 Any other announcements? OK, so it is my great pleasure to introduce Professor Daniel Niles from the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature in photo. Daniel received his PhD from Clark University in 19... 2007. 2007, I'm sorry. You're much younger than I am. We actually worked together at the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature when I was doing a project over there. At that time, his research was more focused on agriculture, landscape, contemporary environmental issues, from which I think he started to focus on the connection between material culture landscape and how people's knowledge is actually part of the material culture, as opposed to material culture reflecting in how other people have in mind. I know that this sounds like a horrible explanation to you. I'm sure that Daniel can explain it in a much more elegant manner. So please welcome his whole title return of the basket on art and environment. OK, thank you very much, you go. Yeah, thanks so much. This paper has caused me all kinds of trouble. I was looking forward to talking about baskets. Since I knew that I was going to be able to come here, and then I've been regretting it, writing this abstract and using the title ever since. So I feel it's a great chance to give you kind of a first round of my thinking so far about baskets. But before I do that, I'd like to thank in particular Kent and Lisa and Junco for being my hosts, my co-hosts. It's really just a pleasure. It's kind of a dream for me to be here. It is a dream in a way because this department is, baskets have such an important position in the history of this department, and baskets have been kind of a fascination of mine for some time. And so I thought, OK, it's the perfect chance to finally do some more thinking about baskets. Now, but strangely, last night, as I was kind of thinking, why is this paper just so difficult? I realized it's because baskets, they appear to be very mundane, fairly simple in a way. That's awful dark. Is that OK? That's what we usually do. OK, OK, OK. If you want to see this and it's hard for you to record it, would you want full or half? I don't know. As long as you prefer, this is just how we feel. Then I think that it would be even better to do. I wanted to come back. OK, all or nothing. So basically, baskets are really mundane, but they're also strangely tricky. And they have a way of kind of resisting, even kind of resisting the gaze in a way. I go out looking for baskets all the time. And they kind of have a way of talking themselves out of view, or somehow a kind of self-effacing character about them that I find really attractive, actually, and interesting. So here I am trying to use some of my experience, especially in thinking about Japanese bamboo baskets to talk about baskets in general. Now, California is, of course, one of the mechas in basketry. And this is one of the earliest examples on record. It's in the Museum of the America in Spain. And it was collected probably in around 1791. And it's given credit as being really among the first to be collected. I think that they must be collected, essentially, in person from living people, because there must have been all kinds of archaeological evidences. Baskets, in archaeology, I get the sense that baskets play kind of second or third fiddle. But they're ubiquitous in the ethnographic record. People everywhere have used baskets to do many, many, many things. And in fact, the life of California over the long term would have been completely impossible without baskets. In fact, you probably can say that they're the most important technology that existed in California history. They were used for everything. And in particular, the two principal lifeways surrounding the collection of acorns and the collection of seafoods would have been, or baskets were completely involved in all of those. And the gathering or catching, in the carrying, in the storage, in the cooking, in the serving of them. And of course, there's so many other uses, but they're absolutely essential to life here. And it's interesting when you look at these very early baskets, here's another one that apparently is collected in the late 18th century that resides in the British Museum, which should really be ashamed of itself in that they provide these atrocious photos of the images of the object. It's really difficult to get much of anything out of that. But one thing that you do get when you look through this small collection and the collection, both of which are online at the Museo de Americas, is that the baskets they've collected, many of which are from Southern California, have an awful lot of this kind of natural ground. And the designs that we see on them are very concise, very, let's say, well, concise is a good word, and powerful. They're not the kind of very complicated ornate and even what begin to seem sensational baskets that maybe we're more familiar with, which are collected about 100 years later. And I don't want to do too much on this really, but here is an example of those kind of later baskets. This one itself actually may not qualify as collected very early in the 20th century, and it could actually precede the so-called penestimony of what struck California, the California collectors in the early part of the century. The late 1880s, 1890s, the early part of the 20th century. And baskets then went from being these very, very utilitarian objects to being essentially things that could be collected, and they were worth quite a bit of money on the market. And so they were, on the one hand, new livelihood opportunities open to Native American peoples, and especially Native American women. And on the other hand, many, many collectors, kind of basket rustlers, dealers, galleries, and tourists who are coming out to California and