After Modernism in Design

“The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.”

―William Gibson

To me, Modernism isn’t a style. It’s a philosophy, a set of values, not a look. It’s good design. It’s the future. It is an idea that perhaps always has been and hopefully always will be. What about traditional Japanese, Danish or Shaker craft is not Modern? Form follows function. All these “styles” share a rational pragmatism, contempt for waste, and absence of decoration. Form follows function embodied.

The conclusions we draw from modern values change as each generation discovers it anew in a fresh landscape. We interpret it in the context of the new knowledge and tools not available previously. Our environment is always changing so the best design solution is a moving target between what is possible and what is available. We shouldn’t strive to move beyond Modernism but instead to embody it in our time. The biggest changes we have seen this century revolve around improving sustainability.

With the hindsight of 50 or more years, Can you parse the treasure from the trash of the past? Each year that goes by reveals new information about the appropriateness of materials and processes.

Buckminster Fuller was interested in the concept of embodied energy but didn’t have the information he needed to inform his decisions. The high cost of aluminum doomed his Dymaxium house before embodied energy even had a chance to. Nobody is building houses out of aluminum today because it’s a terrible material choice due to the energy/cost as well as it’s undesirable thermal properties. To be fair, this wasn’t as clear in 1930-1945 when he was working on it.

Modern production today includes, where possible, favoring the use of wood and other natural fibers that capture carbon and eventually bio-degrade. Considering the energy consumed in shipping materials and products and the potential of human exploitation are also becoming part of the modern math. Not to mention the social costs of our separation from the process and makers of the goods we buy.

In the end, what is Modernism but human design mimicking natural design. As in nature, the part of Modernism that we get right will survive and multiply. The things that we get wrong will not. Novelty, trends and fashion fool us for a moment but efficacious and efficient solutions rule the day. Suitability to task is the compass heading and The Kingdom of Beauty is our destination.

Where Craft Ends.

Knowing when to stop. When is it done?

In misattribution mythology, when Picasso was asked how he knew when he was done with a painting, he said “When I can’t reach it any more”.

But making crafts is different. Despite the confusion and apparent blurry distinction between the terms Art and Craft, they have and always will be distinct.

To begin, the Craft I am talking about is born from utility. The practice of spending resources by embellishing and decorating objects is inconsistent with the values of craft. Attempts to make an object more unique or expressive are on the off-ramp of the craft highway. As accessibility (i.e. quantity, cost and availability) is a defining quality of crafts, all activities that reduce the accessibility (i.e. increase cost) of a useful object reduce it’s craft character.

What is exalted as craftsmanship is often a mark of obsessive and fetishistic refinement in an attempt to exalt the object, it’s maker, the consumer or all three. The word fine is a popular adjective for work in this domain that may or may not be described as art but is a clear departure from craft.

Steve Jobs insisted on making the unseen parts of a product design beautiful along with the exterior. Sometimes the metaphor of “painting the back of the fence” is used to describe this practice. While I can’t defend the merit of painting the back of a fence for the sake of beauty alone, I can defend it as a woodworker as it is well known that wood will bend undesirably if a non permeable finish is applied to only one side of a board.

We can only perform a limited number of tasks each day…so we must choose. The Shaker philosophy is clear on this point. A chair is made to be strong and comfortable and that is all. Nobody spends hours carving decorations on a Shaker chair. Instead, they get to work on the next chair. Leaving the chair at this point is rational and humble. It’s done and there are other chairs to be made.

Should we be painting the back of the fence? Yes, you are adding value. The fence components will remain straight and will last longer.

Should we be working to make all of the unseen parts of our design beautiful? I don’t think so, at least not for too long. Instead I think you should get to work on the next thing. Time is money and less money means a more affordable product that is accessible to more people. And there is a good chance that your efforts to make something beautiful will lead to an item that is trendy or contrived and not beautiful at all.

