About : standard furniture troy ny
Title : standard furniture troy ny
standard furniture troy ny
good morning, everyone. welcome to the smithsonian american art museum for the renwick galleries' symposium: furniture and the future. which we are co-sponsoring with the sam and alfreda maloof foundation for the arts and crafts this morning. we are delighted to have you all here. we have a very full schedule today and some really fantastic speakers on the docket, really looking forward to today. in a moment i'm going to introduce jim rawitsch, who is my co-sponsor for the morning. jim was telling me last night, it's been a couple of years. this program has been long in coming. it actually was sort of birthed in idea before i arrived at the museum two and a half years ago.
we really just started to work on it about a year ago. as jim and i were starting to talk about some of the ideas that we had for this symposium, we really wanted to think outside the box of the usual furniture symposium. we wanted to put together a line up of speakers that could really be provocative and talk about furniture and what it is, and what it can be today, and what it can be tomorrow. i had been thinking quite a bit about how ubiquitous furniture is in our lives that we live with it every day and it's all around us and it affects every single aspect of who we are and what we do, but we often don't acknowledge that. we wanted to bring some speakers together here today to really explore some of those ideas
and think about how furniture makers in particular and designers can affect the world around them - today and for the future. today we will talk about what furniture can be, how it can define us and the world around us, and how we can begin to think about it and harness it not only as a reflection of society, but as an agent of change. we will talk about the history of the field and how furniture design and making is being taught and practiced today in craft schools across the country. we will open up the floor to talk about how the field is responding to contemporary issues, methods, and needs, and how we foresee those issues, methods, and needs changing over the next 10, 20, 50 years. we have a fabulous roster of speakers.
which will be approaching these topics from all different angles. this is a full day symposium that will last until about 5:30 this afternoon. after which, we will have a small reception and you can have longer conversations with the speakers at that time if you like. the day is broken up into two segments, a morning section and an afternoon section. if you can all hold your questions until the end of the sections, we will be bringing up all of those speakers from that section to address those questions at the end of the morning and again at the end of the afternoon. those will be, also there are a couple of microphones at either side of the room. we will have those set up for all of you to come and ask the questions you have on your mind. i hope there are a lot of provocative ideas that come up that get you talking.
this program this morning will be webcast, so please don't do anything embarrassing in the audience that you don't want everyone to see across the country and on our youtube channel from here on out. please silence your cellphones for the morning. i also just wanted to add as one last note, we just opened a fantastic exhibition over at the renwick gallery. i know we are not in the building itself today for this program, but i'd like to invite all of you to come over to the renwick gallery to see the new show. the 2016 renwick invitational visions and revisions, which just opened. the whole museum is all on view right now. it looks absolutely fabulous. with that, i'd like to invite jim rawitsch from the sam and alfreda maloof foundation up here to give some more remarks for the morning.
thank you nora. thank you jim. i'm not going to talk a lot, but i am delighted to be here. as nora gave you a little bit of the background, i can add to that a bit. when we started making plans for the maloof centennial, we wanted to make sure that our celebration of sam's life wouldn't end without looking forward. sam's career was so much defined by his innovative, creative spirit. we are delighted that today's symposium gives us an opportunity to look to the future,
with the help of an impressive list of distinguished scholars and artists. i don't know how many of you may know this, some of you probably do, but since 1970 the smithsonian american art museum's renwick gallery has spotlighted sam's works in no fewer than five exhibitions. the maloof foundation is also a smithsonian affiliate. we are grateful for that membership and the energy that that brings. before we go any further, i'd like to thank all the folks at the smithsonian who have been supportive of this program today. really just incredible in enabling us to achieve this dream for the maloof centennial.
in alphabetical order, rachel allen, nora atkinson, of course, elizabeth broun, harold closter of smithsonian affiliates, robin kennedy, and all the smithsonian staff that has helped to make today possible. special thanks are also due to nicholas bell, who is no longer at the smithsonian, but whose presence in the planning and the realization of this idea was an important part of our story. i also want to thank the board of the maloof foundation. with a special call out this morning to mrs. sam maloof, sam's widow beverly who is here, and other board members as well. you'll get a chance to meet them at the break.
last and certainly not least, i want to acknowledge our generous supporters and funders, the james renwick alliance, it's so important to the renwick gallery, the windgate foundation, whose support for the maloof centennial and the larger american craft community is tremendous and transformational, and woodcraft supply, a maloof foundation corporate partner, that with that more than 70 stores nationwide, connects american's woodworkers to the tools and supplies that they need to forward the story of wood in the united states. to set the stage for today's presentations, i'd like to show you a few photos. that's sam maloof,
born in california, a son of middle eastern immigrants. he was artistic in school. he tried commercial art, he tried painting. he turned down an offer from the disney animation studios. then, he joined the army, a week before pearl harbor and found himself serving wwii in alaska. then, he returned to california. sam married well, that's alfreda ward. alfreda graduated in art at ucla, and taught art on indian reservations during the depression in the 1940's.
as a veteran, she used the g.i. bill to study art in grad school at claremont graduate university. that was where she met sam. now, unlike sam, alfreda was formally trained in art, and brought that enthusiasm into their lives together. they had a family. wait a minute, we are not moving here. there's sam and alfreda! that's a great picture. they had a family. that's there son, solomon.
as a result of starting a family and dealing with the realities of earning a living, and keeping food on the table, they started a business together. sam and alfreda, both. it was a woodworking business. sam was self taught as a woodworker. he was meticulous, hard-working, he was a craftsman who brought his visions and values to furniture making. he was also part of a larger story, too. in the early 1950's studio craft was on the threshold of a new age. sam became a visible and charismatic advocate and teacher.
this movement was happening not just in california, the craft movement was happening all across america. in fact, haystack mountain school of craft, was founded about the same time. today, paul sacaridiz is one of today's presenters. paul is at the haystack school, and we are lucky to have him on the panel today. sam's furniture was not manufactured. he sculpted. he sculpted beautiful, handmade pieces one at a time. this idea of furniture as sculpture is something we will hear more about later with wendell castle who is on our artists panel today.
that panel is going to be moderated by glenn adamson, who will be able to offer some additional perspective on the art of furniture making. that is a very rare picture. that's a picture of sam in a coat and a tie. you don't get to see that often. the real reason it's in there is that it gives you a sense of his simple, sensual, elegant, modernist aesthetic. our keynote speaker, michael prokopow knows the period well, and it's influence on contemporary furniture, and he will be talking to some of those subjects. i love this picture. it shows what hip and fashionable looked like in 1958. that's sam maloof there, but there are some other folks in the photo and i think it gives us a good point of reference for today and the folks who are going to be talking about
furniture today, contemporary furniture, and how it leads to the future. i think the photo also speaks to how the world has changed. or, not so much. i mean, you see all those designers, a number of them worked in partnership with each other. i think uhuru's bill hilgendorf and jason horvath would fit right into that photo. i think the photo also reminds us how much things have changed for women as furniture makers. we thank wendy maruyama, vivian beer, christie oaks and many other women woodworkers and furniture makers for that. we are lucky to have those three with us on our artists panel today.
i think that 1958 looks a long way away when you think about how the world has changed for women. in spite of what you see here, sam never licensed his designs for mass production. in his 60 year career, he made more than 5,000 pieces of furniture. many of which reside in the collection of america's major fine art museums. maloof foundation resident artists, larry white was there for much of that time, and he is here today with us on the artists panel to add another perspective. when sam wasn't making furniture, he was building his home in alta loma, california.
now a part of rancho cucamonga, the city of rancho cucamonga. as the house evolved, it came to be recognized as a cultural treasure. it was listed on the national register of historic places. it was located in what became the path of an interstate highway project, and it might have been doomed. but a team of preservationists, planners, architects, and engineers worked collaboratively to save the house. it was taken apart, put on wheel and moved to a new site about three miles away. it was an amazing feat of engineering,
and equally significant, it's a great example of collaborative planning in historic preservation projects. the house was reconstructed here on a hill of the foothills of the san gabriel mountains overlooking southern california's inland empire. today, the historic home and work-shop stand in a drought tolerant model garden, accompanied by an education center, a gallery, a conservation archive, and i tell everybody i get to work in paradise. come and see us sometime. the maloof woodworker enterprise still occupies it's original workshop space.
where master woodworker mike johnson worked alongside sam for more than three decades and now carries on the business. i love this picture and it's relevant to today because you look at that workshop and you don't see any 3d printers or nc cutting machines. i think when we look to the future of furniture we have some things to think about. the maloof foundation pursues it's public service mission with public tours and educational programs. that's mike johnson there in the middle, leading some students on a tour. mike is here today. we also offer woodshops, workshops for woodworkers.
larry white in that picture is now the resident artist of the maloof foundation. he is, of course, on the artists panel. we do exhibitions, emphasizing wood art and other fine crafts. that happens to be a photo of our maloof centennial exhibition, sam maloof woodworker: life, art, legacy, which just closed. a year ago at this time, we were doing california handmade: state of the arts in collaboration with craft in america. a month from now we will be doing california wood artists.
featuring master artists alongside a new generation of artists. we do arts education including our maloof teen intern program in the local schools. i think that's our getty multicultural intern day. we also do the maloof veterans workshop which explores woodworking and the healing of ptsd. this year's workshop exclusively serves women veterans. that is not the picture of the women veterans. that workshop hasn't taken place yet. of course, in addition to all that, we do a range of public programs made possible thanks to staff, docents, volunteers, and supporters,
with grants from corporate and foundation partners. you can check us out online. of course, whenever you are in the neighborhood, we would be glad to see you visit. i offer up all that background as a way of setting the stage for today and our exploration of furniture in the future. what we make, why we make, and how it impacts our world. by the way, this photo was taken in 1985 when sam became the first craft artists to receive a macarthur fellowship. people magazine printed that picture. he is shown there with his low back armchair, that became an iconic piece of maloof design. it also became part of the renwick gallery's permanent collection.
nora has recently reinstalled selections from the permanent collection on the second floor of the renwick gallery. be sure to stop by and see it while you are in washington, d.c. you will see this chair alongside a nakashima chair on the second floor. sam was also famous for his rocking chairs. we can't leave washington d.c. without mentioning a few of the folks who have over the years admired and enjoyed sam's creations. here is someone you might recognize. oh, no, i'm talking about sam. sam at the white house there with alfreda and someone you might remember.
the chair is now part of the white house collection. here is somebody else you might recognize. jimmy carter called sam, "the best woodworker that ever lived." that really means something coming from a guy who is himself an accomplished woodworker. i got to meet president carter a while ago a wonderful, wonderful experience. here's a nobel prize winning former president and sunday school teacher. who considers sam maloof one of the most significant, important influences in his life. how do you measure impact like that?
what made sam significant? is sam's legacy that of a woodworker, that of a furniture maker, a sculptor? jimmy carter calls sam maloof a philosopher. i think that we can take all those things in consideration when we think about his place in the evolution of the story of american furniture and how that story now goes forward. that's one of the things we want to think about today as we hear from our scholars and our presenters.
