Extreme Craft

Recycling Sucks: The History of Creative Reuse at TEDx Eureka

Last month, I had the pleasure of delivering a shortened version of my lecture Recycling Sucks: The History of Creative Reuse as a TED talk at TEDx Eureka. Lots of fun stuff had to be cut out to accomodate the shortened format, but hopefully the result is short, fun and still informative. TEDx was really fun in Eureka--it happened at the Arcata Theater Lounge, and the production was top notch.

Check out this playlist of other TEDx talks from Eureka, including lectures on art, math, science, laughter, weed, history, slavery... and death. The TEDx event showed how geeky, engaged and enthralling the people are up here on the North Coast.

LINK

Era Messages

Greetings from Portland!  I'm at the Museum of Contemporary Craft, where I've somehow managed to trick the wonderful staff into believing that I'm a legitimate curator!  Ha!  I'm honored to present Era Messages, my debut museum exhibition.  I curated the show from the more than 1000 objects in the museum's permanent collection, which spans the 75 years the museum has been around.

The objects in the show are all very representative of the time periods in which they were created--from funky, fuzzy 1960's textile art to slick, tightly-crafted 90's work.  I'll be in "residence" at the museum, chatting with visitors about the show all day today, then I'll give a lecture called "A Waste of Timelessness:   Craft in the Present Tense" at the museum on Saturday at 2:00.

Is craft at its best when it is categorized as timeless, or should craft be understood as a reflection of the era in which it is made? In this CraftPerspectives Lecture, Garth Johnson will examine how trends in popular culture, fashion and style intersect with craft. Johnson notes, “As legendary cultural critic Heidi Klum says, ‘One minute you are in, and the next, you are out.’” Johnson’s lecture provides context for Era Messages, the exhibition he’s curated from works in the Museum’s collection.

So far, Portland has been a whirlwind of awesome, broken arm nonwithstanding.  I look forward to seeing you at the museum!  Thanks to PNCA for the photo!

LINK

 

 

The Year Funk Broke

Most people in the craft world are familiar with Robert Arneson.  During the 60s and 70s, when crafters were wringing their hands about their exclusion from the art world, Arneson satarized the lowly stature of ceramics by talking about "The World's Most Fascinating Hobby".  As a founding member of the "Funk" movement, he embraced the scatological potential of ceramics, which culminated in his "Funk John", which was originally exhibited in 1963, at an exhibition alongside works by Peter Voulkos and John Mason.

When I was going through the Smithsonian's archive of oral histories, I found an extensive interview with Arneson that gives (among a zillion other things) a history of the Funk John.  After the piece was unceremoniously removed from its original exhibition, Arneson sold the piece to a former student of his, who installed it in her living room (despite strident objections by her husband).  I'll let Arneson finish the story.

Some time later Nina came back to see me at Davis, and she was very upset. She discretely asked me, “How does one fix ceramics?” I didn’t know what she meant. She said, “Well, how do you fix things that are broken?” “Well, what’s broken?” She said, “Well, I must tell you. My husband opened the living room door the other night, took your toilet that was on rollers and rolled it right out to the front porch and down five flights of stairs. It tipped over and was just really pulverized. I gathered up all the pieces and put them in the yard.” So I said, “Well, just bring up all the pieces and let me see what we’ve got.” So she brought up all the pieces back to me. Remarkably, she had them all. It broke in a nice, wholesome manner. There weren’t a lot of little shards, so I restored it to its original.

One thing about my art is that I have always had an impatience with my processing. My work always cracked and did weird things. So I learned to fabricate and repair them. In some cases, I also forgot to make certain sections of my work that were missing, so I always had to fabricate them out of plastics. I really learned how to fit and make pieces belong and come together that were negligent originally in their construction. I put the piece together very nicely. I didn’t give it back to her since I didn’t want a violent act repeated on the piece as I was really liking it. So I asked her, “Now where is it going to go? We have to find a friend of yours.” Eventually Nina was able to finally bring it back to her own home, and hide it in the back of her garden somewhere under a shrub so it wouldn’t be offensive.

Later on when I had my retrospective in 1974 at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, that toilet was certainly one of the pieces that I wanted to have in my exhibition. I made arrangements to borrow it. It had been sitting at the Kelley’s under a shrub for about ten years. Some of the epoxy had deteriorated under the weathering process. I had to bring it back to my studio at Davis and spend about two days on it, etching it in acid and removing some of the shearing epoxy pigments that were coming off, loosening up the epoxy that was wiggling away. I rebuilt it, putting it back together to make it certainly even better than new. And it was a beautiful piece after that.

