Frugal e•Mart

 

FOLK ART: Freedom from Expectation | The Pursuit of Delight

Most, as children, have looked down upon a ‘mindless’ doodle we created while not under the influence of the external events at hand. We may have even found fascination in and attraction to that doodle, especially considering its superficially serendipitous arrival on the page before us.

 

Mindless? Maybe not.

 

I have a proposition. Suppose for a moment that was not the mindless doodling you may have assumed it to have been. What if, you – in retrospect – decide to take those past occasions seriously as a form of conscious creation?

 

Why not treat the marks that you looked down on as the initial utterance of a new exploration. Your marks though written off as “mindless,” may in retrospect have been a mindful, nascent demonstration of your description/exposition of delight sparked by a moment of clarity – not a chaotic sidebar to your flagrant inattention.

 

As I grew up in the visual arts, I would receive comments from the ‘peanut gallery’ of friends and acquaintances, outside of my discipline, not involved in that jury, presentation or other demonstration who would say, “I could never do that.” They would subsequently brush off my immediate retort of “Why not.” Over the intervening years I have struggled to find the bridge past that recurring scene and find a means to take the conversation forward communicating that there is no difference between their abilities and mine. I wanted my companion(s) to see the aesthetic ‘mark making’ emanating from their chosen attire or from their recognition of the alchemy of flavors they described in the meal shared the noon before.

 

Not able to know why that chasm of perception exists, we can find the bridge to span it by bringing to focus the inspiration engine commingled in the experience of delight that we all share. I propose that those I conversed with misunderstood the available vehicles of aesthetic expression – not lacked the ability to produce artwork themselves. Suppose the ability to experience “delight” is all that is necessary.

 

What I did not understand in my past efforts to bridge that communication gap with my friends is that I needed to shed light on the art they had already made. My retort should have been, “You have.”

 

My fellow travels were (are) the ‘folk’ in Folk Art. Analogously, however, removed from nature you believe yourself to be; you notice the absence of the birds singing, you notice the absence of the lilies and their blooms, and you notice the absence of the roses fragrance when they are gone. I finally perceived what I was missing those past conversations. I simply failed to notice the “sights & fragrance” of their work like the roses we all were not stopping to smell. Artistic expression is not something that common expression aspires to attain. That paternalistic mandate is illusion. There is no dialectic between “folk art” and “haute l’art.”

 

Delightful expression is Art – remembering that expressions of delight and of despair are intertwined[i][ii]. The putative distinction between vernacular expression and high artistic expression assumes unnecessary heroism is required to elevate the former to the latter.

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[i] (Venturi, 1966), … emphasis on the words, “gentle” & “complexity.”

[ii] (Steven Izenour, 1972), … the word, “learning,” is critical here.

 

The aesthetic delight perennially experienced through the careful work of craft-filled hands is – to paint, to carve, to build, to garden or to invent new culinary offerings – perpetually conserved and cannot be destroyed by contemporary technological advancements. That delight will be invariant despite the advent of digital processes or feats of artificial intelligence. In our previous post (September 11, 2024), we cited an excerpt from a 1901 Frank Lloyd Wright speech.[1] In another passage of that speech, Wright used the text of Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris to introduce two concepts:

• “The Machine was the great forerunner of democracy” … i.e., as books democratized access to knowledge.
• “Ceci tuera cela.” (“This will kill that.”): the famous slogan of Claude Frollo, the archdeacon of Notre-Dame in Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (popularly known as “The Hunchback of Notre-Dame”), as he touches a printed book and glances nostalgically at the cathedral towers …

Jennifer Gray, guest editor of the Summer 2020 Frank Lloyd Wright Quarterly,[2] and the September 12, 2023, blog post of the St. Tammany Parish Library Blog of Covington, Louisiana,[3] taken together circumscribe the significance of Wright’s comments and the context of Victor Hugo’s work in the syncopation between the phenomena of progress and preservation.

