TIMOTHY POTTS: I'm Tim Potts,
the Director of the J Paul Getty Museum. And it is a great
pleasure, privilege, to have Edmund de
Waal with us tonight to talk about his new
book and his new projects. I think what he's achieved
through his career so far in his stature as
an artist, as a potter, and as a writer, I think is
absolutely extraordinary. And you have to think very hard
to I think even approach what he's done and the
eminence he's reached and the distinguished
nature of his contribution to the visual arts, and
also as a bestselling writer of a really serious
literary level. It's, I think, actually unique
amongst contemporary artists working today, certainly
in the Western world. And I'm delighted that
he can be here today. It's his second time
speaking at the Getty. He spoke in 2010 on his
first book, The Hare with Amber Eyes, which has
been such a runaway success, as is the new book,
clearly giving every indication of being also. And I'm delighted
on a personal level because I had the opportunity
to work with him in Cambridge and got to know him
and his work there. And it's very nice for me. His work is well known. And I'm not going to
say much about it, because you're much better
to see it in his lecture. But he's been collected
in a number of the very most major museums in his
home country in Britain, at the Victoria and Albert,
the preeminent museum of applied arts in the
UK, at others in Britain, at the Fitzwilliam, where I
was previously, at Ashmolean here in this country at the
Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, at the Rijksmuseum in
Amsterdam, and as far afield indeed as the World's
Ceramic Exposition Museum in Korea. And this is, of course, only
a small number of the museums that have collected his work . And those and many others
have also, of course, shown exhibitions of his
work and installations, or as they're sometimes
called interventions, where his work is brought
into the spaces with the permanent collections
in interesting and stimulating ways And indeed, that's
how we first got to know each other
in 2012 or 2013 when Edmund was doing one
of these interventions, what was eventually in 2013 took
place as "On White: Porcelain Stories from the Fitzwilliam. And the Fitzwilliam is a
rather special place for him because it's where he grew up. And as he explained to me
some of his earliest memories of understanding and
exposure and interest in art came from being in
its collections. When I first met Edmund, I
was struck by his insistence that he be described
as a potter. And I thought that was rather
interesting because not only does it reflect the modesty
of the man, which you see in his character and in his
writing and so on, but also, in a subtle way, it
seemed to me actually to be asserting the
artistry of pottery. Because if you do understand
the history of the medium-- and you will be hearing a
lot more about it of course tonight from him-- and the extraordinary technical
achievement that it represents, particularly with porcelain, and
the extraordinary craftsmanship and artistry that
goes into it, it shouldn't and doesn't need
the word "art" in the title. You don't have to call
yourself a ceramic artist as most potters do these days. If you really understand
what being a potter is at this level, it
shouldn't need the word "art" to be explicitly mentioned. So it's in to say
I took it really as a reinforcement of the
fact that being a potter, in a sense, doesn't need
any further passing for you to understand its
importance, certainly when it's at this level
of sophistication. My one little personal anecdote,
the project that we worked on and that took place
at the Fitzwilliam coincided with his
interest in porcelain. And indeed, the coming
together led to a joy a trip by Edmund to
Jingdezhen, the source of porcelain
manufacturing in China, with members of the
Fitzwilliam Museum. Unfortunately, I
couldn't go at the time. And this is not a work
by Edmund de Waal. But from my perspective,
it's the next best thing because it is the work of one
of the potters in the Jingdezhen that Edmund kindly selected
and was given to me. So I'm now the proud
owner of this work from Jingdezhen in China,
which has an Edmund de Waal-- more than an Edward
de Waal taste involved in its selection. A few words, if I may, just
before ceding podium to him. I mentioned, of course,
how extraordinary it is that someone should
reach the eminence he has both as an artist
and as a writer and how rare this
is in our time, and indeed in art
history, generally. But in his case, I think it does
form a very natural pairing. And now that it's
happened, you can really see in both of the
areas of endeavor how much really his approach
to them does hang together and makes absolute sense. Much of his writing, in
particularly The Hare With Amber Eyes has
been about the layers, the multiple layers, of meaning
that objects, the materiality that objects, carry and
portray if you understand them. The meanings that
they're invested with by their makers, the
meaning of the patrons, and then the subsequent
owners, sometimes the loss of the
object invests it with other meaning for those
who used to own them, and then, of course, if they
can be restituted. This was all, of course, part
of the story of the netsukes that were secreted in