trying to find baskets in every house. And that, it's suggested by Mohan and others, has an impact on the form of the basket, on the character, the qualities of the basket. And so here's a nice little passage that says, the following, the selection process works two ways. Travelers choose what will fit into their baggage. Basket makers sensing a good market develop ranges of small, fancy baskets made especially for sale. The forms and patterns may start out as copies of larger baskets in regular use, but often they move in completely new directions. The tourist does not need a bird in a basket, but she might use a shopper. Shapes are more appealing if she can relate them to something in her own culture. Patterns are insignificant so long as they are believed to be Indian. So tourist baskets can become a vehicle for experimental, non-traditional designs. Which perhaps is not a bad thing of itself, but it does show you that there is a basket out there. There's a context out there into which the basket is entering and is changing. And this might have something to do with the disavowal. It's fairly declaratory, if I can say so, from Krober and others, in particular Barrett, who writes the first dissertation in the Department of Anthropology, the first dissertation in California in anthropology, and who kind of go out of their way to avoid kind of interpretation of baskets, interpretation of the significance of baskets to people in this place. And here's Krober's little summation of his student Barrett's dissertation, which is quite a remarkable document. If anyone still cherishes the belief that patterns were put upon baskets by the California Indians for religious or symbolic motives, or that their significance is ceremonial or poetical, the idea will be dispelled by a glance at Dr. Barrett's data in which the thousands of monotonously commonplace and concordant names are unbroken by either a single instance of symbolic interpretation. And that sets the tone. And I don't think that we ought to overdo this in a way, but I think that this is more an indication of essentially the scientific viewpoint at that time, and essentially what is a newly arrived people's attempt to interpret or to at least to see objects, but having essentially no or very little lived experience of the basket. For some more of that, Japan is a great place to go. And here is a site, the earliest wetland middens site in Japan, and also a settlement site that Junko knows very well, that you were involved directly in this excavation. And in this little pamphlet, I do not know this place well, I wouldn't say at all, in Western Japan. But in this little pamphlet, I really love it because here it features the basket makers of Junko around 7,000 feet. And what is really interesting about this site and about the basket portfolio, a pamphlet, is that it gives you some examples of the baskets themselves as they're found on site. And they are about 750 baskets found in the site according to the pamphlet among many, many, many thousands of other objects. But here you have an example of baskets made from tree materials and vines, in which many of which were used for acorn storage or nut storage, some of which were found with still nuts inside of them. And what you see in these examples is that the weaves are defined and refined. There are today in Japan about 12 or so weaves which are commonly used in bamboo basketry. And here they have an example 7,000 years ago of five of them already developed. And not just developed but really refined. And so we can say easily that this type of basketry, that these type of examples, demonstrate a good familiarity, a fine development, in fact, something that has developed and essentially remained the same over the course of the last 7,000 years. On the other side of Japan, the far east at the Sanai Maruyama site, serving the most famous at the Jomon sites, archaeological sites, is this basket. And this basket is made of wooden fibers, as you can see there. And it was found with a nut and it's kind of a nut pouch. It's only about this big. It was featured in one of the highlights in this recent exhibit at the Tokyo National Museum, just included a month ago or so. Now, if at any time as archeologists you feel that the world doesn't pay close enough attention to your ideas, to your findings, and to your knowledge, you should go to exhibit of Jomon archeology artifacts at the Tokyo National Museum. Aside from being a large museum with grand halls, large stairways, and enormous galleries, there are tens of thousands of people at this exhibit every day. It is so full that you actually have a difficult time getting at the objects. And of about the six or seven highlights of the exhibition, our basket here was included as one of them. It was the only non-ceramic piece to be featured in that way. It's only this big. The other objects of this kind, the very famous, the very flamboyant, the sensational. And here you have this humble little basket. Now, I thought that basket was really amazing. And in fact, I went there to see this exhibit because I knew this one would be there. And I also thought it was very interesting because I had just recently found this basket, which also is made of tree bark. It seemed to me to be probably a Japanese cypress, but I'm not sure about that. In any case, I couldn't help but see, wow, that seems an awful similar thing. And it was sold to me in this antique market with this flattered container, copper lined, which is often found in flutter containers. So it's solved with the idea that it would be a flutter container, but I kind of think that probably it was made for some of their purpose. I'm not sure about that, but it seems likely to me at least. And I thought, what can we make of that? You can pass this one around, especially as