Pivot point

Garlic and sapphires in the mud
Clot the bedded axel-tree.

Recently a fellow furniture designer-maker commended another’s account of the development of our work for knowing ‘which pieces were pivotal’. Whilst I don’t want to dispute the ability of either of them to know what work is genuinely remarkable, I do query whether there is anything so specific, in the collective body of the current work of small furniture designer-makers, as a pivot, or whether we are actually aware of our work turning on (or ignoring) any key development.

We are in fact remarkably ill informed of what the rest of us are currently up to. Our work lacks a mode of publication and a nexus of sociability. We have the misfortune that our product is of sufficient substance to make it difficult for us to move around (we are unlikely to up sticks on a whim and go off to make furniture with our fellows in the south of France), but not of enough substance to make it impossible to ignore as hundreds troop by it on their way to work. It is insufficiently artistic, insufficiently valuable, insufficiently new to be much remarked by critics and commentators. It is too expensive to matter much to the masses. The old network of patronage that used to advance fashions in interior taste has passed away, and those who come closest nowadays to setting public taste or fashion often do so without much commissioning or patronising the work themselves.

So how is new work communicated, even amongst ourselves? We might expect to see our fellows’ work at exhibitions, but furniture exhibitions are in notoriously short supply, unprofitable for their organisers and not always well supported by exhibitors with their best and newest work. Nearly all of us have websites, but few are good at updating them with their latest work. We could in fact quite easily do more than we do to communicate our newest ideas and designs: our association could easily – but does not – have a place in the members’ section of its website specifically for such communication.

I believe we don’t do more to communicate our latest work because we do not want to. We do not want to partly for our own reasons of ‘commercial confidentiality’ (I have more often seen members fret about plagiarism than enthuse that others are developing similar ideas to their own), and partly because we simply do not have much in the way of ideas to communicate.

Having claimed that our work collectively lacks particular direction or sense of purpose, I will now contradict myself (up to a point) by trying to identify some common elements in the most noticed furniture.

One recently discernible is the creation, almost the imposition of textured effects on timber surfaces. Pieces of furniture with this characteristic have been the leading items in several recent group exhibitions in London associated with DMOU. Sometimes, not always, rather than exploiting texture inherent in the material, the surface effects are created with techniques similar to those needed to produce the dead-smooth, high-finish surfaces of the ‘I can’t believe it’s not plastic’ type that many have come inescapably to associate with expensive ‘bespoke’ furniture. Sometimes in these pieces, also, the surface texture is the focus to the noticeable neglect of interest in underlying form.

In that respect it may possibly be a parallel to Martin Grierson’s belief that ‘the success and beauty of a design lie as much in the quality of detail and choice of materials as in the overall concept’. I don’t entirely disagree with that, but I do think it may beg the question whether there is a stable and mature vocabulary of form on which the designer-maker draws. Yet perhaps that is what Martin encompasses in his reference to ‘proper pieces of furniture that exploit traditional forms’.

So, if that is the garlic, where are the sapphires? Elsewhere in these London exhibitions an interest in differentiation by conspicuous form still thrives, with, sometimes, a virtuoso predilection for forms that dramatically challenge methods of timber construction and making ability. A delight in pushing things to extremes – in construction, detailing, refinement, and, in consequence, probably cost – has something to be said for it, and something against. It could be seen as part of the overloading of our culture with a multitude of signs. It can hardly form the basis for a movement – flux perhaps but not a movement in any direction. It cannot be that ‘pivot point’ we seek.

It is, however, what frequently receives the prizes and guildmarks for ‘bespoke’ furniture, although, ironically, the particular pieces that receive these accolades are sometimes not bespoken at all but are instead deliberate speculative punts at awards by designer-makers, and, even so decorated, they may struggle to find purchasers thereafter.

