A proposal has been made at the Cleveland Institute of Art to fold enameling into the jewelry/metals program. The following is a letter I mailed to Mr. David Deming, the President of the CIA. I believe anyone who is concerned with the preservation of craft skills in the academy should be alarmed by this proposal, and interested in my arguments against the idea.

January 6, 2010

Mr. David Deming, President

Cleveland Institute of Art

11141 East Blvd.

Cleveland, Ohio 44106

Dear Mr. Deming.

I recently saw Gretchen Goss at the Philadelphia Craft Show, and she told me that the Cleveland Institute of Art is considering merging enameling with its jewelry/metals program. I’m very familiar with the CIA and its craft programs, since I taught jewelry at Kent State University from 1981 to 1991, and I count both Ms. Goss and Matthew Hollern among my friends. I also have a detailed knowledge of enameling, jewelry and silversmithing, having just completed writing Makers: A History of American Studio Craft with Janet Koplos. And, way back in my distant past, I once tried to teach myself how to enamel, so I know firsthand how demanding the craft is. I was a lousy enamellist, by the way.

While it might be tempting to consider enameling as an adjunct or subset of jewelry-making, it is not. It is a separate medium entirely, requiring an altogether distinct body of knowledge and skills. To control enamels, one must know all the techniques – from wet inlay to plique-a-jour – as well as the temperature at which every single color matures in the kiln. One must know how each color reacts to others, how they look when underfired or overfired, how they work over foils, and much more. This is not knowledge that can be transferred in two or three assignments while concentrating on jewelry-making. It is specific, and it is deep. It requires sustained practice and experimentation. In terms of education, the only way enameling can be done justice is to treat it as a separate discipline.

I’m sure you know that the Cleveland Institute of Art was the epicenter of enameling as a studio practice in the United States. Bostonian Lauren Martin and his students did a fair amount of enameling in early decades of the 20^th century, but they had none of Kenneth Bates’s obsession with the medium, none of his forceful curiosity about technique, and none of his missionary zeal to popularize the craft. Later, Edward Winter and William Harper made their own contributions to enameling while they lived in Cleveland, and John Paul Miller’s enameled gold jewels still astonish. The CIA has a central place in the history of the medium.

Study of the history of studio craft shows that the transmission of skill has migrated from trade and industry to college-level art education. Silversmithing, weaving, bookmaking, glassblowing: all were preserved or revived in academia, which is now the primary repository for training and information for each of these crafts. Luckily, information is dispersed across a number of institutions, so the closure of any one program does not threaten the survival of an entire craft discipline.

This is not true of enameling. Most of the degree-granting programs in enameling (Kent State and San Diego State University were the last two MFA programs in the country) have been shuttered. The last school to offer expert training, a studio dedicated to enameling alone, and a BFA degree in the discipline is the CIA.

Which brings up a question: to what extent is higher education responsible for cultural preservation? If an institution is the last remaining repository of best practices and comprehensive information, does it bear a responsibility to preserve the discipline?

I submit that it does. Higher education must answer to society’s highest aspirations. There is a cultural DNA that is directly analogous to biological DNA – and we are all aware of the dangers of the extinction of species. Enameling is part of our cultural DNA. Does the CIA wish to force the extinction of a discipline? While my rhetorical question overstates the case, you get the idea. The Cleveland Institute of Art is now the sole institutional conservator of high-level enameling in the entire country. Educational fashion aside, the CIA is the last keeper of the field.

Is that a liability? I’m sure some educators will tell you that it is; the CIA must change with the times; consolidation is necessary; the post-studio model is the future of art education. I beg to differ. The post-studio model is very fashionable right now. Art schools and departments rush willy-nilly to adopt it. But does anybody point out the downside?

As you know, John Baldessari was the pioneer of post-studio art education at Cal Arts in the late 1970s. In his graduate seminar, he introduced students to a system of inquiry and critique that was perfectly suited to the strategies of conceptual art. Mediums were freely selected to match ideas, and expertise no longer seemed necessary. But there were three hidden assumptions. First, students were assumed to have had a basic training in the visual arts and its mediums: the classic undergraduate education of the time. Second, conceptual art was assumed to be the most legitimate art practice, trumping all medium-based art forms like painting, sculpture or, for that matter, crafts. And third, all mediums were assumed to be disposable.

But what happens when the post-studio model is forced upon students who do not have that classic education? What if the students are undergraduates themselves, without the foundation in the visual arts that Baldessari could count on? And what if post-conceptual art becomes passé, as it surely will? What is left for academia to transmit if it has discarded its expertise in mediums?

An inherent problem with the post-studio model is de-skilling. Students complete their education without the knowledge of how to make things. At that point, their artistic toolkit is half empty. When art changes, they lack the tools – the skills – to adapt.

At the Cleveland Institute of Art, you could declare that your mission is to equip every student with a complete toolkit. Not just intelligence and criticality, but skills to give ideas tangible form. Every medium remains an option, no matter what makes it into Artforum. Artists will rediscover mediums and use them for their own purposes. Certainly, that’s the case with craft. Kids who are fed up with the gallery system and the pretentiousness of high art are turning to craft, and doing very interesting things. Have you seen microrevolt? Marianne Jorgensen’s pink tank cozy? If crocheting can be recruited for current artistic practice, so can enameling.

I don’t know what arguments will be advanced to justify folding enameling into jewelry/metals. Efficiency, perhaps, or declining enrollments. But you could equally well look to the history of enameling in Cleveland, or the role of academia as a conservator of knowledge and culture. You could stand against de-skilling. You could assert the relevance of craft for artists who are increasingly dissatisfied with spectacle, big commerce, and the dematerialization of art. You could decide that enameling is a program that makes the Cleveland Institute of Art unique, and use it as part of your branding strategy. There are many positives about enameling at the CIA, and I hope I give you cause to reconsider them.

