Bitchy About Ceramics
Nov. 25th, 2022 03:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
x_losWestern art terms for Asian porcelain are so frustrating. We say 'famille rose' or 'famille verte' like that really means something, like it's a whole aesthetic genre, but that just means red glaze, green glaze, it's like saying 'clay pot', it does nothing. I fucking hate some famille rose, you know the really busy white-ground work, but the yellow-ground shit is great. That's just too many highly-variable and disparate traditions and colourways crammed under one brand-name. It's serving nothing, hate it.
Also yesterday I didn't bid on a full tester bed because it was one of those more modern reproductions (maybe 19th c earliest but it looked 20th with that schmaltzy back-paneling---lumpy figures and over-shiny, loose line-work) with the unreasonably fat, monumental fore-columns. Who needs that? It's so, idk, English Heritage Tudor? Yes, I want to sleep in the 14th century, but not in a fucking Medieval Times. Also it was estimated at £400 to £600, but doubled that almost before we came to the lot in question. When is Millers or whatever they're using to estimate prices going to catch up to the run on tester beds the last few years? (I mean never, given that I've helped compile a Millers and know exactly what goes into that sausage. (It's fresh-faced female recent graduates who don't yet know about unions.) (And they are using Millers, because there is: nothing else to use.))
Thinking about that job because after 10 years of wanting it and many of actively looking for such a thing at the right price (ie, almost nothing), I finally got a pumpkin-shaped Yixing tea pot today. £30, and a couple others I got for £10 each. Used is usually cheaper, people forget this about antiques. A new Yixing? £150, easy, PER pot (and if you find a bargain, I start to worry about whether it's really handmade, really zisha clay, etc., etc.). I wouldn't have paid £30 for one, if I didn't know it was THE one I'd been looking for, in a style that's rarely made now (it's easier to manufacture and ship the simpler, more minimalist designs, and that, more than any 'modernist aesthetic', is why people limit the range they produce and market). Anyway, it'll be good to have a few, because technically you're not supposed to brew different types of tea in the same pot as the clay is porous and this fucks the flavour. (This is why, and I must remember this, I am not to use soap on the pot or place it in the dishwasher.) According to folklore, if you use the pot thus for long enough it'll assume so much of the character of the chosen tea that just putting hot water in will be enough to brew up. I do wonder if I'll be able to smell what the pot was dedicated to before? Probably not, but it'd theoretically be nice to keep a pot dedicated to oolong all its life chaste in its union.
It's weird to think about antiques and money. Clearly the effort and expertise required, the time it takes, to make a Yixing tea pot is worth £150, and with any luck it's a purchase that will last forever, through generations of a family. Spending that kind of money of anything fragile would terrify me, because I'd worry about breaking it. I can always find another old, cheap tea pot like this, though, and try my best--there's two more up for auction this month, and if the price is right I'd go for it just to have a back-up to soothe my paranoia. So what you're still paying for after this has had several owners, is like, residual labour value. Ghost labour. Equity-mandated re-screening payouts.
For the home, I don't like buying things that are virgin, that have had no life before me and that I expect to die with me or in my lifetime, like that weird 20 year period where Egyptians tried to bury living human servants in their graves with them (mostly, this did not work: the practice of using people who'd been involved in the tomb's construction led to a lot of scampering back through a hole you'd made earlier for the purpose, with an arm-full of grave goods as a bonus). Ideally I want not to have that many things---and that's relative, but for scale, my house is the size of my mom's garage. But the things I have, I want to maintain and improve. I would like them to hold or accrue value, and for the possession or sale of them to be valuable for whoever has to do the admin related to my death. Actually, Victorian furniture just isn't worth a lot in the UK, right now. It's cheap to buy, relative even to an Ikea piece. But Ikea is a car, depreciating even as you drive it off the lot. You can hardly move that shit, it retains relatively little resale value. Whatever you paid for a Victorian piece, you can probably realise back, provided you weren't stupid in how you bought it (like, a public-facing dealer? Bad idea. Don't do that. What you save time-wise in admin, you'll pay over and again.).
