Jonathan Adler returns: The minimalist inside the maximalist

0:00I think the art market is constraining. I think that if you are a successful artist, you end up having to really zero in on a style. And your currency is dictated by how clear and identifiable your style is. So in a funny way, it's creatively constraining. Whereas a designer, the stakes are lower, but the ability to try and fail is much greater. Jonathan Adler was one of our favorite guests on the show. So we've been angling to get him back ever since. He started as a potter and now designs furnishings and interiors that are decadent, but layered with meaning and a great sense of humor. A lot has happened since we last spoke with him.

0:46He had a retrospective at the Museum of Arts and Design, which is the same institution who took a chance on him 32 years ago and sold his pottery. He's also launched a sprawling collaboration with Michaels, which he calls a Temple of Craft. We talk with Jonathan about what it felt like to stop making long enough to curate three decades of his own work, why he's grateful he chose commerce over the gallery world, and whether people really are trading doomscrolling for making things with their hands. Along the way, we talk about his father, the lawyer who painted, and why the maximalist you think you know insists he's a minimalist.

1:23Also, much like our last conversation with Jonathan, there are some instances of adult language and humor. So if you have kids around, it might be a good idea to throw on some headphones. This is Design Better, where we explore creativity at the intersection of design and technology. I'm Eli Wildering. And I'm Aaron Walter. At Design Better, our mission is to produce work that helps people like you refine your craft, improve your collaboration skills, and learn from the creative process of others. If you enjoy what we do here, the best way to support us is to become a paid subscriber at designbetterpodcast.com slash subscribe.

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2:19We'll return to the conversation after this quick break.

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3:29Jonathan Adler:Star Wars The Mandalorian and Grogu is now streaming on Disney+. What are you waiting for? Hop on. The must-see galactic adventure comes home on Disney+. This is the way. Our only chance is to work together. I like this kid. Always wear your seatbelt. Star Wars The Mandalorian and Grogu. Now streaming on Disney+. Read PG-13.

4:02And now, back to the show.

4:09Jonathan Adler, welcome back to Design Better. Thank you so much. I am so happy to see you guys again. This is the second time you've been on the show. We're fascinated by the work that you do, your creative process, your team, and I think ultimately creative lifestyle, thinking about creativity not as just a thing you do, but it's a way of life. Some of the things that we want to talk about today. And you have a really interesting new partnership with Michael's that we want to get into. But first, you went to summer camp as a kid. And that's where kind of the creative spark lights up for you, where you get experience working with clay.

4:47Tell us that story and what happened. I went to summer camp, I guess, when I was 12 years old. And I was a normal kid-ish. And I took a pottery class and I was just hooked. You know, it's many, many decades later. and it's strange to look back and remember this weird moment where my life sort of took a direction that I couldn't have predicted and I was just obsessed. And I turned into an abnormal kid and just kind of came home and just wanted to make pots and begged my parents for a wheel and kiln and they gave me one for my bar mitzvah. And when normal kids were doing normal things, I was in the basement of the house making pots.

5:38What was it in that moment that hooked you? Was it that you found a talent, that you were good at something? Or was it the mystery of what happens with clay and what you can make? Everybody loves clay. Everybody loves to make pottery. If you say you're a potter at a party or a dinner, you can expect to get bored to death by everyone's pottery stories because there's something very primal or primordial about the connection to clay it's just like mud so you know perhaps it was that childlike obsession with playing in the mud for me i was able to like see the matrix i would never purport to say that i'm brilliantly talented it wasn't that i touched clay and suddenly a virtuoso was revealed, the more I got into the world of pottery and the more I sort of grew obsessed with the very arcane movement realized in retrospect now, which is sort of the studio craft movement, which is a longer conversation we can have.

