Fix Fix Fix - Glenn Adamson
In 2011, the V&A mounted the exhibition Power of Making, curated by Daniel Charny and organized in collaboration with the Crafts Council. The premise of the show was simple: to build a contemporary cabinet of curiosities showcasing skillful, innovative, and ingenious making. Charny packed 108 objects into a gallery normally used to show 40 or 50; and though few of the things on view had significant name-recognition (there was no celebrity factor here), the exhibition was one of the most popular in the museum’s history.
What accounted for this enthusiasm? Doubtless, there was an element of good timing. Economic downturns tend to prompt a return to the autonomy and security that people associate with craft. The ever-encroaching world of the digital, similarly, inspires an equal and opposite attraction to solid materiality. Yet I think there was another reason for the success of Power of Making: it was a thoroughly egalitarian space. Objects were shown without any sense of hierarchy. 3D printers were shown alongside traditional dry-stone wall construction, without any implication that one of those technologies was superior to the other. The work of amateur hobbyists mixed freely with that of highly-trained professionals.
Charny’s approach in Power of Making was a real lesson for me. I have long been suspicious of purely celebratory attitudes to craft, so I did have some misgivings about the simplicity of Charny’s message, which might be summarized: making is good for you, so why not give it a try? That clarity was clearly a big part of the project’s success. But even as I have absorbed that message, for me it was the ‘super flat’ structure of Power of Making that was most influential.
Fix Fix Fix at Gallery SO, 2013. Photo: Sipke Visser
In a recent curatorial side project I attempted a response. Entitled Fix Fix Fix, the show investigated the art of repair, pursuing that theme through an associative chain of thinking.[1]Some of the objects on display were by artists, who had been asked to respond to a brief. The challenge I set was to repair an existing object, prioritizing respect for that thing rather than the expressive opportunity that found objects normally offers an artist. On my part, this was a conscious variation on the “assisted readymade” - I wanted to adhere to a professional standard of repair, which one might call “anti-expressive”. The perfect fix, after all, would restore the broken object to its original state, erasing the evidence of the repair in the process. That is only ever an ideal – even the most skilled restorer cannot turn back time – so fixing is always a matter of approximation. But even so, repair tends to erase itself, all the more so when it is done well.
With these thoughts in mind, alongside the commissioned art works in Fix Fix Fix I introduced several everyday artefacts that marked out positions in the world of repair. This was a direct application of Charny’s method of leveling the playing field. To drive the point home, I decided to withhold identification of the objects from the audience. When viewers encountered a Jeep motor in the middle of the gallery, or a set of nineteenth-century mounts that could be used to repair a piece of French court furniture, or a Japanese porcelain box skillfully mended with lacquer and gold, or the frame of a grand piano hanging in a custom-fabricated steel truss, they were not necessarily aware of the status of these objects. Were these things artworks, or not? I wanted to forestall an answer to that question, in the hope that the question itself would come to seem irrelevant.
19th century furniture mounts, lent by Arlington Conservation. Photo: Sipke Visser
Furthermore, I wanted to infuse the exhibition with a complex range of emotional tonalities. These were present in Power of Making too, if you looked hard enough, but I think that the smaller scale and tighter focus of Fix Fix Fix yielded a more intense (and possibly contradictory) psychological environment. There was certainly outright celebration in the show – not least in a video made under the aegis of Fixperts. But elsewhere in my show there were other notes struck. That bundle of furniture mounts I mentioned, displayed in a wrapping of paper and string just as I found them in storage at the restoration shop Arlington Conservation, resembled a Dada sculpture. While appropriated (by me, not by an artist) from a non-art context, it was the object in the show that most strongly suggested a Duchampian aesthetic. The Jeep motor, by contrast, evoked the world of the working-class tradesman and also another historical exhibition context, the Museum of Modern Art’s 1934 show Machine Art, which helped to introduce a taste for industrial forms that persists to this day.
Japanese porcelain box repaired using the Kintsugi method. Photo: Sipke Visser
The porcelain box indexed yet another well-established aesthetic - the reverence shown to precious ceramics in traditional Japanese culture. In that context, an object that has been broken and repaired may actually become more valuable, because a moment in its lifecycle has been enshrined. Hence the gold repair, known in Japan as kintsugi: an accident permanently fixed in a resplendent material. The piano frame, finally, I extracted from a repair project being undertaken by amateur craftsman Steven Probert. He had inherited the instrument, a grand piano made at the turn of the century by well-regarded Boston firm Mason and Hamlin, and over the course of many years has dismantled it and remade it to his own exacting specifications. The lengths to which he has gone to achieve the perfect sound are remarkable – not least, in building a steel A-frame to give himself access to all its surfaces, which he has reworked fastidiously, in-filling each nick, scrape or dent with a custom-fashioned inlay.
