Robert Smit, Sleeping Beauty, c.1990, gold, from the Marjan and Gerald Unger collection

One of the big news stories from across the Atlantic has been the significant donation of almost 500 pieces of jewelry from the Marjan and Gerald Unger collection to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. (To read more about the donation, click here.) Marjan Unger, a leading authority on Dutch jewelry, has among other things published a book called Het Nederlandse Sieraad in de 20ste eeuw (Dutch jewellery in the 20th century), which unfortunately is not yet available in an English translation. One of the notable things about the Marjan and Gerald Unger collection is its obvious agenda in relation to Dutch jewelry history, what the Rijksmuseum press release somewhat cryptically describes as an ‘academic approach’. AJF was keen to find out how Unger’s collecting activities were affected by her scholarly interests, so we asked her to summarize how she approached Dutch jewelry in her book.

Van den Eersten en Hofmeijer, Pendant, 1920s, gold, amber, from the Marjan and Gerald Unger collection

One of my problems is the term ‘contemporary jewelry’. Every piece of jewelry is contemporary if you place it in the light of its time. In the Netherlands we use the term modern jewelry a lot – same point to make.

One of the reasons I wrote my book is that is was a standard notion amongst ‘our kind of people’ that before the late sixties no jewelry worth any attention at all was produced in the Netherlands, and that those modern jewelers emerged very unexpectedly from nowhere at all. The fact is that information of the work of the jewelers before then was so repressed that it seemed to belong to the stone age – a pun of mine in several respects.

Chris Steenbergen, Rope Skipper, 1954, silver, gold, from the Marjan and Gerald Unger collection

So I started digging and unearthing makers and their work. I was so happy with everything interesting I found from the first six decades of the twentieth century, that I used it all. I needed it to create a timeframe and set out cultural developments, which are sometimes very specific to the Netherlands, certainly where jewelry is concerned.

One of my main targets was to define a certain Dutch mentality towards adorning the body, with jewelry and clothes, and to analyze social structures and behavior that is typical for the Low Countries. A backbone of my research was a professional magazine that appeared in 1875 and has continued to be published until now. In fact, I created a multi-disciplinary approach, including social, economic and political developments, and I relied a lot on the history and the theory of fashion.

Joseph Citroen, Brooch, c.1963, gold, pearls, from the Marjan and Gerald Unger collection

In such an approach, all kinds of jewelry play their part. I’m talking about real jewels – that means lots of diamonds and pearls in the Netherlands, as well as popular jewelry, folk dress, fashion related jewelry, and the work from independent gold-and silversmiths and jewelry makers.

When I reached the late sixties and seventies, I did not change this approach. I talked about the ‘modern jewelry’ but I kept looking at the other kinds of jewelry too, the work of the traditional jewelers, etc. And one of the things I found out is that the group of designers that we like to call avant-garde are more often than not a few years behind the cultural developments that they claim to be part of.

Paul Derrez, Pills, c.1997, synthetic, metal, from the Marjan and Gerald Unger collection

Most of the well-known jewelers from the gallery-circuit were not so happy with this, but they have mostly looked if they were in my book and how often they were mentioned. I got a lot of good comments from historians and people who are interested in jewelry from many different perspectives. They could find a lot that was not described before the publication of my research.

Recently Unger received a doctorate from the University of Leiden. Her thesis, titled ‘Jewelry in Context’, extends the approach she developed in her book about Dutch jewelry in the twentieth century, and argues for a multi-disciplinary approach to the study of jewelry that will avoid the ‘misconceptions and tunnel vision’ that have, in Unger’s opinion, afflicted most writing on the subject. (You can read about her research by clicking here.) And if you want to know more about her ideas, click here to read Margriet Soper’s account of a recent conversation with Unger.

Egyptian revival brooch, nineteenth century. Photo courtesy Tadema Gallery, London.

There’s nothing we here at AJF love more than a good jewelry conference. The chance to travel, to hear intelligent talk about jewelry, and the opportunity to wear jewels all the time and not seem out of place is a trifecta we find it hard to resist. On 15 May 2010 the Association for the Study of Jewelry and Related Arts (ASJRA) will be hosting their fifth annual conference in New York. Called ‘One More Time: Jewelry Fakes, Revivals, Recycling and Reproductions’, the conference is dedicated to the weird and wonderful tales of fakes, frauds and fantasies that give jewelry history its particular sparkle. (To learn more about the conference, and view the program, click here.) AJF member Ursula Ilse-Neuman is one of the speakers, and Charon Kransen, also a member of AJF, will be onsite with his extensive collection of contemporary jewelry books and catalogues.