Sincerely,

Bruce Metcalf

Studio jeweler and independent scholar

The Sunday New York Times (December 27, 2009) had an interesting article by Nicholas Fox Weber about a Bauhaus student who wound up working for the Nazis. It turns out that Franz Erlich had been imprisoned at Buchenwald as a Communist in 1937, and insinuated himself into the joinery workshop and began to design. Apparently the SS liked his work, for he continued to design officers’ quarters and furnishings for Nazi officials even after his release in 1939. The photo above shows some furniture he designed for an officer’s residence. (The article is based on a 2009 exhibit At the Neue Museum in Weimar.)

Weber’s article is headlined: “Deadly Style: Bauhaus’s Nazi Connection,” and he agonizes about the prospect of a Bauhausler in collaboration with the Nazis. He writes, “The thought that anyone connected to the Bauhaus could have helped promote Hitler’s regime or design its camps is distinctly painful to people who study or care about this extraordinary school…”

It’s odd that intellectuals who would dismiss the Ruskinian ideal of a moral component to craft could imagine that attending the Bauhaus would act as some kind of moral inoculation. Several prominent Futurists aligned themselves with Mussolini, and more than a few Italian Fascist buildings were designed in the International Style during the 30s. Even the Nazis, committed to a virulent anti-modernism in the fine arts, believed in the possibilities of industrial technology for the betterment of the ordinary citizen, exactly as taught at the Bauhaus. Dr. Porsche’s Volkswagen is one example. Nor were the Nazis above using the Bauhaus style when it served their purposes: the public spaces of the dirigible Hindenberg were furnished with ultralight bent-metal chairs derived from Breuer’s designs.

Which all goes to suggest that art, design and craft can be applied to political ends, even to the service of evil. Why would that be a surprise? I guess some observers fear that any association with the Nazis would contaminate the larger Bauhaus project. But I have always thought that the Bauhaus contained a potent strain of authoritarianism and intolerance, which eventually hardened into a kind of intellectual fascism. Its power has faded now, but anyone who remembers the response of hard-ass modernist architects to Venturi’s first postmodernism buildings will know exactly what I mean.

Weber’s article is a fascinating footnote to the history of design, and it raises some interesting questions. It can be read online at: www.nytimes.com/2009/12/27/arts/design/27webe.html?scp=1&sq=Bauhaus’s Nazi Connection&st=cse

UPDATE: Wordpress, the blog engine for CraftGadfly, was upgraded today from version 2.6.1 to 2.8.6. This upgrade was necessary as my web page had been hacked during early September of this year. This was probably possible due to security issues with Wordpress 2.6.1. In addition to the upgrade of Wordpress, special codes were added to encrypt “cookies” left on computers so that the login could be “remembered”.

As a result, there will possibly be residual effects for users who have created accounts on this blog (27 as of today). Some people may have chosen to have their computer “remember” their login name and passwords. If so, the stored name & password pairs will not work and they will have to manually log in the next time they try. It should work as it used to after they do this and have their computer re-remember their name/password.

Pair of rhinestone clips, American, ca. 1935

Two weekends ago, I spoke at a symposium on American jewelry at the Yale University Art Gallery. It was an interesting event with a diverse audience: jewelry historians, dealers, appraisers, interested curators, and a few jewelers. Part of the program was an opportunity to look at parts of the Yale jewelry collection. A curator provided background info and of participants got to handle the objects. For the first session, I elected to look at some examples of Yale’s costume jewelry collection.

I had no idea that Yale collects costume jewelry, or even that the genre qualified for scholarly attention. I was in for a surprise. A Fellow at the Gallery, Emily Orr, has done a fair amount of research on the various items she selected. She presented original advertisements for the majority of the pieces, and traced the evolution of American jewelry fashion. Normally, I could have cared less. But Orr’s depth of knowledge and the sheer weirdness of some of the jewelry made for a fascinating session.

To conclude the presentation, Ms. Orr took us up to the Gallery’s permanent collection, where a display of Yale’s American jewelry collection had been installed temporarily, pending reinstallation of the entire gallery. There was a 1930s Alexander Calder, a beautiful Mary Lee Hu necklace, a Robert Ebendorf. There were also necklaces from Stephen Dweck and Mary McFadden and a buckle from Mimi di N. Studio jewelry and costume jewelry (and antique jewelry) were all exhibited cheek-by-jowl. In fact, the costume jewelry was given pride of place: prominent positions at eye level, anchoring the arrangements of both display cases.

It doesn’t take a detective to figure out that Yale University Art Gallery regards costume jewelry and studio jewelry as equivalent. And why not? Both are forms of jewelry, after all. In the second half of the 20th century, the scale of both expanded, and both genres exploited all kinds of non-precious materials. Thus, it makes sense to exhibit jewelry with jewelry. To me, though, the combination was creepy. As a studio jeweler who spends months (or sometimes years) conceiving and making a single necklace, I have a hard time accepting that my work could be seen as the equivalent of mass-produced jewelry.

It seems every field in the visual arts needs to distance itself from a close neighbor. Painting wants distance from illustration; sculpture from statuary; art photography from commercial photography. In each case, a field is divided into high and low, pure art and commerce, good and mediocre. Philip Pearlstein is distinguished from Thomas Kincaid, despite the fact that both men make paintings. A Richard Serra ellipse is separated from a cast iron lawn deer, despite the fact that both are sculptures.

Sometimes, the distinction was obvious. In the mid-19th century, illustrations were wood or steel engravings, with none of the color and optical richness of paintings. But with the introduction of chromolithography, illustration came much closer to painting, particularly when the original illustrations actually were oil paintings. Fine art had a problem. Here was work for hire that was in many ways indistinguishable from high art. Two options emerged: make painting as unlike illustration as possible; or make illustration appear to be degraded – a “bad” version of painting. Among painters of a certain age, to say a painting is illustrative is completely dismissive. And so we have an intellectual tug-of-war in which illustrators like Norman Rockwell are regarded as kitschmeisters by a certain portion of the artworld, even as more liberal observers point out his redeeming qualities. (And even as most Americans love Rockwell’s work.)

