The Pig and The Automobile OR Reclamation Tales

Kristi Wilson

Deconstruction of the Automobile: Keep, 2009

Introduction

I have been finding expressions of craft in a variety of cultural reform activities lately. Perhaps it is because I have been looking for them, but perhaps it is because they are becoming more ubiquitous. I wanted to take a minute to write about two such examples that are worthy of our attention, and also stand in for many, many more.

The Pig

I discovered Anthony Bourdain's television show No Reservations, about 8 months ago (I know, I was late to the party). I watched it voraciously and greedily. A few months after discovering Bourdain the desire to eat atypical cuts of meat was growing in my mind and my stomach. Regular viewers of the show will know that this is what Bourdain regularly does. Bourdain's intellectual arguments for practicing expanded palatability in American gastronomy were often based on romantic notions of sustainable production and consumption. In other words, Bourdain's culinary preservationism advocated turning back the clock on our taste-buds to before industrial agro-business. My inner-craftsperson swooned at the notion.

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Feast

219 Westheimer Road

Houston, TX 77006

(713) 529-7788

Feast has no real peer in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and other major cities that pride themselves on their epicurean adventurousness."

-Frank Bruni, The New York Times

Nominated by the James Beard Foundation for Best New Restaurant in the USA, 2009.

One of the '50 Best New US Restaurants'

-Travel + Leisure Magazine

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I started tweeting in earnest a few weeks ago when I got my iphone 4 (You can follow me here, but I am tweeting mostly about my professional activities). One of my first tweets was documenting a going-away dinner that my friends took me out for in Houston. Mike, one of the instigators of the dinner, is a food and beer critic for the alternative weekly paper in Houston. Needless to say I was hyped to put on a tie and go out for a fine dining experience, an activity that a twenty-something artist/writer rarely gets to do.

Feast was about five blocks from my apartment in Houston, and for the first few months I had never considered going there, mostly because it was in a severely understated building (as most really good restaurants are). I was also not really sure what they served. The sign simply had a pig, done up like a wood-cut print (see above). After I become aware of Feast however, I walked by many times, stopping to stare in the window like a slack-jawed gawker. Feast is what Mike had in mind.

The Duck Neck Sausage

We started off with bread and a charcuterie

(cold cooked meats)

plate, both made in house. I ordered the duck neck sausage; duck and pork mixed with sage and other herbs, stuffed into a cleaned duck neck casing, tied off, and braised (I assume), and served on a bed of baked beans and Kale. I cut into the sausage and it squirted duck fat. I ate the skin and tried to eat the head too. The juices mixed with the beans and made them taste like meat candy. Mike ordered bath chaps: pork cheek and jowls, wrapped around pork tongue, braised, then cut into medallions, served with mashed rutabaga and mustard greens. I had one bite of the bath chaps, they

were fatty, gloriously fatty. One bite stuck my tongue to the roof of my mouth in savory sticky bliss. Dessert was sticky toffee pudding. I was too full to remember very much about it.

Over twitter I characterized the restaurant thus: locavore, organic, euro-peasant gourmet food. The owners call it "rustic european fare," and they know their shit, but somehow that gives an incomplete picture of what they are really doing. Meat dishes are the center piece of the restaurant. James Silk, one of the three co-owners, trained as a butcher and worked extensively at Fergus Henderson's St. John Restaurant in central London’s Clerkenwell district. (Ironically, Fergus Henderson's is purportedly Anthony Bourdain's favorite restaurant in the world). Feast could certainly be considered a concept restaurant, as they serve only local humanely raised animals, use seasonal ingredients, and place an extraordinary emphasis on ingredients. As much as they are experts in the culinary arts (or the craft of cooking if you prefer), Feast is promoting sustainable food production through a personal and transparent supply chain, which creates a connection between producer and consumer.

Two excerpts from their menu might further explain this connection:

"We do not use ANY meat or meat product from factory farmed, intensively raised animals in our restaurant. A full list of exactly where your dinner is coming from is posted on the website and on the back of the menu." [And indeed it was/is].

‘The industrialization--and brutalization--of animals in America is a relatively new phenomenon: no other country raises and slaughters its food animals quite as intensively or as brutally as we do. No other people in history has lived at quite so great a remove from the animals they eat. Were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent we would not long continue to raise, kill and eat animals the way we do. Tail-docking and sow crates and beak-clipping would disappear overnight - for who could stand the sight? Yes, meat would get more expensive. We'd probably eat less of it too, but maybe when we did eat animals, we'd eat them with the consciousness, ceremony and respect they deserve.’

