Day Five — Green River Pottery

The reason I'm painting this way is that I want to be a machine,
and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do...
I think everybody should be a machine.

- AW

In my studio I have several giant plastic bins and I like to keep these filled with clay, waiting to be made into things. I like to keep all the bins full because then it takes a long time to run through the supply and some of the clay sits for months, slowly aging, souring, improving, becoming more 'plastic' and pliable.

A less tangible reason also is just the feeling of the full bins. The sense of having tons of clay, I could work all next week if I wanted, I could work all through the night and not run low. An abundance of material helps me work rapidly, unselfconsciously. In the bins I keep the clay a little too wet – this helps the platelets of clay hydrate more thoroughly, on a micro level, and makes the clay age faster. I got up early this morning and eagerly opened a bin of too-wet clay. I took out a ton and put it on the wedging table to begin drying — I would throw it all, I had all day! This was day five of the twelve days I'd marked on the calendar as studio days ahead of a show I'll hopefully be ready for mid-October. If I turned this pile of clay into big vessels, great huge platters & wall panels, I would get the kiln filled & stay on schedule. I'd have a new body of work. I'd have to work like a machine, though!

And, as always happens on days like this, an intervening detail: a dental appointment, a little procedure that should just take an hour. I raced to town. I got there at 8 when the office opened & the office manager was just parking & unlocking the door — I was early on the schedule, that was good at least. I sat in the waiting room & for whatever reason, scanning the New Yorker on my phone, found that old article by Joan Acocella about Andy Warhol. I'd read it before, the article is actually a review of a new (in 2020) biography. How the 'Ab Ex' painters hated him, how he said “everything bad is right,” his cool sarcasm, how he deflated self-referential Modernism & the idea that ‘painting should be about the nature of painting.’

These were old ideas, as I read them in the waiting room, people know this already about Warhol, and like a lot of new research on already-well-researched people the article was concerned to reduce Warhol a little. It focused on grim details. I lost track of time, re-reading, nervous, anxious to get back to the studio, slightly dissociating from my environment out of that instinct toward self-protection that everybody uses at the dentist office, even starting to get drowsy at 8:30 in the morning…and I began thinking back on something else, quite different, that I'd read about Warhol earlier in the summer.

I read a book that focused more on Warhol’s relationship to language, and speech, the need to belong. In a 1967 TV interview, as this book relates, he was asked if he ever reads what people say about his work. “Uhhhh,” he says. “Can I just answer alalalala?” The book meditates on Warhol’s machine-like studio process, the repetition, the generation of likeness, sameness, variations on the similar.

Sameness is what you get from a machine and that is efficient — and reassuring, too. You stay on track. There is the encompassing, mesmerizing, repetition of a machine and in fact it is good to be this way in the studio, to work this way. You detach a bit – you focus and forget yourself. Sometimes I think a big reason I'm in the studio is that I just like that, the comforting spin of the wheel, the churn of the mixer, the tumbling ball mill. You get to be a bit like these machines on a good long day working. This book that focused on Warhol’s language & speech was a collection of essays about several artists that I read last summer with a friend, they were far away and we went chapter by chapter, comparing notes over the phone, and in emails. ‘Sameness...is a profoundly desirable state,’ the author says, ‘an antidote against the pain of being singular, alone, all one, the medieval root from which the word lonely emerges.’

This is the transcendent kind of 'sameness' that many potters pursue, and probably potters more than other artists. It blurs into the Mingei idea of achieving profundity in your work by overcoming originality, by using multiples & anonymity of process to concentrate, to be less vain and conscious of what you're doing. It is the idea of using machine-like discipline, and repetition, to give the things you make an immaterial, almost spiritual dimension. After all Mingei was another pop (folk) movement, also in reaction against another kind of modernism.

I thought about that, and stirred back to consciousness briefly each time the office manager came into the waiting room with a folder in hand. By now the room was full, and she would call a name. Then I'd doze off again. Day five. This show I was supposed to be making work for was my chance to be this way, to work this way. The clock was ticking, the days were passing, summer was long past & I had just seven more work days before I'd better have a ton of new pieces to show in the gallery. How great if it were midsummer again, July, August, long languorous days of reading, emailing a faraway friend with ideas about an essay on art, no deadlines approaching...a swim in the Santa Cruz lake, the top 6 inches of the water’s surface still cold from the last of the frequent summer storms…I put my phone away & folded my arms, dozing deeply.

Then I heard my name and stood up, startled.

The office manager stood at the front of the room with a folder. How are you doing this morning? she asked as followed her warily.

Okay, I said, out loud. Uhhh, I said, inwardly. Can I just answer alalalala?