The boundary between high and low is never fixed. Bodies of work that were once irrefutably low are occasionally elevated to a much higher status. Think of Weegee’s crime photos: once sensationalist journalism, now quasi-high art. Or, perhaps more convincingly, the snapshots Jacques-Henri Lartigue took as a child, which were later admitted into the photography canon in such magisterial exhibitions as “The Art of Fixing a Shadow.”

Despite such occasional migrations, most art fields maintain a tall fence between high and low. Most often, the distance between the two is based on a qualitative distinction, whatever “quality” might happen to mean. Thus, a Pearlstein painting is better than Kincaid because Kincaid churns out kitsch, which is of low quality. However, quality is notoriously difficult to define, and is usually based on subjective criteria, despite all claims to the contrary. A cynic would say “quality” is a marketing ploy: an effort to restrict competition by rendering massive amounts of potentially marketable material invisible.

Personally, I’m not very convinced by hierarchies. Instead, I see different kinds of work within most fields. Each kind is distinguished by a different set of conditions or purposes. Within Western jewelry, for instance, there is precious jewelry, costume jewelry, and studio jewelry. Precious jewelry is expensive, is often used to symbolize important life events, and these days is fairly static and conservative. Costume jewelry is made in relatively large numbers, is intended to appeal to an accordingly large audience, and often tracks changes in fashion. Studio jewelry is generally made by hand in small numbers, has its own distribution system, and is sometimes intended to serve expressive or conceptual ends. Each kind of jewelry can be measured by how well it succeeds in fulfilling its own purposes.

With more clarity as to purpose, each kind of jewelry can be (more) reasonably subjected to a qualitative judgment. Is there bad costume jewelry? You bet! If you have ever seen a commercial casting catalogue, you know that the low end of costume jewelry consists of every cliché imaginable – from bunnies to crucifixes – rendered without imagination or intelligence. Dumb shit for cash flow, nothing more. Is there good costume jewelry? Again, you bet. I have always admired Ted Muehling and 1980’s Robert Lee Morris jewelry.

I spent the weekend at Yale trying to complete an analogy: studio jewelry is to costume jewelry as painting is to… what? Ultimately, I decided on posters. Both costume jewelry and posters are commercial forms, intended to have a certain amount of graphic impact. Both are produced in multiples, and both are more democratic and populist than their upmarket cousins. And I think both are forms of design.

It’s well established that the posters are a subset of graphic design, which itself is a subset of design. To my way of thinking, a design is usually a plan: a set of instructions turned over to a worker (or a machine) for production. The final object, be it a chair or a brooch, does not typically require the designer’s physical labor, no matter how much he or she might have been involved in the prototyping stage. Think of Charles and Ray Eames’s early plywood chairs. Once the two designers figured out how to bend plywood reliably and efficiently, they turned production over to a factory, and moved on to other things.

Design is also about multiples. There can be unique prototypes and limited production runs, but the design project is oriented towards manufacturing lots of identical objects.

(By the way, I want to note that I don’t bear any prejudice towards commerce. There’s nothing inherently wrong with being a capitalist and trying to sell stuff. I object to waste and exploitation, but those crimes are just as common in socialist economies as in capitalist ones. Nor do multiples necessarily make for a lower order of art. Great design takes advantage of mass-production technology to achieve extraordinary results, from the way flat colors are layered to describe space and pattern in Ukiyo-e prints to the thrillingly peculiar forms of Marcel Wanders “Airborne Snotty” vases.)

Now, posters are frequently exhibited in major museums, and not just as ephemera that provides context for paintings on the walls. However, the intentions behind posters are radically different from the intentions of paintings and sculptures and other forms of “fine art,” and posters are usually exhibited in design galleries. The attributes I mentioned above are probably better understood in like company. Posters make sense in the proximity of similar kinds of work.

Which (finally!) brings me back to exhibiting studio jewelry and costume jewelry together, as they were at Yale. I have tried to establish that the two genres are not equivalent. Costume jewelry is more akin to design than studio jewelry (which is a form of craft) is. And while craft and design might share lots of interesting overlaps, craft and design are not the same. Sound familiar?

Actually, I think the Yale University Art Gallery understands both costume and studio jewelry as a form of decorative art. I have argued elsewhere that craft often shares more affinities with decorative art, classically defined, than it does with art forms like sculpture, painting, installation or performance. (Hopefully, my speech on the subject at the GAS conference last summer will be posted on this website soon!) Jewelry of any kind can be regarded as a form of decorative art, with the possible exception of the most dematerialized conceptual jewelry.

In my opinion, aligning jewelry with decorative art is useful. The Dec Arts provide context, history, inspiration and an interpretive scheme to the project of making jewelry. There seem to be quite a few jewelers who agree with me, as Lena Vigna and Namita Gupta Wiggers’s recent article in Metalsmith on ornamental jewelry suggests.

Yale takes the alignment of jewelry and Dec Arts to its logical conclusion: putting all jewelry into a single category. For the purposes of taxonomy and institutional responsibility, jewelry is one of the decorative arts at Yale. And yet, despite my advocacy for exactly this way of thinking, I was not happy.

I mean, there was a Mary McFadden right next to a Mary Lee Hu. The McFadden necklace consisted of tooled leaf forms cut from a thin metal foil, strung on a simple support – I forget if it was a chain or a string. I figure she was looking at Sumerian gold jewelry from the royal tombs of Ur, which have similar tooled leaves. The McFadden necklace is graphically very strong, and would certainly look good when worn. But it has no subtlety, no complexity, and little sense of the designer having transformed her source material. It’s all Pow! and nothing else. Which is fine as far as it goes. There’s a place for jewelry that goes Pow!