Michael Pollan – ‘The Omnivore’s Dilemma’

The Automobile

The same week I visited Feast I spent some time meeting and getting to know metalsmith Kristi Wilson. She had just moved to Houston from Illinois, and in fact ended up moving into my old studio space. My partner Amy and I left and Kristi moved in. It was the changing of the guard at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft. I had met her once before, but really didn't know her that well until we hung out that last week in July. Discovering Kristi's work and Feast in the same week was a convergence that accelerated my thinking about the role of craft in society. Kristi Wilson's Deconstruction of the Automobile is the best example of craft accessing and engaging the modern human condition that I have seen.

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Kristi Wilson

Deconstruction of the Automobile: Complete, 2009

"I deconstruct, repurpose, and reshape vintage collectibles and knick-knacks to address domestic attachment in familial roles, legacies, and everyday stories. Deconstruction plays an important role in my artistic process. As a traditionally trained craftsperson, I understand and know objects through taking them apart, just as my work seeks to know and understand the traditions, memories, and associations of the objects that I collect."

-Kristi Wilson

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In the summer of 2009 Kristi Wilson decided to take apart her car. It was a 1997 Nissan Sentra. The idea was simple: use hand tools to remove fasteners until there are no component parts left to be disassembled. It took a month.

Personally, I take pride in understanding simple mechanisms and frequently disassemble and reassemble many domestic machines. Today, I fixed a toilet that wouldn't flush, it felt great to know that I am the master of my indoor plumbing, this modern convenience will never vex me. The automobile, however, remains elusive. I understand most mechanisms that make up the car. They are simple – for the most part. When placing these mechanisms in sequence they become infinitely complex. It is the intricacy and complexity which I find to be so intimidating and off-putting when thinking about performing work on automobiles.

I would say that I am much more mechanically inclined than the average person, yet I am still a non-automobile tinkerer. For most Americans the idea of engaging with complex mechanical objects – like an automobile – is laughable. We simply do no undergo the manual and mechanical education. The status of the auto-mechanic profession reflects the separation that exists between object users and object builders. Mechanics are often thought of as hucksters and swindlers. I have often puzzled over this because jewelers suffer from the same stigma. It's my belief that this reputation is projected upon professions where two circumstances are at play. First, the value of the object in question is considerable (more than a few hundred dollars), and second the customer does not understand how the object is fabricated or the mechanisms that allow the object to function. At a loss to asses the labor or expertise involved in undertaking mechanical work, the default reaction is unease, skepticism and mistrust. Ignorance leads to fear. This is the root of racism and xenophobia, but also the reputation of the mechanic.

Kristi Wilson

Deconstruction of the Automobile: Pack, 2009

We are not a society of makers; we are a society of consumers. Wilson's deconstruction is a radical act of empowerment. She is attempting to reclaim the knowledge and means of production required to create that indispensable American tool, the automobile. Ironically, this reclamation requires the destruction of the very object to be reclaimed, which itself has significant value. At the same time Wilson takes a step towards self-sufficiency she is also destroying the largest consumer good that she owns, begging the question of the true nature of value. What is more important having a car or knowing how to build one?

Wilson points out through her project, how alienated we are from the things we use and the things we rely on. We cannot build them, we cannot maintain them, we are lemmings, we are infants, we are dependent, we are lost. Wilson uses her understanding of fasteners and mechanical connections to jar us from our sleep, she uses her persistence to scold us for being helpless, and she uses her socket wrenches to remind us that what makes us human, at least in part, is that we are born tool users – that is why we have thumbs.

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Kristi Wilson

Deconstruction of the Automobile: Timing Chain, 2009

"After a month of deconstruction, and prior months of preparation, Mack’s Recycling, a local recycling company, took the car today. I can honestly say to the best of my ability I took the car apart as much as I physically and mentally was able for 1 month. Once I opened the cover to expose the timing chain I knew the project was complete. This was the moment that I associated the car with the body. For I had found the heart and it was done ticking. Somehow, the surgeon I had become was not what I wanted. I was finished dissecting the object. Fluids burst and poured by the bucket fulls. My apron covered in grease and antifreeze. The car seemed to moan and hiss. I was not interested in detaching the parts aggressively or innovatively. Rather, I went about it simply and directly. I listened, paid attention, found difficulties, read my way through it, and felt my way through the rest of it."

