[Under Construction]
- what about the the three-quarters of everyday life that we don’t pay attention to
- I define myself more as a historian of design material culture or contemporary craft more than an art historian
- in many cases I’m talking to artists who often view manufacturing with contempt or like oh well that’s that’s okay that’s just everyday life
- I love factory art – I’m not asking you to convert or be you know change religions I’m just asking you for for a little more love for the world around you
- so this was the factory worker not as a kind of miserable person who doesn’t like drudgery but actually who could discuss with me how, oh you know, when he first got the job after five he thought he knew it all but then after 12 months he thought no he wasn’t so skilled actually and he realized after four years that really he had learned so much more and in some ways it repeats the old adage of it takes seven years to serve an apprenticeship before you’re actually skilled
- the first person to ever have a kind of professorship in art history John Ruskin
- they absolutely said plaster casts are mechanical they reduce people to mere operators they’re not skilled artisans they’re not definitely not artists
- the failure rate is still quite enormous because the material like ceramics or glass is actually kind of fickle and has a life of its own
- this is still craft to me you know to know the molds; to actually test the clay every morning think how is this going to behave today; how do I have to adjust my work
EDIT
- you can also play a fun game walking around the museum you can say this is not a Susan Collis this is a Richard Meier and you can say this is a Susan Collison oh this is a calm Saxon there’s a kind of interesting juxtaposition of tools and machinery right this is a Susan Collis and the leap onto coconut and hopefully you’re not tortured by my terrible addiction to being a professor so we can see earlier works in the Des Moines collection that I’d say resonate anew in light of of Collis and and the kind of what is hardware what what our tools how do how do they inhabit our worlds how do they resonate I mean in in many ways you can say the whole story of art according to Ernst Gombrich and I kind of go with this is really just about order and disorder and the sense of order in life is in many ways what Collis is disrupting and what bond to Q and and Agnes Martin are disrupting I won’t wait for the quiz so we rely on order in order to create disorder but also in order to save our disorder as a kind of mode of individuality and intention and I’d say you know you get juxtapositions like this which which are important in terms of the frame the gilding what it means and here I’d say Collis comes closest to critiquing the the kind of commodity aspects of the museum in a direct way that’s that’s of refuting them but it’s interesting how lots of her work I’d say in some ways it’s going to end up kind of like William Henry van der Bilt’s table not a testimony to one man perhaps but but a museum object a hyper enriched museum object you can look at other aspects of the collection and you can see some of her you know I’d say the the the the spill and the krinkle are her two of her her major gestures that we can think about and when I teach John Chamberlin whose work I do love and scholars of John Chamberlin hate this I say the reason those John Chamberlain’s are so beautiful is because the people at General Motors were artists and there were sculptors so here you have an image of a General Motors sculptor making a full-blown model of a car out of clay in 1954 and this is a practice that continues to this day a man named Harley Earl came up with this notion that every car should be sculpted to size so I have had students who went on to work at General Motors and I think you can look at later John Chamberlain’s and tell me if you agree or not once the our cars were less beautiful as they are today I’m sorry if you disagree with me there and they became made out of plastic and other materials Chamberlain was really kind of up the creek without a paddle and he had to change that rather rather intensely so so you know all of those those graveyards of cheap cars and kind of the post-war affluence that’s part of John Chamberlain story and the sculptors at GM 2r so industrialization and and and and the factory is here it’s here too right everyone know this work so the luis de soto work you know industrialization is really ubiquitous in contemporary art and yet often either it’s below the radar or it’s a kind of subtext that artists visit as if there are tourists but I would say we’re not really we can’t be tourists we can’t afford to be tourists we have to pay attention and savor that ball bear and think of its meanings in relationship to these and I don’t think it takes doubt John Chamberlin down a peg to actually say gosh those cars those tailfins made by Harley Earl were amazing in the 50s you can also think about a reversal of expectations here’s a lovely bit of detritus I picked up off the beach a little bit of sea coal I’d never thought of I know sea glass existed before but I found a bit of CQC coal that was polished by the by the ocean and kind of basically sandblasted so that’s it’s it’s as beautiful as mother-of-pearl you know or something else with that kind of absolutely gentle iridescent flowing out of it so can we find something like this equally radiant of wonder or do we see the factory as kind of gloom doom or or kind of darkness and the same way that I’m asking you to disregard the kind of boundaries of craft art and design and let’s move away from those safe havens that that have been established categorically we can look at this map if the invocation of Native American land rightly feels us makes us feel displaced a bit in terms of ownership I think this should too right because this is a map of the land that we’re inhabiting a geological map made in 1852 that looks at the land in terms of coal so so so these are interesting ways you can use visualization to move beyond boundaries imposed upon you one thing I know for certain that Susan Collison and I agree on is that brick walls are beautiful