Selected Writings

Inspiration in Nature and the Past

- Inspiration in Nature and the Past

- The Influence of Japan and The Beginnings of Modernism

- Art Nouveau and the Cult of Nature

- Isamu Noguchi: The Sources of Art in Nature

- Bringing nature Into It: the Personal Experience of Nature

writing for FS After Hours, the Furniture Society blog

writing for the Furniture Society web forum, San Diego conference presentations:

-Donald Fortescue

-John Cedarquist

-Thomas Hucker-Drawn by hand

Nature and the Past:

This essay explores some of the sources available to contemporary furnituremakers. It is a short study in connoiseurship. The first section lays out my premise and discusses the classical influence. The next section explores the interaction between east and west, first describing how the modern relationship with Japan developed, and then exploring some of the elements available to makers today that originated in Japanese art and craft. The third section discusses Art Nouveau. The fourth describes the life of Isamu Noguchi and explores the way that he embodied east and west, by birth and by his life, and his major concerns as an artist. The final section discusses the personal experience of nature in light of late 20th century art history.

"This has not been scholarly research, or scientific, but romantic, an interest of relaxation from labor; but like every influence of an artist's life-interpreted into his own creative outlook." -sculptor David Smith, 1951, quoted from New Art City by Jed Perl.

I am interested in the way that a designer or builder takes the design of the past and makes it his own. As a trained conservator and student of antiques, I can't help seeing the past in objects. I believe that studio furnituremakers have a unique relationship to the past. By exploring some of the ways that design has been transmitted and developed historically, we can see how this ongoing relationship with the past expresses itself today.

I would like to explore some of the sources of contemporary work. What do makers' return to? What gives life to a made thing. I would like to use nature as the common thread of this essay because I believe that the best design is never far from nature. Isamu Noguchi said that "All our imagination derives from nature, and however we stretch it, it alludes to things in nature." Noguchi felt that a successful sculpture was the result of a practiced eye choosing the right form in nature.

The contemporary Japanese architect Tadao Ando has said, in a statement that could apply equally well to studio furniture, "architecture, which acquires tranquility and balance thanks to geometric order, obtains dynamism thanks to natural phenomena and human movements." In furniture, natural phenomena would be nature referred to in a decorative scheme of course, or as a biomorphic form, and human movements could simply be the functionalism or usefulness which is inherent in a piece of furniture. Ando is known for the way his use of light and water brings nature into his poured concrete buildings. Ando is also interesting to furnituremakers because in Japan architects function as general contractors and are therefore responsible for the actual building process. Andos' buildings therefore have a hand made quality. Ando works with highly skilled concrete form builders, so that his concrete buildings are first formed by woodworkers. Ando has also said: " Contemporary civilization has hidden the fundamental relationship between nature and man and has made it invisible. Nature, in trying to invade architecture, reawakens this relationship between nature and man, which had fallen into inertia. It revives man physically and spiritually so as to enable him to respond once more to nature as in the past."

Nature used in design or ornament is always nature abstracted; a metaphor, a trope, a symbol. No art culture has developed nature as an abstract motif as thoroughly as that of Japan. It is worth considering the way that Japanese art influenced designers and artists from the mid 19th century on, to see how much of the East we have absorbed into our own contemporary consciousness. Even in contemporary japanese art one can find a response to nature that is different from that found in the west. Japanese avant-garde art of the post war period still has a touchstone in nature as in Yoko Onos' “Voice Piece for Soprano” from 1961:

Scream.
1.against the wind
2.against the wall
3.against the sky

All cultures began in nature. We live in nature, in spite of the internet revolution. We are connected to nature on a cellular level: we respond to the turning of the earth, the change of the seasons. The origin of the Greek temple is thought to be the sacred grove of trees. Vincent Scully, in "The Earth, The Temple and the Gods" shows us that Greek temples were physical embodiments of Gods as natural forces, and that the landscape was an integral part of the temple, which began as open alters in sacred sites.

Of all antique furniture forms, I've always been drawn especially to the neo-classical. I ask myself why? If you look at a Boston federal side chair of about 1800, the simple geometry of interlocking circles within a square back, the proportion, the modulations of maple veneers with birch, you might think that it is hard to reduce the design of a chair any further. There is also the tug of history, of something far away. One of the essential "neoclassical" experiences for me is seeing the form of a Greek temple in a farmhouse on the upper Hudson river. The Boston chair may only be an exercise in geometry and proportion, but taking Scully to heart, its' classical origins may be rooted in our earliest experience of nature.

In “The Lost Meaning of Classical Architecture,” George Hersey asks, “Why do we still use the classical orders”… derived from Greek temples “when ancient Greek religion has been dead for centuries? Why wrap a courthouse in the garlands and streamers used to decorate sacrificial oxen?” As a way of explaining how ornament was understood by the Greeks, he introduces the concept of the trope, a form of word play, like a metaphor or pun. He quotes Rousseau, "As emotions were the first motives that induced man to speak, his first utterances were tropes. Figurative language was the first to be born. At the beginning, only poetry was spoken.” By studying the figurative language of the past, we can learn something of where our own figurative language comes from.

Classicism never goes away. Sculptor Scott Burton was an artist who loved modern furniture. From a 1982 interview with Peter Scheldahl in the Village Voice: “in Washington, D.C. in the fifties, where my family had moved from Alabama, modern furniture just spelled modernism to me, and modernism spelled liberation. It was still avant-garde then. Furniture companies like Herman Miller, Knoll, and Dunbar meant as much to me as Picasso and de Kooning, in much the same way. I was just obsessed” He came at furniture as a minimalist and as a performance artist and created iconic representations of furniture forms but nevertheless referred to the classical element in his work: “I think there's a love of classicism in the work- not just classical architecture, but of the whole idea that nature and civilization can be synthesized.”
There is a revival of sorts going on now among the makers who make traditional reproductions. These makers are generally held in high regard by their "studio" brothers and sisters; that is, those following Wendel Castles' example, using the traditional pursuit of furniture making as an expressive form, opening it up to the strategies of modern and contemporary art. Contemporary studio furniture makers will often dip into the furniture making tradition, because it is hard to avoid entirely, although they just as often will take pains to avoid any reference to it as well. There are also makers who work in the traditional language but then push the traditional forms to expressive ends.

Classical revivals began in the Renaissance. Andrea Palladios' buildings were working farmhouses , with nature an essential part of their existance. Archeological discovery (Herculaneum, 1738) and the grand tours of gentlemen of means re-established interest in the 18th century. 18th and 19th century neo-classicism in England, Europe and America appropriated the imagined democratic ideals of antiquity, and was a reaction to the Rococo. In France it was the Empire style; in England, Regency; in the German speaking countries Biedermeir; and in America, the Federal style. After 1825, Americans became mesmerized by the classical world and the American Greek revival entered the vernacular. Although one can see a connection to nature in the paintings of Thomas Cole, and in the Greek revival buildings that were built all over the country, often as farmhouses as Palladios buildings had been, the natural forms used, (acanthus leaves, bellflowers, garlands of flowers,) were highly stylized and removed from direct observation of nature. Nature was nevertheless a central metaphor of the classical revival.