Timothy Veske-McMahon is an artist and contemporary jeweler known for skillfully layering psychoanalysis and social commentary in his artwork. In this interview, he talks with deep consideration about his collection, mirror milk, as a reflection of society, the existence of (or lack of) boundaries between studio and life, and reconsidering the phrase “emerging artist.”
 
Olivia Shih: After earning a BFA and an MFA in the US, you traveled across the ocean to an artist residency at the Estonian Academy of Arts in Tallinn, Estonia. What prompted you to take the leap? How has the experience influenced your work?

Timothy Veske-McMahon: The answer to why I leapt is convoluted and starts with divulging I’ve leapt before using different muscles. In the time between my concept of home became a scattered plural. So, should I pretend that my connection to Estonia is merely professional, as platonically cool as the Läänemeri lapping the shores of Haapsalu in late summer? At one point it may have been so, but simple seldom stays.

I have to snake back to 2011 when I had work included in Talente and traveled to Munich thanks to a crowdfunding project. During the blitzkrieg of “experiencing” work during those mad days I saw much, but little had true lingering power. One such exhibition was Tanel Veenre’s Paradise Regained. Staged within a historic building material shop, the work hung from slumbering wrought iron gates and ornate wooden doors waiting to be reclaimed and live again. And wasn’t that like jewelry too, waiting for the body? Later, Tanel graciously answered some questions on how the exhibition came to be, but I was still curious.

At the time, Estonia was a fuzzy somewhere at best, this placeless place. Now that I had this map pin of an experience, though, it became magnetic. An interrelated pattern emerged as I realized there were many Estonian jewelers whose work I admired but had been ignorantly blind of a shared origin. With a more defined understanding I saw a type of reverence; a way of thinking, feeling, touching, and speaking through consideration that tangibly connected object and maker. This work didn’t look like my work, nor work I would make, but I did identify with it in some way.

That same year I began my master’s studies at Cranbrook Academy of Art, and the work of Estonian jewelers sporadically found its way into conversation or became a point of reference in critique. Studying under Iris Eichenberg, there is an expectation to make the most of the break between years in order to carry and build the momentum into the second year. I had settled into the idea of spending my summer in Munich when very late one night, while I was alone in the studio, I think around one o’clock, the phone rang. On the other end was Iris and in a very succinct manner she told me Munich would be too easy, that I should follow my interest and see Tallinn for myself.

I sought advice from the only Estonian I knew in the slightest way. Tanel put me in contact with the jewelers of studio Gram, who maintain a collective space and are involved in a range of activities. The end result was two months living in Tallinn and a spot in Gram while one member was away. I can’t get into all aspects of the time spent there, the introspective nature of isolation, discovery of new interests, trying to source material, the insatiable appetite for juusturullid, and so on. But halfway through my stay things get complicated; it’s when I meet a stranger that the story turns from a pilgrimage in search of foreign jewels to how I met my husband.

There were loose ends, much of my curiosity laid with the Eesti Kunstiakadeemia (Estonian Academy of Arts) as wellspring of Estonian jewelers. I wanted to get a sense of the culture and pedagogy that was shaping how the jewelers looked out upon the world. I was there, though, during the summer, while classes are on break. So that second bigger leap, I stayed half a year in Estonia, and half of that as artist-in-residence at the academy. Of course, going back was a different creature, having in a sense been married to Estonia. It might seem like I paint a golden picture, but I must mention at this point my husband had moved to a third country for work and this more intense stay went into dark Estonian winter. So the theme of isolation deepens and the sense of searching for identity widens as the need to communicate compounds. There is no border between my studio practice and personal life; the real answer is not in how it influenced my work, but what change it had on life.

Could you describe a day in the studio for you?
 
Timothy Veske-McMahon: First thing that happens each day in the studio is I wake up. Most likely one of my cats, Elwood, is tracing some ghost of a reflection across the wall. I know they bounce off cars passing four stories below, but I can’t see them. I shush her chatters and swing my legs to the bed’s edge, sitting up. This aligns me perfectly with my worktable, bench pin leaning toward my chest. Thankfully, this early in the morning, there is still a yard’s worth of separation between us.
 
It’s hard for me to place a boundary on what constitutes my studio. When I look out the window and imagine the lives of the people waiting at the crosswalk and where they’re going … is that still my studio? Or how about when I run to the bodega to get milk for my coffee? My Spanish is just good enough to understand the cashier refuse to let a woman use the bathroom because her baby is asleep in the sink. A minute later I’m home and still imagining this water-basin bassinet and the baby, who I know as this wiggly boy on a hip, always grasping at something. He grabbed me once, too, while my hand was held out anticipating change. Then I remember I still owe her 50 cents from being short on cash buying cat food last week. By the time the milk splashes into my coffee, it feels borrowed. Did I mention my cats also sleep in the bathroom sink?
 
In many ways I feel the ideation of a creative practice around a physical space is anachronistic. When I create virtual objects on a computer, is the desk my studio, or is it just what is contained in the monitor’s frame, like the four walls of a room? Is it just the tools and limitations of whatever program I happen to be using? To confine a virtual practice to the computer is as irrational as confining a “real” practice to a studio.

Or is it just the place in my head where all my work comes from? Now that’s something I’d like to have a boundary to, to be able to step out of, but it’s not something I know how to do. My husband once asked me in relation to my work: “Is it good for you?” He wasn’t asking if all my efforts gain recognition, nor if it leads to success, but if it is a healthy thing. Not only physically, but also mentally. How much can one call and bleed into darkness, what is returned? So, how do I describe a day in my studio? Troubled.

The title of your exhibition, mirror milk, pulls together two everyday objects into an instantly memorable but unfamiliar phrase. Your work often explores the human need to define the self, a need that can be gratified or be exacerbated by mirrors, but how does milk fit into the equation?
 
Timothy Veske-McMahon: Mirrors offer a false truth; familiarity is a lie. As for milk, it is a wholesome opaque thing that easily turns sour. In society we are surrounded by “milks,” purported wholesomenesses we suckle from, foregoing culture as nourishment, but must be weaned from to survive. Subsisting on only the past is too rich a diet, we need to seek and consume unrefined solids from the untamed corners of our present to prepare for the future.

Parallels can be drawn to Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytical concept of the “mirror stage” of development, particularly his later movement away from a specific period of development of the self, to playing a constant role in subjectivity. This further unfolds with Lacan’s orders of the imaginary, symbolic, and real; if it interests you.

The title also references a theoretical quandary within Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. Therein Alice speculates about the world in the mirror, how it differs from reality, and whether things that are safe in the real world could be harmful in the mirror. (Specifically within the text “Looking-glass milk.”) For this work, the mirror world is our self-perception within society. I’m trying to find for myself where the power and control lies, in casting a reflection there or being deceived by it. Norms are fluid, and only once you hold something for yourself do you realize how well you misunderstood the idea of it.

Your studio practice involves manipulating repurposed materials into an original visual language, where all trace of the original material is wiped clean. What draws you to repurposing materials and your specific treatment of these materials?
 
Timothy Veske-McMahon: I don’t view them as completely clean, more that I’ve been very selective about what information they are sullied by. I do think that I’ve in some ways deboned the original objects by removing any defining sense of form or original intended use. The raised lines crossing the surfaces originally channeled the injected plastic throughout the mold and remain authentic artifacts of their slight structure. It is clear to me that not much care was taken in their previous fabrication. This lack of scrutiny is glaringly obvious in the inconsistency of color. Pigments seem haphazardly added, bleeding into one another and creating muted tints that slowly build toward the mildly unpleasant. I find it especially suspect when one considers these were meant to be children’s paint palettes. They appear aged or perhaps sun-worn, but I have no knowledge of their true origin, even if I personally harbor some darkly romantic notions.

In this way I preserve some of the material’s culture for those who look for it: how it came into existence, how it was considered in handling, and that it once served a purpose. Otherwise, it’s just plastic. Alternatively, when I create virtual objects I am in a sense inventing material. As sterile 3D prints they begin blanched of culture. Here I’m not repurposing material, but images, patterns, and techniques in pursuit of authorship.

Many of your pieces in the collection pair together two shapes, two colors, two symbols. Is there significance in the number two?
 
Timothy Veske-McMahon: It’s the right amount of complication, one that doesn’t curtail possibility by implying too much. I try to balance these glyphs between being symbols and true logograms that one would assume had a “correct” reading. In the instances where I do incorporate more glyphs, it is to an extreme where they compound to a bewildered state. They crackle where the simpler objects buzz. I do regard these pieces as discrete lexicons, a completeness, from which nothing else exists in isolation. The personal “inspirations” come from decisions, possibilities, balances, etc., which we often grasp in binary. The come from very real concrete thoughts, issues, or feelings, but that isn’t important once my eyes leave them. I feel that I have imparted a loudness with even only two glyphs, and I don’t want to be apologetic. There is no linear narrative; I set the tone but meaning comes repeatedly anew in the object’s afterlife. I’m much more interested in how others project meaning from their own life onto them than correctly identifying what anxiety I was suffering that week.

This collection of new work is imbued in a palette of cool pastels, creating an aftertaste of loss. The graphic lexicon, which references hieroglyphs and symbols but is ultimately unreadable, enhances the sense of loss with alienation. How did loss find its way into your work?
 
Timothy Veske-McMahon: Loss of place, loss of words, loss of understanding, loss of purpose, loss of self. While in Estonia I was at a tangle of life events. Fresh out of master’s studies and trying to reenter and redefine a professional practice. Newly wedded, a proposal that just a year earlier would seem laughable. What was this life around me? Is this adulthood? What is a marriage? How long in lasting? Where should I be? It’s when I most need to clarify what I want in life that I begin to come up short in understanding who I am. In the moment, it is a tremendous loss.

Could you name three emerging artists who have introduced a fresh perspective to art jewelry?
 
Timothy Veshe-McMahon: I know this is only a dwarf pulpit, but forgive me for co-opting the question nonetheless. I think the use of the word “emerging,” and the stratification it represents, is unethical. We have an oblique system of consideration for objects based on how we conceive artists, which remains true when inversed. At one point the terminology of emergence was more appropriate, when an artist gradually emerged because they earned, through various discerning bodies, opportunities that granted increasing levels of exposure. Here recognition is coupled with worthiness. In today’s hyperconnected world, though, we have a competing mechanism of cognizance-as-relevance where artists use social media to self-emerge whenever they see fit and without discernment. At this time it isn’t uncommon for graduate students to post, tweet, and/or stream every step of their master’s studies.

