There has been an interesting discussion recently on the furniture designer-makers' forum about tool sharpening systems. There are some quite cunning bench mounted grinding and honing machines available.
Bear with me: it gets more interesting.
As often happens, what started as a 'Which is the best one to buy?' enquiry opened out into a 'Do we really need this?' discussion.
Amongst interesting postings about the details of the performance of rival apparatus there was a distinct element, coming mostly from more senior members, of 'I just use a dry grinder and a honing belt - those machines are just for teachers who have to regrind 40 mangled plane irons before the lesson starts.' (Declaration - I write as one who still has, and uses, his Washita, black Arkanas and even Charnley Forest stones and never got to grips even with Japanese water stones.)
There is clearly a deep, emotional attraction to free-hand skill, the skill of risk. My wife recalls, decades ago, the university joiner at Aberdeen who never seemed to measure anything but whose shelves always seemed to fit perfectly. But then, one senior but rather maverick member of the forum asked why was it so unacceptable to use a jig for getting the right angle on plane irons and chisels when we used jigs for almost everything else in our work - in our making.
Why indeed? In making we have opted for the skill of control. which reaches its apotheosis in computer controlled machinery. Such machinery can even be programmed to simulate the variation of hand work, but that is little seen. perhaps because it lies at the extreme of such capabilities, perhaps because we do not want it.
We have reached this state at the point in cultural and technological history that has seen the emergence of 'design' as something distinct from (though possibly, at least theoretically, fusible with) making, or craft, or art. Design, and the making that goes along with it (especially as practiced by furniture 'designer-makers') is no longer the free exercise of individual skill so much as a process of 'problem solving'. Making is no longer something that one just does, but something broken down into a series of steps along a path from A (intention) to B (object).
That shift seems to me exactly to mirror the technological and perceptive shift in our society from analogue to digital. The 3D printer, digital fabrication, looms, or more than looms. The least frightening aspect of the news that a firm in Austin, Texas has manufactured a fully functioning gun in metal is that it is a gun. More of that in earlier and later posts.
Moreover, our espousal of the skill of control allows us to celebrate skill in making in either austerely minimalist work or in the kind of elaborately sophisticated work so often exemplified in fine furniture -'upscale' furniture as I believe the Americans call it, not afraid to make an allusion to social and economic metrics. Everything in between, which includes the kind of Morris-Gimson-Barnsley work in which furniture designer-makers, at least in this country, usually claim to find their spiritual roots, is left looking faintly ridiculous - or dead - by the skill of control. And what Morris or Ruskin would have thought of it in relation to the life of the maker hardly bears thinking about.
Showing posts with label designer-makers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label designer-makers. Show all posts
Tuesday, 12 November 2013
Wednesday, 7 September 2011
Designers and the riots - an exchange with Skree
I believe, along with many, that the recent riots were not primarily political in nature, certainly unlike the poll tax riots. Many have been blamed or criticised from single mothers to gang culture to the police. Whilst all these professions may have borne some degree of guilt, designers haven't either spoken up nor had fingers pointed their way. What were the most stolen items? not food; Waterstones remained untouched, no, it was the desirable consumables, mobile phones, computer games, laptops, trainers. A feast of designer goods. A new pair of trainers or a Blackberry brings but temporary comfort, dates and needs to be updated to take part in the fashion of object ownership. These rioters who can see no further than a pair of status symbol nikes are a lost generation. Politically the endorsement of material betterment that began with Thatcher but became the thrust of Blair’s 'democracy' has clearly left a gaping hole. These objects of desire deliver a longevity of ‘buzz' not much greater than a bag of heroin or a pipe of crack. But who thinks up material culture? is it not us designers? Are we not equally responsible for delivering these momentary highs as much as any? It is time that designers refuse the throw away, the fashion statement and show a materialism of depth. Arguably the Designer Craftsmen with their adherence to the Arts and Crafts ethos have turned their backs on the trivia of conventional product design and offered an alternative, objects of heirloom significance. The practice must transcend both the attack of the shock of the momentarily new and the self indulgent.
from Skreeworld blog
You could say that, but you would be saying that people rioted because they had been morally debauched by their taste for trainers and mobile phones. Perhaps they had. If they had taken food would we say they had been morally debauched by their need to eat? They didn’t take food, presumably because, although they feel themselves to be materially disadvantaged, they are not, mostly, at the point of not being able to feed themselves. You could simply say that, like most thieves in other contexts, they were after easily portable and saleable objects of high value. Some police spokespeople have said that the riots spread simply because, after the police failure to control the first riots sparked by Mark Duggan’s death, people believed they would get away with it. That amounts to saying that significant sections of society are in a permanent state of potentially violent disaffection and indicates an alarming degree of social alienation. In some broad sense that has to be considered ‘political’. We may be debauched by trashy consumer goods but I think one can overstate the extent to which that is a radical social change. There has always been a taste for quick gratification and often for the tawdry – to some extent. One might equally say that the alienation is produced by the constant display of highly expensive consumer goods that a very small minority can easily enjoy, but only they can. In that picture ‘designer-maker’ furniture comes off less creditably. What is new in our society is an alienation of ordinary people from the processes by which material goods are produced, and that applies equally to the high-tech electronic goods in everybody’s pockets and to the low-tech but immaculate purpose-made furniture.
from Skreeworld blog
You could say that, but you would be saying that people rioted because they had been morally debauched by their taste for trainers and mobile phones. Perhaps they had. If they had taken food would we say they had been morally debauched by their need to eat? They didn’t take food, presumably because, although they feel themselves to be materially disadvantaged, they are not, mostly, at the point of not being able to feed themselves. You could simply say that, like most thieves in other contexts, they were after easily portable and saleable objects of high value. Some police spokespeople have said that the riots spread simply because, after the police failure to control the first riots sparked by Mark Duggan’s death, people believed they would get away with it. That amounts to saying that significant sections of society are in a permanent state of potentially violent disaffection and indicates an alarming degree of social alienation. In some broad sense that has to be considered ‘political’. We may be debauched by trashy consumer goods but I think one can overstate the extent to which that is a radical social change. There has always been a taste for quick gratification and often for the tawdry – to some extent. One might equally say that the alienation is produced by the constant display of highly expensive consumer goods that a very small minority can easily enjoy, but only they can. In that picture ‘designer-maker’ furniture comes off less creditably. What is new in our society is an alienation of ordinary people from the processes by which material goods are produced, and that applies equally to the high-tech electronic goods in everybody’s pockets and to the low-tech but immaculate purpose-made furniture.
Monday, 25 July 2011
The way they live now: a designer makers' guide to the hotel trade
'And being picked out by the most wealthy visiting families can transform a business in a few weeks. A spokesman for InterContinental Hotels said: "During the peak season you will get families taking 30 or 40 rooms to house their extended entourage. It is quite common for a whole floor, or even two, to be booked out by just one group. That's when you can get the really big hotel bills."
'Among the new crop, only the W Hotel might be considered a contemporary designer hotel, suggesting the fashion for modern minimalism may be waning.