I had also seen, oh, just about the same time, this basket, another wooden basket. Now, this one is made originally, I believe. This is also sold as a flutter basket and it has this little hook on there, which may or may not be original, but this one was sold, as I understand, was a kind of hatchet sheet that would have been carried at the waist and used as a regular thing. Now, it's hard to put any age on these things. They can be, oh, from decades to even a couple hundred years old. When you see things dated, see things of this kind dated, you can be surprised sometimes, wow, that's three or 400 years old, but I have no way of really knowing it. Anyway, we can pass this one around, as well. Sorry, that's part of the reason that the lighting is... So, is there a big market then in terms of these baskets? Well, something like this, no, I mean, they're waiting for the basket lovers to show up, but there are a certain number of basket lovers. Yeah, they can, I mean, you do tend to see in antique shops baskets, but not often do you see really remarkable baskets. And baskets like this, as I said, before, are, they're pretty subtle. I mean, they're not screaming out for attention, so you have to find them, and then you also have to do the thing which is the kind of the magic is to agree, okay, yes, I'll give you a hundred bucks for that, or something like that, which can be an added kind of disincentive to appreciate the thing in the moment, and it just kind of costs you a little bit of, you know. So, anyway, I think these both baskets, both of these baskets are just great, and I love them in particular because they are like messages, it seems to me, that the ideas that were already present and developed here have somehow remained current, have somehow stayed alive, and that there's an experience, it seems to me, within them, or that they indicate, that somehow has remained relevant, despite all of the changes in Japanese history and the world, and the world history, and so there's an aesthetic quality which I want to return to later, but I also think that it's really useful to think about these baskets as being tools first, and there are various ways that you can go about doing that. One of them, I was reading recently a book by Gilbert Simondon, kind of philosopher of technology, and he asks us, and when we're thinking about technology, to think about the technical object as defined through its genesis, and this to me seems very interesting and kind of similar to things that others have said, for example, Tim Ingold says we should consider the object in relation to the current of activity in which it properly and originally belongs. So when it comes to basketry, that is a pretty interesting process, and here I have the chance, sometimes in Japan, to work with a scientific illustrator, and these are just our first sketches when we have begun to think about how to talk about the genesis of baskets, and this is an attempt to reflect the idea that baskets are made, they have two surfaces, an internal and external, and they are co-determined simultaneously by the materials of which they're made, its tolerance for twisting, for bending, for nodding, and the thing that the basket is meant to contain. And it's this relationship between the materials of which the basket is made and the thing that goes in that gives the basket its significance, its utility, and also its form, its aesthetic look, its appearance. So Ed Brossback in his book, Baskets as Testile Art, which is kind of a foundational work here says, for example, the traditional process requires time and a stable existence, one season to the next, and a general sense of the appropriateness of the activity to the total life. Certain grasses at certain times of the year, selected and sorted according to certain standards, at certain seasons, in certain moist atmospheres, according to certain techniques, into certain forms, with certain decorations for certain purposes. Okay, yes, that seems all very helpful, and we can also see them as, in the same time, this solution to how to solve a particular problem, how to store something, to carry something, to catch something. And as I said, we have this kind of codeterminacy of the material or this balance between the material and the thing which goes inside. A basket that's made with both the material and the object that it will contain or the task that it will fulfill in mind would have its own form, its own weave, its own pattern, its structure, its look, and also its own associations, all of which would be inseparable from the material and the place of which it's made. So baskets are linking together, place, season, material, food ways, tastes, also social practices that are associated with being in a particular place at a particular time. And at the same time, baskets are, we tend to focus on them as objects themselves, but actually, baskets are always about kind of something else. They are about ways of life. They have facilitated ways of life in particular places and they have translated that ability into material form. And in a sense, then, we can say that baskets are really about how to live here. This, perhaps, is why when you talk to basket makers or when you look at the literature, the much more contemporary literature about Native American baskets in particular, you get often such statements as to understand and appreciate Native American testimony fully, one that's like the transition from materialism to spiritualism, and that seems to make perfect sense. So, coming back to Japan, what really stimulated this talk or the frame for this talk was this sequence of three exhibitions. There have been, in recent times, in Tokyo, sorry, in New York, in Tokyo, in Paris, very sensational, if I can use the, if that's the right word, exhibitions of Japanese