here is someone else you might recognize. yes, that's who you think it is. i think she is recovering from pneumonia there in that picture. that was actually taken a while ago, that's not a recent picture. before i turn the stage over to our distinguished presenters, there is one more maloof fan i want to mention. someone you probably won't recognize. that is our good friend kay langen of greenwich, connecticut. in 1959, kay asked alfreda maloof, "if sam had ever made a rocking chair?" alfreda confessed that going back to her days as a young mother,
she had always wanted sam to build a rocking chair and he never had. well, in 1963 kay and her late husband, dr. michael langen, commissioned sam to make a rocking chair. the first maloof rocking chair, and the rest as they say, is history. for 53 years, sam maloof's first rocking chair has been in the langen family home. where it has rocked children, babies, and grandchildren, and been a comfort to both kay and michael. michael passed away a year or so ago, but kay is as joyful and passionate about craft as ever. as you can see from that photo. although kay is in her 90's and isn't able to travel much anymore,
i understand she is at home this morning, watching our webcast. she agreed to let me share some news today. kay has recently bequeathed the langen family's treasured maloof rocking chair, the very first one ever made, when she is done with it, to the sam and alfreda maloof foundation where it will become part of our permanent collection. here with us today to celebrate is one of kay's and michael's seven children. their daughter mel langen-moore. is meg here?
meg? she is going to be here later today, i know. thank you all for being with us. thank you all for sharing the day with us. thank you langen family for this wonderful gift, and let's get on with the day. thanks so much. thanks jim for starting us off. i'd now like to introduce our keynote speaker this morning, dr. michael prokopow.
michael is a historian, critic, and curator who writes about material culture, art and aesthetics and the built environment. i asked him here this morning to set the stage for our day to deliver a more philosophical ontological approach to where we are, and where we are going. i'm delighted, when he delivered his provocative title to me. cabinets of virtuosity: neo kings, confounding things, and the hyper luxury in the contemporary frame. i can't wait to hear what he has to say. he is the dean of graduate studies at ocad university where among other things, he teaches material culture contemporary art history, curatorial practice, and design history.
currently he is working on a large scale project about middle class taste in north america between 1940-1975, and a book about a landmark modernists house designed by renowned architect arthur erickson. he holds a doctorate from harvard university. please welcome michael prokopow to the stage. good morning everyone. it's the old college professor trick where you bring a lot of things to the podium, so i need a second to get ready, but i will be quick. it is such a great pleasure to be here. i have long admired the work of the renwick,
long admired the work of mr. maloof, and so when the invitation came for me to speak at this esteemed gathering, i was thrilled, and anxious. i can explain why i was anxious, because in thinking about the brief for today, contemplating future, the future directions in furniture. i started to wonder, how does one tackle such a big topic? before i get to that, i would like to thank a few people for the invitation. i'd like to. louder please. louder, of course. sorry about that. there we go. i would like to thank
ms. nora atkinson for her support. she is the lloyd herman curator of craft at the renwick. i'd like to thank ms. gloria kenyon, also at the renwick, for her general assistance and forgiveness. she knows, i actually went to the renwick this morning thinking that's where we were meeting. i got there and i thought, "oh, sort of a quiet crowd." the guard said, "no, no one is here." then i thought, "uh, oh!" i managed to get here in time, so thank you for understanding. i'd like to thank mrs. melanie swezey-cleaves of the sam and alfreda maloof foundation, and the very nice remarks of mr. rawitsch as i say, when i was invited to speak at this event,
i was concerned intellectually and conceptually about the task. i confess this to you all because i spend a great deal of time thinking about furniture across the western historical timeline. from the stone furniture of skara brae which is in the orkneys , i'll show you an image of that eventually, through every art historical period where human beings have fashioned objects for use. i think about the guild systems, technological innovation, the trial and error of manufacturing, the persistence of handmade objects in the wake of mass production and the commercialization and mechanization of making.
i think about the context of furniture in time, about ideological movements such as modernism, which sought to achieve a type of realizable and tangible utopia for people. i think about the wake of post-modernism. that period in time where the ideals of modernism were challenged. i think also about the contemporary frame. historians have yet to come up with a label, or a name for the present. that, of course, will be resolved at some point in the future.
there is always the advantage that historians have of hindsight. in thinking about today's conversation, and the conversations that i know will be stimulating and rigorous and challenging, i started thinking, if we were task with writing a chapter in standard history, of furniture, a chapter about today. how would we undertake that challenge? first off, we would have to figure out when the contemporary begins. is it a year ago, is it a decade ago? we would have to figure out a position. from what ideological or cultural or philosophical position would we start our work in thinking about
contemporary furniture? we would have to certainly acknowledge the previous generations and iterations of furniture making in history in order to come up with a type of conceptual framework. to my mind, the fact of post-modern design, and i think of the work memphis, i think of peter shire, i think of the anti-modernists movements that have marked challenges to modernists culture. so post-modernism as a frame
might be the most recent chapter in our book. we certainly would have to think in this chapter about technological change - about 3d printing, about laser centering, about advanced computer software that allow makers to think of objects in ways beyond what the human mind might be possible. there are any number of makers. patrick jouin in paris made a really remarkable stool that collapsed. he openly confesses that had it not been for very advanced algorithm,
he would not have been able to figure out the mechanics of his stool. that to me raises questions about humans and technology. the idea of cyborgs and robotic people. a central theme certainly could be in this chapter, the relations between makers and their clients, or producers and consumers. i offer this, because what i would like to talk about and i will talk about, is the question of where furniture resides not only in human life how we as people, and ms. atkinson acknowledges, furniture surrounds us, we use it all the time, but it exists as commodity.
it's in the transactional world. if we were thinking about a title. you know, in academics, i noticed the title that was read was not the title that was on the screen. that happens to me all the time. i'm constantly, sort of thinking as an academic about the title. there is that standard joke in professorial worlds, all you really need to do is write the title. but in fact there is more to it. so i thought of a few titles that might be good for our, sort of, mythical chapter at the end of this textbook. what the heck: family rooms, flat screen tv's, home entertainment centers, and the transformation of social relations.
shock in all: the persistence of the hand in making. home sweet home: the ikea-ization of the north american suburban domestic landscape. get with the program: digital tools and technological determinism in contemporary furniture design. lastly, and perhaps most appropriate mortis rigor: craftsmanship, consumers, and the critical meanings of contemporary making. as i say, indeed the last title may be the most appropriate. i know that designers in today's landscape are working at all scales of production, using all means of making - hands, computers. yet the objects that are produced exist as evidence of
of the cultural, ideological, and social thinking of the milieu in which people work. we may live with furniture, we may buy furniture, but for me as a historian, each object that any human has ever produced constitutes a piece of evidence about the context of it's realization. as such, we can read furniture. we can look at every object, every human made, every human modified object and undertake an analysis of time, of people, of values. the concept of what's called homo faber, meaning man the maker. turns to the idea that humans from ancient history
have sought to create tools that aid life. there is that adage that necessity is the mother of invention. and arguably, human beings have always found the capacity to produce things that make things better, or aid them in tasks. that said, we know that objects once produced have to reside or exist within social systems of meaning, or what we can call signification. i spent a lot of time reading home decorating magazines from the 1950's and self help guides that were pitched to newly married couples. these are highly gendered texts,
but invariably there will be a section at the beginning saying, "hello bride, what do you want your home to be? you have choices." you could go french provincial, and this is what that means. you could go colonial williamsburg and this is what this will say about you as a person. you could go modern, and there is always the implication that that's a little daring for the cul-de-sac. but if you are progressive and you want to make the claim, go for it. so we have in the material world, a relationship between the things that humans make and use, and the meanings that are ascribed upon them
and which we as scholars of the past, people interested in symbolism and interpretation can take away from them. human objects are vitally important in human life. and furniture as a category within that broad range of human made and human modified objects is perhaps the one that most literally embodies what might be called the prosthetic imperative. mainly the fashioning of implements and devices technique would be the word we would use around the making, that accommodate both physical and psychological needs.
the fact of human problem solving through the fabrication of tools might be seen as obvious, but as far as i'm concerned in my work, the most remarkable and wonderful challenge is to figure out how, in addition to what a thing does what a thing means. accordingly, in thinking about furniture design - contemporary and otherwise - i'm struck by two things. first, as i said, the field is huge. the german publisher konemann released a volume last year that acknowledged
on average, there 15,000 new pieces of furniture produced in the west each year. now, that may raise the question, jokingly asked, "do we need another chair?" we know the answer is yes, because human creativity is one of the most remarkable things that we as a shared people have and yet there is, within the context of the impulse to make, the reality of how the made thing gets distributed. which brings us to capitalism. arguably at this point in human time, with the concerns about ecological catastrophe and the depletion of resources,
the question of production, or over production married to consumption or over consumption is, i think, a cause for concern. to this end, i was most welcoming of the instructions from the renwick, "to consider how furniture is transforming to meet the needs of contemporary society." mindful of "the broader implications of why we make, what we make, and how it affects our world." in responding to that very welcome invitation, i've decided in my talk, to look at a very narrow scope of design. i'm looking at what i see as the production of objects that exist within the realm
of the hyper luxury consumer market. now, it may be that most of us would not count ourselves among the 1%. i could barely get into the 70%, but if you think about it, there is within the realm of creativity and making an echelon of makers of immense skill, immense vision, immense capacity who have decided, in the context of their practice, to produce rarefied objects for the consumption by people who can afford it. this, i think, raises an interesting question. if we were to go to the metropolitan museum of art or to the national gallery,
we would see in the furniture galleries objects of exquisite rarity. the best of the best. things made by the most gifted craftsmen of their generations, and chosen by curators because they exemplify. because they say something about the circumstances of their production. if we take that model and apply it to the contemporary field and the context of elite luxury making, i think we can discover important things about where we, as a planet, sit at the present. terry smith, a very imminent art historian, writes about the contemporary field in the context of art. he has given us a phrase, or word, called contemporaneity.
sounds like contemporary, but it's not, it has a little inflection to it. professor smith, in coining this phrase, contemporaneity, would say that the current conditions of today are specific to the circumstances of today. now it might be said that every moment in time, experienced in real time could be described the same way. professor smith would argue that there is something about the forces of global economic development, and resource extraction, and wealth, and the movements of people, and the fragility of democracies.
the idea of the post national world that contemporaneity is a state of urgent cultural productions. he gives three definitions. i'll paraphrase quickly. one, globalization drives hegemony in the face of increasing cultural differentiation. we live in a planet of diverse cultures, and yet there is effort on the part of governments and super government agencies to consolidate identity and practice. there is the idea of the acceleration of inequality between peoples. i made a reference to the one percent, one only has to look
at social protests around the world to suggest that the gulf between the haves and the have-not's is widening. it may have ever been thus that there are poor and wealthy, but perhaps because of condition number three, mainly our immersion in what smith calls, "the infoscape" the spectacle society and the distribution of digital images that we are far more aware of the gulf between the vastly wealthy and the vastly poor, or the middle class. all of us have been paying attention to the current election for president
and wealth and equality has been both challenged as not being discussed enough and yet it seems to be the elephant in the room. so thus, globalization accelerated in equality and immersion in an infoscape where information amounts. in these lights, i'm reminded of the work of alan gowans, a very imminent art historian. who in 1964 wrote a book called, "images of the american living." in which he argued, which at the time radically, that architecture and furniture are history in its most tangible form. it's on that note that i would like to talk about hyper luxury and the reading thereof.