The Laws of Craftmanship

Soetsu Yanagi, c.1955

Crafts or more precisely what we refer to as Folk Crafts are activities that link us to our ancestors going back millions of years. The making of useful things is a survival skill that is in our nature. The role of the individual artist or artist-craftsman are relatively modern inventions since around the time of the Renaissance. During the Twentieth century, Art critic Soetsu Yanagi codified the characteristics that were common to craft through the ages and emphasized the importance and purity of folk crafts in The Unknown Craftsman as work that had these qualities:

•Useful

•Unselfconsciously hand made

•Unsigned

•By the Many (in quantity)

•For the Many (affordable)

Based on these simple criteria, you can see that a teapot or a chair could be categorized as Craft or Art depending on how it is executed.

These simple ideas seem to be completely foreign to persons and organizations that promote themselves as champions of craft today. Craft schools, craft museums and the American Craft Council itself all promote individuals and work that are consistent with few or none of the Laws of Craftsmanship. How can these organizations be expected to promote ideas they don’t understand or even acknowledge themselves? Blind to the importance of craft, each actively blurs the line between Art and Craft in an effort to elevate the “artist” their “art” and their institution. The meaning and nature of craft are obscured and diluted beyond recognition.

How many things made today can be said to satisfy the laws of craftsmanship? Has craft disappeared from America? While our collective understanding of craft is lacking, I believe that craft itself will never leave us. It is alive but hiding in the humble corners of our economy. Can you see it?

The Merit of Unique

Often proclaimed as a virtue, uniqueness means that something is one-of-a-kind or unlike anything else. The runt of a litter may be called unique. A genetic mutation that makes you vulnerable to disease is also unique. Related to a Westerner’s love of novelty and innovation, we praise and exalt the unique despite it’s poor track record. The vast majority of man’s novel innovations end up in the landfills of history because design is evolving in much the same way that life forms evolve. Proven and useful characteristics are ubiquitous while mutations for the most part die off. In biology these mutations serve a purpose as part the motive force of evolution. The rare deviation is an advantage that proliferates and allows us to survive as a species and adapt to our changing environment. Genes mutate randomly, nature selects methodically.

“New, new, new, just for the sake of newness, for the sake of the sales’ curve, in order to make people throw away the old things before they have served their time. Not so long ago we looked for a better form, now we only have to find a new one.” -Poul Henningsen c. 1967

Poul Henningsen worked mostly in furniture and lighting but his criticism applies to all consumer goods.

Endless and thoughtless permutations of products are, in summary, the sport of fashion and art. Not only in apparel but in all product categories, the new version has to be different from the old one that everyone already has or we have no incentive to buy it. Feeding the ever expanding economy in this way lifted millions out of economic poverty and delivered them to a new form of poverty, perpetually longing and unable to differentiate our basic human needs from the needs of our egos. We buy the new thing to enhance our identity and somehow don’t notice how quickly it loses its power to make us feel better about ourselves. Before we know it, we find ourselves coveting the newer version that will surely be the thing that finally makes us happy.

For many the uniqueness is a symbol of their status, affluence or good taste; an enhancement to their identity. It is cherished for its exclusivity, the fact that others can’t have it. This is just one of the ways that our egos distort our judgement.

In the context of opportunity cost, it could be said that all the effort to make novel and unique things is at the expense of making better things. How much better could we do if we were actually trying to make something better? Should we sail in the direction of our destination or just sail to any place that isn’t here?

One could argue that modern products are so evolved that opportunities to improve them are incredibly scarce. This thinking fails to take into account that our knowledge, understanding and values are always changing. Today there are tremendous gains to be made related to embodied energy, exploitation of natural resources and labor, pollution and toxicity and many other attributes that we failed to fully consider in generations past. A past where we failed to think of the process as part of the product. Our definition of better is ever changing as our understanding of materials and processes grows and as our values change. There is and always will be room for improvement for those who value better over different.

The Machine & The Moment of Creation

Shoji Hamada, 1894-1978

What is the difference between Industrial and craft objects? Is it the manner in which they were made?; By hand or by machine? Almost all the things found in folkcraft museums are “handmade” but on closer examination you will discover that many are products of a combination of hand and machine work. After all, a potter’s wheel is a machine as is the weavers loom and the woodworkers lathe. So it is not simply the machine that differentiates industrial goods from craft goods.