6:40I became sort of a complete and total fan boy of the studio potters. And I would imitate different potter styles. And I was really somehow able to understand what different potters were trying to say. And I'm happy to say that in my youth, when I was such an obsessive potter, I really engaged with studio craftsmen in a kind of uncritical way. I wasn't applying a sense of taste or style. I was more just like, oh, huh, this is what this guy's stuff is about. This is what that chick's stuff is about. And I wasn't really judging it. It was like a data input period. And again, it feels so strange because I'm very seasoned now, which is a word for very old and different parts of your life.

7:32For me, at least, they feel very disconnected from my current self. I mean, I suppose I contain multitudes, but you know, it was like this sort of dreamy, hazy period where I almost feel like I was a different person, but I'm so glad I was that person when I was that person because so much data and knowledge went into my little brainlet, was able to pass through my little paws. My adolescence was a dreamy period of becoming an obsessed Potter fanboy. And it's weird, but it happened. As a side note, you made far better use of your bar mitzvah gifts than I did. I think in our family, it was a tradition just to waste the money on something completely frivolous.

8:15Like I got a keyboard, like a Casio keyboard that ended up collecting dust. And my cousin got a remote airplane that he crashed, I think, on the first day. The bar mitzvah was a bittersweet memory because the summer after the bar mitzvah was just my mother handling me to write the thank you notes that a 13-year-old boy dreaded writing. It was so awful. It was just hanging over my head for an entire summer. Thank you notes. Definitely. So is it true that your dad was a lawyer, but also as a hobby, he practiced pottery? Well, my dad was a very interesting person, case study model to either emulate or rebel against.

8:54I grew up in a tiny farm town, as did my dad. And he was kind of an intellectual and went to the University of Chicago in this very important and intellectually dynamic time, I guess, in the early 50s. It was like Mike Nichols and Susan Sontag were there. There was this period of intellectualism. And he went there young. So he was brilliant and was an incredibly talented artist. He used to do all the illustrations for the school paper and stuff. And he found himself at a crossroads early in life, which was he could either follow the footsteps of his dad, who was a lawyer and then a judge, or he could embark on life as an artiste.

9:33And he met and married my mom, who was kind of an intellectual in her own right, I suppose. and decided to kind of have both a bourgeois and a bohemian life, but he decided he was going to work as a lawyer and provide a nice bourgeois life for his family and then spend all of his spare time making art. In some ways, he was a model and an inspiration for me because his artistic journey, if you'll pardon Oprah talk, was really about endless experimentation. And I think by choosing to make art a hobby rather than a career, I actually think he ultimately had a more authentically creative life because he was unencumbered by the constraints of the art market.

10:24And I think the art market is constraining. I think that if you are a successful artist, you end up having to really zero in on a style. And your currency is dictated by how clear and identifiable your style is. So in a funny way, it's creatively constraining. Whereas he would paint and sculpt and be interested in new things. And he was just always experimenting. I think about that a lot. I think about him versus me. And it's funny, I used to be in the basement making pots. He was sculpting or painting. We were kind of just mute, not talking to each other. He was deaf, so that was an element of it.

11:06You know, when I became a potter, I was at a bit of a crossroads of my own. I could either become a sort of art potter and try and go into the gallery world, or I could take a more commercial route. And I'm so glad I went commercial because had I decided to become an art potter, I think I would have been much more creatively constrained. I would have had to zero in on an identifiable style and replicate it, albeit with slight variations, rinse, repeat forever in order to have a viable market. Whereas a designer, the stakes are lower, but the ability to try and fail is much greater.

11:54We'll return to the conversation after this quick break.

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14:22Jonathan Adler:Star Wars The Mandalorian and Grogu is now streaming on Disney+. What are you waiting for? Hop on. The must-see galactic adventure comes home on Disney+. This is the way. Our only chance is to work together. I like this kid. Always wear your seatbelt. Star Wars The Mandalorian and Grogu, now streaming on Disney+. Read PG-13.

14:56And now, back to the show.

