Jonathan Adler's Ceramic Art At The Museum of Arts and Design

Jonathan Adler's 30 year career is being celebrated at the Museum of Art & Design in a show titled "The Mad, MAD World of Jonathan Adler," which looks at his ceramic work over the past 30 years.

Alison Stewart: When you enter the exhibit The Mad MAD World of Jonathan Adler, there's a timeline on the wall of the artist's life, and you get a sense of the whimsy and wit that you will find in the exhibition. For example, it says, "1966: Born in Bridgeton, New Jersey." That's fairly simple. Then it says, "1978: Tried pottery at summer camp wearing a Rush concert tee." Then it says later in the timeline, "1993: Creatively starved from three long years in a real job, quit – fired, to be honest – and returned to the studio to recuperate. Tells parents he wants to be a potter and vows never again to have a real job. Concerned parents schedule an intervention."

Jonathan Adler has spent his life becoming a beloved and busy ceramicist and interior designer. He has stores across the country and the pond. He was a judge on Bravo's Top Design, and now he has a museum show. At the Museum of Arts and Design, he has chosen 60 works from the museum's permanent collection that inspire him and paired them with his own pieces, about 90 of them. They are organized by categories like Authentica, and Optimistica, and Metallica. There's a lot to learn about Jonathan and other artists like Howard Kottler and Alice Adams, but ultimately, Jonathan keeps it real with a simple statement that says, "I'm a grown man who plays in the mud all day."

The Mad MAD World of Jonathan Adler is at the Museum of Arts and Design, and Jonathan is in studio with us now. It's nice to see you.

Jonathan Adler: It is so nice to see you, Alison, and what the listeners might not know is that we are old pals from college many moons ago.

Alison Stewart: Many moons ago.

Jonathan Adler: Yes, and when you said-- I loved your intro to me. The only problem I had was when you said beloved, because that sounds old. Beloved and venerable are two words to steer clear of.

Alison Stewart: All right, I'll steer clear of them, I promise.

Jonathan Adler: All right, good.

Alison Stewart: We're old, though.

Jonathan Adler: We are. I mean, it is what it is.

Alison Stewart: Think back to when you were 12 years old wearing that Rush tee. What was it about pottery that you just liked?

Jonathan Adler: It's funny. I'm not a spiritual person at all, like, at all. However, when I touched clay, it was just on. It has been my spouse, my love, my side piece, my everything for the last many, many years, and it's how I think. I just think in terms of clay. It's funny, when you're young, you think- I don't know, you think you can evolve in myriad ways. For me, it was just like, no, I'm a potter. That's what I am. I just knew. I never thought I could make a good living at it, so I'm one of the luckiest humans alive, but I've just pursued my passion and luckily, it has worked out.

Alison Stewart: What did your parents think when you picked up pottery?

Jonathan Adler: My parents were actually very supportive. I like to claim that I am sui generis and that I really am a self-creation, but the truth is I'm very much a product of my parents. My dad was a lawyer, but a brilliantly talented artist who spent all his spare time making art. My mom is a very creative and colorful person. They never taught us any lessons, or they were never Brady Bunch people. Part of that was also not telling us what to do. When I wanted to be a potter, they were like, okay. Were they sick of supporting me until I was like 29? Yes, but they also didn't ever say, "That's ridiculous. You can't be a potter."

Alison Stewart: What was your dad's artwork like?

Jonathan Adler: My dad was incredibly brilliant. It's interesting, when he got out of school, he really faced a challenge. He was like, I want to be an artist, but I want to also have a nice family. He might have made the right choice and pursued law and was a successful lawyer, but for him, art was an endless passion, and he wasn't really stuck to a particular style. I think that when you make your passion your profession, you end up having to stick to a specific style to make it commercially successful. I wonder sometimes if making art your career is creatively stultifying. I think about my dad a lot. In a way, he is a muse for me because in my own work, I strive to not be creatively stultified and to really just be endlessly experimental as he was.

Alison Stewart: We went to school together, but you spent a significant amount of the time down at RISD-

Jonathan Adler: I did.

Alison Stewart: -Rhode Island School of Design. What has stuck with you from the time that you were at Rhode Island School of Design?