From Wikipedia:

Industrial design is a process of design applied to products that are to be manufactured through techniques of mass production.[2][3] Its key characteristic is that design is separated from manufacture: the creative act of determining and defining a product's form and features takes place in advance of the physical act of making a product, which consists purely of repeated, often automated, replication.[4][5] This distinguishes industrial design from craft-based design, where the form of the product is determined by the product's creator at the time of its creation.[6]

Modern tools like an injection molding machine nearly completely eliminate the human role in the production of products In this process the machine is not easily adaptable and renders a unchanging and uniform product. No room for the surprising small mutation that turns out to be better than the status quo.

Craftsmen have been using machines for centuries to make objects of incredible utility and beauty. The defining characteristic lost in the industrial revolution was that the form of the product was no longer determined by the product's creator at the time of its creation.  Designing and making are divided. The cost of producing products plummeted but not without consequences. The craft version was more costly but it was the product of a living process. It was informed by the thousands of like objects that came before it and can spontaneously change to meet changing needs. Each pot that comes from a potter’s hands has the potential to be more suitable than it’s ancestors. In these items the form is determined by someone who has extensive and intimate understanding of history, process of making as well as the demands of the contemporary market. The industrial product is static. Unable to adapt quickly, it’s growth is stunted. We struggle to describe the loss using terms like “cold”.

The Dean of Modern American craft, Wharton Esherick had this to say about machines in his work:

“I use any damn machinery I can get hold of…Handcrafted has nothing to do with it. “I’ll use my teeth if I have to”

Wharton Esherick in Craft Horizons Magazine, 1966

And the man who codified the Laws of Craft Soetsu Yanagi also makes room for the machine.

“The machine, of course, came into being for man’s use and advantage; therefore, we need not avoid it but should find a way of using it more cleverly than we have done hitherto. The problem is not a matter of either hand or machine, but of utilizing both. We have yet to discover just what is suitable work for each….The best course, probably is that handwork and the machine should cooperate and supplement each other’s shortcomings. This has already happened in the industrial arts in Denmark.”

-Soetsu Yanagi from The Unknown Craftsman

It is not the hand that makes the craft but the connection between the designer and the making. As with all living things on this evolving planet, the unchanging is doomed to obsolescence. There is always a version that is more suitable to task in today’s fast-changing world so let’s keep looking for it while engaging more completely the process of making.

Suitability to Task

Yvon Chouinard

"The kind of beauty that emerges from absolute suitability to task"  -Yvon Chouinard

From his book Let my People Go Surfing, the inspiring activist and Patagonia founder describes what he is striving for as they develop new products for their thriving outdoor company. In the world of outdoor adventure and climbing where you often have to carry everything with you, the virtues of suitability-to-task are difficult to ignore.

Yvon and Buckminster Fuller would have been fast friends. Thinking only of practical utility when designing but acknowledging that a lack of beauty in the result was a sure sign that you were off-track.

In his essay Ornament and Crime, Adolf Loos argues that it is criminal to spend resources decorating functional objects because it is not only wasteful but hastens the obsolescence of the object. The nature of decoration and fashion forever condemns both to the landfill of trends. Decor and fashion are defined by their imminent irrelevance while good design is defined by lasting relevance.

Other icons of Modernism Kaare Klint, Peter Behrens, Richard Neutra and others also made reference to the importance and value of functional pragmatism in design and the suitability of materials to a specific application.

The Shakers (now famous for inspiring the likes of Kaare Klint) made simple, unadorned furniture and other home goods admired for their lasting beauty and relevance. Decorating objects was believed to encourage the sin of pride and also was taking up time that they believed could be better spent making another chair or otherwise serving their community or god (i.e. immoral and wasteful). I know of few other communities where lifestyle was so well aligned with espoused beliefs. I believe it is called integrity, more on that another time…

As designers or consumers we could ask which material, feature, attribute or product is most suitable to task and end up with something that costs less and is longer lasting. (i.e. better, less wasteful) But do we have the knowledge, insight and understanding to even recognize these attributes and products in our modern consumer economy? Probably not. After all, it is a market where aesthetic fashions and ego drive emotional decisions and value is determined largely by price and what Kylie Jenner is doing. But I believe we can at least reasonably hope that rational pragmatism will become fashionable once every couple of generations…only to succumb again to the next post-modernist trend celebrating the virtues of novelty.

