... Interesting to see what someone said about Japanese pottery.
I was lent a book by Bernard Leach a while ago ... (The Unknown Craftsmen: Japanese Insight into Beauty) which is partly about Japanese pottery and the way the most highly valued tea ceremony pots are ones that have that quality of having come about through a process of suspending the intellect, achieved most masterfully by Korean potters so unself-conscious within their daily work that the hand produces it naturally.
I think it's the same point your contributor makes - how to intentionally achieve intuitive expressive naturalness. How to achieve seemingly effortless mastery.
In contrast to that, I read somewhere that Duchamp, known and subsequently misrepresented for using his freshly discovered language to try to annoy the pumped up industrialists as he put it, later on criticised various of the post-war American artists who had been busy trying to find ways forward for their post-European culture for having a language but not saying anything with it, as if they, like him should become more culturally intellectual. Which is one way to think about it. ...
He never produced very much after his intial outburst, and I wonder whether in the absence of suitable patronage the primary thing that maintains production is the pursuit of language, of furthering understanding of how it all works. Although considering the somewhat two-faced anti-capitalist attitude of many artists, maybe it's better to hide within such searches and pretend obscurity so as to avoid patronage, or at least to be able to be sneakily subversive at the same time.
Perhaps the skill is to be able to say nothing and in so doing reveal everything.
