The Human Condition: The Stephen and Pamela Hootkin Collection Sept. 2014 | Page 25

language. He converts a charming pot that serves the
warmth and conviviality of tea while offering prayers of
luck and good fortune into something very different—
Richard Notkin, Heart Teapot: Hostage III, from the series Yixing, 1990.

tabletop monuments to man’s inhumanity to man. He
keeps some traditional elements, using sculpted nuts

over the elegance of a pot’s volume or movement of line

as feet but employing the modern colloquial meaning

in a handle or spout. Yixing pots were also singular, signed

of “nuts” as insane. Military Intelligence I (1989), which

by the potters with an impressed seal or chop mark.

he laughingly tells us is an oxymoron, is a triangulated

Identifying the teapots with an individual maker and not a

skull that he modeled from scratch. The finial is a

style or factory was unheard of in early Chinese pottery.

gun turret, handle and spout are bolts of lightning

Yixing is in China’s Jiangsu province, part of the Yangtze
River Delta and about 200 miles from Shanghai. It is

representing nuclear weaponry, and the entire piece
is clad in armor. This pot serves death not tea.

blessed with a brocade of natural, exquisite, fine, velvety

Heart Teapot: Hostage III (1990) is layered with meaning.

clays in a range of hues from pale beige through red and

First, the heart shape (again originally molded by hand)

into purple (Yixing means purple earth). In the late fifteenth

was inspired by the Buddha‘s hand fruit, a traditional Yixing

century potters began to make remarkable teapots from

teapot shape. Notkin combines the kindness of tea with

this clay that mimicked nature: rocks, wooden branches,

the symbol of the heart as a place of compassion (“have

nuts, and bamboo. They are some of the finest examples

a heart,” “heartfelt”) then subverts this to mean the polar

of ceramic sculpting in Chinese art. All these elements

opposite, “heartlessness.” Chains denote the taking and

had symbolic value so an owner of the teapot could read

abuse of hostages and prisoners and the almost-black

literally (in the case of poetry inscriptions) and figuratively

color is funereal. It is always surprising to come face to face

what the teapots were saying. They communicated

with these objects, their refined sculpting and immaculate

information to their public. And the tradition has

surfaces contrasting with the shock of their blunt message.

continued uninterrupted for six centuries to the present.
A few pots in this exhibition do not deal with history, at least
Notkin was enthralled by this work, its individuality, its

not ceramics-wise. Howard Kottler’s set of boxed plates,

messaging, and its scale. Small-scale, issue-oriented

Madonna Ware Set (circa 1968), take on the Madonna as

art was Notkin’s métier and the clay’s velvet texture

a Pop art image. Kottler was one of the first ceramicists out

suited his skills as a modeler. He is a politicist (not a

of the Pop appropriation gate, stealing images wherever

writer, but artist) and immediately saw the potential

he could find them, copying and firing them onto dinner

to reinvent these teapots in contemporary terms and

plates, suggesting an odd meal that might follow.

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