Jonathan Adler: When we were in college, I always used to think the RISD people were like not-- I always thought we were better than them. Cut to, we weren't. They're better than we were. They're much more hardworking and creative and brilliant, and there's still so many RISD people who are amazing. I think one of the things that stuck to me was really being in that art school environment where people are doing critiques, and everyone gets together and criticizes things in a very verbose, overly high-minded way, and it's like-- I think one of the things that stuck with me is to try to not ever think of my work in the same way people used to do critiques in school. That's not to say I'm not intensely analytical, but I try not to get too caught up in it all.

Alison Stewart: I remember I took one course at RISD and the teacher took-- it was a drawing course. She leaned in my ear, she goes, "You might want to try design."

[laughter]

Jonathan Adler: Ouch. They're not necessarily so nice. My RISD professor was not exactly the nicest.

Alison Stewart: I read that. I didn't know if this is internet fallacy or not, but some RISD professors were not kind to you. Is that an internet meme or--?

Jonathan Adler: No, it's real, and I feel really bad. I had this RISD professor who I said to her, "I want to go to grad school," and she's like, "You don't really have any talent." Honestly, I've dined out on that story for the last 30 years, and I feel so bad for her. I don't want to drag her through the mud first. All I'll say is that her name began with a J and ended with -ackie Rice.

As I look back, it's quite interesting, and doing this MAD show has made me think a lot about that period in my life and about how my sensibility was formed and actually about what pottery was like at the time. This is going to sound weird and perhaps somewhat arcane, but pottery was actually like a very macho thing in post-war America. It was very much associated with abstract expressionism, and it just had a very macho vibe.

My work at the time, the stuff that I was making that my professor told me- that she rejected me for was actually not so macho. I was making these teapots that were inspired by Chanel handbags and rap music, and they were really quite postmodern and, if I'm being honest, had a little bit of a gay sensibility, which not all of my work has. I think that maybe I just didn't really conform to the norms of what the pottery world was at the time. Of course, since then it's evolved. This is a long time ago.

Yes, doing the show has really made me stop and think about what the heck I have been doing for all these years and what my sensibility is and how it happened.

Alison Stewart: How did the pop sensibility enter pottery for you?

Jonathan Adler: Well, I think it's a really interesting question. I guess, as I said before, I'm a very postmodern dude in the sense that I-- We're the same age when postmodernism was all the rage visually, in which it was a mashup, like visual postmodernism as opposed to conceptual, academic postmodernism. Visual postmodernism was about a mashup of different styles and a permission to sample and to just have myriad sensibilities, which was quite liberating for me. I think one of my sensibilities or one of my interests has always been culture and pop culture. I was a semiotics major in college. I bet you were too.

Alison Stewart: I was actually English and American literature.

Jonathan Adler: Oh, you were smarter than I was. Oh, I get it. I've always been interested in culture and communication, and pottery is a strange canvas for engagement with culture, but it's who I am, and I made it my canvas.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Jonathan Adler. We're going to talk about his new exhibit at the Museum of Arts and Design called The Mad MAD World of Jonathan Adler. It features his works and works of artists who influence him. You're at this job that you quit, fired, quit, fired. [laughter] You do have talent. Clearly, you have talent. What was the breaking point?

Jonathan Adler: Again, looking back, it's so funny because now that I've been doing this a long time, it seems like, oh, yes, it was fate. Not so much. I've had an extraordinarily lucky run. The breaking point was that I was a terrible employee, and I got fired from three jobs in a row. I was unemployed and unemployable, and I started making pots and teaching night classes at a pottery studio in Hell's Kitchen. I was broke, and I got an order, and I finally had an opportunity to succeed. Not to suggest that I didn't have opportunities in life; I just didn't succeed at any of them.

Suddenly, when I got a soupçon of success, I saw, all right, I have a chance to really live my dream of being a potter. I'm now going to be an animal. That was the breaking point, just like getting an order from Barneys and making the pots. Then I just entered this really crazy world where I just didn't even look up from the wheel for five years.

Alison Stewart: As we enter the studio, we get a glimpse into how you work or how you worked. You list five steps you use, no matter the material. Brass, ceramic. I hope I say it, maquette?

Jonathan Adler: Maquette, yes.

Alison Stewart: Maquette. Prototype, firing, sampling and ordering. Can you walk us through these steps?