15:02I studied painting and drawing and there was definitely a strong push in my peer group that the real work happened if it was not commercial. You know, that you weren't doing real work if you were going out and selling it. And I ended up taking a right turn into design and making a living. and it wasn't that I wanted to let go of that, but it was just interesting. Like there were new things I could explore and it sounds like you kind of arrived at something similar, but I'm curious, the work that you've built, the brand that you've built, there's so much creativity in it and there's so much art history, design history, there's sophistication to that.

15:47It's layers. You don't have to get the layers, but they're there. Who wins when your personal vision and consumer appetite diverge from one another. And how do you think about legacy, which is maybe a heavy word here versus commerce, like how those two things can exist together or maybe not? It's an interesting balance. I see myself and my career in the round and I recognize the areas in which I compromise and the areas in which I don't compromise. You know, I've done a million different things and I kind of understand what the mandate is for each thing I do, whether it's something that's more commercial, less commercial.

16:29I hope that whatever I make at whatever level or whatever collaboration I'm doing, I hope everything I make is great and is an incredible value for money. I think about that a lot. Why is that important to you? You know, I've been very, very lucky in my life. I have been very, very lucky. I'm the luckiest potter alive and I've made some money. and I can kind of afford whatever I want these days, but I have limits. If there's a dissonance between the value and the price of something, it kind of makes my teeth itch and I don't want to pay it. If there's a sweater that I can afford that's$1 ,500, but I know that it really should be like$250, while the money itself isn't the issue, the disconnect between price and value makes my brain explode.

17:19I recognize that the things I make and the prices they sell for should make some kind of sense. I have a very geometric mind. I want things to kind of all come together and almost make mathematical sense. In the art world, there's such a dissonance between price and value. I confuse my own self and I have a lot of varying points of view as everyone does. But yeah, I guess in some sense, I'm a very, very fancy homme du peuple. And I find some of the extravagances and pretense of the art world very off-putting and pretentious. Yeah, so in a funny way, I think that something about the way I've done it and the cost of my stuff is based on how much it costs me to make.

18:10makes mathematical sense. Just to explain a little more about the art versus the design world, I hope this makes sense. I had my dad chosen to become an artiste. And let's say he was lucky enough to be successful and he zeroed in on his style. Part of the contract of success in the art world is that you have to replicate that style with slight variations, but not terribly prolifically. You cannot be very, very prolific because it could decrease the value of your stuff. So there's almost an enforced constipation. And I think for me, by rejecting that and focusing on making stuff, charging prices that are somehow in line with what goes into it, brings me up just to do infinity things at infinity price points.

19:01I would never suggest that I have integrity. I do not. But with my version of integrity. And there is a kind of interesting arc to your journey, which is your first sale was to the Museum of Arts and Design, which I believe was called something else at the time. And then earlier this year, you had a retrospective. So how did that feel given that you're kind of an outsider in that world or that wasn't your focus of your career? When I first was making pots, I called up the buyer at the American Craft Museum, it was then called the gift shop. And she took a chance on me. That was like a huge moment and a leap.

19:35I thought, oh my God, I'm selling my stuff at the gift shop at the American craft museum. How cool. And now 32 years later, I had an exhibition at the craft museum and it was just really incredible and heady. And it was a rare moment where I reflected rather than just doing, which is bittersweet because it's a sign that I am old seasoned, but it was also just an incredible chance to look at myself and look at what I've been doing all that time rather than simply doing it and sort it, create a taxonomy of all the different things that I've been saying. It was deeper than any therapeutic endeavor ever could be because the way I organized the show was into sort of different stylistic or thematic buckets that I think weave their way through my work at any and every price point from like a$40 Bud vase to a whatever thousand dollar thing in the jig.

20:38But it was really a chance to be like, all right, this is all the stuff I've done. I've obviously done this stuff because it sprung from something inside me. And now I can see the different currents in my stuff. And it was interesting for me, especially to see how my early engagement with the Studio craft movement has informed every single thing I've done. I curated pieces from the collection of the Museum of Art and Design and presented them in dialogue with my own stuff, sort of showing how the different strains of the craft movement informed my stuff. I gave everything a cheeky name. So it was like Authentica, which was a more sort of crafty craft, earthy kind of strain, which is in my stuff, to funk Iana, which is more about a subversion of culture, which is informed by the funk ceramics movement from California in the 70s, to Animalia, which was like animals in ceramics and art and how they found their way into my stuff.

