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1.1 Territories in the Scene of Globalised Design: Localisms and Cosmopolitanisms
American Potters’ Interventions
with the Tea Bowl: Using Thing Theory
to Problematize Cultural Appropriation
Meghen Jones
Alfred University, New York
Craft / Ceramics / Thing Theory / Cultural appropriation / Japan
Contemplating things according to subject–object
relations and presence offers a basis for analysis of
objects that embody particular values. For potters
in the United States today, the tea bowl is general-
ly understood as an idiom of strong symbolic and
aesthetic significance. This analysis considers the
trajectory of tea bowl discourse in the US, in which
the tea bowl was regarded as a model form and an
embodiment of values intrinsic to post-World War II
American studio pottery. These values included the
importance of recording process, privileging effect
over functionality, and conceiving of clay as an artis-
tic medium. Complicating this history are questions
of cultural appropriation. The works of Warren Mac-
Kenzie, Paul Soldner, and Peter Voulkos exemplify
how for American ceramists the tea bowl has con-
veyed a sense of thingness.
Introduction
Traceable to Kant’s dualism of the ‘thing-in-itself’ versus ‘the
thing for us’ and Heidegger’s description of a thing as ‘some-
thing that possesses something else in itself’, recent inquiries
into thingness have sparked interest amongst scholars from a
number of disciplines (Heidegger, 1967: 5, 33). Bill Brown’s
seminal essay “Thing Theory” describes ‘the story of objects
asserting themselves as things’ as ‘the story of how the thing
really names less an object than a particular subject–object re-
lation’. Brown argues that things have two aspects—‘the amor-
phousness out of which objects are materialized by the (ap)per-
ceiving subject’ and ‘what is excessive in objects, as what exceeds
their mere materialization as objects or their mere utilization as
objects—their force as a sensuous presence or as a metaphysical
presence, the magic by which objects become values, fetishes,
idols and totems’ (Brown, 2001: 4–5). Contemplating things
according to subject-object relations and presence offers a basis
for analysis of objects that embody particular values.
For potters in the United States today, the tea bowl is gener-
ally understood as an object type of strong symbolic and aes-
thetic significance. As Arthur Danto described:
For a great many ceramists, the tea-bowl, as the distilla-
tion of Zen, has served as a model and measure for their
own work. As a ceremonial vessel, the tea-bowl implies a
metaphysics, a code of conduct, and a mode of life, as well
as a reduced and austere aesthetic, and in making the tea-
bowl focal, these artists have sought to make their own an
entire set of attitudes and values (Danto, 1996: 24).
How did the tea bowl earn such prominence in the US? What
are the tea bowl’s metaphysics, and what values does it em-
body? How can we best interpret the processes and facets of
cultural appropriation for this object type? This paper will ex-
plore how the thingness of the tea bowl offers insights into
particular subject-object relations, presence, and values within
the American discourse of tea bowls.
Bowls for Tea: Use and Form
The generally accepted definition of the tea bowl (in Japanese,
chawan) is that it is a vessel roughly the size of two cupped
palms pressed together, without handles, to hold hot tea. One of
the earliest extant mentions of tea bowls is by eighth-century
Chinese scholar-official Lu Yü, who wrote that utensils for pre-
paring tea should only be used for tea (Benn, 2015: 18). Al-
though a tea bowl is a rather universal vessel form, a tea bowl is
for tea. By the late nineteenth century, Americans could sample
Japanese-style powdered green tea from tea bowls at interna-
tional expositions. Collectors such as Isabella Stewart Gardner,
who visited Japan in 1883, chose a nineteenth-century Kenzan
style tea bowl for her collection (Fig. 1). It bears a boldly brushed,
abstract motif of cormorant fishing in iron pigment on a cracked
and repaired form—the effect highlights the breakage and ag-
ing properties of the medium. Gardner’s friend and author of
the popular Book of Tea, Okakura Kakuzo, might have used it at
tea ceremony gatherings at her home. He described chanoyu, or
the ceremonial drinking of tea codified in sixteenth-century Ja-
pan, as ‘a religion of aestheticism’ (Okakura, 1906: 1).