Detail of a piano repair project by Steven Probert. Photo: Sipke Visser
Walking around Fix Fix Fix once it was finished, I realized that I much preferred these various “non-art” objects over the works I had commissioned: they seemed to me more strange, more aesthetically intense, more provocative. This is not to say that artists cannot achieve all these qualities; just that the world already offers them, if we know where to look. As modest as Fix Fix Fix was in comparison to any V&A show, I feel that it was just as effective in outlining an ecumenical curatorial methodology, in which every object is handled equally. This methodology has become more and more common in recent years, though decorative art curators have certainly not been leading the way. It was specialists in African and Native American art who were among the first to embrace the idea that artifacts should not just be collected and explained, but rather should be given a second life through the mediating act of display. The anthropologist Alfred Gell, for example, was deeply impressed by the exhibition Art/Artifact, curated by Susan Vogel for the Museum for African Art in New York, and particularly her decision to display a hunting net (made by the Zande people of Central Africa) tightly baled and set in the middle of a white cube gallery, looking for all the world as if it were a piece of contemporary art. Gell’s response to this gesture was an article entitled “Vogel’s Net: Traps as Artworks and Artworks as Traps,” which argued for an ecumenical approach in which objects are were shown not according to a pre-existing category (fine art, craft, ethnographic material), but rather their potential to ensnare the audience in a web of interpretative implication. All objects that are “vehicles of complicated ideas,” he wrote, including things like hunting nets that are ostensibly “pragmatic and technical” in nature, could be equally regarded as suitable objects for aesthetic and conceptual interpretation: “I would define as a candidate artwork any object or performance that potentially rewards such scrutiny because it embodies intentionalities that are complex, demanding of attention and perhaps difficult to reconstruct fully.”[2]
Reconditioned Jeep motor on display in Gallery SO. Photo: Sipke Visser
This idea of the difficult but entrancing object now runs rampant through museums of all kinds. As mentioned above in relation to Power of Making, the early modern cabinet of curiosities has become a common point of reference for curators. Objects are increasingly presented in a way that emphasizes their potential to enchant. This does not necessarily mean doing away with explanation entirely (though it may entail something as radical as that), but it does mean that curators are thinking about the affect of their displays on other registers. Their own craft of exhibition-making is more akin to the performance of a magician than the detailed report of an anthropologist.
Such currents in museology may be the latest thing but they are also a return to older ways of thinking, which tries to correct for some of the weaknesses of twentieth-century display methods. For most of its history, the avant garde has suffered from a degree of hypocrisy, in that it espouses radical politics while in practice establishing itself as an exclusive elite. Museums that collect and display material culture are equally guilty: they pretend to the values of progressive universal education, but in fact tend to reinscribe existing patterns of power and prestige. The problem that besets both of these approaches is their pretension to neutrality - as if one were gaining direct access to an artist’s ideas or an object’s history. A truly democratic approach to curating will, instead, clearly express its own status as a form of authorship. Curators must recognize that their trade always involves acts of appropriation, in which meaning is ascribed and produced, not merely communicated.
This post is adapted from Glenn Adamson’s forthcoming essay ‘Handle With Care: Object Encounters in the Museum,’ which will be published in Giorgio Riello, ed., Writing the History of Material Culture (Bloomsbury, forthcoming in 2013).
[1]Fix Fix Fix was on view at Gallery SO, a small but beautiful brick-walled space (a former mercer’s storehouse, as it happens) in the East End of London, from 14 February to 24 March, 2013. Here I would like to acknowledge the contributions of Christopher Thompson Royds and Felix Flury in the conception and execution of the project, and the many lenders to the exhibition.
[2]Alfred Gell, “Vogel’s Net: Traps as Artworks and Artworks as Traps,” Journal of Material Culture 1/1 (1996), p. 36, 37; see also Gell, “The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology,” in Jeremy Coote and Anthony Shelton, eds, Anthropology, Art and Aesthetics (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992); and Glenn Adamson, Invention of Craft (London: V&A/Bloomsbury, 2013).
Glenn Adamson is Head of Research at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Dr. Adamson is co-editor of the triannual Journal of ModernCraft, and the author of Thinking Through Craft (Berg Publishers/V&APublications), an anthology entitled The Craft Reader (Berg, 2010), and the forthcoming book The Invention of Craft (Bloomsbury/V&A, 2013). His other publications include the co-edited volumes Global Design History (Routledge, 2011) and Surface Tensions (Manchester). He was the co-curator for the V&A exhibition ‘Postmodernism: Style and Subversion, 1970 to 1990’ (September 2011 to January 2012) and 'Fix, Fix, Fix' at Gallery SO (February - March 2013).