Edmund de Waal: Make Pots or Die imagine...

This programme contains some strong language.

Edmund de Waal is an artist, write writer. A potter telling stories out

of porcelain and making objects out of words. Some weird spectrum where

words and objects are very, very, very closely aligned. His remarkable

memoir, The Hare With The Amber Eyes, unravelled the journey of

these tiny netsuke, telling a story that touched the hearts of millions

and made his name worldwide. But now he's taking his pots to America, in

the hope that he can finally unite his life as a writer and as a maker.

It is the middle of the night terror, because what is screwing up

in New York is about as bad as it gets. Imagine follows Edmund during

an extraordinary year. I was in on second January throwing

my first pots of the year and it felt pretty good. It felt like this

is a year of very exciting things happening. It felt bloody terrifying

at the same time. Edmund's pots used to occupy kitchen shelves and be

held in the hand, used every day. Over 20 years the pots have become

abstracted. They now occupy a different space, installed in their

thousands. I am making a quartet to go along this huge wall. Of course

there are mornings when it is just shit. Whose idea was it, who do you

blame, we had this idea of making a quartet with 3,000 porcelain pots.

The quartet will be the centre piece of a huge exhibition at the Gagosian

Gallery in New York. Edmund's first show in America. But this year will

not only be about making, there is a new book to write, and the legacy of

The Hare With The Amber Eyes to deal with. There is this after afterlife

of my last book, which is more under control now, but still keeps on

coming back. How objects are handed on is all about story telling. I am

giving you this because I love you, or because it was given to me,

because I bought it somewhere special because you will care for t

because it will comply Kate your life. Edmund has been making pots

since he was five, and ceramics became an obsession. He was

apprenticed at 17 making simple earthenware pots in the style of

Bernard Laech and the Japanese masters. Edmund travelled to Japan

in 19 81 to further his studies, and it was here that he would encounter

the net suk for the very first time. For 264 netsuke were handed down

through Edmund's family, the Ephrussis, they lost everything as

Europe teetered on the brink of the Second World War. But against all

odds, the net suk survived. -- netsuke survived. Where did The Hare

With The Amber Eyes start? I sense somehow that started for you as a

17-year-old boy in Japan when you visited your uncle Iggy there? Yes,

going into his apartment for the first time and being given my first

whisky soda by this lovely elderly gentleman, there they were, this

vitrine of objects. I hated them, I thought they were really fiddly,

precious little objects that didn't anything, they were like bijoux

little things. I was there to make earthy dynamic Japanese pots. What

were these little fiddly things doing? Iggy took the net suk back to

Japan in 1947 when he moved there after the war. He said he was taking

them home. How did you come to love the netsuke? The fact they were so

significant to him, of course changed my relationship with them.

Later on, 13, 14 years later, I was back in Japan for another year, I

used to go and see him all the time, he was pretty elderly, and stories

used to start the whole time, and then trail off. Iggy would be

reading in his arm chair by the window, I would bend down and he

would give me a kiss. He used to open up the vitrine and

get things out and that was very generative of his stories about

childhood and Vienna and these things, with this extraordinary

bridge, between this man and his stories. He would pass me one and we

would look at it together and then I put it carefully back amongst the

dozens of animals and figures on the shelves. I tell you, ehe would say,

how much we loved these as children. How they were given to my mother and

father by a cousin in Paris. Did I tell you the story of Anna's pocket.

They do lead you through touch to lots of other experiences. They

bring ideas and feelings together. Of course, these ones, these hold

extraordinary amount of other people's touch within them. That's

something that I really am very passionate about, the idea that you

can read other people's lives through objects. It is interesting

that Iggy has a story, but he only has so much of a story. He only has

so much. I didn't interview him for God's sake. He gives me, in this

wonderful fragmentary way, he tells me stories around them. And he

doesn't know a huge amount about what happened before. All he knows

is they came from Paris, from this extraordinary cousin.