The Alienation Caused by the Division of Labor

Carl Marx

Was it through our departure from craft that we lost the understanding, fulfillment, connection and joy in labor? Discussions around the merit of craft usually focus on the craft objects but perhaps there are some less tangible things that crafts give us as humans.

Few will argue against the gains in efficiency possible through the further division of labor.  Henry Ford created a labor-saving revolution in the automobile industry by using an assembly line where each worker performs the same task over and over again.   Famously, the workers hated the new arrangement and pay was doubled in order to keep the work force intact.

On the division of labor Plato says:   “it hinders the individual from ordering his own soul by cultivating acquisitive motives over prudence and reason."

Others observe that while something is gained economically, other important things are lost along the way.  Things that are perhaps more difficult to measure but no less important.

Adam Smith criticizes the division of labour saying it can lead to "the almost entire corruption and degeneracy of the great body of the people. … unless government takes some pains to prevent it."

Marx argued that increasing specialization may also lead to workers with poorer overall skills and a lack of enthusiasm for their work. He described the process as alienation.

Alexis de Tocqueville agreed with Smith: "Nothing tends to materialize man, and to deprive his work of the faintest trace of mind, more than extreme division of labor.”  

John Ruskin took a broader view.   Emphasizing the folly of the division of labor from thought, blue collar from white collar.  He argues that this is where the losses to humanity begin to accumulate.  In The Stones of Venice he writes   “The mass of society is made up of morbid thinkers, and miserable workers. Now it is only by labour that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labour can be made happy, and the two cannot be separated with impunity.”    

Our highly specialized modern economy has so many different jobs that they seem countless.  Many of the highest paying jobs don’t contain a single element of labor.  Value is instead placed on information i.e. intellectual property.  Information that is valueless without action. When this information is shared, society benefits but the strategic value of the secret knowledge decreases.

It appears that the decision has been made over and over again for centuries without controversy.  The majority of us are willing to live with our alienated, corrupt, depraved, morbid and miserable selves for ever higher rates of productivity and profits.   Maybe we can buy ourselves some meaning at the mall.  Yay!

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The Beauty of Use

For about fifteen years of my life, I bought and sold vintage furniture, mostly Modern and institutional pieces.  I took some of them to my refinishers in the Los Angeles area to have them completely restored but many were sold after only cleaning and minor repairs.  Occasionally clients would object to the scratches and wear from decades of use to which I would respond:  "Perhaps vintage furniture is not for you.  The wear is evidence of its service, merit and the longevity of its utility".  In most cases, the customer would acknowledge the charms of wear from this new perspective and take the piece home with them.  Of course, some remained skeptical.

George Nakashima affectionately called the accumulation of scratches and wear "Kevinizing" after his son Kevin saying:  "There is nothing quite so uninteresting as a shining unmarred surface that looks like it were never used." 

And of course the Japanese have taken it to the next level, cherishing that which is not only worn but broken and repaired.  Like many important concepts in craft and philosophy, they have a word for it..

Kintsugi (金継ぎ?, きんつぎ, "golden joinery"), also known as Kintsukuroi (金繕い?, きんつくろい, "golden repair"),[1] is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum, a method similar to the maki-e technique.[2][3][4] As a philosophy, it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise.

Ceramic piece repaired with Kintsugi technique

Utility stands squarely at the intersection of Craft and Modernism.  Many products are enthusiastically made with the most sincere of intentions only to end up in a landfill before they show even the slightest evidence of use.  So what is wear really but evidence of virtue and service?  I'll take the scratched one thank you very much.