if you think about the timeline, of history, the question would be: "how is it that today's conditions can explain today's productions?" i suggested in our imaginary chapter that we would have to acknowledge the chapters of history from skara brae, through ancient egypt, through greece, through rome into the gothic, the rennaissance, the baroque, the rococo, the acceleration of time the historical revivals of the 19th century, technological progress foney, other people, mason, alto, eames modernism, modernism, modernism, post-modernism,
shire and company. if we accept that, then the question becomes in the context of our imaginary chapter: how do we make sense out of today? well, we have a cabinet by etienne bouley and we have a piece by studio visioni. called the glitch cabinet, i will come back to that. we have skara brae. this is the first time in recorded human history, in the history of furniture
that human beings fashioned objects in the context of domestic space for life. now, this was discovered, if you can believe it, more or less intact, because it was filled with sand. it sits on the edge of a rocky island. you can see that there's what seems to have been a bed and a shelving unit. sort of an earlier version of the home entertainment center, i suppose. it's compelling. i suggested that post-modernism as a movement is vital to our analysis, because
as an ideological, cultural moment post-modernism said, the hegemony, or the consolidated power of modernism must be broken. rather than a type of progressive, forward, future looking, international, universal aesthetic, we should be interested in history. we should be interested in the diversity of human experience across time and place. we should be interested in what robert venturi, the architect, said "complexity and contradiction." the idea that you could have the simultaneous existence of temporal planes. modern means now, contemporary means now,
but there is nothing within those words that would mandate that the things produced today need to look like today. one could look to the past. philip johnson in designing the at&t headquarters, which is now the sony building, openly said that he was always an admirer of philadelphia case goods from the middle of the 18th century. philadelphia, the most refined city in british america. here's an object. a 17th century cabinet gives and architect working in the 1980's an inspiration for a pediment. so why not make a corporate office tower look like an 18th century highboy.
in many ways they make perfect sense. the highboy was the epitome of power and the representation of wealth and authority. why not make the corporate skyline look the same? but what johnson also did at the same time was to say to mies van der rohe and people over on park avenue, "your black glass darth vador tower is done." post-modernism allows us a type of playfulness, an ironic approach to the material world. ettore sottsass, i show this because it's called the carlton room divider, it's, i think, a very wonderful piece of furniture and it exemplifies post-modernism's
interested engagement with a type of cheeky critique of modernist practices. the fact that sottsass called it the room divider was not because it could sit in the middle a room with things on both sides, because it divided opinion. it really would divide a room of makers about whether it mattered or not. well, to bring us to the post-modernist frame and hyper luxury. it's interesting to me as a cultural historian that in the united states in the age of cartoons, two debuted in american television about the same time. one was the flintstones.
the idea of a type of neolithic happy family riding around in rock cars living in a rock house. the other, was the jetsons. the idea of the futuristic super american family living in the space age. if you think about these two shows airing at the same time at the height of the cold war, they become a type of moral parable of america at a certain point in time. on the one hand, there is this cautioning that should the cold war not go its way, america would be bombed back to the stone age. this was an idea. the other is that technology will free us. so the space race and that competitiveness with the ussr
was sort of encapsulated in the idea of the happy american family living in an age in the future. now, i would say in looking at the jetsons' living room, we still have the type of domestic troupe, patriarchy and domestic servitude. i've always said that the robot is in fact slightly styled as african american. so there is, even with in the height of the cold war, a type of racialization of the future. i show you these two images because i think they get at something very important. mainly, at this point in time,
we see this tension between possible futures. a possible future of retrogression, and a possible future of advanced utopia. the utopia of scientific determinism and technology. well, in terms of makers. hyper luxury, the scholar deyan sudjic would say, is particularly difficult in the age of hyper abundance. i think this is important to note. if you think about it, luxury as a concept has usually been defined by rarity, by an absence of things.
if you think about the courts of louis the 14th and 15th, and if you think about that phrase, "fit for a king." i was looking online recently and i found an add for toilet paper with that moniker- fit for a king. now, i don't know if monarchs would have different types of toilet paper than the rest of us, perhaps they would. but if you think about that phrase when it first appeared - fit for a king - it suggested that there was a group of objects made by a very narrow, small group of makers of exquisite skill for the most powerful person within the context of a place.
something fit for a king was monarchical, royal, regal, unparalleled, unmatched. today the phrase just exists to say it's good. so toilet paper fit for a king is probably not quite what louis the 14th had in mind. when he had etienne bouley make objects. one only has to think about the fate of nicolas fouquet who was one of louis the 14th's ministers. he was superintendent of revenue, and he constructed in 1655-1661 a really spectacular estate called vaux-le-vicomte
outside of paris by 30 miles. he employed all of the best designers - le brun, le nã´tre - and created this absolutely spectacular exquisite enclosed and integrated world, the architecture, and the gardens, and the furniture and the tapestries, and the food, and the dress. he invited, of course, his sovereign to come to the opening celebrations. as voltaire joked later on, in the evening fouquet was the kind of france, and in the morning he was nobody. louis had him imprisoned and confiscated the estate.
the reason being, it wasn't so much as there was a suspicion, which as minister colbert had put in his ear that fouquet was stealing from the royal treasury, it wasn't that. for louis it was, how dare you presume to be above me in station and goods. you are not the king, i'm the king. so fouquet's effort at artisanal patronage ended in prison. but i think the point is worth considering. in that context of furniture making, monarchical making,
kings were at the top of a pyramid. the people in their service producing the objects that now reside in museums were making masterpieces for monarchs. it was a relationship of patronage and commission. i don't think today monarchs are particularly front and center in the commissioning of objects. some might be. but for the most part, there has been a shift from monarchical power to secular and what we might say meritocratic power - russian patriarchs,
hollywood royalty, people who have vast wealth and have the capacity to acquire goods at what they would see as a corresponding level what's difference, however, is the marketplace i don't know that the idea of royal warrants in this day and age would be particularly appropriate. you know, royal warrants, if you go through the streets of london you can come across something and there will be a sign at the top and it will say, whatever, whatever, to appointment to. so today our model might say, by appointment as chez maker to the court of brangelina. mirror master to industry moguls jay z and lady beyonce.
crib and play set fashioner to the house of zuckerberg and chan. it doesn't quite work. obviously it didn't work as a set of jokes. so it obviously, obviously doesn't work. but the point i'm trying to make is in the age of hyper luxury what we see is an inversion of relations of patronage. what the art historian baxandall calls, "makers and consumers and audiences into a world of commerce." if you are of the one percent, how do you let people know?
we can read hello, we can read people, we can look at news accounts, etc. but ultimately these people, as ms. atkinson pointed out, need furniture, so where would they get it, how would they find it? professor sudjic says, as i'm going to repeat, "the pursuit of luxury is more ubiquitous now then any previous moment in history." everything is luxury. i read the financial times on a regular basis and i'm always struck with the high glossy magazine that's produced every now and then and the title
unabashedly is "how to spend it." now, it used to be said that if you had money, you had to keep it quiet and you should never sort of, show your wealth. but today, there has been a change. people like to let other people know that you are not me and thankfully i'm not you. so if we take that into the realm of making, and please understand i absolutely revere makers. i know many, i visit studios all the time. i understand the
creative energies applied, and the technical expertise needed and the dedication. didn't david pie say, "a thing takes as long to make as it takes." the idea that time for makers exists differently. but i am also interested as a historian of the past and present with the implications of what i see as this radically different landscape for some makers. who have decided to turn their attention to the production of goods which can only be understood at hyper luxury commodities. we have a model of display, there are gallerists who will mount shows using the same language and apparatus of the art gallery.
so the idea that there will be an invitation, there will be a privileged catalog written, critics, i've written them myself, critics and historians will be asked to write an essay. what's called art writing, it's not exactly critical because you can't slam the person who is paying you but it does have to be in the zone of intellectually viability, so it will be referenced, etc. but it operates as a type of secular hagiography of an object cultivating legitimacy.
when in fact, all we are really doing, in these galleries, and writing about them is acknowledging that capitalism is the basis of everything. everything is a commodity, everything can be bought. the makers. i'm aware of time. i want to show you maarten baas. he went to eindhoven. his thesis show was a series of furniture. he was interested in the classics. he went out and found things in thrift stores, he said, and he took a butane torch to them. he burnt these objects and then he coated them with this durable non-permeable clear epoxy. think about this.
in the context of postmodernism, this might be equivalent to wolfe's bonfire of the vanities. but in fact, it's not the vanity that's getting burnt, it's the chair that might go with the vanity. that bass would take reitvald, holfman or macintosh, he did them all, and sottsass, and torched these objects. it's a type of denunciation of the canon of furniture in order to create his own canon, with a type of edge.
his aesthetic varies wildly. he makes this type of snow white and the seven dwarfs object that are off kilter, intentionally. i think the off kilter piece is worth remembering. mattia bonetti this is a cover picture from an article that 'how to spend it' featured. he has a remarkable catalogue resume of his work. he is a remarkable maker. self taught, no formal training in an art and design university.
he produced what he would describe freely as, "objects for the people who have discerning taste." what does he make? well, this polyhedral chest of drawers, those fractured mirrored surfaces. i mean, if the whole idea of looking in a mirror is to get a sense of who you are, maybe this object because it does have a reflective surface is saying, well we are multiple people at multiple times. there is something both seductive about it's shape and quite literally jarring.
his liquid gold cabinet. now, the naming of a piece of furniture - chair, bed, carlton room divider, liquid gold, that's sort of appealing. i always think when i look at this object, that the detail is particularly valuable. carnelian and alabaster and aluminum, cast aluminum, with gold plated drippings.
i always think it looks like daffy duck who had an accident at the top of the chest. but in fact what it is, is liquid gold. well, what better way to say, "i am the new louis the 14th, or an equivalent," than having something like this. zaha hadid, and i want to put into this conversation, that you keep in mind the flintstones and the jetsons. if those simultaneous temporal planes suggest that the possibility of time being collapsed and mixed up, these objects that i show you represent, what i see as the, post postmodern's engagement
with the diversity of signs and symbols. not because of the freedom that postmodernism accorded makers, but because there is no master narrative of furniture making. there is no linear history at this point, it's all just stuff. amazing stuff, differently priced stuff, stuff made out of different materials. stuff. zaha hadid. her moon system series. the idea of taking what are, more or less, biomorphic shapes,
but giving them a type of intergalactic swoop. her dune formation: bookshelf and seat as a semiotic entity, this can only take our minds to a future world. what world would it be? one of those dystopian worlds where human beings have left earth and are living on a floating ship? i think of wall-e. is it a world where, in fact, we have stopped hyper consumerism and we are regenerating the amazonian rain-forest? is it a world where we have explored galaxies going to places no one has ever gone before? zaha hadid, i think, a brilliant architect,
a future speculating aesthetics of technological promise. christphoer schanck. he trained at the school of visual arts in new york and then at central saint martins. detroit based maker, who by his own admission is interested in walking around neighborhoods and finding the detritus of the post-industrial world. detroit might be a good place to do that. what's interesting, in the same way that rauschenberg and jasper john's would walk around the block around coenties slip and whatever rauschenberg would find he would turn into one of his combines,
here we have schanck who goes on these noturnal and daytime visits to find stuff. he brings the stuff back to his studio and aggregates it. but the idea of taking trash and turning it into treasure while perhaps laudable, there is embedding in this a type of recycling implication. nonetheless, his objects become art furniture. they exist not necessarily for the masses, but for the few. these evoke such feeling for me. they look like coral reefs.
