Other people's images of us also serve to change us and make us different from what we were before. – Casares, ‘Morel’s Invention’
Blue Willow plates carry strong feelings. People associate these dishes with certain places and sensations, especially with the space and smell of the old apartments and houses of their childhood. Each one is taken down, these items belonging to the deceased, faced in the vitrine or stacked with the pointless delicacy of things seldom used, wrapped carefully then put away in a box. A strange thing: later, in a different house or a junk store, when you come upon a plate or tureen or platter with exactly same pattern, it does not seem like the old familiar object has miraculously reappeared. The double points to the original, which then brings back the rooms and the curtains and the voices and the smoke. You wonder, how did this one get to be where it is? Who died and left it? What made it what it was for one who once held it?
When we are young, we see clearly the inherent strangeness of decorative household items. Weird that images are stamped on things used to transport potatoes. Funny place for an abyss.
Blue Willow is ideal for inventive childhood games. We create all kinds of stories around pictures, an astonishingly powerful ability which is educated away the older one gets [i]. The plates have a common set of elements, a cast and scenery with little variation, to which the child can apply great improvisational skill. The animals, people, landscape, and bodies of water on chinoiserie design are cagey. They tell a fragmentary story which must be completed. When the eye follows a winding spring path, this path implies a labyrinth outside of the circle of the dish. Distant hills become full of invisible dwellings and caverns, strange beasts, underground channels. What is seen suggests the unseen. What is still-life becomes motion. The picture changes as you look at it.
Through the most primitive and necessary action, eating, the story emerges by spoonful. Turtle doves, misty hills, a mythical creature—this all becomes slowly visible from under mounds of beans and sausage, mostaccioli, tikka masala, or ribollita. It as if you have uncovered an occult fresco, an allegorical mise-en-scène which a learned monk had devoted his entire life to creating. The idea that kids are ‘playing’ with their food couldn’t be farther from the truth. Like all children’s games, nothing is more serious than this supposed play.
There is a ‘real’ story behind the plates. It is set in ancient China, though the dishes date only from the 17th Century. The famous ‘Oriental’ Blue Willow design is usually traced to the great English potter Josiah Spode, but it has also been attributed to the equally renowned Thomas Turner. At any rate, it was Turner who first mass produced it using an inexpensive process called Transferware. First a copper print is made, which is then transferred to paper, made into a stencil, and finally imprinted on the body of the pottery. This process allowed for complex and striking detail on modest products, far more affordable than the similarily-ornate handmade luxuries collected by the wealthy. It also made generations of artisans redundant. The extinction of kinds of laborers is hidden in plain view in the history of every commodity; by following style and form you arrive at production cost, area of manufacture, use and exchange value, back to the hand which made the object. Skilled labor is a ghost haunting the deskilled, mass-produced products that have replaced it. Quaint intimacy becomes a throng on the shop floor, the power to attract becomes a slip-casted simulation of the unique artifact. To render something as if it had been made by an artisan makes it appear as if it was made especially for you. It gives it a singular quality and the idea of mass producing goods like plates and decorative objects is to make them both singular and common-place. To make them admirable, but without the costs of something authentically unique, singular, and admirable.
From the early Chinese scenes, images on the plates branched out to include idyllic English and French countrysides. Chinoiserie became Staffordshire or Rouen pastoral. American versions did likewise, adopting colonial motifs and frontier sentimentality. During the 1920s, blue willow was ubiquitous in American restaurants, part of an Orientalist fad in design that added a decadent opioid haze to architecture, furniture, and trinkets. Magnates like William Randolph Hearst had their own expensive, gold-rimmed sets made. Stories of willow plates also appear in many children’s books of the era. As we noted above, childhood and blue willow are inseparable [ii]. At Field’s, Gimbels, or Weiboldt’s, you could get a set or a single plate on the cheap.
The original blue willow craze kicked off roughly at the height of Britian’s pillaging of China. Along with the French, British conscripts had stormed and looted the Emperor’s Summer Palace during the Second Opium War in 1860, an event which seemed calculated to deliver a symbolic death-blow but may have just been the whim of a particularly venal Brit general. Twenty years after, Turner and other potters began to mass manufacture chinoiserie designs on their products. The first and most famous of these images looks very much like a rendering of the lush imperial grounds which the Crown had reduced to smoldering ruins. Above the gardens are two doves suspended in the air.
Along with the ‘Chinese’ plates came a ‘Chinese’ legend employed to sell them. This tale is really a variation on a Japanese story, ‘The Green Willow’, popularized in English books of the time, which did itself derive from China. Both stories tell of star-crossed lovers, a plot familiar to everyone who knows Romeo & Juliet: The daughter of an imperial governor, the beautiful Koong-se, falls in love with one of her father’s humble accountants, Chang. Infuriated by this development, the wealthy lord dismisses Chang and builds a great wall around his palace to keep the two lovers apart. He also promises the hand of his daughter to an influential Duke, thus sealing the union of two powerful ruling class families. The Duke arrives by boat, bearing a box of valuable jewels as a token of his appreciation. The wedding is set for the day blossoms fall from willow trees, the seasonal shift of Late Autumn, a time which brings thoughts of loss and remembrance, and also of longing.
On the eve of the festivities, Chang disguises himself as a servant and secretly enters the palace. After stealing the Duke’s jewels, he and Koong-se escape but they are soon found out and her father gives chase. Enraged, the lord follows them to a bridge, flanked by his retainers. Nevertheless, the lovers are able to steal the Duke’s skiff and escape to an island, where they live in happiness for many years. One day the Duke discovers them accidentally on a hunting foray and, never having forgiven the shame they caused him, puts both Koong-se and Chang to death on the spot. The gods, who witness all things, are so moved by the lovers’ plight that they transform them into doves. Koong-se and Chang fly off together into the horizon.