Are we ok with that? Shouldn’t these objects be saving their performance for critique, and not spending it on likes and shares? Is an investigation that is aware of its own performance actually research? Not only is this a disservice to what we expect from an undertaking of master’s study, but it places work created under mentorship out of context and offers it up to receive recognition as product of a professional practice. In comparison, what happens then to the artist who doesn’t feel that social media has a place in their artistic practice?

So if we want to continue using the terminology of emergence, we need to define what we actually mean, and by extension understand what it means to have a submerged practice.

Are we talking about success, potential, recognition, representation, collections, something as arbitrary as time? We need to stop caring about and rewarding something as anachronistic as a singular emergence, and start commending artists of all ages and levels of success for how much risk they take, rather than for their consistency. Their future potential for expanding the field is much more important than how well they succeed. We need to pinpoint art that is in danger of being unwillfully submerged.

We have this incredible push toward entrepreneurial ideals, which I see as supplanting experimental work. What honor is there as an artist to emerge within a system that favors precious over precocious? I think in most cases what is currently referenced as emerging artist would be much more accurately referred to as “emerging product.” Maybe it’s just that I’m searching in life for meaning, but I want to make and see things that matter. Being well made, aesthetically considered, or popular does not remedy meaninglessness.

Where is the necessary differentiation that allows conceptual jewelry artists to prosper? Why are there so many multi-juror selection processes when all they do is quicken the homogenization of the field? The premise that work must be “good enough” for all jurors, that work that is good to only a minority is not “reliably good,” is flawed. Truly deserving artists are more likely recognized through contention rather than consensus. Our most common systems of recognition only ensure that true revolutionary work is rarely selected. Extraordinary work requires extraordinary perspective to recognize it. It is actually the “good” work that is discerning of a good juror and not the other way around.

Internally, we need to stop tending to objects and start supporting artists. Museums, collectors, curators, jurors, galleries, and organizations have to start allocating their resources where their mouths are in terms of contemporary jewelry having relevance. We need more non-commercial exhibition spaces and opportunities that aren’t tied to traditional craft institutions with the associated agenda. We need work that isn’t so easily packaged, work that isn’t so coyly aware of its salability.

So, who are three artists making important work that should be more widely discussed?

I’ve known Leslie Boyd since her time as an undergrad student at Pratt Institute, but she went on to do her master’s at RISD and created her series My Favorite F-Words; Family, Freedom, Feminism, Fucking. The work explores gender, class, pop culture, feminism, and sexuality through object-making, self-portraiture, and installation. There was no compromise, no middle ground of pleasantness or easily discrete objects. Thinking realistically, where does this type of work currently live outside of academia? Who is invested in supporting the practice of jeweler-artists who push us collectively toward social relevance without capitulating to a preciousness that remains appropriate hung over a mantelpiece? Someone should approach Leslie with an opportunity, or better yet, an offer to bankroll new work.

I don’t know Zachery Lechtenberg personally, but I’ve seen his cartoon- and comic-inspired enamel brooches pop up periodically over the last couple years and have been keeping an eye on them. Here’s the thing, though; what excites me is the potential for his subject matter and style to be social commentary and because of my distance from it, I don’t know the intention. So right now I still see the work forking two ways, as quirky products as an extension of his personally branded world, or as part of an extroverted conceptual practice that assimilates and reflects issues of the real world.

Saving the most seemingly nepotistic for last, Alissa Lamarre and I attended Cranbrook together, but trust me, she deserves recognition. It’s hard to use the word authentic without it seeming somewhat diluted, but it is the best descriptor for the consideration Alissa has for her work and the place it comes from. Alissa is a smooth shifter, moving easily between jewelry and object making as she imparts a strength of being and a self-aware sense of wayfinding in her work that approaches us like a quietly patient outstretched hand.

Have you heard, seen, or read anything of interest lately?
 
Timothy Veske-McMahon: I picked up a book on sincerity from a used book shop; it has been dutifully filling the role of subway and park bench reading. It’s entertaining. The author is R. Jay Magill, Jr., and the full title summarizes it well: Sincerity: How a moral ideal born five hundred years ago inspired religious wars, modern art, hipster chic, and the curious notion that we all have something to say (no matter how dull).
 
Curationism: How Curating Took Over the Art World and Everything Else, by David Blazer, is another book I read recently that I would recommend, but especially to those who have toiling thoughts on how work gets shown. It stretched my perspective back much further and rewrote basic principles of how I see a curator. It’s a book that can help give direction and form to those unsatisfactions you may be feeling, if you know what I mean.

If you come to NYC this summer, make sure to visit America Is Hard to See at the Whitney.

Two years ago, Ted Noten had his Framed exhibition at the Stedelijk museum's-Hertogenbosch in Den Bosch, the Netherlands. When organizing this show, which involved Noten choosing a collection of art works by other artists, he sent a request to Sjarel Ex, the director of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. The request was written on a postcard showing Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting of The Tower of Babel, a 16th-century gem in the museum’s collection. What the card said was: Can I get this painting on loan for my exhibition? NO, the director answered simply by texting. Noten decided not to include a copy of the painting in his exhibition, but instead presented a pile of 5,000 postcards, addressed to the museum director and printed with a copy of the original handwritten request, embodying a longing for something you can’t get. For months the director received these postcards—hundreds of them—diligently sent by visitors to the exhibition in Den Bosch.

Noten has just unveiled his own The Tower of Babel in the vicinity of the famous painting, only a few museum rooms away, under the motto “if the tower can’t come to me, I come to the tower.” The tower, 7.5 meters tall, is built from the contents of his studio, and it is a beautiful tower that balances chaos and order in a subtle way. Noten emptied his entire studio in order to create a tabula rasa. By building something here, emptiness is created elsewhere. To him, Bruegel’s painting represents the ambition and impossibility of artists to reach for heaven, the utmost, for the unattainable.

Noten’s Tower reminded me rather of an altar, towering high up in the circular hall. Maybe the circular shape of Museum Boijmans’s hall added to this religious association. One recognizes in the tower parts of Noten’s installations, presentations and projects, prototypes, models, drawings, sketches, photos, and it includes the The Tower of Babel postcard among furniture, boxes, benches, and storage systems. It is an impressive construction, and confusing at the same time. It is clear what the tower means to Noten; he is looking for the emptiness, the studio as a non-zone instead of the studio that dictates his days, and his work. Only then are you able to reach deeper layers in yourself, and in your art, he says. But what does he want us to see? Are these the leftovers of an artist in crisis, a romantic with an extremely good eye for detail? Is this the next Noten-act in his extended programming, born out of a sheer need for visibility? Or is the artist trying to brush up his artistic skills? But art without questions is non-art, and this tower is a mesmerizing work of art.

Before nearing the tower, the visitor stumbles across a huge sandbox that fills an entire museum room. In the box, or arena, an electric remote-controlled frontloader moves a large heap of sand from one corner to the other. The machine will only work on Sundays, and is controlled by volunteers who registered for the assignment during an interview with the artist broadcast on Dutch national radio (he received more than 100 requests). The volunteers have their own control station, high up in the room, with a steep ladder to enter it, protective clothing, a hard hat, a radio, a poster of a pin-up girl, and of course, a joystick. This work reflects the work of the artist, Noten states, the pointlessness of what the artist is doing. But it is also a comment on the meaninglessness of what we are all doing in society, the wasting of money on projects that never finish, the breaking down and building up, again and again. Yet artists need this very much, says Noten: “As an artist you have to do many useless things to get to deeper art. You need certain emptiness; the word ‘output’ that is now so in vogue in discussions about art, doesn’t work. You need more aimless moments to get somewhere.”

The third room in the show is Noten’s Treasure Room. Here are exhibited some 30 iconic pieces by Noten, not borrowed from collectors all over the world, but exact 3D-scanned and 3D-printed scale copies in paper. These are copies of one-off pieces and 3D-printed series, such as the Miss Piggy ring. These may be copies, but they are highly original, unique (one-off) copies: They are made using a rather complicated and outdated 3D-printing method in paper, sponsored by a company in Dublin, Ireland—one of the few that is still able to apply this method. After printing, the 3D reproductions were all dyed “Noten yellow.” The 30 works are presented in three showcases, and bear paper labels reminiscent of archives and old ways of storing objects.

These pieces have a very special beauty of their own—a special paper materiality that adds a new quality to the work. Imagine the Rat trolley, three dimensionally, in paper. It is missing the original shiny acrylic and the plastic of the handle, but the possibility of actually touching all shapes, the body of the rat, and this brittle material make it a totally new work. The room questions ideas about original and copy, and society’s demand that artists be original in a new way. In the same room, a six-minute-long animation, made by Eva Verheul, together with Jaap Dekker and Floris Regoort, is projected on the floor amidst the showcases. It is a fascinating movie that unites fragments of Noten objects to fully formed pieces, and shows sperm swimming through and between objects and in space. All done in Noten yellow, like the book that is published on this occasion (and that will be reviewed separately).

“I’m in a crisis,” Noten yelled when people started flocking into his exhibition. “What are you going to do the next four months in your empty studio?” people asked. “Holiday,” he replied. Noten has again reached a junction, and he does not know what it will bring, or if it will lead to something. He refrains from thinking in terms of output and profit, or planning. He needs a time out.

If cleaning your studio can result in this outburst of creativity, then this tabula rasa, this non-zone, must be the start of something new and awesome. After sweeping clean, and taking stock, he is ready to face the emptiness. Now people will ask: But is this jewelry? Is it art? What is it? Well, I don’t know, actually, and I don’t care. It is space, it is breathing, it is air, it is generosity, it is energy, it is a big gesture, and it is a look inside the creative process, which can lead to anything.

I am currently writing a longish essay on new media, and two of the three themes of this year’s SNAG program[1]—“Social impact” and “innovation”—held a special appeal for me: There, in the same room, in the course of a mere three days, my education regarding crafters’ involvement with new media would be done. Yee-ha!