the mattress in Vienna by the maid to Edmund's
family during the Nazi years and is the core of
that earlier book. His art, likewise,
is extremely pure. In fact, sometimes I'd like
to think actually rather misleadingly so. It's sometimes
called minimalist, although I don't see it actually
as being minimalist so much of it is very purist. But it's deceptively
so, because it is the purity of his objects,
usually monochrome, sometimes a very simple white glaze,
a simple cylindrical form. But invested in that
is all the history, the extraordinary
technical achievement that it was to create
this magic material which we call porcelain. And it often was in the
most humble seeming objects. But as I say, behind that
humility and simplicity is an extraordinary technical
artistic and craftsmanship that is anything but simple. The second point
that I'd like to make is that I think both
his art and his writing is very much an exercise
in juxtaposition. The works of art that he creates
from individual vessels, you, often in a particular framing
or in this particular space and time, the work of
art is a combination of these elements
at a point in time and in a space defined by
the frame or the vitrine or whatever, which
goes way beyond the individual significance
of the individual pieces. It's all about the
selection, the arrangement, the juxtaposition. And, of course, it's
set the same in history and in the narratives
that he tells. The events that he
portrays and retraces through the journeys
and the research has been about particular
people, particular episodes. But it's the juxtaposition of
those people, those objects-- and the objects, of course,
are always at the center-- being at that place and
that point in time that come together with often
momentous, well, in some cases momentous consequences,
whether they be good or bad, and technical
or historical, and so on and personal. In all of this, of
course, he takes us on a journey in which
it is, as I said, the objects that carry
either the bounty or the burden of that history. And that's what makes his
writing as much about art, as is indeed, the works
that he makes themselves. And he's always reminding
us that objects have lives as much, in a way, as we do. They're just different and they
don't declare themselves to us as obviously. The last point I'll make. I think what, for so much
of us, is so wonderful about Edmund's work
is the poetry of it. And this is, again, is both
in the character of the pots that he makes and
also of his writing. His art is rather gentle. It suggests. It gestures. And it seduces rather than
trying to describe or persuade us of something. And this is quite a rare quality
in today's contemporary art world where so much art is
so strident and demonstrative and in, one way or another,
rather in your face. It is very contemplative. It's, as I said
before, very purist. As I say not minimalist,
because it's not the slick, sharp, technical
minimalism that we conjure up by that term. In fact, the
perfection of his work is all about its imperfections. It's the slight wobbles
around the rim of the vessel or the corrugation
of the coiling. It's the very
handcrafted quality of it that gives it its
human dimension. As I say, it's the
imperfections that make it as perfect as it is. And likewise, in his
writing about complexity, and beauty, and meaning and
the objects that carry them. These are often things that are
hidden, that are not declared, but they are gleaned if
they can be and divined. And it's always a journey
that he takes us on and a wonderful journey,
and an enlightening journey, as indeed the subtitle
of this latest book indicates, The Journey To An
Obsession or Of An Obsession. So without further
ado, I'll invite Edmund to take us on that journey. And thank you so
much for being here. [APPLAUSE] EDMUND DE WALL: Thank you. Thank you so much, Tim. That was hugely generous. I'm even more nervous
than I was before. And believe me, I was
pretty nervous to begin with because it's
quite something to stand in this space, in this
place, with all of you here to tell you about this
particular journey. Where do you start? I start in my studio. I walk through my space,
an old ammunition factory, in a not very nice
bit of South London. And I walk past this space in
which I put out an installation if I want to look at it hard. And I reached a staircase. There are two
staircases in my studio. One goes up here. It goes up to a small
space with a wheel. And this is where I make pots. I've been making pots for
45 out of my 51 years. When I was a very small
child, I persuaded my father, an Anglican priest
and Episcopalian minister-- translate for you-- to
take me to an evening class in the local art college. And at the local art
college in Lincoln, I went down the stairs
with him into the cellar. For some obscure
cultural reason, potter's are always
put in cellars. It's very mysterious. And there was a wheel. And I sat down. And I was five. And I made my first pot
on an electric wheel. And it was dreadful. But there was something
totally, utterly mesmeric about having
a lump of clay, this heavy, inchoate,
dense material, and throwing it down
onto this wheel head, and then making a form,
feeling this clay come alive in my hands. And the next week I went