-Kristi Wilson

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Conclusion

The similarity in these two endeavors is at once both glaring and imperceptible. How is gastronomy and fine cuisine anything like taking apart a car? Most of the time the answer is that they are nothing alike, but when the impetus of the each activity is to reclaim the means of production over the output, then surprisingly, they are quite similar. And it is finally in this intellectual framework that we find the overlap between the aforementioned projects and contemporary craft. In a post-industrial consumer economy the means of production of the goods we consume is beyond the reach of most consumers. Craft, together with other reform movements, allows us to meaningfully reconnect with the materials and objects that make up our world, by reclaiming the techniques and skills that make us autonomous. Without craft we are dependent, with it we are free.

Comments welcome,

-Gabriel

Detroit Craft City

Last December I posted a youtube video about Craft Scotland's national campaign, the "C" word. In the post I thought aloud how great it would be if we, in America, were to replicate some sort of nationally distributed media campaign in support of craft.

So last night I am sitting in a movie theater in Detroit – my stint in Texas is over – when this advertisement comes onto the screen. "The things that make us Americans are the things we make." I was floored. I thought this was at last the long awaited, not so highly anticipated national campaign for craft. In fact it was not. It was a Jeep commercial. An infinitely better argument for craft than the Craft Scotland "C" word spot, the jeep commercial appeals to cultural trends in self-sufficiency (DIY) on the left, nationalism on the right, and our desires as consumers for community, quality and utility.

To the new executive director of the American Craft Council, Chris Amundsen: This is how you bring craft back into the fore in this country, with grandiose romanticism. I hope you are paying attention because even though the council just moved to Minneapolis it looks like it will be Detroit Craft City.

As Always Comments Welcome,

-Gabriel

JewelReCulture Vol. 1: Austerity Measures

Introduction

Over the next year I will endeavor to explore contemporary art jewelry in relation to other cultural phenomena in an attempt to find the nexus between art jewelry and wider cultural meaning. At the very least I hope to find that jewelry participates meaningfully in cultural trends even if it has no role in determining them. This essay is my first entry into a series which I am calling Jewel Re Culture. Pronounced "Jewelry Culture," it is simply the activity of placing jewelry in a wider cultural context (but also a catchy title that describes this undertaking).

The full title of this first essay is Austerity Measures: Current Events Creating Context. This essay endeavors to explore the odd phenomenon of how current world events can determine the interpretation and context of visual art, with particular attention to art jewelry. I will start by illustrating this phenomenon with a case study that finds a recent painting show an unintended victim of the recent BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. After finding our quarry, I will move on to events in Europe; specifically, Greece's fiscal crisis, and the current austerity measures in many European Union member states. A summary of European austerity measures will then enable us to graft regional economic events onto European art jewelry. This will be done replete with contemporary examples and a historical anecdote. Finally, I will draw some conclusions.

Darren Waterston

Anatomies installation view, 2010

Case Study: Darren Waterston's Deepwater Horizon

Anatomies, a solo exhibition by Darren Waterson, recently closed at Inman Gallery in Houston. The show was another in a string of superb exhibitions at Inman, and this one appealed to my inner chromophobe. Black paint and ink covered antique prints, punctuated watercolors, and enveloped swamp creatures creating a black, white, and gray pseudo-scientific environment. Splashes of yellow-gold suggested refinement in the eerie installation. But most gripping was the materiality of the collected objects. The use of oil paint as a sculptural medium was notable, and the smell of linseed in the gallery felt both unsettling and honest. Another feature was the slippage created by Waterston’s repetition of form across several media; for instance, a possum skin and a black watercolor silhouette of a possum, or else a 19th century printed diagram of a rock matrix beside its painted artifice.

The reason to go into such detail about the richness of the exhibition is only to understand the formal language that Waterston uses, as it related to my next point. Mostly conceived in the first quarter of 2010, the exhibition opened on May 8th of this year, just 18 days after the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion. Known in the media as the BP oil spill, this catastrophic event certainly was on the lips and minds of many throughout the country, but in Houston, the center of the American energy industry it was (and still is), absolutely, a mania. Personally, I have had occasion to hear armchair quarterbacking from half a dozen oil industry workers, needless to say that I hardly run in oil industry circles.

The Deepwater Horizon oil rig ablaze. US Coast Guard

Almost three weeks out from the initial trauma of the explosion, and well into the drama of the environmental disaster unfolding, Anatomies struck me as a poetic lament to a terminally ill lover. Piled crabs covered in black oil paint, rows of tombstones rendered in viscous yet transparent washes, how could one escape reading the show as an environmental protest? The bizarre truth is that the work actually carried more cultural currency precisely because of the tragic events of the BP oil spill.