AJF asked Elyse Zorn Karlin, one of the directors of the ASJRA, if she could tell us a little more about why they chose this particular theme.

Why the topic? Well, probably several reasons. One is that Yvonne Markowitz and I are always trying to find an area of jewelry history that has not been covered in a conference. For us the reason we have conferences is to provide useful and provocative information that is as interesting to the novice collector as it is to a jewelry historian or decorative arts scholar or an appraiser. Secondly, for those interested in jewelry history this is a very relevant topic . . . there are always historic revivals, reproductions, and outright fakes in the marketplace of ancient and antique jewelry. For example, there have been many Egyptian revivals throughout jewelry history. Yvonne, being an Egyptologist, is attuned to the subject of revivals.

And recycling, though we might think of it as contemporary jewelers using recycled materials in an effort to be “green”, is not a new subject. We have always had in antique and period jewelry what we call “marriages” . . . a piece of an old jewel incorporated into a new one. In fact, that’s what makes intact antique jewelry valuable . . . that it has managed to remain intact—that the relative a jewel was left to didn’t re-design a piece or change the stones.

We chose the speakers we did because they are some of the most knowledgeable and expert on the subjects we wanted to cover. We strive to have scholars and authors speak at our conferences on subjects they know well. And Yvonne and I are speaking on some fun subjects . . . several famous hoaxes involving gold and diamonds (fakes) and the famous theft from The American Museum of Natural History in the 1960s . . .

The conference costs $210, and you can register by contacting Elysa Karlin at ekarlin@usa.net. There is also an additional study day limited to 25 participants, which includes visits to the studios of Jamie Bennett, Tom Herman, Pat Flynn and Jennifer Trask, as well as a behind-the-scenes tour of the Samuel Dorsky Museum at the University of New York/New Paltz, as well as a tour of the Metals department with Jamie Bennett.

Jennifer Cross Gans

While all eyes were on the speakers at the 2010 SNAG conference in Houston, here at AJF we managed to spend a little bit of time scanning the crowds for notable jewelry sitings. These portraits were taken by our very own answer to Annie Lebovitz, AJF member Jennifer Cross Gans. And if you have any photographs of jewelry-wearing conference attendees, please send them in so we can post them in our Gallery of Good Gems.

Jillian Moore’s shoulder was a perch for Wurmiz, a Star Wars-like creature crafted in foam, epoxy, pigment and metal spines.

Satomi Kawaii wore a necklace in copper and pigment.

Marjorie Schick had fun with two puzzle necklaces from Wal-Mart, and a pin swap pin by AJF member Mike Holmes.

Marjorie Simon, who had an exhibition of her work at the conference, showed off a black Perspex flower pin.

Harriete Estel Berman, the Queen of Tin, wearing her latest Flower Pins.

Linda Savineau, who flew from Belgium to attend the SNAG conference, sported her green acrylic neckpiece at the closing night party.

Lena Vigna

A recent post on the AJF blog dealing with the current embrace of luxury and excess in contemporary jewelry talked about Lena Vigna’s exhibition Adornment and Excess: Jewelry in the 21st Century at the Miami University Art Museum. (To read this post, click here.) Lena Vigna sent us the following reflections on the question of decadence, and how the jewelry in her show tackles the question of excess – and the potential complicity of contemporary jewelry in the production and circulation of luxury.

Kathy Buszkiewicz, Omnia Vanitas IX, 18 carat gold, U.S. currency and black pearl

Considering the work featured in Adornment and Excess within the context of decadence seems particularly appropriate. In organizing the exhibition, I deliberately incorporated those dealing with consumption, luxury and excess on multiple levels – as it relates to jewelry and also as it relates to capitalist consumerism. In the Western world (speaking very generally) there are a lot of “things” - objects made, consumed and discarded. As I wrote in my catalogue essay:

The current global economic crisis forefronts concerns about luxury, consumption and excess. The residue of this unrest, perhaps on a psychological more than material level, coupled with the broader conversation regarding natural resources and consumer production, necessarily and significantly impacts the metaphorical construction of wealth, power and status. All of these art jewelers address this topic and weave a web that connects past and present, social dynamics and body adornment. They engage in considerations of material and metaphorical meaning and their address of the concepts of “luxury,” “consumption” and “excess” are fluid and dynamic.