Although many American art potters in the early twentieth
century were influenced by Japanese design, their tea bowl pro-
duction was limited. One of the earliest US-based ceramists
Fig. 1 Style of Ogata Kenzan (Kyoto 1658–1716), Tea Bowl (chawan), 19th century. Ceramic
with cobalt and iron pigments under clear glaze and repaired with gold-sprinkled
lacquer, 6.35 x 12.8 cm. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
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2. 112 Back to the Future [icdhs 10th+ 1Conference] Proceedings Book
whose works reference tea bowls was Charles
Fergus Binns, known as the ‘father’ of Amer-
ican studio pottery for his role as founder of
the New York State School of Clay-Working
and Ceramics (now the New York State Col-
lege of Ceramics at Alfred University). His
interest in Chinese Song dynasty forms and
glaze effects extended to making dark brown
‘hare’s-fur’ glazed bowls that reference Jian
ware tea bowls. Like many of his contempo-
raries in the US and Europe, Binns’s pursuit
was one of aesthetics and technique, not func-
tionality according to the structure of chanoyu.
Warren Gilbertson, who studied in Japan in
1938–1940, likely also made tea bowls within
his study of raku. A fast firing process in
which pots are removed from a hot kiln rather
than left to slowly cool, raku dates to six-
teenth-century Japan where it is associated
with highly coveted red or black tea bowls of
the family lineage named Raku. In the late
1940s, Gilbertson’s study at Alfred University
overlapped with that of ceramist Robert Turn-
er who, according to his later colleague Daniel
Rhodes, made ‘at least a hundred variations
on a small tea bowl, searching for the form
which would be “just right”. The “right”
form… had the most subtle turn imaginable
from base to lip. He is still producing this
shape. Turner’s pots are always characterized
by harmony and the subordination of the
parts to the whole’ (Rhodes, 1957: 15). Tea
bowls by Binns, Gilbertson, and Turner were
thus springboards for dedicated explorations
of form.
Later potters continued to see the tea bowl
as a formal exercise. Kenneth Ferguson, who
received his mfa from Alfred in 1958 and
travelled in Japan in the 1970s, said, ‘I make
teabowls as an exercise. They’re a lot of fun
to play with, just to get some ideas out’
(Kleinsmith, 1984: 26). Over the course of
his career as Executive Director of the Archie
Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts and
Professor of Ceramics at the Kansas City Art
Institute, Ferguson influenced an extraordi-
nary number of students. Ceramist Andrea
Gill, a student of Ferguson’s in 1972–73, re-
counts that his tea bowl assignments were
meant to train aspiring potters in judging a
pot’s balance, form, and weight (Gill, 2018).
In workshops throughout the country such
as one at a California community college in
1984, he would begin the event by demon-
strating how to make tea bowls on the wheel
(Kleinsmith, 1984: 25).
Beauty, Presence, and Zen
Post-World War II tea bowl discourse in the US emphasized Japanese aesthetics
and Zen Buddhism. In 1946, Americans had access to Bernard Leach’s Potter’s
Book, the most influential book in the history of Euro-American studio pottery.
Leach, who took up pottery in Tokyo, described the Japanese ceremonial drink-
ing of tea as ‘harmonizing life and beauty’ (Leach, 1991: 8). The book featured
images of a seventeenth-century red raku bowl by Donyu, two seventeenth-cen-
tury raku bowls by Hon’ami Koetsu, and three stoneware tea bowls by modern
folk craft movement potter Hamada Shoji. Although tea bowls were not dis-
cussed at length in the book, Leach’s views on them came forth in 1950 when
he demonstrated tea bowl throwing techniques to Alfred students. Among
them, Susan Peterson noted that Leach said Japanese people ‘couldn’t be bad…
because they came from a long history of aesthetic concerns and ceramic appre-
ciation’ (Peterson, 1981: 57–59). Such a comment made during the ongoing US
Occupation of Japan must have been particularly memorable for the many vet-
erans of World War II enrolled at Alfred at the time.
A presence perceived when handling tea bowls was also of note. Ceramic sculp-
tor Ken Price, who studied at Alfred in the late 1950s, recounted one particular
Japanese black raku tea bowl:
[It] set a standard for me… [with its] nice form with lift and a good, inside
shape, a waxy surface, nice tong mark and stamp, good weight, a great foot
and that eccentric drip glaze… Holding this bowl for the first time ran a
chill down my back and made my neck hairs stand up. It has real presence
when you hold it (Higby, 1993: 38).
