Our conference last June at San Francisco's California College of Arts and Crafts and the Oakland Museum met the expectations suggested by its title, "East Meets West: Visions Beyond the Horizon," and then some. The event brought together studio furniture devotees from up and down the West Coast (with particularly strong showings of students from San Diego State University and Oregon School of Arts and Crafts, as well as the site-supporting CCAC students). Its reach and the roots of its content also extended throughout the U.S., into Canada, and across the Pacific Basin to Japan, China, Australia, and Fiji. For three and a half days the Bay Area became the center of studio furniture making's little universe.
The three days preceding the conference saw a similarly wide-ranging and no less consequential get-together. The Furniture Society Board of Trustees (whose meetings I attend as an advisor) met to discuss and plan such issues as exhibitions, publications (both print and electronic), membership, outreach, resource development (both funding and volunteer), and conferences, including the final touches on Furniture ‘2011. Our discussions ranged from the pragmatic to the philosophical, as we evaluated past and ongoing projects and formulated new ones. Latest developments appear throughout this newsletter.
From various perspectives and in different forms, the question recurred: Who are we? How big is the tent that the Furniture Society has erected? How can we best incorporate the growing interest expressed by academics, consumers, collectors, marketers, and the media? Why do we seem to have attracted more contemporary makers than traditional? How can we be more inclusive? More responsive? The conference that followed helped to focus these questions and suggest some answers.
The opening remarks of FURNITURE ‘2011 underscored how dynamic yet apparently immature the studio furniture field is. Aaron Betsky, curator of Architecture and Design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, entitled his talk, "Sitting on the Edge: Modern Furniture between Architecture and Craft," and in it he positioned furniture in the middle of several continuums. Architecture is masculine, he said; interior decoration is feminine. Furniture bridges both worlds, as it does also the worlds of craft and style. Furniture is practical and it is full of meaning. It is an extension of ourselves, as functional as a prosthetic device, as personal as our wardrobe. It expresses our taste and our politics while serving our bodies. Betsky reminded us that William Morris, who postulated the Arts and Crafts Movement in reaction to the numbing advance of industrialism, saw in handcrafted furniture the salvation of modern culture; that the Shakers were no less political in surrounding themselves with their own furniture according to the principle, a gift to be simple is a gift to be free; that Reitvelt, Hoffman, Eames, and Breuer all furnished the Modern world often uncomfortably, Betsky suggested, as if discomfort were the exact right place from which to contemplate Modern alienation.
Betsky illustrated his ideas about furniture using pictures from the collection of Michael and Gabrielle Boyd; the collection will constitute a show at SFMOMA opening in November. Over and over he found examples of how "a piece of furniture can be the beginning of a new world." Significantly, I don't remember a single piece of contemporary studio furniture in Betsky's presentation; for the architectural and museum communities, studio furniture is no doubt a marginal genre. But there was plenty of evidence at this conference that the studio furniture world is not only extensive, it has a past as well as a future.
The size and character of the studio furniture field, for instance, comes from a synthesis, spanning cultures from all over the world. The influence of Japan has been pronounced, as was clear from Woodwork editor John Lavine's panel discussion, "Closing the Circle: Japanese Influences in West Coast Furniture." John Burt (a blacksmith as well as a furniture maker) came to his appreciation for Japanese sensibilities through his tool making; Seth Janofsky (a former photographer) and John Cederquist (a former illustrator) were attracted to Japan's rich visual aesthetic. Wendy Murayama, who as a professor of furniture design has influenced a whole generation of makers, confessed that she has only recently begun to explore her Japanese heritage, but has not been surprised to discover how compatible are Japanese notions of craft and design with those she's cultivated in her work and teaching.
Toshio Odate and Yeung Chan, immigrants from Japan and China, respectively, shared their familiarity with their cultures through technique. Odate's demonstration of shoji construction and Chan's presentation of the details and logic of Chinese joinery, as evidenced in a faithfully accurate reproduction he made of a Ming dynasty chair, were enthusiastically attended. Elsewhere across the Pacific, Australia was represented in the work of Donald Fortescue, himself influenced by the resourcefulness he has seen in Japanese culture, and Peter Walker, a designer whose adventurous spirit matches that of his country. Kristina Madsen shared her affection for and assimilation of the Oceanic carving designs and techniques that she studied while apprenticing in Fiji.