The Hu necklace, on the other hand, is subtle and complex. It’s a small piece of Hu’s lifelong investigation into the possibilities of wire, and represents years of research into inventing a new visual language from historical sources. It shows how jewelry can becomes precious for reasons other than the cost of materials. And there’s also an investment of care that is utterly lacking in the McFadden. For those who know what they’re looking at, Hu’s necklace goes far beyond its first impression. There’s a Pow! for sure, but there’s also something to think about.

I was bothered that these two very different objects were treated as if they are equivalent. They are not. The McFadden is like a poster – a potent one – but the Mary Lee Hu is like a painting, rich and layered.

Not coincidentally, I saw some great paintings in the Yale galleries, but no posters.

Granted, the installation of jewelry at the Yale University Art Gallery is temporary, and the curators figure their jewelry will be incorporated into the larger collection once the galleries are revised in the near future. And one could presume that Yale’s audience would be able to figure out the difference between the McFadden and the Hu on their own – but I’m not optimistic about that. Most people take what they are given. If Yale suggests that costume jewelry is pretty much the same as studio jewelry, most people will assume it’s true.

Throughout the Yale galleries, text panels explain the particulars of many of their paintings. Clearly, the curators believe some teaching is called for. There’s a difference between the Fauves and the Nabis, for instance, and part of the purpose of the institution is to explain such differences.

Studio craftspeople work hard to go beyond ordinary things – the plates and vases and clothing and jewelry that cascade out of the malls and into our lives. Craft might share a common root with everyday functional objects, but it heads off in a different direction. Great craft is always extraordinary. It’s layered. It carries on a discussion with history, instead of just quoting it. And, as I said, great craft is invested with a measure of care that mass-produced objects just cannot have.

I don’t mind that the Yale University Art gallery exhibits costume jewelry, not at all. However, I was annoyed that different kinds of jewelry were treated as if they were all the same. I hope Yale’s curators see an opportunity for teaching here. Will they apply the same kind of scholarship to their jewelry collection that they devote to painting? We’ll find out soon enough.

There’s an interesting little book now available from the Museum of Contemporary Craft: Garth Clark’s “How Envy Killed the Crafts Movement: An Autopsy in Two Parts.” (It’s a print-on-demand title from Lulu.com for $9.00 plus shipping.) In many ways, Garth and I agree. I have long been accusing the craftworld of art envy, and I have long been saying that craft needs to find its own subjects and critical vocabulary. But death? The end of craft as we know it? Clark overstates the case.

I respect Garth Clark, and I have known him for a long time. He is a deeply critical thinker, dating back to the time when skepticism was almost a sin. But I think he has grown increasingly out of sync with the times. His thinking has turned towards establishing a craft canon and identifying masterpieces of craft. Huh? These ideas are wildly unfashionable, probably for good reasons. And in conversation, he has been sounding the death knell for crafts for the past five years at least.

In his essay, Garth identifies a few key signs of craft’s death. One was the American Craft Museum’s abandonment of the word “craft,” opting for “arts and design” instead. Furthermore, he accuses the American Craft Council of irrelevance, especially considering the program at their 2006 conference in Houston. He says these two institutions are craft’s leadership, and their corruption is a sure sign that the heart of craft has flatlined.

In response, I have to point out that the presumed leadership does not constitute the field. MAD and the ACC were flagships, to be sure, but neither institution had been particularly relevant for many years. The ACC was dead in the water for a decade or more. The organization showed some signs of life when Carmine Branagan was Executive Director, but that opportunity was blown when she left in 2007. Beset by funding troubles and a board with neither vision nor serious money, the ACC faces a very uncertain future. As for MAD, they haven’t been much of an advocate for craft since Holly Hotchner took over.

It’s too bad, but it’s not a big deal.

The ACC was a dominant player in the 50s and 60s, before the rise of the medium organizations. The ACC used to run the only national conferences in the biz, and later its regional councils were the only alternative. But now there’s NCECA and SNAG and GAS and ABANA and the Handweaver’s Guild and the FS and two groups for woodturners and many others besides. Similarly, Craft Horizons used to be the only studio craft magazine, but now there are more than a dozen if you include foreign publications. While the ACC continues to be the only public face for the entirety of craft, there are plenty of active craft ghettoes. The ACC’s illness is no indication that the larger body is sick unto death, not at all.

As for MAD, it isn’t the only player in the field either. In a delicious irony, the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland adopted the name the ACC discarded years ago, and they are doing very well, thank you. The Mint Museum of Craft + Design will continue as a boutique museum within the larger Mint Museum, and the Fuller Museum in Brockton has shifted its emphasis to entirely craft. Regional museums like the Racine Art Museum and the Bellevue Arts Museum have very strong craft components, and major encyclopedic museums in Boston, Houston and Philadelphia now have curators dedicated to advancing craft. While it’s unfortunate that craft lost its advocate in New York City, there is more museum support for craft than ever.

Pretty lively for a corpse.

I think Garth makes another mistake: he assumes there’s a “craft movement.” That’s like saying there’s a painting movement, or a photography movement. No such thing exists.

Like all fields of visual production, studio craft consists of more than one kind. On one side, the field shades into high-end trades like faux finish painting or custom cabinetry. On another, it merges with punk DIY. On another side, fine art. On another, design. This is the age of pluralism, and craft is resolutely plural. To say that there is a single craft movement is wrong-headed. That might have been the case a century ago, but now it’s a misrepresentation.

One of Garth’s points is that really interesting craft is now readily accepted in the art marketplace. The prejudice that used to force a hard segregation between art and studio craft has eroded. Kathy Butterly, Judith Schaechter and Josiah McElheny all do well these days, with or without an accompanying craft identity. If that’s the case, he reasons, why keep a wall around the field? Good work is not a just matter of medium or of identity, but of intelligence and invention.