Daniel Rhodes, who taught at Alfred University from 1947 to 1973 and had
researched pottery in Japan in 1962–63, wrote in his widely-read 1976 book
Pottery Form:
In Japan the tea bowl has the status of an art form… Bowls used for tea are
not merely pots to be bought, used, discarded; they are symbols of nature,
time, beauty, feeling, friendship, and hospitality… [Tea bowls] represent the
quintessence of the Japanese sensibility and their genius for investing a sim-
ple object with an inner mystical spirit… Of all the world’s pots, the Raku
bowl is perhaps the most inviting to the touch (Rhodes, 2004: 128–133).
Rhodes’s positioning of the tea bowl as a complex aesthetic and social object
with a spiritual quality transformed the object from vessel to thing.
The tea bowl has often been discussed as connected to Zen, which has fur-
ther increased its perceived metaphysical attributes. In his 1938 book Zen and
Japanese Culture, Daisetz Suzuki described tea drinking as ‘a momentous event
that leads directly up to Buddhahood and its absolute truth’ (Suzuki, 1959: 293).
Danto described the tea bowl as ‘a lesson in applied Buddhism… [that] connects
us to the abstract background of what Oriental philosophy designates as the
Way’ (Danto, 1996: 25). There could also be a conflation between ‘master pot-
ters’ and ‘Zen masters’. Ceramist Hal Reigger wrote, ‘while most raku potters
in America do not assess their pots in the same manner as a Japanese Zen
master, there are aspects of a good ceremonial tea bowl that apply and are indeed
valuable for the Western potter to understand and assimilate’ (Reigger, 2009:
4–5). As Morgan Pitelka has argued, although the first tea bowls brought to Ja-
pan were in association with Zen monks having traveled in China, the connec-
tion between Zen and tea bowls is ‘inconsistent and historically contingent’ and
‘drinking tea from a bowl may indeed trigger satori, but for others, a bowl is just
a bowl’ (Pitelka, 2017: 70).
Warren MacKenzie, Paul Soldner and Peter Voulkos
Warren MacKenzie, who trained with Leach in 1949–52, influenced a large
number of American potters infusing their functional wares with Japanese-style
forms and processes. Over the course of his career he made bowls sometimes
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1.1 Territories in the Scene of Globalised Design: Localisms and Cosmopolitanisms
labeled by gallerists and collectors ‘tea bowls,’ and often with
Japanese style glazes (Fig. 2). According to MacKenzie:
I know I’ve been accused of making pots which are very
Japanese. They’re influenced by Japanese qualities, but
they’re certainly not Japanese pots. In fact, I think Jap-
anese would find—the Japanese, let me say, are unusu-
ally chauvinistic about pottery, and they believe, and
perhaps rightly so, that Japan is a very important ce-
ramic nation. But they are also jealous of the fact that
people, in a sense, imitate Japanese pottery. I don’t im-
itate Japanese pottery, and the Japanese people who I’ve
known are well aware of this fact. They say, “Oh no,
your pots are American pots; they’re not Japanese pots,”
even with a strong influence. (Warren MacKenzie
Oral History Interview, 2002)
While observers may describe them as ‘tea bowls,’ it is clear
that MacKenzie has not sought to copy Japanese tea bowl mod-
els directly, but reflect their fluid forming processes on the pot-
ter’s wheel and gestural glazing.
Like those of MacKenzie, the ‘tea bowls’ of Paul Soldner
(Fig. 3) and Peter Voulkos occupy a realm outside of aesthetic or
formal mimesis, but both were Japanophiles. Three years Peter
Voulkos’s senior, Soldner was Voulkos’s first student at the Los
Angeles County Art Institute (now Otis Art Institute) begin-
ning in 1954, and both shared a love of Japanese pottery.
Voulkos had observed Hamada Shoji’s throwing method in
1952 at the Archie Bray Institute. Their interest was further
kindled by trips to Los Angeles’s ‘Japanese town [to] check out
the pottery.’ Soldner imagined he ‘had spent past lives as a Jap-
anese peasant potter’ (Berman, 1983: 2–3). Voulkos similarly
mused, ‘I had a vision once that I was a potter out of Kyoto
someplace, dressed in those weird robes and stuff. The year was
about 1250 A.D. I swear to Christ that I was around at that time.