so if you open my book you’ll see the same kind of celebration of pattern and structure and and that’s what I say when I I talk about how children who run alongside a sturdy brick wall and touched the narrower joints of mortar between the the courses of brick kind of enjoy that meander pattern enjoy celebrate and kind of apprehend the kind of essence of craft and that we adults might do well to kind of go back to that memory or that or that or that rhythm that a child’s finger might might might do we might think of like you know the weight of the brick and empathize with the bricklayer we can do that too that’s okay again I’m a both/and person modern either or we can also think about how the kind of the mysteries of mud and brick and mason and wall all come together these are images of a museum in Sweden actually where the architect invited the brick makers in the yard to decorate the bricks so they they depicted a trowel right they also put little crowns for the emblem of Sweden and waves and some nasty minded people actually depicted little wine bottles too but here that I love this because you know how postmodern can you get in terms of so referentiality and art about art here’s a brick and a brick wall so so there’s a funny kind of language here and under way in which hopefully we can look at objects like this and say this gives us great tactile joy and it even kind of oxygenates our life in this way to think about to think about human manufacturing as healthier for our minds than it is harmful for our environments right so that notion of a celebration of manufacturing is what was what I’m interested in with Roerig and when he says that’s my that’s my signature it’s out there all over the world I think it’s quite interesting because really he’s saying I’m live today and even if people have you know done what Paul Rory’s been doing for centuries our history has yet to catch up to it and even most crafts historians really focus on crafts is something that’s in the past that’s historical when you open up the dictionary most dictionaries actually even giving you that you know description instead of saying well what if we actually listen to the scholarship that and say most industrialization generated new crafts and new craftspeople so my interest in kind of primary research pedestrian research of going to manufacturers and thinking what’s a factory that’s interesting is is this for one going to Wedgwood an old manufacturing and what what’s happening there is Neil Bennett is actually pulling a strap that turns a lathe that chisels clay and so what you’re seeing there is a magnetic Li attached chisel that’s cutting into the leather hard surface in the background you can see and maybe some of you know this what Wedgwood is known for is that kind of rule letting or machining of ceramics so there’s a checkerboard pattern on that urn in the back Tiger Woods has a few of those they still make PGA trophies and this is a machine but and it was described as a machine when it was made in the 1780s for Wedgwood but it’s not connected to any source of power except the human hand so the hand has to know how to operate this and however kind of highly refined the tool is the human has to be attuned to it so here’s me or your kind of egg-headed professor going into the factory and Neil Bennett’s giving me the chance to actually pull the strap and if I pull too hard which I didn’t do of course first I pull it too soft and it went backwards and and then if I pull it too hard it shattered the clegg shattered like not shattered and and and it didn’t make a smooth even cut so the manipulation of materials and the attunement materials is one of the things that the book is about and really it’s also about building empathy with paul Roerig Neil Bennett or other people in factories Mason & Hamlin is a piano manufacturer here is a man leashing you freehand cutting with a chisel so here that that does subscribe to what most people think of as as craft being handmade and actually employing chance more often and not being machine driven to go back to inlays I also visited Steinway & Sons and and and Steve Meltzer whose work is illustrated in the book and this problem should be redacted from the slide set because this is highly illy I shouldn’t have taken this photograph its intellectual property of the factory and this is is is is now in in the Middle East this piano but it was made for our Commission and it is a you know a million dollar piano that’s been incredibly enriched with with with with Steve’s hands but also with with with precious metals and jewels on the other hand going into factories it’s also fun because you you up ends your idea of who’s in the factory nine out of ten commercials on television show you men manufacturing cars if you go into Volvo and Sweden or if you go anywhere in the US you’ll find women engaged in manufacturing and that’s fascinating because that really confirms the story of the Industrial Revolution which is that manufacturing begins with textiles and with women going into factories especially in in America and in England so here someone you know using their hands using their hand and I skill right the the academic Elaine free good describes how quote handicraft and machine production once resided unproblematically in the same word manufacture and for those of you don’t know Latin man you actually says the hand is in production there she continues these were not antidotes for the others poison and so really just like our crazy polarized political world too often I’d say art schools and artists themselves even get into this notion of saying handmade is quite different than machine production and not saying they’re the same at times or they overlap it it’s a more complex world III won’t make you do it but I often tell students to repeat after me as if I were a preacher I am a manufacturer saying because people get into all these cockamamie terms in terms of well I’m a I’m a I’m a product artist I don’t know what that means or I’m an artisan crafts person like as if those two things weren’t repetitive for and then of course I’ve seen good dear friends get up and say you know I’m an artist or I’m a sculptor