I just used the words “new media” without defining them: New media can mean a lot of things and, at SNAG, they encompassed modes of fabrication (M.I.T.’s FabLab and Nadya Peek’s machines to make machines), modes of computation (Nervous System’s growth algorithms), and methods of circulation, as enabled by IT (Michael Strand and Gabriel Craig). I intentionally bundled these aspects of new media together, because I wanted to look at how their narratives overlap.

The thing I found remarkable—and this informs the structure of my micro-report—is that building participatory platforms is key to the success of three very different models: Michael Strand’s social projects (Bowls around Town), Neil Gershenfeld’s vision of personal fabrication, and Nervous System’s grow-it-yourself jewelry.

Michael Strand described[2] how his practice shifted away from the traditional pursuit of design toward community building as the value he is ultimately interested in. There are “diminishing returns on improving the design of a cup,” he said. His Bowls around Town project is about “harvesting recipes and images from people, using bowls as activators,” and the model he implicitly refers to is that of user-generated, user-organized knowledge. Strand is an initiator, organizer, and promoter: He provides the scenario and, most importantly, insures that the modes of participation, the implementation, and the results of the projects widely circulate. (Gabriel Craig, another craft activist, says about his own projects that it is “rare [for me] to develop a project independent of the mechanism that would distribute it.”[3])

Neil Gershenfeld (M.I.T.) and Stuart Kestenbaum (Haystack) talked[4] about having installed a mini Fab Lab at Haystack and of the difficulties of selling a dream of techno-driven self-sufficiency to a bunch of self-sufficient crafters. M.I.T.’s Gershenfeld was trying very hard not to evoke the specter of craft-killing techno-fear, and he managed, in tandem with Kestenbaum, to present his Fab Lab as a space for instructive errors, accidents, and ruse (in short, as an experimental space for making). The question of competence loomed large in the discussion: Gershenfeld (and later, Nervous System) spoke about “low technological barriers,” but it is quite clear that mastering digital softwares—if one is to go beyond the simple tweaking of given parameters—requires time and experimentation. How the general public can actually access personal fabrication, and what crafters must learn and unlearn to appropriate the Fab Lab tools, are two very different challenges. Some aspects of this unusual and successful joint venture were not fully discussed—in particular, where the agendas of professionalized hand-making and amateur production come in conflict. But by and large the mood in the room (if I gauged it correctly) is that the Fab Lab’s promise of “personal production” as an exciting alternative to industrial production is just too close to crafters’ own ideals of self-sufficiency to be dismissed.

Nervous System discussed[5] the different apps that allow users to manipulate growth or structural parameters to create individual models in terms of “co-creation,” and bullet-pointed their vision for the future as one where “complexity is free,” “variation is free,” and they have “lowered the barrier to creation.” They talked of “disseminating their research through affordable jewelry,” and, in effect, the objects they sell are one-offs at the price of mass-produced objects.

Nadya Peek, finally, managed to weave[6] several of those strands (accessibility, community building, co-creation, self-sufficiency) in her cool video-based presentation of laptop-sized machines that make machines. This, for me, was the clincher: Surely the revolution is nigh?

The happy narrative about the beauty of the participatory model and/or of the consumer as producer—and the attendant idea of user empowerment—is a very difficult one to resist, for crafters. It suggests that the community-centered paradigm of craft aligns with several of the sexier aspects of new media: the fact that knowledge is user-generated, that relations between people (not products) are today’s hot currency, that the modes of production, distribution, and exchange ushered in by online networks allow niche markets (and niche projects) to exist. In short: the hippie-ness of Silicon Valley is high-fiving the hippie-ness of craft’s social and human project.

I would not be able to make sense of all of this—or in fact know that I don’t know much about networks—were it not for reading The Alchemy of Multitudes, a remarkable book that explains how the web is changing the way we interact with things, people, information. I learned about the idea that niche markets become viable in the digital age in that book (specifically, from a reference to the notion of the “long tail” developed by Chris Anderson), and about the paradigmatic shift from links to relations, and about the potential of crowdsourcing intelligence. (You know: when you create or gather information, and post it on a proprietary platform, like Facebook, or Wikipedia, or CDDB?)

What SNAG made evident—at least to me—is that a number of these technological changes (whether they have to do with information or production) “look like” things that are very much part of craft’s past tenets (self-sufficiency, mutualization of production tools, lateral transmission of knowledge), and of its current interests (community building/social practice, self-management of information about one’s or others’ projects, craft’s accessibility to the wider public). So if it was surprising to see M.I.T. at SNAG, my sense is that we will want to play around with them a lot more in the future.

I would like to conclude my report by taking a page out of The Alchemy of Multitudes: I will assume that “my readers together know more than I do,”[7] and ask you what you think about these four questions:

1. What is a good network?

2. Is easier access to personal production technology a good thing for humans?

3. Should knowledge be monetized; should it be considered a commons?

4: What should the next question be?

The comments area below—though restrictive-looking—is where you can play, but you can also express yourself on FB or, if you really insist, by email.

[2] Michael Strand, At Human Scale, lecture, May 21, 2015, SNAG Boston

[3] Gabriel Craig, during a Face 2 Face discussion (with Sam Aquillano, and Jason Talbott), May 22, 2015, SNAG Boston

[4] Neil Gershenfeld and Stuart Kestenbaum, In Conversation: High-Tech at Haystack, May 23, 2015, SNAG Boston.

[5] Nervous System, Rapid Fire Presentations, Innovation (alongside Nadya Peek, and Arthur Ganson), May 23, 2015, SNAG Boston.

[6] Nadya Peek, Face 2 Face discussion (with Nervous System, Arthur Ganson, and Stuart Kestenbaum), May 23, 2015, SNAG Boston.

Gijs Bakker is one of the most active and innovative jewelers working today. His constant desire to work on the technical and visual cutting edge of object making keeps him sharp. His show at Atelier Courbet introduces jewelry into the mix of other beautifully designed furniture and objects represented by this gallery.

Susan Cummins: At Atelier Courbet you are showing The Holes Collection of furniture with holes from 1989, as well as new work designed in conjunction with the Atelier. Along with your jewelry, have you continued to design furniture regularly since the days you were with Droog?

Gijs Bakker: Yes, I do. I keep exploring design in all forms and through all types of applications, scales, or functions. While working with Atelier Courbet in preparing the Holes project exhibition this spring, we explored and created three new design iterations as part of the Holes Collection. I'm constantly interested in thinking and exploring new design ideas.

Your jewelry collection at Atelier Courbet is mostly a nice grouping of older pieces also from the 1989 period. Was this thought of as an additional complement to the furniture?

Gijs Bakker: Rather the opposite, my collaboration with Atelier Courbet started around jewelry. We were interested in presenting jewelry pieces that are iconic representations of the design ideas I have long explored and that also highlight the informative relationship between the techniques, the craftsmanship, and these design ideas. I accepted to release some older pieces of reference from the studio’s collection that I have had in Amsterdam to present a comprehensive palette of works at Atelier Courbet. The bracelet with Holes is the articulating piece between where our collaboration started with Melanie Courbet and the presentation of a design idea or a body of work that has indeed been informed by techniques, craftsmanship, and design applications.

For much of your career you have worked as a contemporary jeweler in the design world. You created a company in 1996 called chp…? and invited both designers and art jewelers to produce designs for the line. Then you have a jeweler make multiples. Why did you start this company?

Gijs Bakker: I noticed that there was (and still is) a tremendous gap between the product design and jewelry design worlds—they are two communities that rarely communicate. Product or industrial design talents may perceive the jewelry application of a design idea as a specialized niche discipline, or maybe they look at it as creating a non-functional and decorative object and therefore don’t venture naturally toward it. Maybe they are intimidated by the scale. I have been in contact with so many luminaries throughout my career, I was interested in presenting them with the challenge of thinking of designs in small scale and as decorative accessories that can carry a meaning, a statement, and can serve as mediums of expression both for the creator and the collector.

So after almost 20 years of the existence of chp…? can you answer a few questions for me? What has this experiment taught you about (sm)art jewelry? Who is interested in it?

Intelligent jewelry is more than just decorative. It is a hard struggle to convey the many layers and concepts at play, but we never give up; it's a rare segment of sophisticated collectors that want to adorn themselves in such a manner. Art jewelry has long touched a niche of virtuous and educated eyes that, like wordsmiths and poetry, can play with the linguistics of art or design and have fun with it. However, I also think that the nature of the object allows a younger collector to acquire a small-scale art piece that can be worn. The younger art and design enthusiasts’ demographics among art jewelry followers have grown in recent years. Which is great and which I’ll constantly try to encourage through some of my open or wide edition jewelry collections.

Has the audience changed for this work over time? How?

Absolutely. Our newest audiences are today involved with the design world and come across the jewelry at fairs and design events.

At one time you had collections based on ideas like Sense of Wonder, What’s Luxury?, and Rituals. In a recent scan of the chp…? website, I noticed those collections were no longer there. How did that evolve?

Through these ideas, such as Sense of Wonder and What’s Luxury?, I described the collection and it is then the designers' challenge to create, based on their reflections on a given statement. We chose to present the chp…? pieces all together now, only divided between a ready-to-wear and a haute couture collection. The origins of the pieces and the collections in which they were conceived are still on the website, under the About page. Some of the pieces produced have become design classics; Marc Newson's bracelet, in particular, remains popular. chp...? continues to invite new designers every three years and recently debuted the latest project, called Make it chp…? at the Salone del Mobile in Milan.

What issues do you think jewelry can or should be addressing today? What are the big themes of the moment?

3D printing and the new possibilities of production are the most interesting and relevant conversations at the moment. The most recent chp…? project that was shown in Milan at Salone del Mobile involves 3D printing. For $25, an individual may download a file that was designed specifically for this project and then print their own piece of jewelry at home. Younger audiences are excited to offer the gift of a file rather than of a material piece.

Thank you.

“What Makes a Woman?”—Elinor Burkett’s op-ed for The New York Times—triggered a saucy catfight between second-wave and third-wave feminists (and who doesn’t love a little girl-on-girl action, am I right?). Burkett makes what she seems to think is a compelling argument that being transgender is just another way for those assigned male at birth to be dicks to “legitimate” women, and that Caitlyn Jenner’s choice of nail polish undermines Burkett’s own identity as Best at Feminism.