I suppose I like understanding almost everything I own. Having made decisions about it. Knowing that if it breaks, it can be repaired and is worth repairing. Doing up the house has been immensely effortful, but when I'm very depressed I can see myself in it. Trim I went to some bloke's shed for, paying £1 a piece and riding back with it in a bus or a van with a taciturn man, which I then painted myself. I had to talk to three handymen before I found one who knew, or who would understand me, when I said picture rail had to be screwed on as well as glued to the wall in order to support the weight of frames (aka, the entire point of 'picture rail'--it's not just fucking decorative, it's load-bearing). I can see all the work I did---the reading, the historic houses I visited, the notes, the sifting I do every day when I look for bargains on my standing auction alerts. The Saleroom system covers every sale in the UK, and some abroad. The stair rails I had to go to Exeter for, when an architectural salvage yard closed down and I spent days alone down there, going through the warehouse with a tape measure. Some poor other building was destroyed, but someone thought to save this fragment of its bones. I bargained away the rest of the lot to some mean Cornish Tories in exchange for some of the newel posts they had and I needed. (Actually, I had no use for the other rails and didn't want to haul them back, but the Tories didn't need to know that.) What a lot of trouble it was, to finally find the elderly Romanian man who could put the stair rails in. But how quick and good at it he was, when I finally found someone competent---as if it really had been simple, all along, as I'd imagined it must be.
And when I think I've done nothing lasting, nothing that matters---which is easy to think, when I'm very ill and lying on the floor of the bath---I can manage to turn my head and look up at the window, and see the 1890s tile I put in around the frame. Beautiful tile should be used, not collected: it should be a part of a house, a living thing. I didn't make them, but I cleaned over two thousand four-hundred encaustic, geometric floor tiles, rescued from demolished buildings. I inventoried them and consulted with the Tile and Architectural Ceramics Society and the Ironbridge Museum to get the Victorian design catalogues I'm going to use to lay them out. I made something better by being alive, and I can look at it and touch it---the raised texture of Minton chrysanthemums, beautiful and everyday, a thing you can forget and remember. We moved so often when I was young. I want to move once more in my life, perhaps, or never. And I suppose it won't matter if, when I go, the new owners completely fuck up my Glasgow-school inspired bathroom design, but fuck I never want to know about it if they do.
Also yesterday I didn't bid on a full tester bed because it was one of those more modern reproductions (maybe 19th c earliest but it looked 20th with that schmaltzy back-paneling---lumpy figures and over-shiny, loose line-work) with the unreasonably fat, monumental fore-columns. Who needs that? It's so, idk, English Heritage Tudor? Yes, I want to sleep in the 14th century, but not in a fucking Medieval Times. Also it was estimated at £400 to £600, but doubled that almost before we came to the lot in question. When is Millers or whatever they're using to estimate prices going to catch up to the run on tester beds the last few years? (I mean never, given that I've helped compile a Millers and know exactly what goes into that sausage. (It's fresh-faced female recent graduates who don't yet know about unions.) (And they are using Millers, because there is: nothing else to use.))
Thinking about that job because after 10 years of wanting it and many of actively looking for such a thing at the right price (ie, almost nothing), I finally got a pumpkin-shaped Yixing tea pot today. £30, and a couple others I got for £10 each. Used is usually cheaper, people forget this about antiques. A new Yixing? £150, easy, PER pot (and if you find a bargain, I start to worry about whether it's really handmade, really zisha clay, etc., etc.). I wouldn't have paid £30 for one, if I didn't know it was THE one I'd been looking for, in a style that's rarely made now (it's easier to manufacture and ship the simpler, more minimalist designs, and that, more than any 'modernist aesthetic', is why people limit the range they produce and market). Anyway, it'll be good to have a few, because technically you're not supposed to brew different types of tea in the same pot as the clay is porous and this fucks the flavour. (This is why, and I must remember this, I am not to use soap on the pot or place it in the dishwasher.) According to folklore, if you use the pot thus for long enough it'll assume so much of the character of the chosen tea that just putting hot water in will be enough to brew up. I do wonder if I'll be able to smell what the pot was dedicated to before? Probably not, but it'd theoretically be nice to keep a pot dedicated to oolong all its life chaste in its union.