back down those stairs. And there was my pot
slightly smaller and fired. And the teacher said
to me, now dear-- I can remember the "dear"-- what color do you
want to make it? There are all these
beautiful colors. You can have purple, and red,
and blue, and green, and black. You can have all the
colors of the rainbow. And I glazed it white. And 45 years later, I am
still making white pots. And the subtitle of my book
is from Melville, "what is this thing of whiteness?" Because I come up here to
my slightly monastic place in which I make porcelain
bowls, porcelain vessels. And that's what I think about. What is this thing of whiteness? Or I go up the other
staircase in my studio where I have a space with books. This is far too
scrubbed and clean. It's never nearly as
glamorous as this. It's been done for a magazine. It's piles of books. It's piles of papers. And it's porcelain shards,
broken bits of porcelain. Two staircases-- one
up to clay, the other up to books and words. But in both spaces, I
write, like a five-year-old, on the walls, all the notes,
all the ideas, about what I want to make, what I want to write. And as I tip towards
middle age, to my crisis, I was thinking about all those
decades of sitting, a trying to still the world a little
by making white, porcelain objects. And I thought if I don't
go now on my pilgrimage to try and work out why
I was still doing this, if I didn't go on pilgrimage
to the three white hills in the world, the three
places where porcelain was made or remade,
thought about or invented or reinvented, then
I would never do it. I would be in my old
age and I would never have gone on this journey. And so here is my list of places
and people for my White Road-- London, Plymouth, Venice,
Dresden, Cornwall, Stoke Jingdezhen-- the
city where it all starts-- Istanbul, Dublin, North
Carolina, Beijing, Allach, West Norwood. West Norwood is my suburban
suburb where I make the pots. And then Rome crossed out. I can't remember why
I crossed Rome out. But I didn't get to Rome. But that's my journey. And it all looked so simple-- a list of places I needed to go. But to go anywhere, and
particularly to go on a journey to three white hills,
these three special places, you need a guide. And I chose-- I have to say, and
I'm going to sound insufferably English and smug-- incredibly well. I chose a Jesuit. Now Jesuits are
really good guides. This is advice for free. Jesuits are very tidy and
very good at note taking. So for my first
trip to Jingdezhen under the auspices of, as Tim
says, of the Jingdezhen Museum, I took with me this
extraordinary man, Father d'Entrecolles,
a 17th century Jesuit. A Frenchman, born in a
peasant family in Limoges, where my clay comes from,
who set off as a young man and was sent-- like
all the Jesuits were in the 17th century-- to
go off to extraordinary places and turn the heathens
towards the Lord and also to write down, in
incredible detail, about what they see, and smell, and hear. And my Father d'Entrecolles,
this young Frenchman-- who said halfway through his
journey that he'd rather die than continue on this
dreadful journey to China-- arrives in the
city of Jingdezhen the city of porcelain. And he begins to
take notes of all the things he sees around him. This city of clay and
kilns, of glazes and people. And these are his notes. So to go to Jingdezhen,
I photocopy-- I have to say rather
preciously-- all his notes and carry them
off to Jingdezhen. And on my first day in
this humid, Chinese city, I go up the mountain,
Mount Kaolin, the clay mountain where
porcelain comes from. And I go up into these damp
hills, these dense, damp hills. And I look down under
my feet, and there is a Sung Dynasty bowl, a broken
shard of a Chinese celadon pot, under my feet,
cracking under my feet. And this is my great epiphany. 45 years and there I
am on my first morning. And I shout out to my
guides, this is it. This is it. And I can't understand while
they're all laughing at me. And they're laughing
at me because the whole bloody hillside
is millions and millions and millions of broken pots. It's a landscape of porcelain. This is a tidal slip
of broken porcelain. Everywhere here under
your feet are broken pots. Because this is
what porcelain does. Porcelain goes wrong. This is my kinship with these
pots from 1,000 years ago. Because when you pick up the
clay that you have laboriously mined from these hills, you
get imperfections into it. And it goes wrong. You pick it up to
throw it, and it warps in your hands and moves
like an art deco figure. And it goes wrong. You put it in the kiln. And my god, it cracks. You try and glaze it
and it all goes wrong. It's a millennium of
things going wrong. This is my kind of place. And down from this extraordinary
hill, this white hill where porcelain was
discovered 1,000 years ago, here they are carrying the
clay down towards the city. And it's a city which-- here in a wonderful 1920s
photograph by a journalist-- was described in
the Sung Dynasty by a really plaintiff poet. Actually, Chinese poets
are often very plaintiff. This was a particularly
plaintiff poet who hated being there. And he said by night it's hell. All the kilns are like the mouth
of hell with flames coming up. And by day, you cannot see
