The long-running tale of furniture designer-makers reforming their association has reached some kind of conclusion, but in the two or three year long process has become rather like the Schleswig-Holstein question. When I die no-one will understand it except our founder, who, by then, will be in a lunatic asylum after his long battle against the committee-ising tendency.
So, before I forget all about it, here, for the benefit of posterity, is my digested read.
There once was an association called DMOU without rules or leader. It had an internet forum called Discuss, or the forum, but you couldn't join Discuss except by being a member of DMOU, though you could be a member of DMOU and not take any part in Discuss. Being a member of DMOU was if existing members recognised you as such. After the Two Hundred Years War a majority of members of DMOU voted to call themselves FDMA, call Discuss the Forum, adopt a set of rules which nobody read but everybody thought were jolly good, and elect a committee which wasn't meant to do anything except keep the money, answer the post and deputise for each other when they fell ill from too many committee lunches. (Some hope there!) Since DMOU had no rules, no-one could say whether this was legitimate or not, but FDMA had 'force majeure' on its side. Following the example of David Owen when the Social Democratic Party merged with the Liberal party, some old lags from DMOU declared the vote was not legitimate and that they embodied the continuing DMOU. Others, like aging bishops slumped in their armchairs in the library of the Athenaeum, no longer knew what they belonged to. There then ensued the War of the Succession, which lasted for the next five hundred years, outlasting the survival of furniture as it was once known, and which, as I hardly need tell you, in our day has been totally replaced by Gravity Control Differential Force Fields and Invisibility Cloaks. If you're interested to know what 'furniture' actually looked like back then I think you can still find a few examples in Reserve Collection 5C of the European State Museum of Antiquities (normally open every third Wednesday afternoon of the month by appointment). As I recollect, there are even one or two pieces reputed to have been made by members of DMOU or FDMA. It is now difficult to know what functional purpose theses strange-looking objects possessed, and at least one of them has a peculiar mark called a 'Guildmark'. No-one now knows what that mark represented, but it is thought to have had some significance in the War of the Succession. Or not.
I hope that makes it all clear
Showing posts with label Guildmark. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Guildmark. Show all posts
Monday, 9 May 2011
Thursday, 28 April 2011
Ruins, ancient and modern
In a recent newspaper comment article, Simon Jenkins, former trustee of the Architecture Foundation, former deputy chairman of English Heritage, current chairman of the National Trust, deplored the English ‘cult of the ruin’, which leads us to the antiseptic preservation of historical ruins, where close cropped ‘nationalised grass’ stops three inches short of the stabilised masonry – a description many will instantly recognise as characteristic of English Heritage’s wind-swept ruined choirs – whilst we dutifully reject any attempt to put our historic derelicts to any active use or, yet worse to some minds, ‘restore’ and rebuild them as the Victorians might unhesitatingly have done.
As in so many of our present cultural problems, the Victorians provide precedents for both the malaise and the solution. Simon Jenkins might have cited the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings as a guide to a humane solution. Founded in 1877 by William Morris and other members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to oppose Victorian restoration of historic buildings to a supposed (and often spurious) ‘authentic’ state in which they were thought to have existed at some arbitrarily chosen point in their history, the society, in the spirit of ‘anti scrape’, campaigned against the destruction of those accretions of physical adaptions and maturings that embodied the history of the human use of the building over the course of its existence – the patina of buildings, one might say. It believed historic buildings should be kept in good repair, put to sympathetic use, and physically adapted if necessary, but that any additions should be frankly modern and not attempt to disguise the distinction between the new and the old. Protection, not preservation.
In this, as in his concern for the state of manufacturing, and especially for the condition of furniture making that was expressed in the Arts and Crafts movement, Morris, like Ruskin and other like-minded contemporaries, emphasised the human, not just the aesthetic aspect of the culture, art and craft of their time.
The SPAB continues to this day, still requiring each member to subscribe to Morris’s original manifesto, though at times it may seem that the humaneness of the society faces a tidal wave of professional and commercially motivated restoration experts and materials suppliers. Yet it perhaps preserves the original spirit of its foundation better than that other survival of Morris’s efforts, the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, which has renamed itself the Society of Designer Craftsmen, and about which I have commented somewhat critically in an earlier post.
