Large chains securing beat up bicycles,
The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
Blue Note and Dizzy’s Place,
The Mary Griggs Burke Collection of Japanese Art,
Tremors on Broadway,
Money, money and more money.
There is gravity to entering a co-op in New York City. Demure doormen with the countenance of railroad conductors scrutinized us as we approach their turf. Once inspected, we are allowed to enter the vestibule.
I begin to imagine myself a fraud and pray that I have given the correct name. With phone to ear, the doorman quietly announces me to the unseen party and I wonder if I will be thrown out onto the street.
It seems all are suspect at this preliminary stage, but I am grudgingly acknowledged and another of our uniformed interrogators silently accompanies my wife and me as we ride up in the cramped elevator.
Awaiting us are three pieces of pottery from the age of the samurai. They are as large as the personalities that used them, and they are from a time before technology diminished us as individuals.
The size and presence of these vessels dwarfs the utensils I encounter today. To drink tea and draw water from such formidable chawan and mizusashi must be an empowering act, an act in defiance to Rikyu's wabicha. The chado of the samurai mimicked the life and death struggle played out in large scale, but performed on the small stage of the chashitsu.
But I am getting ahead of my self. What am I doing, where am I, what am I looking at and with whom am I interacting; all valid questions that I will attempt to answer.
Several years ago at my local library I came across a catalogue containing a selection of objects from The Mary Griggs Burke Collection of Japanese Art. The objects, which number in the hundreds, were collected by Mrs. Burke and her late husband Jackson Burke.
The collection consists of works of art in various media, but it was the tea ceramics that caught my eye. Chawan, chaire, mizusashi are all distinctive in their own way: one tea bowl with a sunken base and another with a hand print left over from its glazing, a tall narrow chaire, and a wonderfully misshapen mizusashi.
Shino ware and works by Ninsei represent the highest level of design and craftsmanship in the world of Tea. They are beautifully pictured and described in the catalogue with a scholarly yet surprisingly readable text.
As we are greeted in the foyer of the Burke apartment I think back to the foreword written by Mrs. Burke herself. It is a loving remembrance of the childhood influence of her mother and of her adventures growing up in the Midwest interspersed with travel to Asia. It is a story of collaboration between herself and her husband, both sharing a love of Japanese culture.
Their collaboration was so fruitful that the spaces we now find ourselves in were redesigned to house the collection after the Burkes’ zeal for collecting outgrew their primary New York City residence.
Gratia Williams and Stephanie Wada, curator and associate curator, welcome us warmly. After an initial greeting - we have been corresponding through email for two years - my wife and I are led into a gallery that displays Buddhist and Shinto statuary along with a striking clay funerary figure called a haniwa that dates from the sixth century.
We are shown some handsome lacquer objects, one decorated with silver and gold wisteria leaves on a deep black ground. This yuoke (hot water ewer) was used in the late sixteenth-early seventeenth century during kaiseki meals for pouring hot water into rice bowls to refresh the palette, and to savor the essence of the rice.
Coincidently the Japan Society is having an exhibit of the work of lacquer artist Shibata Zeshin that we were able to view the day before. Some of the most spectacular works displayed in the exhibit are from the Burke Collection. They are in pristine condition as if they were recently produced and not one hundred years old. Among the Burke pieces are a stacked lacquer food box from the middle to late 19th century. Objects like this represent the apogee of lacquer ware.
I feel ill prepared and thankful for the comprehensive tour that the Japan Society's docent had provided the day before. It is then that we are asked to enter the Burke chashitsu. Shoes off, we creep in and there before us lie objects formed from clay in the sixteenth century.
What can one say about these rough-hewn vessels: Whose hands held them, drank and ladled water from them; In what quiet tearoom four hundred years ago did men discuss them, as we do now?
Did these men set aside their meticulously forged swords to enter that room? What fortunes were spent to commission them from the then famous potters and how were those fortunes made. Were they won in battle or obtained from the blood, sweat and tears of the peasants.
These three pieces pose many questions for me and make my imagination run with images of kimono-clad samurai deep within fortress palaces. Maybe this is too romantic of a vision, and the chawan, mizusashi and chaire had much more mundane lives. No matter, truth some times lies in the mind of the beholder.
What we do know is that they are made of the earth of Japan, shaped by a ten thousand year old legacy handed down from father to son, influenced by the Chinese and Korean cultures and fired for days in hillside kilns. Ultimately to be used for that one time, one meeting, that is so illustrative of chanoyu.
Volume 5718 (4), 6/20/2008
