http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/16/garden/16craft.html?_r=1
Furniture Takes a Manly Turn
By PENELOPE GREEN
Published: September 15, 2010
JOOST VAN BLEISWIJK, a 34-year-old Dutch designer, makes domestic objects
like clocks and candlesticks, chessboards and china cabinets out of Cor-Ten
(otherwise known as "weathering") steel that he sets outside his Eindhoven
studio for a month or so, until it accrues a nice coat of rust.
He used to make shiny, highly polished pieces that gleamed like prerecession
bling, or a Manhattan skyscraper built before the crash. Then he became
interested in tougher, grittier finishes, and he's been playing with the
weather ever since.
"Small raindrops and lots of wind looks best - who knows why?" Mr. van
Bleiswijk said recently, speaking by cellphone outside a restaurant in his
hometown. Soon, he said, he'll be working his pieces over with a blowtorch.
His goal, he said, is to "do even heavier metal, and do it even more rough.
I think, in this time, people are bored with too-perfect things."
Thwack! So much for lacy Tyvek garlands, corseted velvet chairs and
Swarovski crystal chandeliers. Or delicate Black Forest woodland imagery -
indeed, anything that smacks of embroidery or the gentle arts is for
sissies. So are teddy bear chairs, or even high-tech chairs designed with
computer software and in materials hatched in a test tube.
Rough-looking furniture that carries a whiff of shop class, handmade by guys
who have their own power saws - and know how to use them - is design's new
tack. Art is a many-gendered thing, but right now it is emphasizing the
influence of the Y chromosome.
"Butch craft" is how Murray Moss, the canny marketer and former fashion
entrepreneur, describes the work of Mr. van Bleiswijk and others, which he
has collected in an enticing show that opened Wednesday night at Moss, his
SoHo store. It has a "rough-hewn, virile and heavy-lifting aesthetic," Mr.
Moss said, albeit one that is sensitively rendered or considered, a nod to
the history and semiotics of the word "butch." ("Make Me," reads the
invitation, illustrated by a photo of a shirtless and ambiguously gendered
individual wielding an ax. We'll get to the queer-studies stuff later.)
There are boiled-leather vases cinched with wing nuts and riven by brutalist
steel shafts made by Simon Hasan, a British designer. The undulating shapes
look like the bubbling lines of an R. Crumb drawing. Mr. Hasan uses a
technique once deployed to soften and shape the thick hides for medieval
body armor; in a photo on his Web site, he wears a smithy's apron.
The "keel tables" by Oscar Magnus Narud, a Norwegian designer, have gutsy
iron legs you whack in yourself with a mallet provided by Mr. Narud. He said
he liked the idea of making furniture that was resilient and utilitarian;
furniture you could fix yourself, and even if it was chipped wouldn't be
ruined.
"I'd been looking at old Norwegian pieces that are put together with little
fixings," said Mr. Narud, who works in London, sharing studio space with his
Royal College of Art pal, Peter Marigold. "A lot of pegs and wedges and
things like that that are very simple but make a very sturdy piece of
furniture." It is in contrast, he noted, to super-modern, super-slick
furniture whose value would plummet if its precious veneer were to be
nicked.
Mr. Narud, who was speaking by cellphone, passed the phone to his studio
mate, Mr. Marigold, whose stunning, blood-red tables and benches dominate
the show at Mr. Moss's store. Made during a two-month residency in Norway,
they were inspired by the electricity pylons dotted about the woods. Mr.
Marigold used a circular saw and a single piece of wood to put together the
tough-looking, archly artless pieces, which resemble the objects in a Philip
Guston painting: the wood grain has been punched up with a sand blaster;
brass screws are lined up, sort of.
"I think today people are very suspicious of a certain kind of ornament," he
said. "Like when I see laser cut, I think that's just lazy design. This kind
of restraint" - restraint being the quality he was assigning his own and
other semi-tough pieces - "is important because you try to focus on the idea
rather than the form. I think things that are well finished should come from
industry. For me to make something that's smooth and shiny would take a lot
of unnecessary effort that I think would distract from the content. The
'butchness' is a focusing of my effort rather than a lack of focus."
Mr. Marigold is no mere art school theorist, however. He has serious craft
cred and can wield a power saw with the best of them. Tellingly, he recalled
a conversation he had recently in a pub about English schools and how, he
said, "If you're creative and vaguely intelligent, you're pushed into doing
art, but if you are - how can I put this? - a bit thick, you're pushed into
doing craft."
You mean, like shop?
"Yeah, basically," he said. "That's what the troublemaking kids ended up
doing, and that's what I wanted to do. But I got pushed into doing art."
Butch craft, as imagined by Mr. Moss, can also include nonfunctional work:
four-foot tall, broken-plane pieces made from Sheetrock by Aaron Raymer, a
soft-spoken sculptor from Louisville, Ky.