When that show came down, I had reached the point where I decided – I knew that the toilet was such a crucial piece in my life that I really wanted it back. I offered the Kelly’s the opportunity to have any work that they would wish or they could even commission a piece, for that toilet, which they had originally purchased for $500. At current value in 1974, they could have something closer to $3,000 or $4,000, whatever they wanted, or I would make them a piece, or they could choose a piece within the next few years, irregardless. Anyway, looking back on those toilets, that was the impetus to a body of work on my part that I felt was finally arriving at what Bob Arneson’s art was going to be about.

If you're interested in reading more of the extensive interview with Arneson, follow this LINK.  I can wholeheartedly recommend the entire Smithsonian oral history archive, which has transcripts of incredible interviews with artists, crafters, collectors and thinkers.  It's a treasure trove that will fuel tons of craft researchers in the new millenium.

LINK to Smithsonian oral history archive

Magic Carpet

I'm working my way through a giant stack of Craft Horizons magazines from the 1960's and 70's.  My research keeps getting sidetracked by all of the amazing finds.  I just read an incredible article by Joy Wulke, a sculptor who has spent her career making large public art projects for civic and commercial clients.

One of her early projects was a large-scale carpet that she wove for the Windows on the World restaurant on top of the World Trade Center.  Wulke worked with the restaurant's architect, Warren Platner, and his interior designer, Lee Alstrom.  The concept was a sixteen foot square hand-woven carpet that would be one of the centerpieces of the space.  For anyone who ever worked on a large commisison, Wulke's saga will sound pretty familiar. 

After she worked up some samples, the designer told her she had to create the same effect at half the price, with half the wool that she had originally planned.  Then, her wool supplier in Pakistan came down with a case of anthrax, so she had to find another supplier.  Then, she had to commission woodworkers to build a loom that big in her relatively tiny studio.

After all was said and done, Wulke was left with $1700 to pay for her labor and that of her assistants.  That's something like $6000 when adjusted to today's dollars, especially considering the project was so monumental.

I've been thinking a lot about 1970s interiors.  It's pretty mind-blowing that a corporate building like the World Trade Center would have a restaurant built around something so handmade...and so... PIMP!  Say what you want about the 70's, but the public was definitely receptive to natural textures... and plenty of them.  I managed to uncover the original New York Times review of the restaurant's interior (along with another amazing article about the quantity of silverware and other accessories were being stolen by the souvenir-hunting public).  Here's an excerpt, and you can download the entire review by clicking HERE.

It is not, in principle, a bad idea. Miesian purism by now is commonly acknowledged to be a style of the past, and anyway it was never very able in its cold rigidity to provide dining spaces that satisfied the imagination as well as the rational eye. Dining in a restaurant is a fantasy experience, and there is nothing wrong with a restaurant's design playing up to this.

And play up this restaurant does. The main dining room of Windows on the World, as the 107th floor is called. is done in soft pastels, with tufted vinyl banquettes, lots of brass, and fabric-covered walls. The room is so lush that even the simple wood-and-cane Prague chairs used at the freestanding tables, a classic modem design, take on a certain voluptuousness.

No mention of our hand-woven rug, but you get the idea.  I'm sure it didn't take long for that interior to be replaced by some serious Gordon Gekko-esque gold and black lacquer during the 80's.  In 1997, Ruth Reichl had this to say about the 1990's Windows on the World interiors:

"Despite recent renovations, New York's highest restaurant still looks like an airport lounge; if not for the fabulous view, you could be in a bland hotel in the Midwest."

Of course I mourn for the loss of the World Trade Center...but I also mourn for the funky, fuzzy interiors of the 70's.  How are we supposed to appreciate fondue without them?

Making Amends

Ah, the life of an accident-prone pottery lover.  My wife and I have never met a piece of ceramic art that we couldn't find some way to destroy.  We also live in an active fault zone--Eureka had a 6.5 earthquake last year that destroyed a lot of our ceramics.  We're a mosaic artist's dream.

The Japanese have other ways of dealing with their broken ceramics.....in fact, they've elevated it to a high art.  I've known about kintsugi for a long time.  It's the art of repairing cracked or broken ceramics, and rather than attempting to hide the mends, the mender accentuates them with real gold or silver.  I've seen plenty of images of old master tea bowls over the years, but I never knew exactly what the process was... until now.