From Jennifer Gray’s introduction:

“In 1901 Frank Lloyd Wright delivered a seminal address called “The Art and Craft of the Machine” to an audience at Hull House, an organization that offered social services, such as education, childcare, and legal aid, to poor communities in Chicago. The themes Wright outlined in his talk would preoccupy him throughout his life, namely the relationship between machines, education, architecture, and democracy. Calling the machine “the great forerunner of democracy,” Wright invokes an argument advanced by the French author Victor Hugo in Notre-Dame de Paris in 1831 that reflects on the power of the printed word. Before the age of Gutenberg, architecture centered on the handicrafts and was the “universal writing of humanity.” The invention of the printing press—arguably the first great machine, Wright points out— transformed architecture but also social relations. Books democratized access to knowledge. While any individual book may appear ephemeral or fragile, the sheer number of them, the number of people reading them, and the ability to reprint them renders “printed thought … imperishable … indestructible.” Widespread literacy and access to knowledge ultimately contributed to the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century, including the American Revolution.

Wright embraces the machine, broadly speaking, as capable of reducing human labor and expanding lives and “thereby the basis of the Democracy upon which we insist.” …, the machine reduces waste and lowers costs so that “the poor as well as the rich may enjoy to-day the beautiful surface treatments of clean, strong forms.” Indeed, throughout his career Wright would experiment with various ways to harness the advantages of machine production to design quality, affordable housing for large numbers of people. …”

From the St. Tammany Parish Library Blog:

“Efforts to update the Notre Dame cathedral, which included replacing its stained-glass windows with clear glass, disgusted writer Victor Hugo. Hugo was fascinated by the cathedral, visiting it many times in the late 1820s. He struck up a friendship with a priest who explained to him the symbolism inherent in many of the building’s architectural details and statues. Enamored, Hugo hoped to preserve the cathedral from any further meddling through his next novel project.

…, Hugo did not just use the past as window dressing: he was interested in recreating a long-departed time and place down to the smallest detail. The story is set in fifteenth-century Paris, complete with its widespread superstitions, rigid social hierarchy, and of course, its gothic architecture.

While one might expect a book born of the desire to preserve historical architecture to be at best a dry read, the continued popularity of the story proves otherwise. Hugo’s novel remains a deeply affecting tragedy, powerful in its depiction of humanity’s tendency towards both cruelty and compassion. …”

The Tammany Parish Library Blog Post highlights Victor Hugo’s ulterior, preservationist motives that contain the seed of a thought Frank Loyd Wright will later sample and ironically reuse to advocate for the displacement of stalwart, edificial cultural landmarks with the nascent promise of imminent technical advancement. Interestingly, Wright is likewise arguing for the preservation of something precious at the deeper level of experience, the art in craft. This dance of ideas that are simultaneously opposing and reinforcing emulates the choreography of the cycle of life/death and reflects the gleeful contradictions of everyday living. The ‘old’ gives way to the ‘new’ in the fullness of cyclic time while somehow and magically preserving the essence of past delight with enough veracity so that it lives on, anew but different, and thankfully invariant at the core.

We cannot discuss tool selection and our associated craft aspirations without an inevitable confrontation with the question of why we find a particular result pleasing or even beautiful. Academics of the last century debated the efficacy of the word “beautiful” due to the often oligarchical or elitist subjectivity of past efforts to define beauty.[4] We believe that angst was settled in the thoughtful embrace of ‘the beautiful’ by Dewey and Joyce.[5],[6] Also in that century, when Christopher Alexander[7] writes about the universal “quality without a name,” he is referring to conservation of the delight felt while experiencing the presence of that earnest aesthetic spirit – the phenomenon connecting Wright’s intent with Hugo’s work. Hugo’s work passed the presence of that spirit forward through time to Wright as if in an ephemeral relay to celebrate the immutable and universal sense of aesthetic delight. That ‘timeless way’ of work guides the collective effort to increase delight in our environment and our artifacts. When gently inspired, consciously or unconsciously, by the aesthetic whispers from past artfulness, we find the wit to imbue our wielding of the tools of our time to experience delight as well.

Frollo’s prophecy is false. The book did not kill the edifice. Contemporary buildings still aspire, in their way, to achieve the artful presence of Notre Dame. And, current digital tools, 3D Scanning|Printing, ChatGPT, et. al., will not make moot the careful work of our hands for the sake of craft and art.