the idea of putting trash into the ocean and letting the sea take it over. they look like thrones. they remind me of, i think, it's at the smithsonian that set of african american furniture that's covered in foil. his obviously, sort of, baroque bookcase that again looks acceded and growth like what would be the aesthetic import of this object? what are we to make of it? these things cost thousands and thousands of dollars so the aesthetic presentation of the object, the semiotic implication of the object
ask more questions than they answer. these are not for storage. they are not for use, they are for display. max lamb, based in the united kingdom. he went to the university of north cumbria, and then did advanced study at central saint martin's. he describes himself as a maker using his hands. he makes stones furniture. he will buy blocks of uncut marble from quarries in china and he will have them transported to london.
right there, the cost of moving materials from one place to another for the fabrication of objects and then will hand chisel these pieces. now, not flintstones exactly, but sort of. but for me it raises implications about how such things would exist in the world. in the airport yesterday there was a copy of the real deal. i don't know if you read this magazine. it's the new york real estate news, and this is the august addition, but in the middle of it was this wonderful sort of thing called billionaire's row. it talks about the creation of buildings that are as high as the former world trade center.
which i find interesting in and of itself. here we have this apocol event from years ago, fifteen years ago now in which tall buildings were targets. now the super wealthy, whether they are real estate developers or people who occupy the buildings that are created have to furnish their objects. i don't know that max lamb's furniture could be in one of those buildings. i don't know what the tensile strength of a floor plate would be. but the idea of higher and higher, literally and figuratively, and the need to furnish these spaces.
max lamb's poly dining table, here he takes blocks of solid polystyrene and takes a chainsaw and cuts them to make furniture. easier to move. not as heavy as the stone furniture. but the same type of aesthetic, rocks. why make furniture out of rocks? why not? postmodernism would say, "if we can, we should." fredrickson stallard, a design duo based in london. both graduates of central saint martin's in furniture design. they have several things i want to show you. the crush collection.
here is this spectacularly shiny object that again is reflective. reflective surfaces, think about reflection. we reflect on things and things can reflect us. here in a piece of luxury furniture selling for $100,000, or so, you get this jagged surface. it's sort of john chamberlain's sculpture brought forward, but rather than using automobiles, that look as though they have been in accidents. here people literally take an object through very advanced fabrication techniques and produce this type of aesthetics of destruction. the crush collection: hurrican mirror.
the name in itself is complicated. obviously not to be used. because, could it be, is there irony on the part of the maker? we don't want to see ourselves in this object. too much looking and self reflection might yield answers that we don't want to know. the species sofa. this is a phenomenally complex piece of furniture. intricate in it's multiple layered interior. it's covered with this type of velveteen surface. when i first saw this, and i've seen it in life, i haven't sat on it, i thought immediately that it was a meteor. it looks like something traveling through space, or it looks like something you would chip away.
they talk about this as the embodiment of life and dealt. it's the colors of life, this type of blood. but, how does it operate? well i would suggest that the furniture of max lamb - his rocks - and the luxury furniture of fredrickson stallard are dealing with the same things. the idea of the basic elemental character of human life. looking for materials that have metaphor. but as an object, even in its seemingly ancientness, it speaks to the conditions of today. lila jang, she studied in seoul, and then at the ã‰cole nationale supã©rieure des beaux-arts in pais. she was deeply influenced in her practice by french furniture.
she spent many hours at the louvre. she went, as she says, by her own admissions to all of the museums, and started to make furniture that references the french court. but here we have a type of distortion of monarchy. literally turning monarchy on it's head. ferrucio laviani - was commissioned early on to make a series of furniture to which the title was as you see printed w(hole): "f* the classics" here he takes what looks to be a louis 15th bureau and
puts in this laser cut pink wound. that's what it is. it's a wound in furniture history. it's sort of a denial of the past or a remaking of the past. the good vibrations glitch cabinet. this is the aesthetics of technological disaster purposefully made by lavioni. now, this is perhaps the most complicated piece of furniture i'm showing you today. it was modeled on a program that would allow him to figure out how it could maintain its structural integrity. then there was a question about doing two projects at once. having someone actually carve this
from the design, or having a cnc laser router clean it out, cut it out, which is what was chosen. remarkably intricate piece of work. for me, it's about the distortion. we assume that somehow technology is going to be the salvation of the world even though simultaneously it's leading us to destruction, jetsons not withstanding. lavioni, in his practice, makes these objects that bring in the forefront the fallibility of technology. if not the ghost, some time of specter. studio job. two graduates, a romantic couple for a while, not recently, now they are recently separated, both went to eindhoven, skilled, skilled makers, vast material vocabulary, deep understanding of making.
their practice has been defined and described by critics as whimsical, ideologically sharp, insightful. their robber baron series that's sort of rather direct. if we know our american history we know that the great age of 19th century industrialism, with people like the vanderbilt's and all were known as the robber barons. the historian vernon parrington said that that period of time between the end of the civil war to 1900 was described as the great barbecue. kill it, roast it, clean it. this couple takes that aesthetic and looks at industrial factories and turns it into luxury.
cast bronze and then gold plated. the tales of power, corruption and art series, the robber baron credenza. the idea, quite literally, of opening up the origin of wealth. here is an object of hyper luxury that on the inside looks like ore - yours, mine, and ours, well - not ours -theirs. the robber baron armoire. the implication is that a canon has shot a hole through this bureau. a counterpoint. the practice of the very talented and thoughtful marlene huissoud also from central saint martin's. you'll notice there is this sort of focusing of artists coming out of
that school in london that is a superb place for material study. she came from a family of bee keepers in france and she is interested in eco-waste - the things that are left over from natural processes. so this is a press cake. she went to an olive oil plant and was instruct by the pellets that get produced when the olives get crushed and she decided, could this organic matter be transformed into furniture? here is her stool. it has the capacity to hold body weight. it's not sold. she would avowedly say that her ideological positioning doesn't allow her to participate in the luxury market. but nontheless, as a studio maker, she values her labor. so there was a price tag attached to these noble efforts.
the elevation of the handmade into the realm of the culturally significant of insects and men. beeswax and other substances turned into a vase. she is working on a line of furniture under the same idea and vases. antoine & manuel. it's interesting, in this day and age it's not too hard to find biographies. not much is known about this couple other than they are known as spain and france's most gifted graphic designers. they made a series of digitally cut cnc credenzas that show the tableau of life. i particularly like the sort of kitten/dog underneath at the bottom
and the sort of scale of the mountains. this is a visual tour du force. they have classical architecture, they have a flora, they have a landscape, they have human drama. mathieu lehanneur. he was commissioned by veuve clicquot, a very distinguished designer, he also studied in paris. he was commissioned by veuve clicquot, the champagne company and a very distinguished hotel in reims, the hotel du marc to create an environment for jet lagged travelers.
the idea that you'd take your transatlantic flight from somewhere to somewhere and you'd arrive by limousine at this hotel and you'd be quickly taken into this chambre du roi, of sorts. it's a temperature controlled sleeping pod that changes the climate, produces very good air, it dims the lights in certain ways, and allows you to have a very deep sleep and then it wakes you up very slowly. we know that lehanneur and his thing is referencing royal making.
this is a chamber for a neo king. if you are the type who travels globally, up at the front of planes, who has a special lounge, etc. you might end up at the hotel du marc and you might, with your bottle of champagne, take a dream in a king's bedroom. the last piece i want to show you is a work that lehanneur made that, i think, exemplifies the capacity of digital technology in today's world in which we have the ability to make things that may not be real. that give the consequence and effect of something. this is a sheet of marble that was digitally modeled and
then cut using a laser device that's installed in the courtyard of a loire valley chateau. it does look like a rippled pool. it reminds me of the gardens at vaux-le-vicomte, or at fontainebleau, or versailles. the idea that digital making has this immense capacity to simulate reality. the theorist, jean baudrillard would say that one of the legacies of postmodernism is the fact that things that look real may not be real,
and things that are real may not be recognized as such. in this day and age of contemporary furniture making in the realm of hyper luxury you have a diversity of makers who are exploring any number of visual troupes. they are seeking to communicate to the wider world within the context of capitalism that these are perilous times. that luxury is all well and good, but luxury without responsibility might lead to doom. that said, i acknowledge that these are brilliant thinkers. exquisite crafts people who have taken their talents and turned them to the fabrication of thing that i imagine in many instances will grace the halls of the metropolitan museum
and will be seen by future furniture historians as masterpieces of their time. we, however, may not be alive to read that chapter in the history text. when that is written there will be the advantage of hindsight. there will be the advantages of knowing how things turned out. at this point in time i would think we are close to the edge of some time of precipice and if hyper luxury production is to tell us anything, it's that making in the service of money says a lot about the role of money in our world. thank you so very much.
[applauds] thank you michael, that was a fantastic start to the day. very insightful. as gloria gets us set up, i'd like to introduce our next speaker. paul sacaridiz is a sculptor whose work has been included in exhibitions across the united states and internationally. he was a fellow with the national council of arts administrators, served on the board of the national council on education for the ceramic arts, and is a member of the international academy of ceramics. prior to his current position as executive director of the haystack mountain school of crafts,
he was professor and chair of the department of art at the university of wisconsin, madison. i had the pleasure to visit paul out at haystack this summer, we had a fabulous time at the haystack summer conference. he is doing amazing things out there. we, in fact, had a conversation out there to do with what michael had just spoken about. why do we need another chair? it was a provocative and fun week to be had. paul is here to talk a little bit about what they are doing out at haystack. producing furniture, and i don't know what else to say. paul come on up. thank you.
i've just hit that point where i need bifocals, so i'm trying to navigate that. i don't have them yet, and i need them. does this have a pointer on it, nora? there it is, ok, great. good morning. that was a brilliant talk. i could have listened to that for the rest of the morning. it's a pleasure to be here this morning, to be in the company of such remarkable people. a special thanks for nora atkinson, the renwick gallery of the smithsonian, and the maloof foundation
for making this possible today. having a chance to be a part of conversations like the one that we are involved with to ask questions, deposit ideas, to think carefully about the field we are so deeply involved with is the reason we do the work we do. what a privileged it is to be here. in case you are wondering, yes, the place i live and work does look like this. i want to talk about three things this morning in the time that we have together. first i'm going to discuss the haystack mountain school of crafts, the history of the school, where we are located and how we think about the work that we do.
then i'm going to talk about some observations i've made on the field. particularly the field we are talking about today. these are, of course, just that. they are my own views on a field that complex, broad, and constantly changing. what i'll focus on is fairly specific and just one part of a much larger whole. i don't say that apologetically, i just say it for clarity up front. finally i'll talk about a project made by an artist that i feel ties together the first two parts of what i'm going to talk about. it hits on how haystack functions, and also deals with a broader involvement with technology and community. at least that's the hope in the next 30 minutes.
i came to haystack having spent 18 years teaching in universities. most recently, as nora mentioned, at the university of wisconsin, madison where i was both a professor teaching in the department and chair of the art department. my career has always spanned three areas. just a moment, my notes just disappeared. that's interesting. can we have a pause for just a moment, please? thanks. it just decided to go to sleep. so i've always spanned three areas. i've spanned the area of teaching, of administrative work, and making sculpture.
i've always liked all of it. i was the guy who wanted to go to meetings. it took years before i realized that most of the other people in the room did not enjoy them as much as i did. over the years, my work has dealt with architecture, ornamentation, urban planning, and abstraction. at least these are the broad approaches i've dealt with for a long time now. i come out of a traditional base in ceramics. i'm not a furniture maker, but i've always been aware of and involved in conversations that extend beyond that - that being ceramics. to be perfectly honest, i've always had a complicated relationship to craft. but that's also the thing that keeps me up at night.