The story later moved from a PR stunt to sell porcelain to a place in English folk song. A verse from 19th Century England describes the scene: Two birds flying high/ A Chinese vessel, sailing by/ A bridge with three men, sometimes four/ A willow tree, hanging o'er/ A Chinese temple, there it stands/ Built upon the river sands/ An apple tree, with apples on/ A crooked fence to end my song. The song seems to reflect someone admiring a piece of blue willow pottery and cataloging its elements into a simple hopscotch-like rhyme.
Another version of the song omits anything Chinese, adding a few mysterious lines: Now Dover church stands very bare/ Twice a week they worship there/ A little tree with apples on/ And plaited palings in the sun. The end is shifted to a church at Dover—probably St Mary’s, built on the site of an earlier Saxon church, which was in turn built on the site of a Roman baths built on the site of an indigenous spring.
The priceless porcelain stolen from the ruins of the Emperor’s Summer Palace entered into the market from the barrel of a gun. Once there, its invented worth, a new heavenly mandate, ascends high into the skies, climbing ever higher until the limit, the ceiling of price, is finally reached. But what we are seeking here is not rich people’s toys but the aura of these memorable objects. Not the aura of a rare piece, but the reasons such objects attract us, even though they are comparatively worthless. This quality does not come from their history, but appears like lightning at the moment a person chooses one of them—takes a shine to it, to one out of many and one only.
Back at the old house, when these objects finally come down to us, usually via death, we add something to them in turn. I am looking at a wooden server. It is factory painted, with a bird flying over bullrushes. An uncanny object. The little bird in faded colors strikes a pause in natural time, drawing a lateral line from the dead who once owned it to my own future and solitary death. After this last death, the battered wooden platter will reach the end of its chain of connected owners. It will end up in a thrift store (I have made plans for this), where it will sit on a shelf stripped bare of any remnants of myself and the person who gave it to me long ago. Once upon a time, the little bird on the plate caught someone’s eye. By the weakest of passions—a slight attraction to it, a mild affinity to the sweetness of a color-shape, its cheap price—it entered into a house and into a life. When an object loses its admirers, its mysterious attraction, which once hung over it like breath on a mirror, vanishes at the speed of light.
Here is the important contradiction: In mass produced items, there is always one among them which seems to possess an odd, singular presence (for example, castoffs and rejects have their own gravity, far more seductive than mere perfection). This essence is added by the beholder and cannot be manufactured, yet it may be passed down. What remains in some objects is an original pull—we say that there is something about it—but the proof of such a charisma is dream-like, intuitive, a witchcraft. Because our objects are all streamlined, perhaps we have even wished this bewildering property into existence. It has its own peculiar effects. Without pity, objects surround us with reminders of losses, disappearances, ellipses in time, and the hard fact that we know much of life through inert materials whose silence is deafening. We look back at places as if they were pictures and pictures as if they were living beings, via a few junk items whose phenomenal power lies precisely in an interior life that does not really exist.
But something immaterial does haunt material, circling the mysterious thing, drawn in to it like a moth to fire. Hands grasp the wooden tray or the blue willow boat, and the little bird becomes unbearable. What has this to do with footsteps I do not hear, a name and a shape, with other inventions taking up the night? With packing up a tropical house, a body in a schoolyard, events seen through the eyes of others and remembered as if they were my own? To retain one last image for a while, as if it were truly there. In a room, there is a table; on the table is a plate, and above it, the light around which a moth circles until, exhausted by repetition, it falls to the floor.
The point is not to live in the past, which is impossible and would demand anyway the most impossible of betrayals, but to investigate the objects of the past as if they pointed out a crime or a miracle. The image is fixed yet the eyes that see it notice subtle transformations, each eye in its own way. It was into an image after all, into a painting, that the Chinese master artist Wu Daozi fled, leaving an earthly kingdom and its unpredictable Emperor behind. This ruler had commissioned him to create a scene so lifelike that it would be indistinguishable from reality. Naturally, Wu Daozi would be executed when he finished it, that no new masterpiece might equal its power. It is said that the Emperor saw Wu Daozi for a moment, making his way through the landscape of the painting, before he entered a little shrine and closed the door behind him. Maybe it is possible then to enter into the Blue Willow, becoming part of the scene at the bridge, witnessing the death on the island, the transformation of the two forbidden lovers into doves? You retreat deep into the background, in the reeds or far off mountains, disguised as a minor manufacturer’s glitch. But we must remember that the whole scene is frozen and motionless. And here is where the fact of its production by machine becomes fatal: Every scene on every plate is exactly the same, a million identical moments reproduced millions of times on millions of plates. The blue willow labyrinth is ruled by a law which does not demand eternal repetition but an eternal stasis, reproduced a countless number of times, potentially to infinity. Doomed to maintain their rigid positions in the sky, the doves have become an impression to which the adult mind is powerless to give flight.
[i] In the end, this childhood talent becomes inaccessible. We remember it and that is all, remembering vaguely. Only mental patients seem to fully retain such imaginative ability. Wild of mind, they fight a secret and grueling battle to keep something which everyone else has long since dismissed.
[ii] Blue Willow were a favorite of Hearst’s mother. Perhaps the sleigh Rosebud at the end of Citizen Kane was originally a plate. Hearst loathed the film with a passion. What Oedipal complex would such a substitution have uncovered?
Wonder if I saw any at Hearst Castle?!! Will have to look next time. Good read.