Furniture designer-makers tend to be uneasy about the relatively high prices they have to ask for their work. They would like it to be widely accessible, not so much for commercial reasons but because of the relationship they would like to see themselves having to wider society. In that little has changed since the days of William Morris.
Mostly, our customers, although not without disposable income, tend not to come from the super-rich. Those who are serious about the acquisition of wealth have neither the time nor the stomach for the risks of commissioning individually designed furniture, unvalidated by the market or received opinion. Look at the pictures of the interior of One Hyde Park, designed by Lord Rogers for the Candy brothers developers and recently celebrated as the most expensive London perch at £6000 a square something or other. Luxury perhaps, but design originality no.
One Hyde Park: the cutting edge of design?
We should be grateful that our customers are people committed to individual engagement with small designers and makers, but they are not immune to the strains of the Candy-coloured economy that is enveloping us. In the
GM HQ Detroit: the lower edge of luxury?
Few now subscribe to the idea of the rising tide lifting all boats. The idea that we are distinguished by the size of our boats, but that otherwise we all bob around quite unconstrained on a pond of equal opportunity seems to me bizarre. We exist and operate in a complex network of circumstances, relationships and mutual assumptions – social, economic, political, cultural, material – that partly and unequally determines our ability to respond to changed external circumstances. One needs to examine and perhaps alter that network as well as try to influence or recognise the changes in external circumstances. Indeed the two are not actually separate.
Our work as furniture designer-makers differs not just in its individuality but in its type. Some among us produce collectable furniture, furniture without a back, furniture that might seem more comfortable on a plinth as a sculptural object than against a mundane domestic wall. Unsurprisingly, this is the furniture that gets noticed: it is within at least occasional hailing distance of that ‘unusable, unaffordable and, preferably, unmakeable’ furniture so beloved of the press and critics (and whose creators would not dream of aligning themselves with any of the restrictive categories of ‘furniture’, ‘designer’ or ‘maker’).
Indirectly, this collectable furniture benefits us all: in the minds of some of our customers it effectively validates what we do on a humbler plane. How many of us have not seen a questioner’s brow clear when they say, ‘So, your work is like so-and-so’s’, naming some more celebrated member of our ranks? Yet it is a mixed blessing: it brings us work but, unless we challenge it outright, we may find it difficult to distance ourselves far from it. We may feel we have to keep up, or at least not fall too far behind, as it moves towards ever grander plinths. It also brings some risk of squeezing out humbler work from publication, exhibition selection and so on.
Things are not helped by our collective unsureness as to what are the primary qualities that we are selling with our furniture: and the public falls back to the default option of ‘antiques of the future’. Is it an intimate relationship with wood; is it craft, design, art; or is it a ‘bespoke’ service to answer highly particular practical needs? They are all qualities that we frequently invoke, but equally they all have limitations against which we sometimes feel compelled to protest. In a crude and unrigorous survey of the catalogue to an exhibition in which I participated in 2010 I found the following frequency to some key qualities: ‘commission/bespoke’ 19, ‘unique’ 14, ‘craft’ 14, ‘design’ 12, ‘beauty’ 12, ‘wood’ 11, ‘awards/prizes’ 8, ‘heritage/generations/timeless’ 8, ‘environment/sustainability’ 6, ‘tradition’ 2. They were not always (but were mostly) the actual words used – I was surprised how often ‘beauty’ occurred. Maybe I’ve missed some: there were a few references to functionality, but no-one mentioned modern technology or its capabilities.
Is it originality and uniqueness that we aim for? It comes second in my survey and there are some very bold claims within the catalogue to the current Millinery Works exhibition, not so much to be pushing the boundaries but to be stepping right outside them. (But a severe critic might say that when we do step outside the boundaries it is more a matter of distance than new direction.) Do such claims stand up? Is that what we should be doing? The early 21st century would be an unprecedented period of cultural innovation if we were. Or are we working within and developing a broad cultural movement, as furniture-makers before us have mostly done? Are we truly developing, as the exhibition claimed, the ‘Arts and Crafts legacy’? Do we truly know what it is? 'Tradition', T.S. Eliot wrote, 'cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour.'
Eliot had much of interest to say about artistic or cultural tradition that provides a useful antidote to our tendency to regard ‘traditional’ work as simply doing what has been done before, and ‘innovative’ work as the more valuable the less it has any connection with anything that has been done before. Eliot regarded cultural tradition as something more complex and dynamic than an all-pervading ether that we inhale involuntarily. It makes little sense that art which we struggle to comprehend when new should by the simple passage of years become something that we can apprehend without effort. Eliot thought that cultural tradition could only be apprehended fully through creative or critical/appreciative effort and that, in making such an effort we do not simply repeat what has gone before, but bring our own individual variation to its realisation, so creating a living tradition and changing, to a degree, the work of the past as well as that of the present. By such changes he did not mean the kind of ‘boundary breaking’ innovation that we frequently extol, but he did recognise that a culture could at times become stultifying rather than sustaining to the individuals who shared it – ‘So positive was the culture of that age [the eighteenth century] that it crushed a number of smaller men who thought differently but could not bear to face the fact’. He recognised that, as changes in sensibility and circumstances accumulate or accelerate, a culture periodically reaches a point where artistic expression has to change decisively to maintain its functioning viability: ‘Sensibility alters in us all from age to age whether we will or no, but expression is only changed by a man of genius.’ That genius he thought lay in artistic skill, not in intensity of personal vision. In fact, perhaps for reasons peculiar to his own personality, he was intensely hostile to allowing personality any role in artistic achievement: ‘The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.’ He believed that any artistic expression was, by its nature, a collaborative enterprise, and he was surely right in thinking that if art is great simply according to the intensity and uniqueness of the artist’s individual vision it becomes of interest to the rest of us just as spectacle or the object of shallow emulation, precluding his concept of a creative tradition.
