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GLENN ADAMSON, THE DIRECTOR OF THE MUSEUM OF ARTS AND DESIGN, RECENTLY MET ARTIST MARYLYN DINTENFASS FOR LUNCH AT THE CENTURY CLUB IN MANHATTAN. WE EAVESDROPPED ON THEIR TÊTE-À-TÊTE ABOUT CRAFTSMANSHIP AND IDEAS. Photography by Dietmar Busse
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arylyn Dintenfass: The great thing about the story with John and I is that Arthur Williams, who is a great ceramic collector, is a friend of John’s, and when John was looking to start dating and wasn’t having any luck, he called Arthur and said, “Arthur, I’m not finding anybody. Do you know anybody great that I can meet?” and Arthur said, ”Yes. I do, and if I wasn’t the man I am (because he’s gay), I would never give you her number, but I’m having a dinner party on Friday. Would you like to come check her out?” The dinner party was filled with ceramic artists and collectors. I was working as creative director for this little moment at a big internet consultancy company, and I was flying all over the country, so I had a lot of stories to tell. John was viewing me from afar, unbeknownst to me, and waited in the lobby for me to come down. But then I never came down, so then he invited me for dinner. And then what happened is that Arthur Williams decided to start a museum called MOCA, the Museum of Ceramic Art. And he picked a board of directors, trustees. John was one of the trustees, and I was one of the trustees. We had monthly meetings, and after the meetings, he’d say, “You want to go out for dinner?” and I’d say “Sure.” He says, “I just wanted a meal,” but that’s not what he wanted. And then, I would go and say, “That was so good what you said at the meeting,” and he’d be like, “Oh really, I don’t think what I said is that good,” and I would say, “No. I think it was really good.” We had dated, but it wasn’t until we were board members of the trusteeship at the never-to-be MOCA. Arthur had a huge post-production company called Tapehouse, and it was doing very well. Slowly during that time there was a big strike of all the people that were doing commercials and that kind of thing went to Canada. It hurt his business, as well as technology that was rapidly coming, so everything you used to have to go hire, a room and an editor, you could start to do on your computer. So his whole fortune actually waned at that time. And he was not a fundraiser. And so I got a fabulous logo. And, of course, when my kids first came to see, when John and I moved in together at his apartment and the kids came up, they’re looking around and are like “this is the first place I’ve ever seen that has more ceramics than where I grew up, (my house).” I have to say, when I first met John, every closet, every drawer of his apartment was just filled with ceramics. And then, of course, when we were first dating we were like, “This is so great, this is so cool.” Of course, then when I moved in (laughs), it was like clothes and stuff. Glenn Adamson: The apartment became clutter instead of genius. I think I might have met him first around that time. When did you met him? MD: 2000. GA: So it was just after; 2002, maybe. I remember seeing his collection here in New York at this time and just being absolutely rolled over. I hadn’t seen as many private collections at that time, but even so, looking back…
MD: Even now, you know why? Arthur, for example, had a very charming art collection, in that realm of people who buy what they like. But John, because he is a connoisseur, bought what he liked but also bought what led up to it, whether the artwork that led up to it were letters, or drawings, or paintings of Bernard Leach that supported the work. And then he also bought the people that surrounded Bernard Leach, like Shoji Hamada, you know, all that other material. So John’s collection is both beautiful and gorgeous to see, and it has depth, a scholarly shape. GA: That’s quite unusual in craft collecting I think. If you call John a craft collector. But you really can’t. He’s really…
MD: No. GA: He had an interesting position vis-à-vis the art craft issue, because he was so ideological about what he was doing. I feel that the question of art was of less interest to him than it was to Leach because Leach had really been forged in the fires of the Japanese avant-gard, and so the whole question of a craft tradition becoming progressive art tradition was very crucial to him, whereas for Cardew the priorities were much more about life and ethics, more ethics than aesthetics. It’s a wonderful book, one of the finest biographies. MD: The discussion about this concept of ideas vs. craftsmanship goes way, way back, including to when I first started working in ceramics because I came from a painting background. So when I would lecture about ceramics, I would try to make this distinction between the idea and the craftsmanship. If you’re jurying, the idea of jurying is always like: “How ambitious is the work, and how successful is it?” because it can be successful, but not ambitious, or vice versa. So this idea of putting that together… I think that Leach was very interested in ideas. It wasn’t that craftsmanship was the God for him. It was very much about ideas. GA: The opposition between craftsmanship and ideas. It was about prioritizing craft as an idea. MD: I don’t think it’s an opposition. GA: Exactly. So you try to think dialectically about it and see that craft is already a proposition, or a base of knowledge, a set of ways of thinking about creativity, and also that concepts aren’t always reflected by the physical manifestation that they take on. So I see them as two ways of thinking about the same subject, really: one, which is coming through the physical material door, the other through the conceptual intellectual door, but it’s the same room you are in. MD: I think that all great art has to have a level of craftsmanship to make it above, even if it’s pure idea. Think about Richard Serra. That’s just pure idea that can only exist with the level of craftsmanship that he puts into it. And I think all art, think about the paintings in the club that we see here today, they are about craftsmanship and ideas. And that’s what you are bringing back to the museum, which is something that I’m thrilled and delighted about. GA: I think that’s right. It’s about how craftsmanship provides validity to the idea and vice versa. Each is like a flesh built on the armature of the other. MD: I love that idea of ambition and success, which was taught to me a long time ago when I was jurying—that the item that we were looking at had to have this basis of being both ambitious as well as successful. And the word ambitious I think takes in all of those different things in terms of craftsmanship, scale, in terms of… GA: …Personal commitment. Because the purest form of ambition is to do something that you’re not sure whether you can do. So even a great artist can become unambitious. You can feel that, even if what they produce is much more prodigious than what a younger artist can do, because you can sense that they’re not being ambitious any longer, and it dies on the wall.
MD: John is also the one who always says, “This work is art.” He wants it to be shown as art, displayed as art, thought of as art, and he can’t.
MD: There are many artists who have incredible reputations, such as Jasper Johns, who have long ago lost the ambition, being afraid to fail. Doubling back on work that kind of made it, and then taking the essence of it—like making a whole gallon of iced tea with one tea bag—it gets diluted.
GA: Have you read The Last Sane Man, Tanya Harrod’s book about Michael Cardew?
GA: The furniture maker Wendell Castle, furniture sculptor, has this great saying: “If you
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