or I’m a crafts person depending on the audience so it’s a tricky thing craft but manufacturer really isn’t it’s wonderful and it opens up the world in a great way and I would say you know manufacturer really is something that’s not given credit for its emotional weight in our lives we would be twice as anxious if we didn’t have standardization and this is one of my my favorite examples is I asked my students to imagine you know their breakfast and what it would be like without standardization if you did not know you know what your orange juice was gonna be whether it was gonna be some pulp no pulp or with pulp would you actually viscerally have a response in your mouth and that might sound kind of silly but in that way I’d say no ten times even more so whatever if you went to the gas station you didn’t know what kind of what kind of power you were gonna get or whether what kind of dilution so we have emotional needs for regularity and that that same idea that Gombrich talks about the sense of order existing in art we need that sense of order in everyday life and this is one of the things I mentioned in my book as a wonderful little object and and it’s not about uniqueness it’s not about self-expression I think we’ve had perhaps too much of an emphasis that creativity is defined in relationship to self-expression technology has always been our best hope for for cheating death and perhaps not technology in terms of Apple stores and commodities like NASA gadgetry but real technology baskets metallurgy you know what what what what metal will we’ll tie a colour to to to to cloth what shoe leather can withstand a hundred mile hike and and here this little bit of technology is really just a brass slug that was made that’s an extrusion die of sorts if people know what that is it’s used that to squeeze one material through another we use extrusion guys for for making tiles for making lots of things but we also use them to make pasta so the joy in in my factory tour here was visiting the mall dhari Factory in Brooklyn there’s only eight different pasta dye manufacturers in the country even though there are dozens or hundreds of pasta manufacturers and this little piece of pasta was called Aradia Torre which I love again because it actually pays homage to being part and parcel of the mechanized industrial world it’s what you have at home a radiator a core of tube with fins right that are radiating the heat so this is a mulled re design which is now made here by a shop and stop or you can go down Market and look at how they call it ruffles in other supermarkets but to visit the mall dari Factory was to also visit a museum where they had different forms of pasta and different molds and to look at how they historically had supplied industry with these with these little molds and some of those molds are continuously you know invented a new to make a son ship took 14 months in terms of R&D and getting like the chip to be the way the designer wanted it to be and the company wanted it to be things like that right those are the things we take for granted and yet we don’t you know you open a bag of potato chips that’s been smooshed or or you know and you’re miserable or you open a box of pasta and can you imagine if it didn’t all cook at 12 minutes or at eight minutes as the box says that’s the sort of regularity and standardization that really is part of our worldview that’s very much about stability and about industrialization being a good thing and I think especially working with students today hopefully you’re not as pessimistic as they are a lot of people look on the Industrial Revolution as something that we need to do to move back or or back away from or even set the clock back and really it’s it’s that’s a danger in terms of subscribing to that because we’re we really can’t and and and this sort of industrialization has beautiful aspects of it too not just the city smokestacks in my book I’m really interested not just in factories but but in how broadly we can we can define technology so I fell in love with basketry writing my book it’s really the lowest of the low in terms of crafts it’s not in in many museum collections it’s usually relegated to to ethnographic collections you cannot find many art schools and you can’t even find many craft schools that have dedicated spaces to basketry so it was increasingly interesting to me as something that was once part of our industrial landscape so bucks to catch eels these were massive things right that that were dropped into into the River Thames and then brought up and you might look at this and think this is some kind of ancient Roman chariot but this is actually a 1906 advertisement for a car body right so the interiors of our of our planes basketry before we you know had a Lumina man it was cheap or foam and basketry is astonishing in terms of woven cups that can hold water they’re really quite remarkable as wondrous objects but then there’s also large-scale basketry like this these this is a man in Rotterdam who’s who’s building a fascine willow mattress that will be part of a dike and a rampart seawall right against the rising tides of climate change so this is an ancient but really rather wonderfully useful tool still willow and the harvesting of willow has been industrialized for centuries and it will continue to be at least there in Rotterdam so so factory skills like molds are a way to fight entropy but also it’s a way to study entropy this is an image of taking my students from taking my students to a electrical insulator Factory again drive down the road and you’ll see how all of your all of our infrastructure still rests on porcelain insulators up there or glass right so these objects really are quite quite beautiful quite elegant quite interesting and if these fall flat – you think well maybe we maybe we can actually look at how other people have have seen them and have transformed them into magical objects so you can aestheticized these fragments of the industrial landscape but you can also as Annie Albers did here you know turn them into a necklace she’s better known for for her weavings there she is with her husband and Josef Albers but it absolutely takes this