The Kamakura period’ (Berman, 1996: 14). In 1953, Voulkos
taught a summer course at Black Mountain College where John
Cage lectured about Zen and art. Voulkos’s later emphasis on
materiality and recording processes of clay manipulation re-
lates to what Cage had observed about Hamada—the process of
wheel throwing was the primary pursuit (Perchuk, 2016: 32).
Their tea bowls have not been the most critically evaluated
works in their oeuvres, but the tea bowl clearly was an impor-
tant thing for Soldner and Voulkos. While his early tea bowls
in the 1950s conformed to the requirements of utilitarian ves-
sels, Voulkos’s later versions defy function with holes, tears,
and sharp edges—he irreverently called them ‘tooth chippers’
(Balistreri, 2018). Like his larger scale ‘ice buckets’ and
‘stacks,’ his tea bowls of the 1970s–90s were fired in wood-fue-
led kilns that produced natural ash glaze in a manner recalling
that of medieval Japanese pottery. For Voulkos, the tea bowl
served as reference not only for the works he labeled ‘tea bowls,”
but also for his larger scale ‘stacked’ sculptures. Voulkos called
attention to the thingness of his vessels by making them defy
function and highlight the process of grappling with the mate-
rial—in doing so he was seen as having elevated the ceramic
pot to art object status. Process itself could be the ‘thing’ when
performed at workshops, where Voulkos would often execute
several types of pieces simultaneously to allow them to dry suf-
ficiently (Balistreri, 2018).
Similarly, works like Soldner’s 1964 tea bowl (Fig. 3), fired in
a raku kiln, emphasize the idea of the tea bowl more than a
promise of function. For him, making tea bowls went hand in
hand with raku firing, a technique he popularized in the US
Inspired by Leach’s instructions in A Potter’s Book, Soldner first
publicly experimented with this method in 1960 at the Lively
Arts Festival in Claremont California (Levin, 1991: 18). Soldner’s
1964 tea bowl, however, is not a copy of a Japanese Raku bowl,
but rather an embodiment of reverence for the object’s throwing
and glazing processes—an homage to Raku bowls.
Voulkos and Soldner clearly held the tea bowl in high es-
teem. When asked ‘If you had a chance to own any piece of art
in the world, what would it be?’ Voulkos replied, ‘I do love the
old Japanese tea bowls. Millions of bowls were made to get to
Fig. 2 Warren MacKenzie (1924), Tea bowl. Stoneware with glazes, 8.6 cm. x 10.2 cm. Alfred
Ceramic Art Museum.
Fig. 3 Paul Soldner, Tea bowl, 1960s. Earthenware, 13.97 x 12.7 cm. Los Angeles County
Museum of Art.
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4. 114 Back to the Future [icdhs 10th+ 1Conference] Proceedings Book
that one. It takes them days and days and days, just like me workin’ on a stack,
to get the whole universe in a tea bowl’ (Berman, 1996: 14). Soldner said:
When you look at a tea bowl…you can look at it and say, well, it’s just a bowl
to hold tea, period; that’s the only reason it exists. But if somehow or oth-
er the person making it was able to imbue other qualities, aesthetic qual-
ities that others recognize, then I think it becomes an art object, not just
a tea bowl. And it’s confusing sometimes to beginners…because some-
times when they look at it and all they see is a rough surface, I mean a
blemished surface or even a crack running down through it, and they’re
confused as why it’s worth $50,000, and, of course, the problem is they
have not grown their own aesthetic appreciation, understanding of what
makes that tea bowl different from an ordinary tea cup. They’re both
made of the same material, but one transcends the making and the mate-
rial and all of that and gets recognized by a tea master as being aesthetic
or an art object, more worthy of protecting and only using for special
events like a tea ceremony than commonplace in the kitchen. (Paul
Soldner Oral History Interview, 2003)
Soldner notes his appreciation of the aesthetics of imperfection, the elevation
possible from pot to art, and, importantly, valuation. How important is mone-
tary value in the tea bowl’s thingness? As Karl Marx stated, when an object
becomes a commodity ‘it is changed into something transcendent’ (as quoted in
Mitchell, 2005: 111). Such a sense of tea bowls’ transcendence was reinforced
when the Japanese government in the 1950s designated eight tea bowls as na-
tional treasures. American potters were well aware of high prices paid for Japa-
nese ceramics. Of his solo exhibition in 1956 at Bonnier’s in New York City,
Robert Turner remarked, ‘I realized I was getting about a tenth of the price on
my floor, the first floor, as compared to what somebody from Japan was getting
up on the second floor’ (Miro and Hepburn, 2003: 76).
