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.