John Toki and Some Reflections on Cultural Service
Richard Whittaker
“Why don’t you come to our symposium?” John Toki asked one day when I had dropped in at Leslie Ceramics, a business he owns and manages in West Berkeley. “You can have a table for the magazine.” He was talking about an event at the California College of Art where Toki teaches in the Ceramics Department. The invitation was typical of John’s generosity. Toki and others had arranged a day of slide presentations and hands-on demonstrations by Robert Brady, Lauren Ari, Doug Casebeer and Tony Natsoulas.
Leslie Ceramics, it happens, celebrates its sixtieth anniversary this year. Toki’s parents founded it in 1946. It’s become something of a local institution. I don’t think I’m far from the mark to say that every potter and clay artist within a hundred miles of Berkeley has some kind of connection with the place, no doubt an affectionate one. Discovering it myself over thirty years ago remains a fond memory, but my interests shifted away from working in clay, and a long time would pass before I stopped in at 1212 San Pablo Avenue again.
That happened about a year ago, when I realized that issue #4, which features a rare interview with Viola Frey, belonged there. The issue had been in print two years already when I walked into the store with several copies. Hardly had I made it to the counter before a familiar feeling surfaced. Nothing seemed to have changed. I was sent to see Joy, who handled books and periodicals, and meeting her marked the beginning of relationships with just about everyone who works there.
Around the Bay Area, I take the magazine into bookstores myself and I meet all kinds. I’ve been treated with indifference, with outright rudeness and, at times, with decency and sometimes with actual interest. Over the years I’ve made friends with the small number of bookstore owners and staff who have been willing to listen to someone off the street and look at what they’ve brought in. These small acts of attention can be significant, certainly for the individual who receives them. I once had a conversation with John Evans [Diesel Books] about this, about the part of being a bookstore owner that wasn’t about the bottom line. He talked about cultural service, something he’d thought a lot about. Running a bookstore, he felt, besides being a business, also included a cultural obligation, something intangible, but quite real. It’s a subtle thing, but one can feel it when such an attitude is present in the atmosphere of a place. It disappears as economies of scale take over and customers become the abstract ciphers of a demographic.
I once asked John Toki how his parents conducted the business, what was their attitude about it? He told me his parents had always gone out of their way to make friends with their customers. The relationships that developed were genuine and went far beyond something located in numbers totaled up at the end of the year.
It's coming back to me now, an idea I ran across a few years ago, that culture is really something like a web of feelings. A cultured person was someone in which the sensitivity to qualities of feeling had been developed. Interactions, transactions—all are grounded in the context of relationship where there is always an invisible element, feeling, present which calls both for attention and care. How to even think about such an idea today?
Suddenly I’m reminded of an odd moment years ago on a road trip. I’d pulled off an interstate somewhere and had headed into the parking lot of a Wal-Mart. Maybe I needed a toothbrush. It’s easy to picture the building, a non-descript “big box” with aisles and aisles of merchandise inside. Entering the stream of people coming and going, I walked in through the automatic door. As I stood there trying to figure out which direction to go, suddenly a stranger was standing directly in front of me. “Hello,” he said, with dedicated clarity. Startled, I looked at him. A mental case? No, a quick scan ruled that out; this was someone performing his job; this was a “Greeter.”
It’s interesting how much can happen in the briefest of moments. In a flash, I recalled reading somewhere that in the early days all Wal-Mart stores had greeters. Although I am not a frequent Wal-Mart customer, I'd never before seen one. In that microsecond, I was also aware of the incongruity of the moment, of the transparently corporate nature of this human gesture now being directed at me. And yet, in spite of it all, I can remember how this ritual enactment, bizarrely transposed, still affected my feelings. All these contradictions existed together in that one moment.
Perhaps for those who may never have had the experience of small businesses where elements of personal relationship form an integral part of any transaction, such things are not missed. Maybe it’s enough to have a big selection to choose from, good prices and a sturdy cart for carrying attractively packaged corporate product to your car, SUV or truck.
For such consumers, stepping through the doors of Leslie Ceramics might even bring a little discomfort. Nowhere is the detached impersonality of corporate enterprise in evidence. Rather, there’s some of the disorder that always seems to go along with living. A variety of announcements, cards, notices and other ephemera are always sitting on counter tops, or posted here and there in support of potters and all kinds of artists and craftspeople. And it soon becomes clear that there’s an art collection scattered almost randomly throughout the store, ceramic pieces the Toki family collected over the years— works purchased, received as gifts or taken in trade from artist customers.
It might take a little time for someone accustomed to a corporate atmosphere to get used to Leslie Ceramics and to make the transition from the comfort of detachment to the pleasures of human contact in which the unpredictable can always appear. Each piece of art on display represents a transaction rooted in some mixture of respect, friendship, affection, well-wishing, recognition and encouragement. These are some of the invisible goods Toki and his parents traded in, goods difficult to find and impossible to measure with price tags.
In the early 1970’s, when I was buying clay and glaze materials, I enjoyed the place without having met John Toki’s parents. And when I found my way back to Leslie Ceramics recently, it took awhile before I met John Toki himself, who has carried on what his parents began. But one day he was there and introductions were made.
Not long afterwards, Toki invited me to see his studio. He grabbed a piece of paper and began sketching directions. He was moving quickly, but I noticed there was no sense of hurrying. When he handed the sheet of paper over to me, I was struck by how clear the map was. Toki is small of stature, alert and friendly. I think of him as being on the quiet side, but that doesn’t explain how easy it is to talk with him. My visit to his studio supplied me with more contradictory impressions.
In an industrial part of Richmond, I followed a road that turned into a dirt path along railroad tracks. Behind a high fence of dinged metal panels, several monumental ceramic sculptures and a large steel boom and crane rose into the sky. Struggling with a steel studio door, I finally managed to swing it open and went in.