Is art envy a problem for craft? It is, I think – but for reasons that have more to do with education than the practice. Craftspeople have been ambitious to make art – usually meaning sculpture – since the 60s. Furthermore, some very good work has come of the impulse to merge art and craft. (Along with a LOT of junk.) But art envy didn’t kill craft forty years ago, and it won’t kill craft now. So hold those funeral plans. Garth Clark might have the coffin all ready to go, but the stiff is busy making stuff.

November 4, 2009

I managed to see the Ron Arad exhibit at MoMA recently. The show was quite a production – clear evidence of the status that star designers can rise to in the MoMA pantheon. The organizers must have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on the installation. It was a large mobius-strip-like structure made of stainless-steel boxes, each one individually shaped and fitted into a curvy grid. The whole thing must have been 70 or 80 feet long and maybe 15 feet tall. Chairs and other objects fit into the boxes, projecting shadows on a fabric surface wrapped around the whole thing. It was spectacular, to say the least.

Arad started off making hand-made objects. His first notable designs were consumer items like stereos embedded in artfully eroded concrete (1983) and later chunky welded chairs in polished sheet metal (1988). At the time they were never presented as craft, always as design. It helped in making that case that Arad used any number of mediums, so he could never be pigeonholed as a welder or a concrete guy. Over the years, he graduated to high-style and high-tech.

His current designs exploit both digital design and rapid-prototyping technologies. It’s especially interesting to compare his RP outputs to work done on the same machines, but emerging from craft-based programs in the U.S. Arad’s designs are much more wide-ranging, dealing with formats as varied as vessels, chairs, interior design and architectural models. There can be no doubt that Arad is unafraid to design anything.

One amusing design, rendered in epoxy resin, is called “Coupe Banana Bowl.” Arad wrote out the phrase “Not made by hand,” which was then extruded in a concave form via digital and RP technology. Only one end of the bowl can be read; the rest appears to be entirely abstract. It was produced in an edition for a gallery in the Netherlands.

Arad’s central focus has been on seating, especially chairs. His “Big Easy” armchair is widely known. It looks like a Tex Avery cartoon of an easy chair, with exaggerated arms and sharp edges. More recent designs riff on rocking chairs and chaise longues.

For all their inventiveness, Arad’s chairs work largely because they stay within the envelope. Even his conceptual chairs are recognizable as chairs, and do not stand as pure abstract forms. The thrill of an Arad chair is that we can see how much he departs from the familiar typeform. An Arad chair carries enough of the signifiers of “chair” to remain legible as a chair, while simultaneously giving us something new, surprising, or outlandish. But he never throws the context away completely. Without our knowledge of the history of chairs lurking in the background, the restless invention in Arad’s chairs would be illegible.

In a sense, maybe he’s more like a craftsperson than an artist. He’s loyal to his forms, the same way many people in the crafts are loyal to their mediums.

Still, Arad gets his artworld cred by working in any number of forms, as I noted above. His fearlessness sets him apart from the majority of craftspeople, especially older makers like me. I’m narrow: these days I make only jewelry. (I used to fool around with other forms like hollowware, furniture, sculpture, drawing and photography, but not anymore.)

Because Arad uses so many mediums, he offers a challenge to craftspeople who limit themselves to one medium. For instance, to the furniture-maker, he asks: Why just wood? Why ignore the astonishing possibilities offered by RP, carbon fiber, LEDs, and who knows what else? Arad exhibits an active curiosity about new materials. Those who choose to limit themselves to wood (or clay, or glass, or metal, or textiles) ought to have an answer for Arad’s challenge.

One of the oddities of the Arad exhibit is that museum-goers could not sit in most of the chairs and chaises on display. In fairness, a museum’s charge is to preserve the objects put under its protection, so they have to remain untested, remote. MoMA installed two Arad modular seating units outside the entrance to the show, though. I sat on one (“Do-La-Res,” 2008) and it was uncomfortable.

To what degree is comfort necessary to a chair? Frank Lloyd Wright designed any number of tortuous chairs, and yet we still celebrate them. Why, exactly? I think it’s because we celebrate invention. We appreciate departure from the norm, even if the results are ambivalent. I remember trying to sit on one of Mark Newsome’s “Lockheed Lounge” chairs, and it was practically impossible. You slid right off the thing. For all its weakness as a functional object, it remains a memorable variation on the chaise longue. Comfort is fine in its place, but so is discomfort.

Big proviso here, though. MoMA’s design collection is founded on several firm and relatively fixed principles, which go all the way back to the 1934 “Machine Art” exhibition. Absence of applied ornament is one (with an exception made for textiles). Sound usefulness is another. Industrial fabrication (or its appearance) is a more recent addition to the canon. MoMA has long collected objects that embody these principles: the helicopter in the light well, the Ferrari racing car in the educational wing. Furthermore, MoMA aggressively excludes objects that don’t conform to its principles. Try finding wallpaper with a representational pattern in the MoMA collections. Or whimsical design, like Kid Robot toys. Or anything produced in the past 15 years that comes out of the studio craft context.

That being the case, what does one make of the early Arad chairs that were strictly handmade? Or the sexy forms that bear only the most tenuous relationship to function, like the corrugations in his “Ripple” chairs or the vast 3-D grids that he proposes for interiors? The truth is, many of Arad’s designs (or parts of them) are blatantly decorative: useless elaborations applied to designs simply because they look great. Arad’s decoration is acceptable to the stodgy powers within MoMA.

Which is great, because the design world is already there. High-end designers like Marcel Wanders and high-end stores like Moss embraced decoration years ago. Artists like Ryan McGinness revel in it. Now Ron Arad has been officially anointed by MoMA, in an act of bold hypocrisy. (Not his, but MoMA’s.) Arad shows what the decorative arts look like right NOW: inventive, smart, lightly ironic, often funny, often implicated in new technologies. Anyone who has the slightest interest in ornament needs to watch closely.