bamboo baskets. The first one was at the Met. It was in the Japanese Wing, it took over the entire Japanese Wing of the Met, and apparently it was one of the most popular and most successful exhibitions in the Japanese Wing's history. They provided a bulletin, a special bulletin, featuring this exhibition. They sent out 110,000 of those, and then there was so much demand they had to reprint. I went there, I saw it, it was an exhibition which focused really on the Japanese baskets, beginning with the flower-arranging baskets that are made, starting in the beginning part of the 20th century, and going through the kind of golden period around the middle of the century, and ending up here in this contemporary abstract, sculptural works. That was followed in April with this exhibition in Tokyo at the Musetomo, which is a kind of decorative arts museum, quite a fancy place. If the Met is a generalist, it's a popular museum, it's something devoted to world cultures, this one is really devoted to the decorative arts, especially in Japanese decorative arts, and here in this exhibition, it seems as if they are entering in with their focus on two principal basket makers, Isukuro Yokansai in the east, the Tokyo area, and Tanabe Chikunzai the first in the Osaka area. These were the two kind of original, two of three really original flower-art baskets centers of production, and here you see a bunch of examples, all of those are made by Yokansai, who in my view is one of the great geniuses of 20th century arts. He is spectacular, his works are just, well they just kind of defy description, they're really just amazing. Anyway, the museum here, their task, their clientele is quite an educated, at least in the traditional Japanese arts population, and here they are with the first dedicated exhibition in Japan, especially at a museum in Tokyo, in about 40 years, kind of entering bamboo basketry into the pantheon there of the great classical Japanese arts, and they do that with this amazing dark and spotlight exhibition and the selection from some of the top dealers in Kyoto and Tokyo and a few museums of these really, really prized pieces. This one recently sold at auction to the dealer in Kyoto for 300 and some thousand dollars, so baskets have now suddenly arrived, a piece like this, I mean this is an exquisite and really there are two of those, but this one is owned by one of the collectors in Tokyo and it is simply not for sale. He's been offered vast sums for it and he just will not do. And that's where bamboo basketry is going, and especially with these people who are considered to be just kind of genius bamboo artists. There was a period in Japan around the middle, in the early, in the 20s, in the 30s, in which artists who could have done anything and oftentimes were trained in painting, in classical painting, maybe in Western painting, in poetry, in calligraphy, could have done any of those things but chose bamboo. And the works that they produced were really just amazing. So I'll show you a few of those in a minute. And then finally, coming next month, opening at the Musée de Brunlie or Quix Brunlie in Paris, the Principal Ethnographic Museum there, is this kind of strangely titled exhibition of bamboo art in Japan, leaving the air, and here they're kind of tagline for the first time in France, an exhibition paying homage to the little known art of Japanese bamboo basketry that tells the story of how the basketry became sculpture. So here's an ethnographic museum, which is now kind of doing actually what I think the French ethnographic people have done quite a bit and is taking some object from one context and bringing it into a kind of Western art history. It's kind of, this one is just opening. I hope I can go to see this, but you begin to see that there are some kind of really interesting, we can say appropriations or approaches, at least to a tradition of art. It's hard to know exactly where that is going. But in any case, bamboo basketry, when it does attract people's attention, does something which is pretty unusual in the sense that it stimulates people in a way. There's this great phrase by John Carver, he's a Native American art critic who goes out of his way in his review of contemporary Native American art to include Japanese bamboo basketry, which he says, bamboo baskets woven from millennia have evolved into one of the most sophisticated, most traditional and simultaneously most innovative art forms on the planet. And that is kind of consistent with this kind of overflowing review that occurred in the New York Times about the show at the Met, one of the world's most complete and resident art forms. Wow. So let's look at a few of these baskets. Here is one, the original, this is really kind of what would be considered a classical flower basket based on Chinese forms. This is a story that I really don't get into in any detail, but in the early part of the 20th century, there was quite a bit of interest in the kind of Chinese Ming dynasty, literati and the people who kind of poet philosophers who would use philosopher's stones, hanging scrolls, miniature landscapes of various kinds and flower arrangements in baskets as objects to stimulate their philosophical and political contemplations. And these forms were defined then in China, they're oftentimes seen in scrolls and the original tea masters would ask accomplished bamboo crafts people to produce something that looked like this one here on the scroll. And so you get a reproduction and a slight kind of adaptation of classical Chinese forms, kind of reinterpreted slightly for a Japanese sensibility. Another one here, quite an unusual diamond shape opening and just a really elegant kind of scalloping to the body. Both of these baskets are plated. And then you begin to see people taking techniques. This