anything for the smoke. He really had a
very bad time there. But actually, in this
extraordinary city, Jingdezhen, my wonderful Jesuit guide talks
about seeing everywhere people making pots. He talks about
people making them. He talks about people
grinding the cobalt to make that extraordinary
dense, blue black color, which turns porcelain
into storytelling. And he talks about all the
cries of the people wheeling and carrying these great
groups of porcelain through the streets. And there, in the streets-- aren't these dreadful-- these
extraordinary cart loads of porcelain going everywhere. This is a man, who my
heart was in my mouth as he bumped this
porcelain along the roads. But it's a city which has
porcelain in its blood. You look through the
courtyards and you see extraordinary objects. Great Ming dynasty vases being
made for the hotels of Dubai. You see children
making this stuff. And I went into this workshop
and I asked these kids, 16, 17. And they're paying
paid enough, this girl, said for her mobile phone and
a packet of cigarettes a day. And wherever you
go, you see dust. Because that's the great
thing about porcelain. When you make white pots
out of this porcelain clay, every time you touch it,
every time you scrape down a pot, every time you
put that pot in a kiln, there is white dust. The dust is silica. It enters your lungs. It's called potter's rot. Everywhere you go,
you see white dust. What is this thing of whiteness? What is this whiteness
doing to you? What it's doing,
of course, here is making things of unbelievable,
incendiary beauty. This is a pot amongst cap ewer. This is my first white pot
of my book, of my pilgrimage. A monk's cap ewer made
for the Emperor Yongle an extraordinary and terrifying
early, early, Chinese emperor who created the Forbidden City,
who moved mountains, literally who sent fleets
around the world, who massacred tens of
thousands of people, but loved white porcelain. He is my first obsessional
white lover of porcelain. He loved Tibetan Buddhism. He also killed
thousands of people. And in his devotion to white,
his obsession with white, he created, for
his late parents, a pagoda of white porcelain. A pagoda 275 feet high
in the middle of Nanjing. And there were lamps put
every evening to light up the whole of the pagoda. And the bells would ring. And this white object-- imagine it. Just imagine this
extraordinary object in the middle of a city-- a white object of
devotion and grief, an object of obsessional power. This extraordinary
porcelain pagoda-- who sees it? Everyone sees it. And the person who sees
it and writes about it best is my French Jesuit,
Pater d'Entrecolles. And he writes these letters home
about how to make porcelain. And he writes about
the extraordinary scale of the porcelain he's seen. And his letters go all the way
back to Paris to Versailles. They get translated
into every language. But the person who reads
them with the most avidity is another obsessive. It's Louis XIV. And he decides that
if an emperor in China can have buildings made out
of porcelain, well, damn it, he, too, can have his
own porcelain building. And so he builds for
Madame de Montespan who is his current squeeze, his
current mistress, the Trianon de Porcelain. And here it is. It's 20 minutes walk
from Versailles. And they can't make
porcelain in Europe. So he uses Delftware. He uses white pots made down the
road in Holland blue and white. And can you see all
those urns and vases clustered on the roofscapes. And the whole of this
building is made with tiles. But Madam de Montespan hates it. It's damp. It's not big enough for her. And Delftware cracks
in French rain. But it's the first
attempt obsessive attempt to try and make a different
kind of porcelain object in the world. And before it's
turned into shards, a young man on his travels, on
his [GERMAN] on his gap year, comes to pay homage to this
extraordinary building. And this is my second
man I fell in love with, very unlikely
person to fall in love with-- not for looks. This is my other hero, my
second hero of my journey. He's a young German philosopher. He's a penniless count. Walther Ehrenfried
von Tschirnhaus. And he's a man-- he's
a very strange man to fall in love with. As a child, he discovered
a love of mathematics. He was a brilliant
mathematician. He loved the way that you could
make the world conjure itself into equations and balance. And he went off on his travels
with mathematics in his head. And he went to sit at the
feet of Spinoza and Liebowitz and Newton. And this I have to say
in slightly idiotic and I have say also
very obsessional way that I do things like,
I bought at vast expense his first Latin
treatise on mathematics. I can't read Latin. And I don't know anything
about mathematics. And it cost me about half
my advance for the book. But I had to have it in my hand. But this is it. This is beauty. This is real beauty. But he took himself
off to see Newton. And Newton sketched
this extraordinary thing about how light bends. And at the feet of Spinoza,
the great philosopher, he learned how to grind lenses. And he discovered that he had
a talent for making lenses, for understanding how light
bends and how heat works. And this incredible
and beautiful lens-- you have to leave here