'Though demand for London's most opulent hotels appears to be insatiable, lower down the Automobile Association's star ratings, many hoteliers are faring less well. A wave of businesses have gone to the wall, among them von Essen hotels, which included Cliveden, the Berkshire stately home at the centre of the Profumo affair.'
Monday, 18 July 2011
Wednesday, 13 July 2011
Gear change
 |
| Is it a bus or a punt? |
I used to think governments were the mechanics of the bus depot, tightening up the wheel nuts from time to time, but now I see they are mostly in the driver’s cab, grappling with the steering wheel alongside the bank chief executives.
So I am off to Oxford, land of punts, buttered crumpets, real philosophy and bookcases, to pose as a furniture maker for a while.
Tuesday, 12 July 2011
'Designer-maker': a peculiar furniture question - postscript
A colleague has remarked, perhaps not disapprovingly, amongst other comments he had on my 'designer-maker question' and Peter Dormer recent piece, that “in writing about John Makepeace and Waywood you have crossed that divide where we openly talk about each other's work”.
I was not actually conscious of crossing any divide, certainly not in any improper way. I do in fact have considerable admiration both for John Makepeace’s work as a whole and for the particular cabinet of Waywood’s on which I commented. In any case I did not consider myself to be offering criticism, in the sense of saying whether the work was good or bad. What I was attempting was to place what we do, as ‘designer-makers of furniture’ in the context of a currently live cultural matrix. I took John Makepeace’s work as a whole because he is so evidently the leading exponent of this type of work and the one whose output is both influential on other practitioners and most often commented upon by others. In some sense, willingly or not, he stands as elevated proxy for us all. That particular Waywood cabinet seemed to me to illustrate, better than any other individual piece of which I know, the ambivalent attitude we have (or might have – I do not know whether Barnaby Scott had in his mind any of the thoughts his piece stimulates in mine) to the principles of Arts and Crafts furniture, still our default cultural forebear.
At some level, as I said, it does not really matter: there is always a place for someone producing furniture without regard or deference to the culture around him or her. Yet culture is a collaborative enterprise, depending upon shared senses of what is worthwhile, although they need periodic refreshment or challenge.
It only makes sense, to take an extreme example, to talk of ‘morality’ in design in a context of shared cultural values. No-one is killing babies here. Any matrix of cultural values depends on acceptance rather than argument or logic. As soon as you question the foundations of such a matrix the whole structure above ground begins to look absurd, no matter how rigorously built.
It seems plain to me that we are designing and making furniture at a time when all of those cultural structures are tottering. Most of us, in our little community shelter somewhere near the ruins of the Arts and Crafts. Another group of designers and producers shelters in Modernism. Elsewhere numerous ramshackle structures, Deco and Dada, Constructivism and even neo-Classicism, have a surprising number of inhabitants, some a little shifty. But all of them have seen better days; none now looks entirely convincing. In this landscape of ruins some roam ever further afield, knocking on doors marked art, philosophy, technology.
Historically it is a relatively new kind of landscape. A few centuries back the artist craftsman (to employ a short-hand anachronistic term unsatisfactory at every time), whether he were making furniture or carving cathedral stonework, would have imbibed without deliberate choice or justification. Even later, when competing styles vied against each other, a continuity of basic cultural assumption underlay them. It was only towards the end of the nineteenth century that in the production of useful artefacts choices had to be made, about the way in which people worked and the nature of what they produced, that were seen to be acutely culturally defining. The Arts and Crafts and Modernism both had their distinctly moralising and missionary qualities, which we have neither shaken off nor entirely renounced.
In a curious way Modernism echoes the cultural certainty of the eighteenth century and its conception of ‘correct’ taste. If Modernism, from the beginning faced more cultural challenges than eighteenth-century culture it was not because its precepts were less self-confident but rather because no one class any more had a near monopoly of cultural expression.
Yet its day has passed and we have inherited its questions rather than its answers. I don’t believe we shall find new cultural accommodation for ourselves until many much wider questions of our social organisation have been answered (maybe even including in the great tide those hoary old things that troubled Ruskin and Morris). There are a great many contractions for us collectively to work though before we can hope to get to that stage. So, meanwhile, it might be better for us to focus our enquiring minds on what I have not – the actual workings and output of individual makers and making teams – but we do all in fact make it extremely difficult for that to be achieved, sometimes apparently thinking (perhaps in our commercial and socio-cultural anxiety) that the only communication worthwhile is the higher puffery.
I was not actually conscious of crossing any divide, certainly not in any improper way. I do in fact have considerable admiration both for John Makepeace’s work as a whole and for the particular cabinet of Waywood’s on which I commented. In any case I did not consider myself to be offering criticism, in the sense of saying whether the work was good or bad. What I was attempting was to place what we do, as ‘designer-makers of furniture’ in the context of a currently live cultural matrix. I took John Makepeace’s work as a whole because he is so evidently the leading exponent of this type of work and the one whose output is both influential on other practitioners and most often commented upon by others. In some sense, willingly or not, he stands as elevated proxy for us all. That particular Waywood cabinet seemed to me to illustrate, better than any other individual piece of which I know, the ambivalent attitude we have (or might have – I do not know whether Barnaby Scott had in his mind any of the thoughts his piece stimulates in mine) to the principles of Arts and Crafts furniture, still our default cultural forebear.
At some level, as I said, it does not really matter: there is always a place for someone producing furniture without regard or deference to the culture around him or her. Yet culture is a collaborative enterprise, depending upon shared senses of what is worthwhile, although they need periodic refreshment or challenge.
It only makes sense, to take an extreme example, to talk of ‘morality’ in design in a context of shared cultural values. No-one is killing babies here. Any matrix of cultural values depends on acceptance rather than argument or logic. As soon as you question the foundations of such a matrix the whole structure above ground begins to look absurd, no matter how rigorously built.
It seems plain to me that we are designing and making furniture at a time when all of those cultural structures are tottering. Most of us, in our little community shelter somewhere near the ruins of the Arts and Crafts. Another group of designers and producers shelters in Modernism. Elsewhere numerous ramshackle structures, Deco and Dada, Constructivism and even neo-Classicism, have a surprising number of inhabitants, some a little shifty. But all of them have seen better days; none now looks entirely convincing. In this landscape of ruins some roam ever further afield, knocking on doors marked art, philosophy, technology.
Historically it is a relatively new kind of landscape. A few centuries back the artist craftsman (to employ a short-hand anachronistic term unsatisfactory at every time), whether he were making furniture or carving cathedral stonework, would have imbibed without deliberate choice or justification. Even later, when competing styles vied against each other, a continuity of basic cultural assumption underlay them. It was only towards the end of the nineteenth century that in the production of useful artefacts choices had to be made, about the way in which people worked and the nature of what they produced, that were seen to be acutely culturally defining. The Arts and Crafts and Modernism both had their distinctly moralising and missionary qualities, which we have neither shaken off nor entirely renounced.