is the son, this is Chikun Sai II. He, whoops, whoops, whoops. He is, oh, I had a little image. He's the son of Chikun Sai I, the first one whose basket is featured in the lower part of the Tokyo poster. And he takes this very fine mat and we're plating to make a subo or kind of jar shaped basket. And you begin to see people playing around with the forms and the weaves and going in many different directions and really doing what we in the West are oftentimes tempted to do when we look at Japanese art and say how modern it seems. But in any case, modern, not that's an interesting debate because oftentimes I think it is not, but in any case, these basket makers are not making traditional baskets. They're making flower baskets and they're reimagining the style. Here's the bottom view of this basket which is quite a stunning one. Here's a basket made by the apprentice, one of the many apprentices of Chikun Sai I. Bamboo sheaf flower basket in 1,000 line construction. So people are using bamboo. They're taking advantage of its various qualities to make all kinds of different shapes. For example, this one on the left, which is really a spectacular one and kind of an iconic flower design, flower basket in the world of flower baskets and with large sections of flattened bamboo. And this one, which was made by Enzo Giro, I saw this one in his house and told him it was on its side. He had made it as an object. And I said, this to me looks like a flower basket and I happen to have a tube, so I put the tube and put it there and send him the photo. He said, it looks beautiful, but he considers himself as a kind of contemporary artist and not as a bamboo basket, as a flower basket maker. In any case, this is an interesting little example. But it begs the question of what is the similarity or what is the difference? Or how do we go from here from these baskets, which according to my story here are so rooted in place to those baskets which seem to be all over the place and finally to something like this, the sculpture which is really apparently something else, entirely, sculpture. And here's the hint. The hint is that these baskets, if baskets have to be considered from both the external and the internal, these baskets are different in that the problem of containment is solved by a water container. Once you have solved the problem of how to contain the thing that goes in it, the outside can do whatever you like. And in bamboo, a material which has so much versatility to it and which has been used in Japan for so many different things over the millennia, people are extremely creative. But that begs the question. If you can do anything now, what do you do? And then it's interesting to look at the kind of, at kind of central ideas or begin to, you begin to collate through the baskets and say, okay, so what are people doing? How do we begin to understand what these forms are and what they mean? And here's a nice example. Again, another one of the sun is the same basket maker. One of the things that you see is that, boy, these artists are not constrained by any preexisting idea of form or style. They go all over the place. And this artist is just as capable as doing these and of many others. Anyway, this basket, he makes kind of early on, assuming his formal artist's title, it's called Mountain Path. And when you look at this basket a little bit, it has a kind of a more, it has this kind of rough, of course, open weave. It's random. And it has this long length which circles around the width of the basket three times. And you might just barely be able to see but it's kind of scarred and stuffed up. These bamboo would oftentimes be reclaimed from old farmhouses where they would have been smoked and preserved and patinaed over the centuries. And he and other basket makers prize that material in the color and would reuse them in their baskets. And this one is kind of scarred and stuffed. It's been well-worn and well-worked. And so the basket is entitled Mountain Path. So you see a kind of homage to rusticity, to country life and to the kind of everyday objects of the traditional Japan. Here's a basket by the elder brother of Rokansai in Tokyo. It's a basket which is entitled Potato. And it's meant to look more or less like a potato. Now you have to, I find myself quite impressed at the artists who have such cultural cachet and really such incredible skills who will with a kind of affection and it seems a sense of a fumer and warmth makes such humble shaped objects. But at the same time, this basket is kind of deceptively plain and simple. The weave, you can see that the verticals are kind of moving in two principal directions diagonally. And these ones heading off to the left direction skip outside the ones to the right never do. And there's a kind of formal, so there's a method, there's a pattern which is almost sensible there but there's a regular method that he has used. And the basket has a kind of looseness at the same time that it gives you this kind of representation of the image. It seems kind of less woven together than almost gathered up kind of in a single breath. Here are other artists. One of this basket on the left in the shape of an eggplant. This is a gorgeous handle there. And the one on the right in the shape of a double gourd. One, of course, of the oldest and most useful of plants around. And then this basket, which I have seen recently. This one, if you know Japanese food, you may remember natto, natto is a fermented soybean. It's a high protein and high kind of antioxidant or whatever food. And you would find that traditionally packaged and maybe even fermented in a rice straw package. Inside there would be this gooey bean paste. Really stinky but people, especially children tend to like it. Anyway, this is definitely a kind of country home food