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[1] Daughters of the revolution, Illinois, excerpt from “The new industrialism,” Part III, pages 87-119, Digital Public Library of America, https://dp.la/item/93eb1c929b351123f792553233d561cc (Catalog Record: The new industrialism. Part I. Industrial… | HathiTrust Digital Library).

[2] Introduction by Jennifer Gray, guest editor of the Summer 2020 Frank Lloyd Wright Quarterly, The Basis of Democracy: Frank Lloyd Wright on Community, Education, and Opportunity.

[3] Spotlight: “The Hunchback of Notre-Dame” by Victor Hugo, September 12, 2023, ^© 2024 St. Tammany Parish Library Blog

[4] Foster, H. (1999). The Anti-Aesthetic. New York, New York: New Press.

[5] Dewey, J. (1934). Art as Experience. Originally delivered as the first William James Lecture at Harvard (1932). New York, New York: Perigee Books by G. P. Putnam’s Sons.

[6] Mason E. & Ellmann R., Editors (1964). The Critical Writings of James Joyce. “Chapter 33: Aesthetics, 1903/04,” Pages 141-148. New York, New York: The Viking Press.

[7] Alexander, C. (1979). The Timeless Way of Building. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

As technology and the tools derived from that technology change over time (hopefully in the direction of progress), our handiwork should adapt. Expressions and results that we believed impossible or impractical may become achievable or even common place in the near future. Examination of that adaptation, or lack of adaptation, in the last century demonstrates that artistic progress in not certain and technical advancement is no assurance of pleasing aesthetic/artistic outcomes.

In 1901 Frank Lloyd Wright delivered an address entitled, “The Art and Craft of the Machine.”[1] That speech contained the following passages:

“We will find the magnificent prowess of the machine bombarding civilization with mangled corpses or strenuous horrors that once stood for cultivated luxury and are now a species of commercial vulgarity. Without regard to first principles or common sense the letter of tradition is recklessly fed into the rapacious maw of machines until “reproductions” may be had for ninety-nine cents where the original cost ages of toil and patient culture. This seems like progress were it not that these very things are now harmful parasites befogging the sensibilities of our natures, belittling and falsifying any true perception of normal beauty the Creator may have seen fit to implant in us. The idea of fitness to purpose, harmony between form and use is lacking in them as t it is sadly lacking in us; and as for making the best of the conditions which produce them, by so doing idealizing the industrial fabric that is perverted and enslaved by them, the mere idea has grown abnormal. …

… As perhaps wood is the most available of homely materials and naturally then the most abused, let us first glance at wood.

Machinery has been invented for no other purpose than to imitate the woodcarving of the early ideal, with the result that no cheap furniture is salable without some horrible botch work meaning nothing unless it means that “art and craft” has fixed in the minds of the masses the old hand-carved chairs as the “ne plus ultra” of the ideal. … Simplicity teaches us that the beauty of wood lies in its qualities as wood. Treatments that fail to bring those qualities foremost are not plastic, therefore not appropriate – so not beautiful. The machine teaches us, if we have left it to the machine, that certain simple forms and handling serve to bring out the beauty of wood and retain its character and that certain other forms and handling do not … The machines used in this work will, if a little study is bestowed upon them, show you that by unlimited cutting, shaping, smoothing, and repetitive capacity they have emancipated these beauties of nature in wood … Here these machines considered technically have placed in the hands of the designer a means of idealizing the true nature of wood harmoniously with man’s spiritual and material needs without waste and within the reach of everyone. But an unfair advantage is taken of peerless tools and we merely suffer from a riot of vitiated handicraft. …

You will find in studying the group of old materials that they have all been rendered plastic by the machine. The machine itself is steadily creating the very quality in these things needed to satisfy its own art equation. …“

Wright, as we do now, saw the ‘dumbing down’ of artistic products through undisciplined, unscrupulous and unimaginative uses of new machine-age tools. But, more importantly, he simultaneously notices what industrialization made possible with the use of recent technology. Wright gave examples of craft results not previously imagined. The tone of his presentation implies that Wright was attempting to persuade his audience that the potential of new, industrial tools to contribute to novel artistic possibilities was worth the risk they represented to future art & craft.