In a curious way Modernism echoes the cultural certainty of the eighteenth century and its conception of ‘correct’ taste. If Modernism, from the beginning faced more cultural challenges than eighteenth-century culture it was not because its precepts were less self-confident but rather because no one class any more had a near monopoly of cultural expression.
Yet its day has passed and we have inherited its questions rather than its answers. I don’t believe we shall find new cultural accommodation for ourselves until many much wider questions of our social organisation have been answered (maybe even including in the great tide those hoary old things that troubled Ruskin and Morris). There are a great many contractions for us collectively to work though before we can hope to get to that stage. So, meanwhile, it might be better for us to focus our enquiring minds on what I have not – the actual workings and output of individual makers and making teams – but we do all in fact make it extremely difficult for that to be achieved, sometimes apparently thinking (perhaps in our commercial and socio-cultural anxiety) that the only communication worthwhile is the higher puffery.
Friday, 8 July 2011
'Designer-maker': a problem peculiar to furniture?
The draft of some reflections on this topic, prompted by a reading of Peter Dormer's The Art of the Maker (1994) and The New Furniture (1987) can be found on the Talks and Articles page of this blog.
Tuesday, 21 June 2011
Back to furniture
“To Generalize is to be an Idiot. To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit.”
Blake was protesting against the culture of the eighteenth century in which all particularities were referenced to and judged against general standards of good taste, correctness and politeness (a quality then seen as much an essential component of art as of social behaviour).
Originality was thought as likely to be absurd as enlightening, and so slightly valued that Joshua Reynolds, whose Discourses Blake was annotating, could observe, "invention, strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory."
T S Eliot remarked that so positive was the culture of that age that it crushed a number of smaller men who thought differently but could not bear to face the fact.
With Blake it was his own perception and vision that was positive and not to be crushed and his apprehension of the particular was not to be referenced to the general.
In our own times, we seem not to know whether we wish to particularise or generalise, and to have lost our confidence in both. We cherish the particular but have lost the sense of accumulated experience into which it might be placed. We are surrounded by a plethora of cultural signs so clamorous that they have driven out meaning. The world and its history has become a cultural and natural supermarket which we loot for our individual satisfaction.
So furniture designer-makers have recently been berating themselves for how infrequently they indulge in any critical commentary on furniture, but the response is thin, and focussed on assessment of this or that designer’s whole body of work rather than on the examination of individual pieces of furniture. Such comment puts us in the realm of claim and counter claim, some doubtless more intelligent or discriminating than others but none able to validate itself, as individual criticism could do.
The debate is more political (in a cultural sense) than critical. We have an unsatisfied need to give shape to our inchoate culture by ranking and sanctioning practitioners rather than artefacts, although usually it is done politely, by quiet selection or exclusion rather than by manifesto or denunciation. Yet, however it is done, the process of creation, whereby individual perception is transmuted into something less limitingly personal is devalued, vulgarised or commercialised.
We have lost confidence in meaning or significance: objects are classed as ‘iconic’, without any sense of what they signify, simply because they are striking and frequently referenced. Furniture is ‘expressive’ without our having any sense of what it expresses. Little did Le Corbusier know what he was about to visit on the poor humble chair when he declared it to be ‘art’. Modern designer-maker furniture sometimes seems more ‘gestural’ than ‘expressive’, typified by the extravagant curve or the enveloping surface texture, offering a route to distinctiveness, sophistication or soul, bypassing the kind of design or cultural awareness necessary to achieve that sense of newness and rightness that dawns quietly on the observer rather than loudly assaulting him.
Blake was protesting against the culture of the eighteenth century in which all particularities were referenced to and judged against general standards of good taste, correctness and politeness (a quality then seen as much an essential component of art as of social behaviour).
Originality was thought as likely to be absurd as enlightening, and so slightly valued that Joshua Reynolds, whose Discourses Blake was annotating, could observe, "invention, strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory."
T S Eliot remarked that so positive was the culture of that age that it crushed a number of smaller men who thought differently but could not bear to face the fact.
With Blake it was his own perception and vision that was positive and not to be crushed and his apprehension of the particular was not to be referenced to the general.
In our own times, we seem not to know whether we wish to particularise or generalise, and to have lost our confidence in both. We cherish the particular but have lost the sense of accumulated experience into which it might be placed. We are surrounded by a plethora of cultural signs so clamorous that they have driven out meaning. The world and its history has become a cultural and natural supermarket which we loot for our individual satisfaction.
So furniture designer-makers have recently been berating themselves for how infrequently they indulge in any critical commentary on furniture, but the response is thin, and focussed on assessment of this or that designer’s whole body of work rather than on the examination of individual pieces of furniture. Such comment puts us in the realm of claim and counter claim, some doubtless more intelligent or discriminating than others but none able to validate itself, as individual criticism could do.
The debate is more political (in a cultural sense) than critical. We have an unsatisfied need to give shape to our inchoate culture by ranking and sanctioning practitioners rather than artefacts, although usually it is done politely, by quiet selection or exclusion rather than by manifesto or denunciation. Yet, however it is done, the process of creation, whereby individual perception is transmuted into something less limitingly personal is devalued, vulgarised or commercialised.
We have lost confidence in meaning or significance: objects are classed as ‘iconic’, without any sense of what they signify, simply because they are striking and frequently referenced. Furniture is ‘expressive’ without our having any sense of what it expresses. Little did Le Corbusier know what he was about to visit on the poor humble chair when he declared it to be ‘art’. Modern designer-maker furniture sometimes seems more ‘gestural’ than ‘expressive’, typified by the extravagant curve or the enveloping surface texture, offering a route to distinctiveness, sophistication or soul, bypassing the kind of design or cultural awareness necessary to achieve that sense of newness and rightness that dawns quietly on the observer rather than loudly assaulting him.
Wednesday, 18 May 2011
Accuracy
As a footnote to my earlier reflections on Hand or machine? and Designer-makers: the world we have lost, it has struck me that the nature of accuracy in craft work has completely changed between hand and machine skills.
In hand work accuracy is the exercise of dexterity and poise, arising from judgement in the combination of the perceptions of the senses and the application of the hand. Skill is a constant response to, and if required, correction of what has been done to the artefact before.
Accuracy in machine work is all about consistent referencing to the established datum.
Sophisticated, modern, automated machines can establish a new accurate datum with each process, as programmed in advance. Hand operated machines, with scope for manually introduced error, need to be referenced back, as far as possible, each time to the original. Correction and modification is likely to result in unintended deviation.
In hand work accuracy is the exercise of dexterity and poise, arising from judgement in the combination of the perceptions of the senses and the application of the hand. Skill is a constant response to, and if required, correction of what has been done to the artefact before.
Accuracy in machine work is all about consistent referencing to the established datum.
Sophisticated, modern, automated machines can establish a new accurate datum with each process, as programmed in advance. Hand operated machines, with scope for manually introduced error, need to be referenced back, as far as possible, each time to the original. Correction and modification is likely to result in unintended deviation.
