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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

In the Early World

In the Early World

I remember once hearing Bernard Leach talk to a small group of people in the Department of Education. He was talking about art, in particular about his own art of pottery. After a while he paused, and one well-feathered bureaucrat asked him – ‘What can we do about this in the schools, Mr Leach? How can we recognise the potential potters among the children – how can we help them to develop their creative faculties?’

‘You needn’t worry too much about that,’ Leach said. ‘The best potters will very likely be the rebellious and ineducable ones. Just leave them alone. Give them the materials and leave them alone.’

Perhaps I’m putting words into Mr Leach’s mouth; but that’s the way I remember it. He was paying a tribute to the creative faculties that most children have anyway, with a side-swipe at the educational process which so often reduces these faculties to nothing or to a feeble imitative gesture.

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So one must recognise from the start that this magnificent book was not created by Elwyn Richardson or by the New Zealand Council for Educational Research. The noonday demon of abstract boredom which has its home in our offices and schools is not its progenitor. The book was made in spite of that all-pervading power; and Mr Richardson is to be congratulated chiefly for his humility. He made it possible for Dennis, Eric, David, Mavis, Barbara, and the rest, to make pots, lino-cuts, printed fabrics, drawings, paintings, stories and poems at school. He did not stand in their way any more than he could help. And the fruits of their creativity and his humility are offered to us in a selected form in this book.

The problem of the teacher of art is always that he finds himself dealing with pupils, not with people; and there is no way round it, except the way of abnegation, by which the teacher ceases to be teacher and becomes the eldest of a group. To the extent that he does this he has ceased to do what he is paid to do; he is concerned with relationship, not with instruction, with the free acts of the creative will, and only by chance with the acquisition of supposedly useful skills. I have held that it is impossible for anyone to produce works of art in a classroom but Mr Richardson has all but convinced me that the impossible has been achieved. If so, there must have been occasions when his school ceased to be a school and the angels held their breath. If I were in control of our local bureaucracy I would have Mr Richardson jailed immediately as a saboteur. He has wantonly thrown a spanner in the works of that machine in whose grim bowels human beings are turned into computers and filing cabinets. To the chain gang with him!

Pictures of pots are not so good as pots which one can touch and handle. But pots can’t be divided and multiplied, and remain the same, as poems, and in a far lesser degree pictures, can. As far as I can judge, the children’s pots are good. They are strong, lumpy, asymmetrical pots, with bold incisions and broad marks like bandages. I think they have that quality which belongs to all child art – they aren’t built to last for ever – they would be good to make and also good to smash – except for one or two that would be kept as a memento of a time when one felt particularly full of satisfaction. Because most children feel (so rightly) that they will never die, the urge to make remarkable monuments is usually absent from their creative action. It is one of the points of separation between the lives (and so the art) of children and the lives (and so the art) of adults. I have seen squarish Japanese vases in which the urn-quality, the endurance of the knowledge of death by the living, was so much part of them that I found it hard to look at them for long: one should not look too long at death or at the naked sun.

The children made masks. Naturally they resemble most the geometrical spirit-masks and ancestor-masks of Africa. A certain amount of a child’s sense of what is terrible is represented (or rather, signified) in them. That is the way they affect me.

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At the risk of being mistaken, I would like to make a crude distinction between craft and art. The small, beast-headed, callipygnous earth mother which I carved out of wet pumice with a rusty nail, and which now stands on my window shelf, is a work of art, however ill made. I made her to outlast the Hydrogen Bomb. Three things combined to make her: my slight skill, the wet pumice which taught me what I could do and couldn’t do with it, and a mainly subconscious feeling-state connected with motherhood and beasthood and whatever endures. The first two things (skill and material) go to make craft; the third is necessary, however nebulously, to make a work of art. In my own art, the making of poems, there is no such thing as craft alone. Poems are either symbols or nothing. But in all the arts where one carves, shapes, decorates, craft can stand separate from art. There is a school of thought which holds that craft is art, that the essential relation is that which exists between the artist and his medium – an attractive notion, but in the long run depressing – too far, I think, from the primitive sources where some touch of the sacred symbol lay on everything made. But our educators love this notion; for it delivers them from any encounter with the numen . . . Instead one has little houses made of ticky-tacky in which little children made of ticky-tacky grow up to be big people made of very thick strong rubbery opaque ticky- tacky. And I must get down from my soap box.

The fabric prints pleased me least (though even they were good to look at) – chiefly because I suspected the children had been ‘encouraged’ to look at caterpillars and leaves and make up patterns that resembled them. It’s a way of integrating Nature Study with the art syllabus, God help us! I remember some gruesome hours at an Ardmore Training-College Teachers’ Refresher Course when we had to look at leaves through magnifying glasses, and then paint them, and then write poems about them, under the guidance of an incarnation of the noonday demon, a youngish art instructor on his way to the top of the ladder. There were ‘extension exercises’, if I remember rightly – something like being hung up with weights attached to one’s ankles. I wrote and circulated a number of obscene quatrains in order to fend off the power of that boring devil. Perhaps Mr Richardson has ‘encouraged’ his children; perhaps not. Some of the fabric prints look the nearest thing to it – very two- dimensional, very nice and flat.

When you buy this book, you must look yourselves at the passages where Mr Richardson tells how they built and used their kiln. I liked reading about it. But you would know precisely what was involved in it.

It seems that Mr Richardson was prepared to accept whatever the children produced, to get their confidence – it would take a good while – and then let the whole group make comments. My own doubt about whether actual works of art can be produced in a classroom rises to the surface when I read the children’s poems –

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Cows

Away down in the man high fern
Cows are roaming
With shiny backs showing.

That poem by Owen gives me great satisfaction; there are many others nearly as good. Yet I notice it follows the present style for classroom poetry – wherever the children are ‘encouraged’ to write it – a clear, hard, exact image (often, though not in this case, a simple comparison); something observed; a tiny, broken fragment of experience; something expressed very visually; a form reminiscent of the Japanese haiku. Like some of the fabric prints, it side-steps the essential problem – that children are very loath to express their actual feeling states in the deeply authoritarian world of the classroom – they will imitate, improvise, make something in order to please. In the broad terms of Carl Jung, intellect and feeling predominate; intuition and sensation remain for the most part asleep. To go back to the pictures – or forward, if you like – would the children from time to time when they represent people show them equipped with genitals? I doubt it; I doubt if it would occur to them to do so, except on the dunny wall. The world of the school and the world outside the school are still separate – yet I deeply respect the working compromise initiated by people like Mr Richardson. Let us not say, though – ‘This is free; this is art’ – let us rather say – ‘This is a development of a part of the creative faculties in a situation of compromise; may it continue.’

On the whole I was much moved and cheered by this book. Some of the work is very beautiful. And all of it was done by the children. They can do it anywhere if they are allowed to.

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