The Object Talks Back - by Ingid Bachmann, assistant professor at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada

I recently returned from a visit to Santa Fe, New Mexico, a beautiful city known for its mix of Native and Spanish cultures and a spectacular natural setting in the arid landscape. A visitor is struck by the obviously successful efforts at historical preservation. Municipal by-laws dictate the use of specific building materials and height restrictions for new construction to ensure aesthetic continuity and authenticity. Santa Fe's central plaza is flanked on one side by the Palace of the Governors, the oldest government building in the United States. Shaded by its long porch, native craftspeople, some in traditional dress, display their wares on black felt placed simply on the ground. Unlike the artisans who sell their goods in the tourist shops and galleries surrounding the rest of the plaza, they have permits from the city guaranteeing their authentic Native status, for the benefit of the purchaser.

After a while, these efforts at enforced authenticity begin to make you feel as if you are in a giant, but very beautiful, outdoor airport lounge, a Disneyesque, controlled place where time and space are suspended and the only permitted activities are shopping and waiting. The purveyors of the practical and mundane aspects of daily contemporary life — drug stores, grocery stores, hard-ware stores—are conspicuously absent, while shopping, particularly souvenir shopping, looms large.

But what is really for sale here? And what are people really trying to buy? It can be argued that one of the functions of a souvenir is to collapse a whole range of lived memories into an object, condensing real experiences into a representation or material sign. Souvenirs function metonymically: the memory of lived experience is replaced by the memory evoked by the object.

Like the native artisans on display along with their wares in Santa Fe, the contemporary craftsperson is equally on display, albeit not physically, when his or her works are exhibited. While craft objects are exhibited and purchased for their particular qualities of beauty and skill, they also fulfill other functions. I would suggest it is the lifestyle of the craftsperson or, more accurately, the perceived lifestyle of the craftsperson, that is the object of desire. The craft object stands in for the loss of an imagined simpler time, the pre-industrial, pre-technological era. It satisfies a nostalgic yearning for an inevitably imaginary past.

This phenomenon of objects functioning as surrogates is what might be called the "Martha Stewart syndrome". By watching Martha Stewart's television show, reading her magazine, or visiting her Web site, the viewer vicariously participates in her activities. How else to have a full-time job and still have time to make homemade jam and preserves, hand embroider family crests onto bed linens, starch napkins and make holiday ornaments that will be the envy of your neighbourhood?

SPEED

     Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared? Ah, where have they gone, the amblers of yesteryear? Where    have they gone, those loafing heroes of folk song, those vagabonds who roam  from one mill to another and bed down under the stars? Have they vanished along with footpaths, with grasslands and clearings, with nature?'

In our increasingly hyperactive time, when multi-tasking has become the norm, and the standard response to the pleasantry, "how are you?", is no longer "fine", but "busy", the craftsperson singularly absorbed in his or her labours is a powerful, albeit nostalgic, image. To labour at antiquated and seemingly obsolete hand processes, fabricating objects readily available through mass production, is a potentially political and even anarchistic act. Yet craftspeople tend to produce objects that, by virtue of their history, function and relation to the marketplace, imply an inherent conservatism. This contradiction suggests that one might view the field as blatantly apolitical, even complicit with bourgeois consumer culture. But in an accelerated and speed-obsessed world the craftsperson's commitment to a single task, a single process and a single material is more radical than it might first appear.

     Speed is the form of ecstasy the technical revolution has bestowed on man.... A curious alliance: the     cold impersonality of technology with the flames of ecstasy2

The relationship of slowness to remembering (and speed to forgetting) is one that comes into play quite poignantly in contemporary craft. The act of remembering usually takes the form of a slowing down, of repetition, of lingering. When we wish to forget something, we tend to move quickly; speed becomes a form of amnesia, if not erasure. Craft work usually represents a mastery gained through experience over time. The sinuous lip on Thomas Aitken's thrown porcelain jug is a piece of choreography, a gesture that is only possible through repetition.  Unlike the concert violinist's virtuosic gesture, which illustrates perfect technique by its very transparency, Aitken's gesture endures as the artefact of a moment.

In this age obsessed with celebrity, when daytime talk show confessions win instant rewards and fame, the idea of bestowing praise and recognition for evidence of a lifetime's hard work and research is worth re-evaluating.

THE OBJECT TALKS BACK 

But what do the objects tell us? Inevitably, the relationship between people and things is complex and to varying degrees reciprocal. Handcrafted and mass produced objects, in addition to or even in spite of their makers’ intentions, circulate within a complex set of shifting relationships among their producers, their consumers and the social and cultural factors that contribute to their production, dissemination and reception.

Social relations are mediated by objects, but not necessarily reduced to them. An object arises not only out of strict functionalism, but also out of the demands of individual and cultural needs. Indeed, it would be difficult to argue for contemporary craft on the basis of utility alone, but there are other functions that the contemporary craft object fulfills. An obvious one is the ability of an independently produced object to frustrate the homogenizing tendencies of mass media and advertising in shaping desire and consumption. In a society of programmed abundance and planned obsolescence, where everything (and, by inference, everyone) can easily be replaced, the handmade object thwarts the relentless accumulation typical of a consumer society.

There is another function, too, much more modest but equally important. It is, simply, pleasure in making. Pleasure is a term that has been given little credence in contemporary art and craft discourse. It has been suggested, however, that the development of shopping as a cultural activity is an attempt to make up for the collective loss of making, and that this loss is, in fact, a terrible one. It seems that our desire to embrace the virtual and the digital has resulted in alienation from the material conditions of our lives and our environment.

The satisfaction found in producing something, in touching materials and realizing an idea in a tangible form, however modest, is indeed pleasurable, demonstrating the need for tactile presence and touch. Making things offers the potential of agency and self reliance in a largely disposable culture.

This is Wood by Ryan Legassicke may answer the theme of the Looking Forward exhibition best. Made of two pieces of rough-hewn, cantilevered maple, one of them projecting outward sixteen feet, it is able to support weight, yet seems to defy gravity. It amplifies and celebrates the most important structural element in woodworking, the joint, in this case the lap joint, which occupies a relatively humble position within the hierarchy of cabinetmaking. Such concentration on the act of connecting disparate elements is a wonderful displacement from the traditional emphasis placed on the beauty of the object. The acknowledgement of action over finished form, of creative activity as a verb rather than a noun, mines the traditions and history of craft in an inventive and potent way and suggests a promising direction for contemporary craft work.

1 Milan Kundera, Slowness trans. Linda Asher (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1995), p.3.

2 Ibid., p.2.