Drywall is pretty butch. Certainly, handling the utility knife to slice it
up is.
Mr. Raymer, who used to make mechanical, machine-driven pieces, had been
installing Sheetrock for years before he realized he could use the stuff for
his own work. Last May, he was part of a team putting up drywall in Mr. Moss's
store when he caught the eye of the boss: "I said, 'That guy is really good,'
" Mr. Moss recalled.
Mr. Raymer let him know that was no stranger to Sheetrock. "It's kind of
strange to think of this," he said the other day. "But it always seems like
I apply a blue-collar trade approach to the art world. A lot of that comes
from being in the labor force for a long time." (Mr. Raymer, a stay-at-home
dad, is 32; he received his M.F.A. from N.Y.U. in 2008.)
When Mr. Moss showed Mr. Raymer's work to a reporter, he said, "Doesn't it
just put you right in the construction site, and there's dust all over and
everyone is wearing hard hats?"
DO tough times call for tough work? "Do people want to be reminded of tough
times?" asked David McFadden, chief curator and vice president of the Museum
of Arts and Design in Manhattan. "A real collector might want pieces that
carry the voice of right now."
But he added, "If you are looking for a functional piece of furniture, you
may not want to see rough screws."
Butchness, he continued, is in the eye of the beholder. "One man's butch is
another man's femme. We attribute certain characteristics to design
objects - they are clues to personality, but not the whole Freudian session.
Marigold's work is an example of the juxtaposition of the extremely refined
with the extremely crude. It's the design version of the raw and the
cooked."
The fathers of butch furniture could be said to be makers like Paul Evans,
fomenters of the studio craft movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Or Tom Dixon
in the 1980s.
Mr. Moss draws a line back to a "bowl" made with a slice of an iron I-beam
by Enzo Mari around 1957. (Mr. Moss's own I-beam bowl is in his shop this
week.) "The toughness is there in the material," he said. "And in the
banality, the humbleness of the material. And yet the elegance is truly
evident."
For the last 10 years, said Paul Johnson, a gallerist in New York who
represents Mr. Hasan, the boiled-leather man, as well as vintage work by Mr.
Evans and other '70s-era craft types, "design has been very futuristic, very
flashy. I think what's happened in the world has allowed the artists who
make more affordable things with their hands to gain market share over
someone who has to spend a ton of money to get their work produced."
He continued: "It's sweat equity. Some of these things take months to make.
The first couple can take a year. That's what I've always liked about this
kind of work: it's time and the hand, plus you get something that can't be
made again."
As Mr. McFadden observed: "People are really eager to experience process,
and something tangible. We live inside our heads so much. There's a
sensuality to these designs, and it's not in terms of comfort, but in a more
basic, instinctive sense. The other part of marketing contemporary design is
that everyone is looking for a younger audience of collectors. I think the
butch craft design definitely has a resonance with a younger person. There's
a humor or a whimsy to the phrase - it sounds cool."
Andrew Wagner, editor of ReadyMade magazine and a former editor of American
Craft magazine, put out by the American Craft Council, described Mr. Moss as
"a master marketer."
He added, ruefully: "What the old school craft world needs is a Murray Moss.
It needs a Moss to step up and come up with the language. Murray has an
amazing knack of taking stuff that's pretty far out there and making it come
to life. What he's showing now, and what these guys are doing, is nothing
new, it's been happening for decades. But people got caught up in production
furniture, and this idea of making it yourself kind of got lost and kind of
stale."
In an era defined by an appetite for "conspicuous authenticity," to borrow a
phrase from Andrew Potter, author of "The Authenticity Hoax: How We Get Lost
Finding Ourselves," out this year from HarperCollins, it's easy to be
cynical. Butch Craft could be an arts collective in Bushwick, or maybe a
Viking metal band, the phrase peppered with umlauts, or a reclaimed-wood
furniture collection produced by bearded hipsters.
Feh, Mr. Moss swatted the idea away. "This isn't an inelegant going back to
the rough gesture," he said. "It's not a guy going out and making a bed of
antlers. It's a progression toward a very elegant gesture. It's just that
the materials have this toughness and are an alternative means of giving an
art content form and expression in a functional object."
What he means is that his artists have thought hard to present rough. Which
leads us back to "butch," a term hatched years ago by the lesbian community
to describe a kind of hyper-maleness: a woman's performance of masculinity,
as queer theorists like Judith Halberstam, a professor of gender studies at
the University of Southern California, and author of "Female Masculinity,"
will point out.
"It's an old term, but it's still brimming with meaning," Ms. Halberstam
said recently. "Today, I would define it as a counter-gender identity."
Mr. Moss would agree. "I thought about this a lot," he said. "I used the
term 'butch,' versus 'masculine' or 'tough' or 'manly,' because what I mean
by this is work that is stereotypically considered manly, but expressed by a
personality that is stereotypically considered sensitive or feminine."
In other words, an artist.