and anybody who knows natto would recognize this thing immediately and it couldn't help but kind of make you smile. And it also shows a kind of humility in the ideas that bamboo, which is kind of considered traditionally or oftentimes at least in the art world to be a kind of a noble material here is masquerading as regular old rice straw. Then there's something else. And this is slightly different. Perhaps a little bit further afield but also very interesting. These two baskets here are almost identical. Are a kind of reverse image. Are a kind of reference or something like that to the most recognizable form of Japanese surrounding. One of the oldest ceramic traditions in the world and baskets and pots of this kind. There are so many different examples but here on the right at least is one around 4,000 years before the present. And here we see in 1930 that artists are still using them as a kind of a reference it seems. A kind of translation of ideas from the past. And when you begin to think about these objects as being involved in some kind of dialogue things become more interesting. And in fact you begin to be able, I think to trace ideas across the realm of material culture. So you see a kind of dialogue between tree and bamboo, between pot and basket, between fiber and clay, between ideas of nodding, the techniques of nodding. A kind of internal dialogue between objects and elements across the media and through time. And between materials and forms between patterns and textures as if commenting on related ideas. And I think that this makes good sense in a way if we come back to the idea that these clay baskets are really about how to live here because Japan, like California, are territories which have been long inhabited and in which there's been a very slow evolution, co-evolution of food, landscape, or livelihood practices that on which people depended for very, very long time. And new things that arrived were integrated into pre-existing fields of activity without oftentimes completely displacing them. And so here we come in a sense perhaps to some idea or approach to the aesthetic potency or the aesthetic powers of objects. And I would suggest then that what we're, when we're talking about the aesthetic component of objects, what we're oftentimes talking about is their ability in one quick moment to link up different realms of life. To link up people's understandings of seasons at place, of everyday practice, and social experience, of the passing of time, and their sensibility or sensitivity to the ever present natural agencies that make community life possible. And the aesthetic effect or impact is really about leaping together of those different realms of experience and making it sensible in one quick moment. And the quicker the leap, the greater the excitement, the greater the aesthetic impact and the sense of significance and finally the sense of beauty. So as tools then, because they don't cease to be tools, we can see them in the sense of, in addition as the sense that Engel says here as clues and a landmark that condense otherwise disparate strands of experience into a unifying orientation, which in turn opens up the world to perception of greater depth and clarity. Clues are keys that unlock the doors of perception. So in the last minute or two, I just want to say something about these exhibits because none of this sensibility, not the landscape, and certainly no deeper kind of archeological history is present in these three exhibits, at least so far as I know. And instead what we see is a move in contemporary bamboo to this idea of abstract sculptural figure. And it's interesting to note that these are almost entirely purchased by Americans. Almost entirely, there's virtually no market for contemporary Japanese bamboo art in Japan. Almost all of them then comes from abroad, mostly America, although increasingly now with this exhibit in Paris in Europe. And the demand is mostly served by a gallery in Santa Fe, the Thai modern gallery, which signs these artists to exclusive contracts and in a sense promotes them and makes them able to sell their kind of work. So it has to be given some credit, but also tends to, it seems from some of their longer term artists, kind of track them into an idea like this one. And it seemed to me that this perhaps could be in some way similar to the impact if it indeed existed of the kind of canistermania under the California baskets. And that to me seems, if I may say so, a bit of a shame because you see again a kind of relatively arbitrary and contemporary aesthetic sensibility applied to baskets. And in the end, it leaves the exhibitions themselves, the Met and the Tomo as being, on the one hand is very gratifying to see these baskets, such beautiful baskets. On the other hand, you feel still something missing, something important missing. And it seems to me what's really missing there are the place values. The objects themselves become objects for contemplation by standards which are mostly informed by a kind of Western, an understanding of Western art history. And in that context, objects cannot translate their wisdom and their meanings are quite opaque. And it seems to me that they're converted mostly into only another commodity. And this in the world today seems to be a bit of a shame because you have in baskets, thousands and thousands of collected years of experience, of environmental experience that is still, it seems to me, present in them. And instead of speaking now to that history, you essentially develop a new kind of commodity, a new thing, a kind of clutter in an already cluttered world. And it seems to me that this is a kind of lost opportunity to get at some of the deeper meanings of material culture. I mean, while you're here, and you're going to be looking at the Hearst Museum and