Lecture by Edmund de Waal on porcelain and obsession

[Music] and up here is that everyone all of you every single one of you told me that I can relax if 300 people tell you you should relax you are so worried by the time you get on stage so thank you Sweden for telling me to relax but thank God for that sunset the most in corporal light in this extraordinary beautiful building this building which is embedded in the landscape I've been working on this exhibition for several years and I keep thinking how miraculous it is to be allowed to bring porcelain sculptures it's a conversation with morandi I think the conversation with this landscape is lights they were huge huge thank you and no I am NOT relaxed so when I go to my studio in South London I come into my studio and I have two staircases I can choose from one thinking up to this very small almost monastic space where I sit and they pop the wheel you can see it's a small electric wheel as er it's a wooden bench a very uncomfortable wooden bench so I've been using for 25 years why I don't know or I can choose to go up another staircase which takes me never ever ever as clean as this this is a totally fake image of a room that I have in my studio which is sort of books and it's a space where I have not only books but a few objects a few shards broken pieces of porcelain small objects that I've acquired that I picked up on my travels through the world and there's a very large white wall and on this white wall I found after a year or two that I was starting to make lists I'm starting to write notes to myself when is beginning another journey I was beginning a journey towards Portland and I had prized myself after my last journey the journey into my family's history the journey which took me into the 19th and 20th century which took me across the whole of middle urological me to Vienna which took me to Paris which took me to a destined to me to Tokyo but the last thing I would do would go on another journey but here I found myself writing London Plymouth Venice Dresden Cornwall Stoke Ginga Jen Istanbul Dublin North Carolina Beijing Alec West Norwood West Nora's the suburb in which I work Anna Rome crossed out I realized that I was already on another journey it was a journey in some ways which was totally autobiographical it was a mid-life crisis journey to try and work out why after almost 40 years or obsession LeeAnn obsession is the word that perhaps is the pivot for the evening obsession ly making white pop I still needed to come in pick up a piece of white clay and make a white vessel what was going on and I realized that rather than abandoning this journey or turning my back on that question I had to go to the places in the world the core places in the world where white porcelain had been invented or reinvented trying to find in history the people who had shared my obsession with white vessels I hadn't shared my obsession with this color white across the whole of this very long wall I wrote the line from Moby Dick what is this thing of whiteness why whiteness and it's difficult to know where to start but I started by taking myself off to the hill in China in Ginga Jen the place where porcelain had been invented a thousand years ago the hills where porcelain clay comes from and on my first day in this hot humid city of porcelain misplaced that that Marco Polo had been to 800 years ago I took myself up with my guide my driver up into these hills and I looked up under my feet and there bologna was a porcelain shard from the Sun Guinness tree eight hundred years old and I picked that I was in tears this was my big epiphany night big connection with porcelain the beginning of the portsmen I looked round and my guide was laughing at me because the whole bloody hillside is full of broken pieces of porcelain because this whole landscape was a landscape of broken porcelain this hill of Portland this white hill and I knew that I was where I belonged because porcelain if you make porcelain if you work with this beautiful translucent plastic material which transformed in your hand as if it is aligned as if it is breathing you know that the great penalty the great danger of porcelain is that every thing goes wrong it goes wrong when you're making it goes wrong in the firing it goes wrong as this poor Potter found out eight hundred years ago in the glazing and this city is built this is a great photograph from the 1920s this great city of porcelain which in the words of a famous poet who was exiled here eight hundred years ago very depressed Chinese taupe there are got many depressed trying to coax a spectacularly depressed Chinese poet said that this city was a nightmare it was a calling by day because of the clouds of smoke from the kilns and it was worse by night because it was like the mouth of hell with all the flames coming from these kilns and he talked about the impoverishment the poverty of all the workers in this town the extraordinary people who ground cobalt that beautiful blue oxide which which begins to tell those stories on blue and white porcelain and so when I'm going through the city of porcelain I look into these studios and I see all these people working in ways but they've worked for a thousand years I see people like this working ankle-deep in white dust once dust of causes the dust that causes silicosis it checks your lands I see people pushing great barrels of I followed this man wobbling porcelain through the streets of Jing dejenne and through the courtyards you see these huge enormous terrible pieces of porcelain that are going off to Dubai but you keep thinking why this obsession with porcelain the obsession with loitering is because it's white because it's beautiful because it has in its own nature this extraordinary incendiary moment of release with release into something which you cannot understand what is this thing of waste and this piece dispersed white products showing you a you are made out of Portland for a terrible ming dynasty emperor who was obsessed would by the color white killed tens of thousands of people that used these wonderful white vessels to cleanse his hen pan in the evening and built in memory of his parents a porcelain pagoda a white porcelain pagoda in which lamps