The largest of Toki’s stoneware sculptures stands at about twenty-four feet and weighs over ten tons. It took Toki several years to complete. Another one, now at the Oakland Museum, weighs five and a half tons. They're made in sections, fired and bolted together via engineering of Toki's own devising. John loves that kind of challenge. Building the crane capable of moving such heavy pieces was a special challenge, he told me. “I built everything here!” he told me with a sweep of his hand.
There was a note of childlike enthusiasm in his voice, one I recognized. It’s fun to build things, fun to build big things, especially when you have to figure out how to do it all yourself! Afterwards, when you’ve overcome all the problems, it’s fun to stand back and look at what you’ve accomplished— the simple wonder of it.
Several months later, I asked John why the grand scale of his ceramic sculpture? “To get right down to it, I just like them!" he said. "My dad always used to get on my case about that. He asked why I didn’t make smaller things. The big things weren’t practical. But I just didn’t want smaller things.”
As Toki continued to show me around his studio, I became aware of feeling good; it was contagious. At one point in our conversation, he mentioned, “I own another company, you know. It’s down in Southern California: Lockerbie Manufacturing. They make potter’s wheels and equipment.” This was a little hard to digest. It must have showed on my face because he added, “I write books, too, you know” and walked over to a bookshelf to pull a couple off to show me.
Someone else might have been bragging, but it didn’t feel that way to me. He was simply trying to identify himself. I remember noticing his eyes. They had a quality of focus. Here was someone handling five or six careers at once. How does that work?
The Symposium
I arrived early in the morning at the ceramics studio at the California College of Art. It was January 21st. The sun wasn’t up yet. Lights were on. The door was open. Somewhere in the building I heard footsteps, and a young woman came around the corner, Crystal Morey, an undergraduate. "John told me you could set up over there.” A table with printed signs was already in place.
Student work—greenware, bisqueware and finished work—was all over the place. Sculpture was clearly favored over wheel-thrown work. Toki and Arthur Gonzales, the department chair, are both sculptors, but perhaps the lack of pots was simply a sign of the times—the California College of Art used to be the California College of Arts and Crafts. I couldn’t help noticing that fifteen or twenty kick-wheels were all shoved together in the shadows against a wall on the far side of the room.
The CCA Ceramics Department fills a large two-story building and includes a gallery, over twenty kilns and extensive studio space with lots of storage and all kinds of equipment for working with clay.
As I was looking around, John arrived. Checking to make sure I was squared away, he headed off with Crystal. There were still things that needed to be done. Coffee and pastries? All set. How about the audio-visual? Check. Enough chairs on hand? Check. Power wheel ready to go? Yes. Raffle tickets? Ready to go.
Raffle tickets? Leslie Ceramics had donated several hundred pounds of clay plus several sets of glazes and tools. Industrial Minerals Company of Sacramento had also donated materials.
There’s always more work and planning for these things than meets the eye, but the work had been done and soon people began arriving. And before long, we were underway.
Robert Brady was first up. In issue #9, I’d published a few images of Brady's work and was especially interested in his slide talk. He took us back to his high school days where his friends, as he joked, were all misfits and troublemakers. It was there he'd had his first experience working with clay. Briefly shown how to roll out slabs of clay, his teacher told him “to make a teapot.” It was the door that opened into the rest of his life.
As I listened to Brady’s understated and often humorous descriptions, I became aware that something unusual was taking place. It was about sharing something very close to one’s heart. It brought back a question I’ve wondered about before: is there something about people who work with clay that makes them warmer, more human? I even posed this question a few years back on the ClayArts listserve. Here are two excerpts from responses I received: “It could be argued that one aspect of clay working, making vessels to eat and drink out of, builds a strong community. All clay people love using an object that was made by another clay person.” Here's another: “Is there something intrinsic about doing ceramic arts that would support this vitality? We clay people are anchored in mud and warmed by flames—vital? Damned right!”
I was touched by Brady’s generosity. It turned out that the whole day was like that. As I listened to Arthur Gonzales, the department chair, as he introduced each of the four artists, I was struck by the spirit of supportiveness in his own extemporaneous remarks. I already knew this about John, but throughout the day, something similar was coming from each of the four artists in turn. Lauren Ari was so transparently open and free with her artself that I found it a little astonishing. I began to regret that I hadn’t thought to invite friends to this event. This wasn’t what art school was about. Art school was tough, mean-spirited, full of empty, fashionable rhetoric and desperate rivalry, wasn’t it? How to explain this? Was it something about working with clay that was causing this lovely, generous atmosphere?
Doug Casebeer’s and Tony Natsoulas’ presentations continued this theme of openness, light-hearted sincerity and sensitive responses to questions, and the day ended with the raffle drawing. Nearly everyone took home something.
I had not been prepared for the genuine sharing and openness that I witnessed. The substance, the underlying quality of feeling so much in evidence that day, is another example of what I’m calling cultural service, but I’d be surprised to hear anyone else using such a term to describe the symposium. The content of the day, in respect to the special qualities of feeling set free in the air, belongs to an invisible realm that we hardly have ways of talking about. A trace of the experience may be left in memory, but without being named—given words, voiced—these traces quickly drop below the surface, forgotten in a way.
The following day, by chance, I ran into John and his wife, Pam Stempl. I wanted to tell him how the day had been for me. “There was such a…”—I paused looking for the right word. “The whole day was filled with something like,” —I paused again. A word suggested itself, but maybe there was a more reserved way to put it. No. The word fit. Besides, I’d started a sentence twice already. It was time to finish it: “What I felt yesterday, John, was that there was such an atmosphere of love in the room.”
--by Richard Whittaker; Apr 2, 2006
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