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.

Is it Art?

A furniture maker's lament

We furniture designer-makers are much exercised by contemplation of the nature of what we do (as this blog may demonstrate). We start from the recognition, often very reluctant, that it is certainly ‘craft’. We quickly add that it is also ‘design’. Since the 1960s ‘design’ has had almost totally positive connotations. (In 1960 the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, founded in the 1880s by Walter Crane, William Morris and others, thought it wise to change its name to the Society of Designer Craftsmen – gender politics seemed of less concern.) So we are ‘designer-makers’, thus distinguishing ourselves from those craftspeople who ‘think’ only to the extent of considering the precision of their joints, who read popular amateur craft magazines, and who have a distressing tendency to sell their work in village halls. Yes, we are certainly designers.

Yet, half a century on, the attractions of being a designer have worn rather thin. Those Bauhausian certainties may still work if you are producing a revolutionary new hand drier, but if it’s another expensive table they don’t seem to achieve the high prices and glittering press to which we aspire. What we would really like to be is artists, working in studios, showing in proper galleries; not the Crafts Council (ironically universally despised for jilting craft for art) but the Arts Council.

Or rather, we would like to create ‘art’ (taking our cue from T.S. Eliot’s sniffy response to the young man seeking his advice on how to become a poet, that he could not understand anyone wanting to be a poet, although he could understand someone wanting to write poems).

Is what we do ‘art’? That is not an easy question to answer unless we can say what art is, and people seldom venture a definition of art except as a stepping stone en route to arguing a further point. But such light footwork leaves the foundation of any claim shaky and we would be best to think a little about the nature of art outside our own activities before laying any claim.

What is it then that I do when I hang a painting of, say, a seascape on my wall? (A bizarre and useless thing to do.) What is the intention of art?

At the most workaday level one might say that the painting extends the viewer’s experience: shows them something they haven’t seen before. That seems a little inadequate, at least in the visual arts, which must be one of our closest desired fine arts bedfellows, although in narrative literature there is much, past and present, that feels no need to stake a higher claim to justify itself as art. But let us look beyond.

My seascape, Dutch master or Turner, may change the way in which I perceive the sea, not just the sea it portrays, but all sea. It changes my sensibility, changes my perception of the world: indeed great art may change the way I see everything, whatever the picture portrays, or does not.

It would be possible to argue that all fine art, even abstract art, is representational, or perhaps less contentious to say that all fine art centrally references something outside itself. That art achieves universality by being not self contained. Until one comes to Malevich’s painting in 1913 of a white square on a white ground, by which he looked to create purity of feeling, and Mondrian’s work a few years later, in which he aimed not at purity of sensation but purity of being, and thought that only by confining himself to right angles could he achieve it.

Somewhere here is our first problem as furniture designer-makers and would-be artists. It is not just that we start with (more or less) useful objects. When I design and make a chair I do not make a representation of a chair (or a locus of pure feeling or pure being), I make a chair itself. If I argue that my artistic enterprise is the representation of some ideal notion of a chair, I don’t really convince myself. People might also wonder why I confine myself to the more or less realistic representation of furniture, and whether I should not be relegated to a similarly lowly status in the artistic hierarchy as botanical artists and pet portraitists.

Yet, putting those worries aside, can I design and make furniture that changes the way people perceive a chair, or a table, if not the world?

Some designer makers have produced items that, one might say, do exactly that: in appearance or actuality challenging our assumptions of the qualities essential for a furniture type. A table is an elevated, stable, flat, horizontal surface, but Ian Spencer’s table gives the impression that as soon as you placed a feather on it all its end-grain components would drop to the floor in pixelated disintegration. Michael Wainwright’s Mutagen table bristles with spiky little growths that would make placing one’s floral arrangement and family photographs a little difficult.

Yet these pieces shake up one’s assumptions, rather like the child’s snow-storm toy, only to let them settle back in the old form, leaving us with a more vivid realisation that a table is an elevated, stable, flat, horizontal surface after all. Look, Ian Spencer is leaning on his table, it doesn’t fall apart. Striking though the furniture is, this approach, conceptually, seems rather a one-card trick.

