Page 96 - Constructing Craft

However, although he described the movement as healthy in New Zealand,
Spencer warned that it was changing:

as New Zealand itself has changed from an egalitarian society
to one with an increasing gulf between rich and poor. The aim
of many potters now is towards sophistication – what Barry
Brickell calls zuit (or is it zoot?) pots. This is the exhibitionist
approach, where the piece is seen as an object beckoning
attention … in a race to be noticed or perhaps to win the prize.
In thus attempting to give the pot a special status, … we have
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the essence of the “fine arts” approach.

Spencer predicted that this approach would:

lead to a disintegration of the New Zealand pottery tradition …
pottery will become like other “fine arts”, the preserve of
galleries and collectors … the general public will lose touch. …
Where fewer, though higher priced pieces are being made, few
potters will be able to survive economically and will need to
supplement incomes, probably by teaching. This in turn leads to
pottery becoming “ceramic art” as practised within colleges and
universities, where teachers teach students, who in turn
become teachers – the whole cycle touching the general public
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not at all.

Spencer continued in the letter to detail the cycle of decline, describing how it would

lead to ‘ephemera and to fashion.’ Finally he asked two questions: ‘Has New
Zealand pottery, in chasing immediate effect, lost a wholeness it once had [in the

1960s]? Second, are we moving from a broadly-based pottery tradition towards a
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closed society of self-conscious artists?’

Spencer may have had in mind developments in the United States where, by the
1970s, the craft artist/craft educator was a dominant figure in the craft world. For

some craftspeople in the United States the battle that Spencer was fighting had

been lost ten years earlier. Commenting on an article about one of America’s most
famous potters/ceramic artists/educators, Peter Voulkos, Moishe Smith wrote to the

editor of the Ceramics Monthly: ‘With the February [1976] issue, your magazine has
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once again shown that craftsmanship is dead in American ceramics.

Constructing Craft