These were collected by Charles Ephrussi. He was a cousin of my

great, great grandfather. Charles was a tremendously interesting art

critic. Art collector. Lover of people. This is the boating party by

Renoir, and there at the back is Charles Ephrussi, friend and patron

to the impressionists. He collected paintings by Manet, Degas and Monet

and became the model for Marcel proous's Charles Swann. They are

huge hugely seductive things. You pick them up, you roll them in your

hands, you pass them round. Pass them to your lover, you pass them to

a dinner guest, you pass them to some poet who is there by chance.

Because they are little eroticised things to start conversations.

Charles actually gives it away to this very beloved cousin of his, a

younger man who is getting married, who happens to be my great

grandfather, victor. Then they go to Vienna. So these little things go to

this very big place. That is the next part of the story.

Tomorrow Edmund is off to ven NARCs he is giving a talk on the Achelous,

the effects of restitution on the art world and what is happening in

Austria now. 75 years since the Achelous, since Hitler walked into

Austria and was met by cheering crowds. Austria capitulated in this

extraordinary way. It was a cataclysm for Vienna and it couldn't

be a more charged moment to do a talk about restitution and memory

and what it all means. I haven't slept for a week.

Actually here in the Belvedere, they have three contested pictures

belonging to my father. Three pictures that were in the family

collection in 1938, in that building there. Of which there is issues why

they are not being rest tuted. Iify family were Jewish and staggeringly

rich. I want to know what the relationship has been between this

wooden object that I am rolling between my fingers, hard and tricky

and Japanese, and where it has been. I want to know what it has

witnessed. I kaem here, I was really scared and

and there was an office here, and I was asking permission to come into

the house and it felt so unreal to be actually in this place. The house

is too big to absorb, taking up too much space in this part of the city,

too much sky. It is more of a fortress or watch tower than a

house. It is certainly not a house for a wandering Jew.

How about this, I don't know when a last time a member of the family was

on this balcony. You have to imagine 75 years ago what was happening on

those nights. I had to go to places, I had to

experience the places, I had to find out more and more. Not just through

books, but through being in places and trying to find the traces of

where the family were and what was left. In Paris, Vienna and all these

other places. It became more and more complex, and of course much,

much darker. It is on that first night that the sounds of the street

become shouting in the Ephrussi courtyard, echoing around the walls

and off the roof. Then there are feet pounding up the stairs, the 33

shallow steps to the apartment on the second floor. They are inside

now at last. This is how the Jews live. This is how the Jews used our

money, room after room, stacked with stuff. And these are just a few

souvenirs, a bit of redistribution. This is the start. They drag the

desk out into the corridor, and they push Emmy and victor and Rudolf

against the wall and three of them heave the desk and send it crashing

over the hand rail until, with a sound of splintering wood and guilt

and marquetry, it hits the stone flags of the courtyard below. This

is the window they threw the desk. And the sounds ricochet off the

glass roof and the broken drawers scatter letters across the

courtyard. You think you onus, you'll be next, you fern shits. --

foreign shits. Three years after being published,

The Hare With The Amber Eyes with is still sense and has been translated

into 22 languages. Edmund de Waal is no longer just a potter. He is also

a world-famous writer. Immediately I am in conversation with lots of

people. I wonder whether you would come to Zurich, where I live? I have

Jewish friends, and it would be marvellous. It is not just elderly

diasporic Jew ish Jewish community. My generation who have grown up

knowing absolutely nothing and I have broken through that, so of

course that's been kind of interesting for my generation, of

people who simply don't know where they came from.

What writing this did was to make me feel that there were, that I was

able to occupy a space that bigger narratives were possible and there

couldn't be a bigger narrative than this particular story, which comes

from very small objects, but becomes this very complex inhabited space,

series of spaces, in a book. That weirdly, being able to discover that

I could do that, actually has also allowed me to work on a bigger

scale. With what I make. In a couple of hours I will have

made 200 of these. I suspect I need to makes 600 of them. My back is

slightly counting those hours. As the pots for the exhibition begin to

pile up, the need for more space has become critical. We are completely

stuffed. This is why we are so desperate to move. I am working

here, we have crates of things in, crates of things out. We have scale

models, galleries in New York, we are just completely full. We just

can't wait to move. Where do things get stored? I don't know.