Fortunately, Burkett got served numerous educated responses (see here and here and here and here). Breaking it down in the Explain It to Me Like I’m a 4-Year-Old department, Jill Filipovic for Cosmo: “Transgender men and women help to highlight one of our biggest social lies: That being a man or a woman is about the extra social and cultural stuff. The existence of people across cultures and throughout history who have transgressed the boundaries between male and female make[s] it clear that while gender is real, the way we conceptualize it and live it is largely a performance.”

The history of gender expression is inextricably tied to the history of adornment and how humans have decorated their bodies as both a representation of, and response to, one’s individual and social identity. And the history of jewelry is itself a case study in how Western culture has proceeded to view gender as increasingly binary—as the boundaries tighten around what is socially acceptable as either “masculine” or “feminine,” jewelry has come to be viewed as an almost exclusively feminine expression.

While Caitlyn Jenner presents herself on the extreme end of what’s considered “feminine,” her appearance in the media reminds us that between the extremes also exists a full spectrum of gradations. There’s an opportunity here for jewelry, not only to reflect society’s greater awareness of the continuum of possibilities in gender expression, but also to provide means of expression ranging across that continuum. Case in point: Jacobo Toledo, a Mexican jewelry line conceived as an androgynous option, that actively campaigns through its marketing for equality, tolerance, and “a more mature and inclusive society that accepts people just as they are.”

In the mid-90s, to use the word “curating” in the field of contemporary jewelry must have sounded exaggerated or simply incomprehensible. To think with and through the format of an exhibition in order to transform it into a discursive medium was quite unusual, especially if the statement was coming from an independent curator, who was not a maker herself, and not affiliated with an institution, as was my case. For some years, the “Off-Schmuck” circuit in Munich has given a new visibility to the activity of curating, even if it is mostly reduced to issues of arrangement and display. In a wider context, a debate is taking place—for example the international seminar Curating Craft, initiated by Jorunn Veiteberg and myself in 2012; the book edited by André Gali, Crafting Exhibitions (Norwegian Crafts, 2015); or the recent AJF publication, Shows and Tales, a valuable contribution to the history and critique of jewelry exhibitions.

At the same time, one finds the term “curated by” in increasingly unexpected contexts: the shop window of a fashion store in Bangkok was curated by jewelry designer Ek Thongprasert, and a billboard in a tram stop in Zurich advertised a G-Star Denim collection curated by musician Pharrell Williams, just to mention two recent examples. The inflationary use of the word “curating” is encouraging people to define its changing meaning lest (or as?) it becomes devalued (a similar over-use of the word “craft” is discussed in an article by Gareth Neal.) When I saw David Balzer’s book at the Palais de Tokyo’s bookshop in Paris, I thought it was time to know more about this phenomenon.

There is indeed an irony in finding this book in the institution that promoted relational aesthetics, a genre also known as “curator’s art” with skeptical connotations. Indeed, the book fulfills in an entertaining way its quest to investigate the “curationist era,” an expression coined by the author. Balzer, an art critic based in Toronto, surveys the origins and history of the curator’s figure, tracing back to the Roman empire, where the “curatores” were bureaucrats, administrating departments of public work. He walks us through centuries of curatorial practices, based on caring (from the curator as a healer and priest in the Middle Ages to the curator as alchemist for social change in the contemporary biennials); on the celebration of curiosity (from the Louvre’s loot-keepers to the first director of MoMA); and more recently, on the authorial dimension of curating through grouping and selecting (from Szeemann as father of all professional curators to celebrity curators, coming from the entertainment industry, who infiltrate the profession in an amateurish way). Dissecting the multilayered roles that a curator can assume as a connoisseur, dealer, critic, institutional agent, or even artist, the author places the activity of curating in a cultural arena that reaches far beyond the art world, and includes music festivals, gastronomy, and fashion. Sentences like “Sometimes you have to climb a mountain to properly curate a sock” testify to the irony that the author employs to approach the topic.

I enjoy that the author is extremely informed but not super-rigorous; he is proud to state that the book hardly contains references and has no footnotes. This slight understatement makes the book unleash what Deleuze and Guattari would call a “rhizomatic potential,” in a generous way. The book is thus particularly inspiring for me because it reconnects me with other texts I have read in the past and urges me to revisit what I thought when I read them. Its timely engagement with the topic of curating will challenge everybody occupied in communicating their own work and the work of others.

Sometimes, it is great to acknowledge what a book does to you instead of what it is strictly about—especially in summer.

Three different Wunderrūma shows in three different locations with three different outcomes: Peter Deckers unpacks the first two quite different Wunderrūma exhibitions, one at Galerie Handwerk in Germany and one at The Dowse Art Museum in New Zealand, and ponders its third iteration in Auckland, opening mid-July.

I was fortunate to see the two Wunderrūma exhibitions in both locations, Galerie Handwerk in Munich in March 2014 and at The Dowse in Lower Hutt in June of the same year. The show is now on its way to the prestigious Auckland Art Gallery. These New Zealand (NZ) exhibitions and their accompanying catalog were put together by jewelers Warwick Freeman and Karl Fritsch. It was courageous that these two internationally renowned artists would stick their necks out to select and present an introductory show of NZ jewelry, originally aimed toward an international audience during Schmuck 2014 in Munich. In my experience, the two Wunderrūmas were two almost unrelated shows, and I am still amazed by how transformative a few more pieces and a new display strategy were to the project. This review will mainly focus on this aspect of the two initial iterations of the show, without discussing or comparing individual art works.

1.
The NZ curators are quite aware of what international and national jewelry shows usually contain. They both operate from different ends of the postmodern spectrum, and their Wunderrūma collection of work and its presentation were both unexpected and excitingly contradictory. The original brief was to showcase NZ jewelry in Munich to a European audience. Later it was decided to also show the “complete” Wunderrūma in New Zealand.

The process of how the curators went about their task is not an unfamiliar one for NZ jewelers. Late last century, several curators went around NZ workshops to select artists for participation in the highly successful Dowse Jewellery Biennales. The curator would first visit the makers in their workshops, essentially “doing their research” before making their artists’ choices. Warwick and Karl went around in a similar fashion—not to invite makers themselves, however, but to find work from makers (know or unknown, dead or alive) that suited their exhibition vision. They called it “their fishing trip,” herding the “clumps” of work they had in mind to make up a show. A Dropbox folder was also created so that all NZ jewelers (both emerging and established) would have a chance to showcase their work for the curators.

Warwick and Karl fished and hunted through peoples’ workshops, looked at work in development, even rummaged through the makers’ “question mark” piles, their table and ledge collections, their drawers and old containers. They also went through gallery drawers and museum collections. The search went even beyond the usual jewelry makers and gathered some additional work from fine artists with an object focus. All the work chosen from craft and fine art artists was jewelry-focused, and had to have a real “jewelryness” that would match one of the envisaged clumps—such as beads, tools, flowers, etc. The curators wanted to showcase objects only and avoided any installations, works with explanations, or idea-based works.

The breadth and seriousness of their search led people to expect that the curators would showcase a comprehensive representation of NZ jewelry, but the audience came to realize that it was more a personal selection expressing the curators’ own vision.

The curatorial choices of Wunderrūma represented the Kiwi preference for understatement. NZ jewelry is often rough around the edges, low-tech, with a backyard shed attitude, and this came through in a majority of works in both shows. The fact that a range of selected works didn’t best represent their makers was widely discussed by some participants. Indeed, the selection was not a “best of,” but sought to find a balance within each clump, rather than let individual works fight for attention: In the end, nobody really jumped out. This might be a first, because curators and artists alike generally favor making a big rumble with specific works rather than instigating a motley conversation that includes lots of voices. Wunderrūma does not mean to showcase the cream of NZ jewelry, or NZ’s most prolific makers. It constitutes an idiosyncratic cross section of contemporary jewelry today: finished pieces from a wide variety of makers next to jewelry made by non-jewelers, the odd student entry and works in development, as complemented by historical and indigenous works. The inclusion of fine artworks and historical artefacts made this exhibition more interesting and less about showcasing treasures of contemporary jewelry.

2.
How the two shows looked so different concerns both display furniture and the exhibition list.

In the newly renovated Galerie Handwerk, a playful scatter of dark, waist-high cabinets was placed over two floors. The first impression when walking through the gallery’s stark, modernist space was the dominant presence of those cases. Almost all works had been placed inside the cabinets, with the odd piece hung on the few available walls. I expected a jumble of the 200 pieces on display. Not so—each cabinet displayed a minimal amount of work and most works were placed in a sea of space, so nothing felt cluttered. The only viewpoint into most of the cabinets was from the top, and one experienced the works as individual pieces rather than in a conversational cluster. I was not overly impressed when I saw the first Wunderrūma show. The objects lay in their near-empty cabinets, saying very little. Even Lisa Walker’s raw laptop necklace was eerily silent.

In stark contrast, the curatorial concept unfolded loud and clear three month later at The Dowse, and this can be credited in large part to the creative use of displays. See-through Perspex cases produced in the museum were cheerfully stacked on top of one another to form sculptural, light spaces that enabled the work to be viewed from different angles and heights, with bigger works at the bottom and smaller works closer to the top. The unique positioning of work and use of cabinets made reference to both Karl’s usual playful displays and Warwick’s tendency toward the modernist’s grid. This combination situates Wunderrūma at The Dowse among the best jewelry shows I have experienced.

However, the experience of the show requires a certain patience. No artist names, captions, or artist statements were displayed near the work, and those who bothered had to plow through a gallery list to locate individual letter-referenced captions. The absence of artist information, statements, and artist names is becoming a trend that I hope will be short-lived. I believe that captions and works are symbiotically connected, that the title and consequently the story or concept behind the work contributes to a much richer reading of it. This intellectual process helps visitors connect the visual aspect of a work to the context of ideas in which it grew, and provides in return other sensory benefits.

For me, the most salient feature in The Dowse version of Wunderrūma was the inclusion of the non-jewelers, mostly from Te Papa’s collection and the interplay of the refurbished Perspex displays. This may further explain the comparative weakness, or muteness, of the Munich show: Due to its strict lending rules, Te Papa did not allow the selected work to travel to Germany. Instead, the Te Papa pieces were replaced with New Zealand works from the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum. There was a tiki and some other historical carvings from their collection, but the contribution those works made was unable to pull the contemporary NZ work into context.