its baskets. So kind of just within a minute, so what's your kind of, what's your research design in terms of how you're relating these back to the Japanese baskets? I mean, so I know that's part of what you're looking for. Yeah, you know, on arriving here, I have to say that my initial kind of proposal for looking at the baskets here and comes off as a bit uninformed. And part of that is seeing that just how much material has already been worked on and developed on California baskets. And I really felt like, okay, wait a minute, time to back up a little bit and start to see a little more of the lay, of the land in terms of the basket literature itself. So I'm really interested to see some baskets, but I still realize that this is a vast world that I really don't know very well. So it's a slow down mode, yeah. So it's a learning curve along, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's interesting, yeah, please. Well, if you come to the Perse Museum, I hope you look at our Japanese basket collection. Thank you. As we recently got a collection of about 200 contemporary baskets that were made for use in farms. Great. And they've never been studied since we acquired them. Great. About five years ago or something, so this would be a great opportunity. Yeah, thank you very much. I love to take a look. Great, thank you. Thank you, thank you. Is that bamboo? They're mostly grass. What? They're not too many of the art baskets, but there are two bamboo baskets as well. By the way, in the last minute, I meant to do this, too, but I got distracted. Here's a contemporary wall hanging basket, to kind of show you a later version, made by Yozaru Jirou, who did that kind of open abstract flower sculpture. You see, he does what many, most all basket makers do these days, sign the back, and this is his kind of approach to the contemporary hanging basket. And it's made of bamboo? Oh, entirely, yeah, entirely bamboo, yeah. And return, the ties are returning, yeah, so. We had a basket twiever's presentation here, in January at Korea, from the Sukwon Museum. Yes. And we actually had him in Hokkaido to do a basket workshop. Right. What really impressed me was that, at the beginning of the basket weaving workshop, he said that 80% of the work is actually to collect the raw materials, and it starts with planting trees in the forest. So for him, it was really tied to the environment. Yes. And that made perfect sense to me, and yet it wasn't really sinking into me. So at the end of the workshop, we are cleaning, there are these tiny, like a couple of inches of leftover. And as I said, no, no, wait a second, that is very important. And that really made me realize, okay, even like a couple of inches of piece of a small grass rope is very important. So to what extent these artists will get that kind of sense, I think, how they get the sense of where the raw materials are coming from. That might be one of the clues to link their artwork with the environment. Yes, definitely. The different basket makers are kind of linked into local environments to different degrees. All of them are super attuned to the different qualities of bamboo, the different varieties of bamboo, and the ways that they can be worked. And in fact, when you begin to look at bamboo, in fact, this guy, for example, he's on Sado Island and he uses some varieties which are particular to Sado Island. And bamboo people recognize that right away. So no, we don't have a chance to work with that material. That it would be something that is very distinct. And some of those are, some of the contemporary basket makers are essentially urban-based, so they don't do the landscape practices. But many are out there in small villages and hamlets and they do manage stands of bamboo and they do that very carefully. So it really does take, there's a landscape dimension of the management of the plant. And definitely the same is true in bamboo that the preparation of materials takes much longer than the leaving of the basket except for a few extreme examples where the basket becomes extremely intricate and can take months, three months, four months to do a single work. But yeah, that is consistent, please. Is there, are there living national treasures who are engaging in that basket? Yeah, yeah, yeah, there are two now, yeah. And there have been, I think that there have been six in total. It goes back, those two early, those two great masters were both kind of too early for the designation, but the son of Rokansai Shokansai, he was named as a national living treasure and there have been a number of others from the Kansai and the Tokyo areas. So a few, and so they do, you do get bamboo baskets in those really in the national competitions and things like that. That's competition basketry. So those skills of being passed on, they take up rent as six and yeah. I don't know, one of the current Katsushiro Soho, he's awful old right now and he's not making many baskets at all, I believe. But regular basket makers do take apprentices normally and then there's still, there are two bamboo training programs. One in Kyoto, but the most famous is in Oita, sorry, in Beppu, in Oita Prefecture. And many of the contemporary basket makers go through that. In fact, the current Chikunsai, Chikunsai is one, two, three, four, five, the current fifth Chikunsai, who I believe is the great, great, great grandson of the first went through the bamboo vocational program in Beppu before assuming his title. So in the old days, you would apprentice from the age of children would start in the age of five and six and seven. And by the time that they're 19 or 20, they have all of the skills necessary. And from then on, it's a question of what they choose to do. But bamboo basketry as a whole these days is really on, it has trouble because people don't use