As for that other English institution over which Simon Jenkins holds some sway, the National Trust, it too was founded, at the close of the nineteenth century, by people whose concern was for the well-being of people in the physical and cultural landscape, and, as such, they were the successors of Morris and his socialist-minded contemporaries. It was only in the mid-twentieth century that the Trust began to devote so much of its energies to the preservation of the English country house, with which it has come to be so much associated in the public mind. That effort, in its own way, also laid much emphasis on the preservation not only of the buildings but of the material and detritus that embodied the lives of their past occupants, regardless of high aesthetic merit – everything from the Rubens to the elephant’s foot umbrella stand. A corollary of that was the desirability of maintaining the occupants in residence where possible, even if in reduced domain – something that was, we are told, later to lead on occasion to friction between the ‘owners’ and the Trust’s professional advisors and staff. Nevertheless, on another level the contextualised preservation of the art of the past, the only realm in which the cash-strapped post-war English could compete with the purchasing power of American and other foreign public and private art buyers, did achieve remarkable professional cultural and commercial success in opposition to the isolated, anaesthetised presentation of the cultural object in a museum environment – the cult, if not of the ruin, at least of the artefact.
For the masses, for whose benefit the Trust was originally established, this country-house culture came to be expressed in the ticketed-entry, exit-through-the-gift-shop ethos – a far cry from the cultural and social concerns of the young fogeys who had ‘saved’ the country house, but an essential prop to the political and commercial well-being of the Trust today.
In our own little realm of furniture making, we have an interesting conjunction of the historic and the modern in the Worshipful Company of Furniture Makers, an association active in the affairs of the industry at every level including that of the small designer-maker and bestowers of the Guildmark, something about which I have commented in a few posts on this blog. This ancient sounding company was founded in the 1950s with full subscription to the arcane trappings of the City of London Livery Company – an relationship that such groups in modern economic life as public relations practitioners, international bankers, tax advisers, management consultants and security professionals have, in recent years, been anxious to establish. Move over, cordwainers and tallow chandlers.
Wednesday, 6 April 2011
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.
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.
A brand too far
Furniture designer-makers – well, British ones, mostly – well, some of them – have been busily changing their association into something more ‘outward-looking’ that will make them much better known, and much better off. DMOU becomes FDMA. It has taken more than two years of discussion and debate and some people – well, me anyway – regret that the open and fluid character of the old association will be lost for no actual gain. So this is a post only for furniture designer-makers and those with a direct interest in such things.
The association will certainly have to change the ‘About Us’ page on its website.
Now we have a committee, whereas before we prided ourselves that we did not, and it takes its first small steps into brand definition with a quest for a Iogo. To what extent, I wonder, is it possible to advance the interests of all members by the promotion of a single FDMA ‘brand’?
Members get touchy at being differentiated from other members, at least at the upper end of the spectrum, but we cannot sensibly ignore the fact that, having already taken our association down the road of ‘inclusiveness’, our membership embraces a very wide range of work.
Of course the FDMA can say, ‘At whatever level you wish to acquire a piece of furniture you can find a small independent designer-maker who can provide you with something individual and satisfying.’ But that’s hardly compulsive promotion. As soon as the promotion tries to be more effective it has to concentrate on some differentiated particulars. Can we really advance the fortunes of --- --- and --- --- in a single breath? Do we all sell to the same market? I think it is difficult to answer ‘yes’; the membership as a whole just does not constitute, in a commercially meaningful sense, a single ‘brand’. We do have a, rather frayed, ‘philosophical’ identity as ‘designer-makers’, but, although that is real, I do not think it will be much called upon in commercial promotion: it is sometimes difficult to get our membership to understand it, let alone the buying public.
There are some members scarcely involved in one-off commissions; there are great disparities of scale (some members head companies that employ around 40 people, others are one-person, or even half-person bands); enormous variation in the character of ‘artistic’ approach; there are members concentrating just on particular types of furniture; and so on. But the most obvious disparity is in – I struggle to find a word that expresses what we all recognise without giving offence – ‘sophistication’? ‘refinement’? ‘originality’? maybe just ‘expense’. Not all our members can meaningfully offer to inlay their client’s coat of arms into their purchase. A few of our members have achieved almost ‘heritage’ status, actively admired by a section of the public who cannot possibly aspire to own a piece of it. You have only to look at the published results of successful PR about our work, with that vulgar or pretentious vacuousness that so often characterises it, to see that we cannot blithely ignore unwanted externalities in constructing our promotion. These are marketing facts. The world is not about to change, even if we are.
So, ill equipped as we are to direct the public attention with any developed distinguishing discourse of our own about our work, we focus it (or allow it to be focussed) on the small group of individuals whose work we know, from experience, provokes the readiest response, a small group selected by the even smaller group that runs the project, one perhaps not completely distinct from our (non)-executive committee. So FDMA becomes a successful public brand; we have created stars, or at least buffed up our existing ones – but is it a successful association?
