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 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 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
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 not 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
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 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
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