We have archive, this is the archive of all work going back to when I was

apprenticed. Years and years and years ago, a pot that I made in 19-

the National Gallery wants to borrow the photo album of this ball that my

great grandmother went to in 19 00. I don't know where the fuck it is,

it is somewhere here! I have got to a different place,

where the work and scale of things, and the capacity of projects and to

write and think and do all that stuff as well as make, very big

installations in a garage down the road, I was completely screwed. I

had to find a bigger space. The new space is a former gun factory in

South London, a pleasingly destructive back story for a

porcelain studio. We have moved into the new studio, it is really

exciting. We have spent the last week unpacking.

Over the last week I have got terribly excited by Paul Celan, the

Romanian born German poet. There is an extraordinary thing

about breathing and poetry and what it can and can't do. We have worked

out the shape of the show in terms of words. So it's brilliant

actually. Is it an accident that Paul Celan,

the inspiration for this work, that Paul Celan also sounds like

porcelain? It is beautiful, isn't it. We can claim that, I don't know.

It's pure beautiful accident. Paul Celan, a Romanian Jew survived the

Holocaust though his parents died in a labour camp. Celan's poetry can be

seen as a response to the Holocaust but it is also a challenge to the

poetic and to language itself. What is so extraordinary about these

is that they are very short poems and lots and lots and white space,

they are always moving towards the fragment or away from the fragment.

So there is a sense of how do you shape anything in the world, how do

you finish anything? Everything moves towards the fragmentary or

jagged or uncompleted or lost. Quite a lot of the work in this

exhibition, which I am really struggling with, is about you make

something and you want it to be beautiful and lyrical. But you also

want it to kind of have lots and lots of space for all the loss.

That work over there, that's got a musical reference. I heard it said,

it's called and it's 12 vitrines each with five very simple objects

in it and it's like conversation with early music of Burg. When I

walk along that in the morning, I hear it as a piece of music and

other people are going to go for God's sake, it's just pots, but for

me that's musical. I absolutely hear it and when I write something, it

has a shape. Words and objects are very, very closely aligned.

What do you think Isla? There's almost always muse music when I am

making and sometimes when I am writing, too.

It gives me more space. Repetition isn't about repeating the same

thing, it is about minute differences. Between each moment,

between each sound, tweech each object that you are making. It gives

you a kind of much steadier way of thinking through ideas. Doesn't that

make you want to make things. How can it not make you want to make

things. The quartet isn't Edmund's only challenge this year. His

publisher is expecting the Manu script of his new book in 18 months'

time. The Hare took him seven years. Tell me about the book which is your

other big project this year. Well, this year! And forward. It is a

journey through white. It is a personal journey through the

discovery of porcelain 1,000 years ago, China and this great

reinvention of it. In the 18th century in Europe. It is really

about obsession. Really about what white means, why people obsess about

it, what white does to people. And what white displaces in the world

when it pushes away from it. It is a strong pulse of going and looking in

archives and going and talking to people, trying to excavate where

white happens. While the pots are being glazed for

the Gagosian show, Edmund is on a research trip for the new book, with

his son Matthew. They are looking for the very first piece of pours

lain that knead from east to west, brought to Venice by Marco Polo. We

are in Venice because- for seven reasons, the real reason is to be

here with him. With Matthew. He is reading Terry Pratchett. We are on a

trip to try and see whether we can find this extraordinary bowl. It is

a really good story, it is supposed to have been carried back by Marco

Polo in 1175 or something like that. No-one admits to having it. Marco

Polo was Matthew's age when he arrived in China with his father and

saw porcelain being made for the very first time. Little did he know

the impact the material was going to have when it arrived in Europe. You

could say how could a bowl not fit into the new book because it is

exactly about objects in transit, it is about the hidden stories of

objects that have moved from one place to another. Marco Polo is the

risk Road. Edmund has been try to go trace this porcelain for over a year

and there's no certainty he will find it here in Venice. The question

is whether or not it is a myth or whether there is some Reality to it.