immediately and go to Dresden where this incredible thing is-- it's almost as big as that. It's absolutely-- no. I am totally exaggerating here. It's half the size of that. It's very big this
auditorium, Tim. It's very impressive. Half the size of that screen
is this beautiful lens. And you come towards it. You really do have
to go and see it, it's absolutely extraordinary. And the whole world changes. It's like Alice in Wonderland. It's amazing. But with this lens,
Tschirnhaus realizes that he can look at materials
and begin to understand how materials work. And he has a dream, a dream from
looking at that failed Trianon de Porcelain that he is
going to understand and make porcelain, be the first
person in Europe to crack this extraordinary arcana,
this mystery, of how porcelain is made. And so he takes
these great lenses. And he goes to the city where
he knows he can get patronage. He goes to Dresden. And this is Dresden
the year he goes there. There's the Elbe. There is Dresden. And Dresden is in color. Dresden is gold. Dresden is glamor,
because it's ruled over by this ridiculous man, Augustus
the Strong, Elector of Saxony. The man, according
to the reports of the day, a man of appetite. A man of appetite means
that he had when he died 212 illegitimate children. A man who would entertain
his guests after dinner by bending horseshoes with
his bare hands or going out for a spot of badger tossing,
which means throwing badgers up into the air for entertainment. But a man above all-- when he is not doing
all those other things-- who has a self declared
porcelain [GERMAN],, a madness for porcelain, the [FRENCH]. He has, when he inherits
Saxony, 32 pieces of porcelain in the imperial treasury. And when he dies he has
32,768 pieces of porcelain. In Dresden, he wants porcelain. He sends people to
Amsterdam to buy whole shiploads of porcelain. He wants to send his
own boats down the Elbe all the way to Jingdezhen
to buy porcelain before anyone else can buy it? Why does he want porcelain? Porcelain for him is
otherness, strangeness. It's a dream. It's a dream of elsewhere. It's imperial in scale. It's a material that is
neither one thing nor another, but beyond all. You can see light through it. It weighs nothing,
yet tells stories. Why would you not have
the madness of porcelain? And Tschirnhaus
comes to tell him that he can make it,
this young philosopher. But he can't. But then there's a rumor that
in Berlin, a young alchemist, a young man called Bottger. I really dislike this man. It's not necessarily
just the open shirt, though that's a bit
of a problem for me. I think it's that he is
the most appalling person to have to spend the last
five years of my life with. But Bottger, this young
man, has discovered the Philosopher's Stone. He's changed lead into gold. And cleverly Augustus
kidnapped this young man and brings him to Dresden. And he's locked
up in the cellars of the castle in Meissen. And here are the
cellars of Meissen. And you think, well,
that's bad luck. But I have to say, having read
this, which are his accounts and complaints, you
know, I still even think that locking him
up is still about right, actually I have to say. But between them, this
alchemist and this philosopher, start to trial
different materials. They begin to put these
different materials together in order to try-- there are volumes
of these complaints. They are absolute
volumes of them. And didn't get me started on
the archivists of Dresden. Sorry. I'm going to lose my way. They spend years trialing
in order to try and find white porcelain. And they finally
make this porcelain. And it's beautiful. And it's wrong, but
they're on their way. They've discovered
how to build kilns that can get to the
right temperature, begin to compound materials. And here is the wonderful
notes from the day in where they find number five-- they're bringing different
materials together. If you look down to number
five, [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH].. 1708, they open the kiln. And they've made this. They've made the first
porcelain in Europe. And it's beautiful. It's so beautiful. And Tschirnhaus, my
lovely philosopher, my errant philosopher,
writes that it's as beautiful as a narcissus,
which I have to say is so touching. And there it is. It's made. They've cracked the arcanum. They can make porcelain
for Augustus the Strong. And two days later,
Tschirnhaus dies. And his papers have disappeared. And his books have disappeared. And Bottger goes to see
Augustus the Strong and says, I am the inventor of
European porcelain. And there he is. And Meissen is invented. The crossed blue
rapiers in cobalt are put on the basis of all
these extraordinary pots made in this Saxon
porcelain manufacturer. They've done it. It's the second white hill. But what do they
do with porcelain? They make this. So you have it and you don't
have it at the same time. And I have to say there's quite
a lot of this in your place, too. For my third white
hill, I'm in England. This is the end of
England, Land's End. For my third white
hill, I'm following my third hero, my
third unlikely avatar, the third discoverer
of porcelain, the man who discovered
English porcelain. And he was an
English apothecary, a man called William Cookworthy. I didn't choose them