Whether any of this can amount to a continuation of the Arts and Crafts ‘legacy’ (the theme of these exhibitions), beyond a degree of self-regard in our work as furniture designer-makers, I personally doubt. It certainly does not constitute ‘wonderful furniture of a commonplace kind’, to use Ernest Gimson’s description of WR Lethaby’s furniture in the 1890 Arts and Crafts exhibition.

What exactly is meant by that phrase is a little problematic. It perhaps applies more to Gimson’s work than Lethaby’s. Lethaby did not actually design much furniture (or architecture come to that) and some of it might not universally be regarded as commonplace. Nor is it without decoration. But perhaps this is a subject to which I might return.

Hand or Machine?

'Manufacture': literally, to make by hand.

The question whether hand work is somehow superior to machine work is s an old one that takes us straight back to our supposed Arts and Crafts roots. When John Ruskin and William Morris first objected to the Victorian mechanisation of manufacture their primary concern was for the spiritual wellbeing of the craftsman; the quality of the artefact was secondary in their minds.

Today we have almost completely lost that concern, although there is an interesting echo when we say that some more primitive methods are so tedious that the maker is unlikely to indulge in a second attempt to improve a poor initial result. There, in some sense, one is referencing Morris’s recognition that machinery could legitimately relieve the workman of unhealthy drudgery, but I’m not sure that either he or Ruskin would have welcomed the idea that the artefact is to be perfected by multiple mechanised attempts. That’s not how they built the cathedrals, as anyone can still see.

It was in this context that the Arts and Crafts objected to ‘applied decoration’: they were very far, at least initially, from objecting to ornamentation as such, and for Ruskin it was a vital expression of the spiritual content of craft.

The primary concern of Ruskin and Morris was that the craftsperson should be engaged in and should delight in the process of the making of the object from start to finish – the autonomy of craft. So hand versus machine is not a simple issue. Yet machines do inevitably tend towards a division of labour, no less in our time than the Victorian, as we (some of us) commission the computerised subcontractor for some highly specialised element of our sophisticated design.

Nor is excessive finish and unwelcome physical uniformity in furniture or any other artefact necessarily the product of the maximum utilisation of available mechanical processes. To a considerable degree, ‘craft’ making skill in our time has come to be identified with the achievement of levels of accuracy that the public might think cold normally be achieved only by machines. That may be a vulgar misperception but it is nevertheless something that designer-makers have done and continue to do a great deal to encourage. And we start to feel either uncomfortable or exhilarated as highly mechanised and automated production begins to achieve a level of individualised design that previously was associated only with small-scale ‘hand’ production.

It calls into question the whole aesthetic of the modern movement, that still holds surprising residual sway, that function could determine form without the intervention of taste or style, that there was, somehow, a styleless modern style that would be ushered in by the inevitable mechanisation of production.

Machines and tools exist in a continuum, and skill is not to be counterbalanced against them. Indeed the exercise of skill, in the context of making artefacts, is hardly possible at all without the utilisation of tools or machines. Yet there is an inescapable paradox that tools at the same time enable skills and achieve ‘deskilling’. The difficulty arises when and to the extent that the tool or machine operates without the agency of the person – though in our own context of ‘computer controlled’ (what exactly do we mean by that phrase?) machinery it is not always as easy as it might seem to say when that point is reached.

Lethaby, one of the progenitors of the Arts and Crafts as a movement, urged that craftspeople should produce good designs specifically for machine manufacture. Ernest Gimson always resisted Lethaby’s personal urgings, arguing that the mechanically produced version of his design work would drive out, commercially and culturally, the hand production that resulted in something superior at a higher cost. Both, in their different ways, had to a considerable extent abandoned Ruskin’s and Morris’s struggle with the personal cultural and spiritual problem of their (and our) day, and we now seem no closer to re-engaging with it.

Perhaps, as our national economy increasingly outsources to developing countries not just all physical production but also ‘mind-based’ work, it has come to be seen as a lost battle or an irrelevance.