Monday, 9 May 2011
Schleswig-Holstein digested
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
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
Sunday, 8 May 2011
The cutting edge of luxury
Furniture designer-makers anxiously and interminably fret about their commercial viability, their social responsibility, and look to their new association to make them rich and famous (whilst keeping them ethical and sustainable).
It would repay us to reflect on an account of a commercially highly successful sector of the retail trade in the UK published in today's Observer. At first sight, we are the polar opposites of women's high-street fashion, but we live and work in the same world. Is that the globalised world?
Saturday, 7 May 2011
Designer-makers: the world we have lost
I should perhaps apologise, to those who come to this blog thinking it concerns furniture, that so many of the recent posts have been about the world and politics. Yet I have been reflecting, from a furniture designer-maker’s perspective, on skill, tools and machines – though I fear that, through them, we shall get to society again.
Skill in making, I reflect, is only expressible through tools – which is the only reason the dolphins have not surpassed us. And machines – are they not another form of tools? We use the word now to mean motorised devices, although it was not originally so, and that, I first think is the key distinction that makes a tool a facilitator of skill and a machine a limiter of it. Yet perhaps it is not so. Is there really any essential difference between the pole lathe and the electric one, the treadle fret saw and the electric one?
Let me take a step back, or sideways, and consider the meaning of the term ‘designer-maker’, which is so important to some small-scale producers of furniture. We style ourselves furniture designer-makers not simply as a description but in something of a declaration (honoured perhaps more in theory than in practice) that the furniture, and the person, actually benefit by being ‘designed’ and ‘made’ by the one person. It is not simply that knowing how to make something helps avoid having the design lead to faults and shortcomings in the made thing. Rather it is a belief that ‘design’ and ‘make’ are inseparable, that the quality of each is actually different when they are carried out by the one person. I have found that to be so in my own experience.
I don’t deny that there are attendant dangers, of being constrained in one’s imagination by one’s knowledge of making practicalities and difficulties, or that there can be some virtue in the unfettered design imagination that challenges someone to find a way of making it. Yet it is a particular and limited kind of virtue, often seen in a rather humble form in architects’ furniture designs, which typically call for the impression of lightness or disconnectedness at the very point where furniture needs maximum structural strength – and sometimes seen in its most extravagant form in some admired ‘art’ furniture where, as a colleague remarked, the desiderata are that it should be ‘unusable, unaffordable and preferably unmakeable’.
I have myself, in a mood of relief, sometimes designed upholstered furniture, about whose construction I know very little, and I have found the design process becomes largely a manipulation of forms – a not unworthy but a limited aspect of design.
So what, in this single human engagement with both designing and making, is the essential nature of the second element. Am I still the maker regardless of the extent to which I mechanise and automate the process?
People often say they would not go back to the drudgery of doing all the making by hand. Even William Morris welcomes the ability of machines to remove drudgery from hand work, and I myself would not go back to hand planning all my timber (as distinct from using the planer-thicknesser, to employ a now rather antiquated example). I would not do so even if the organisation of society would still allow me to make a living that way, which, largely, it does not. Yet I know that, even with the simple machine planer, something is lost in return for the liberation from drudgery. The loss is in the engagement with the material, and it is therefore a coarsening of the process of making - and the process of making is inherent in the object. In that sense machine manufacture, in artistic (without the metaphysical capital A) terms, is regressive.
People then accuse one of romanticism, based on an unreal idealisation of hand work. It is not so: I actually know from experience what that hand work is like, and, as I have said, I choose not to go back to it. Yet I know what is lost as well as what is gained. I recognise that in all aspects of our lives – making, living, consuming, aspiring – we are not saints.
‘Hand’ versus ‘machine’ is, I think, obscured by regarding machines as simply another manifestation of tools. Motorisation is perhaps not a distinct but still a key distinction, and it is what removes one from interaction with the material, as all makers know – and all the more so when one is kitted out in the health and safety ear defenders, goggles, face mask, with guards, push sticks and hold downs.
Who has not had the experience of putting a plank into the thicknesser, after anxious deliberation about feed direction and depth of cut, and having to stand helplessly by, listening to the painful sound of an awkward piece of grain tearing out?
People say the CNC machine does only and exactly what it is instructed to do by the operator (is he here designer or maker?). Maybe so, but the dual point is that the machine does it itself, instructed, pre-programmed rather than guided, and that it can be instructed to do things against which the material resists. Indeed the perfection of the machine (far advanced on my elementary planer-thicknesser) is to be able to overcome flawlessly the resistance of the material, to treat wood as if it were plastic. Wood is a very resistant material, more so than almost any other. Stone may be harder, but wood has more active resistance, or reactive resistance: it responds to what we do to it, or to how we change its environment, not always in ways we welcome, nor always immediately – wherein lies the flaw in the perfect woodworking machine.
With lesser machines and tools we strive for a balance between overcoming the resistance of the material and the resistance of the material overcoming the process. We achieve that balance by controlling the application of power, so that one knows when one has overcome the resistance of the material cleanly or when one has broken it, sensing immediately, or preferably anticipating, the clean cut or the tear. It almost parallels good and bad governance, applying power with assent.
Skill in making, I reflect, is only expressible through tools – which is the only reason the dolphins have not surpassed us. And machines – are they not another form of tools? We use the word now to mean motorised devices, although it was not originally so, and that, I first think is the key distinction that makes a tool a facilitator of skill and a machine a limiter of it. Yet perhaps it is not so. Is there really any essential difference between the pole lathe and the electric one, the treadle fret saw and the electric one?
Let me take a step back, or sideways, and consider the meaning of the term ‘designer-maker’, which is so important to some small-scale producers of furniture. We style ourselves furniture designer-makers not simply as a description but in something of a declaration (honoured perhaps more in theory than in practice) that the furniture, and the person, actually benefit by being ‘designed’ and ‘made’ by the one person. It is not simply that knowing how to make something helps avoid having the design lead to faults and shortcomings in the made thing. Rather it is a belief that ‘design’ and ‘make’ are inseparable, that the quality of each is actually different when they are carried out by the one person. I have found that to be so in my own experience.
I don’t deny that there are attendant dangers, of being constrained in one’s imagination by one’s knowledge of making practicalities and difficulties, or that there can be some virtue in the unfettered design imagination that challenges someone to find a way of making it. Yet it is a particular and limited kind of virtue, often seen in a rather humble form in architects’ furniture designs, which typically call for the impression of lightness or disconnectedness at the very point where furniture needs maximum structural strength – and sometimes seen in its most extravagant form in some admired ‘art’ furniture where, as a colleague remarked, the desiderata are that it should be ‘unusable, unaffordable and preferably unmakeable’.
I have myself, in a mood of relief, sometimes designed upholstered furniture, about whose construction I know very little, and I have found the design process becomes largely a manipulation of forms – a not unworthy but a limited aspect of design.
So what, in this single human engagement with both designing and making, is the essential nature of the second element. Am I still the maker regardless of the extent to which I mechanise and automate the process?