Jonathan Adler: Of course. First of all, I hope people go see the show because it was an incredible thing to do [crosstalk]--

Alison Stewart: It's really fun, first of all. It's really fun, and I learned a lot.

Jonathan Adler: I'm so glad [crosstalk]--

Alison Stewart: We're going to talk about that.

Jonathan Adler: Yes, I think it's really cool the way I did the show, if I say so myself. I think it's the new paradigm in museum shows and everyone should have to follow my lead. The way we work in my studio, I started out as just me and some clay, and now I have a team who works with me, but it's still a craft-based design practice.

The process is we start with a little ceramic maquette, like a little tiny model with which I work out my ideas, and we have a dialogue. Then once we have a direction for something, then we take it to a full-scale model crafted from clay, and then send that-- Now I'm lucky to work in myriad media, whether it's brass, acrylic, but still, everything starts as a pottery prototype that we then ship to a different workshop around the world, get the sample back, critique it, decide on whether or not it should make it into the line. About 50% of what we make actually ends up being ordered.

Alison Stewart: Oh, wow.

Jonathan Adler: Yes.

Alison Stewart: When you're critiquing, what are you looking for?

Jonathan Adler: Well, I'm trying to tune out the noise, so I'm looking at it and thinking to myself, does this need to exist? My motto is, if your heirs won't fight over it, we won't make it. It's a very, very simple- it's a very simple rule for whether or not something makes it into our collection. I have to look at something and be like, you know what, this is cool, but is it cool enough? Is it something that if somebody were to buy it and then kick the bucket, would their heirs be like, "I want it. No, I want it. No, I want it"? That's really my very simple rule; if your heirs won't fight over it, we won't make it.

Alison Stewart: Somebody just wrote that down in our control room. [laughs]

Jonathan Adler: Oh, good. You should catalog all the stuff you have at home and be like, will my kids, nieces, nephews, will they fight over this when I kick the bucket? If they won't, jettison it, get rid of it.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Jonathan Adler. We're going to talk more about The Mad MAD World of Jonathan Adler, which is at the Museum of Arts and Design, after a quick break.

You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest is design and ceramicist Jonathan Adler. We're talking about his new exhibit at the Museum of Arts and Design called The Mad MAD World of Jonathan Adler.

Okay, so the second 'MAD' in the title is in capitals, The Mad MAD World of Jonathan Adler. Why is the second MAD capitalized?

Jonathan Adler: The second MAD is capitalized because it is the acronym for the Museum of Arts and Design, which is where the show is. The title just seemed to make sense to me because the show itself is about, really, a dialogue between my own work and the pieces from MAD's- the museum's archive that inspired it. When I cheekily said earlier that I think I've set the new rule for how all museum shows should be organized, what I was really referencing was the fact that I try to be very communicative. For me, it was really interesting to juxtapose my work with the stuff that inspired it, and to try to communicate to the viewer the journey of how people develop their sensibilities.

I think MAD, the museum, has always meant so much to me in its previous incarnation as the American Craft Museum. I used to go there in my youth and haunt the halls of the museum. It's surreal for me to be having a show there, but it's really getting into the archive and remembering how my sensibility was formed and how the different movements of, really, post-war American craft, which is a somewhat arcane genre, but it was fascinating for me to remember like, oh, I would see these funk ceramics from the '70s and they reminded me to be irreverent. Or I would see these beautiful Ruth Duckworth or Val Cushing ceramics from the '70s that reminded me to just strive for beauty and formal majesty. Or Judy Kensley McKie's animal inspired furniture, which inspired me to make animals in my artwork.

It's really a cool, I think, dialogue between inspiration and the output of said inspiration.

Alison Stewart: Yes, it was great. You got to dig around the museum's archives, and you got to see all of this great work. What stuck with you?

Jonathan Adler: Well, first of all, it's so cool. I would love to just be an archivist at the museum. Not really. It's a lot of work. What really stuck with me is that I've been at this now for 30 years and I've just been in it. I get to work, I have to deal with things. I'm an applied artist or a designer, whatever you want to call me, but I'm just in it. I don't really have time to reflect. Doing this show was quite a profound experience, and it took me back to why and how I started and what my influences are. It actually was fascinating because I realized that my inspiration and influences were set in stone early in my life, and my work has just been an expression of them.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk about a couple of different categories. Optimistica.