My friend Becky just called my attention to the fabulous YouTube video above, which was put up by a Japanese metalsmith/jeweler.  Apparently, the process is all based on resins and lacquers that come from trees.  The kintsugi artist carefully repairs the broken vessel with a sticky resin that hardens as it dries.  The resin can then be sanded and buffed until the crack is almost imperceptible to the touch.  After that, the artist takes a lacquer that has been combined with real gold and covers the crack.

This can play out two ways.  If you're repairing a stately piece of celadon or other fine porcelain, the craggy gold lines add a wildness and life that the piece didn't necessarily have in the first place.  On the other hand, if you're repairing a rustic wood-fired shigaraki teabowl, the gold repairs become little bits of refined order that balance out the wildness of the original form.

When I think of how disposable everything in our culture is, my mind reels at thinking of a process that renders something thought to be useless into a piece of art that is more valuable than the piece was before breaking. 

Kintsugi is so important that certain people have been known to intentionally destroy ceramic objects so they can be beautifully repaired.  I'm kicking myself that I missed the exhibition that the Freer Gallery at the Smithsonian hosted last year.  It was called "Golden Seams: The Japanese Art of Mending Ceramics".  The show traced the history of kintsugi to 15th Century Japan, when a prized teabowl that belonged to a nobleman was broken.  The teabowl was sent to China, where the finest porcelain wizards in the world plied their craft.  The family was shocked when the teabowl came back "repaired" by large metal staples that held the pieces together.  This led the Japanese to develop kintsugi within the next half-century.

Kintsugi is a demanding art to learn.  It involves hard-to-come-by materials, a steady hand and a lot of patience.  If any of you have the ear of the folks who make SuperGlue (or even duct tape), you should plead with them to develop a 21st century equivalent....before the next major earthquake hits my house.

Link to YouTube video (Thanks, Becky!)

LINK to Freer Gallery of Art Show

LINK to fabulous Washington Post review of the show

Give Up The Folk!

Do you have one of those friends who is both hypercreative and incredibly modest?  The problem with these types of friends is that you see them, hang out with them, but it's really, really hard to keep up with with their creative output.  My pal Clifton is just such a friend.  The problem is compounded by the fact that whatever he is up to creatively, it can't be put into a neat box. 

I'll hear one month that he's working with other graphic designers on information kiosks for small towns in Mississippi, then the next month he's teaching himself to write iPhone apps to pitch to traditional book publishers.  Fragments of some of his projects tend to pop up on his website, cliftonburt.com, which also serves as a repository for his world class musings on whatever strikes his fancy that day.   I hope I'm not making him sound frivolous...because he has more "game-changer" in his pinky toe than most people have in their whole body.

That's why it didn't surprise me that one of Clifton's new projects, FOLK OBJECT slipped under my radar until Design*Sponge wrote about it last week.  Doh!

Folk Object is a Clifton-curated Tumblr reliquary for..well...folk objects.  As he should, Clifton takes a broad view of what constitutes "folk".  On the Folk Object site, you've got your curious expressions of nationalist craft rubbing shoulders with album covers, high fashion and distillations of "folk" sensibility that range from psychedelic to dollar store.  Academically trained artists rub shoulders with craftspeople, designers and business people.  It's up to you, the viewer to juxtapose everything and sort it all out.

All of this is offered up without wry commentary or even justification.  In grand Tumblr style, viewers can register their approval or reblog the images.  Folk Object makes it apparent that the Esperanto-leaning utopian impulses that started developing early in the last century are continuing apace.  Objects in the "folk" vernacular have their own peculiar beauty and symbolism that is ripe for mashing up, reviving or exploiting. 

A visit to Folk Object leaves me both shaken and stirred.  I slap my forehead at the ways folk traditions are mined for their commercial potential and kitsch, but I'm also excited by the way their potency and shocked by their malleability.

I dare you to take a look through the pages of Folk Objects and walk through a thrift store without seeing the objects on the shelf anew.  Prepare to have your paradigm shifted.

LINK

Strips of Fabric

While Claire and I were in Portland a couple of weeks ago, paid a visit to Portland's massive Fabric Depot.  We were accompanied by our friends Diane and Katin.  Diane is an all-around crafty goddess, and Katin is a very good sport.  Katin would be the first to admit that hanging out at a fabric store isn't his idea of a great time. 

