements.   My formulations must have been intelligible enough, because, in due time, I was granted my degree and left to ponder the implications of what I had said. What a clever trick that was.

 

Now, such a statement might not seem like the obvious philosophical endpoint to an undergraduate education in ceramics. There’s a lot wrapped up in those few words, but there’s not a single reference to art technique, medium, or art theory.   No reference to form following function, identity, or self expression.  I mean what exactly does it have to do with learning to be an artist? What does learning to make clay pots have to do with crafting a way of life? And more immediate to our purpose here, what does any of it have to do with the 2008 presidential election or Joe, the potter or the plumber?

 

I had begun to suspect that art wasn’t simply a matter of dynamic brush strokes and sculpted marble. Specifically, as a student of ceramics, I had begun to suspect that making good pottery had to do with more than concerns for symmetry, balance and heft.  That it took more than a cultivated skill on the potter’s wheel and a deft hand with a glazing brush to become a refined clay artisan, and that such an artist might just be concerned with more than firing temperatures and kiln atmospheres. I had begun to suspect that a person making functional pots might want to know something about food, since that was one of the most important uses for such wares.  And if that were true, a person interested in food might also want to know something about farming and the agricultural arts.  If art mattered, it seemed to me, then it ought to relate to the rest of life in some basic, valuable way lest it run the risk of becoming an exercise in self-indulgence.  Similarly, I had begun to suspect that citizenship might involve more than paying taxes and memorizing the pledge of allegiance.  That truly living in a place might require more than having an address and a phone number. That we might all be responsible for helping to create the kind of world we want to live in. So I began to look around for other people who were working on these ideas.

 

To my delight, I discovered Joe. Joe makes wood-fired functional pottery. He is a production potter, which means he makes similar forms repeatedly, in succession. When he decides to make a pitcher, he might throw ten or fifteen.  It is a way of making that grows indirectly from a more agrarian, utilitarian past where communities relied directly and solely on the village potter for plates, and jugs and storage jars. Of course this tradition has filtered through a number of historical artistic movements, most prominently the studio pottery revival led by British potter Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada of Japan.

 

Joe's pots are dynamic, fresh interpretations of traditional utilitarian forms; pitchers, bowls, teapots, and baking dishes. He makes most of his pots on a Leach-style treadle wheel, a style of non-electric wheel that involves kicking a treadle bar in a repetitive motion to power the wheel head.  The result is that, generally speaking, the wheel spins slower than it would on an electric wheel. This requires a different sort of full-body responsiveness from the potter. Making a pot on this sort of wheel has as much to do with the abdomen, back, shoulders and legs as it does the fingertips. Often, it involves using clay that is a bit softer and wetter than you might use on an electric wheel. Because of this, the pots tend to be loose, or more gestural, than would pots made on an electric wheel with stiffer clay. Joe's pots are evidence of an unselfconscious mastery of this difficult dance.      

 

Early in his career as a professional artist, Joe scaled the heights of the world of studio ceramics. His work is in collections from the Smithsonian to Siberia (literally). He's done workshops in countries around the globe, and counts among his peers and friends some of the biggest names in the academic and professional world of studio ceramics.  His pots grace the pages of numerous ceramics books. Late in my undergraduate studies, I had begun to notice Joe's pots in these books, and I loved both the aesthetic freshness and the plainspoken functionality of his work. His pots were quietly beautiful, sturdy, and useful.

 

 

The first thing that you notice when you start to read Joe's blog is the prominence of his family.  His wife, Lee Udall Bennion, is a painter  and they have been married for 31? years. Their story, as Joe tells it, is one of youthful naivete and plucky independence. Thirty years ago they arrived in Spring City, a sleepy Mormon farming community, set back from the main state highways. They set out to see if they could build a life for themselves based on making art, growing their own food, and nurturing a family. The aim was to live a life that was close to the ground, close to home, and close to their ideals and beliefs.

 

Spring City proved to be fertile ground, both literally and figuratively.  The couple has three daughters who they raised on a steady diet of home grown produce from their gardens and the pracitical lessons learned from years of tending the soil. All now grown, the Bennion daughters are all well-adjusted and engaged in various pursuits. Joe's blog posts are as likely to be about one of their projects or insights as they are to be an update on what he's making in the studio.  Joe makes no bones about his priorities.  His family comes first, and he is more proud of having raised his girls into responsible adults than anything he has accomplished in the world of ceramics, and this comes shining through.

 

As a less than virtuosic gardener myself, I loved the frequent, long entries about the processes of caring for his extensive gardens; of picking tomatoes, stringing garlic, and hilling rows of potatoes. Occasionally, one of Lee's recipes would even make it onto her section of the website.  There were vivid photographs of the family working together in any number of tasks, and other vibrant images of zucchini blossoms and corn stalks that seem to have been taken simply to celebrate of beauty of a garden at twilight or dawn. Indeed, The Bennion's are a family of photobugs and there was no shortage of stunning images.  Joe supplements his pottery income by guiding river rafting trips during the summer for a company called Tour West. The vistas and canyons of Utah and Arizona make frequent, and alluring, appearances in his blog.