3.
At the time, the exhibition in Munich received much positive attention. There was an agreement in the Schmuck audience that Wunderrūma in Munich was a fresh revelation among the 80 or so exhibitions on offer during the 2014 Munich Jewelry Week.

The most pointed criticism I heard concerned the raw or low-tech attitudes some of the NZ makers have in their practice. Schmuck attendees, many closely involved with contemporary jewelry either as makers or collectors, are exposed to legions of technically and conceptually refined jewelry. This did not prepare them for some of the “back shed” Kiwi entries. I could understand that criticism, but I also thought that it showed an inability to appreciate how different making approaches may add to the rich cultural discourse of jewelry. 


The next location for Wunderrūma is the renovated Auckland Art Gallery, where it will open on July 17. The art gallery is handsomely nestled opposite Fingers, New Zealand’s best-known jewelry gallery, which will host a response to the Wunderrūma exhibition. Due to the large amount of space available, Auckland Art Gallery invited the curators to choose extra works from the gallery’s collections, to be added to the already large Wunderrūma selection. The jewelry will be placed in the usual clumps, presented in the same unique display formation as in The Dowse, but accompanied by a larger selection of complementary art. While before, the “fine art” inclusion was based on artists who made “jewelry-like” work, now jewelry and artworks will be clumped thematically, connecting for example floral jewelry with Old Masters containing flowers. In other situations, the connection is more peripheral and may relate to just the name or provenance of the artwork. “To some extent the accompanying artworks are used a bit in a ‘jewelryish’ way, not as totally autonomous works for themselves but applying a jewelry condition of being able to build an intimate relationship with other bodies of works that in our eyes benefit from each other,” says Karl about this new focus.

Normally I would be suspicious when curators use art work in a purely supportive role. The integrity of the artwork can be at stake, and exhibitions were curators “paint” with art, craft, or design works often end up looking like theme parks. Moreover, museums have strict rules that frame the way art can be handled and used, which can water down even further the curator’s intentions. But beside all those issues, I know that having these two keen artists-turned-creative curators at the helm may produce an exhibition we have not experienced before.

Within the first week of the Wunderrūma exhibition opening, expect all kinds of guerilla jewelry exhibitions and exciting response activities around Auckland. The activities will most probably be driven by the The Jewellers Guild of Greater Sandringham, responsible for publishing the snappy online magazine, Overview. There will be surprise infiltrations during the opening, window displays spread over town, pin swaps, fundraisers for noble causes, even small exhibitions on pathways, park benches, the Internet, tarmac, and protruding from dark drains.

The Wunderrūma name is a mix between Māori for “room” and the German “wonder,” but in Auckland it promises to become more of a wunder-fest: a hot destination for the eager jewelry enthusiast and potential new jewelry audiences.

Wunderrūma, Auckland Art Gallery: July 17–November 1, 2015

For more information on the events surrounding the exhibition, please consult Wunderweek (July 17–26) and watch for Overview #22.5.

Note from the editor: this article is a version adapted from an article originally published in Overview #18.

Ramon Puig Cuyàs is an artist from Barcelona, Spain, known for his simultaneously chaotic yet balanced compositions in jewelry. Inspired by the human spirit, Puig Cuyàs layers lines and geometric shapes with pops of color. His work has been exhibited and collected internationally, and he has taught as the head of the jewelry department at the Escola Massana since 1977.

Olivia Shih: How did this collaboration with Galerie Noel Guyomarc’h come into existence? Is this the first time you’ve curated a show for this gallery?

Ramon Puig Cuyàs: Galerie Noel Guyomarc'h has represented my work in Canada for many years and, besides my personal exhibitions, I think we had already previously collaborated on an exhibition of artists from Barcelona. It has always been a great pleasure working with Noel.

This time he asked me to propose a theme and make the selection of artists according to my criteria.

There are countless types of silences—lighthearted silences, awkward silences, furious silences, and more. In the exhibition’s introductory text, you bring up the idea of “an expressive silence, a potent silence.” Could you talk more about this type of silence?

Ramon Puig Cuyàs: Yes, it’s true: There are many forms of silence. I am referring to the silence that listens. Sometimes you have to learn to be silent, in order to listen best. When I talk about an expressive silence, I mean the silence between two words, between two sentences, between two persons conversing, and that leaves a space for reflection. A penetrating look can be more expressive than a long speech. In Spanish, it is said many times, “An image is worth more than a thousand words.” But this image must be powerful, memorable, unique, personal. If not, it will only be one more element in our contaminated visual environment.

But as I wrote in my text for the exhibition, I refer particularly to the silence necessary for the act of creation, when the artist is completely alone and facing himself and his work. At those moments, it is very important to create an inner silence that allows us to listen to ourselves, allowing us to listen to a voice that is interior and very deep. Sometimes this voice is hardly heard, sometimes it’s almost like an intuition, but we must listen. Silence is also listening to nature, to what is outside and that speaks without words.

As you stated, we now live amid extreme noise pollution, ranging from physical noise to digital informational noise. Was there a single event that inspired you to curate “silence” to counter the noise?

Ramon Puig Cuyàs: Someone said that art begins where words end. But I often have the feeling that the words and conceptual discourses are more important to the artist’s own work of art. People in the art world, sometimes they talk and talk, flooding us with information, but they forget the most important—the unique experience of listening to the artwork in silence! Silence please!!

When we cannot find the words to express, to communicate, we turn to art. Humanity has created the arts to treat what is indefinable; dance, music, poetry, movement, color, materials ... in short, humanity has created the myth, the metaphor, and the symbolic world, without rational words. For me, art is a form of communication, and in the case of jewelry, it becomes a very intimate medium. You need a complicity between the two actors, the artist and the jewelry wearer. The expressive object, the transmitter object of our ideas, our doubts, our questions, or our claims, is always the jewelry object. Conceptual discourse can never replace silent symbolic speech.

Many of the artists who are participating in this exhibition are known for their understated and contemplative works, such as Judy McCaig’s carefully considered compositions of nature and Julia Turner’s distinct blend of textile and wood. How did you decide on inviting these artists?

Ramon Puig Cuyàs: In a very spontaneous way; most of them I know personally, and some produce work that I have followed for a long time. Other younger ones, I’ve known as a professor, just as they launched their artistic careers. I wanted a selection of artists who worked coherently within the concept of the exhibition, but also in different forms. I was interested in creating a body of work that will generate dialogue. I looked for artists who have a personal and strong language, working with their hands to build an intimate world, revealing the secrets of matter and form, slowly, without haste. Artists whose work we need to approach with respect, to listen to.

Naturally there are many other jewelry artists that could be in this exhibit, but it was a problem of space.

As an artist, one often needs silence in order to converse with oneself. Do you think silence is also required for a conversation between viewer and art jewelry?

Ramon Puig Cuyàs: Of course, the viewer needs to also approach the work of art with a respectful silence, inner silence; art needs a long and silent look. The viewer can be an educated person, informed about the art world, or maybe not. It can be a person without much prior experience, but when standing before the work, like the artist, we are all alone. The only voice that we can listen to is our own voice in dialogue with the work. For me, listening to the silence means listening to others, putting it in its place, trying to understand it.

You’ve been making jewelry for nearly 50 years and have seen the slow rise of art jewelry into a sophisticated language of its own. What problems do you think art jewelry faces?

Ramon Puig Cuyàs: I discovered the world of jewelry art in the early 70s. I think in those days many of us had the idea that with our work as artists we could contribute to a social change. Transform not only the conventional concept of jewelry, but also in democratizing society, to make it more egalitarian. Change the material values for others, and generate more respect for nature and the environment. As you say, the world of jewelry has undergone a process of sophistication, and maybe these human values and philosophical ideas that were driving the history, maybe today they are blurred.

Where do you see art jewelry heading next?

Ramon Puig Cuyàs: I have no idea. I think that art is not going anywhere, and is simply here with us. It will be here when humans need to find answers to their transcendental questions. There are many pretentious art jewelry pieces, but these are background noise, banal, superficial, and vulgar. Jewelry can take new forms, new fashions, but above all, the most important is that, in the future, art jewelry can recover and strengthen its archaic and ancestral function, which was to connect with the symbolic and transcendent world. Recover the magical act when a person was given a jewel or an ornament.

I, at least, am trying it.

Thank you.

I’m happy to send you a picture of my work space, the room where I create and design my “quasi caramelle” line of jewelry. This is a very comfortable and tiny room with a table, two chairs, some books, and many varieties of paper, which is the main material I use. Together with this there are water-based paints/varnishes, water-based glues, and other eco-friendly supplies. My creative process is very simple and intuitive. I play with paper and I let myself be naturally guided by my feelings toward the final form. As you can imagine, inspiration is fundamental for me, and in this room I’m sure to always find what I need because here, magic happens.

http://quasicaramelle.mysupadupa.com/

My Mum gave me Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual for Christmas 2011. Since then, the big wedge of paper has undergone material transformation, something Perec pays particular attention to within the book’s numerous and nebulous narratives. Tiny bits of torn paper bookmark pages that I have to return to; the thinly glued spine is broken in a couple of places; and the book is adorned, in the manner of a religious text, with a textile cover from the shop of the Victoria and Albert Museum—a reproduction of a Lewis F. Day Arts and Crafts print that shows acanthus leaves swirling around small fruit trees—another gift, given to me when I finished a teaching job.

Put simply, the book is about the inhabitants of one Parisian apartment block. But it is not so much about people as about their vast network of material residue: what they have acquired, produced, collected, bought, lost, made, organized, or found. Throughout, Perec includes curious pilcrows, changes of font, and text laid out in multiple formats, from signs, diagrams, and menus to advertisements and cartes de visite.

The structure of the narrative is shaped by the distribution of the occupants in the building. We start “On the Stairs,” and are led through the lives of the rooms’ occupants—from “Rorschach,” “Bartlebooth,” and “Altamont,” who have several chapters to their names interspersed throughout the book, to “Cinoc” and “Réol,” who only merit a couple of shorter passages. Dipping back into the bookmarked pages, I am reminded of the countless stories: from the artist Hutting’s experimental salons held on Tuesdays—a litany of faddish artistic experiments and happenings of which he eventually tired—to the system the antique dealer Madame Marcia uses to circulate her acquisitions from storage to display.

