Edmund de Waal: –one way or other–
MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House, Los Angeles
The Germans have a word for it: die Porzellankrankhei, or porcelain sickness. Marco Polo introduced this ‘white gold’ to Europe from China in the 14th century and the continent’s connoisseurs continued to tinker and guess at the formula for centuries before learning its method, and harvesting both petunse (the pottery stone) and kaolin (or china clay) named after a mountain in Jingdezhen, to fulfil the demand for it at home. By 1708 the German alchemist Johann Friedrich Böttger had cracked the formula, found a local source of kaolin and established his Meissen factory. The Quaker William Cookworthy found the raw ingredients in Cornwall half a century later, and Wedgwood emerged soon after.
The English artist and writer Edmund de Waal has traced the origins of the wondrous material through both trade histories in his The White Road: Journey into an Obsession (2015) as well as the possessions that travelled through generations of his family in his novel The Hare With Amber Eyes (2010). He has also been a potter since the age of five, when he asked his father to take him to an introductory course, and has practised ever since. Known for his installations of groupings of serial, spare-glazed sculptures in white, celadon and, more recently, black, the artist’s first architectural show in the US takes place at the Schindler House in Los Angeles.
When the émigré architect Rudolph Schindler finally completed the 3,500-square-foot house in 1922, it was a dream of early California modernism made real. He created it for the new world, and for himself and his wife, Pauline, and another couple, Clyde and Marian Chace. The space was designed to liberate its inhabitants from the bourgeois familial expectations of old Europe (Schindler was from Vienna) and middle America. Partitions could be shifted or moved, perhaps a metaphor of the very fluidity of the lives it would contain. For its architect and inhabitants, this house was an experiment and a playground. Visitors included John Cage and Edward Weston; Richard Neutra and his wife, Dione, dropped in and stayed for five years.
De Waal has often worked within existing domestic environments, sometimes permanently installing his refined, pale arrangements in private homes, sometimes temporarily such as in the opulent 19th-century Waddesdon Manor and the 1930 modernist High Cross House in the UK. At Schindler House, with its deliberately material but minimal style, he has been inspired by not just a unique past, but one where design, music and dance of a truly pioneering nature happened.
It’s no coincidence that all these influence de Waal’s own work, which for all its restraint is the product of rich experience and dogged innovation. The time he spent working in a traditional ceramics studio in Japan, Bauhaus theory, the global travels he undertook to write The White Road, John Cage and Steve Reich’s minimalist musical systems, the émigré experience, and ideas of collecting and collections – all are embedded in his creations.
The Schindler House was constructed to contain four studios of equal size, and it’s in these that de Waal has intervened. A poured concrete room that was once the studio of the dance therapist Marian Chace now houses case study #1 and #2 (both 2015). The two tasteful acrylic vitrines on needle-thin steel posts each hold 15 charcoal-coloured slim cups; the slowly swaying grasses in the yard, visible through the open door, become part of the installation. The specially commissioned soundtrack by Simon Fisher Turner, a quiet corner in time, mixes recorded sounds of sites in Vienna that Schindler frequented (the Opera, the corridor of the Technical Institute, the doors of the Bauschule) with the city’s trams, the ambience of de Waal’s own studio and Cage’s 4’33”. It’s an overlaying of time that loops together the present and past, and here blends with the noises of light construction work taking place out on the street. In Schindler’s office in another wing of the house, a group of 18 slender vessels (#835) seem to totter a little to cellist Matthew Barley’s performance of Anton Webern’s Drei kleine Stücke (Three Little Pieces), composed in 1914. The dialogue between the vessels’ vertical leaning lines and the orthogonal wooden beams of the house’s Japanese-inspired construction is spoken quietly but firmly.
At the heart of the house is the central rectangle that was given over to Pauline Schindler’s studio, where she composed music (and possibly carried out some of her brief dalliance with John Cage). A dozen white vitrines hang from the concrete wall, each containing a careful bouquet of gilded porcelain, a white cup and a sliver of alabaster. Each one seems a faint, lonely shrug.
De Waal is a material storyteller. Porcelain clay can change into a type of translucent but almost unbreakable glass; tools of daily ceremony become emotional vessels, in the same way that the physical house becomes a spiritual home. Apparently de Waal had a photograph of the Schindler House pinned up in one of his early studios. It feels quite right that he’s finally found his way here.