 

Friendship and community are woven through the Bennion's story. There were frequent entries celebrating visits from friends, and occasionally the sad news of a friend who has passed away. Their story is not one that has been free from significant challenge and loss. The Bennion's themselves have faced battles with Cushings disease and Thyroid cancer. They have lost close friends to cancer and family members to age and disease.  All of these stories were shared in a way that is both courageous and humble.  There were no cheap pleas for sympathy, nor were these things hidden away. The Bennion's are plain spoken about their Mormon faith and heritage as well.  What is obvious is that in these times of trouble, their faith in God gives them a bedrock strength.

 

What was immediately apparent to me was that so much of what I was striving to say in my thesis (and to live in my own life) was present in the Bennion’s way of doing things: They were responsive to so much, they took so much into account. The importance of community, family, faith, and heritage; the interconnectedness of art and agriculture; an adventurous lifestyle filled with travel, challenges, and the unexpected, all of these things were thoughtfully addressed.  It all seemed to fit.  These were people who had very consciously done the work of crafting a way of life, perhaps not according to a pre-scripted plan, but by adhering to a steady set of ideals and convictions. It seemed to me that in such an insistently technocratic and industrialized world, the Bennion’s way of life was a fine example of what it might mean, in the best sense, for artists to live a settled life in a community, a network, and a place.   I decided to send Joe an email to tell him as much and to see what I could learn.

 

As a potter, I wanted to get his take on why he thought that hand made pottery was important in this day and age. I shared with him my rather cynical fear that people today have very little frame of reference for appreciating hand made pots, let alone considering the finer aesthetic points of ceramic art.  “I struggle with the notion that people really don’t care about or appreciate the work of the studio potter, except in a superficial or sentimental way, as something cute or quaint."

He responded by saying, “I think hand made studio pottery has relevance first because it represents human endeavor in a material way. It speaks of the hand and heart in a way machine made pottery cannot. If you love what you do and put your heart into it, you are giving your consumer a great gift. This is something industry can't do. People need that in a big way.  They need it in their food too.  So if you can't pot, garden; and share or sell what you grow.  Pottery is about making a space for people to put their food that is at once not distracting but that can feed the soul if one cares to look at it closely. We play in the background of one of life’s great rituals.”

 

I was heartened to hear him mention the connection to food. One of the most important parallels I’ve come across, when thinking of studio pottery and its place in our society, is farming. Particularly, the “new” agrarianism, as it is sometimes called. The scatterings of small, family owned farms, have an enormous amount in common with “traditional” potters. They are both engaged in consciously human-scaled, inherently localized cottage industries that rely on care and skill more than efficiency, speed and volume.  The emphasis in both is on quality. Indeed, on Joe’s website this was made explicit.  On the introduction page  I found the following, “So much of what is offered for sale in this country today is mass produced, industrial and often comes from foreign sources. Between the point of origin and the retail outlet are a great number of middlemen, packaging and transportation costs. By coming to Spring City and purchasing our pottery you are bypassing all of that and connecting with this art work at its source. You are also supporting a local economy and a family rather than a large corporation. We are the manufacturing equivalent of the small family farm. Our products are most certainly fair traded.”  That sounds to me like it could’ve just as easily come right out of a book on marketing local, organic produce or grass fed beef.

 

But the reality is that not many of us live in a community with traditional, agrarian values these days. Nevertheless, Joe's way of making a living seems to have addressed some of these issues.  It’s obvious that he's made some very conscious choices about who and what he wants his pottery to relate to.  I asked him about this and if he could say a bit about why he made those choices, and also how he sees the importance of both professional networking and local community in pottery making today.

 

"I have benefited much from the activity of networking. At the time I began networking with lots of other ceramic artists and potters I needed the feeling of importance it gave me. As I emerged into the NCECA (National Council on Education in the Ceramic Arts) world I was greeted as an artist of some merit. I was invited to go to new interesting places to demonstrate my work, give slide talks and speak on panels. I got to travel and be called Mr. Bennion. I got published and collected by museums all of which was good for an ego neglected by years of perceived inferiority. I don’t regret any of those experiences. I did wake up one day in the midst of this happy dream to the fact that it was not helping me support my family. I had thousands of dollars worth of my wares out on consignment in some of the nicest craft and art galleries in the country and was not making a living by it.