Hypertrophy (crustacea)

crabs and paint, 2010

Feather Valley

oil on wood panel, 2010

Austerity and the Evolution of European Art Jewelry

And this got me thinking – as these things usually do – about an approximately analogous phenomenon currently at work in Europe. The big news out of Europe recently has been the austerity measures being formulated and implemented across the continent in response to the economic crisis that began in Greece. I don't claim to be an economics writer, but a pared down summary goes something like this:

To begin, austerity, in economic terms, is when a government reduces its spending and/or increases user fees (i.e. taxes) to pay back creditors. Austerity is usually required when a government's fiscal deficit spending is believed to be unsustainable. This may seem laughable for US readers whose government has a $13 trillion dollar plus national debt, and is currently running a $1.4 trillion dollar deficit. The key difference between the US and Greece in this respect is demand for debt. Lender's are confident in the US's ability to repay their loans and so continue to loan money, at low interest rates, allowing the government to continue borrowing.

In Greece, for many years the government has run a large annual budget deficit, incurring debt which now totals an estimated $406 billion dollars. When there was not enough demand for Greek debt in early 2010, and it became clear that the Greek economy required intervention in order to stabilize itself (due to more factors than described here), Greece asked the European Union (EU) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a bailout. Historically, the IMF has attached required policy changes to these types of interventions, and concurrently, Germany – whose government does not run a budget deficit – put increasing pressure on Greece to implement austerity measures. Greek citizens opposed to higher taxes and cuts in government services erupted in violent protests in Athens killing 3 people on May 5th, 2010. A dark chapter in this saga to be sure.

Even after the EU/IMF bailout was approved global markets did not entirely stabilize. And more alarmingly, Greece's troubles seem to be just the tip of the iceberg. As world markets sour in response to the crisis, the borrowing climate for other countries in the Eurozone seems bleak, prompting forecasts of possible repeat performances of the Greek episode in Portugal, Ireland, Italy, and even Spain. In order to prevent further economic decline, austerity measures have been adopted in Greece, Spain, Portugal, France, Germany, Italy, and Ireland.

Hermann Jünger

necklace, gold, 1957

Finding our way back, I wonder if these austerity measures can be projected into the reading of European art jewelry? For some time the paradigm in continental European jewelry has been that of process based material exploration. In fact, it was the unconventional use of precious materials (as in the work of Hermann Junger above), and then the rejection of precious materials altogether (illustrated by the work of Otto Kunzli below) that has helped to define contemporary art jewelry. An addendum to the aforementioned trends would be the rise of synthetic polymers.

Otto Künzli,

Gold Makes You Blind, gold, rubber, 1980

The evolution of art jewelry in Europe over the past half-century is the story of the gradual erosion of conventional goldsmithing dictums. This erosion certainly came from the makers themselves rejecting tradition, or perhaps more accurately, wanting to create a new tradition. From an anthropological perspective however, one might look at the shift as a democratization of jewelry. The new materiality of art jewelry reflects the accessibility of Western consumerism by using familiar industrial materials like plastics and fabrics. Exoticism is now achieved by inventive processes and experimentation with materials, rather than through the harvest and use of rare materials. Jewelry makers have become material innovators rather than artful technicians.

This shift might also be a form of metallurgical abstinence. If in the past jewelry made of precious metal and gemstones were symbols of luxury, extravagance, aristocracy, and the patriarchal system, then contemporary European art jewelry must represent moderation, restraint and democratic, socialist, and egalitarian values. This is where the logic arrives in considering European art jewelry through the lens of Europe's current economic austerity; the systematic rejection of precious jewelry materials by makers attempts to recast the cultural value of jewelry as more relevant – and even participatory in a semiotic way – in progressive European society.

The Austerity of Iron

So now that the stage is set for austerity, perhaps it is the right time for a supporting historic interlude. In about 1806, wealthy and patriotic Prussians began donating their gold jewelry to help fund the ongoing war against Napoleon – the Napoleonic War(s). In exchange for the gold, those who donated received Berlin Iron jewelry produced by the Prussian Royal Iron Foundries. Quite an interesting cultural phenomenon, Berlin Iron came to symbolize not only patriotism, but also generosity, austerity and good fashion. In fact it became so popular that it spread throughout Europe (though devoid of its original patriotic significance), was shown in the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, and is now a duly celebrated chapter in Western jewelry history.1

Comb

Unknown Maker, probably Berlin, c. 1820

collection of Victoria and Albert Museum, London

It is of note that austerity measures are often accompanied by some patriotic scheme. The logic must be that communal hardships create solidarity. In the above example the exchange of gold jewelry for iron became the mechanism to leverage austerity into patriotism. The second thing to take away is the significance of the shift in material. Iron came to be the socially endorsed material for jewelry making during the early 19th century in Prussia.

