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Michael Cohen Interview MR. COHEN: Well, when you're making functional pots, it's very hard to say things making functional pots. So the ultimate thing is to make the most beautiful functional object. MR. WILLIAMS: Beauty is the function? MR. COHEN: And function is beauty. MR. WILLIAMS: And what makes a pot beautiful? MR. COHEN: For me, it's all the plastic things, shape, and form, and size, and means of use and means of handling, touch to the lip, touch in your hands, holding it with two hands, what it feels like that, using it to cook with. And I love cooking. I cook an awful lot, so serving on my plates, my beautiful dishes. I mean, how many people make their own dishes? I mean, only a potter does that. And people beg me to make this stuff for them, but it's so hard to do dinnerware. Just to make my own set, I made a set for myself, I made a set for Harriet [his first wife]; I made a set for each of my children, and that's it. So functionality, you can't get incredibly spiritual with just making functional objects. MR. WILLIAMS: How about the limitations of clay? MR. COHEN: God, you read a few issues of American Craft or Ceramics Monthly, there are no limitations of clay. You can make clay into anything. You can make it look like wood or plastic, you can paint on it. There is no limitation. Controlling yourself from doing too much on something is a goal, because you can do anything in clay. But just because you can do it doesn't mean you should do it. And a lot of people, I think, when they're doing bad objects, break that line. They make clay into something else. Well, there's this whole thing of mechanical looking
objects that you see in American Craft. Someone's cast some
gears and cast some pipes, and then you make molds, and you cast the
mold, and you put them together, and what have you got? You've got a
ceramic machine that doesn't work. And then, there's the people like,
oh, the woman who started doing leather bags and leather shoes, Marilyn
Levine. |
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