for their looks. But my god, I love this man. He was an extraordinary
talker to people. Quakers are very noisy. It's one of the great
mysteries about Quakers. Everyone thinks that they're
totally silence as the grave. But the more time you
spend with the Quakers, the more you realize
how noisy they are. And Cookworthy was a
great conversationalist. He went, as a young
man, to live in Plymouth which is staggeringly wet. His neighbor was the man with
the first English barometer. And so all the time that
Cookworthy in his long life lived in Plymouth, his
neighbor was writing down everyday rain, a greater
rain, even greater rain. But there was nothing
to do in Plymouth in the rain except read. And he reads those letters
of that extraordinary Jesuit. And as he goes with
his horse Prudence-- you couldn't make it up-- all around the
English countryside to visit his aged relatives
and preach in Quaker meeting houses, he thinks about the clay
and the ground under his feet. And up on this hill,
Tregonnin Hill, talking to the tinners, the
people who were mining there, he takes the white clay. He takes it home to his
modest house in Plymouth. And he starts to make notes. And he makes more notes. And then he builds
a little kiln. And then he starts
to experiment. And here are his first shards. I was in an archive in
the middle of nowhere, taureau, nowhere. And I opened this letter. And for the first time since
1764, this letter was opened. And out fall these
broken porcelain shards. He says this is my
idea of porcelain. And it takes him years,
and years, and years. And then finally 1768, March
14, Cookworthy Fecit, CF. Out of that little kiln,
comes the first piece of English porcelain. And it's a beer mug. It's a beer tanker. Can you believe it? With the arms of
Plymouth in cobalt, really badly painted so they've
run, but it's a noble effort. It weighs an absolute ton. And there, William Cookworthy's
factory in Plymouth. He's done it. And here he is reading
scripture in his chair, because he's a contemplative
man who loved porcelain. And then he makes the most
terrible catastrophic error. He decides he's going
to get a patent. 40 years it's taken him,
he's damn well going to get-- he wouldn't say that word-- a patent. And as soon as he publishes
his patent, all the way down from Stoke-on-Trent, the
beady eye of Josiah Wedgwood falls on my Plymouth chemist. And Wedgwood is many things-- the first industrialist,
the greatest potter ever, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But he's also a total
bastard because he decides that he is going
to crush the patent and crush Cookworthy. And he does. He totally destroys
William Cookworthy. And what's more, he
hears from Cookworthy that there's been
seen, all the way across the world in
Carolina, in the colonies, in Cherokee country, a
particular kind of white clay. And so because-- amongst all
the other things that Wedgwood does-- he's indomitable,
Wedgwood sends an adventurer, Thomas Griffiths-- a ne'er
do well man with no money-- all the way across the
world into Cherokee country, into the hills of
the Appalachians to a particular hillside where
Cherokee Indians have been using kaolin clay, porcelain
clay, for ritual purposes and to cover the insides
of tents and structures to make them white, to make
beautiful white spaces. And he sits down
with these Indians. And he makes a terrible
bargain that he will take five tons of their
precious sacred clay away but will return the
next year with porcelain tankers for them. And he takes weigh
five tons of their clay and disappears for good. This is the hillside. And this is the last
piece of clay there. And Wedgwood uses this clay. He makes things of beauty. There's Cherokee clay in
the extraordinary Wedgwood surface that's made for
Catherine the Great. But Wedgwood knows so much. He knows how to make clay work. And so Cornwall becomes this. Cornwall gets
eviscerated for kaolin. And people start to move
towards Cornwall just to create these
blocks of kaolin. And kaolin clay is taken all
the way back on the new canals to Stoke-on-Trent, which
becomes the new the Jingdezhen. It becomes the
city of white pots. It becomes the city where
you look through the doorways and children are making pots. And that, I thought
was that, idiotically. I thought I'd done my three
heroes, my three white pots, my three white hills. I thought that was
enough of a pilgrimage. I thought, idiotically,
that I would end my book with this beautiful,
extraordinary teapot made during the Russian
Revolution by Malevich, by the great supremacist,
radical thinker about what white means. That I thought was a bloody good
end to a book, end on Malevich. But then, because I
can't sleep because I drink too much black coffee,
in the middle of the night, I was checking up-- obsessionally-- on the kills
of Germany in the 1920s, tracking down my famous
favorite Bauhous designer, Wilhelm Wagenfeld. I thought I would
just give him a look. And in the list of factories
of Germany in the 1920s and '30s, I find
that Wagenfeld-- great hero of mine-- had worked
in a factory called Allach. And because I
didn't know Allach. I start to look it up. And I find that it was in the
suburb of Munich established in 1936. So I go there. And I find the derelict
factory on the suburb of Munich called Allach. And I find that this young,