It's weird to think about antiques and money. Clearly the effort and expertise required, the time it takes, to make a Yixing tea pot is worth £150, and with any luck it's a purchase that will last forever, through generations of a family. Spending that kind of money of anything fragile would terrify me, because I'd worry about breaking it. I can always find another old, cheap tea pot like this, though, and try my best--there's two more up for auction this month, and if the price is right I'd go for it just to have a back-up to soothe my paranoia. So what you're still paying for after this has had several owners, is like, residual labour value. Ghost labour. Equity-mandated re-screening payouts.
For the home, I don't like buying things that are virgin, that have had no life before me and that I expect to die with me or in my lifetime, like that weird 20 year period where Egyptians tried to bury living human servants in their graves with them (mostly, this did not work: the practice of using people who'd been involved in the tomb's construction led to a lot of scampering back through a hole you'd made earlier for the purpose, with an arm-full of grave goods as a bonus). Ideally I want not to have that many things---and that's relative, but for scale, my house is the size of my mom's garage. But the things I have, I want to maintain and improve. I would like them to hold or accrue value, and for the possession or sale of them to be valuable for whoever has to do the admin related to my death. Actually, Victorian furniture just isn't worth a lot in the UK, right now. It's cheap to buy, relative even to an Ikea piece. But Ikea is a car, depreciating even as you drive it off the lot. You can hardly move that shit, it retains relatively little resale value. Whatever you paid for a Victorian piece, you can probably realise back, provided you weren't stupid in how you bought it (like, a public-facing dealer? Bad idea. Don't do that. What you save time-wise in admin, you'll pay over and again.).
I suppose I like understanding almost everything I own. Having made decisions about it. Knowing that if it breaks, it can be repaired and is worth repairing. Doing up the house has been immensely effortful, but when I'm very depressed I can see myself in it. Trim I went to some bloke's shed for, paying £1 a piece and riding back with it in a bus or a van with a taciturn man, which I then painted myself. I had to talk to three handymen before I found one who knew, or who would understand me, when I said picture rail had to be screwed on as well as glued to the wall in order to support the weight of frames (aka, the entire point of 'picture rail'--it's not just fucking decorative, it's load-bearing). I can see all the work I did---the reading, the historic houses I visited, the notes, the sifting I do every day when I look for bargains on my standing auction alerts. The Saleroom system covers every sale in the UK, and some abroad. The stair rails I had to go to Exeter for, when an architectural salvage yard closed down and I spent days alone down there, going through the warehouse with a tape measure. Some poor other building was destroyed, but someone thought to save this fragment of its bones. I bargained away the rest of the lot to some mean Cornish Tories in exchange for some of the newel posts they had and I needed. (Actually, I had no use for the other rails and didn't want to haul them back, but the Tories didn't need to know that.) What a lot of trouble it was, to finally find the elderly Romanian man who could put the stair rails in. But how quick and good at it he was, when I finally found someone competent---as if it really had been simple, all along, as I'd imagined it must be.
And when I think I've done nothing lasting, nothing that matters---which is easy to think, when I'm very ill and lying on the floor of the bath---I can manage to turn my head and look up at the window, and see the 1890s tile I put in around the frame. Beautiful tile should be used, not collected: it should be a part of a house, a living thing. I didn't make them, but I cleaned over two thousand four-hundred encaustic, geometric floor tiles, rescued from demolished buildings. I inventoried them and consulted with the Tile and Architectural Ceramics Society and the Ironbridge Museum to get the Victorian design catalogues I'm going to use to lay them out. I made something better by being alive, and I can look at it and touch it---the raised texture of Minton chrysanthemums, beautiful and everyday, a thing you can forget and remember. We moved so often when I was young. I want to move once more in my life, perhaps, or never. And I suppose it won't matter if, when I go, the new owners completely fuck up my Glasgow-school inspired bathroom design, but fuck I never want to know about it if they do.
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Date: 2022-11-25 08:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-11-26 09:57 pm (UTC)