People often say they would not go back to the drudgery of doing all the making by hand. Even William Morris welcomes the ability of machines to remove drudgery from hand work, and I myself would not go back to hand planning all my timber (as distinct from using the planer-thicknesser, to employ a now rather antiquated example). I would not do so even if the organisation of society would still allow me to make a living that way, which, largely, it does not. Yet I know that, even with the simple machine planer, something is lost in return for the liberation from drudgery. The loss is in the engagement with the material, and it is therefore a coarsening of the process of making - and the process of making is inherent in the object. In that sense machine manufacture, in artistic (without the metaphysical capital A) terms, is regressive.
People then accuse one of romanticism, based on an unreal idealisation of hand work. It is not so: I actually know from experience what that hand work is like, and, as I have said, I choose not to go back to it. Yet I know what is lost as well as what is gained. I recognise that in all aspects of our lives – making, living, consuming, aspiring – we are not saints.
‘Hand’ versus ‘machine’ is, I think, obscured by regarding machines as simply another manifestation of tools. Motorisation is perhaps not a distinct but still a key distinction, and it is what removes one from interaction with the material, as all makers know – and all the more so when one is kitted out in the health and safety ear defenders, goggles, face mask, with guards, push sticks and hold downs.
Who has not had the experience of putting a plank into the thicknesser, after anxious deliberation about feed direction and depth of cut, and having to stand helplessly by, listening to the painful sound of an awkward piece of grain tearing out?
People say the CNC machine does only and exactly what it is instructed to do by the operator (is he here designer or maker?). Maybe so, but the dual point is that the machine does it itself, instructed, pre-programmed rather than guided, and that it can be instructed to do things against which the material resists. Indeed the perfection of the machine (far advanced on my elementary planer-thicknesser) is to be able to overcome flawlessly the resistance of the material, to treat wood as if it were plastic. Wood is a very resistant material, more so than almost any other. Stone may be harder, but wood has more active resistance, or reactive resistance: it responds to what we do to it, or to how we change its environment, not always in ways we welcome, nor always immediately – wherein lies the flaw in the perfect woodworking machine.
With lesser machines and tools we strive for a balance between overcoming the resistance of the material and the resistance of the material overcoming the process. We achieve that balance by controlling the application of power, so that one knows when one has overcome the resistance of the material cleanly or when one has broken it, sensing immediately, or preferably anticipating, the clean cut or the tear. It almost parallels good and bad governance, applying power with assent.
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.
Sunday, 3 April 2011
Is this a juggernaut I see before me?
Sources of information: blogs versus politicians
Is it all we can do was to lie down before the approaching juggernaut of economic and social collapse?
'Juggernaut' comes from a Sanskrit word meaning 'lord of the universe' and is one of the forms of Krishna. At one temple devotees were thought to cast themselves under the wheels of a massive chariot carrying statues of Krishna as a deliberate act of devotion. Or perhaps they just slipped.
I am no kind of expert at all, but judgement is always about ranking opinions more knowledgeable than one’s own, and, sometimes, one has to nail one’s colours to the mast if only to allow others to steer clear.
The sources of information now are numerous and range from blogs to politicians. At one extreme many blogs, though of independent mind, are so overwhelmingly concerned to complete their own interpretive scheme that they are sometimes little concerned to identify which specific triggers of change are likely to occur first. Yet, in their defence, one must recognise that there is too much variability in the world, too many possibilities of both negative and positive feedback, too much irrational behaviour, and then the occasional small piece of enlightened rationality, too many unforeseen circumstances both benign and malignant, too complex a web of inter-connectedness in the political-economic structure we have erected, for anyone to know exactly what is going to happen and when.
On the other hand, information from those actually involved in trying to move the levers of power is highly compromised. Is ever a politician willing to lose office for the sake of telling the electorate something it needs to know, or do they all, like Vince Cable, believe that the marginal results they personally achieve in office completely outweigh public understanding?
Underlying instabilities
Beneath it all, at the level of historical perspective, it is not difficult to identify major and largely inexorable trends that threaten our current way of life: climate change; environmental degradation; population increase; natural resource depletion; increase of social/economic complexity; decline of state competence; decline of democratic control. Our cleverness, busy-ness and short-sightedness in coping with the here and now give us an amazing capacity for ignoring the ground beneath our feet and also for maintaining our balance, but there are good reasons for thinking it cannot go on much longer.
Which of these instabilities is most likely to hit us first, if not hardest? In my view it is the increase in social/economic complexity and more specifically the implosion of our financial system.
The only system that works?
When one posits a financial or economic collapse people tend to react that capitalism will go on for ever, that it is the only system that ‘works’, that there is no alternative system. Whether or not it is the only system that works is hardly worth debating. There certainly have been and are other social economic systems, but nothing to rival the scale of capitalism. Capitalism certainly works in its way, and it has a unique capacity to facilitate and accelerate economic growth. In our lifetimes it has produced unprecedented economic growth. People nowadays, in claiming that capitalism will go on and on, mostly identify it with precisely that phase that we have recently experienced. Capitalism inherently requires constant expansion. It is a pyramid structure, subject always to periodic collapse. It can restart after collapse, but there is no inevitability that it will regain the former level of activity and prosperity.
The collapse of capitalism? The view from the top of our pyramid
There have been capitalist booms and busts in the past, and there are always minor fluctuations in the ascents and even descents. Yet it is clear that we now stand at the peak of an economic pyramid whose summit is of historically unprecedented height.
The foundations of our pyramid were laid in the industrial revolution. It was thereafter fuelled by the western world’s colonial expansion or its settlement of new continents and dispossession of the native inhabitants. After 1930 it was further boosted by an exploitation of the earth’s material resources on a scale and with a rapidity totally unprecedented. Things were flagging a little by the time of World War 2, but reconstruction helped, and when, in the 1970s, resource limitations were beginning to be felt, trade globalization achieved essentially a recreation of the benefits of imperialism for the developed economies without the necessity for legal or physical occupation. However the engines were essentially decelerating and the final, brilliant boost from the 1980s onwards was the development of massive international financial expansion and deregulation.
That financial turbo-charging of our economy is what tottered in 2008 and is still threatening to collapse. In fact it cannot avoid collapse.
Financial instability and collapse
In the past few decades financial transactions internationally have outgrown trade in physical goods and services by several orders of magnitude. For banks the financing of trade and industry is now a very minor part of their activity and profit generation. Even a manufacturing company, such as Porsche, may make more money from financial transactions than physical production. Such financial transactions are ‘rent seeking’ activities that draw money out of the productive economy without generating wealth.
Such activity requires constant acceleration to avoid collapse. It is achieved by private finance’s destruction of state regulation, escape from state taxation and by a constant expansion of debt-based trading. Because financial trading has so enormously outstripped economic growth, this debt is backed by vastly overvalued assets (see sub-prime etc) and complicated financial insurance (see AIG etc) for which there are insufficient funds to meet eventual claims. Because the financial system is so complexly and inextricably inter-connected, financial trading insurance is far riskier than insuring casual risks such as theft or illness. In fact it is inherently unsustainable, but it is intended to underwrite the whole international financial edifice.