were lit every night in their memory just think of it a white porcelain pagoda and everyone of course who goes to China sees this great pagoda in Nanking and they take images of it home back to Europe back to this extraordinary place where people want portsmen and everyone begins to think about how they too can make Portland porcelain is a secret it's a Chinese secret but everyone wants something like this and so it is there sighs a young Louisa 14b on Sun King decides to build his mistress not a deportable the extrordinary channel the porcelain business is crazy attempt at making a porcelain building but in Europe they can't make Portsmouth they don't have two decks reuse Delft where they thoroughly the Dutch but of course all these great fake portlet urns are hanging on every single surface of this tree and all Riverside fall off and break and the mistress is awoken individual life by sounds of breaking fake porcelain and it's cooled down everyone wants porcelain but of course the person who wants porcelain more than anyone else in the world lives in this city this interesting and he is this impossible man Augustus the strong he has he says the manatee the porcelain puts a lot crankin height he has an obsession which is what he says than the passion for oranges he also has 247 illegitimate children so there are other passions that go along play porcelain but he is so obsessed that he says in a wonderful sign which is written down by the court described that he's going to send boats all the way down from Dresden down Albert all the way around the world just to pick up Chinese porcelain but he has a better idea an even better idea he is going to create Portland themselves and in this castle it might be imprisoned two extraordinary people do I loathe and love simultaneously one is a great philosopher a great thinker who understands how materials melt who understands how to how to use light to create extraordinary new materials and the other is an alchemist berseker a young earth fraud who is a great talker and these two men together for 12 years in this extraordinary castle slave away in order to try and make European porcelain and where do they get they make black porcelain they're almost there it's beautiful but not quite the kilns are beginning to work and then in this wonderful wonderful note the only time ever I'm going to tell you to read lacking in a lecture but here they say this is all the different different kinds of glazed qualities and number seven is a and there's number five off today album at the list of the best is white as translucent they opened the kiln and they actually got these extraordinary materials blended together and they make white cotton it's beautiful it's extraordinary that it does a Saxon Emperor is amazed and myself blue and white mice marks European porcelain is born and here is this terrible fraudster a European blood girl showing the king that he is the the king or porcelain and what do they do with it they make the most terrible things you can possibly imagine that your grandmother still has in her porcelain cabinet - Whitehills Ginga Jen and Mike and the third place in my journey towards white takes me to England because I wanted to understand what it was to be English and make porcelain so I go down to Cornwall where a wonderful man's not the great looker but a wonderful man called William cook worthy a young chemist take themselves down to Plymouth and those of you who know England will know that Plymouth is the most boring city in the world there's nothing to do in Plymouth because it rains all the time except read and so he discovers that there is this thing called porcelain and ticks himself off into the hills to try and find white stone and he takes himself off and entré donning heel this beautiful extraordinary hill in Cornwall he picks up white stone and he takes it back to Plymouth he builds a rudimentary kiln in his back garden this is no Emperor here this is a man obsessed by making porcelain himself and after years he's a beautiful with broken pieces that were founded in an archive and a great believer in archives if almost there he begins to get two walls porcelain and finally he makes English porcelain he opens his kiln and here it is March the 14th 1768 cookware the stages I made it cook when he made it and what is the first piece of English porcelain it's a cider tankard it weighs an absolute bloody bomb it went so much no lights coming through this and he painted the cursed of arms of Plymouth in cobalt and they run it's terrible but he's made it he's done it by himself and here he is this wonderful man myopic scholarly but he did it but then he makes a dreadful mistake he decides that he's going to patrons he acknowledged so he forms a painting to say that he is going to own the rights to English porcelain and as soon as he does that all the way down from stoke-on-trent someone noted next is my Plymouth chemist and that is Wedgwood Wedgwood the great extraordinary powerful man who understands material like no one else who can make any color happens who can understand trades in the Royal Academy and who is a man who wants Portland and he bad crops my lovely cast he bad props in because wedges wants to own white clay he wants to own everything about white clay in fact he's even heard that all the way across the world in Cherokee land in the Appalachian Mountains but there is a seam of white clay the Cherokee Indians have mined and used for their own ritual purposes so because Wedgwood is a man of power he sends a boat across the Atlantic he sends an adventurer up into the Appalachian Mountains so if he goes I have to go to so I borrow my eldest son Ben and we go up into the Appalachian Mountains to find where this adventurer went this man who wedgewood the sense and it's a terrible story this adventurer travels into these red mountains and finds the place where white clay comes from and bartered with his Indians he says I'm going to make porcelain for you I'm going to make you rich and five tons of their precious clay is taken away forever and all that is left is this tiny amount of clay on a hillside because of course everyone wants white clay everyone is obsessed with this beautiful material and what you