i loved being inside of a large research university. it was endlessly interesting to think about one set of ideas against another, and it was a real privilege to spend those years there. it had a tremendous impact on my work. but i also wanted to make a change and haystack became the answer to that change. i'd been a student there, here at haystack 25 years ago. i returned to teach about 5 years ago in ceramics. at each instance the experience brought about a profound shift for me. when i taught there last, i returned back to wisconsin having seen a model of teaching and learning that i thought was more effective than the one i was inside of
and, in fact, the one i was advocating for and running. in choosing to come here, i felt that i had found a place where i could focus the work that i was doing on an organization level and also contribute to a meaningful discussion. in evolution of a field at a time where it was poised for change. that's a brief example of how i ended up here today, but in reality i'm still trying to figure out what happened. this is my first full season as director. i have the privilege of being the fourth director in the history of the school. it's 65 years old, there have only been four people running the school. my predecessor stuart kestenbaum was the director for 27 years. so it's a big shift.
for this one season, i had the recurring title by everyone that i met on the very small island of deer isle as being, "the new guy, the new director, etc." i spotted a cashier wearing this ribbon at a grocery store earlier in the summer and i all but stole it from here and pleaded to have one because i thought it was the perfect segway. in some ways you only get to be new once. perhaps a ribbon is a helpful reminder to others and ourselves but i also really like the idea that we can get some patience as we figure things out. more and more i'm convinced we all need reminders like this in our daily life. because the greatest hope as creative thinkers is that we can always find a way to be new at something. perhaps, or even most importantly, at the thing we are most proficient with.
it reminds us that the way we understand something is capable of shifting. in case you have not visited us, and i hope you will. out of curiosity by show of hands how many have been to haystack or are familiar with the area? ok, thank you. haystack is located in deer isle, maine. it's far from washington and in some ways it's not really close to anything in particular. as nora can attest to. i sometimes say that you should stop by and see us because we are only five hours from the end of any trip you might be taking. we sit on a granite ledge at the tip of deer isle, which is a coastal island connected to the mainland by a bridge overlooking jericho bay
and an archipelago of 60 coastal islands. it's actually the largest archipelago on the eastern seaboard. the stunning landscape was formed during the last glacial period approximately 14,000 years ago and put in perspective, you've been here for about an hour. when we think about time, we talk a lot at haystack about the way that time slows down and it gives us a way to focus on our work. i think in that way, the place where we sit really does underscore the work that we do. the school was founded in 1950 by mary beasom bishop in montville, maine. not deer isle.
montville is located inland, approximately four hours north of portland. at the time, that area was even more remote than it is today. shortly after founding the school and coming up with the idea of creating a school, francis merritt was brought on as the school's first director. a momentum very quickly to a place. the school was founded during a period of radical experiments in education and admittedly a complex time in american history - 1950. put in a broader context, if we think about a few book ends, the skowhegan school of painting and sculpture was founded in 1946,
skowhegan, maine - fairly close to montville. black mountain college, arguably the most impactful center of avant garde american art and literature of the time would close in 1957. if you think of those two dates and those two institution and where haystack falls in between. the school is a radical idea in and of itself. to imagine what it meant for a woman, in 1950 in rural maine to start this sort of project is a part of our mission that we are incredibly proud of.
i think that it took remarkable conviction. in many ways, the mission that drove those early days of the school are still at the core of how we operate today. in the early days workshops at the montville campus were sighted in these rustic, but "intentionally built" cabins. the first classes taught were in clay, weaving, woodworking, and printmaking. this was not an insignificant decision as it intentionally situated more conventional craft based practices along side a form that was distinctly outside of the tradition of hand craft.
i was at the original sight of the school two days ago with al merrit, which is fran merrit's son. it was a remarkable day to be there with al and to be actually at this cabin. it does not look this way anymore. the photograph looks a little bit like a horror film of these decrepit cabins. it's gone through multiple iterations over the years. on a personal note, when i was there with al we discovered that he moved here with his father -
his father was the director - when he, al the son, was 14. i just arrived at haystack and my son is 14. which means something and nothing all at the same time. around 1955, five years into the program running, only running for very brief periods of time in the summer primarily with the same rotation of faculty for the first few years route 3 was being constructed, and this was part of a larger program of road expansion in the united states. highways are being built, roads are being beefed up, cars are being increased
and route 3 would bisect part of the original site. literally as we stood in front of that cabin the highway would have been where that banister is and it would have radically changed what it meant to be in that place. you would have taken a rural and seldom traveled dirt road and transformed it into a main route. which would go across the state to access the north and south highway. so this was significant.
a decision was made that they had to move the school to a new location. primarily the goal was to move it to a place where a highway would never be built. they chose there and the school was here, so you go up you go over, you go down, you cross a bridge, you cross a causeway, you cross another causeway and then right there is the school. so they succeeded on their first mission of moving the school. ruth asawa,
anni albers, paul sperisen, karen karnes - just passed away, m. c. richards and many others spent time at black mountain, and also at haystack. as work on an exhibition, which is being planned at the portland museum of art, which will be opening in 2018, the ties between black mountain and haystack are becoming even more apparent than previously realized. it's an exciting project to be involved in discussion with the curators on.
some interesting discoveries are being made. this seems particularly relevant a particularly relevant moment to be thinking this idea about of black mountain as we are witnessing a renewal in interest of the school. also in historical models of radical education in general. the recent exhibition, leap before you look, organized by the ica boston has been part of a large conversation that's reinvestigating these various histories as a time when questions on the ethical and financial sustainability of higher education within the arts is unavoidable.
at the core there seems to be a strong desire to investigate these sorts of ideas. this is what the land looks like. the campus itself is comprised of 52 acres purchased for $2,500 at the time. please support our annual fund. it sits right on the atlantic ocean. it was designed by noted american architect, edward larrabee barnes
and, as i mentioned, it sits on jericho bay. it's a breathtaking and dramatic place. the campus is widely recognized for its integration into the site. buildings are situated along granite hillsides that slope toward the atlantic ocean. when the campus was built, very little was removed to accommodate the buildings. everything sits on pilings, and the entire structure seems to float above the forest floor. everything is, in fact, connected by this series of decks
so when you walk from the water, which is where we would be standing looking up the entire campus is connected by these decks, so everywhere you go community is created by how you traverse this floating landscape. underneath you'll see these boulders that are left in place. moving all the way up, you'll see them situated underneath and sticking out from under buildings. these were called glacial erratics, having been moved from the last glacial period.
we always remind people, they are not going anywhere. barnes went on to have an amazing career, and since that time the haystack campus has been recognized with a number of architectural awards. it received the 25 year award from the american institute of architects in 94 which is given annually to a group of buildings more than 25 years old that have retained their design integrity. rockefeller center, the guggenheim, and the vietnam war memorial all share this recognition. but haystack might be the only one which was built for $5 a square foot. it's interesting to think about this again in the light of skyrocketing costs
that seem to be occurring these days in designing and building arts organizations. we even came in, in 1960 when we moved here, under budget, but in all fairness, we don't have heat. so it only runs from may-october. today haystack is an international craft school that attracts students from 18-88. from beginning to advanced professionals, people come to work in studios that are open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week dedicated to really the same
pursuits from when mary beasom bishop started the school: clay, wood, metal, glass, fiber, graphics. the studios are modest in scale and the entire campus is designed to promote community and interaction. the images i'm showing you tell the story of people at haystack. this is all where things really come alive. i can think of fewer opportunities in our lives for people to work inter-generationally. where someone who can be 18 can work next to someone who is 88. where a college student can work next to someone who has retired from another career.
we also bring in visiting writers, engineers, anthropologists, scientists, and thinkers from seemingly divergent fields. our programming includes two week extensive workshops, conferences as nora mentioned, symposiums and open studio residency program for emerging and established artists. we have a history of publishing and each year we produce a short monograph on craft. in most cases these have been produced by people from outside of the field of craft, seldom produced by scholars within the field. again that's an intentional way to try to think about the act of making through a broader lens. we are not a traditional craft school, but we do teach through traditional craft media.
our role has been as a though leader for both preserving the tremendous legacy of american craft, of which we have played a key role, and asking challenging questions about where the field can go. as director, i see my role as continuing the school as a think tank. where we can bring the most brilliant people we can find we give them time and space, access to studios and materials, and most importantly time with one another to see what might be possible if we ask interesting questions. it's a simple idea that's had tremendous impact. if you've not already seen, it's an incredibly beautiful place.
these are sleeping cabins. another example of how things are up on pilings to accommodate the slope of the ledge. there is a really special way in which a craft school functions. it's very different from the pedagogy that functions within a university. part of it relies on a peer to peer learning network, it very much relies on a breakdown in hierarchy and it relies on spending long periods of time together.
this is the dining hall. the scale of haystack is really critical. the school can hold 100 students. we have no plans of increasing. when i was hired on as director one of my biggest points was that i would not do an expansion of the campus. if they wanted to double the size of the school there would be other people that would be better to take on direction of the school. this was particularly relevant for me coming from an academic institution that was about growth. i felt it was growing too large
to a degree that i thought at times was questionable in ethics. we have digital technology that i'm going to talk about in just a moment. this is the main deck with the entrance to the dining hall overlooking the water. this happens everyday. someone who taught for us recently, in fact, was with nora and i this summer at the conference called me mid summer from another craft school and said, she was there and i said, "how is it?" she said, "it's pretty good, but they don't have enough dessert." that craft school will go unnamed.
it's a good place, but we all have our shortfalls. in this particular context i'm going to talk about our fab lab, which is a collaborative project at mit. this is neil gershenfeld. haystack's involvement withdigital technology began in 2004. in 2011 we were able to build a lab. neil works with the center for bits and atoms at mit where he is director of research. he runs an incredibly sophisticated lab that's working at the forefront of physical and computer science.
this means the interaction between hardware and software, mechanical tools and the codes that make them work. neil is one of those brilliant people that has inspiring ideas about how the world can work. he sees it as incredibly malleable - the world. he originated the idea that there could be small scale digital fabrication labs in divergent places across the globe. from afghanistan to madrid, from remote places in africa to new york city. he thought of this as he sat in a hundred million dollar facility
at mit and realized no one would ever have access to this. his interest has been in democratizing technology. the logic is that each fab lab, ours included, has the same equipment. a laser cutter, a cnc router, a vinyl cutter, 3d printer, electronics equipment for making circuitry, etc. it's sophisticated, but it's also fairly streamlined in what's there. each lab would have shared software, primarily open source, meaning that innovations and lessons from one lab could be modified for use in another. at the core it's an idea that's based on democratizing technology. putting advanced manufacturing in people's hands.
this has been done without an end goal in mind, which i think is one of the most beautiful things about the lab. there are different sorts of results that emerge, from solving design problems at a very sophisticated level to printing a new part for a broken bicycle in an economically impoverished neighborhood. it empowers people to be actively involved in the world through making things. this is my predecessor. i had the good fortune of following the worlds nicest guy. it's great to come into an institution where things are bad because you look good really fast.
i came into a situation where everything was great and i was asked if i could juggle. that was the biggest question that i had. when stew met neil, someone made a joke and said, "oh there's this guy around, you should meet him. he is a computer scientist, you are a poet at a craft school....ha, ha, ha, what could you possibly have in common?" what they had in common was curiosity. neil has come to love haystack and we are very fortunate. he comes every summer to the lab to update the software, install new drivers, bring machines to us.