interesting porcelain factory was set up by the
SS to make white porcelain for the functionaries
of the New Reich and that Allach porcelain was
so successful that in 1940, it's moved from this derelict factory
to Dachau concentration camp. That Himmler who
loved porcelain, Himmler who was another
obsessive over white porcelain, wanted it so much that he,
too, wanted his own porcelain factory. And what better
place for Himmler to have a porcelain
factory with Dachau where he could visit
and bring colleagues to look and pick up and examine
the new porcelain for the New Reich. Because porcelain, of course, is
quotes "a good German material" because porcelain's whiteness is
the whiteness of the New Reich. It's an Aryan material. Because with porcelain,
you can make figures as great as any made in Meissen. But what do you make? You make peasants. You make animals. And you make figures of Nazis. Here is the figure
of The Fencer which was only given to the
commandants of concentration camps. It's Heyrich who started
the final solution with his favorite object made
in a concentration camp out of this pure,
beautiful, white clay, an object of contemplation,
an object of beauty. Here is Himmler giving presents
to Hitler on his birthday, new objects from Dachau. So I go to Dachau. And I go to that archive. And I read the account
books and the letters. And I try and work out
where this kind of porcelain takes me. And the archivist
says we've just got in a new figure
that's been given to us that was made here in the camp. And they bring out one of
those plastic laundry boxes with things wrapped
in newspaper. And I think what's it going
to be and I unwrap it. And it's Bambi. It's kitsch of the
most horrific kind. And I pick it up and
turn it over as you do. And there is the
signature of Allach. It's Meissen's double swords
turned into the SS runes. How do you deal with that? It's obsession. What is this thing of whiteness? And I'm finishing this journey. And I can't finish the journey. And I have an
invitation as I'm trying to write about what this means,
about this kind of territory that I have unexpectedly
found myself in. And I have an
invitation from Vienna to make something, an
installation, an intervention, for a building on
the Ring Strasse for the Theseus Temple,
a white building. Now as some of you
may know, Vienna is a complicated place for me. But, damn it, I'm not
going to turn down an invitation to make something
for this space in Vienna. It's opposite the
Kunsthistorisches Museum. It's in the great plaza,
the great Volksgarten, where Hitler at the Anschluss
addressed 100,000 people. It was made for a Canova
sculpture, a white sculpture. And it's now, every year,
they invite an artist to make a piece, and
put it in this building. And the doors are
open and people can wander in for a year. But what do you make for Vienna? And I made this. I made a pair of vitrines,
because vitrines also have a resonance for Vienna. For me, vitrines are places
where objects are held safely. They are kinds of liminal
spaces where things happen. And a pair of vitrines
and this is what they are. I called it Lichtzwang,
two words brought together by the great poet, Celan,
the great poet in German of the 20th century
whose parents died in the Holocaust, whose poetry
anatomizes the German language and anatomizes how you write
about what it is to survive. And he wrote a poem about
the complexity of white. White was a difficult
color for him. White, he said, was the color
my mother's hair never reached. White is the homecoming, the
[GERMAN],, I can never do. So I wrote on the wall his
poem in English and in German. And in these vitrines, I
put white pots, some of them with tiny glimpses of silver. It's a poem, a poem
with porcelain. It's two pages of a book. It's porcelain in vitrines. And that's the first
piece that I brought here to LA from Vienna, Lichtzwang. And I make this piece. And there it is for a year. And people wander in. And the Viennese
critics hate it. And mums come in with their kids
when it's raining, and tramps with bottles of wine, and a
not very good dance troupe making not a very nice thing
about it, but that's fine. But it's there, in
Vienna, for a year-- Lichtzwang. And then I'm back in my studio. And I think what can I
do after making this? And so I make
another piece, which is the other side of this. And that's black milk. It's another poem of Celan,
"Black Milk of the Daybreak." It's from his great
poem "Death Fugue. And this is my
second Celan poem. Black milk, white which
has been turned black. These are my black vessels. They're metallic and dark. They're all about the
shadows because what I am starting to do
and come out about what I do is to make poetry. What I'm doing is bringing
vessels together in spaces and bringing them in to
constellations and groupings. Bringing in seriouses and
pauses and moments of energy. Bringing all kinds of
different rhythms together. So that when you see
objects in these spaces, in these vitrines,
in these shelves, and when you walk
along them, when you look along a
whole installation, you get rhythms as
of reading poetry. It can be Celan. It can be Wallace Stevens. It can be anyone. But that's what I'm doing. And it is poetry. But for me, I am
