Green River Pottery

Fort Mason,
San Francisco

Teapot, tray, & cup
with ash glaze

Magic Mountain Parkway:
On the Road in CA this August

This Month at Green River Pottery: August 2010

 

Fort Mason

The city I grew up in had one of those renovated downtowns, where they’d blocked off a street to make a pedestrian concourse, lots of cement, a cluster of shops and a fountain and big clocks at each end—digital ones. My friend Jon and I used to walk down there to buy doughnuts after school sometimes. The place was usually deserted, a fact that Jon delighted in; presumably the Commons, as it was called, had been built by the city at great expense and with input from high-paid academics who consulted about urban renewal. But there were always vacant store fronts, and anybody who really needed something, such as a pair of shoes, or who just wanted to go to the movies, skipped the Commons and went to the mall instead. For Jon, the Commons proved the failure of Liberalism: elitist, alienated from the true needs of society.

Regan was elected when Jon and I were in high school, and we carried on a four-year-long argument about this and related issues. Anything arty, anything pretentious or alternative, raised Jon’s suspicions. “You know,” he said one afternoon as we walked along past the fountain, “when the revolution comes, that store’ll be the first place to go.” He pointed to People’s Pottery, a brightly-lit store front filled with wind chimes, hardwood cutting boards, hand-dyed fabrics, hand-thrown ceramics.

“Really?” I said, biting into my second doughnut. I always got the whole wheat ones. This was a good fifteen years before my pottery career would begin but nevertheless I took the comment personally, as Jon knew I would. He waited with satisfaction while I struggled for an answer, a rebuttal. But he was right, of course—or, at least, his point made perfect sense. As long as there’s poverty and people living on the streets—there were always a few homeless people on the Commons—it’s absurd to waste money on hand-dipped candles and stoneware platters. These are luxury items, albeit for those with anti-luxury leanings. They also typify—or they did in the Eighties—the urge to distinguish oneself from consumer culture—to feel superior to it—an urge Jon could detect a mile away. As far as he was concerned, hand-made anything that you could get at a fraction of the cost elsewhere was just pretense and extravagance.

I never did come up with a good answer, as far as I can remember. And Jon’s comment comes back to me sometimes, even now—especially when I’m getting myself into a frenzy of preparations for a show, making mugs, little bowls, things to sell for forty dollars. Just to make money. I still feel challenged by Jon’s view of things. Do I have a right to my life in the studio? How do I justify it, actually?

I was thinking about Jon again this morning as I walked to my booth at the American Craft Council show at Fort Mason in San Francisco. Crossing Lombard Street and approaching the Bay, the long cement buildings on the Fort Mason piers stretched out over the water before me. Abandoned rail road tracks, buried in the blacktop, curved toward the main gates. Just inside the Fort’s entrance I stopped to read a National Park Service plaque: “Between 1909 and 1962, vast numbers of soldiers were sent to war from the piers at Fort Mason,” it said. I walked on, passing through the glass doors that have replaced the great roll-top entryways to the buildings. Inside the vast interior space I let my eyes rise from the black drapes and EZ-Up booths, the halogen lights and jewelry cases of the craft show floor, to the old angle iron rafters of the Fort. Rusting with age, they sit on top of yellow cement walls. Other exhibitors jostled past, towing suitcases on rollers. Once, it was soldiers arriving here, getting off trains and boarding ships and being sent to war—now—today—I’d hope to sell large ceramic vessels to latte-sipping shoppers for hundreds of dollars. I’d be sipping a latte too. What would one of these soldiers say if he could come back and see what’s become of this place?

I flipped the lights on in my booth and re-arranged a few pieces, hoping to show them to better effect. I thought anxiously about how much work I might be packing up and transporting back home if it didn’t sell. I had a few extra minutes, and I walked down my row to say hello to the other potters, and to look out at the water. On the rotting wooden pier where the troop ships once docked, I could see a man throwing bread to a few of the gulls that gathered warily around him. He looked like he spent a lot of time doing this—maybe most of his time, or all of it. He lobbed a wad of bread just right, and a gull snapped it before it hit the ground, almost like they were playing catch. A good pot does get made with the struggles of the world in the back of your mind, I reflected. Each form you finish has to be necessary, on some level. It has to really contend with the good and the bad of things—and if it’s successful, you can feel it reaching through the chaos and the collective toward beauty, toward independence, toward a kind of existence in the invisible realm beyond the physical. Vanity, pretense, extravagance—a soldier might laugh at these, and there was plenty to laugh at there at Fort Mason that day, certainly. I cringed to think what Jon, too, might say about the purple kaleidoscopes, the wire Eiffel towers and tiny bicycles, the metal suns with faces painted on.

Back at my booth, I scuttled a few mugs that didn’t need to be there—that distracted, and that were a better reflection of my yearning for gas money than my yearning for meaning, transformation. You do have to be humble, I decided, about what can be achieved on behalf of the world by spending your life alone in a studio. But on the other hand—maybe this is what I could say to Jon next time I see him—just as one good piece raises the level of the whole show, in the same way, one beautiful ceramic form, a really good one, reaching out of the mundane and into the sublime, pulls us all along with it just a bit, and pulls the world along, too.

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