September 15, 2009

Last week, I opened my first solo exhibit of new work in eight years. That’s too long for a working artist. I’ve been busy with other things – I did manage to write half a book and help put together a major traveling retrospective, after all. I also lost two important gallery affiliations (Cummins and Drutt) about 2003. So this new show at Snyderman Gallery is a big deal.

Rick Snyderman took a risk when he offered me his street-level gallery. It’s a big space: 13 foot ceilings; two large blank walls; and lots of acreage in between. It’s the kind of room that furniture does well in. I’m pretty sure Rick worried that jewelry might be dwarfed in there. I worried about it too. I was used to tiny spaces like Helen Drutt’s back room. She had two cases with self-contained lighting. 10 or 15 brooches could fit comfortably in those cases, and everything was tidy and clearly demarcated. Jewelry was always in the back of the gallery, tucked away in boxes, with ceramics up front in the light.

Sculptors used to talk about “activating space.” I find that phrase a bit suspect – I think they meant that artwork should be big enough to not feel small when it’s on display. So what do you do when the objects on display are small? In the wrong conditions, small objects in big rooms look dinky.

I was lucky that I had a fair amount of work on hand that had never been exhibited in Philadelphia. Some of it goes back to 2002, which means it’s not exactly fresh. Luckily, the older work is visually consistent with my recent jewelry. In the end, I edited out only two older brooches. I have also been more productive in recent moths, and I had about a dozen fairly new pieces. In all, I was able to scrape together 36 brooches and necklaces, which is a lot for me. Most of my solo shows have consisted of 10 to 15 pieces of jewelry, no more.

Snyderman asked me to build closed wall cases for all my necklaces. I wasn’t thrilled with the prospect, but he was concerned about security. The crowds that show up for First Friday, the opening night, were a particular concern. So I had 10 deep boxes built, compete with hinged Plexiglass doors and magnetic catches. (My fabricator is a local woodworker named John Staack. He does very good work, and delivered everything on time and on budget.) I then made plaster torsos, which I mounted in the boxes. The boxes expand the scale of the necklaces while simultaneously giving a schematic indication of the body. They’re are handsome enough, and hopefully buyers will want to use them for display in their homes. We’ll see about the last part, though.

I then built 14 small panels to display brooches. Each panel is fitted with a brass mount that holds the brooch one inch off the surface, so it appears to float in space. Four brooches had such neutral colors that they just died in front of the natural birch plywood, so I painted four panels a light lime green. (It took me two days and five attempts to get the right green. What a pain!)

For drama, I asked to have the shorter of Snyderman’s walls painted bright blue. After placing the cases and panels, I spent three days drawing on the walls. (White Conté crayons on the blue wall, and graphite on the white wall.) For the most part, I drew objects from the history of decorative arts that had inspired details of several pieces. Among them were a decorative border from a Kelmscott Press book by William Morris, a Chinese jade disk of a dragon and a phoenix, an Italian heraldic lion, and an acanthus motif. Some drawings were adjacent to the jewelry in question, so an observer could figure out the relationship pretty easily. Other images functioned more as context: a Baroque gold and ruby necklace; an image of Hans Bellmer’s doll. My intention was to place my jewelry in the lineage of both art and ornament, but with a heavy emphasis on the decorative arts.

The drawings also “activated the space” nicely, so they served a formal function. It’s possible that most people won’t understand the relationships of drawings to jewelry, and won’t speculate about their sources in the dec arts. Still, I’m pleased that the information is there, and I know a few observers figured it out right away, Plus, I resisted the temptation to tell people what I mean. I briefly considered extensive hand-lettered text on the walls. But in retrospect that probably wasn’t the best idea, considering that I tend to over-explain.

Considering the vast scale, wide-ranging associations and often crude craftsmanship of contemporary installations, my exhibition display is pretty conservative. At the same time, it’s pretty ambitious for an American jewelry show. Jewelers have to figure how to get out of those damn display cases. European jewelers have been tackling the problem for decades, and Ruudt Peters is probably the most adept at breaking out of the box. But still, I was pleased with the complexity of the Snyderman installation. Maybe next time I’ll try something more courageous.

September 10, 2009

Faythe Levine and Cortney Heimerl’s book is a fair snapshot of the state of the indie-craft movement. I assume it’s an outgrowth of Levine’s movie of the same name, which I have not seen. The book is more of an appreciation than a commentary. Everything is upbeat and positive: there’s no critical analysis or historical context. In a sense, the book appears to be an accurate mirror of the whole movement.

Indie-craft is a truly democratic (democraftic?) phenomenon. It has grown up without help from the established craftworld like the ACC, the medium organizations or the schools. If anything, the craft establishment continues to resist indie-craft. The ACC makes half-hearted attempts to promote indie-crafters at the Baltimore show, but imposes rules like forbidding the sale of tee shirts. Such restrictions deny the basic values of the movement, and make the exhibitors seem like pale imitations of themselves. Virtually all the college craft teachers I know disparage the work they see on Etsy.com and at indie-craft fairs, if they have bother to look at all.

But indie-craft does not represent the values of the craft establishment. If anything, indie-craft is more true to the original vision of William Morris. Art for all, not just for the few. Pleasurable labor. Environmental responsibility. These are the virtues of craft that Morris envisioned more than a century ago, and it’s fascinating that they have spontaneously re-emerged in the 21st century.

Aesthetes and connoisseurs will probably be appalled by Handmade Nation. If so, they’re missing the point. This book is not about great works of art. It’s about a collective response to modern society, and the thousands of young people who hope to align handwork and morality once more.