emiko oye, The Duchess 2 from “My First Royal Jewels Jewellery Collection 2008”, 2008, repurposed LEGO®, rubber cord and sterling silver

Gemstones and the history of jewelry as a signifier of luxury (and decadence) are ever present in this conversation. Those who take on the topic of luxury via the context of history (such as Yevgeniya Kaganovich, Kimberlie Tatalick, Erin Rose Gardner, The Opulent Project, Yael Friedman and emiko oye) do so without using luxurious materials. For example, Erin Rose Gardner uses mass-produced “diamond” engagement rings that are compelling yet disturbing and that link the conversation about capitalism to feeling and emotion – so many rings, so much manufactured sentiment. emiko oye’s LEGO neckpieces based on royal jewelry are exaggerations of their antecedents (their largesse addressing the decadence  of the original gemstones in a tongue-in-cheek kind of way).

Erin Rose Gardner, Pink Things (brooch), 2009, silver, enamel paint and steel pin back

Several of those involved with this exhibition are dealing with material “excess” as it is reflected in the reuse and repurposing of objects already made, bought, sold or discarded – a fact that ultimately brings us back to what luxury could mean even beyond the context of jewelry (as it relates to the amount of what is produced and the amount of what is cast away). These artists investigate and draw attention to capitalist practices and their material choices not only echo an embrace of non-precious materials by decades of jewelry makers but also reinforce the prevalence of available material in a material-driven culture. In my catalogue essay I wrote:

New objects are being created but – either through choice of material or mode of production – they confront the very existence of the volume of other objects being produced daily across the globe. By changing the flow of goods (recovering some materials, renegotiating the space within which the jewelry operates), this jewelry highlights current critical conversations of sustainability, wealth and social status and personal responsibility.

However, the conversation with “excess” does not end there. Within a modern Western context, jewelry can be inexpensive and fashionable or very expensive (and, perhaps, still connected to fashion). Yet, its relationship with notions of excess can extend beyond cost or number to form and design. What is excessive, opulent and ostentatious today? How does the manipulation of materials and content effect concepts of ornament and display?

Meg Drinkwater, Necklace, 2007, resin, found costume pearls, laser cut vellum and paint

For example, Meg Drinkwater creates necklaces and earrings comprised of found costume jewelry. There is a doubling of excess here, both the actual accumulation of multiple gold and pearl necklaces and the mimicking, in the form of costume jewelry, of luxurious materials. As I put it in the catalogue for Adornment and Excess, ‘Her rescue and re-use of the found jewelry is made all the more poignant when we consider that for all that she rescued there is still that much more out there. The conglomerations and piles of chains are simultaneously appealing and unsettling…some pieces are encased in resin as if the “preciousness” of these discarded goods needed to be preserved . . .’

Anya Kivarkis, Rebecca Miller Academy Awards, (2 part brooch), 2008, silver and auto paint

Others such as Anya Kivarkis directly connect jewelry to value, status, image, luxury and decadence. The brooches and earrings in her Vanishing Point series address the ambiguity of status as a social construct. From my catalogue:

Kivarkis’ jewels – of silver, white gold and auto paint – are representations of million dollar objects as conveyed via image – details are obscured and turned into flat spaces, necklaces and earrings are rendered as the light captures them, with areas obscured and imperfectly translated. Lavish adornment becomes silhouette and diminished form. Throughout much of her recent work, Kivarkis has asked questions about the context of jewelry as an object of creative construction, as an outgrowth of personal taste or aspiration and as a mode of communication – luxury is always viewed through the lens of a question and, by implication, the culture and people who define it.

Ethical Metalsmiths, Radical Jewelry Makeover, various sites, 2007-2009

And, yes, there is a tension in this investigation. The abundance of objects are the result of someone’s labor at one level or another – it is not as if this particular group of artists, as whole, is calling for a revolution of capitalism or a complete restructuring of the whole system (whether that is good or bad). They do seem, however, to be self-aware of their role and the potential power of the conversation they could raise. Both Gabriel Craig and the Ethical Metalsmiths take on the intersection of luxury, decadence and materiality in a way that engages the community-at-large and directly undercuts contemporary mechanisms of consumer culture – their projects reiterate the importance of handmade jewelry (and, consequently, other handmade goods) and play on the idea of jewelry as an object of exchange as well as carrier of meaning on multiple levels. Here’s how I describe this in my catalogue essay:

Gabriel Craig, Pro Bono Jeweler performance, Richmond, VA, 2008

In order to provide a vernacular context for handmade jewelry, Gabriel Craig has taken his “studio to the street” for performances that involve dialogue, jewelry production and exchange. Craig’s performance series developed from the recognition that jewelry production is not common knowledge and that the cultural value of jewelry could and should be stressed to a broad public… Not only does he provide insight into a studio process, but he also makes a practice of giving away his work… Craig’s actions undercut practices of consumption and challenge ideas of luxury. His efforts – and, by association, the value associated with it – operates beyond a culture of capitalism while still commenting on it.