Two of the principal characters, the wealthy Englishman Bartlebooth and Winckler—“prodigiously clever with his hands” and a jeweler, too—are engaged in the most incredible durational art project. After learning watercolor from scratch from one of the other characters in the book (Valène), Bartlebooth travels the world and produces watercolors of seascapes (one every fortnight) that he sends to Winckler, who glues the composition, with a specially-made glue, to a thin wooden backing (poplar plywood) that he then cuts into a jigsaw puzzle of 750 pieces. When Bartlebooth returns to Paris, he starts to complete these puzzles (one every fortnight) in order to hand them back to Winckler to be “retexturised”: the jigsaw pieces glued back together and the reconstituted image removed from its wooden backing. The watercolor would then be taken back to where it was painted, dipped in detergent, revealing a blank piece of Whatman paper. Never fully realized, the tension between puzzle-maker and puzzle-solver is the most extraordinary leitmotif throughout the book.

The book has been a constant presence in my research. The silversmith Michael Rowe initially recommended it to me after my PhD upgrade exam at the Royal College of Art. I borrowed the book from the library and, like many readers coming across Perec’s work for the first time, I felt a little confused. By the time of my final PhD examination in 2012, I had my own copy, and used one of the tales in the book to kick off proceedings. The story of Herman Fugger, an amateur chef snubbed by the hosts of a big party despite his desire to contribute one of his own “delectable” treasures, seemed fitting for the research that challenged the marginal status of amateur craft practices.

On the colophon we read a line from Jules Verne—“Look with all your eyes, look.” Perec does so with skill, showing maker, writer, and thinker alike how we might engage with the material world with depth and flair.

Annelies Planteijdt is fascinated with architectural floor plans. They reflect her way of thinking things through. She has been working on this idea for a number of years in her Beautiful City series. To this she has added a clever twist on the forms to include crystal formations. The show at Marzee will include these magical necklaces that look one way laying out flat and completely another when worn.

Susan Cummins: Can you tell us your family story? Where did you grow up and what was your childhood like? What did your parents do?

Annelies Planteijdt: I was born in Rotterdam in the Netherlands, and I grew up in Middelburg, in the southwest, not far from the sea; the sea was everywhere around. I was the firstborn of six girls. The best friends of my parents had four girls, so when we had dinner at their house or ours, there were 10 little girls, quite a feminine household.

My father was a pathologist and my mother did all kind of things, besides keeping an eye on us all. They were very much socially interested. We were a very close family and my childhood was very happy. I had my own room where I could play and “make things.”

When did you first discover you were interested in jewelry?

Annelies Planteijdt: Ever since I can remember, I have always been “making” things. At home, when I didn’t know what to do sometimes after school, my mother would say to me, “Go, make something.” I was always fascinated by jewelry, the jewelry boxes of my mother and grandmother. My other grandmother traveled a lot and always brought back, as souvenirs, jewelry of all kinds from all over the world. Then, at age 12 I started to make jewelry of silver wire and beads, and at age 15 I went to jewelry class after school. It was my mother again who discovered this course for me with Cees and Anne Mulder. At that time I wanted to study “languages” at the university, but after one year or so in the jewelry class I changed my mind and decided on jewelry. I remember my father telling me the difference between a translator and an artist. As a translator you are working with other people’s thoughts. As an artist you have to work with your own thinking. I was more attracted to the last and to the freedom it seemed to offer.

Did you study in a university program? Where did you learn to make jewelry?

Annelies Planteijdt: When I was 18 I went to the technical school for goldsmiths in Schoonhoven. After four years, one of them being a practical year at Jan Tempelman’s studio in Zutphen and Cees Mulder’s in Middelburg again, I continued at the Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. I had been longing to go there for a long time, but first wanted to learn some technical skills. To live in Amsterdam was like a dream to me. During the five years at the academy, with Onno Boekhoudt as head of the department, I met Giampaolo Babetto, who was one of the guest lecturers, and he offered me the opportunity to work in his studio for seven months. I was really happy to go to another country by myself and learn a lot from a great artist and teacher. And also to learn the language, which was still one of my fascinations. It was a great time, surrounded by art history and beautiful cities like Padua and Venice, where I went almost every week, as well as Vicenza, Milan, Turin, Bologna, Ferrara, Florence, etc. My stay in Padua is a jewel in my life.
 

Do you ever teach?

Annelies Planteijdt: I do not teach. I sometimes have talks with students about their work, but not as a regular teacher. I never developed it. From the beginning I was able to make a living from my work, with the help of grants from the BKVB foundation in Amsterdam, and I always preferred to put all my energy in my work, in order to keep it going. Really I just love being at home in my workshop and having all that time.

Where did your obsession with floor plans come from?

Annelies Planteijdt: I’d rather call my obsession with floor plans a fascination. Ever since I started to make my “own” work, I have been drawing in gold, or other materials. One moment I realized that the drawings were a projection of my thinking. Thinking is multidimensional. The projection of my thinking is two-dimensional (flat on a sheet of paper or a table), hanging is three-dimensional (gravity), and moving through time is four-dimensional.

Although thinking is multidimensional, my imagination of my work is two-dimensional. It only becomes three- or more dimensional on the body, in reality.

So the floor plans are in fact a reflection of my thinking, they are not the thinking itself, and they behave differently in real life. I see this everywhere around me in natural processes. Everything is built up of elementary particles, although you don’t notice the particles themselves. And their behavior is different in various circumstances or at another scale.

Your Beautiful City series has now added a Crystals investigation. Can you describe how you developed this new idea and what you are thinking about in the new series?

Annelies Planteijdt: The Crystals investigation emerged from earlier work. I wanted to expand, to go beyond the squares, to move out. The Crystals are not a fixed form, although you could think so. They are formed by the square they are in. The square is fixed and the Crystals adapt to the square. So the Crystals are like liquid crystals: They have the structure of a crystal, but are also liquid at the same time and circumstances. Because of this, these pieces are hard to put in their floor plan: They can move in all directions. I made relatively complex Crystals, but when they hang they fall completely in line with the squares. They appear when you put them in the floor plan, they disappear when you pick up the piece and wear it, and you can make them reappear when you put them back into the floor plan.

You can only see where the Crystals are when you look at the layers: Instead of surface there is stratification, density. Instead of being spread out they become compact in one line.

The Crystals are in a necklace what a diamond is in a ring. The square is the setting of the Crystals. They are being held by it. The Crystals are made of the same material as the floor plan—it’s just a small change in size, or color, that defines the Crystals.

You tend to use various colors on the different sections of your necklaces. How do you decide what section should be which color? Is there any significance to the choices?

Annelies Planteijdt: The choice of the colors in my pieces is made very slowly. The colored part is mostly the part that is held by the squares. There is no significance, as in symbolic meaning, in the colors. They don’t stand for anything. I choose them according to my preference and my imagination of the piece. I am looking for colors that are strong together, so they don’t lose strength or clarity opposite or next to each other. I use the pigments pure. I don’t mix them.

What do you do for fun?

Annelies Planteijdt: What I love doing for fun is having dinner with friends, or riding my bike along the river Schelde near my house (there is a beautiful bicycle path where the sea meets the river). And I am learning the Chinese language once a week, but I am not learning to speak it. I am interested in languages and challenge myself to learn about them.

There is a small place (only a few houses) on the north coast of Brittany in France where we have gone for holidays for a long time now. I always go west to the sea.

I am always dreaming about going to Amsterdam more often to visit friends, see exhibitions, and walk in town, but time flies all the time. So I find myself most of the time here at home in a very small village having time and making contacts through my work in a lot of places in the world. That is fun for me, and gives me the feeling that I am playing.

Can you recommend a book, movie, play, some music, or anything else that has struck you as worth recommending?

Annelies Planteijdt: I love reading, although I am a slow reader. What I have recently read is The Stranger by Albert Camus, Open City by Teju Cole, All That Is by James Salter, Selected Stories by Alice Munro, Monte Carlo by Peter Terrin, IJstijd (Ice Age) by Maartje Wortel, and Dagen van gras (Days of Grass) by Philip Huff.

Thank you.

After the publication of this book, Berger described that he “has never written a book with a greater sense of urgency.” This comment resonates with me to this day, as I have never read a book with a comparable level of urgency. Before starting the book itself, I was particularly drawn to its striking cover illustration: Illustrated by Peter Marlow, it has a revolutionary air of truth to it. An infinite expanse of sky stretches to the top of the book cover, with an undulating mass of gray clouds. Below, crowds of people are gathered like pilgrims, as if in an auditorium, settling down to listen to Berger’s arresting text on art and resistance.

Berger, an English writer, art critic, and a painter, is a collaborator of language and voice, looking and seeing, imagination and conscience. And this noble collaboration, for him, is never a binary affair. Rather, it is always triangular. This book was conceived as a “pocket” of resistance against the fabric of inhumanity spun by the new world economic order, in the form of compelling triangular exchanges: “coming together are the reader, me and those the essays are about—Rembrandt, dogs at dusk, an expert in the loneliness of certain hotel bedrooms.” With poetic precision, he has gathered paintings, hotel bed sheets, a crumpled paper in Rembrandt’s studio, to recount their stories on an imagined stage, before their memories are lost to the inertia of odious mainstream politics, the Internet, and reproductions.

And here is where we meet. This, as Berger’s readers know, is the quintessential title of another one of his books. And it is probably the most salient expression of the way he projects his stories. His chapters are meeting places: as tangible as Leon Kossoff’s drawing studio, or as intangible as the changing evening light in Miquel Barceló’s studio.

In the middle of a book, we meet him near the River Po, where he quiveringly outlines the contours of our destiny as “always beside, never in centre, with no clear outline.” And he invokes this through the angles and frames of a character, The River Po, as it appears in Antonioni’s film. Frida Kahlo’s paintings, today, are eclipsed by discourses on feminism or Mexican popular art. But in the chapter dedicated to the artist, he discreetly discovers in her paintings, like an epiphany, her indispensable necessity to paint on surfaces as smooth as her own skin: Masonite and metal, instead of a grainy canvas. And he goes on to describe Kahlo’s tracings on Masonite as a confession of her pain and of being sentient to all that is alive and living.

