The New York Times

Finally, the Bowl Gets Its Due

By Julie Lasky, The New York Times, March 27, 2013

Last week, a media frenzy erupted when a small white ceramic bowl carved with a pattern of lotus blossoms sold for more than $2.2 million at auction in New York. That price, which included the buyer’s premium, was 10 times what the auction house, Sotheby’s, expected the bowl to fetch, and more than 700,000 times what the sellers had paid for it.

The consignors, whom Sotheby’s identified only as a family from New York State, had bought the bowl for a few dollars at a yard sale in 2007. It was displayed in their living room until they consulted Asian art experts and discovered that it was a thousand-year-old artifact from the Northern Song dynasty in China, an exquisite specimen of pale, thin-walled Ding pottery.

If it’s curious that this Chinese bowl escaped notice for so long, it’s an equal wonder that it finally came to light. For all of the object’s obvious beauty, nothing signaled its age or rarity to the untutored eye.

Bowls haven’t changed in any important way since the Song dynasty. In fact, they haven’t changed much since the Neolithic era, between 4,000 and 10,000 years ago, when people first began making receptacles by hollowing out wood and stone or molding and baking clay.

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Before the bowl, cupped hands and folded leaves brought water to the lips. The new containers offered a place to hold the materials of community and ritual: food for sharing, incense for burning, water for irrigation, wine for sacrament, alms for the poor.

And yet, “we don’t talk about the bowl because it’s completely this everyday thing,” said Namita Gupta Wiggers, director and chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland, Ore. “We take it for granted. We know it too well.”

That so vital an article is routinely overlooked led Ms. Wiggers to organize an exhibition devoted to it. “Object Focus: The Bowl” opened earlier this month, displaying nearly 200 bowls, from a Tibetan singing bowl to a chrome ice bucket. The show, which is subtitled “Reflect + Respond,” will run through Aug. 3. A second part, “Engage + Use,” which involves artists’ performances, a bowl-lending library, a symposium and a collaboration with chefs, cookbook authors and bakers in Portland, will be held from May 16 through Sept. 21.

Speaking by phone from Portland, Ms. Wiggers said she was moved to think differently about the bowl after reading “The Language of Things,” a book by Deyan Sudjic, who directs the Design Museum in London. Mr. Sudjic wrote about the ways designers have transformed ordinary household objects into coded luxuries meant to raise the owner’s status and self-esteem. Such objects, as Ms. Wiggers interpreted it, include the table, lamp and chair. Consumers, she said, covet not just tables, but Noguchi tables; not just chairs, but Eames chairs; not just lamps, but Ingo Maurer lamps.

The bowl does not perform the same star turn in the object world, Ms. Wiggers believes, and she attributes its background role to its close connection with craft. Many magnificent bowls have been made by ceramic and glass artists working outside of mass-market commerce, detached from the publicity machinery that promotes recognition and value. She would like us to seek not just bowls, but Marguerite Wildenhain bowls and Lucie Rie bowls, to name just two esteemed artisans. At the same time, she would like us to respect the anonymous vernacular bowl that descends from generations of well-wrought tradition.

Another reason the bowl has been overlooked, Ms. Wiggers posits, is because it’s an accessory. Which is to say, it’s a supporting player in the narrative of other objects and their users. What else is to be expected from something defined largely by the void at its center and its ability to contain a near-infinite variety of things?

“When I talk to people about the bowl, it is always about something else,” Ms. Wiggers said. “It’s a metaphorical conversation about ritual, like in the tea ceremony, or about the fabrication process. It’s very hard to just talk about the bowl itself. We talk around the bowl.”

Paradoxically, it’s the bowl’s lack of presence that makes it such an excellent metaphor and accounts for the many memorable references to it in literature. Sifting through the Western canon alone, one quickly arrives at Mr. Micawber and his punch bowl; Mrs. Dalloway’s outré friend Sally Seton floating the heads of dahlias and hollyhocks in bowls of water; stately, plump Buck Mulligan performing a parody of the Roman Catholic mass with a shaving bowl; and, of course, “The Golden Bowl” of Henry James.

Tables, chairs and lamps can’t begin to compete.

Ms. Wiggers has capitalized on the narrative richness of bowls by inviting scholars, writers and artisans to select an example from the show and write a brief essay about it. Some of the essays are philosophical, like the meditation by Mara Holt Skov, a curator in San Francisco, on a glass bowl by Do-Ho Suh modeled with the impression of the South Korean artist’s cupped hands pressed into the base. It is, Ms. Holt Skov wrote, a “reminder that the hand is present in everything we make,” even if the evidence is not always obvious.

Daniel Duford, a potter and printmaker, wrote more personally about a ceramic bread bowl of unknown origin that had been inherited from his wife’s great-grandmother in Puyallup, Wash.: “It is thick and stout like a Dutch farm wife. For all its stoutness, it has a handsome figure, neither dumpy nor high-toned.”

Ms. Wiggers has invited the public to contribute writings as well, which are collected online at objectfocusbowl.tumblr.com. And she is encouraging people to render their ideas about bowls at a drawing station installed at the exhibition. Undergraduates from the illustration program at Pacific Northwest College of Art, the museum’s partner institution, were the first contributors, followed by anyone who has cared to pick up a pencil.

Written or drawn, these interpretations encourage us to look at bowls with new eyes and find the poetry in their banality. Bowls are the mother of design, and their unique qualities may be stifled by the comfort of their familiar forms. Take the ancient Song dynasty bowl that created such a stir: Tao Wang, an archaeologist who heads the Chinese art department at Sotheby’s, said that the lotus pattern in the ivory bowl is probably a Buddhist allusion, symbolizing rebirth and purity. This particular bowl would have been used not for dining, Mr. Wang noted, but for making an offering to a temple. “It’s not a simple daily object,” he said.

Which is not to denigrate the everyday. “The simple bowl,” Mr. Wang added, “is the great invention of the human mind.”

A version of this article appears in print on March 28, 2013, Section D, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Finally, the Bowl Gets Its Due.

Design in the Round

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Dan Kvitka/Museum of Contemporary Craft