The Absence of Material Context

For many years now European jewelers have used conspicuously non-precious materials to create jewelry that reinforces cultural and economic austerity through material usage. Ela Bauer and Mia Maljojoki are two great examples of this (below). The question is, now that Europe is in a period of austerity, will its indigenous art jewelry come to be viewed in light of current events, much the same way that we view Berlin Iron as inseparable from the Napoleonic Wars, or the way I read Darren Waterston as intertwined with the BP oil spill?

Perhaps this is a question that cannot be answered just yet. A clue may be found in dissecting Iris Bodemer's recent body of work, Ingredients. Bodemer's work has, by degrees, moved further and further away from precious materials, but has never abandoned them entirely. Looking at her untitled ingredients neckpiece from 2008, none of the materials look like they are treated with particular reverence. I wonder if it is even possible to determine whether she used precious materials or not. Can you tell? Make a guess then highlight the line marked < > to see if you are right.

Iris Bodemer

ingredients neckpiece, untitled, 2008
<gold, ebony, iron, pyrite, ribbon>

Bodemer's material promiscuity finds precious materials treated the same as any other, as if to deny their inherent value. The gold and the ebony could have just as easily been brass and plastic, or gold paint and steel. For contemporary art jewelers like Bodemer, Bauer, and Maljojoki, form clearly reigns over material. As the forms read like aestheticized, ambiguous, organic, primitive body adornment, the question becomes what context is there to read these objects in other than the insular context of their creation? I don't mean this as a slight in the least. Objects that reject precious material's primacy, and use materials developed for industry in an organic way, willfully deny participation in a generally readable material context. To an increasingly savvy material culture reader (this being the entire industrialized public), this absence of material context creates a gulf between the object and its cultural context.

Conclusions

So where does this leave us? One possible outcome is the projection of meaning onto jewelry objects by outside cultural forces. My proposal is that this can happen through cultural phenomena such as current events. As Europeans are plunged into political, economic, and cultural austerity, art jewelry, made of non-precious materials, has the ability to engage European viewers as meticulously created objet d'art that speak to the restraint that their society is collectively exercising. As we saw with Berlin Iron two centuries ago, this is not such a far-fetched idea. Jewelry has long been used to express virtues or qualities of the wearer. Interpreting contemporary European art jewelry in such a way would allow citizens to express their solidarity with the austerity measures aimed at stabilizing their way of life. Art jewelry could even become a fashionable and patriotic statement.

Unfortunately, I can't really conceive of this happening. The Livestrong yellow rubber bracelet becoming the symbol of fighting cancer in the United States is a cultural phenomenon that owes much to both a sports celebrity and a vigorous marketing campaign by Nike. Who will speak for art jewelry as a symbol of austerity? Angela MerkeI? I hope European art jewelry enthusiasts can find the silver lining in the austerity cloud, especially since it could afford the practice of art jewelry making greater cultural notoriety.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel wearing an Iris Bodemer brooch as a symbol of European economic solidarity.2

Ingredients Brooch, 2008

feathers, steel, staples

I am yet undecided as to the appropriateness of reading artwork through the lens of current events, but despite appropriateness, through this essay I have demonstrated that this often superfluous context becomes inescapable under certain circumstances; these circumstances being, visual similarity (as in Darren Waterston), physical or psychological proximity (as in Waterston and also Berlin Iron), and deliberate projection (as in the Livestrong bracelet).

Some interesting points have also been raised about jewelry's wider cultural value. Particularly interesting is the absence of a material context in certain art jewelry work, as if it were a building with no shadow, or a person with no mirror reflection. Perhaps this lack of context is in itself a significant phenomenon. Another point of interest is the depths to which jewelry seems capable of projecting ideas into the cultural psyche. Whether its the patriotism of Berlin Iron, the selflessness and support of Livestrong, or the potential to express austerity through European art jewelry, the most potent cultural role of jewelry seems to be its ability to both contain and project abstract ideas. And we will end on that note, having succeeded in the task of locating Jewel Re Culture.

Comments Welcome,

-Gabriel

1 Phillips, Clare. Jewels and Jewelry. V&A: London, 2000. p.72.

2 This picture is a fabrication. Angela Merkel did not in fact wear this brooch to the best of my knowledge. The image is intended for purely illustrative purposes.