Driven to “educate and connect people with responsibly sourced materials,” Ethical Metalsmiths has conceptualized and organized community-based projects under the title of “Radical Jewelry Makeover.” The public is asked to donate their unwanted jewelry (basically, to mine their own homes) to volunteer jewelers and metalsmiths who will use this “excess” to construct new jewelry objects. The new jewels are exhibited and offered for sale. Providing not only a framework in which to understand the mining of resources for jewelry but also a new framework in which to consider material consumption, the Radical Jewelry Makeover events highlight resourcing, process, technique and creativity…The end product is not just the tangible objects – brooches, rings and necklaces that combine past and present – but also the sense of community engendered in the process and the renewal of cast-off objects.

Yael Friedman, White Elephants, 2008, constructed paper

This jewelry develops a new strategy for defining decadence – one concerned with material value, certainly, but also volume and context. They are in concert with larger conversations that affect people across economic lines and social status.

Jillian Moore

Rachel Timmins, I Want To Be A Gold Lobster With Blue Puffs, 2009, found fabric, wool yarn, copper, thread, Poly-Fil stuffing, found gloves, 19 x 12 x 4 inches each

A few weeks ago the Society of North American Goldsmiths (SNAG) held their annual conference in Houston, Texas. (To visit the website of SNAG, click here.) This is a major event in the American contemporary jewelry calendar, and an opportunity to take the pulse of the jewelry scene. AJF is lucky to be able to publish this report by American contemporary jeweler Jillian Moore, who found herself wondering, what’s in a name?

While attending this year’s SNAG Conference in Houston, a chronic nagging question was amplified. What, exactly, is it that I do? In passing conversations I never seem to be able to explain it to any acceptable degree without endless digressive hurdles. In the simplest terms I set out with the word “jewelry” though even this is a personal conversational concession. The litany of descriptors we can now alter jewelry with can leave a person breathless – art jewelry, contemporary jewelry, sculptural jewelry to name a few. Casual conversations always include “no, I don’t make that kind of jewelry”. And when I start using phrases like “abstract life forms” and “composite resin” people’s faces screw into frustration. When I’m feeling less motivated I just say “I make jewelry out of plastics . . . various plastics”. But it feels condescending both to whomever I’m speaking with, and what it is I like about my work. I’ve spent nine years and borrowed tens of thousands of dollars for two degrees – a BFA with the words “Metalsmithing and Jewelry Making” at the end and an MFA with the alternate “Jewelry and Metal Arts” attached. But I find none of this mixing and matching of terminology to be of any help when trying to actually articulate what it is I do with all of my time.

Nick Mullins, Brooch 2, 2009, resin, wood, paint, 6 x 4 x 2 inches

During a late night conversation with several other attendees in Houston, all friends from the now ubiquitous world wide web, we started talking about our personal beefs with the current state of affairs in the field. “The field” itself is so difficult to pin down, that I find myself returning to a chart in Oppi Untracht’s irreplaceable book Jewelry Concepts and Technology which reads like a sprawling family tree, and in the nearly three decades since its inception that family tree has sprouted innumerable new branches. It became clear that all of us felt like we were outside of some magic circle of inclusion either due to the long tired misnomer of SNAG itself, or the content of the conference, or our exclusion from the various exhibitions that were taking place. I found myself wondering how I had gotten to this point when only a few years prior I had felt so completely “in the fold”. I have not outwardly rejected conference attendance like many close friends and colleagues, but I’ve begun to feel more and more like a tourist. It’s still very much of interest, but my personal level of investment is becoming tenuous. With the sudden resurgence in efforts to change the name itself – Society of North American Goldsmiths – and unload all of its ponderous, colonial sounding exclusory baggage, I can’t be the only one having this dilemma.