thing from everyday life and and turns it into something magical her aluminum strainer necklace right made with paper clips so again this is someone who defined themselves as a weaver as an artist the Museum of Modern Art had an exhibition of her work that described her as a textile engineer she was both and it’s not either/or she was someone who could straddle these these diverse spheres but it’s alright if you’re anonymous – I would argue and here I’m gonna introduce you to someone I call a ghost Potter who works for industry but you’d never meet him if you didn’t have my my book – to introduce you to so contemporary Mack Therese have have done something interesting lately they have perfected the mass production of seemingly eccentric forms right so they’ve got the suggestion of individuality and here is Kevin Millward who’s an amazing on the wheel on the potter’s wheel and meeting him in in stoke-on-trent where he lives was amazing because he took me into a shop where would you know a factory shop Porte Marion that was selling hundreds of thousands of plates and he said look I made that I threw that and so the old story of the factory displacing hand skills or eradicating certainly the wheel from the modern ceramics factory was quite different here you can do many different types of craftsmanship here he’s he’s being employed by Port Marion to throw pots that are then being branded as Sophie Conran’s range if you know Terence Conran and Conrad’s store this is Terrance’s daughter and I think it’s very interesting that this is really being sold under a certain sort of country ethos of handicraft Sophy Conran is as is saying how she is believes in living and enjoying every moment and creating a beautiful world around you with simplicity and love one life live it well there she is and it’s all about cooking and it’s all about a kind of home life in a sense of domestic ideal and this kind of rustic ideal that’s driven driven art for centuries in terms of rokoko paintings but also driven things like ceramics as well so here is a teapot and when I say that this is the suggestion of eccentricity the marks of wheel thrown marks of course have been taken from Kevin’s prototype and then transformed into a mold and and when Kevin first made this teapot port Marianne said can you add a little more wiggle to the knob can you can you bend it a bit more can you exaggerate so he can do this for them but he can also do this right so that notion of of a Potter still existing in his workshop and making things by hand was fascinating to me he held up a 3d printed cup and it said it took them all day to make that cup so they sent it to him and he could make in one morning 40 different handles and 40 different versions so he’s faster than the 3d printer so so having faith in humanity as well as manufacturing is a good thing his own pots it kind of explained to you why port Mary and turned to him the the kind of the mug on the right there is is Kevin’s the mug on the left is Sophie Conran’s or is it Kevin’s I’m not sure or is it poor Marion’s I don’t know you get into this weird area where you don’t know whether to identify the designer manufacturer and crafts person or how much credit you want to give and how many layers Kevin’s own pot could never be slip cast because the handle is it’s a tube which he then tears off but you can’t slip cast tubes because it’s too complex in terms of mold making it has to be solid like Sofi Conran’s cup when he made the the the the handle he said to them you’ve picked the wrong handle because you can’t fit your fingers into it he said you know try this one out this is superior and they said we looked at it on the screen and we’ve come up that on the web which is how most people are gonna buy this mug it looks better that way so the suggestion of handmade and the suggestion of the hand is it’s obviously a primary concern its shipping its manufacturing it’s many different aspects so the ghost Potter is fascinating at in terms of thinking that you know stoke-on-trent is famous in terms of it’s like our Rust Belt it’s you know the industry has died it’s faded out it’s gone and and most of it’s been relocated to to to to Southeast Asia and yet here is Kevin working on I’m not sure this will be true for generations you know it depends on whether we start paying people livable wages over there and it becomes more affordable to make things over here again it’s complex but it’s fascinating for me to discover that craftsmanship lives on in these different pockets where we think it’s gone so to be anonymous is okay to be part of a whole constellation is okay Kevin actually is very very happy to be making the pots purport Mary and he said it was just my pot they never buy him everyone loves it cuz it’s Sophie Conrad’s so he loves it he’s happy to be part again a content to be part of even if he thinks some bad decisions or some decisions he disagrees with it’s fine that’s true of most designers but and craftspeople who are part of larger larger kind of constellations of labor and that’s again something that my book is very much about it’s not people working independently individually by themselves it’s about people doing what we talk about a lot but usually don’t do collaborate and it’s also about people really with precise skills and expertise most of the things made in our you know most of the things made before 1500 in our museums were made by many skilled craftspeople working together there was a dye specialist there was a weaving specialist there was an embroiderer but but the embroiderer and the weaver were two different skills that they put together I’m gonna bring it more home now in terms of asking you know about something that everyone likes to talk about these days IKEA now many different museums I even you know Sweden’s National Museum does not have a banal piece of Ikea in it designers are furious over there and they should be I think because it’s representative of everyday life and and and this chair was interesting to me in terms of pedestrian research I discovered this chair shopping for for a bunk bed for my children in Ikea and I read the label and it said Oh designed by Maria vinca I was