Craft Show

I met a furniture maker yesterday and we talked about how little appreciation there is for making things by hand. It's so easy (probably because I hold the arrogance of one who does work by hand on a daily basis) to be sarcastic with the world and curse it for its lack of understanding and its coarse Wal-Mart taste when it comes to encountering things made by hand .

But, in truth, blaming the "masses" for this loss of understanding is not so simple. We have such a long time as a civilization to rid ourselves of the tyranny of manual labor that we have tossed out (baby with bathwater-style) everything-all that we learned about working with our hands and with raw materials. Hand work has become extinct, a dead language. To extend my metaphor, we can't hold those who know no Latin to blame, when active knowledge of this language has been relegated to a sort of hobby (a boring one, at that, to many).

Those of us who speak Latin are a breed apart-a strange culture that thrives on ideas considered by the majority as either long dead or useless in any realistic context. Yet, we (we handworkers, that is) go on, applying this arcane knowledge on one hand and also trying to exist in the "real" world. Hand work fosters attention for the fact that it stands out as being aberrational- products that look more like factory "seconds" than the "real" thing.

Could the world get by without Latin? Without people making things by hand? Be careful how you answer this. I say this only to play Devil's Advocate-personally, I can't imagine living without making, but what I make is so unneccessary, so useless. Society calls it artwork, but that just means it's useless by definition. Most of the handmade products I've seen in my lifetime (with very few exceptions) can be done just as well or better by machine....or not at all. Schlock withstanding, do we really need this stuff?

Anyhow, this last is a digression-my main point is that you can't blame an audience that is unappreciative after being hard-wired to value and almost revere homogeneous products (which extends into every aspect of our lives-the landscape, the automobile, the job market, advertising, the educational system). After all, "diversity" is such a tired and meaningless concept. The civilization would run so much more efficiently without speed bumps.

The photo is a detail from "Cyclone," a recently completed sculpture. I covered the body of this figure with an old burlap sack from a broadcaster.