Once an identity of structure and an identity of brand are adopted they require, for their effective functioning, an identity of membership, and one will be acquired and imposed by process and practice if it is not chosen by discussion and consensus.
The question of our identity needs answering not only in deciding what to do in defining FDMA as such, but also in forming the relationship between individual projects and the FDMA ‘brand’. It is difficult to see that most marketing or promotional projects will not be slanted towards the ‘upper’ echelons of one-off commission work. I don’t mean exclusively so, but, given our inability to select or characterise our work by any criterion beyond a general and unarticulated notion of excellence or expressiveness (to award it a Guildmark so to speak), it seems all the more likely. That is the easiest sector to promote; those are the members most likely to have the resources, the time, the money and the appetite to support projects; that is the territory from which the FDMA idea sprang and it is quite prominent in the committee make-up.
In that way FDMA will become ‘aspirational’: with people joining expecting to serve a long apprenticeship before they can hope to participate fully in the tangible benefits of membership. That is not how DMOU/FDMA has presented itself to designer-makers hitherto, and it is not, in my view, a sustainable format for the association.
I am not suggesting there are dark forces at work here, or that this is the exclusive character of FDMA’s likely development, but I do think it is a real danger that, over time, after the initial enthusiasm, a significant body of members (including some who voted for FDMA) will come to see FDMA (with some justification) as benefiting mainly those ‘upper echelons’, those who, to their minds, least need it.
They will say nothing at first and so, in that sense, the association and its discussion forum will appear undivided. But the resentment will grow, and from time to time break out in fractious and slightly them-and-us. This is the classic path of broad-based but formalised ‘professional’ associations, especially those (and FDMA is quite likely to join their ranks) where membership is seen as essential for professional advancement.
All the talk now of course is of success, democracy and solidarity, but this minority will feel more and more ignored and become less and less inclined to take any part in the association, and so sets in its slow decline, or else its conversion into (or supplanting by) a more frankly selective and ‘aspirational’ body.
The more our committee tries to define the single FDMA ‘brand’, moving on past logos, thinking they are being ‘inclusive’, the worse it will become, because it can only be a pretence that all our interests are served by a single kind of promotion and FDMA will become effectively identified with the kind of work that is easiest to promote. It is our own backyard globalisation, our surrender to the deracinated concept of the ‘world-class’, where creativity is validated not by the individual, rooted imagination but by general commercial endorsement – a concentration on the kind of furniture whose market depends upon a globalised, high-input, low resource-cost, high wealth-polarisation economy, which, it seems to me is what the Guildmark culture links into. We are in danger of adopting a cult of mindless excellence, complete with its own external identifiers. DMOU/FDMA, despite in practice always veering towards inclusiveness over any individual membership application, has already, in its outward pronouncements, begun slipping down that slope by putting first, in its list of indicators for potential members to use in pre-assessing themselves, awards, selection for particular exhibitions, and membership of other groups.
Maybe it won’t be as bad as I fear; maybe we’ll just rub along with nothing terribly remarkable being achieved for any of us. So that we all stay a little disappointed, but no-one gets resentful of others. I doubt it, but, if we want to maintain a broad association more than we want to achieve substantial advantage for just a section of it, that may be the best we can hope for, unless we take radical and determined steps to disaggregate the FDMA commercial ‘brand’ and get back to our original vision.
The association will certainly have to change the ‘About Us’ page on its website.
Now we have a committee, whereas before we prided ourselves that we did not, and it takes its first small steps into brand definition with a quest for a Iogo. To what extent, I wonder, is it possible to advance the interests of all members by the promotion of a single FDMA ‘brand’?
Members get touchy at being differentiated from other members, at least at the upper end of the spectrum, but we cannot sensibly ignore the fact that, having already taken our association down the road of ‘inclusiveness’, our membership embraces a very wide range of work.
Of course the FDMA can say, ‘At whatever level you wish to acquire a piece of furniture you can find a small independent designer-maker who can provide you with something individual and satisfying.’ But that’s hardly compulsive promotion. As soon as the promotion tries to be more effective it has to concentrate on some differentiated particulars. Can we really advance the fortunes of --- --- and --- --- in a single breath? Do we all sell to the same market? I think it is difficult to answer ‘yes’; the membership as a whole just does not constitute, in a commercially meaningful sense, a single ‘brand’. We do have a, rather frayed, ‘philosophical’ identity as ‘designer-makers’, but, although that is real, I do not think it will be much called upon in commercial promotion: it is sometimes difficult to get our membership to understand it, let alone the buying public.