21:45Just all these different buckets. Yeah, it was a great moment to reflect. So this is a really interesting opportunity for you in that it gives you this perspective on your work that when you're in this maker mode, you kind of make a thing and move on. But this is the pause button where you have to look at the landscape of everything you've done over the past few decades. And you might start to see themes and meaning in your life as well as your work. And I'm curious what that experience turned up for you? It was super heady. When I was putting the show together, my husband, Simon, could see that I was in a little bit of turmoil because it was kind of deep.

22:26It was like, what's it all mean? It was very interesting. It reminded me more than anything, as I've moved on in my life and become more of a designer, it kind of reminded me how much being a teen potter informed everything. I hope that I have created a paradigm shift in museum exhibitions, at least I should have, which is that I think every museum show should have to be a dialogue between somebody's work and the things that inspire them. Because I hope that in sort of the accompanying text and the plain visual language, I hope that I was able to, in some way, decode how an object happens. For a normal person, I think they see something and just kind of think it just happened.

23:12But the way this show was organized really sort of showed a through line between the inspiration and the end product. And I think if I were just a person stumbling upon the show, I would find it really interesting and cool and want it from every other show ever. Like I want to see how a painter arrived at their painting. I want to see the stuff that inspired them and be able to trace inspiration into the final product. Small aside here, but do you know Adam Moss? Have you ever talked to him? Yeah. We used to go to the same gym. Okay, great. Yeah, his book, The Work of Art, is essentially this deep research on that.

23:53How do people arrive at the thing that they're making? It's fascinating to see that. It's great. And I think so many artists and designers kind of try to obscure it. Not intentionally, but, you know, you're sort of meant to be a suey, generous genius who kind of just happened and sees the world in a unique way. But everybody has inspirations, both stylistically, thematically, and sometimes, you know, maybe there'll just be a line or a gesture that you might just crib from somebody, you know? So inspiration is a complex web. John, the last time you were on the show, we talked a little bit about your creative process and how you approach your craft and design.

24:38And you gave this example of Jeff Koons, who told the story of purposefully divorcing himself from the craft. So he'll have an idea and he'll get his team to execute on it because he doesn't want his interaction with the process to corrupt his original vision. but it sounds like your approach is different and you last time talked about a tool of Pierre which I think neither Aaron nor I knew what that was exactly but it's a lot of French a lot of French shout explain that to us and how you have a vision for it then you go to the studio and you craft something and along the way maybe your original vision doesn't change but how it turns out changes in the course of that process and maybe you could talk a bit more about that I saw an interview with him in which he said he stays away from actually making things because the process of making something can sometimes inform the end result.

25:27And he likes to be a little more detached and clear in his intention. And so for him, he said that having other people make things makes his ability to realize his vision easier. I think I can see both sides of that. And that's one of the things that shows up in that show that I did is some of my stuff is very detached intellectually driven and informed and some of it is process driven so i'm open to both ways of creating design i think it's good just to kind of know about the pluses and minuses of each approach the process oriented approach in which what you thought you might want to make might evolve into something different and better, or conversely, the more detached intellectual approach in which you're very, very clear about what you want to make and you don't want to get involved in the process because it might distract from your vision.

26:24One thing that's interesting about the craft of pottery, my wife studied ceramics undergrad and graduate school, practiced production studio for a while and then kind of took a break when babies arrived. And it's interesting, she still stays connected to it through YouTube or TikTok. And she has just noticed how much the craft has changed. And a fair bit of it is technology. There's a lot of 3D printing that people are bringing into it. As someone who's involved in the craft and also in production and you've been at it for a while now. Presumably you've seen technology really shape and shift what's possible, what you can make creatively.