Banks are uniquely allowed to fictionalise their accounts. Governments, spurred on by the big international accounting firms, have recently allowed them to value their assets not according to what they might fetch on the open market (‘mark to market’), but according to what their computer models value them at if certain inconveniences and ‘disruptions’ to the market were removed – such as the fact that there are no willing buyers for their assets (‘mark to model’). Add to that all banks’ use of complicated corporate structures in tax havens, and their accounts become totally opaque.
The credit crunch was the panicked recognition of all banks that not even they could trust the solvency of their fellows. The immediate crisis was averted by state intervention but virtually every bank remains insolvent if any half-realistic valuation is placed on its assets. Since the credit crunch we have seen a series of government sponsored ‘stress tests’ applied to the commercial banks. These they have all passed, but in some cases (see Ireland) only weeks later they have required massive further state support.
Reactions and remedies
State governments have not only lost control of the financial system but their own financial ministries and advisers have become completely infiltrated by the financial classes (‘regulatory capture’). Nevertheless there is genuine alarm, even panic, at the instability of the financial system. (That is what explains the complete capitulation of the Liberal Democrats to the expenditure cutting agenda once they were admitted to coalition government.)
Governments seek to shore up the financial system by a combination of not always compatible measures.
The immediate reaction has been, and still is, to transfer the liability for much commercial bank debt via government to the tax-payer, either by guarantee or by buying bank debt at optimistic valuations. Quantitative easing injects massive amounts of liquidity into the economy through the banks, where it almost entirely remains, used not for productive investment, but for commodity speculation (see food prices and Middle East unrest). Regulatory control is fiercely resisted but governments are trying to impose higher liquidity requirements on the banks, which will make them ‘safer’, but will also reduce both their profitability and their lending capacity.
These measures may help shore up the financial system but they do nothing for the productive economy, whose fortunes come a very poor second in government priorities (see ‘Main Street’ versus ‘Wall Street’). Our economic system, as David Cameron might like to put it, is broken – and no-one knows how to fix it. It is all too complex and inter-connected. China is not the new economic paradigm; it is the last gasp of the old one.
Public burdens
Ironically, as globalisation fails, because third-world countries begin to resist the imposition of exploitative terms of trade upon them, the burdens imposed by non-democratic institutions such as the IMF and central banks are increasingly directed at first-world publics. Commercial bank debts are transferred to governments, who must then cut public spending, increase taxation or transfer it from corporations to individuals (see VAT increase and ‘internationally competitive’ corporation tax) and suppress wages and labour negotiating rights (see Wisconsin). When nations are severely distressed financially, many of these measures are effectively dictated by the IMF and other funding governments in contradiction to the inclinations and commitments of the democratically elected government. The IMF has an explicit policy of reducing labour costs in all European countries.
‘Rescue packages’, as in Greece and Ireland, are designed not to benefit the national economies directly, but first to save banks from collapse. Despite widespread public opposition to 'bailing out' 'lazy' PIGS in Germany, where Angela Merkel is caught in approaching election trap, several German banks have had highly improvident involvement with Irish banks (where regulation was lax even within its own legal requirements) and the German banks are likely to become insolvent if Ireland and/or Greece default. The Irish banks have just failed another stress test (is it the fourth?). How is it that every time these wise (and highly paid) financial people look at the Irish banks they find they missed a few score billions last time? Is it that there’s a hole in the bucket and the banks are even now creating new losses? Everyone knows Ireland will default: it is just a question of how long Germany and France can delay the inevitable. Some British banks are likely to be affected also. (Why else did UK extend its own individual loan to Ireland with money 'it did not have', even given that we're making a profit on the deal?)
European PIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Spain) can now borrow to fund their deficits, either from private bond investors or from national or international ‘rescuers’ only at rates well above even optimistic forecasts of growth in their economy. Their debts can only get worse, cuts deeper, public unrest more vociferous. The European Central Bank has signalled a forthcoming rise in interest rates (probably now slightly delayed by the Japanese disaster). European banks have total claims on Portuguese, Irish, Italian, Greek and Spanish debt of 2.4 trillion dollars. Do they really think they're going to get it all back?
In the US the housing market is in continuing decline, and the solvency of major and minor US banks still depends on overvalued mortgage-backed securities. Rising interest rates are possible (or yet more quantitative easing further increasing US debt, except that it's just again breached the congressionally approved limit) following Japanese sale of US bonds, thus increasing mortgage defaults. There is political paralysis at federal level and growing budget crises and possible bankruptcies at state and municipal level. US unemployment has just decreased sufficiently to boost not only the Dow but the FTSE as well, but few bothered to notice that the number of employed people had also dropped. Research shows almost half of the US population of working age has no full time job. Approaching a half of all US citizens are benefitting from food stamps. (The big banks administer the food stamps system and make a nice profit on it.) Meanwhile Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase (‘the most dangerous man in America’ and Tony Blair’s new boss) is busy telling us all that the problem pre-2008 was too much financial regulation.
In the UK most economic indicators are turning down - growth, unemployment, housing market, consumer confidence. Inflation is up. Bank profits rise. The government’s Office of Budget Responsibility forecasts that private debt will increase massively over the next few years as public debt, maybe, declines. The full scale of cuts and transfers to the private sector, and the public anger at them, is yet to be felt.
Tipping points
The burdens placed upon the public in the first world, by political and business leaders seeking to maintain the financial system, are, in anything but the short term, insupportable, but there is no other plan. The burdens placed upon the public in the third world, by economic exploitation and commodity speculation, are equally or more immediately insupportable and contribute directly to popular uprisings in the Middle East, including the supposedly oil-rich nations. State forces have shot and killed demonstrators in Yemen, Bahrain and Syria. Saudi troops are in Bahrain.
Japan’s misfortunes threaten to destabilise the bond and currency markets. The Bank of Japan’s immediate reaction is a massive dose of quantitative easing. Industrial disruption in Japan is likely to ripple out to industry internationally. It may be worse than a shortage of batteries for iPads.
Against all this it is difficult to believe that we are not in serious and present danger of financial and economic implosion.
Deflation and depression
It will take the form of severe deflation and depression. The money supply will drastically reduce as financial debt cannot be honoured. Over 95 per cent of money in circulation is not government issued currency but debt-based money created by commercial banks.
There is certainly too much money (and debt) in the system now, but economies always over-react and there will shortly be too little. Money is necessary to facilitate human exchange of goods and services. People are unemployed in a depression not for a lack of any possible activities useful to themselves or their fellow citizens, but because the mechanics of the system for rewarding them for their work with some token they can use for obtaining goods and services they require from others has broken down. It is quite possible in a depression for farmers to be throwing away food they cannot sell, whilst nearby people are starving because they cannot afford to buy it. Neither supply nor demand are absent; just the mechanism to bring the two together.