Update: Due to the popularity of this post, we frequently get inquiries asking if we offer Kintsugi repair services which we do not but these services are offered by Lakeside Pottery. More information here: http://www.lakesidepottery.com/Pages/pottery-and-ceramic-fix-restoration-repair.html

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A Disaster for the Crafts

Objects: USA was an exhibition at the Smithsonian that opened in the fall of 1969.  It was a  comprehensive collection of  "Works by Artist-Craftsmen in Ceramic, Enamel, Glass, Metal, Plastic, Mosaic, Wood and Fiber"

Art Critic Barbara Rose in New Yorker Magazine (June 1972) reviewed the show characterizing  it "a disaster for the crafts".  She writes: 

"The individual, divorced from the community of artisans, taking from fine art the license of self expression, amusement and occasional formal interest, is not capable of participating in a genuine craft tradition.  Objects:  USA, consequently, is a collection of absurdist fantasies produced by individual egos striving for self-expression as unwilling to assume any role of social responsibility as the fine artist."

I couldn't agree with her more and the same is true over 40 years later.  This followed the twentieth-century trend of craft being almost entirely consumed by the industrial revolution and what little craft that remained lost its identity as it struggled to enter the more prestigious art world.  Curators and collectors and craftspersons themselves, with the best of intentions and reverence for the work of craftspersons, attempted to "elevate" the objects and their makers to the level of fine artists and their works.  There were many attempts, some more successful than others, to promote craft so that they could command the prices and recognition that artists received.  Objects: USA  was one of the most well produced efforts to this end.  The problem here is that craft and art are not nuanced shades of each other as often described but entirely different things.   Craft objects have utility.  Art objects do not.  Craft is affordable and accessible to the many.  Art is or aspires to be for the consumption of the aristocratic class.  Craft is not self-consciously made and is usually unsigned.  Art is a conscious act of individual expression and often loses value if unsigned or unattributed.  

"As long as craft objects are useless, they are categorized more closely related to contemporary painting and sculpture than to the craft movements of the past."

-Barbara Rose

In many cases the craft world was surrendering the defining values of craft in order to position their products in the much more lucrative art world.  While this practice proved commercially successful for a few who made the transition from craftsman to artist, they left their values behind and the movement dramatically changed the meaning of the word craft in America where individual expression is so highly valued.  Craft museums and schools now offer exhibitions and classes in what is unmistakably art, lacking in most or all of the qualities of craft.  The traditional materials and tools of craft are present but we are at a loss to differentiate them from art.  Don't get me wrong, art is great but I like craft too...wherever it is.

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Chesterton & The Rise of the Salesman

“Thrift is poetic because it is creative; waste is unpoetic because it is waste.”

― G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World

Chesterton (29 May 1874 – 14 June 1936), was called "a man of colossal genius" by George Bernard Shaw.  Much of his work challenged strongly entrenched social conventions.   I would normally try to summarize his ideas with words of my own but I think Dale Ahlquist says it perfectly in this short essay for the the American Chesterton Society.

Consumerism

by DALE AHLQUIST

Part of the idea of what people refer to as “The American Way of Life,” is wrapped up in the whole notion of our “Standard of Living.” The “Living Standard” is a measure of consumer spending. It is concerned with how many things we can buy, how expensively we are able to live, what luxuries we might afford. For many (perhaps most) Americans, the purpose of work is to earn a wage or salary in order to support the level of consuming that we believe is right for us and will make us happy.

Americans will say they reject these materialistic ideals. Yet they might find it difficult to explain how their vision of work and leisure differs from the “getting and spending” syndrome that plagues our society.

Chesterton’s writings offer a ready cure for this disease. He will remind us that work is or should be a vocation and that it is really more fun to produce than to consume. He will remind us that the end purpose of work is a product, not a wage, and that all the exchanges in which people exploit one another, both socially and financially, are also opportunities for people to dignify one another.

Chesterton lamented that “the spotlight of social importance” had passed from workmanship to salesmanship and from thrift to indebtedness. He regretted that “the tricks of every trade are tricks of selling things rather than tricks of making them.” He knew that the getting and spending lifestyle is no road to any kind of happiness. Chesterton called his alternative “Distributism,” and those who dismiss it as “impractical” have nothing to offer us but materialistic dreams of avarice and clutter.

And for further reading in Chesterton’s works, see “The Enemies of Property” and “The Modern Slave” in What’s Wrong with the World and “A Workman’s History of England” in Utopia of Usurers.

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