There are some members scarcely involved in one-off commissions; there are great disparities of scale (some members head companies that employ around 40 people, others are one-person, or even half-person bands); enormous variation in the character of ‘artistic’ approach; there are members concentrating just on particular types of furniture; and so on. But the most obvious disparity is in – I struggle to find a word that expresses what we all recognise without giving offence – ‘sophistication’? ‘refinement’? ‘originality’? maybe just ‘expense’. Not all our members can meaningfully offer to inlay their client’s coat of arms into their purchase. A few of our members have achieved almost ‘heritage’ status, actively admired by a section of the public who cannot possibly aspire to own a piece of it. You have only to look at the published results of successful PR about our work, with that vulgar or pretentious vacuousness that so often characterises it, to see that we cannot blithely ignore unwanted externalities in constructing our promotion. These are marketing facts. The world is not about to change, even if we are.
So, ill equipped as we are to direct the public attention with any developed distinguishing discourse of our own about our work, we focus it (or allow it to be focussed) on the small group of individuals whose work we know, from experience, provokes the readiest response, a small group selected by the even smaller group that runs the project, one perhaps not completely distinct from our (non)-executive committee. So FDMA becomes a successful public brand; we have created stars, or at least buffed up our existing ones – but is it a successful association?
Once an identity of structure and an identity of brand are adopted they require, for their effective functioning, an identity of membership, and one will be acquired and imposed by process and practice if it is not chosen by discussion and consensus.
The question of our identity needs answering not only in deciding what to do in defining FDMA as such, but also in forming the relationship between individual projects and the FDMA ‘brand’. It is difficult to see that most marketing or promotional projects will not be slanted towards the ‘upper’ echelons of one-off commission work. I don’t mean exclusively so, but, given our inability to select or characterise our work by any criterion beyond a general and unarticulated notion of excellence or expressiveness (to award it a Guildmark so to speak), it seems all the more likely. That is the easiest sector to promote; those are the members most likely to have the resources, the time, the money and the appetite to support projects; that is the territory from which the FDMA idea sprang and it is quite prominent in the committee make-up.
In that way FDMA will become ‘aspirational’: with people joining expecting to serve a long apprenticeship before they can hope to participate fully in the tangible benefits of membership. That is not how DMOU/FDMA has presented itself to designer-makers hitherto, and it is not, in my view, a sustainable format for the association.
I am not suggesting there are dark forces at work here, or that this is the exclusive character of FDMA’s likely development, but I do think it is a real danger that, over time, after the initial enthusiasm, a significant body of members (including some who voted for FDMA) will come to see FDMA (with some justification) as benefiting mainly those ‘upper echelons’, those who, to their minds, least need it.
They will say nothing at first and so, in that sense, the association and its discussion forum will appear undivided. But the resentment will grow, and from time to time break out in fractious and slightly them-and-us. This is the classic path of broad-based but formalised ‘professional’ associations, especially those (and FDMA is quite likely to join their ranks) where membership is seen as essential for professional advancement.
All the talk now of course is of success, democracy and solidarity, but this minority will feel more and more ignored and become less and less inclined to take any part in the association, and so sets in its slow decline, or else its conversion into (or supplanting by) a more frankly selective and ‘aspirational’ body.
The more our committee tries to define the single FDMA ‘brand’, moving on past logos, thinking they are being ‘inclusive’, the worse it will become, because it can only be a pretence that all our interests are served by a single kind of promotion and FDMA will become effectively identified with the kind of work that is easiest to promote. It is our own backyard globalisation, our surrender to the deracinated concept of the ‘world-class’, where creativity is validated not by the individual, rooted imagination but by general commercial endorsement – a concentration on the kind of furniture whose market depends upon a globalised, high-input, low resource-cost, high wealth-polarisation economy, which, it seems to me is what the Guildmark culture links into. We are in danger of adopting a cult of mindless excellence, complete with its own external identifiers. DMOU/FDMA, despite in practice always veering towards inclusiveness over any individual membership application, has already, in its outward pronouncements, begun slipping down that slope by putting first, in its list of indicators for potential members to use in pre-assessing themselves, awards, selection for particular exhibitions, and membership of other groups.
Maybe it won’t be as bad as I fear; maybe we’ll just rub along with nothing terribly remarkable being achieved for any of us. So that we all stay a little disappointed, but no-one gets resentful of others. I doubt it, but, if we want to maintain a broad association more than we want to achieve substantial advantage for just a section of it, that may be the best we can hope for, unless we take radical and determined steps to disaggregate the FDMA commercial ‘brand’ and get back to our original vision.
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