There will still be rich people in a depression, but fewer of them and they will be more worried. There will still be a market for expensive goods, but a much smaller one and suppliers will be much more vulnerable.
Middle income people, even up to a quite high level, will suffer a drastic reduction in their wealth and purchasing power. The poor will grow and struggle. Asset values will plummet; the effective price of essentials will rise; governments will withdraw from public support.
It is not a happy prospect for furniture designer makers.
Where do furniture designer makers fit in?
These developments will affect every section of society, including furniture designer-makers, but there is a particular way in which we fit into them.
It is no accident that the ‘British craft furniture revival’ happened during the post-war boom and that it reached its climax of widespread public attention (not necessarily its largest membership) in the seventies and eighties. Our natural market is the inconspicuously rich (‘the lower edge of luxury’). That market has for many of us been augmented by more structured forms of wealth disposal amongst corporate customers (now largely faded) and the rich clients of decorators and interior designers. But those we access by piggybacking on other professionals. All of these markets and mechanisms will suffer severely in a depression.
A few of us have gained custom under our own steam from the conspicuously rich, and have done so by projecting a certain kind of extravagance of design and making. Only a few of us have the talent or aptitude to do that, and it depends in any case for its effectiveness on a level of exclusivity.
When we try to promote our group fortunes in any organised way, as FDMA intends to do, we have a tendency to lift up our eyes to this market of the conspicuously rich – in my view in vain. Even if we do not imagine every one of us can access that market, we slip too readily into the assumption that we need to emulate the characteristics of that furniture to make all of us more commercially successful.
In the coming depression there will still be some conspicuous-rich demand but it will be a contracting niche and it is hopeless to think that more of us will be able to climb in. The inconspicuously rich are going to be severely squeezed. There will be more localised markets for basic and durable items. In that situation I think it is very unwise for FDMA to take its character (or its leadership) from what has been established as the apogee of furniture designer-making in the preceding decades. Most of us are going to have to establish radically new models if we are to survive as businesses in a changed world.
There is a further, more particular way in which our group development reflects the unsustainable economy in which we are set. A significant number of us depend for a substantial part of our income on training new would be professional designer makers. I believe we are training more people than can expect to succeed in their own businesses. We are running in effect our own Ponzi scheme. Unless we have a much clearer idea than I have seen of a successful business model for furniture designer-making in the coming decades I do not think we should be actively encouraging people to join our ranks. There will be enough who do so without encouragement.
Recovery and its limits
The world will recover, though it took the best part of a decade and a world war to recover from the last depression. Capitalism will survive (probably), but it will not return to anything like the level of economic activity, of prosperity and of internationalism that we have seen in recent decades.
That is because other underlying limitations will catch up with us following financial collapse, in the form of energy deficiency, climate change, and general resource scarcity.
Oil and gas are certainly beyond their peak. The energy returned on energy invested ratio on new supplies is between a fifth and a tenth of what it was on the primary oil field discoveries. The boom may make new difficult (and very small) oil reserves look economically viable, but the failing economic recovery that rising energy prices helps bring about will mean that many of these new discoveries are never exploited.
Even if nuclear and renewable energy had the inherent capacity to substitute for our present level of energy use, which many informed people doubt, we do not, from where we are now, have the economic ability to create the massive new infrastructure required. That infrastructure would have to be created from the ‘old’ economy and from conventional energy. We have simply left it too late.
There will be other scarcities too, most notably of food and water. Water supplies are inadequate and compromised in many parts of the world (including the USA). It may be true that there is enough food in the world to feed everyone, that it is just in the wrong place, but that doesn’t remove the problem. China and India have difficulty feeding their present populations and are currently buying up enormous swathes of agricultural land from impoverished countries that are more inured to seeing their own populations periodically starve (see Ethiopia).
And modern food production is of course highly dependent on cheap energy and petrochemical inputs – and increasingly in competition for land usage with bio-fuels.
Is that a juggernaut? I think it is. Can it be stopped? I think not. Can we, as individuals in local communities or small groups, dodge it? Possibly.
Why do people join associations?
Why do people, including furniture designer-makers, join associations?
Now there is a really interesting topic of psycho-social speculation.
To be brief: why do people join (or in the case of furniture designer-makers, why were they so exercised about having a newer better association instead of just getting on and doing the things themselves in ad hoc groups)?
They join because they see themselves as the sort of people who ought to belong to that sort of association - and vice versa. It's ideas in their minds in each direction.
It's a question of identity, and the association becomes a small (usually) part of their identity. But of course they're not in control: other people form part of this thing that is part of them, and they have different ideas and modes of behaviour. Therein lies the explanation of why people not infrequently behave so badly in associations - behaviour they would feel inhibited from indulging in individual encounters. They impugn people's motives; they object over strongly to other people's actions or even discourse; they misrepresent others' words and deeds; they hope to expel them. But they have to do so because they are correcting a wayward part of themselves. They don't mean to accuse others. It's a mild form of derangement, probably with a name in the literature (I expect it's the 'Strangelove syndrome' - remember his arm?).
These are the stronger (or madder) members. The more vulnerable join because they hope they are, or hope they will by joining become, the sort of people who ought to belong. They keep quiet and nurse their discontents. For the time being.
There it is in a nutshell, totally theoretical of course. No reference to any living person is intended or should be inferred, and no animals were harmed in the production of this post.
Now there is a really interesting topic of psycho-social speculation.
To be brief: why do people join (or in the case of furniture designer-makers, why were they so exercised about having a newer better association instead of just getting on and doing the things themselves in ad hoc groups)?
They join because they see themselves as the sort of people who ought to belong to that sort of association - and vice versa. It's ideas in their minds in each direction.
It's a question of identity, and the association becomes a small (usually) part of their identity. But of course they're not in control: other people form part of this thing that is part of them, and they have different ideas and modes of behaviour. Therein lies the explanation of why people not infrequently behave so badly in associations - behaviour they would feel inhibited from indulging in individual encounters. They impugn people's motives; they object over strongly to other people's actions or even discourse; they misrepresent others' words and deeds; they hope to expel them. But they have to do so because they are correcting a wayward part of themselves. They don't mean to accuse others. It's a mild form of derangement, probably with a name in the literature (I expect it's the 'Strangelove syndrome' - remember his arm?).
These are the stronger (or madder) members. The more vulnerable join because they hope they are, or hope they will by joining become, the sort of people who ought to belong. They keep quiet and nurse their discontents. For the time being.
There it is in a nutshell, totally theoretical of course. No reference to any living person is intended or should be inferred, and no animals were harmed in the production of this post.
Tuesday, 22 March 2011
Current Exhibition: 21st Century Furniture III
The Arts & Crafts Legacy
A Selling Exhibition of Today's Designer Makers
I am currently participating in this exhibition, which has now become an annual event.
A Selling Exhibition of Today's Designer Makers
I am currently participating in this exhibition, which has now become an annual event.