like I was curious I’ll just take a picture of that keep going got home send it you know does she does she exist over there can I find her and then and then the chair itself interested me she writes or IKEA writes about her the designers thoughts number one else that says this gentle rocking helps your body and mind to relax and other little bits said things like that these were you know very important to me said these are unique objects one-of-a-kind they vary and I thought is this is this IKEA salesmanship or is this is this reality the designer herself was wonderful and I’ve stayed in touch with her and I continued to work on her because I think she’s fascinating and really smart and inventive she said this is a chair you can actually sit on she’s also very very short she says I hate Volvo cars they’re made for these tall Swedes and Scandinavians and like I always throw my back out trying to reach the clutch so so here she’s really designed a chair that’s for her own petite physique but that she also wants to do so that it’s it’s like children’s furniture which can stimulate very different scents several different senses and then she also used banana fiber because actually IKEA said we have this material banana fiber make something out of it and she said I’m gonna make a chair every all these architects make chairs the chairs are you know very hard to design this is very opportunistic of her IKEA had not said make a chair they said use banana fiber come up with something so she you’ve made a chair and she made a chair that kind of for her challenged many ideas by being small by also having this wide base so it rocks so it can’t tip it’s it’s good for children it’s low and it fit her body right another IKEA chair again just to note it says hand-woven each piece of furniture is unique you know that’s out there there’s nothing in the IKEA literature that is is critiquing this or questioning this and you know it’s amazing that these things sell for $69 a hundred and $69 are they really handmade to to continue my conversation with with with Maria vinca via email and then Skype and I’m very very appreciative of her first time she actually connected me to the the factory producing this and they were very skeptical of my intentions at first but then they shared images of production and they shared the story of production and it turns out yes these are all handmade and much IKEA production is handmade in Southeast Asia I found it really fascinating to hear the the factory owners view of kind of what what the factory was as a kind of as an employer in terms of its ethics in terms of what what materials it was using previously rattan furniture had been soaked in diesel oil so the thing that you think is natural maybe actually wasn’t so natural it was a technique of killing insects he is very proud in terms of giving his employees health care and and treating them humanely and having a kind of humane workspace but was what was most fascinating to me was that most of these women were skilled in his eyes and then also a lot of them were part-time farmers so there were part-time farmers and part-time chair makers which for me as a historian of design and decorative arts pulled me back to 1820s New England and thinking about farmers making hundreds of pairs of shoes in the winter and and that’s true of many different trades not just not just cords wieners to makers so this is a kind of fascinating object in fact it is handmade and to talk to Maria more I said what was your what was your inspiration and she said well first I was really designing something for myself but after I made it my father turned to me and said it looks just like a casa or a see which is a term for this kind of wooden ladle and so this is a screengrab I took of Maria making this drawing to explain to me what a casa was I had no idea that’s cosa but but these are what they are they’re burl burl cups and what was fascinating to me about these as well was that she is Sami which is a kind of minority in in in in Scandinavia Sami kind of they had have been traditionally called Laplanders but that’s a kind of derogatory term and to be Sami was really to in in the in Sweden’s history and the history of Norway and and Finland was to be a kind of suppressed minority and not to be celebrated in terms of handicraft and what Maria had done here is she had made a mass-produced object in Southeast Asia that was part Sweden part Swedish part part part Sami and so there’s kind of cultural heritage that bubbles up inside of these mass-produced objects that are lingering in IKEA so we really can’t sell the world so short and we have to also take them at their word that it’s unique sometimes at least banana fiber is is a waste material that’s why IKEA wanted to use it so they’re celebrating it as sustainable as well and green it also has a steel armature inside so that’s not so sustainable but you can’t have everything but there’s this question of how we value Kraft as a kind of collective endeavor and how it really is still out there in our everyday world is something to think about when we need to kind of move away from fetishizing you know crafts not just made by the individual maker and art and design are much more complex usually and there’s larger stories to unearth in terms of how people change and develop there’s famous glass makers you know who’s whose whose work ships when their body of assistance changes and that you can actually date oh those were the years when bill was working for him so this doesn’t mean you know that we should you know not teach students to to to kind of engage in these craft pursuits I think all the more so like we need to do to retain them and those skills are all transferable in kind of complex ways I think learning to to make a basket I can tell you firsthand is a fascinating mechanical experience in terms of order in terms of tension of material and it is kind of wondrous in a kind of really really non hierarchical and and and non elitist fashion so this this game of focusing on everyday life is fun I hope you’re gonna think more having spun that little ball bearing about the the beauty of a bicycle albert einstein is very very eloquent