Handmade Nation presents an informal view of indie-craft from the inside. I ignored the cheerleading and tried to see the larger trends in operation here. For instance, all the work presented in the book is made as production items at fairly low price points, and that’s consistent with the aims of the makers. Not only do most of them appear to make a living, but they sincerely want to get their work into the lives of ordinary people. Most reject the gallery system, and most seem to reject the idea of craft as a precious object to be displayed on a pedestal. Many speak of the beneficial impact of handmade craft: green, locally produced, good for community building, and vigorously anti-corporate.

It’s hard to determine if these impacts are real or imagined. One has to wonder if you can save the world by buying handmade stuff. It’s still consumerism, after all. I suppose the idea is that people will consume clothing and handbags and jewelry no matter what, so these objects might as well be produced in a way that creates a decent quality of life for the makers and are, in many ways, ecologically responsible. Some of the most persuasive indie-crafts are made of recycled material, like Emily Kircher’s crocheted rugs.

I think indie-craft often trades in symbolic gestures, more than measurable social improvement. The problem with political art is that it usually effects no real social change, despite its best intentions. If the goal is to cause change, isn’t it futile to try when the project is probably doomed from the outset? This is the criticism commonly leveled against political art. But Arthur Danto proposed an alternative view: that art can present a picture of the world as it should be, not as it is, and that picture stands as an exemplar and aspiration to all. This art is symbolic because it stands for change rather than causes it, and is a gesture because it is aware of it’s own ineffectiveness. And I think that’s OK. Much of the best art in the world stands as symbolic gestures. Did Picasso’s “Guernica” stop a single person from dying in the Spanish Civil War? Probably not. But it is now regarded as one of the most potent anti-war paintings ever done.

Or, perhaps indie-crafters realize that most social change occurs in tiny increments. Massive change occurs when these small gestures are repeated by thousands, then millions. This is exactly the logic behind Wal-Mart’s concerted effort to market compact florescent light bulbs. An environmentalist persuaded Wal-Mart execs that the incremental energy reduction of one CFL bulb, multiplied by millions, had a major environmental impact in energy savings. And he was right. Wal-Mart’s marketing muscle is now saving the U.S. many thousands of barrels of oil every day. Thus, the lofty goals of indie-crafters may not be so unrealistic as it seems. It all depends on the multiplier.

If I could, I would like to ask Levine and Heimerl a few questions.  First, where are the men? Every crafter in the book was a woman. This is not an accurate representation: in my travels around indie-craft fairs, I see a modest number of men. But still, more than 80% are women. Why? Has the entrepreneurial spirit become the property of young women only? Are young men not as interested in making as women? Are men so seduced by their sense of entitlement that they no longer want to take on the discipline that craft demands? What’s going on here?

Second, what’s the attitude towards criticism? The tone of the book – and the quotes from the crafters themselves – is uniformly upbeat. Despite the fact that many of these women graduated from art school (although rarely from craft programs), I found no trace of that time-honored art school ritual, the critique. If there were criticisms, they were directed at the larger culture. (Corporatism and globalism are the most popular candidates for criticism.) But I detected no sense of self-critique.

Is this a feature of indie-craft, or is it a cultural shift of an entire generation? My age group, especially those who became teachers, bought into the idea of the critique. We believe that an honest evaluation should be both positive and negative, and that students develop faster when negative feedback is taken into account. Has this model been rejected? Is the new assumption that self-improvement is best effected by positive feedback only? Or maybe there is a different kind of criticism in indie-craft, only it’s invisible to the likes of me?

I realize that Handmade Nation is intended to be a celebration, and I suppose that’s fine. But indie-craft may be repeating the biggest mistake that the craft mainstream made: hard criticism was avoided like the plague, and still is. That lack of questioning and toughness ultimately retarded the entire field. Who questions the pleasant assertions? Who demands more than conventional wisdom? I don’t see them. From a certain point of view, indie-craft looks like a vast comfort zone. And I would hate to see indie-craft go down the same old path of endless self-congratulation and approval. That path goes nowhere.

Anyway, I enjoyed Handmade Nation. The history of craft is largely about a contest between elitism and democracy, and the persistent democratic impulse separates the culture of craft from that of fine art. Indie-craft is the newest manifestation of the desire to be inclusive and open, to invite everybody into the big handmade tent. It works for me.

I spent Wednesday and Thursday last night at SOFA, the annual extravaganza of high-end craft n’ commerce. I was hanging out in the booth of my new gallery, Snyderman/Works, trying to be polished and conversational. No sales came of it, though.

The big buzz among jewelers was about Sergey Jivetin’s three pieces made from bird eggs. They were amazing. Each egg was reinforced with Kevlar/carbon fiber, and carefully fitted into cloud-like accumulations. Jivetin made two brooches and a necklace out of the eggs. There was an accompanying series of jewelry made of other unusual materials, including a necklace made of sectioned compact florescent light bulbs and candles – but the egg jewelry overshadowed everything. Interesting to think that really dramatic jewelry can be something of a curse to its maker.

Overall, business was slow. Many of the gallery owners I spoke to seemed content just to make expenses. As Susan Cummins joked, “Flat is the new up.” Talking to collectors, I sensed caution, not fear. It seems the economy has made people focus, but not quit spending money completely. As for me, I usually buy jewelry if I make a sale. And since I didn’t make a sale, I made no contribution to the craft economy this year.

I had a conversation with Wendell Castle about the craft biz, and he had a fascinating observation. In the last few years, the high-end design world decided to issue limited editions of star-designer objects. (The art world has recently taken a similar course.) Obviously, prices for these exclusive design objects were high in recent years. But now the bubble is deflating rapidly, and the galleries that put out editions are in a fix. They can’t discount unsold pieces from their editions. Otherwise, clients who bought at last year’s prices would feel cheated, and probably complain bitterly. (And very likely never buy from a design edition again!) Thus, unlike the market for one-of-a-kind works of art, in which comparisons to last year’s prices are muted by the fact that the new art is necessarily different, design editions are stuck at unrealistically high levels. There’s already talk that the high-end design market is frozen.