Berger thinks in climatic terms, smells with the fog, peers through pure beeswax, and writes with indelible cinematic ink. The lives and subjects evoked in Berger’s pages enact and reaffirm their appetites and delusions, allowing us to feel their presence. The presence “which has to be given, not bought.”

Jiro Kamata’s creative process is material driven. He elevates old camera lens elements to the status of jewels, creating technically exacting jewelry that is awash in color and a sense of play. His work is inspired by his travels in various parts of the world—the saturated colors of Mexico, a desert in Chile, old etchings in a German city. Here, Jiro tells us about his relationships and influences, with people, material, and ideas. His current show—dark to light to dark—is on exhibit at Gallery Funaki through August 1, 2015.

Bonnie Levine: Jiro, tell us about your background as an artist and jeweler. How did you become interested in making jewelry?

Jiro Kamata: I come from a jewelry family. My father has a jewelry shop in my hometown of Hirosaki in Japan so I grew up with jewelry, but I hated it. At that time, jewelry was for me just glittery and expensive. I really didn’t understand why people liked and bought such things. After finishing high school, though, I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to go in a creative direction, but I was 18, so I had no idea what direction to go in. One of my father’s friends informed me about the jewelry school in Yamanashi, Japan. Because I come from a jewelry family, I decided to try to study there. And then I met with my master, Okinaki Kurokawa. He was in Pforzheim, Germany, in the 70s and studied under Professor Klaus Ullrich. He taught me many things and showed me how interesting contemporary jewelry was in Germany and Europe. His work is really fantastic and I still see his inference in my work. This was the beginning of my fascination with jewelry.

Your work is so iconic, incorporating old, retired camera or sunglass lenses of various sorts in it. It’s such an ordinary material, yet so magically reinvented. What was the inspiration behind this? Have you always worked with lenses, or has your work evolved to using this material?

Jiro Kamata: The first work that I made in Germany was the Tesa Ring, in 1999, which used Sellotape and lip marks. When I made this ring, I was so fascinated to see the transformation of the material, and I realized that ordinary material can be valuable. Since then, “value” has been an important topic for me. In 2003 I made a series of five pendants from silver called Target (Marzee Collection). This is my first work with the theme of “optic” and it has been one of the main subjects of my work. The other main theme is “reflection.” Since I have been making jewelry, I have never seriously used gemstones. I didn’t want to go the classical way, and somehow it was taboo for me to use them, but this is exactly the reason why I am working with reflection. Gemstones have strong reflection, color, and mystery. In the past I thought I hated gemstones, but actually I was jealous of gemstones because of the attraction to them. In September 2015 I am going to go to Idar-Oberstein, a city in Germany famous for stone cutting, where I will be an artist-in-residence for two months, learning to work with stones. Maybe now it is time to understand them.

You call yourself a goldsmith and have said that materiality is a starting point for you. Can you tell us more about this and how materials and technique come together in your work?

Jiro Kamata: I am very proud to say I am a goldsmith. I love to work with silver and gold. I can communicate with them very well. Almost all of my pieces use silver or gold and it is an important part of my work, but I am not a classical goldsmith since I work with other materials besides gold, silver, and gemstones.

I am always looking for a new material. If I find it I am crazy about it, I touch and try everything to see what I can do. If the relationship works between the material and me, the material shows me what I should do with it. I sometimes have a feeling that I’m talking to it and it’s a wonderful moment.

You studied in Germany at the prestigious Academy of Fine Arts in Munich under the master of contemporary jewelry, Otto Künzli. What was it like to learn from such a legendary force in the field? How did he influence your work? Now that Otto is retiring, will you still stay on in your position at the Academy?

Jiro Kamata: When I started to study at the Academy, I expected to be taught by Otto, but he was not a teacher. I was a bit depressed because no one told me what I should do. But that was, of course, the wrong expectation, and one day I realized that I have to decide myself what I should do. I have to know what I want to do. This is the first thing that I learned from him. He doesn’t teach students but supports students. Maybe the biggest influence that I got from him is the mindset of an artist.

I am at the Academy until the end of this semester. I will open my new studio in August in Munich.

You’ve been in Germany a long time now—studying, living, making, and teaching—so you’re very familiar with European culture and traditions. Why did you decide to stay there? Does your native Japanese background find its way into your life and work?

Jiro Kamata: Munich is a great city to live in as a jewelry artist. A lot of things with jewelry happen here, and people come from all over the world. But the most important thing for me is friends. I’ve been in Munich for 15 years and have here all of my friends and great colleagues. Any attractive city couldn’t be really attractive without good friends—this is the reason I am staying here.

Please tell us about your various series of work—Momentopia (2008–2010), Arboresque (2010–2012), Spiegel (2011–2013), and now the BI and Palette series. How did they evolve from and influence one another?

Jiro Kamata: I made the Momentopia series when I was in Hanau, Germany, for the artist-in-residence program in 2008. It was inspired by the old etchings of the City of Hanau that look like a fisheye landscape. In 2010 I was in Mexico and was influenced by the Mexican color, architecture, tacos, tequila, and blue sky. With this wonderful experience I made the Arboresque and Spiegel series. BI came from the experience in the Atacama Desert in Chile, with an amazing sunset and, simultaneously, a full moon rising, sometime in 2013. Palette was made for special display for the exhibition Lux is the Dealer in Munich in 2015. In my work there is always a different story behind it, but somehow they are connected and cross each other.

Your current show at Gallery Funaki is called dark to light to dark. What’s your concept behind the show? What work are you presenting?

Jiro Kamata:In this exhibition I show BI pendants, brooches, and necklaces, and Palette brooches. All pieces are made with dichroic mirror, which reflects two colors in two directions and also changes the color in many different ways. The title dark to light to dark connects the effect and function of this material. On the other hand, wearing the light is also the subject of this exhibition. A piece of jewelry needs the light. We wear jewelry but in some way we wear the light on the body.

As a maker and teacher, what do you see as your role in contemporary jewelry today? Do you see jewelry as an object of value?

Jiro Kamata: I was never a teacher, and as a maker I don’t really care about my role in our field. I am making what I want to make. I am glad if my pieces can make someone happy and if someone can find value in it. And yes, for me jewelry is an object of value.

What have you seen or read lately that influenced you that you’d like to share with our readers?

Jiro Kamata: I have just come back from Melbourne, Australia. During my stay I went to Grampians National Park and saw an amazing sunrise on the pinnacle of the mountain. It was dark, cold, foggy, windy, and raining, but the amazing sunrise was waiting for us after two hours of climbing. It was one of the most beautiful and magnificent sights I’ve ever seen.

Thank you so much—it’s been great talking to you!

Hi, my name is Vinny, and I am Margaret Hilda Thatcher’s pearl necklace. I hear you! Sounds like a bleedin’ self-help support group. Well, maybe it should be, my old cocker.

It all started back in August ’53, the year of our Regina’s coronation. There I am, in Asprey, minding my own business, dreaming about one day getting the Lizzie Taylor gig, when this geezer called Denny comes in and points a digit in my general direction. Before you can say “La Peregrina,” I’m being bungled into a snazzy velvet-lined coffin and hightailed out of the gaff. A bit like, way back, when I was just a little grit. Except, this one was dry and didn’t smell of fish.

The next thing I know, I’m slapped around the neck of this bird, who’s holding a couple of bambinos. One on each tit. And I’m thinking, this could be cushty, my old son, tucked up in some dusty old jewelry box with a load of sparkly mates for company, only having to venture out at weddings and funerals to wow the relatives, occasionally.

But after a while it starts to dawn on me. This bird doesn’t act like one of those that sits at home day in, day out, keeping the dust at bay, moaning about her lot and eyeing up the tasty new postman. No, this one is always out. And wearing the trousers. Then one day, she only goes and gets a new job running the bleedin’ country. Now, the geezers who do the actual running of the country, them that always have, get her all dressed up for battle in blue twin-set fatigues, especially camouflaged for a terrain of business, selective tradition, and more business. They also manage to get the trousers off her and bung a skirt on. As a reminder of her sex, no doubt. But boy, when they say to her, “Ditch the pearls, love, as they make you look a bit posh and standoffish,” she goes off on one: (in a posh accent) “That’s the f-ing point, you numbskulls. When them toerags—sorry, I mean ‘voters’—see moi in my beads giving it some, them, not being the brightest sparks, will think I’m the queen of England, who’s come to rule over them all happy and glorious. And cos the beads make me look a bit super-soft and girly, the dumb fucks will think I haven’t got it in me to be all nasty to the poor people. As if!!!”

No. Stop. I am terribly sorry, I just can’t do it anymore. I’m going to have to stop talking in this awfully boorish faux Cockney accent. I only started using it to try and disguise who I am. So you wouldn’t recognize me and wouldn’t associate me with that … that woman. I’m just so terribly embarrassed about what I have done. I know deep down it’s not all my fault, that I didn’t have a choice, but any part I have played is still a heavy burden borne. I have witnessed first-hand the effects of my contributions to her evil agenda as she divided communities, distributed fear and loathing, drove people into the fringes of society, and dismantled the things that people had held most dear. (You, young reader, may not remember when the coal mines ground to a stop. Or when the country’s silver was sold down the river in the privatization of land, stock, and culture … And they say time heals.)

Take a look at me in all the photographs, in my exposed and exalted position, bouncing around her cold, clammy neck, powerless to escape the shackles of my clasp and/or my captor.

Forced to witness again and again how my harmless magic for emanating charm, femininity, grace, class, and softness was hijacked to deceive, to draw people in, and to sugarcoat a dark and harsher motive beneath.

I, so often a thing of gentle beauty and joyful decoration, became the dirty and deadly psychological weapon fired on an unsuspecting populace by a self-serving political elite.
 
But now the witch is dead. She has worn me, but I no longer have to wear her. I can brush off the flakes of dead Tory skin and the perfumes I never knew the names of from my lustred coat and I can once again be innocently worn by those who want me to only bring a little charm, femininity, grace, class, and softness to their own lives, I hope.

Peter Deckers is a spark plug. He has started up many conferences, organized exchanges and exhibitions, and generally speaking whipped up activities to encourage and develop the New Zealand jewelry scene. In his show at Avid Gallery, he also has created jewelry that questions value and the status quo. It is passionate work.

Susan Cummins: What does the title of your show, Deflating Standard, mean?