on the wonder of a bicycle even to his lofty mind and as well as helicopters automobiles paper mills textile mills but also of course you have to think and think gosh it’s just come back in vast numbers i’ve just I haven’t just passed around a self-aligning ball bearing I’ve passed around a fidget spinner so that kind of joy that a child would take in the fidgets spinner you have to think of as a kind of mechanical delight that we have within us that we should think about and this is the sort of craft that really does as I say in my book it lies around underfoot and yet it kind of oxygenates our lives it gives us great joy and pleasure and again it does prove that human manufacturing as a kind of larger kind of goal is wondrous and wonderful right when you actually and this is what I mean by being positive and optimistic when you look at how how much labor people expended a hundred years ago to do kind of to light their house versus the magic we have today of just this this switch and how that light switch is is truly a phenomenal experience when you’re next time you’re sitting on the tarmac waiting for your plane to get off the ground think don’t think gosh half an hour this is horrible think ancient Greeks would have died and gone to heaven to have this experience right and Here I am taking it for granted so so so thank you for your time and patience I hope you can you can repeat silently in your own head I heart factory art too but I look forward to your questions and again thank you for your time and we will pass microphones on either side of the hall here so if you would raise your hand we’ll get a microphone up to you Lulu I’m coming to you in the back no we we you can wait for me so then everyone can hear thank you thank you do you have any information about which way the world is going in terms of artificial intelligence and robots making things and making the human obsolete in terms of craft or are we heading much more towards craft humans you know engaging in in craft and the rest of us appreciating that more and supporting it more I’m no prophet so uh but I would say you know I think you’ve got a you’ve got a ponder it as a more psychologically fraught landscape but also it would be helpful if we actually pondered it more realistically so like in the last election there was a lot of hoopla about people losing jobs and it’s automation and it’s been a gradual you know yes we’re gonna increasingly automation is going to continue it might get you know increased customization it might I’d say make for a better world overall but it will increase there’s just no buts answer if no buts possible about that but we all I think should be quite quite happy that this enlightenment project is continuing and we’re bringing electricity out there too to people who didn’t have electricity before and and bringing cups and clothing people and giving them shoes who didn’t have shoes before so so that’s on the one hand you know automation will continue I think right now you’re seeing a resurgence of interest in ceramics like Port Marion is selling because people are anxious about the loss of the hand and in a curious way of course there not getting closer to the hand by buying the Port Marion pot but but they feel they are and I think that the way people consume things really is is is a kind of fascinating story in terms of needing needing to interrupt the order of everyday life with with with disorder or with individuality or with the appearance of the unique the appearance of the handmade even if it isn’t handmade I mean what’s a tie-dye shirt is it it’s like you know it’s mass-produced but it’s it’s still it’s not really handmade and we have lots of different different kind of you know gray areas and and and and ways in which these have continued for a long time in terms of these kind of weave they’re not irreconcilable I would say I think that looking at art schools no I’m part of me thinks that I should I should quit my job and I should I should try and get schoolchildren to to engage in basketry as a kind of lifelong mission because basically you know I see my children using magic markers and crayons and sheets of you know bleached paper and just think what if what if what if every school were just like growing willow on the side of the playing field and the kids were actually learning to harvest it and what if they were making things that they’d not like waste paper baskets that’s like the only thing we have right at home made out of basketry waste baskets and bread baskets but what if they were making like like panniers for bicycles what if they were like making things that they were exciting to them I think that that that’s in fact it’s a kind of it’s one of the ways I hope things like that well they help I hope one of the ways that crafts that we have more time to think about that and more ways to develop it for me making a basket teaches you geometry and teaches you you know about about the flora and and nature and cultivation in a kind of fascinating way that that then is again it’s it’s not an individual unique drawing like we see on the kind of gallery on your walk in here instead it’s usually like somewhat anonymous as an object you can’t tell my basket from your basket probably if we’re don’t both both you know making baskets for the first time and that’s what I mean when I say you know too often we think of with thought of creativity in terms of individuality and uniqueness I think if we if we back up and we think of creativity in terms of kind of you know traditions and you know either maintaining a tradition of making a basket or learning how to make a form that other people have made for centuries before it’s not boring actually you know one of my favorite quotes I’ve heard recently is this you know quote of Gustav Mahler it’s tradition is not ashes and and passing on of ashes it’s it’s the transmission of fire from generation to generation it can be exciting it doesn’t have to be conventional and boring I just got back from and Sica yesterday so I still like feel like I’m still it and Sica which is the national clay educators conference of America anyway so yesterday I also talked to Michael Sherrill