For me, the shift came when I began electroforming vessels rather than hammer forming them, and spray painting rather than enameling due to structural problems and kiln size limitations. From there it was only a matter of time before the metal itself became secondary to any material that might solve the problem. Knowing that I would soon be out of the academic context and setting up a studio in my home only hastened the transition. This puts the death of my “metalsmithing” career somewhere in the fall of 2007 when I finally traded electroforming for foam and composite resin. Oh, I may dabble in copper still, fabricating elements for the foam and composite resin pieces, but I tend to bury them under layers of paint and epoxy resin to the point of being unrecognizable. I am very aware that this is a decades old debate in our field, and that artists working in alternate materials have been well accepted. But again, the language we use in our field and what is chosen to be held up as the shining example can be a powerful tool to marginalize that work which still falls outside of “metalsmithing”.

As a result, the last couple of conferences have left me with a strange disassociated feeling. Thankfully this year there were a few shows and many notable artists who’ve also decided to stop worrying about neat little linguistic lines and just make challenging work. Transmutations: Materials Reborn, curated by Susan Kasson Sloan and shown by the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, featured work in plastics, though I didn’t know this on my first round. The work spoke more about form, color, and experimentation to me than of what we tend to expect with the word “plastic”. Any exhibition that typically addresses “new” materials, and in particular plastics, tends to look more like someone raided the costume department of some low budget sci-fi movie but without all of the camp and whimsy that might actually make it palatable. Instead there was new work from personal favorites Natalya Pinchuck, Masako Onodera, and Masumi Kataoka. There were also many artists I wasn’t yet familiar with, like Lin Stanionis, Rebecca Hannon and Susanne Klemm, whose work I’d either never gotten to see in person or had simply never encountered, which was such a wonderful surprise at a SNAG Conference.

I also really enjoyed the exhibition Extreme Beauty, curated by Kim Cridler at the Glassell School of Art. Not so much new names as work I’d never get to see up close and personal, especially given that I’m tucked away here in Iowa – Karl Frisch, Gijs Bakker, Andrea Wagner, and Constanze Schreiber to name just a few. More importantly, there was work I wouldn’t have expected to see at a SNAG conference, which is typically dominated by student work and a finite number of “approved” artists mostly from within our geographic borders. This means a vast number of international artists are unseen at SNAG even if they are very well-represented by US galleries. I regret that I was shooed out of the Museum of Fine Arts after the Exhibition in Motion and missed the other work on display there. From what I’ve heard and images I’ve seen it would have been very enjoyable.  Had I known, I would have ducked out on the “bustier” portion of the Exhibition in Motion. I’ve since read that the fashion students selected pieces to design around, but it resulted in the segregation of wearable work in two camps. And the first camp was not interesting unless you were inclined to attend fancy dress balls in parking garages. Again this is just my personal opinion and I mean no hostility toward fancy dress balls or parking garages in general. The work in the second half was more conscious of the body, and seemed to contain the more fully realized work making it, I would assume, difficult to comfortably spin off a fashion piece.

Rachel Timmins, I Want To Be A Unicorn, 2009, copper, 24k gold leaf, sterling silver, craft glitter, chemical bonding, ribbon, patina, horn: 7 x 3 x 3 inches; hoofs: 4 x 6 x 7 inches each

With regard to current student work, only a few artists have stayed with me. This doesn’t mean that the student work this year was necessarily uninteresting, simply that I had become so oversaturated I’ve come to notice the names that didn’t shake loose with time. These two students – Rachel Timmins who is a graduate student at Towson University, Maryland, and Nick Mullins, a graduate student at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana – were not only a nice change from the current frenzied mining of historical ornament, but also a break from the dry, humorless autobiographical work that seems to be the loudest counterpoint on offer. At Extremities: Exploring the Margins of the Human Body, juried by Andy Cooperman, I found two pieces by Rachel Timmins: I Want To Be A Gold Lobster With Blue Puffs, and I Want To Be A Unicorn. Both pieces were exhibited with photographs to show how they looked when worn – of particular importance for her work given how both were activated on the body, highlighting their absurdity. Rachel’s work is fun as well as fearless, proving that the two aren’t mutually exclusive, and her use of textiles and metal interchangeably speaks to her commitment to her work over material loyalty.