When we were discussing the fabric store visit, Katin suggested that we menfolk could go have a cup of coffee if there was a coffee shop nearby.

When we got to fabric depot, we noticed that there wasn't a coffee shop across the street, but there WAS an adult "super store" called "The Peep Hole".  

Ah, symbiosis.

We hung out in the Fabric Depot's "husband lounge" and watched football instead.  However, when Katin and Diane took the train back to their house, a bunch of strippers used their train car for a photo shoot.  Karma rules. 

A Banner Year

Because they take such extreme technical skill to create, and historically, they were commissioned by patrons, tapestries exist in a weird netherworld between art and craft.  Additionally, tapestries are lived with differently than paintings.  There's a reason that teenage boys (or guys who collect asian weapons and still live with their parents) decorate their rooms with big Bob Marley or Three Wolf tapestries instead of paintings.  The tapestry is a classy way of warming up a wall.

The owners of The Rug Company in London know this.  They've been selling high-end rugs for many thousands of Pounds by designers like Vivienne Westwood and Diane von Furstenburg for over a decade.  Their rugs range from tasteful and minimal home accents to bold intrusive designs like Westwood's "Rubbish", a wool rug whose surface is decorated with an extreme close-up of a garbage pile.

Chris and Suzanne Sharp, the owners of the Rug Company are astute businesspeople, but they also seem to have restless, creative minds.  The Sharps were thinking of the way that artists and workshops worked together in the Renaissance to create tapestries when they created "Banners of Persuasion", a collaboration that paired fourteen artists from the fine art world with a workshop in China that creates luxurious, detailed tapestries from wool and silk.

Among the artists that the Sharps persuaded to collaborate were Kara Walker and Grayson Perry, two artists known for combining historically craft-based processes with their own shocking contemporary images.

Kara Walker produced "A Warm Summer Evening in 1863", a combination of an old engraving showing a mob burning down an orphanage for black children with an image of a lynched pigtailed child in period dress hanging from a bow.

Turner Prize winning transvestite ceramic artist Grayson Perry has always found clever ways to blend historical forms, craft processes and his own worldview, which makes his tapestry a natural progression for his artwork.  "Vote Alan Measles for God" appears to be a riff on Afghanistani rugs that date back to the Soviet Invasion of the 1980's.  More current war rugs tend to show the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, as well as American weaponry. 

Perry's rug shows his teddy bear, Alan Measles (who is often used in his work) scaling the burning twin towers with plastic explosives strapped to his body.  Oil wells, stealth fighters, crosses and Osama Bin Laden lie beyond the twin towers and Pentagon in a walled-off war zone.  In another historical layer, Mr. Measles appears to be depicted in Aboriginal X-Ray style, showing his inner structure.

Today's Sunday New York Times contains a great article (with accompanying interactive slideshow) about Banners of Persuasion.  The workshop that created the tapestries didn't just translate two-dimensional images from the artists--they worked carefully with the artists to develop different stitches and details to make certain brush strokes or implied objects stand out. 

Fred Tomaselli's "After Migrant Fruit Thugs" was developed from a canvas that included collaged photographic elements, paint and other materials.  The leaves were embellished with tiny gold threads that Tomaselli sees as "imparting a life force" in the piece.  When faced with the range of technical possibilities that working with master craftsmen offers, many of the artists appear to have adapted their ideas and concepts accordingly.

Thirteen of the banners are currently on view at the James Cohen Gallery in Chelsea through February 13th.  I would love to be able to see the details in person.  If only I had enough cash...I might consider replacing the "Three Wolf" banner in my room with a Grayson Perry.

LINK to NY Times Article  LINK to Banners of Persuasion website

Flags of Hope

Pat Robertson can suck it.

Last week's earthquake in Haiti is a tragedy on many, many different levels.  The loss of life, livelihoods and homes are staggering.  I've never been to Haiti myself, but all of my friends who have visited there came back with fantastic stories about the people they met.  My friend Todd even flew a Vodou priest to Omaha to perform his marriage ceremony.  Haiti has a rich history of art that is inextricably linked with religion, culture and geography.

My favorite form of Haitian art is the Vodou Flag.  These intricately beaded and sequined banners have traditionally been used in religious rituals.  The flags are placed atop poles and carried through the Vodou temple, accompanied by drums and dancing.  Of course the Vodou banners have been commercialized and turned into secular souvenirs, but they are still produced for use as well.