it's kind of like if you bought a maserati and the guy who invented it changes your oil, and cleanse the windshield for you. but what neil has talked about in very articulate terms, and i said to him, "why do you come here?" he is around the globe on a constant basis. he said, "because things are learned in this lab that aren't learned in others." there is a way in which the technology works and that people use it that is different from the way that a scientist uses it. he has rewritten code based on the way that artists use machinery.
then goes into the international global network of fab labs because they would tend to think of a machine talking to a machine in a certain way. we would say, "this machine cuts flat things that are nonporous." someone walks in and says, "i have this wavy thing with a lot of porosity. i'd like to cut it." we say, "well it doesn't do that." and somebody say, "really, why?" they put it in the machine and it does something unexpected. to an artist this is basic. this is what we do. we mess with stuff, right?
but to a scientist, that's not the way you do it. the lab has been revolutionary for us, and i think also for the bigger picture. they way that the lab works, which is relevant to talk about here, is that it's staffed by what neil calls gurus. i love the kind of quasi spiritual and directional quality that term has. they are generally graduate students from mit, harvard graduate school of design, as220, and labs in other parts of the world. these are incredibly sharp brilliant people, generally coming to us in the midst of doctoral work. we had a woman here recently who was making a device to find the center of the universe.
no one quite knew what that meant, but it was incredibly impressive as a project. we don't teach dedicated classes in the fab lab. so you can't take a workshop in fab lab. the fab lab exists as a hub that people channel into to use and to ask questions that help break apart the division between studios. we allow this, the weighing of clay, not in the fab lab next to 3d printing this object,
next to cnc cutting out parts for something. this is the way in which the gurus might work. every two weeks everything at the school changes. if you ever think of a great model, our idea of a great model is to create it and then change it every two weeks. we bring in great faculty and after two weeks they leave and all the students leave and the gurus leave. then a whole new set of people come in and the entire school reinvents itself. the lab is also based on part of a large model philosophically of replication. both in terms of machines that make machines
again that phrase - machines that make machines - which is a developing thread in neil's research at mit and in fab labs in general. the idea that the lab could replicate itself technology wise and also how we think about knowledge transfer between people. when you come in to use the lab, to make something it's not a job shop. you come in, you meet the guru, you tell them what you want to do, they think about the viability and ask questions. they help think through what you need to do and what you need to know
and then they proceed to point you in the direction to figure it out. as a student, or participant, you are actively engaged in that learning. that is an incredibly important part of this facility. there is almost as much talking as there is making going on. in the winter when we are no longer on campus, we extend the fab lab out to the local community of deer isle, which is a rural fishing village and we make the equipment available to elementary and high school students. oh my goodness, i'm short on time.
we believe that the shop should stay moving. i'm just going to go through these few other pictures of the campus. the beauty of the school is that different things are happening in very different ways simultaneously. this was a drawing for raising a copper bowl and the concentric circles were a recording mechanism for how small it was getting. someone actually left this, they thought that was just a diagram. or here, a poet that attached a stylist to the cnc. so looking around over the past number of years i think it's easy to say and to observe that craft is changing. i think in the past we had a model that was very much in terms of pedagogy based on working in a very deep way
to learn a specific skill and to reproduce that object at times ad nauseum. but there is a generation of students given that i'm down on time i'm going to close my notes. there is a generation of students that i think have grown and developed who are much more nimble in how they are thinking. they are much more aware of the landscape of contemporary art. this is andrea zittel. this is adam manley who just took over the position at san diego state in furniture.
i don't think that forty years ago you'd think of this as a person who is running a furniture program. katie hundle. this is roxy paine's work, which is all fabricated in wood. which is actually only 15 feet deep of this tsa checkpoint and everything is meticulously fashioned. so does this fall inside of craft? does this fall inside of what we would be looking at in a curriculum for craft students? did he make it? this is matayos pliessnig.
he makes stunningly beautiful objects. he perhaps makes 1% objects, interesting question. this is all steam bent wood, clamped together, an incredibly meticulous craftsman. again, someone who is incredibly aware of the larger worlds of design and contemporary art. in a way that there is no gap between. so the work of tom sax for this generation
is as much of a touch stone as say the work of wendell castle. the kind of slap dash aesthetics of tom sax's work, i think, has kind of become a battle cry to an entire generation of students and also of artists in general. his film, a love letter to plywood, i would argue is perhaps one of the more influential films i would say in terms of materiality and craft. he shows you where the grain runs. they are funny, they are poignant.
another film called, the ten bullets, i'll speed it up, which shows you how to organize your shop. that's counted also with recent work such as this publication of mortise and tenon. which is a hybrid between an academic journal and a how-to manual for hand woodworking. this is published on the blue hill peninsula. to michael swaine's work in san francisco where he has built this cart to repair people's clothing. to theaster gates' work with the yamaguchi sole manufacturing company
which he set up of pottery. which has less to do with making pottery and more to do with urban revitalization. here a project for dorchester, where he is essentially buying up buildings on the south side of chicago and working with them to create more of a greater sense of community in those locations of people. in closing, i would argue that we are at a moment where pedagogically the field is shifting and a school like haystack can't look the way that it's looked. we have to be answering to questions and engaging in a dialogue
that considers the wood house as much an object of wood, the idea of a pottery that is set up under the moniker of a pottery, or the notion that an artists can work in social spaces to have an active engagement with community. it's perhaps the counter to the 1% collection that we just talked about. i think it's one of the most critical places where people are working today. - applause -
now we are getting a bit of a feel of the energy of the day. i think it's quite broad and interesting. for those of us who are curious it creates and opportunity to say, "wow, how are these ideas connected, and what do they tell us about ourselves, and what do they say about the future?" to continue on that theme, i want to show you all this book. have you seen this book? this is, "now i sit me down." by our next presenter, witold rybczynski.
this book has been out for a couple of weeks. the subhead on it is, "from klismos to plastic chair: a natural history." i want to tell you a little bit about witold so that you'll know he knows what of he speaks. witold rybczynski is a writer and emeritus professor of architecture at the university of pennsylvania. he is the author of, "how architecture works," and the book, "home the most beautiful house in the world." he has also written about architecture and design for the new yorker, the atlantic, the new york times, and slate.
witold is an ardent scholar of chairs from folding stools to rocking chairs, in cultures from ancient egypt to the 21st century. he studies chairs, the appreciates chairs, he sits in chairs. he is here today to share some insights. witold? i've got 30 minutes, so i'm not going to thank anybody. but i would like to thank our keynote speaker because he asked a question - do we need more chairs? it reminded me that i actually answer that question in my book.
i thought i'd just read you this because i think it relates very much to that. i'm quoting from a news article, i think it was 2012, or 2014. "a report released tuesday by a team of researchers at the brooking's institution has confirmed that the united states currently has enough chairs and there is no urgent need to produce new ones. representing a five year inquiry into the nations seating availability and quality, the 85 page study on american homes, offices, dining establishments, public spaces, and patios has determined, that for now, the nation has plenty of chairs
and can get by just fine with the chairs it already possesses." according to the report, "chair production can cease entirely with no negative affects on the american consumer. as the many good chairs now on store shelves and available at garage sales are sufficient to satisfy the countries seating requirements for the immediate future." though some citizens reportedly believe that they require more chairs, the study found "that most had not taken into full consideration the number of armchairs, folding chairs, adirondack chairs, leather chairs, swivel chairs, and rocking chairs
already in existence. not to mention all the bean bag chairs wingback chairs, directors chairs, recliners, papasan chairs and deck chairs." this was a report from 2012, but it was in the onion, so it was a satirical report. but, i think, when i read it and when you listened to it, it didn't sound completely like satire. there was certainly truth in it. like all good satire, there is truth in it,
in satire. i don't think chairs are very important. i quote somebody in the book a design theorist and historian that said, "the chair is what you need when you don't need anything at all." the truth is, you can sit on anything. you can sit on the ground, you can sit on a box, you can sit on a ledge, you can sit on a tree stump. the chair, almost by definition, is a kind of extra. about 15 years ago, i wrote a book - the history of the the screwdriver and the screw. it was called, "one good turn."
i call this talk, "a tool for sitting," but the chair is actually a different sort of tool. of course it has a practical purpose like a screwdriver. it does a job. but i've learned that it's also a very personal kind of tool. there are very few people who have a favorite screwdriver. i mean, a screwdriver is just something that's in the kitchen drawer and when you need it, it's there, and it does a job. it's done the same job for several 100 years. we have favorite chairs. we have our, my chair, the chair i sit in after work, or the chair i read in, or the chair
i watch television in. chairs are different, they are personal and there are other differences as you'll see in a minute. i thought this is the most famous sam maloof chair. i wanted to talk a little bit about rocking chairs. this talk is mostly about the past, i don't know what the future holds. we are always surprised by the future anyway. it's always safer to look backwards and see what we can learn. i wanted to talk about the rocking chair. the rocking chair is a very mysterious
human device, because the cradle has been known since the middle ages. the cradle was invented in the middle ages, because we discovered that babies cry less if they move. of course you can move the baby, but if you put it in a cradle, you can do something else while the cradle rocks. people knew this, and rockers are around for 100's of years, and yet nobody thinks to put a chair on them. i'm not sure why.
i speculate in the book, partly it's because certainly in the middle ages, chairs were so big and heavy that putting one on rockers wouldn't make much sense. it would be a sort of lumbering sort of thing. but also because chairs for the longest time, and still today are associated with status. when i was teaching, i had a chair. i mean i had a chair, but i had a university chair
which was a mark of status in the university. the idea of putting a chair on something that moves back and forth seems very frivolous, kind of outlandish. certainly that's what europeans thought when they came to america where the rocking chair was invented. they thought we were kind of goofy. back and forth, back and forth, i mean, what's wrong with these people. i'm not quoting but these are the gist of some of these visitors.
americans are so nervous, making money that they can't stop. they have to keep moving even when they are relaxing. the chair actually, the rocking chair was invented somewhere we don't know exactly who, but it was certainly in the philadelphia area because there is the oldest evidence of a rocking chair. there is a receipt from a chair maker for a nursing chair on rockers. we know this actually isn't the first rocking chair, but it is the earliest one we know of. this is roughly about 1740.
it would have been a chair, something like this. a nursing chair was a low chair without arms that a mother could sit in and hold the baby and have enough space without the arms to rock it back and forth. it was a pretty obvious connection, but it took several hundred years to put a chair on rockers. then you could hold a baby and rock at the same time. rocking chairs are an american invention. they are an invention that catches on.
it's initially used mainly by women. but somebody sits in a rocking chair, a man sits in a rocking chair, and finds that it's actually quite pleasant. i'll talk about why in a minute. the rocking chair becomes something for men and women. there is mark twain sitting in a north carolina type of rocking chair which uses a weave for the back as well as the seat. it's a little more comfortable. it lets the air through as well. the one on the left is actually a european painting by munch, but it's
probably, it looks like a boston rocker which is a particular kind of rocking chair. it became really a craze in this country every household had at least one rocking chair in it. it spread literally like wild fire. it was like the hula hoop craze, but it lasted longer. because it was invented here, it of course started here. as i said, european visitors were struck by this
and many of them write about it because it's such an unusual thing. no such chair existed anywhere else. this is a very american posture. i learned this from reading about chairs. leaning back on the back legs of a chair is something that american arguably men, i'm not sure that women do this too, my wife always scolds me when i do this. but this is an american habit. i'll leave it to physiologist to figure out why americans do this, but when thonet started exporting bent wood chairs to america,
he discovered that he had to reinforce the bent wood chairs because the back legs keep breaking because americans kept leaning back. this is a rocking chair, so it's actually made for that. the interesting thing about rocking chairs is that they are not really about rocking, i think. the great advantage of a rocking chairs is that a rocking chair is like the tilt mechanism on an office chairs. you can lean back. just stop. you can change your posture, of course, that's what he is doing. he is not rocking he is just changing the angle of the seat. in fact, office chairs started life in the home.