The whole edifice will come unglued if pieces from these editions show up at auction and sell at a discount. If that happens, everything could go south. Galleries will be forced to buy back work to protect their price levels – if they have the financial resources. If not – listen for a giant sucking sound.

Craftspeople are often jealous of the price structures in the art and design markets. (I am, for sure.) But Wendell’s tale is a warning: be careful what you wish for.

It’s always awkward to read one’s own reviews. An artist usually has firm opinions about his/her work, and can get oversensitive about readings that do not concur with those opinions. At the same time, every viewer is entitled to her own responses. There’s a conflict.

At any rate, I was annoyed by Maria Porges’s review of my exhibit  “The Miniature Worlds of Bruce Metcalf” in the Feb/March 2009 issue of American Craft. Porges is an artist and writer with relatively little experience writing about jewelry. Her review opened this way: “There is something deeply unsatisfying about the way fashion is exhibited in museums. Though mannequins in cases demonstrate how garments hand or cling, their frozen poses never show how a piece of clothing moves through the world on its wearer. The same is true of the display of jewelry.”  She continues to say that the exhibition lacks “the one thing that would bring [the jewelry] to life: being pinned to a dress or a coat and thereby developing personal relationships with wearers and admirers.”

Porges identifies jewelry primarily with its use. I assume she would draw the same conclusion about any craft form. Her suggestion is that a pot is always better when it’s full of soup, or a vase is better when holding flowers, or a chair is better when somebody sits on it. Thus, to merely look at a piece of craft is to relegate it to an unsatisfying half-life. Of course, this criticism would never be applied to painting or sculpture or performance: such forms can never be tainted with some real-world function.

Porges played up the “deeply unsatisfying” nature of exhibiting jewelry. She could say the same about the car & the helicopter in MoMA’s  design collection. She could even say the same about posters, if she wanted to push the point. In the end, she denied my work the possibility of having a satisfying presence in a gallery. Or, for that matter, on display in a home.

What Porges overlooks is that crafts have been involved with symbolic display for millennia. Craft that is made to be used is always bifurcated; it always has a double life as a thing to be used and a thing to be regarded. This is NOT news. My jewelry is made to be regarded and meditated upon just as much as it is made to be worn. In effect, Porges denied that fact.

Most studio jewelers I know work very hard to see that their jewelry is satisfying even if it’s not on the body. Given that jewelry spends most of its life unworn, it would be foolish not to. If the thing looses all its interest and vitality when removed from the body, it asks to be stashed in a drawer. We’re all vain enough to think that our work should be looked at, not hidden away. In my case, I made stages and frames for many of my brooches. Others I made so they could stand up by themselves. Either way, it was obvious that I designed my jewelry to have a strong off-the-body presence. Porges, in pressing her point about jewelry being better when worn, cleverly overlooks the obvious.

Furthermore, a cursory look through the “Miniature Worlds” checklist would have proven that a substantial number of the pieces in the show come from private collections, and she could assume that plenty of those brooches are unleashed “on the unsuspecting world outside the walls of a museum.” She undercut my work for being on display in the first place, and then further undercut it because she doesn’t think it gets worn! Lose-lose. Great.

In her review, Porges went on to respond to the content of the work, and I have to admit she was sympathetic. She picked up on the relationship between drawing & object (although that was obvious, given the installation and the presence of the notebooks) and that she noted that restrictions are sometimes liberating.

But if the social use of jewelry was really her issue, Porges could have taken the next step. She could have anticipated what it’s like to wear my jewelry and to witness it work being worn. She could have wondered about the way jewelry is experienced in social space. In fact, imaginative projection of that sort is one of the great pleasures of looking at contemporary jewelry.

Jewelry has to present a quick, easily-digested impression in order to work properly in social space. It’s hard to look closely at jewelry on somebody’s body – it can be a bit embarrassing for everybody concerned. What to do when you want to stare at a woman’s chest? So… what of jewelry that supports a more sustained look? Hmm. Maybe it’s best if seen off the body?

Or she could have speculated about my work as art. Is that a valid claim, given the dominant paradigms in the artworld today? What of the miniature, the modest, the carefully made? Does it subvert the spectacular? Does it say anything about the post-studio, post-conceptual practice that is so widely accepted as the default position for art-making today? I would have found that interesting, you know? Especially since my work has always been intended as a rejoinder and a critique of contemporary artworld virtues. I would have though that, as an artist, Porges would have been sensitive to all that.

Oh, well. I did like the layout of the article, and some ink in AmCraftMag is better than none. But the Porges review illustrates the difficulty of asking writers to look at craft without prior knowledge of the field. They tend to reinvent the wheel every fucking time. Writers who have never thought about jewelry before tend to get distracted by issues the field resolved decades ago. They are shocked that jewelry doesn’t have to be worn! They are amazed by expanded scale! The connection between the wearing of jewelry and the theatrical is a revelation!

Well, duh. If they had spend a few hours looking into the history of recent jewelry, such issues would have become obvious to them, and they could have turned their attention to more important matters.

But in my experience, “outside” writers don’t want to be bothered with doing homework. If they were called upon to review a Richard Serra exhibit, they wouldn’t even think of writing without first securing a detailed knowledge of Minimalism, site-specific sculpture, and Serra’s thinking about the intersection of geometry and lived experience. Never. But review a craft exhibit… well, anything goes. Research? Hey, it’s only craft! What’s there to know?

In fact, there’s a lot to know. It frustrates me that otherwise intelligent writers continue to delude themselves that they have a decent working knowledge of craft without ever cracking a book. If any of you are reading this, pay attention: Next time, do your homework!