um who most Potter’s would not recognize his work but they recognize his work because he’s changed their work in everyday practice we jokingly call this the red ribbit-ribbit of pottery because of his manufacture so I’m interested in finding out what you know about Michael Sherrill and you’re interested in him yeah well it was a lovely invitation to contribute to to a catalogue about his work and he is you know in many ways the exhibition which i think is still up at the mint maybe it’s closing soon I don’t know it’s going to travel I think is is is pretty incredible for for a personal journey of someone who is in some ways is is really self-taught and and and also taught by kind of through apprenticeship and through kind of community learning more than traditional academic learning so he’s fascinating to me on that level I appreciate his work I also when I first met Michael I was blown away because he has has a business called mud tools and he makes tools for Potter’s but when I went to his studio I saw you know five dozen other tools that he had invented to make his own work and that sort of of kind of feverish brilliance of like handiwork was just you know that’s my kind of that’s where I love his work so when I first met him he gave me a few of these tools which are made of silicone to kind of shape clay on the wheel and I immediately said this you’re fantastic this is gonna be incredible way to you know these are great cooking tools to take camping so I can make my there great pot scrapers and he was like oh gosh but but I think there’s there’s there’s a way in which his tools really excite me in terms of of all of their possibilities as well and that’s what I think so I love the art and hit the show was a very traditional art show in you know vitrines objects in cases and if you read my essay I celebrate his little like spritzers and like different tools that he’s developed because I think those are the kind of those are the things that turned me on I guess in addition to his kind of you know incredible abilities to to to you know both make pots but also it’s more recent work as is really isn’t actually it would be interesting to juxtapose with Susan Carlos because it’s it’s it’s it’s it’s it’s got this Trump Loy kind of power and brilliance and kind of the ability to to create you know rhododendrons that have kind of sat in the frost after they bloomed is really you want to kind of eat them in a way and they’re beautiful you just can’t they really are resplendent objects and to kind of you know cultivate fallen nature really interest me too in terms of just elegance have a question down here in your experience whether it would be visiting Kohler or the factory where they had insulin made insulation for different power lines or things like that I oh sorry as far as like your experiences with visiting various factories whether it be Kohler or installation factory made insulators for power lines and things of that nature what what have your experience with these other people that are doing these crafts how are they challenged the redundancy of doing those things so as somebody works with a hand and doing the same thing over and over how do they tend to overcome like the numbness of doing that yeah it’s a it’s an interesting thing I mean I think in some ways it’s it’s you know the empathy I talk about in terms of having empathy for Paul Roerig it’s not that different than us I’d say in terms of our everyday lives and like you know there’s people who like to cook and like to chop onions and there’s people who find it like drudgery and and I think that when you go into a factory like Cutco and up in Olien enough anyone has think Cutco knives but i was talking to people who actually we’re saying to me well in this kind of new managerial method that’s like they’re rotating us from job to job he’s like I don’t like that I want to stay put at the same job that predictability so that sense of order is interesting some people like getting shifts shifted around and having different tasks in the course of the day and you know the managerial guru who came up with this idea of round-robin or musical chairs works for them but it doesn’t work for everyone and some of them were you know most of them might say this goes back to your question most people who work in factories are thrilled about automation because it’s taken jobs that they didn’t like to do and which are generally simple and and and and and they don’t see that as they understand the future they’ve got a sense of like the factory survival being paramount and it’s it’s those places where management and you know labor are on the same page that that will survive probably so but but this issue of you know repetition and craft is fascinating I think it’s I think a lot of you know a lot of times I’m saying to students wake up don’t get that tunnel vision and just do this repetitive kind of action see the larger field right see the space that you’re in happening see the larger constellation of objects that you’re related to or or or or or read a book instead of just doing right so so it’s it’s it’s an interesting thing you know both in a studio setting and in a factory setting yeah I have a question for you as her I’m unhappy that you left Susan Collis juxtaposed with that god-awful hurt her table I don’t think that’s fair hard work to do Oh Sachs I mean I think you know you kind of and maybe a misunderstanding but you kind of isolated her in the you know the the individualistic kind of artists fine artists kind of category in a way but I feel like a lot of what her art is talking about is actually what you’re also talking about it just happens to be in a museum I mean because she’s very much talking about collaboration and like bespoke is a really great example of just that um so I just wanted to – yeah host Sheila on that a little it’s fine I don’t share with you the disdain for the herder I get I think that’s the real difference I love that herder table too and so it’s not my life you know I’ll never be a fan der bilt but but but I think that table is again it’s it’s the wonderful story I look at that table and I see I see this like immigrants coming to America kind