This is amazing. You have everything here, which is tremendous.

It's one thing amongst many but it is very, very particular because it

holds Marco Polo, it holds that story of travel within it. I really

have to find it. This is the Treasury. This is it.

It's there. I'm desperate to pick it up. This is Marco Polo and he brings

it back all the way with camels and dock kiss and horses and -- donkeys,

across the whole of the world, through Constantinople and takes a

boat back down to Venice and unpacks his treasures which are

extraordinary objects. This is kind of a crazy attempt to find where

white comes from and so this is kind of iconic, this is one of the very,

very special bits of white coming from one place and ending up

somewhere else completely, utterly, amazingly different, that's got the

story in it. There's no time to celebrate their discovery. Edmund

has to get ready to give a talk about The Hare With The Amber Eyes.

Tonight is the Venice Litary Festival. I have to go to the

Palazzo Grassi and talk. I want to go and sit with a beer and

that is not going to happen tonight. How do you start? You start by

taking an object out of your pocket and you put it down in front of you

and you begin to tell a story. And because of you I have brought two

objects, and I want them back. But pass them round, this is 17 70.

Like the Netsuke Edmund's own work is displayed in vitrines.

Collections of objects held together in time and space. Back at the

studio, he begins to install the quartet for the Gagosian show. We

might need to have very loud Steve Reich on, just to move away from the

thinking bit. Each of those tiny pots, seven

movements. I picked up a knife and cut them five times, and then the

single mark of my seal at the end, letting it go. Each of those is a

number, but not the sort of ghastly code codified formulaic things at

all. It is a pacing through the world. For reason at all there

should be the same number or density of things on the same shelve.

With those 3,000 pots, months and months of work, hours and hours,

hundreds of hours of work, then I can retime myself in the work by

making different kinds of spaces. But if I hadn't done that, if I had

said, you know what I need to make 1476 pots and thags ae into four

because there is a quartet, it's dead, it's dead before you begin.

Not everything in Edmund's life is white. For the New York show he's

been making a series of new works in black. These pots share their story

with the very beginnings of white. And Edmund's new book. He is in

Germany where the very first European porcelain was made. Solving

what was considered to be one of a great mysteries of the age. Dresden,

this extraordinary place, incredible place where black porcelain becomes

white porcelain. You have to think back 300 years.

And you are a collector. What is the thing that is the most esoteric and

the most rare rarified, the thing that tells you that is most special,

has this aura around it. It is porcelain. What do you do? You find

people who can tell you all the time, I can make t I'm great, and

they all fail. Then you come across an alchemist who tells you that he

can do it. That is what this journey is about. It is in search of this

particular man, this particular alchemist who said, do you know

what, I can do it. He told Augustus the Strong he could do it and was

locked up. He was locked up. With this enormous terrible threat

hanging over him. The threat was make porcelain or die. That should

be hanging above our own work shop actually!

Augustus the Strong was the greatest patron of the arts in Europe during

the early 18th century. He commissioned whole palaces to house

his collections. For Edmund, the demands of obsessive collectors is

familiar territory. You wouldn't think this had any relationship at

all to what is going on in south lon doen but it kind of does. Porcelain

doesn't begin in the West, with white things. It begins with this,

it begins with someone who works out that if you fire high enough, with

the right materials and put them together, you can produce something

as hard adds a gem stone, but it's not white.

Augustus the strong, this nightmare obsessional man, just screaming

away, why isn't it white? This is the great case that you have got the

first pieces of porcelain. When he starts to do his work, he can't get

there, so the surfaces are pitted and there is a greyish sheen. What

you see here is someone who is actually trying to work something

out. Look at this fantastic covered bowl

here, with this pierced decoration and it is completely screwed.