the revolving tilting chair, it's not an office device, it's a domestic device. there is a connection. people like those chairs. the rocking chair precedes it slightly. the rocking chair gets exported or imported by the europeans. i would say the idea gets imported because thonet figures out that the rocking chair would be a great thing to make out of bent wood since you are bending wood anyway, you are making the rockers immediately out of bent wood. of course the thonet chair is a much more elegant rocking chair. rocking chairs are really ugly chairs.
i'm sorry mr. maloof, but it's not a great chair. it looks like a chair with some weird mutant thing stuck on it. these are beautiful objects. it's the continuity of the rockers and the arms and everything, it really becomes a sculptural thing. which is why it appeals to artists so much. impressionists painted these thonet rockers. thonet rockers are about 1860s. they are pretty early. they become, somehow associated with, by artists with probably the sculptural shapes. they show up in a lot of impressionists paintings.
the rocking chairs gets a revival in america when john f. kennedy introduces the rocking chairs into the oval office. kennedy had a back problem and his the doctor said, maybe you should get a rocking chair. the doctor also had a back problem and she recommended this north carolina rocking chair. the one with the weave woven cane on the back and the seat i think that kennedy had these kind of hokey but probably comfortable bits made for it. to make it a little more comfortable. these padded things that are placed onto it. john kennedy had these everywhere. he had one in air force one.
he had them at camp david. he really believed in this, and of course again it wasn't that he was rocking back and forth, but the occasional movement did something in his spine that was positive. i'd hate to imagine what these three are concocting around this coffee table. concocting. here is an interview with donald trump and pence on 60 minutes and i show them in this talk because they are sitting in these louis 15th chairs. louis 15th chairs are actually perfectly good chairs.
they are excellent chairs because they represent the acne of chair making. they are padded in all the right places, they have these padded elbow rests. it's just unusual to see an american politician sitting in one. outside the ã‰lysã©e palace. it's a chair that we associate with french politicians not with americans. these, i hasten to say, are made in the u.s.a. a reader emailed me about this and she said she saw them being made in the 1980's in los angeles. but there is an ironic twist because they were made my illegal mexican immigrants.
this quote is important for me in the book. george kubler was an art historian at yale and he wrote a wonderful book called, "the shape of time." he made this statement that everything comes from something that proceeds it. and that you can in fact follow this. he was talking about art, but i think it applied to artifacts as well. that you can follow this all the way back to the very beginning. as he poetically says, the first morning of human time. i'd like to look at one particular kind of chair in this way. this is philip sharedon and his generals meeting during the
civil war, so we are talking 150 years almost, more or less. this is sometime in the 1860s. they are all sitting on folding chairs and camping furniture as a subcategory that is very interesting and i talk about in the book. it starts with british basically. really interesting chairs. how do you make a chair that you can roll up, or fold up, or collapse it in someway when you are changing camp. all of these are folding chairs of one kind of another but it's the - is it this? opps.
i better not use this. the gentleman on the right is sitting on a folding stool. i don't know if he is a lesser general. he doesn't seem to be, but in any case, he is sitting on a folding stool. that's what i wanted to look at because if you went to home depot you could buy virtually the identical stool. it's made out of different materials. out of aluminum and either canvas or nylon, but it's virtually the same stool. it's really such a great device because
what's so wonderful about it other than the fact that you can just fold it up, it weights nothing, it's easy to make, and you can fold it up and carry it take it with you, is that the heavier the person is, the more the canvas stretches. the trouble with canvas seats is that they tend to collapse over time whereas this, because of the x shape the weight pushing down stretches the canvas even more. that's one of the interesting things about chairs that i found writing the book that became a theme, is that
chairs have a very long life. a useful life, much longer than most things. partly because if they are well made they don't fall apart. this idea goes back to the civil war, it actually goes back much further than that as you'll see. we can't improve on it, so why bother? we can't improve on it. we use different materials, but it's a perfectly useful chair. that hardly is true of anything else. a civil war gun would be kind of useless today, except for a collector or a history buff.
the army would not distribute civil war guns to its soldiers. but the army would distribute these kinds of stools. in many technologies, the electronic technologies that we are so proud of last a few years and then they are superseded by something else. i'm old enough to have seen three generation of music players. i had lps and then i had cassettes, and now i have cds. i'm not changing again. but it will change again. the younger people here are going to have to replace their cds with whatever else comes along.
but i have a chair that is 30 years old. that i bought used at a fea market and it's still useful and it will remain useful. chairs are very interesting in that way. i think that's why designs survive. windsor chairs are really marvelous designed chairs. in a sense we don't need more chairs. once you have windsor chairs you hardly need more chairs. that's why we still make windsor chairs,
because they are a very good chair. we use automated lathes we still make them out of wood, although not the same wood that was used originally. but the design is identical, and the principles are identical. you have a big heavy seat and then everything goes into holes. it's a crude chair. you don't need to be a craftsman to make a windsor chair, you just need a drill. because it's all based on pegging into holes. the feet go into it, that hoop goes into it. the spindles go into it.
100 years before the civil war, george washington has these camp stools made. you can see one in the smithsonian. he had about 20 of them made by a philadelphia furniture maker. virtually the same as the previous two stools. these i think are made of leather and wood. but if we go back a little further, to the 17th century you have these rather ornate and grand stools which work on the same principle.
this camp stool clearly has precedence. they didn't make camp stools in the court of louis 14th, but they made these taburets. those are versions of something in the middle ages of folding stools in the middle ages. here is a monk in a library copying on this kind of this is related to the scissors chair. rather than two x's there is a kind of series of x frames
which makes it a little bit more stronger and more durable than the other kind. if the arms go up, it becomes a kind of armchair. there are many thrones from the early middle ages that are based on this. why would a camp stool be a throne? it seems like an odd relationship. that really comes back to the romans. you can sort of make it out in this roman coin. the emperor is sitting on an x framed
stool. in ancient rome, the sala carolis, which was what they called the stool was a special seat for judges and important people to sit on. it was symbolic seat as much as, it wasn't simply a camp stool. it's that symbolism that migrates to medieval europe and then those stools become used as thrones. the the sala carolis sometimes had arms. this one doesn't but sometimes the
legs curved up into arms, but they never had backs. it was said that this was so that they judges, because judges sat in these, would not make long deliberations. because you do need a back to support the chair. as a footnote, one of the things i learned reading and studying about chairs is that sitting is really a - a chair, a tool for sitting is always a kind of compromise.
the human body is made for walking and running and it's made for laying down. because we need to lay down, we recharge every night. but sitting is actually not - the human body isn't made for sitting, and we have these sitting bones which interfere and so you have to make something soft when you sit on something hard or that doesn't take some shape, you are going to feel uncomfortable. if you sit for any length of time you start to cut off the circulation to parts of your body
and that feels uncomfortable, so you move. you cross your legs, or you move around. it's basically impossible to make a good chair. it's always this sort of compromise and yet we get tired. we want to sit down. in a more complicated way which i won't go into here, we do move up and we develop furniture for all kinds of uses - for dining. we could do that sitting on the ground, but we have chosen to sit up higher.
i'll talk a little bit about that later. but the romans didn't invent the x frame. here is this fresco that was discovered at knossos in the palace which is called a camp stool fresco because the discoverers really thought these were like british camp stools. these are two young men having a party or something. this seems to be a, not a grand chair, it seems to be a utilitarian chair with some sort of cushion or maybe a sheep skin or something is laying on it. the oldest examples
the oldest example of a folding stool, there are two examples, and they are from radically different parts of the world so it's a kind of puzzle. did one copy the other or did they just develop separately? this is an egyptian folding stool the seat is missing, but you have to imagine a laced kind of seat with all those little holes on the top. this is a rather fancy one, this is a 2% version. it's got inlayed wood and carved animals. we also know from tomb paintings that there were rather simple ones.
here you have people waiting, they look like maybe students. people working on stools. they were everyday objects as well. they were both fancy stools, but also rather commonplace stools. the other place where we have discovered a stool is in denmark. it dates from roughly the same time. it was dug up. it's basically a wooden fame. the frame it must have been in peak or something it was entire, there was an x frame
and then there is a fragment of caribou hide or some sort of hide which means the seat was leather. it's basically the same as these. how did it get from egypt to denmark? i don't know. it feels more likely that it developed separately in some sort of parallel way. the oldest chair i found was actually a sculpture of a chair. this is about a foot high. it's from the cycladic culture, which is the culture that precedes ancient greece. on the islands around the main land greece.
there is a number of these sculptures that have survived. they are generally of musicians, sometimes they are on stools, but he is sitting on a four - it's like a kitchen chair. it's not a throne clearly, because he is a musician, it's a practical chair. when i saw this at the metropolitan museum, i was flabbergasted because it was this entire perfect little chair. the egyptians did not use chairs. they used throne like chairs for very important people, but you never see any paintings of ordinary people sitting in anything like a chair. they are sitting on stools.
here was this perfect chair and it's 27 to 2800 b.c. it's really really old. the problem is, the cycladic cultures didn't, as far as we know, develop writing. there is no written record of anything from this culture. all there is is a bunch of these various sculptures. you'll notice the face, it looks very much like a modelyani or hansard or something. these were discovered in the early 20th century and art collectors collected these, so the tombs got totally pillaged. we have a very sketchy idea of this culture. where they lived, how they lived.
we just don't know. clearly they were a chair sitting culture, but more than that we really don't know. of course, not everybody sits on chairs. there are very advanced sophisticated cultures which simply sat on mats on the floor. here is one example. the japanese are the most famous example of a floor sitting tradition. they knew about chairs.
they simply chose not to do it. it's not a question of evolution or or not knowing it or inventing it. it really is a cultural choice. it's a choice by the way, which has huge implications on things like architecture, because ceiling heights don't need to be very high if you are sitting on the floor. in fact, if you are sitting on the floor, a very tall ceiling might be unpleasant. it affects clothing, it affects the way people eat. it has lots of repercussions. the chinese, like the japanese, were also a floor sitting culture.
but we know that around 100 a.d. they introduced these folding stools. they called them barbarian beds, because in chinese culture, barbarian simply meant not chinese. humble as they are. bed was simply because the chinese sat on beds. beds were sometimes used as a kind of dios or platform. but they didn't sit on anything else, so they had a sense of they used the word because bed was what they sat on. a barbarian bed was as close you could get to the folding stool.
what's interesting about the folding stool is that it was strictly used outside, it was never used indoors. it was only used outside and the parallel is the way an american family will have a blanket on the floor, on the ground for a picnic, but if you went to somebody's house and they put a blanket on the floor, for dinner, you'd feel very strange. the chinese were kind of the opposite. they had these stools, but they never used them inside. inside they sat on the floor, or on these heated platforms because in northern china it was very cold.