of working in whatever style that their patrons need being inventive again no one made you know tables with that were that enrich those reply that’s the high point in terms of collaboration of craftspeople in America in many ways is the Gilded Age when you know America had never made tables like that before that’s our one moment where we can say we have a little Versailles going you know and you can hate it or loathe it and that’s fine that’s about taste but but to me it’s it’s it’s it still is quite a an authentic object and I I so I see Susan Carlos’s work as very authentic but you know I I do see it as this kind of hyper enriched object unlike the ball bearing which I’m just saying you know love that to again I’m not I’m not critiquing Susan Carlos in a kind of negative way and saying she’s she’s like the herder table in terms of its of her content at all I think you’re exactly right that she’s about you know meditating on the everyday meditating also on her own I think her work is very much about about her life in London and like you know if you as the catalog and and the interviews to tests it’s like a adore she sees in the trash becomes part of her work and so that kind of way in which you’re paying attention to the garbage or what other people see is garbage yeah it is and then recognizing that it’s not it’s actually a document of our world in our life and is worth recording you know I think you know probably will look back on some of the hardware she makes and it’ll be a document of our time that’s instead of being below ground archaeology it’ll be up here you know and sitting in a case and people you know are we all gonna know what you know drywall screws look like in two hundred years my children can’t they’re already can’t recognize what a typewriter is or a photograph of a typewriter by Tina MIDI they don’t see as a typewriter it doesn’t leap off the page as where we have one more question over there yes I just I had a bit of an aha moment with the previous question about the relationship you know what what is the person who does a routine job in a you know in a production Factory what is that interest what is that commitment to the craft or the the art or the both of those things together as they as they take shape and I got to wondering I was doing reflecting there were a few years in the 1970s when we were looking for teaching jobs and there were none to be had when when my husband and I worked in a factory we actually worked in a factory that my dad managed which was a very interesting kind of experience but there and then we became artists we were my husband is still working as an artist and I went on to do other things but we ran a pottery for twelve years and so we’ve had that experience as well and I think there’s similarity and a difference in those two endeavors I think it’s when you’re working in that production setting on an object that maybe you didn’t have any involvement in the original design there can still be an incredible commitment to the quality and the integrity of the in product that you’re engaged in putting together but it’s it’s a different kind of commitment in a way and yet it’s the same so there is something to be said about the beauty and the usefulness of something that you’re you’re working on whether you’re doing it as a as a fine craft or as a work of art or as a production piece and so I think you know I think there’s that interesting change and I was really interested in the know that through auto through automation so when you have so when you’re bringing in the artificial intelligence and the more advanced technologies into that what does that free you up as a person working in that place to think about and think about differently I think you know there there I still I still think there are gray areas that these we’ve sorted these out too much so and I’ll just say like you know for instance my last you know example would be when I went into to Kohler again there are these these these you walk in and you see these sinks that are shaped like like raised like a fish like you know they’re curved like this and then in talking to the the people who are working with the designers they said to me well you know the designers came up with this thing this shape and then we’ve got to figure it out in the block and mold shop and so lots of people like Kohler said you know unauthorized changes we’re part of their creative output in a sense right so I’m not saying all factories are interesting I think everyone knows that right there are factories and then there are interesting factories let’s say or there’s production and then there’s interesting production just the same way that like you know using a mandolin can be a lot more exciting than just chopping an onion with the knife cost be more dangerous but it can be exciting in terms of you can taste it as well the difference in how you’re changing the texture of food and so I just think that I know my students are taught from a very early age just like I was that when I make a drawing I should sign it and pin it on the wall and that that’s authorship instead of thinking collaboratively or in more complex fashion so I think that you know I am Pei came up with this texture of this kind of corduroy he didn’t invent it other people made it too but when you look at I love this kind of mid-century architecture you can look at lots of different buildings we’re casting the concrete and coming up with different textures was done in many different ways and all corduroy concrete walls are not the same and some of them have different levels of skill and some of them don’t but often it’s not just the architects decision and this is the exciting thing about beautiful buildings and beautiful bridges is that is that you have collaboration and you have a kind of a builder and an engineer and they’re determining what concrete to use and what casting process and what tools and you know in in ideas and inventions sometimes and those complex webs of design do bubble up in different ways from you know not the traditional author so that’s my overall thing again it’s ila Hart factory art – it’s not it’s not rejecting anything Ezra thank you so much