Completely shot to pieces. It's got all the cracks where the making has

happened, the glaze hasn't fitted the body and it has been presented

to Augustus the Strong and he said fine, something that is completely

wrong, he actually knows, it actually is going to work. By 1713

he can make white porcelain, he can say to Augustus, I can do it, I can

do this thing now. That is when it gets really, really complicated.

This is the Disney moment for porcelain. This is just complete

completely utterly ridiculous. This isn't about the collectors, it is

about the collector's palace, it is not about the vitrine in the back

corridor, this is about the whole world in porcelain, now. Here is

this sad bear. This is about bringing one material from right the

way across the world, reinventing it and then discovering what you are

going to do with it. It is about completely about space, about how

much space porcelain can take up and in this case, a lot of space, so of

course how can I not be excited by that. That is what I am try to go

do, occupy a lot of the world through porcelain and it happens

here first. Every time you come away from a research trip you feel like

you have found something and you realise beyond that thing you found

are months and months and months of research. I pray my publishers

aren't watching this because God knows how long I am going to take

with this book. Research for the book has to be put

to one side, as the studio prepares for a visit from some tiny potters.

My daughter's primary school, 60-odd kids are going to be making pots

here. The story we are going to tell is going to be a story about a

journey. Here we've got images of journeys. Does anyone recognise any

of them? Favouritism, Emma, start us off. James and the Giant Peach. The

Gagosian works all around, we are making a big installation today.

It is a big strawberry. As you can see, there are lots and lots of

them, one of your jobs is to count my pots. 71, 72, 73... Thank you.

Having survived the school trip, the quartet is packed away and shipped

out. Once he has decided on how he wants the pots to be, we are marking

each shelve A, b, c, d, with a number as well, so we know the

number of pots, which shelve it should be on and on the shelve we

have mark marked like an invisible ring which is transparent varnish,

which will mark the exact position of the pot. I can't find the

singlearity of something without looking at an awful lot of objects,

so I can't under understand a Chinese bowl without walking up a

hillside full of thousands and thousands of fragmentary shardz of

pots. That idea of the abundance or the uncountability, of the world is

also really poetic. Nowhere in the world is the historic

porcelain in greater abundance than in the archives of the V in

London. After the extravagance of Dresden, Edmund is looking for the

hummable beginnings of white here in England. We are here because this is

me searching for extraordinary man William Cookworthy. He goes on this

journey and discovers how to make porcelain and this is the first true

porcelain in England, and I have never had it in my hands, so this is

my moment of what is it like, I just don't know. It's fantastic. We have

others that are stained to a nicotined brown, they had such

problems. I love this, I have only seen these in books, because I

always imagined Cookworthy trying to make impeckible European porcelain

objects and it isn't quite! We have a cow. It is an object of ambition

but not of great beauty. If you think about Augustus the Strong

surrounded by this music and life-sized porcelain figures and you

have Cookworthy making his cow sitting amongst daysies.

It is now just one month until the New York show, but William

Cookworthy has inspired one last research trip. We are in Cornwall in

search of the place where Cookworthy first found the materials that could

make porcelain. Tregonning Hill. God knows where it is. I thought it was

a proper hill. All I can see is suburbia.

This is a proper Cornish map. Everything here says shafts (dis)

and quarries. The whole landscape is shot through with the remnants of

mining. This whole landscape up there is basically due to Cookworthy

discovering China clay. We are at the end of the world here. So far

from anything else. This is where the material is, you have to dig up

to make these pots and you have to get it off this bloody hillside. The

whole thing starts out in incredibly primitive way and you have to

remember how incredibly poor Cornwall is. It was medieval mining,

just with a shovel. Absolutely basic. Not content with just seeing

Cookworthy porcelain in archives, Edmund has started his own

collection. The moment of complete I had yosy, I brought this -- idiocy,

I brought this, a bit of Cookworthy porcelain. I am repatriating it,

speckly and full of bits that haven't burnt out properly. Sod it,

it's beautiful. For Edmund, this little pot holds the story of white

in England. It is important to hold and understand as the netsuke his

uncle Iggy left him. What of William Cookworthy and his great break

through? Porcelain didn't work for him. He made no money at all out of

porcelain. I never managed to work out how to turn his intuition into

industry. The show is imminent. Edmund is

about to leave for New York. It is a different scale, it is a different

audience. It is a very tough audience.