so the platform was heated and you could sit on blankets on top of it. they eventually developed portable platforms for summer time that you could take outside because they liked the idea of sitting up for some reason. this has the same name as the other platform, even thought it's wood and portable. out of that comes a chair. some of these platforms had backs so you could lean against them. so if you have a platform that's 18 inches high and it has a back,
you are almost at the chair and if you put your legs down and lean on it, you've got the posture. i believe posture always comes first. people don't invent chairs and then sit on them, they sit in that chair sitting posture and then they invent a chair that will support them. here's from a 900 a.d. party where some people are on chairs, some people are on this platform
which is sort of like a sofa, but they are sitting cross legged or they are leaning against the platform. you've got this sort of transition period where people are, what they are not doing is sitting on the floor. there are no mats on the floor, nobody sits on the floor. china moved radically from one thing to another, which of course is not a surprise because within our lifetime they moved radically from being a so called third world country to being a competitor.
that same dynamism was evident in this time. we are talking of course about the early middle ages in europe when we were sort of staggering around without chairs of any kind, maybe a stool, occasional benches, but nothing as sophisticated as the chinese chairs. here is the emperor on a chair. it's very democratic the chinese chair. it's not just a throne, it's all over the place. let me go through very quickly. they developed a folding model, which was unusual.
this postdates when they shift to chair, so this wasn't a shift from stool to folding chair, but this folding chair was an indoor chair and a very prestigious indoor chair that was given to guests and important people. when the europeans started importing chinese goods, porcelain, furniture, and so on in the 18th century, you can see the affects of these chairs. here is the folding chair, steamer chairs from the late 19th century, rattan is another chinese invention. deck chairs are kind of simplified versions of those chairs.
i'm going to have to go through very quickly, we are running out of time. the directors chair, actually invented in 1892, long before movies. it's only when movies took up directors chairs and put names on the back like howard hawks has here that somehow that name stuck to it and it became a popular chair, and still is. the lawn chair. not a great chair in terms of design museums, but i think a very sophisticated design. very light, you can leave it outside, it's easy to fold - unlike a deck chair. it's durable, inexpensive, really a very sophisticated chair. invented by a man in brooklyn.
then the very simple metal folding chair. i'll just finished off with the one piece air chair. which is a design by jasper morrison, but there are many plastic chairs. the one piece plastic chair, i think, is our periods great contribution to chair design. the 1% chair is not withstanding. this really is a revolution, because in some ways the history of chairs is the history of chair makers trying to get rid of joints. thonet when he creates bent wood furniture it's to get rid of the joints so he can have legs, back and legs
with one piece of wood. you just eliminated about three or four joints. the plastic chair eliminates all the joints. there are no joints, it's just one piece of plastic. it's made, of course, it's molded, there is no craftsmanship. nobody touches it. it's 60 seconds from when the pellets go in the machine to the finished chair coming out of the machine. which is why it costs about $10 on the lowest end. whatever the future of the chair is, it somehow connects to this, i believe
in some way because it's such a global chair. the thing that is most striking about the plastic chair is that it's the chair that becomes globalized. it's produced in all countries of the world. it's produced in africa, asia, east asia, the middle east. if you watch the news carefully you'll see plastic chairs everywhere. whenever there is a meeting of people, they are likely sitting on plastic chairs or you'll see them in the streets. it really is the global chair.
finally, just to finish off. what strikes me about the chair is that, of course, the chair changes as a function of how you make it. whether you are making it in a factory, or craftsmen are making it, what you are making it out of. wood was the material of choice for millennia but then you get metal, all kinds of fibers, and plastics, and finally all plastics. yet at the same time, the chair really doesn't evolve. you can't say that the eames chair is better than the chippendale chair.
it's just a different chair, it's make out of different materials, it doesn't represent a step foward in chairs. they are both perfectly good chairs. that's why i think chairs do have such a long life. the body doesn't change, taste change. we may at one point think the eames chair is hopelessly out of fashion. we don't think that today, but who knows in 50 years what people will say. the same thing, we like ergonomic chairs, but ergonomic chairs are not perfect chairs. they are very good chairs, i use one myself, but you still have to get up and walk around because you are always fighting
the body which really doesn't want to be seated for long periods of time. ok, thanks so much witold. we have about 10-15 minutes for questions so if i could have the speakers come back up on the stage. we have a couple of microphones placed at the back for anyone who has anything for them. the microphones are in the back if you would like to come ask questions. of all the furniture that's been developed, why is the chair the least comfortable over the centuries? as i explained, we are not made to sit in chairs. we were made to stand. it's not that we were made to sit on the ground, sitting on the ground doesn't solve the problem.
sitting is an awkward position for us. we are much better off laying down, which is, of course, why for hundreds of years people ate laying down. the egyptians, the greeks, and the romans all ate laying down. probably because it's just more comfortable. i don't know, i've never done it, so i don't know. but i think that's the easiest answer to your question. yes, there are designers who are producers, there are designers who are making expensive objects.
maybe not for the 1%, but for the upper echelons. ultimately, makers have to find something that suits their temperament and their practice. which is viable. ultimately we are talking about labor. i always, i'm impressed with dismay when i go into a tail gaze of makers and they will tell a lamenting story that people will like their work, but then be disgusted or upset by the price. i offer this because i think that
what culture has done and what mass production has done is that it has devalued labor. there are so many makers here who spent hours and hours and hours using their skills to produce objects that should have a right price on it, but the broad public is used to cheap bargains and things made in china and plastic extruded chairs don't necessarily want to acknowledged that the price of human labor is not cheap physically or economically. so to your question about a 1%, yes, there are makers who are producing luxury goods in the united states and in canada.
i sit on the board of craft in ontario and thinking about a recent exhibition of objects, there was a chair for $15,000. hundreds of hours of labor, exquisite material didn't sell and people reacted to it that it was very expensive. it raises the question about well what is the relationship between the amount of energy, mental, physical that goes into the making of something and it's value in the world. the 1% may not have to, well maybe they pinch penney's. i don't know.
but i don't think that they have to worry so much around the price they would pay for something. most people though, i would say, in the north american market have been removed. we produce what we don't consume and we consume what we don't produce and this has resulted in the devaluation of the value of labor. it's a very good question. good for some people. i hope that the profit sharing relationship benefits the makers.
so 50/50, 60/40. right, well i mean, makers do need a venue for selling their work. i guess the question is what's the fitting venue to the maker's idea of the standing of their work? italis and the relationship with venues like guild, make sense. they have their own bronze casting foundry. they worked with some other shops that made staach's furniture. there is a great cooperation among them. a lot of artists do not make their own work. in thinking about that i can't help but share my impression of jeff koons.
if you think about the contemporary art market, he is, i think, one of the most successful contemporary makers. he is also very much interested in quality control. he went to the extent he was concerned about the metal he as using, the steel he was using in his casting. he bought a decommissioned ore mine in pennsylvania and opened a foundry. so he smelts his own metal. that is vertical integration which takes us back to the 19th century, which then i guess you know the idea of having to separate out.
these very sophisticated and complicatedly arranged etalis to make sure the work that comes out is exactly as the envisioner, i think koons is an envisioner. he has a 137 paid employees, jeff koons. studio jobs has 40 people on payroll. i don't know whether this is a question or a comment, but i feel as though it really is based on the philosophy of the maker. whether the maker wants to reach a broader audience.
these days, especially with all the new technology whether or not the maker is employing assistance of machinery or whatever. at the maloof foundation, of course, revere sam and his notion of, no chair left his workshop that he didn't begin and have a major part in. i guess i'm wondering if that philosophy will hold over with the new technology going forward? i think fordism, as the idea of staged making provided us with a very effective industrial model.
not without social consequence. not without the consequences around potentially the exploitation of labor. if a maker wants to produce things and requires owning a foundry and hiring all these skilled people in the assembly, well the process from thinking to realization so be it. the point i was trying to make is that whereas in the world of kingship there was a patronage relationship where objects were produced in the service of the state.
today objects are being made in the service of capitalism. the self fashioning, we all buy things and we wear clothes because we want to communicate who we think we are. this 1%, or 2%, or 3% are doing the same things by buying the 100th floor penthouse and filling it perhaps with luxury objects. i haven't had the privilege of going to those apartments, but i think that's the gesture. if a maker wants to have a practice defined by certain complexities, economics at this point in time are complex. manufacturing is complex. i think a lot of makers hold on, i think within the realm of craft thinking
to a type of romantic notion of labor. the idea of mr. maloof, one object, it had to meet his standards before it would leave his studio. that is fine, it's no better than the studio jobs model, it's just a different model. ultimately things are getting made, whether by maloof or others, are products. i think too, as you say it's a modern idea - this idea of the maker. in the 18th century, and those chairs are arguably at least as sophisticated and i would say more so than most modern chairs. it's very hard to figure out who designed the chair. at least a dozen people are involved in making a chair.
they had the separate guilds, so the upholster is separate from the framer. only the framer in france signed the chair. that was simply a rule of his guild, but that didn't mean that the framer designed the chairs. sometimes the upholsters designed the chairs, sometimes the decorator or the architect designed the chair, sometimes the business man, i can't remember the name now, who essentially he had a shop. he
was the man who connected with the clients. you get the feeling that in many cases that person may have designed the chair. the idea of design is very difficult to pin down at that point, and yet they are making totally crafted and totally beautiful chairs. this will be our final question. with the duality that exists now with the makers of the 1% - hi i'm over here. with the makers of the 1% chairs or the 2% kind of in conjunction on the other end with the makers doing pottery disguised as helping out a community.
in our future do you see kind of a melding of these two very extreme types of crafts coming together? no, i think that they are completely counter and i think that there is a value system that is ascribed to both. when i asked is it a problem that something is sold for $100,000 i'm happy to buy something for $100,000 if somebody wants to buy that but there is a value system in it, and i think that we have we are in a very peculiar moment of incredible elitism. where a tremendous amount of art making and high craft
has essentially become luxury goods. which i think is what your talk pointed out. i think the question is what does that mean? what are the implications of it? what is the history of that? i don't think that there can be a conflation. although if we had longer, we could talk about the way in which perhaps theaster gates would be a model of the conflation. in that he is very savvy in the ability to make objects that are sold in the highly elite sphere
with the funds going back into a community based project. he talks about it racially. he says i'm a black man playing the white mans game, and i'm going to win. i think we can't also take race and access, and equity out of these questions. i think they are highly charged questions. and they are highly complicated ones. i'm not looking to turn haystack into the haystack mountain school of social practice, but i am looking to a generation that, i believe, is saying this isn't going to happen for us, in this way.
the bubble is popping, or the bubble is not going to pop but we don't believe in the ethics of it, or we do believe in the ethics and i want to make a ton of money. right, so i think there is multiple ways. i think if they are going to colaless, they are going to colaless in a really messy way. in perhaps the way that theaster's work might be done. again, i don't think one is bad. i don't think it's bad to sell an object for $100,000, but it's complicated. nor do i think that the warren mckenzie model of pottery of leaving a cigar box out by your pots
and selling them and hoping people will put in that they feel is worth while. that works in some places, but what warren mckenzie found was that people were coming to his studio leaving him a small amount of money, an then reselling it on a secondary market. that was smart, right? i mean. who was foolish there? so, it's complicated. i'm so grateful that this symposium started out with questions about value. so, that's maybe my long winded answer. i think that's a good point that we can all continue to discuss at lunch.
we are going to take our break now, we will reconvene at 2 o'clock. there are a lot of restaurants in the area, if you are unfamiliar, there are lists at the information table right outside so please grab one. come back at 2 o'clock and we will see you then. thank you all. thank you gentlemen.