Peter Deckers: This title refers to my (that is, the world’s) increasing realization that our planet is accelerating toward destruction, compounded by my frustration that neoliberalism will be incapable of finding a solution.

In a statement about this exhibit, you talked about how “value is perceived, mediated and utilized” as being one of your recurring themes. Can you explain how that thread appears in this body of work?

Peter Deckers: The work for this exhibition is largely made from low-cost and/or devalued materials that have been manipulated to increase their value or significance. Most materials in this exhibition are of nominal value, from found plastics to coal; however, there is a dash of black diamond and some silver to be found. The exhibits are all pointing toward the perception of normality, all is good and positive ... business as usual.

The focus of this show is not unlike how our neoliberal society works. Neoliberalism overvalues things that in themselves have very little value. Therefore I like to use a variety of “clashing” materials that represent the perception of value. Some were chosen with a great deal of thought, and others just came through play and experimentation. I am not a purist in my design and making processes and always leave things open for chance and happy accidents. Through this process, poetic forces influence the work I produce.

Although my art process is intuitive and lyrical, the elements it taps into are not. There is an unseen and nonspecific object psychology connected to “value judgments” that can be analyzed. Most daily objects inform us about how our culture has been progressing. Each known object contains a layer of history with its own value judgment. A plastic composed pendant can be a (perceptive, conditioned) beautiful object and at the same time be ugly as a material and/or in its subject matter. This dichotomy is constantly at work for most materials and functionality. For example, I have fused bits of washed-up plastic from a Wellington beach into a ball on a chain. The composition looks beautiful, but our giant floating Pacific garbage island (also made of jettisoned plastics) is far from that. Our postmodern society looks at such issues with open eyes. The global destruction now underway can’t be hidden anymore and drastic intervention will need to happen sooner or later.

When my wife Hilda Gascard and I immigrated to NZ in 1985, we saw ourselves as “environmental refugees.” The industrial European smog, acid rain, overpopulation, and planned cruise missiles on the border of Holland made us look for a better place to live. Chernobyl had happened, so my first solo show in NZ in 1989 was therefore called Environmental Distortions. I made work based on man-made and natural disasters. It was important for me at the time to point toward environmental concerns. It was the reason for our immigration, after all. In NZ I came to realize that nature has its own increasing plan of destruction and that you cannot hide from the consequences. We all witness with increasing climate disasters that the world is on a pathway of destruction. This exhibition builds upon that in relationship to a perception of value in a more subdued fashion.

With this jewelry are you trying to increase the perception of value of costume jewelry?

Peter Deckers: To a point. The use of costume jewelry in my work plays on the fine distinctions that can be drawn between what constitutes good taste and bad taste. I find it most satisfactory that a low valued item and/or discarded materials can be reworked into a beautiful and loving object. It holds the intrinsic value of my aesthetic energy that has been formed over the years. In the end, it is that intrinsic value that remains and hopefully is passed on to an appreciative audience. I realize it is a question of judgment about how the work will be perceived in the future. However, this type of “anti-value” jewelry might not do well in the Antiques Roadshows of the future.

Common tastes of beauty, ugliness, aesthetics, and the value of provenance are all prone to cultural and historical conditionings. Our eyes and fingers can see and feel the slightest difference between material textures, shapes, etc. That information is processed in our brain through a value system filter. We all do it; we all judge. Our value system knowledge is formed by our conditioned education system, history, and culture. Value can only be compared to what we can recognize.

We do not like to be deceived or cheated. Costume jewelry has never been accepted as valuable or even being an imitation of the real. The shapes and stones are called cheap and nasty, although everything is close to the real. The dispersion and the reflection of light in glass stones is close to the dispersion in real gemstones. Our eyes can barely see that slight difference, but we perceive the two as being hugely different. This fascinates me, and I play within this weird world of value perception.

For this show I collaborated with a kumihimo (Japanese braiding) artist, Katy Corner. I responded to her colors and textures in a similar fashion to how I worked with other found materials like costume jewelry. I do not set out with any predetermined shapes, techniques, or process, and that opens up exciting adventures of discovery. After making jewelry for more than 40 years, I can proudly say that I still do not have a set way of working. I refuse to trap myself in a single direction, although I do have an “accent” in my working process that is created by my industry training. I don’t find that a very attractive “accent,” however. I believe that knowledge or focus solely based on technique kills creativity and the enjoyment of making. To keep fresh, I constantly rework my value concepts, and that provides the context that determines what my intuition needs to do.

As a tutor at Whitireia University, what do you regard as one of your most challenging assignments?

Peter Deckers: As tutors, we need to stay true to the task of nurturing the next generation of artists, and that is:

1)    not killing talent
2)    providing a creative and progressive program that is challenging and stimulating; that is student-focused; and that avoids creating a “house style”
3)    giving regular feedback that is inclusive, builds upon students’ development, is not a conversation stopper
4)    listening to the ideas and philosophies of the students and giving feedback from that position
5)    avoiding bringing into the feedback our own tastes, philosophies, and values (here I am challenged by my own value conditioning philosophy)
6)    assisting everybody who is passionate, has a vision, and is energetic.

In 2018, Whitireia Art will move to a big new building in central Wellington. We are working with an architect to make the design of the spaces fit with our philosophy. It is a challenge, because budgets, interest groups, and our philosophy do not necessarily share the same objectives.

Besides making your own work, you have been very busy with other projects. These include curating projects like Deep, Deeper Still, Jewelry Out of Context, HandStand, and HANDSHAKE. What interests you about curating?

Peter Deckers: Around 2000, I realized that not much was happening in New Zealand for emerging artists and projects that stepped outside the norm. As a good immigrant, I pioneered my own projects and fortunately managed to find sponsors, locations, and colleagues along the way to help them become a reality. This approach was not born out of ambition, but more out of necessity.

Your project called HANDSHAKE paired young New Zealand makers with well-developed jewelers from around the world. Tell us about how this worked. What were the results?

Peter Deckers: HANDSHAKE is a mentoring and exhibition project involving emerging jewelers from New Zealand being matched with their chosen idols from across the globe in mentoring roles. The project began in February 2011, with a series of (progressive) national and international exhibitions. HANDSHAKE is now in its second iteration—HANDSHAKE 2—with professional development workshops and master classes aiding the mentees in their development for exhibitions and the growth of their professional practice. Each new HANDSHAKE exhibition is progressive, and the feedback before and after gives opportunities for new thinking, making, presentation, and networking. Each HANDSHAKE project has its own website where the participants report on the progress of their research and development.

In 2016 a third HANDSHAKE project will bring together selected creative enthusiasts from the former HANDSHAKE1 and 2 projects. Next to the development of new bodies of work, HANDSHAKE 3 will also focus on collaboration in its widest sense, and will be accompanied by a fresh series of exhibitions at prestigious national and international galleries. The participants are selected through an open call, and a selection panel is built from internationally renowned experts from a variety of art practices.

It is a fine-tuning process and we have to ask if a mentorship would further the artist’s practice, whether they have the drive to take risks and experiment and to become a mentee. The project relies on the concentrated focus of each mentee, and on the relationship and knowledge of the participating mentors.

HANDSHAKE 2 is currently at Sydney’s Stanley Street Gallery as part of the JMGA 2015 series of conference exhibitions. Read more on HANDSHAKE 2here.

You also were instrumental in organizing JEMposium, an international symposium. Why did you organize this, and what issues did you hope to explore?

JEMposium was an attempt to create creative dialogue and unity among New Zealand and Australian makers. Ten years ago we had symposiums every so often, and the odd conference. They always sparked off energies and synergies. In more recent times, nothing was happening so, I created my own, by forming a steering group and finding funding for a Wellington conference. JEMposium echoes three Whitireia jewelry papers: one based on the development of ideas, one based on ideas explored through materials, and an exhibition/creative enterprise paper. These are the questions we explored through the three different topics:

1)    Ideas into materials topic:

How do processes and practices formulate creative platforms?
What are the methodologies that allow an artist to materialize an idea?
Artists introduce and discuss the different processes they use to transform theory into practice.
 
2)    Materials into ideas topic:

How do artists use innovative materials to yield unexpected ideas? Or, how do traditional materials generate extraordinary ideas?
Artists present and discuss the impact ideas and design processes have on the generation and execution of creative solutions.
 
3)    Distribution topic:

What happens with the finished product that comes from the artist’s workshop? This session examined a variety of distribution approaches:
 
a) Traditional: the role of museums, galleries, and collectors
b) Alternative: new and unusual forms of distribution, such as projects and alternative sites for jewelry presentations
c) Documentation/communication: how do critical writing, photography, Internet/blog and catalogs impact on sales and distribution of jewelry?

What do you think about the current state of international contemporary jewelry? Some people are very pessimistic. Are you?

Peter Deckers: Not where I operate from. In New Zealand, contemporary jewelry is getting stronger by the day. It is still well supported by the New Zealand arts funding agency, galleries, educational providers, and museums. These elements need to go hand in hand to make it work.

Lately the international focus has somewhat shifted away from central Europe to other countries, like northern Europe, Asia, South America, and the USA. There are two upcoming events here in New Zealand and in Australia where visionary individuals will work together to make a splash (Wunder week in Auckland and Radiant Pavilion in Melbourne).

There are, however, definitely elements of concern that are undermining those who are passionate about contemporary jewelry. Since its birth, contemporary jewelry has never been a mainstream art form and it relies therefore on strong individuals for its distribution, funding, and promotion. Those in the know are few and far between. However, the contemporary jewelry world is still in its pioneering stage and that will always attract certain passionate individuals. Unfortunately, almost nobody can make a decent living in it, and therefore those who are passionately active need to support themselves by other ways of making an income.

The international field of contemporary jewelry artists is so small that when somebody significant falls off, we instantly notice. Most pioneers in contemporary jewelry are getting old, or are dead, and we are solely relying on the next generation of enthusiasts to pick up the pieces. We regularly hear stories that some education provider in jewelry has been eliminated, some galleries have closed down, curators and writers have moved on, some collectors are getting old or have stopped collecting and others are scared to step out.

As long as there are enough passionate people driving contemporary jewelry, it will be around for much longer. Those producing sellable work, or providing training according to industry standards, might complain, but those interested in its pioneering role are still excited by its unexplored potential and the adventuresome journeys ahead.

Thank you.