happens when you were obsessed if you don't count the cost to people you don't see what's happening I don't care what's happening and it could be Cherokee Indians it could be workers in Ginga gen or it could be stoke-on-trent which becomes the new Ginga gen dreadful by day and worse by night and in the factories of stoke-on-trent children work and fall deep in white dust and that I thought with my journey China Germany and England and I thought I finish my book with a nice chatter about the Bauhaus we all want nice chapters about the Bauhaus surely so I thought I'd like about how I love minimalism and porcelain and this would be the end but in the mid of the night because I can't sleep because I drink too much black coffee I'm going through lists and I find out about a German Factory in the late thirties called Alec and I didn't know about Alec except that it was in Munich or the suburbs of Munich soon I going to try and find out more about this Factory founded in 1937 and I find that remnant with factory with do not enter written across it the derelict Factory and I find out that this factory too was obsessed with white that this Factory was so obsessed by life that when it was set up by members of the National Socialist Party in the late 30s it ain't late entry of Heinrich Himmler who was like so many before him obsessed with porcelain so obsessed that he buys the factory and moves it to Dachau concentration camp because in Dachau you can't fully understand porcelain because in a death camp a labor camp you can make white pure porcelain for the right anyone can come and visit you can show off to people from around Europe purity precision beauty regularity all the things that porcelain can also achieve and because Portland the centuries has been about giving yes think of those Chinese emperors think about Augustus the strong porcelain is given by Hitler asking and in this camp white porcelain figures are made this the standard error and this extraordinary figure this is Heydrich who founds the whole settlement of the final solution a portrait of him with his favorite white fencer and so in the other archives the archives of Dachau I find a different resonance of porcelain and when I'm there looking at documents that are curved it says we've just been given some alack porcelain that was made here do you want to see it in a laundry basket is brought in on those plastic blue laundry baskets full of newspaper are unpack things and there is the mark of a like it's a object made in Dakar and it's Bambi how do you compute an object of such extraordinary kitsch of such horrible nuts with the manufacturer through people who have dimes how do you fit it all together Portland has a cost the obsession with whites has a cost and I asked what do you make how can you know this stuff and still make Portsmouth but I'd be making porcelain all my working life I've been thinking about what objects made from this material might mean and this story this white rose into obsession makes me mean with the meaning of Portland yet more coded yet more difficult and yet more essentially and so I run up from Stockton from this wonderful place and I got my wheel and I start to make porcelain and I start to make porcelain which is in some ways a series of memories this is canzoni it's a memory of writing by Leopardi the great italian poet slide winter songs music and different works that are in some ways energies this is a series of energies I made for Mandelstam the great poet of the fragment the great poet who died in Stalin's labor camps and I try and bring these broken objects these shards you pieces of gold you pieces of marble in two kinds of conjunction with spaces with definition with kinds of places where light and shade and shadow will happen energy for my great-grandfather the leader and pieces which are in some ways are bringing into blackness of this extraordinary whiteness and danger or porcelain so I'm working with seriousness for an expedition where I'm brought into conjunction with a man who I absolutely love a person whose seriousness of purpose whose obsession whose extraordinary scrutiny of what objects needs that objects simultaneously hold all kinds of history and begin again each time you put them down in new places who understands that all still lifes all looking hard at object in a kind of metaphysics it's a kind of meditation on what it is to be a human being to sit still to stand in front of something and spend time spend time see how you are changed by the world and recorded by this man who spent 50 years in that extraordinary apartment in Bologna that does the bourgeois apartment bringing objects into focus bringing objects into and out of shadow and returning returning again and again and again to the idea the idea of what object hood means because of course objectives our relationship with the things that we choose to surround us in the world is profoundly complex and the way that we can understand that is through poetry and my god idiots through looking at the paintings of this incredible artist late beautiful aesthetic works by Miranda I'm allowed to be here so by your generosity by the generosity of everyone here which is extraordinary or a long war in this amazing building I like you can't read this I put it up to say that there is a text on the wall I like to test for morality I put work up high above you and on a beautiful day finally these works works in the trees works throughout the space I try and make an exhibition which is an attempt to slow me down an attempt to try and bring the person you into relationship with light and shade and object with and my god how wonderful it is tonight that the Sun came out that we could walk through these extraordinary spaces with morandi there in front of us with the opportunity to think again about what possibly it is to slow down to think again to come back to return to these extraordinary things which are perhaps a way of thinking about objects thank you [Applause]

Channel: Artipelag

Views: 5,663

Rating: 4.8431373 out of 5

Keywords: Edmund de Waal, Porcelain, artipelag, lecture, Dachau, ceramics, Ming

Id: qFi60R6b6oI

Length: 28min 21sec (1701 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 08 2017