Unfortunately, the intervening years have not been kind to Wright’s fragile, hoped for enhancing application(s) of industrialization. Junk has proliferated. Realizations of art & craft literacy, not so much – thus, the reason “we don’t have nice things.” However, Frugal e•Mart believes that there is always a chance for redemption.

The surge in grass-roots craft activity during and following the pandemic is an opportunity to surface the potential of modern tools in a manner that the mass market (a would-be Design Hero – past or present) has not. One niche of aesthetic interest at-a-time, on the smallest of scales and on the miniscule budgets those of ordinary financial means apportion to their hobbies; ‘we the people’ might redeem the higher aspirations of Wright’s 1901 speech. YouTube, home & garden magazines and popular TV series all hint at the pent-up interest in making artifacts and buildings that bear resemblance to the notion, “desirable,” even if they must be self-produced. Frugal e•Mart seeks to support those that use modern processes and media in pursuit of beauty in ordinary circumstances. If they succeed in displacement of the “vitiated handicraft” Wright bemoaned with earnest objects of their own making, we all may find a future where the “desirable” is legible and widely displayed. At a future moment our manufactured surroundings, small and large, may allow all to agree that we then “have nice things.”

 

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[1] Daughters of the revolution, Illinois, excerpt from “The new industrialism,” Digital Public Library of America, https://dp.la/item/93eb1c929b351123f792553233d561cc.

As the twentieth century technical landscape emerged, the arts & crafts design generation exemplified by Ruskin, Morris, Stickley & Wright [1] pondered the fate of traditional crafts as the industrial age took firm hold. Today, with the advent of digital tools and nascent artificial intelligence, a sympathetic anxiety has arisen.

 

Will the look, feel and spirit of the handmade artifact survive? We are about to find out. The answer lies with our collective behavior and not the prognostication of pundits or futurists. The unfortunate crucible of this century’s pandemic had the side-effect of forcing our citizens to pause, completely still, in unison for a sufficient length of time to rediscover a fondness for making things with their own hands. [2] Frugal e•Mart’s sales during that moment were anecdotal evidence of those resurgent desires.

Tool Chest by Henry O. Studley

 

The spirit that appreciates the work of human hands alone is still with us. If we collectively exercise that creative muscle, it will not atrophy. With the currently renewed interest in growing our own food, self-made artifacts and appurtenances demonstrate the uniquely desirable qualities of democratization and autonomy the citizens of our country find wholesomely reassuring. The “one market fits all” nature of mass production, especially in its digital manifestations, is clearly not the sole path forward. With desire & precise effort, the individually made imprints on our contemporary physical reality are proving just as indelible as those of large corporate entities.

 

‘Small’ is considered beautiful by some; but, most importantly, ‘small’ is attainable by all. Imagine a miniaturization of production to sufficient degree that a portion of what is nominally consumption of mass-made goods morphs into self-made staples via the careful acquisitions of the correct tools. What if, by way of knowledge and mastery of the proper tools, the public becomes the vicar that defines ‘quality’ in certain every day goods bringing meaningful choice back within its reach? Suppose a work bench became as common to each household as its kitchen table?

 

Small tool selling enterprises may provide instruments that help prepare the daily meal, replenish home goods, tend the backyard garden, or fabricate the presents exchanged at festival time. Larger concerns might sell the components of a home mill that provide that home with furnishings, maintains the means of personal transportation or domestic repairs. However, the guiding central theme is participation in the making of one’s own physical repose with the enjoyment of a modicum of autonomy and freedom which ensues.

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[1] John Ruskin (1819-1900); William Morris (1834 –1896); Gustav Stickley (1858–1942); Frank Lloyd Wright Sr. (1867–1959)

[2] (The Third Craft Revival, 2023) “The Third Craft Revival;” Stanford Journalism; June 14, 2023. +  (Chapman, 2021) “Mend and make new – how the pandemic reignited a repairs revival”; Chapman, Peter; The Financial Times; January 29, 2021. + (Jolliffe, 2021) “Could Our Year of Crafting Revive the Craft of Building?”; Jolliffe, Eleanor; Building Design; March 30, 2021.