Cultural Appropriation and Things
Tea bowls by the makers mentioned above, and others, are subject to analysis
that considers cultural appropriation and Orientalism. These objects fall into
the category of what James Young terms ‘content appropriation’ in which ‘an
artist has made significant reuse of an idea first expressed in the work of an
artist from another culture’ (Young, 2010: 6). But do they result in—as how
Bruce Ziff and Pratima Rao have described, referencing Orientalism—exam-
ples of ‘cultural damage through the flawed rendering of the Other’? Should
ceramists and artists avoid removing objects and practices from their ‘original
setting’? (Ziff and Rao, 1997: 12). These and other questions arise when con-
textualizing tea bowls against the backdrops of World War II, Japan’s surrender
to the Allies, and the US Occupation of Japan. Voulkos, Soldner, MacKenzie,
Ferguson and others who rose to prominence in the postwar American ceramics
field served in the US military, and for MacKenzie and Ferguson in Japan itself.
Unlike other highly contentious forms of cultural appropriation, American
ceramists’ naming of their vessels ‘tea bowls’ has not been the subject of wide-
spread public debate. Should it? In a 2012 roundtable discussion published in
the Japanese ceramics journal Tosetsu, the well-known author and curator Inui
Yoshiaki said, ‘Westerners praise tea bowls, but really none of them truly under-
stand them….Tea bowls all look the same to Westerners, since Japanese aesthet-
ics are so different. If Japanese people do not touch, drink, and use [tea bowls],
it is no good.’ Ceramist Morino Taimei added, ‘In the West, one looks only with
one’s eyes, but in the East, it is not only the eyes, but the five senses’ (Inui, 2012:
33). Related is a commonly heard comment by American ceramists who studied
at university ceramics programs in the 1950s–70s—that exposure to Japanese
ceramics occurred mainly through photographs reproduced in books.
This brings us to a final point—is some-
thing a ‘tea bowl’ if it is not used for tea? What
is the identity of the object if it is removed
from a perceived ‘original’ context? Since a
bowl is a universal form, naming is key to the
thingness of the tea bowl. In a recent exhibi-
tion catalog, Solder’s bowls are irreverently
labeled ‘tea bowl (peanut bowl)’ (Jenkins,
2009). This naming suggests an awareness
of the inherent expectation of the audience to
treat the object with reverence—see it as a
thing—if it is labeled ‘tea bowl.’ More broadly,
if we see the tea bowls discussed above by
MacKenzie, Voulkos, and Soldner operating
primarily as things, not copies, we may grasp
their embodiments of underlying values such
as the importance of recording process, privi-
leging effect over functionality, and conceiv-
ing of clay as an artistic medium.
Conclusion
This study has addressed the place of the tea
bowl within contemporary American ceram-
ics discourse by considering its complexity
beyond processes of cultural appropriation or
copying of particular forms or styles. Writ
large, tea bowls in American pottery discourse
rose in prominence in part through attempts
by makers to position the ceramic medium
such that it embodied their contemporary val-
ues. Ceramists required a means to convey
the presence, the thingness, of the objects
they were making. For students, amateur
practitioners, and experienced ceramists
alike, to distinguish a primordial bowl form
from a ‘tea bowl’ opens up a wider field of per-
ceived aesthetic and spiritual gravitas. For
many American ceramists, tea bowls are
things with values for studio pottery and ce-
ramic sculpture praxis, manifest most clearly
by the naming of objects as tea bowls.
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Meghen Jones is Assistant Professor of Art History at
Alfred University. Her research interests center on ce-
ramics and craft theory of modern Japan and in inter-
national perspective. Currently she is working on a
co-edited volume of essays, Ceramics and Modernity
in Japan.
jonesmm@alfred.edu
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