Jonathan Adler: Well, I did a taxonomy of my work and of the inspirations and gave each one a cheeky title, so the one you're [crosstalk]--

Alison Stewart: Please help me out.

Jonathan Adler: I will help you out, because they're all fake words. I think what you're saying is Optimistica, which is [crosstalk]--

Alison Stewart: Optimistica, yes.

Jonathan Adler: Optimistica, which is one-- the museum-- It's broken down into, I hope I can get this right, Animalia, which is animals. Optimistica, which is really about the joy of creativity in a sincere, childlike love for creativity. Authentica, which is my homage to sincere modernist artists who strove for beauty-- strived? Strove for beauty in craft and design and a sense of purity and materiality. Metallica is really about how much I love artists and craftspeople who work in metal, and about being able to work in a material that is more durable than clay, and being able to make things that are even more attenuated and fragile than I can in clay. Broadly speaking, I broke it up in my own mind into the two broad facets of my sensibility. The ones I just described, I would say are my modernist sensibility, which are very sincere and pure, if I dare say so.

The other side of the show, I thought of as my more postmodern sensibility. The categories in that were Erotica, in which I cheekily explore the human body, inspired by a lot of the craftspeople who did that before me. Americalia, in which I engage with the idea of America. It was a real thing in post-war American crafts to engage with what it meant to be American. Much of the art from that period, quite subversive and ambivalent. I'm less ambivalent, if I'm being honest. I love this country, I feel so lucky to be here, but I still engage with the idea of America in my work. Funkyana is the last bit in the postmodern section, which is about my love for, again, an arcane genre of ceramics called funk ceramics, which was a California '70s movement that was totally subversive and irreverent, silly, mad, fun, and reminds me to try to never be too serious and to be willing to subvert anything and everything.

Alison Stewart: The place where we get a little bit of an art history lesson is you-- to complement your own work, you take these things from the archive. For Authentica, you write a bit about the studio craft movement. First of all, what is the studio craft movement, for people who don't know?

Jonathan Adler: Yes. Well, the craft movement in general, it's a weird word 'craft' because it conjures so many different things for people. Currently, if you say crafts, someone might think you're making-- I don't know. Just like you might be taking pool noodles and making animals-- I don't know. It's like crafting is a just fun thing that people might do as a hobby. The art and craft movement at the turn of the last century, I guess, was the beginning of when people started to really make things with artistic intentions.

Really, what happened is, I would say in post-war America especially, or starting in the '30s and '40s, there became this movement of artists who were working in media that were not considered art, like ceramics, glass, weaving, and taking these somewhat mundane materials and turning them into an art movement, and so there became ceramic artists and weaving artists. That craft movement is what really formed my sensibility. Those were the people with whom I was obsessed in my youth when I was a teen potter. Nerdy as that sounds, it's who I was.

Alison Stewart: In your Metallica section, you talked about how you could make things that were going to be metallic that ceramic might not allowed you to make. What you put forward for people to experience is the work of-- it's John Prip-

Jonathan Adler: Yes.

Alison Stewart: -this beautiful tea set. Tell people who he is and what you admired about his work.

Jonathan Adler: John Prip was, again, a post-war, brilliant, I guess, silversmith, metal worker. I think what I love-- First of all, I think in the show, I included a teapot of his. That's because teapots are, to me and to most potters, the ultimate challenge, the favorite playground. It's like a specific thing, but you have to get everything right. It has to feel right and pour right. John Prip's metal teapot is like a distillation of what a teapot can be, and so I just had to include it because it's so perfect. It's just pleasingly perfect. It looks like it was meant to be.

Actually, John Prip is what I-- All right, so when I'm making things, I think my goal, in addition to making things that your heirs will fight over, is I want things to feel like they were uncovered rather than created, like there's a lightness of touch and that was like, yes, of course that object exists in the world, so that you're not overly concerned with the work it took to make it there, but it just feels light and easy and inevitable. I think John Prip's work has that feeling of inevitability.

