- Once you're exposed to war, that kind of violence on that scale, I think it does change
you in a way.
That guy that went to the war isn't the same person that comes back.
That's a big powerful weight in your life.
My father was in Vietnam and my granddad on my mom's side was in World War II, and I joined
the Marine Corps in 1989.
I was in Desert Shield, Desert Storm, the Gulf War.
I thought that's how men became men was to be in the military.
I believed in America and I believed in the New World Order which was talking about that
we were the good guys fighting the good war.
- This will not stand, this will not stand, this aggression against Kuwait.
- I've taken part in things that I kind of question now.
I know that if things had gone this way or that way in a situation I would have done
bad things.
Because war is not like anything else.
I got out of the Marine Corps and the idea was to go to school and find something I like
to do.
I had the GI bill paid, covered everything so I kind of fell into art.
I guess coming back from the war, I wanted to talk about that a little bit but wasn't
sure how.
I started with drawing and painting but that seemed like too big or too kind of overtly
didactic or something, you know?
But the cup, it's a little thing, it's not confrontational, it's just a cup.
- Ehren Tool has gone off to war, witnessed the horrors of it, but instead of shying away
from it he's decided that he wants to address it.
I love the idea of him coming back and being invested in the material.
But Ehren has decided to be socially invested in what the message of his ceramics is going
to be.
And it's all shaped around this simple, humble cup.
- Why a cup?
Because I think the cup's the appropriate scale to talk about issues of war and violence.
And then the shape, it's just a shape that feels good in my hand.
And that's the way I want them to be used is hand-to-hand.
There's over 14,000 cups that I've made and given away now.
It is a vocation, right?
It's something I feel called to do is to make these little silly cups and give them away.
I use lots of different molds.
People will let me borrow their insignia and I'll make a mold and then I make them a set
of cups with their insignia there right on it.
Then a bunch of the other stuff is just toys.
This is the gas mask I wore in the '91 Gulf War thinking that the air was poison, and
now it's a toy for ages six and up.
It's kind of surreal to see how military culture is translated into civilian culture.
My wife calls my work war awareness art.
I'm not so concerned if you're for or against a specific war, but that you're ignorant of
what's happening is not okay with me.
I think when the cups are the best is when they spark a conversation between somebody
who knows what the images are and somebody who doesn't.
I think most people who have been through war, they don't talk about it.
So sometimes I think the cups can be that little spur to start a conversation that wouldn't
happen otherwise.
- I got like two pieces.
- My son's nine, and we still haven't had that conversation.
He asked me, he said, "Dad, how come you were bad "and now you're good?"
And I said, "What?"
And he said, "You were a soldier, right?"
And I just started crying and I said, "Let's go watch SpongeBob."
Because I didn't know how to communicate that.
I'm just putting decals on cups.
The printer I have has iron oxide in the ink, so we can print out onto water slide decal
paper and then refire the cup high enough that the iron oxide melts into it.
When I use the decals, I can actually get photographs of people and vets.
It makes it a little more personal.
Calling me anti-war, you know, it's not that simple.
I enjoyed my time in the Marine Corps, I met some really great guys, we did some amazing
things.
But I mean, the '91 Gulf War was a cakewalk compared to what a lot of the guys are going
through now, I think.
My job at Berkeley is all the technical stuff.
Loading the kilns, firing the kilns, making the glaze, making the clay.
I'm not the instructor.
I work with the kids, but more on the technical side of things.
There's nothing I do, I think, that is gonna change the world but there's nothing in the
world that releases me from my obligation to try.
I don't believe in memorials.
But I made the 1.5 second war memorial.
And it's just the cup being shot and the cup being shot.
If you wanted to watch it for everybody killed in World War II, you'd have to watch it for
almost two years, at 1.5 seconds per life.
If you want to watch it for the Americans killed in my war, you'd watch it for like
eight minutes.
Those cups, all those cups, could have gone unchipped for 500,000 to a million years.
But a little piece of lead found them and they're broken forever.
In the same way, all the war dead, they could have had kids and grandkids and contribute
to medicine or something, but a little piece of lead found them and all that possibility
is no more.
I think that peace is the only adequate war memorial.
- Crafts in the military goes a long ways back before World War II.
The military was trying to find ways to make sure that the morale and welfare of the service
members was being maintained during that period of preparing for the war.
So in 1941, Brigadier Genenral Osborn was asked to lead the committee on recreation
and community service.
- He already had an interest in craft because his sister was Aileen Osborn Webb and she
launches the American Craft Council in 1943.
If you have an agenda as much as Aileen Osborn Webb did, I'm sure Frederick had no choice
but to love and appreciate and implement such a thing through the Army.
- [Nolen] From that grew the arts and crafts program.
They initially started out with trying to provide recreation to our servicemen and women
while they were in barracks.
But particularly after Pearl Harbor, the program provided activities to those that were in
staging areas preparing for combat.
- One of the things that we don't really think about when we think about war is there is
a lot of down time.
And by providing a space where the military servicemen could be working with their hands,
all sorts of interesting things came out of that.
For example, Marines on ships were issued a standard trench knife, but then they took
Lucite and acrylic from windshields of fighters that had been broken and made these beautiful
objects that are just as good as some of the best 20th century design.
- At the same time, at Walter Reed Hospital, they're using art and crafts to work with
wounded men to help rehabilitate them, to bring them back to society.
Both the Army and the Red Cross focus more on the craft than they do the fine arts because
they saw actually therapeutic results from this work.
- [Nolen] Today, the arts and crafts program continues to provide that service.
They are located through all our bases.
People can go in and experience ceramics, woodworking, metals.
They get assistance and instruction by other artists.
So there are a lot of creative individuals in the military.