I am doing work which is about the speechless speechlessness, silence,

about the fragmentary, about Europeanness. People there who have

read my book are going to be baffled by the fact that I am a maker, an

artist. It's middle of the night terror to be honest, because, you

know what, screwing up in New York is about as bad as it gets. Everyone

knows. We are here, I am an artist and I

have an exhibition. Hello Mark, I am in transit towards you and the

exhibition. You plan and plan and plan, and then it becomes something

else. It's out of your control, which is kind of good, difficult

sometimes. Here we are, at Gagosian. I am on the bloody side walk, how

fantastic. Atemwende. Hi, I am Edmund. I am so excited. Oh

my God. Welcome to New York. Hello. You won't get much sense out of me

for at least half an hour, I am afraid. That's OK!

Gsdz What's the worst that can happen? You get a shitty review,

people don't like it, nothing sells. None of those are terrible things to

happen. The terrible thing to happen is for it not to leave the studio.

This is me pretending that I am really busy trying to keep out of

everyone's way. While mayhem descends. I have a cafe latte with

four shorts of espresso in it to keep me going for the next hour!

This show is by far the biggest show I have ever done. It is by far the

most ambitious show I have done, but it is also the show where I have

really gone public. It is very exposing for me, because I also

write and it is this show is very much more open to the way in which I

write things and the way in which I make sculpture.

After all the months of work, the show is finally ready. Edmund's

wife, Sue, has arrived in New York, just in time to steal a few quiet

moments with her husband. Have they got a light well behind them as

well. Perspex. In America, Plexiglas. I like Perspex better.

No-one understands what Perspex s you have to say Plexiglas.

I have tears in my eyes, my dear. It's beautiful.

It's been quite a while. For me getting to this point.

Completely beautiful. But also I love these because they are back to

words and poetry and spaces. It is a poem, that one. It's a poem.

September 12th, the day of the opening of the Gagosian on Madison

Avenue. This is the most influential commercial gallery in the world. And

yes, Larry Gagosian, the don of the New York arts scene is here to see

how Edmund fares. Edmund de Waal. We expected you to have the netsuke.

Thank you for writing such a beautiful book, I read it last week,

I was devastated and loved it and it was gorgeous. Like many of the

people here, curators, collectors, seriously wealthy, Larry Gagosian

read the book and loved it so he took a gamble on a show by an

English potter. Some of these works have already sold for hundreds of

thousands of dollars. It is a little overwhelming. One of the things that

interests me about this show is to try to figure out how we would react

if we hadn't read The Hare With The Amber Eyes, what would these objects

mean to us and in some way, what I find quite interesting is that you

feel a a need, an urgency to touch them. Looking at these objects is

sort of taking your breath away. This is where it all is. This is

where it all... It is such a beautiful space. Looking at them

earlier, there are so many ways you can look at this work. It is rather

extraordinary. Congratulations to you. I am so thrilled for Edmund. It

is the most beautiful show he's ever done. Atemwende is a real

masterpiece and I feel so excited when I see it, because I know where

it started. I feel very warmly welcomed to New York. How objects

get handled, used and handed on is not just a mildly interesting

question for me, but is my question, I have made many thousands of pots

and very bad at names, but I am good on pots. I can read how an edge

creates tension or loses it. I can feel if it has been made at speed or

with diligence. If it has warmth. I can see how it works with the

objects that sit nearby, how it displaces a small part of the world

around it. You started making pots when you

were five-years-old. And you are now in your 50th year this week. Thanks,

you are the first person to put it in those terms. Yes. You have been

making pots for 45 years. I have been making pots for 45 years, yes.

I don't know, this year has been- one of the things about this year

has been working out that I can, a sort of confidence to really just go

for it. Just simply say this is what I do. This is what I do.