 The beauty of the banners makes the authenticity debate almost moot.  To see a Vodou flag in person is to experience a little window into Haitian culture.  The flags are full of symbols, including representations of priests, implements of worship and plenty of syncretic images that work for both Voudou and Catholicism, the two main religions practiced (often at the same time) on the island.

The flags also portray the pantheon of Vodou gods and goddesses.  The above image is a flag representing The Grand Bois, who is a spirit commonly associated with nature.  His counterpart in the Catholic world is Saint Sebastian.  Offerings to the Grand Bois often include honey and spiced rum.

This image is of Silva Joseph (creator of the Grand Bois banner above), a Vodou priest and master flag maker.  Many of the established masters live in Port-au-Prince, where the earthquake struck.  Like all details from the earthquake, the whereabouts of various Vodou craftspeople are hard to come by.  The Haitian art blog Haitianna has offered up a few updates about artists the blogger knows personally.

A longer article about Vodou flags can be found at Candice Russell's Haitianna.  Vodou flags also featured prominently in UCLA's recent touring exhibition Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou.  The Vodou exhibition (and its accompanying website) delves into history and ritual, using objects like Vodou flags to illustrate Haiti's links with Africa and France.

Port-au-Prince's Iron Market is where the raw materials for the flags can be found.  A Vodou flag master/priest usually sketches a design onto fabric, then stretches the fabric onto a frame before beginning the weeks-long process of adding the sequins one-by-one.  Each banner is embellished to the point where the senses of the viewer are overloaded.  Even a small Vodou banner is entrancing--viewing an entire collection of them is overwhelming.

You can find plenty of Vodou flags on the web.  I bought an entry-level flag with a mermaid on it for Claire a few years ago, and I think about Haiti every time I walk past it.  The best way to purchase a Vodou flag, of course, would be directly from its maker in Haiti.  My thoughts are going out to the artists of Port-au-Prince.  In addition to Vodou flags, Haiti is home to many accomplished painters, and increasingly, talented sculptors that transform scavenged metal and garbage into brilliant art.

You can, of course, send aid to Haiti many different ways.  I especially recommend sending donations to Doctors Without Borders.  Thanks go out to Indigo Arts for most of the images I used on this post.

(Black Velvet) Elvis Has Left the Building

Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!  I got some shocking news this morning.  According to a new article in the Oregonian, Portland's museum of black velvet art, Velveteria will be shutting its doors on January 24th.  The owners, Caren and Carl will be moving to Southern California.  The couple cite Portland's economy as a factor in their decision, along with the rapidly falling real estate prices in SoCal.

I got to visit Velveteria for the first time a couple of years ago, and it was magical.  Velveteria had just moved from its old space to a deeeee-luxe new space on East Burnside.  It's no secret that I'm a fan of the black velvet.  I've got a small, but intensely cultivated collection, even though I gave my Kenny Rogers (as the Gambler, natch) painting away last year.  The crown jewel of my collection is a painting of the Pink Panther on the toilet, holding up his tail.  He's shuffling his feet (there's a motion blur) and smoking a cigarette in a long holder.  There are also, for some reason, fried eggs on the floor.

That's why I'm going to miss Velveteria.  The place is chock full of paintings with weird, incongruous details like these.  Ethnicities blur, patriotism and the erotic commingle, and of course, Elvis is everywhere. 

Carl and Caren literally wrote the book on black velvet.  Their book, Black Velvet Masterpieces was published by Chronicle in 2008.  It's filled with their genuine love of the entire range of black velvet paintings...from common portraits of Fat Elvis to exquisite 1940's erotic Polynesian paintings.  Carl and Caren were incredibly nice.  They're a fixture of the Portland cultural scene, and they'll be sorely missed.

The closing of the Velveteria isn't the first cultural tragedy of its kind to hit Portland.  The town is still reeling from the closing of Stephanie G. Pierce's 24 Hour Church of Elvis (full disclosure--I'm a card-carrying Saint in the Church of Elvis).  Stephanie wasn't able to keep the Church of Elvis going, so Portlanders now have to go to Voodoo Doughnut to get married.

Stand up for yourself, PDX!  Don't let every treasured cultural institution slip through your fingers until all you have left is a Niketown store and Ahmad Rashad's birthplace.

LINK to Oregonian article

LINK to Velveteria book