On texts, tools and Ceramics:

It is interesting to note (somewhat as an aside) that diverse cultures have diverse tools to write. The Sumerians, the inventors of writing, used the edge of a reed to impress little elongated triangles into the soft clay tablets, which gave the name cuneiform to their writing. Impressing marks in the soft clay left a soft edge and a deep depression (so that the text would be long lasting), while the process was also efficient and quick, important qualities when writing while taking notation from a speaker. Of course, one of the most common tools to paint images and to write texts as well, remains the brush, and the use of this particular tool can be found in most if not all cultures. It remains nonetheless that the brush is the preferred and emblematic tool of Oriental cultures, notably the Chinese, who have greatly influenced all the other oriental cultures. The brush is the ideal tool for a fluid, gestural, curvilinear, calligraphic style of writing and the 47,035 Kanji Chinese characters are ideally suited to be written with a brush, although the pen and printing is now mostly used in communication in China. The Arabic script is also a very calligraphic writing system that uses the brush preferably, in documents where the inherent esthetic qualities of the script, as is true for the Chinese, need to be retained. In the western world, originating in Europe, the preferred form for the written text remains the printed letter, due to the notable advantage of a limited (in the number of signs) alphabet. Even prior to the discovery of the movable type in Germany by Gutenberg, European scripts and alphabets, all closely connected, were designed as if they were awaiting their use in printed form. The simplicity of European alphabets (more or less 26 letters and a few other signs) makes them ideal for the purpose of printing, although the system was devised long before it was used in printing. That simplicity may come from the need to carve letters on monuments, as was the case in Roman times, for example. Carving is slow and laborious, and may even have been made by workers who were themselves illiterate, and needed simple, graphic, recognizable and memorable signs to copy faithfully. Yet, the two great scripts that are articulated around carving, in their form and in their use, are the hieroglyphic Egyptian and the Mayan from pre-Columbian America, both containing a rather large number of complex signs to communicate a written text. If Mayan writing is found carved in stone in ceremonial and political contexts, it remains that the most beautiful examples are carved on clay pots, where the soft, responsive material conveys with the utmost efficiency the roundness, generosity, almost bloated nature of the script. 

Closer to us, pencils are made with a fired mixture of lead and graphite, encased in wood. Pencils were invented and perfected in the 18th Century. The most recent advancement to the ballpoint pen is the ceramic roller ball, made of precision-formed hard ceramics that will never corrode, flatten or skip, providing a smooth, clean and continuous stroke each time. Most paper also has a 2 to 10% clay content, which provides opacity and whiteness and helps in controlling the flow of ink in both writing and printing.

The importance of tools and materials in conveying the meaning of a text can be seen in a Chinese porcelain box from Cheng-te, made in 1506. It is inscribed in Arabic, another example of trans-cultural exchange, and it reads: “A fool finds no contentment. Strive for excellence in penmanship for it is the key to a livelihood.”

Different inscriptions occur on different kinds of objects. A redware pie plate from New-York, 1801, has a slip trailed decoration that states “Why will you die?”, a rather puzzling and disturbing question to ask on such a dish! Similarly, the great potter George Ohr often added inscriptions on his work. When his friend, the potter Jules Gabry died, Ohr was very shaken and he recorded the sad event several times on different pots: “Jules Gabry, born in France, 1829, suicide in Biloxi’s water, August 18, 1897, 68 years, poverty cause.” Another inscription by a potter is on a large jar by Dave, made December 9, 1860, at the Lewis Miles Pottery, in South Carolina. Dave was an African American literate slave, who could read and write. A number of his massive storage jars carry his incised poems: “A noble jar for pork and beef, then carry it around to the Indian chief”. Dave was an accomplished potter who threw the largest pots known to have been made from Edgefield district. The biggest of his “noble jars” held over 40 gallons.

China and the Orient is also very fertile ground for the use of calligraphy on pottery. Many porcelain wine ewers were made in the shape of characters for happiness or longevity, two very appropriate symbols on objects used for drinking and made with such a timeless material. A contemporary example would be the Ampersand teapots of Adrian Saxe, which reinterpret the Chinese originals. Porcelain seals are also very common and they were the forerunners of printing blocks and movable types. Movable types for printing longer texts were actually invented in China by Pi-Sheng in 1041, centuries before Guttenberg in Germany. As you would have guessed, these earliest movable types were made of fired clay. Pi-Sheng made clay copies of Chinese characters, fired them so that they would be hard and resistant to pressure, then he glued them to an iron plate, inked them and pressed them to paper to make copies. Books had been copied by hand before or at times printed, but then the whole page had to be carved from a block of wood and few copies were made. The oldest extant printed document of this type is the Diamond Sutra, printed from a carved wood model in 868 CE., found in a cave in Dunhuang in North Western China. The invention of the movable type by Pi-Sheng made printing much easier and the propagation of numerous copies helped in preserving many texts. In Chinese history, it was often the case that a new Emperor or a new dynasty would destroy the records of predecessors. When the Chinese emperor Qin Shi Jiangdi (of terracotta army fame) came to power in 200 BCE, he condemned all previously written books as worthless and had them all burned, keeping only treatises on medicine and science. The earliest, most ancient examples of Chinese scripts are not found on ceramics, interestingly enough, considering the deep connection ceramics has with all things Chinese. The oracle bones of the Shang dynasty, from around 1300 to 1100 B.C.E., are found in tombs in Anyang. These engraved texts on bones were first discovered by scientists in apothecary shops in Chinese cities, where these old bones were ground up to make medicine. Large quantities were thus destroyed before their value as documents and their historical importance was realized. If these early texts had been engraved on ceramic tablets or other ceramic objects instead of bones, they would have been much better preserved and would not have been so readily destroyed for such spurious use to become pills of dubious medicinal value.

In Japan, the potter Ogata Kenzan (1663-1743) often used calligraphic poetry to decorate his wares, both in his individual work and in his collaboration with his celebrated painter brother Korin. These poems on plates and square dishes, make references to the times of the year when a particular utensil was actually used, or they were playful addition for games, for guessing what poem was hidden under the food, helped by clues offered by the visible painted image. In the 1950’s in Japan as well, Kitaoji Rosanjin and Tomimoto Kenkichi both used script on their functional yet highly decorative wares. An example of a decoratively patterned Tomimoto plate also shows four characters for wind, flower, snow and moon, all about change and impermanency. Their contemporary Sawada Chitojin does the same on his vases covered with inscriptions in old Japanese, mostly decorative and optical in purpose, since it cannot be read by anyone but experts since the text is now reduced to complete abstraction, as markers for history more than for actual communication. I have seen pots decorated likewise in China today, with an illegible squiggle, a script that no one could actually read, and whose effect was totally symbolic and ornamental. The contemporary Japanese ceramist Kohei Nakamura did a room-size installation in 1989, titled “Resurrection”. One wall was covered with a long inscription in English, a quotation from the Bible, actually, made with ceramic letters dealing with the theme of the installation work.