Rather different is Gareth Neal’s ‘Cut and Groove’ series, where his Anne console table has a Queen Anne design appearing inside the ghostly slotted outline of a modernist table. It is undeniably striking, but neither design, considered on its own, has particular merit. It is the coincidence of the two, historically different idioms that gains the effect – and distracts us from considering the complete domestic impracticality of the piece. If one were to use the same concept with the historically anachronistic design as one element would it have the same effect? Once again, this seems something of a visual trick – original certainly; but is it transformational, capable of generating a new line of work, a recreation of tradition (it relies on notions of tradition for its effect)? I think not.

Perhaps we should look more to those designer-makers who avowedly aim to extend the range of expectation that people might entertain for a table, a chair. We didn’t think a table could look like this, we gasp in surprise and admiration. Is this art? Up to a point perhaps, but when Cézanne painted Mont Sainte-Victoire he wasn’t showing us a new kind of mountain. In fact, without Cézanne, it’s a rather ordinary sort of mountain. He was changing the way in which we perceive all mountains, perhaps all nature, all masses. The table extends our perceptions cumulatively; the painting does so transformationally. There may be (though there probably aren’t) limitless ways in which to make a table, and, once shown, they are all accessible to us. There certainly are limitless ways in which to perceive the mountain, but they are not all accessible to us: it takes the artist (what Eliot would call the man of genius) to show us how. If there were such a thing as an Aztec table we could probably create our own table in its spirit; but an Aztec figure carving, or an Ife head, though they move us, are not fully apprehendable for us. Their culture is no longer fully accessible to us.

So where next, in our search for greater cultural ’bottom’ to our work? Perhaps we should follow the architects: after all there never was one who didn’t think they could design furniture regardless of an ignorance of how it could be made. Yet they have an unfair advantage of scale over us. You can get inside their creations (even though the roof may leak). Getting inside a wardrobe doesn’t normally offer the same opportunities for the appreciation of spatial organisation as standing at the bottom of the staircase in the new Ashmoleum.

Architecture is of course, apart from sometimes incidental decoration, an abstract art, and it is interesting to reflect that, long before the prevalence of the abstract in modern western fine art, there was a historical period when art was not only abstract but there was an absolute prohibition on representation. ‘Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image, not the likeness of anything that is in heaven above, nor in the earth beneath, or in the water under the earth.’ One can further observe that the non-representational art that prevailed and achieved enormous sophistication in the east over a period of seven hundred years and spread its influence west was a decorative art. Over seven centuries it manifested no growth or development beyond the refinement of perfected formulae. Remarking on that, Ruskin concluded that abstract art, if long pursued leads to the destruction of both intellectual powers and moral principle. Mondrian apparently disproves him on both counts, but the relationship of the abstract and the decorative in non-representational art requires considerable discrimination.

However that may be, because of the limitation of scale and complexity in furniture, we are often tempted into decoration to give added interest or greater perceived value to our work. There is some hypocrisy in the prevailing design animus towards decoration. Even engineering-based designers are often deeply concerned with the cosmetic properties of their product, claim as they may to eschew decoration as such. The Arts and Crafts furniture makers were not opposed to decoration. Much of their work, as well as the historical exemplars they admired, is rich in applied decoration. Decoration can be an aid to spatial articulation and differentiation.

An architectural critic, who, writing of a church by the seventeenth-century master-builder Francesco Borromini, observed: ‘The effect of prolonged contemplation of this interior goes beyond logic: it produces a mental tension, an excitement, in which – as in a flowing piece of counterpoint by a great composer – everything fits miraculously together and it is impossible to separate intellectual from emotional pleasure.’ If we could achieve that we need not bother whether it is craft, design or art.

Perhaps, after all, we should be content as ’makers’, aspiring, like Eliot, to learn from and to be ‘il miglio fabbro’. (Isn’t all the best furniture Italian?) At the beginning God made heaven and earth: he didn’t feel obliged to explain that it was design – or art.