Arts and Crafts furniture is at least then potentially an enormous element in our cultural inheritance whether we acknowledge, ignore or reject it, but I see little evidence that we are carrying it forward in any recognisable form overall. Some pieces in an earlier exhibition that appeared at first sight to relate most to Arts and Crafts had some pretty un-Arts and Crafts construction beneath.
Yet, for a sign of our times, if one looks at the website of the Society of Designer Craftsmen, which makes much of its direct descent from Walter Crane’s and William Morris’s Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, one finds it proclaiming ‘Innovation, originality and quality are seen as integral elements of our work…we look for people who design and make original, beautiful, exciting, challenging works…we expect members to have a strong and innovative design sense…’ I’ve added the italics to point out the particular flavour of their advocacy. I’m in favour of those qualities myself, but is there not a degree of imbalance here? (How much excitement can one take in one’s dining table?) All that reiteration comes within a few sentences. It’s not exactly how Morris would have written: Morris, Gimson, the Barnsleys and others of the Arts and Crafts movement were innovative but were also keen to draw strength from aspects of tradition. Ironically the SDC goes on to say ‘We don’t accept work that is confined within the past tradition’. It’s not quite clear what they mean by that rather tortured phrase, or whether they’re referring to their own Arts and Crafts tradition – is that only to be invoked positively when considering the society as an organisation? Is tradition an in animate object? Perhaps it’s a polite way of saying ‘reproduction’; anyway, they don’t seem to have read much Eliot, and their words are, I think, symptomatic of the way in which we now give a reductive meaning to ‘tradition’ and regard it as excluding ‘innovation’, rather than seeing the two as interactive. It is also I think a little shaming that a society, descended from nineteenth-century artists and writers who thought deeply about culture and society, should show so little evidence of serious thought about artistic tradition but opt instead for something more akin to repetitive marketing-speak.
The curators of the designer-maker exhibitions to which I refer, struggle to give us a specific, positive identity as a group (far less write us a manifesto) and fall back to ‘it may not look like a movement but….’ Is our ultimate identity only a matter of superlatives?
Collectively, we seem able to ignore scarcely any furniture-making virtue of the past 150 years: the elegance of a Ruhlmann, the robustness of a Lutyens, the truth to materials of a Barnsley, the new materials of a Breuer, the simplicity of the Shakers, the decoration of a Bugatti, the flowing curves of a Guimard, the sculptural forms of a Gaudi, the linearity of a Gray, the innovation of a Rietveld, the tradition of a … well, there I’m lost for an immediate recent exemplar. But what other quality does our work not seem to lay claim to somewhere?
Are we, in the terms of one exhibition catalogue, striving to imbue our furniture with ‘expressive existence’ or is the creative process less singly driven, so that it attains its end when it embodies a state where intellectual and emotional satisfaction are indistinguishable? A large demand on a small canvass, but I have encountered a few such pieces of furniture (including a Barnsley piece). Perhaps it is a possible defining quality of ‘applied’ art that it seeks to resolve tensions, whilst ‘fine’ art need not.
If, in search of common ground beneath all our work, we say, as this catalogue does, that ‘workmanship’ is a ‘given’, although it words and places the idea carefully, we run some risk of again reinforcing that ‘antiques of the future’ preconception; for the public is able to appreciate not so much the inherent skill which can be found unostentatiously in work of many types, but the particular expression of skill that is only possible by taking many hours: high finish, complex jointing methods and detailing, unconventional construction, extravagant forms, wide variation of materials. ‘Ah! So that’, the public thinks, ‘is why it is all so expensive.’
Is there still, in the full sense of the word, a place for ‘respectable’ furniture any more? Are we still able, in our culture, to respect something that is not innovative? If tradition has a specific, realisable meaning for us now we should be. Yet we inhabit a growth-and-progress culture which finds it almost impossible to regard embodying the future as anything but the highest virtue in a new artefact, and, although we can just about consider the possibility of cultural deficit in our obsessive contemplation of the character of each new decade, successive centuries are invariably regarded as inevitable advances, so that ‘21st-century’ glibly replaces ‘20th-century’ as a term of approbation and new hope. The hollowness of our collective cultural analysis is perhaps illustrated by the fact that, at the same time, the revered artworks of the past achieve astronomical monetary values, and, although price levels fluctuate, the work of any individual is hardly ever evicted from the financially approved canon by changes in cultural values and interests – but individual works can be admitted or removed by attribution or de-attribution almost regardless of aesthetic appeal, in something akin to financial re-engineering. It is the function of the ‘criticariat’ to translate the new, the ‘work of the future’ as rapidly as possible into the collected, valued, traded, sanctified ranks of our cultural ‘heritage’. That process is now brought to such a pitch of efficiency that it can be completed within a few years, rather than having to wait for the passing of a generation or the gradual shifting of sensibility (from future to past with minimal lingering in the present), and selected living artists simultaneously (it would seem) both challenge and embody our cultural assumptions. Eat your heart out, Van Gogh. This, in more rarefied form, is the mechanism of ‘antiques of the future’: in our case it works rather more slowly and uncertainly.
We maybe have to accept as designer-makers of furniture that we survive at the margin and sometimes in odd, though possibly moderately comfortable, niches. I hope not, but there are worse fates.