What is it that we do when, as ‘designer-makers’ we make a table? What, through the table, do we seek to exhibit? Why do we define our exhibition by reference to furniture-makers in small workshops, in the southern English countryside a century ago, producing ‘wonderful furniture of a commonplace kind’? ‘Art’ and ‘Craft’ are labels that now we are comfortable neither to abandon nor wholeheartedly adopt. ‘Designer’, though now fading from its recent almost universally positive currency, was an offspring of Arts and Crafts through a Balhausian intermediary, where it acquired its renunciation of ornament. Ornament, not universally eschewed by the Arts and Crafts makers, troubles us still. Now that we can make in so many ways (the kind of technical virtuosity that got the Victorians into trouble) we are tempted (as always following the architects) to differentiate our work through form, which can sometimes be as much ‘applied’ as the decoration of the Victorians. Such thoughts are pursued elsewhere on this blog.
The Millinery Works
85/87 Southgate Road
Islington
London N1 3JS
020 7359 2019
20 March to 1 May 2011
closed Mondays and Easter
further details at http://www.millineryworks.co.uk/
Decoration
‘Decoration’ is a subject that calls forth the knives and cudgels. One group is brave enough to call themselves ‘Interior Decorators’, to the disdain of ‘Interior Designers’, those Squires to the Knights and Lords of Architecture. (Sometimes literally such – what was it in our generation that caused architects, historically for the first time, to be added to the ranks of those with Expectations of Honours? Was it just that New Labour wanted to show how switched on it was and couldn’t quite bring itself to ennoble the Gallagher brothers or Damian Hirst, or had the Fosters and Rogers simply risen to join the captains of industry?)
In fact the boot of disdain has been on the other foot in quite recent times in at least one context. In the 1930s and 40s, when the English country house aesthetic was being established (arguably our most successful cultural export, especially in the north American direction) as the National Trust struggled to rescue our ancestral aristocratic houses from the onward march of proletarian history, authentic clutter was preferred to any notion of period consistency. John Fowler, as Patrick Wright puts it in A Journey Through Ruins, “the advocate of ‘humble elegance’ and ‘pleasing decay’ who would become the trust’s favoured ‘decorator’ in the late Fifties, scorned the idea of ‘design’.”
But in our own times, a recent panel discussion by Designers about Decoration published in the design magazine FX (August 2010) might have got further if they could have brought themselves to step back more from the rather petty current turf war between interior ‘designers’ and interior ‘decorators’ – both terms now in considerable need of explication and demystification.
When did decoration become a sure sign of moral disintegration? In the second half of the nineteenth century, in reaction to the Victorian willingness to apply decorative effects of any provenance or quantity to manufactures. The Viennese architect Adolf Loos, whose private feelings about sensuality and morality were more than a little occluded, explicitly decried ornament as a source of degeneracy and crime. Yet that did not prevent him from bestowing a richness on his room interiors belied by the elegantly stern exteriors of his houses.
We forget now how outrageous, historically and culturally, is what came to be an aesthetic and moral ban on decoration. Until the nineteenth century all art and artefacts that could achieve and afford it were decorated – Anglo-Saxon, Islamic, gothic, Aztec, Chinese, classical Greek – what is the Parthenon frieze if not decoration? The purpose of decoration was to beautify and differentiate. No-one doubted it.
It was the Bauhaus modernists (great admirers, as are most architects, of Loos) who introduced much of the confusion by claiming there was an undecorated form of any object that was inevitable, pure and moral. But the urge to beautify and differentiate could not be done away with, only disguised. There is nothing inevitable about the form of a Barcelona chair. It is pure differentiation. As, too, is the cosmetic appearance of a Dyson vacuum cleaner, however much it may relate to its engineering function.
Since we forwent decoration, we have had to differentiate through increasingly promiscuous manipulation of form, especially where we have acquired the capacity to manufacture pretty much as we like – the kind of technical virtuosity that was the Victorians’ undoing. The classical Greeks had little choice in the way in which they constructed a temple: they had soon to turn to decoration to differentiate their creations.
It makes some sense to say that ‘design’ is sculpted, whilst ‘decoration’ is applied. Yet modern architecture is sometimes characterised by a kind of applied form (as much applied as any decoration of Victorian architects) with wilful and extravagant external forms, ‘organic’ freeform or anarchic geometry, that bear little relationship to the internal utilisation of space or the logic of construction.
Time to pull the baby out of the plughole?
In fact the boot of disdain has been on the other foot in quite recent times in at least one context. In the 1930s and 40s, when the English country house aesthetic was being established (arguably our most successful cultural export, especially in the north American direction) as the National Trust struggled to rescue our ancestral aristocratic houses from the onward march of proletarian history, authentic clutter was preferred to any notion of period consistency. John Fowler, as Patrick Wright puts it in A Journey Through Ruins, “the advocate of ‘humble elegance’ and ‘pleasing decay’ who would become the trust’s favoured ‘decorator’ in the late Fifties, scorned the idea of ‘design’.”
But in our own times, a recent panel discussion by Designers about Decoration published in the design magazine FX (August 2010) might have got further if they could have brought themselves to step back more from the rather petty current turf war between interior ‘designers’ and interior ‘decorators’ – both terms now in considerable need of explication and demystification.
When did decoration become a sure sign of moral disintegration? In the second half of the nineteenth century, in reaction to the Victorian willingness to apply decorative effects of any provenance or quantity to manufactures. The Viennese architect Adolf Loos, whose private feelings about sensuality and morality were more than a little occluded, explicitly decried ornament as a source of degeneracy and crime. Yet that did not prevent him from bestowing a richness on his room interiors belied by the elegantly stern exteriors of his houses.
We forget now how outrageous, historically and culturally, is what came to be an aesthetic and moral ban on decoration. Until the nineteenth century all art and artefacts that could achieve and afford it were decorated – Anglo-Saxon, Islamic, gothic, Aztec, Chinese, classical Greek – what is the Parthenon frieze if not decoration? The purpose of decoration was to beautify and differentiate. No-one doubted it.
It was the Bauhaus modernists (great admirers, as are most architects, of Loos) who introduced much of the confusion by claiming there was an undecorated form of any object that was inevitable, pure and moral. But the urge to beautify and differentiate could not be done away with, only disguised. There is nothing inevitable about the form of a Barcelona chair. It is pure differentiation. As, too, is the cosmetic appearance of a Dyson vacuum cleaner, however much it may relate to its engineering function.
Since we forwent decoration, we have had to differentiate through increasingly promiscuous manipulation of form, especially where we have acquired the capacity to manufacture pretty much as we like – the kind of technical virtuosity that was the Victorians’ undoing. The classical Greeks had little choice in the way in which they constructed a temple: they had soon to turn to decoration to differentiate their creations.
It makes some sense to say that ‘design’ is sculpted, whilst ‘decoration’ is applied. Yet modern architecture is sometimes characterised by a kind of applied form (as much applied as any decoration of Victorian architects) with wilful and extravagant external forms, ‘organic’ freeform or anarchic geometry, that bear little relationship to the internal utilisation of space or the logic of construction.
Time to pull the baby out of the plughole?
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)