Lost Innocence   1      2      3      -      PRINTER VERSION

>> He writes:

Yanagi himself emphasized that he did not intend to start a movement; he did not begin with a preconceived theory of art which he then tried to apply to Japanese folk crafts. Things were much simpler. He had no aesthetic ideas at all, but just looked at craft objects and experienced a certain "mental shock". It was from his own. personal experience in "just looking" at crafts that Yanagi developed his mingei theory. (pp. 18-19)

This "mental shock" came to be known as "direct perception" and was a fundamental tenet in his folk craft philosophy. Moeran concludes, however, after a thorough examination of "direct perception" (chokkan), that it "cannot...logically provide a standard of beauty". (p. 26) Moeran's tendency to look at Yanagi's philosophy with a somewhat jaundiced eye and his percipient examination of its discrepancies should, one hopes, jolt many American potters who still blindly cling to the mingei philosophy out of complacency and begin to push them to provide intellectual arguments to support their aesthetic choices. As Michael Cardew the eminent British potter once pointed out:

"...A potter will feel isolated, and will not be able to sustain his confidence long enough to do anything useful unless he can give it a secure intellectual base. The artist must be conscious of what he is doing. Yet the inner springs of art are always unconscious. There is a natural apprehension that if one starts meddling with these and brings them out in the open, they may dry up and the shoots may wither. But it is an apprehension that must be overcome, since all mental and moral progress in the past has required the enlarging of the consciousness and the widening of its field, and has been the direct result of that enlargement." (Pioneer Pottery, St. Martin's Press, 1969).
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