flower baskets the way that they did. And as a consequence, this has become the new market. And it makes really good sense and Thai gallery, Thai modern, you kind of can't fault them because they have supported artists for some years. And at the same time, they're a little bit tricky. They have these exclusive contracts. And yeah, from the inside of the bamboo world, if you're not in Thai gallery, then you become kind of a non-entity internationally, which is a shame seems to me, but that's their model. I was wondering like, what's that little goal kind of benefit of sticking to the categories of baskets when it's changing quite a bit. And also like how interchangeable it's kago and baskets. For example, the German one. I was at the exhibit, it was drowned by all these other thermic. I don't even remember, like you said, it was so crowded. But also what was the Japanese title for it? Because when it's flat like that, it would occur to me to think of it as a basket, because baskets kind of like in my imagination has to have like some space. And I mean, it's like flat, it's more like a pouch. It was a pot, yeah. Yeah, I don't know. I don't remember the title in Japanese. It's Gojoumon Poshet. Poshet. But in Japanese, what was it? It's Katakana. Katakana? Oh yeah. So yeah, kago, most of these, I mean, okay, the question of is kago, these are not kago, these are obje. Right, right. That's what artists say, we're making obje. So yeah, that's a problem that they don't know. I mean, they're looking for a new market and if baskets are not the, you know, Hanakawa are not the market, it's not our baskets, then obje will do. If that's the new frame. But you think it's pretty interchangeable, like the Japanese word and the baskets. Kago. In English, yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. It seems to be the kind of, that's the way it has been done so far. It doesn't seem bad to me. But maybe I haven't done enough. Well, we did the Aino workshop. After we did that in Shirahoi, we went to Nibutani and their fabric waivers were very interested in baskets. For them, the distinction of weaving cloth from barks and collecting barks for baskets, that was still all part of there. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. See, the textile people, especially Japanese, our original textiles, because they were using all of these three materials, they're really interesting. And I've just kind of began to realize, oh, this is natural. These are the same ideas, in a way. And the knotting, and that's part of the reason I took the picture, it was not so fair, because knotting ends up showing up all over the place. You know what I'm saying, knotting is really, really important. So it's something that easily is over the place. Yeah, at least these things together. And that's made it tough, but I have two questions. Actually, the ispando baskets actually have a very, a lot of influence from, if you see the art of acid at this point, it's actually the tea ceremony. Yes. Yes. A lot of influence. Yes. So going back to the, you know, the modernization just began, just some of them, actually, some of the philosophy engineers decided to see craft art in everyday life, and art of beauty, for art and ethics. So that's kind of very different. Two different streams to understand how beauty it is. Right. So what do you think about this? So right now, this actually going to the much more, the art and aesthetics version. Yes. It's completely different, actually, the context from the, you know, the craft arts in everyday life. Yeah. So right now, you are trying to support the, I thought, but yeah. Oh. So how do you think about that? Differentiation of the beauty. Yeah. I mean, that, I mean, I didn't talk about the tea ceremony hardly at all. And tea ceremonies is, these things are, I wouldn't say they're right at the center, but they're certainly an important element within the tea ceremony. And they would have been used to set up little compositions of seasonally appropriate flowers as part of the entire complex, which would have been in both tea ceremonies, a kind of recognition of the moment in time, in the moment together, and chance to have a kind of social exchange within this explicit kind of environmental imaginary, in a way. And within the tea ceremony, there are two kind of separate tea ceremonies, the Chinese and the Japanese. And these bamboo artists begin to blend them together in terms that they take references from both kind of traditional Japanese, Chano-yu context, and also from the Sencha, the world of Sencha. And you start to see that type of thing in these baskets when the basket makers who are really trained and brought up in a market that favors the Chinese baskets begin on their own in a way to experiment with what they consider to be more kind of traditional Japanese aesthetics. And so you get this type of thing, which is, could have been used in the Chano-yu and the Japanese tea ceremony, but also could have been a regular everyday kind of mushroom collecting basket. So you see a blending, because within the Japanese tea ceremony, oftentimes you would use, you would see a kind of, and we could call it a preparation, but was really more of a kind of an honoring of everyday material culture, regular rustic things that would have been brought out of. In fact, one of the most famous baskets is the Katsura basket, which the founder of the tea ceremony needed a basket for a tea ceremony for the great emperor, ran down to the river, saw a fisherman with a fishing basket, took his basket, bought it, or took it, I don't know what, and brought it in and put it in the Tokonoma as the flower basket. So there's direct link, yeah. So it's in there, definitely, all of this, yeah. It's all ready. Well, thank you very much. Thank you very much. My pleasure.