 

When Lee and I left suburbia for Spring City it was to make our living with our art. I realized that no one coming into my shop cared much where my work was published or exhibited. For better or worse I was living in a largely philistine culture in need of education about what I do. About this same time I was reading certain ideas from Wendell Berry about community and about local economy. I set a goal of selling all my work at home to people who came to me. Though my clay is imported, the energy that turns my wheels and the fuel that burns the wares is local. The biggest part of what I am selling is not in the materials anyway; it is my way of putting things together. It is my years of study and discipline given form in the cheapest of materials. I set out to make the circle intentionally smaller.

 

My task has been two fold. Partly I have to find a way to get the local rural people into my shop. The idea of using something locally produced is a new one for most of my neighbors. Look at the opening of the film “Country” by Sam Shepard. Here is a farm in financial trouble. As the mother (Jessica Lange) is feeding her family breakfast and preparing their lunches you see only store bought food used. This is a farm for crying out loud. Buying and using locally produced things is gone from the American countryside, as is home production of domestic commodities. Local economy is community. I once heard the late Tom Marsh say that he valued the local farmer selecting one of his mugs for coffee more than the vase or casserole he may have in a museum. I bought that line.

 

And yet, I also have to get the more urban clients with money into the shop as well. There are not enough coffee-drinking farmers in this county to support me. (This is Mormon country after all.) I need to get the city dwellers from 50 to 100 miles away to build a visit to my shop into their weekend plans. So I place my newsletter in urban baby boomer hangouts and in the local café and burger drive in.  I also take my wheel to the school for career day. After all the dust has settled I see the greatest accomplishment of my career being the fact that I am able to sell almost all of my production here at the point of origin."

 

I am grateful that we live in a country where creative, enterprising folks like the Bennions, who aim to make a life for themselves apart from the rat race and the 9-5, can make it. They are an example of what it means to craft a way of life, and to do so responsibly.  It is not to be overlooked that they have done this throughout the terms of numerous presidents and swings of the political pendulum in Washington. Their way of life has required no official sanction beyond the liberties set forth in the constitution.  It is also notable that while the Bennion's were busy cultivating this graceful, responsive way of doing things, American culture was generally sprinting ever more headlong toward all things corporate, mass-produced, inexpensive and cheap. There is a certain sense in which the Bennion's story is a testament to stubborn self-reliance; that WE, as individuals, are responsible for crafting a way of life, that we certainly shouldn't wait for anyone to do it for us or to give us permission. There is an essential truth in this, but it doesn't account for everything.

 

To say that government has had no effect on the Bennion's way of life would be a profound misstatement.  Local economy and community are key parts of what their way of life is about, and it is not hard to see how the last forty years of government policies have affected local economies in this country. Visit the old courthouse square in almost any small town and you will have your answer in the vacant storefront windows.  Visit any grocery store and count the number of truly local items on the shelves. Compare the number of farmers markets to fast food chains. Consider the fact that in most areas, locally produced energy does not exist. While it is true that we are responsible for crafting a way of life, it is the job of our government to protect the independence of its citizens, and this includes protection from the ever more invasive influence of corporations. Nowhere can the need for this change be more readily seen than in the area of agriculture and food policy, where the retail food choices that are available to "consumers" are all subject to the influence of USDA policies in one way or another. Ending our current system of direct payment of cash grain subsidies that have dominated our farm policies for the last fifty years would move mountains toward leveling the food market for organic and locally produced food. And that's only the tip of the iceberg. As someone who hopes to live in a country that begins to value local, fresh, organic food, and the human skill that goes into producing it, I'm encouraged by the prospect of having a president who has read something by Michael Pollan. It's a tiny step in the right direction, but it's something.

 

But while I am hopeful, I am not naive.  No president is perfect, or exactly what any one of us might wish. I have no interest in seeing an increase in the use of nuclear power, expanded off-shore drilling. I would like to see a real champion of sustainable agriculture chosen as the Secretary of Agriculture, someone like Wes Jackson or Fred Kirschenmann, but as I write this, those are not the names being bandied about.  I would like to see the democratization of energy as a stated goal of our federal energy policy; support for projects like community-supported wind and solar initiatives, and direct subsidies to taxpayers for the installation of renewable energy systems.  Fixing the economy as it exits now is essential, but only in so far as it prevents a tidal wave of suffering and privation.  What we'll need going forward is a way to reform our economy into something far more responsible, and sustainable.  As a nation, we need to become responsive to the health, and not simply the wealth, of the systems by which we live-- economic, ecological, and social. The task of becoming responsive in this way will inherently mean fostering and empowering local communities; real people caring for real, specific places. For this task, the Bennion's are as good of a model as anyone I know.   The example of their way of life gives form and clarity to my hope for the future of this country.  While we may not NEED potters in the exact same way that we once did, the human skill, care, and artistry that goes into the work and the way of life, remains enormously valuable and instructive if we care to see it. I would argue that we need a new generation of farmers and artists, and for many of the same reasons. So, whatever the Obama administration might mean for plumbers, my hope is that it will be good to Joe the Potter.