Alison Stewart: In Optimistica, you made these beautiful cups and vases and they have circus performers on it and they're all about joy, but you say in the text, it says, "You have to be self-critical, have self-critical analysis to make things that are joyful." What did you have to ask yourself? What do you ask yourself when you're thinking about making something that is just purely joyful?

Jonathan Adler: Well, there's a lot of reasons not to make things in the world. There's both conceptual and commercial. You have to think like, God, does anybody really need a vase that has a circus performer on it? The answer, of course, is no, but you need to suspend your disbelief, I suppose, and just take a flight of fancy and think, all right, I'm just going to make this, and I think this should exist. That's the leap of faith that creativity requires. Then after you take that leap of faith, then you need to take it through all the steps to make it a commercially viable thing and to work on its own terms.

I really like working in as an applied artist rather than art artist because there's a logical, rational structure to it. Think price is not arbitrary. In the fine art world, price is arbitrary. It's like, I don't know, should this be $1 million or $2 million? In the applied art world that I inhabit, it's like, all right, how much does this thing cost me to make? What should our margin be? There's a really logical, rational structure to it, and I really enjoy that.

Alison Stewart: Then on the back wall, there is a section devoted to Howard Kottler.

Jonathan Adler: Yes, Howard Kottler was a ceramic artist, artist-artist, who I think is somewhat underappreciated. I mean, he's well known-ish, but he was-- I guess he worked mostly in the '70s and '80s. He had a diverse body of work that was sincere, subversive, gay, ambivalent about America. He captured everything, to me, and he's just one of my forever muses. I thought he was somewhat underappreciated, and so, yes, it's its own discrete section of the show. It's just like Kottler-ia, an homage to Howard Kottler, an underappreciated but really important artist to me.

Alison Stewart: We got a nice text here that says, "Great interview. Jonathan Adler is awesome, imaginative, and a real original wit. Thanks for putting his MAD show on my radar. It sounds great."

Jonathan Adler: To not know me is to love me.

Alison Stewart: [laughs] I'm going to ask you a question. You were quoted in a recent New York Times article and you said, "So many things I make fail."

Jonathan Adler: Bro.

Alison Stewart: Bro.

Jonathan Adler: Tots.

Alison Stewart: Tots.

Jonathan Adler: So much stuff fails, yes, and some of the best stuff I make fails. I've discovered there's no rhyme or reason to anything in life. Now that I'm done certain âge, I think I have realized-- If anyone ever were to seek my wisdom, which they'd be ill advised to do that, but I would say what I've learned is that absolutely nothing makes any sense whatsoever.

Alison Stewart: Just do what you think is right.

Jonathan Adler: Yes, and it probably is wrong. Who knows? I think that I just try to make stuff and tune out the noise, and some of it works, some of it doesn't, but I'm the luckiest dude on earth ever.

Alison Stewart: How do you balance being an artist and being a brand? This is the big brand year for you. You have to balance the two. How do you do it?

Jonathan Adler: It's so funny to say that because first of all, my sister always makes fun of me and says that her brother has been replaced by a brand, as if I've become a Stepford person, which I wish. If only. I think a brand isn't as introspective and tortured as a person. I don't know. It's funny. When we were young, the idea of being a brand didn't exist. Brands were Kellogg's, Pillsbury. Then during the intervening years, people have become brands. It's such a silly word and concept. I never really thought about it, but I guess it happened to me. I became a brand. Weird. Never saw that coming.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: They don't teach you that in art school. [laughs]

Jonathan Adler: No. Yes, it's very-- I don't even know what it means, but here I am.

Alison Stewart: What do you want to do next?

Jonathan Adler: Make more pots.

Alison Stewart: Yes?

Jonathan Adler: Funnily enough, it is something I grapple with. What do I want to do next? I've been lucky to make a lot of stuff. One of the interesting things about doing this show has been that it's actually gotten me back or even more in touch with my love for clay. I've always worked in clay. I still make the prototypes in my studio. I'm still a potter, first and foremost, but this has reminded me of what it all means, and it's that I love to make stuff in clay. That's what I want to do next; make more pots.

Alison Stewart: The name of the show is The Mad MAD World of Jonathan Adler. It's at the Museum of Arts and Design. Jonathan, thank you for coming to the studio.

Jonathan Adler: It was an absolute delight. Thank you so much.