also saying, now, that it is a kind of music. Because when I make pots and
when I see them, I hear them. There is a kind of
quality of sound for me around these objects. And so what I am doing with
these kinds of new pieces is to make a kind of
transcription, a kind of score. You can read them or hear
them or look at them. They do these things. So my other invitation
that happened as I was finishing my
journey of the white road was to make an exhibition
for Los Angeles. And for me, Los Angeles is
people and particular places, real grounded people and places. And my first person was
John Cage who grew up here. And Cage is the
master for me, has been for ages and
ages and ages of how you record fugitive
sound, how you understand and make sense of
poetry, make scores that can be read and
invested and brought to life in all kinds of
ways, and how you can deal with silence, and
make silence happen in extraordinary public
ways, four minutes 33 tacit, tacit, tacit. So Cage, for me,
is the person who I associate with
this place, with LA, because he is the person who I
want to talk about when I come to this extraordinary city. And when I was
thinking about Cage and reading him and
listening to him, I was also thinking
about this place, this extraordinary
catalytic place where all these different
kinds of conversation across the boundaries
between music and poetry. Charles Olson writing
about lines of poetry, generative lines of poetry. Cage making music. Art and work happening together. The new art of the
East coming together in this extraordinary way,
being introduced to painters so that zen poetry is brought
in contact with Rauschenberg, with Gottlieb making
these extraordinary marks, and with dance with the whole
idea of the mark as someone in motion. Merce Cunningham in mid air
in this extraordinary series of photographs where
the body is in space, where the line seems endless. This is the kind of
experience that I get from reading and
thinking about Cage. The man, who with
Rauschenberg, put a sheet of paper down
on a street in New York and got a tire, a automobile to
make the longest line they ever could make. Cage and LA. So for coming to LA, I
make a piece for Cage. It's called The 10,000 Things-- Brackets for John Cage. I want to make it bloody
clear it's for him. And it's 20 aluminum boxes. And in each of them, as
I put them up my studio, I put corten steel, this
new material for me. I put it down and
it's percussive. One piece, two pieces,
five pieces of corten steel and then these new black glazes
around them, these objects. So that you can walk
along this whole series, this whole installation, and
hear my approach to music. This is the 10,000
Things for John Cage. But then as I read and read and
read in the middle of the night about this man, I discovered
that he had actually lived in my favorite building in LA. How cool is that? The Schindler house. The place made by
the great Viennese emigre, Rudolf Schindler. Here he is looking like a
wonderful ruey, the man-- that's a proper mustache
if you ever have it. And here with
Pauline Schindler who Cage had this great,
wonderful love affair, wrote these tremendous
letters for. This is where Schindler
invents modernism in LA. He builds this house
for the two families. He builds this
extraordinary building where work, where the
studio and the living spaces flow from one space
to another, where the doors are open
to LA, where light comes in all kinds of ways. It's a beautiful,
beautiful house. It's also a place
where materials for me are investigated
and interrogated in an incredibly powerful way. So for LA, for Schindler,
I make these pieces where corten steel floats like
a beam in the Schindler house where porcelain is
held in mid air. And I make a new kind of
a vitrine, a vitrine which sits out in the world. Because what Schindler does
in his extraordinary house, in this great,
ridiculous metabolic way of bringing spaces
together, is to make us look at how we move through space. And that's art. How do you move through space? So for this show, for
this exhibition for LA, I make a piece
called A New Ground. I take this. I think about it. I think about it
for another year. And then I make this
series of vitrines. These are my newest work. Five or six vitrines
brought together that you can look
around and see through, which are my affectionate
move towards Schindler. My saying that actually
vitrines and buildings, pots and people, materials
and memories are very, very closely aligned. And then, finally,
because I'm English, I make something
about the weather. I find out that
late in life, Cage had made a piece called
A Lecture on the Weather. So I look obsessively,
because I am an obsessive, about the LA weather. And I make you this. And it's bloody
good, because if you look, on the 12th
of January, which is the second one along on
this close up, I got it right. That's your weather today. That's your sky. So that's my lecture
on your weather. And that's my white road. You make porcelain. You pick it up. And somewhere along
the line, it ends up as this, as the first
thing I picked up on that hillside in Jingdezhen. But shards matter,
because they're history. You pick it up and you start
another kind of journey. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]