Cultural diversity was brought into focus also from the perspective of gender as well as ethnic background. One panel wrestled with the "issues and answers" of women in woodworking, from educational opportunities and challenges in the workplace to professional visibility and critical recognition. Another panel addressed the impact and influence of our ethnicities in furniture making. Lofty as these topics sometimes were, there was always some real-life, practical encounter that solidified the philosophical excursions.
Likewise, aesthetics were well integrated with the conference's technical presentations, which included bronze casting (featuring Garry Bennett and his foundryman Piero Mussi), creating painted and special effects (offered by Greg Johnson, Wendell Castle's finisher), working with Corian, using new and recycled materials, and a surface design workshop that served as a welcome retreat throughout the conference for those itchy to get their hands as engaged as their minds.
Educational and training issues were addressed in a panel discussion that included both teachers and students. Marketing was viewed from several perspectives, including a panel discussion on collecting for both public and private collections, another on the commission process, a workshop on creating presentation drawings, and a reception at the San Francisco Design Center.
Prominently well attended was the three-session "Critical Discourse: Meaning and Value in Studio Furniture," where panel leader Loy Martin brought together the perspectives of anthropology, archaeology, psychology, architecture, decorative art history, and visual art criticism, not to mention furniture design and history. Those disciplines represented the credentials of the panel presenters alone; the backgrounds of the dozens who contributed as participants to the provocative discussions that ensued ranged even wider. I tried to photograph the standing-room-only scene, people perched on the room's window sills and haunched or sprawled on the floor, figuring I could run it here to convey the irony in a caption: "Furniture ‘2011 attendees search for meaning in furniture," but there was no room to position the camera!
As Rhode Island School of Design Professor of Furniture John Dunnigan's presentation made clear, there's no question that such a search would prove fruitful. He took us on a reverse-chronological survey of furniture forms, from contemporary art furniture through twentieth and nineteenth-century mass-produced successes, through European high styles, back to the ancient Greek Klismos chair and the throne of Egyptian Pharoah Tutankhamun, all the way back to present-day India where beds are made and commonly used that are indistinguishable from what they have been for millennia. Without forcing a point but rather uncovering a view, he found historic, cultural, personal, and a fascinating blend of unique and universal meaning in each piece. These examples showed that there is a very long and rich history to support our understanding of what furniture is and does.
To the panel's question of whether there is meaning and value in furniture today, Dunnigan said, "We can't help but find meaning and value in it, we just might not always like what we find." To illustrate, he described our end-of-millennium culture as conditioned by four broad categories, all of which are in some ways antithetical to making things: the electronic revolution, the global domination of capitalism, the global domination of Western popular culture, and philosophical determinism. "If these four conditions of our age have the implied impact on our collective psyche," Dunnigan said, "then it should come as no surprise if there are serious questions about meaning and value in our lives."
I'll leave it to his essay in next fall's Furniture Studio One for Dunnigan to develop a few of the ideas from his presentation, like how making furniture might be a healthy antidote to our cultural miasma (or perhaps, as Aaron Betsky put it, ""be the beginning of a new world.") In the meantime, I have two more things to say about FURNITURE ‘2011.
As wide ranging culturally and conceptually as its topics were, FURNITURE ‘2011 was also well rooted in the locale that hosted it. Yale University PhD candidate Glenn Adamson chaired a panel discussion featuring J.B. Blunk, Don Braden, Art Carpenter, Marcia Chamberlain, and Michael Cooper, all veterans of the craft movement in Northern California who reflected on the period 1965 through 1975. Now, I made furniture in the Bay Area immediately after that period, when the self-styled California approach to woodworking began to explode, and this panel brought back the powerful memory that there were many indeed who it may be said were building a new world in building furniture. Sitting in that auditorium watching thirty-year-old slides of studio furniture naively displayed on the grass at local craft shows, I realized that what we have done as furniture makers has a past, long enough ago to need being reminded of, but solid enough to have built on.
Later in the conference during Russell Baldon's presentation of "The Next Generation," I realized that studio furniture making also has an awesome future. The work of Isabelle Moore, to name just one of the impressive makers Baldon assembled, was so consummate in such a variety of materials, forms, and styles, that, as in the television series that shared this panel's name, the story of contemporary furniture making seemed to jump to warp speed.