Nick Mullins, Brooch 7, 2009, wood, resin, plaster, string, paint, 6 x 6 x 2 inches

Another student whose work I’ve long enjoyed is Nick Mullins.  He had several pieces in No Boundaries, SNAG Juried Student Exhibition at the Glassell Junior School Building, MFA, Houston, which was juried by Brigitte Martin and Lena Vigna. Nick’s work is clumsy in the best way – the forms are large and awkward hacked from wood and other found materials. Treated roughly, they come off feeling urgent as if they were made in a sort of frenzied play session resulting in objects that are fun and self-effacing.

Nick Mullins, Brooch 5, 2009, foam, resin, wood, string, paint, 4 x 4 x 2 inches

I realize the work I’m drawn to talks more about my personal taste than about the conference as a whole. And given my lack of sleep and the overload of two gallery nights, I’m sure I’ve overlooked a lot of wonderful work. But there is a predominant homogeneity that should be of concern not just to practicing artists, but to students and educators out there as well.

So where does this leave me in terms of my identity crisis? What do I have left to identify with and what is lost to me? Handwork and the inception of a tactile object is still a source of solidarity for us as makers, even when some of us feel wholly removed from the vast majority of work being made. To be situated in a place between definitions, ahead of language as it struggles to keep up, can be a very satisfying thing. Though I may never be able to fully explain what I do for a living with a casual acquaintance on a bus ride or in an elevator, there’s something exciting about that striving to encapsulate what is happening with contemporary jewelry making. The nebulous state we find ourselves inhabiting can be frustrating, but change is a beautiful and messy thing. You only need to look at the current political climate for a gross magnification of our field’s current polarized state. Paradigm shifts aren’t just inevitable, they’re necessary.

Renee Bevan, Blooming Big Brooch, 2009, cotton, stainless steel

Here at AJF we think a lot about the issue of audience in relation to contemporary jewelry. This covers a lot of territory: from the question of how contemporary jewelry positions itself in relation to fine art and design (click here and here to read previous posts), to the way jewelry objects are exhibited (the problem of the body), and even where (craft versus fine art galleries, for example).

Ilse Marie Erl, Bone Cameo, 2009, found bone, oxidised silver, cotton, stainless steel

We were very interested to learn about a novel initiative for connecting contemporary jewelry and its audience that is currently taking place in New Zealand. Organized by Kristin D’Agostino, a recent graduate of the Unitec jewelry program in Auckland, Broach of the Month Club was inspired by D’Agostino’s desire to find new ways to display contemporary jewelry, and to initiate contact between jewelers and wearers. One of her touchstones has been Liesbeth den Besten’s concept of borderline jewelry, which den Besten defines as ‘about borders, about going beyond borders, over the border. Borderline artist jewellers can’t live in the reality of showcases, galleries and museums. They need other ways to establish a bond with people, with people other than the usual jewellery audience.’

Sharon Fitness, Purple Floppy Poppies with a Blue Edge, 2009, silicon, pigments, sterling silver, 9 carat gold

Keen to know more, we asked D’Agnostino some questions about her project, which is now in its second year of operation.

Broach of the Month club (BOM) is a collaboration between twelve brooches, twelve makers and twelve wearers. It aims to reinstate the community aspect of traditional craft in contemporary jewelry culture. The 2010 club has collaborated with Masterworks craft gallery in Auckland to initiate a new BOM club.  The 2010 group includes six original BOM makers, six Masterworks makers and twelve regular Masterworks clients and friends of the gallery. The brooches will be worn, reflected upon and rotated each month, so that over the course of a year every wearer interacts with every brooch.

This is a non-profit project designed to broaden the contemporary jewellery wearer community. No money changes hands. Each party receives equal benefit.

Raewyn Walsh, Vessels, 2009, fine silver,oxidised silver, copper, paint, graphite powder, surgical steel

The BOM club concept provides a vital space for experimental work to be shown and  supplies valuable feedback to the makers. BOM club also creates a forum outside of the gallery where selling work is not a concern. Often, only public galleries provide a space where generating revenue isn’t the key component, but public galleries don’t always have the opportunity to show artists in the early stages of their careers. BOM club provides a living exhibition venue that isn’t beholden to the counters of hipness, fashion, and commodity.  It aims to present another way of tackling the Gert Staal/Ted Noten question regarding the dilemma of displaying jewellery in galleries as opposed to it being worn.

Gillian Deery, Untitled, 2009, sterling silver, stainless steel

The 2010 BOM club is a pre-emptive test-run for my DIY Broach of the Month Club manifesto, wherein I envision the possibility that BOM could “go viral” and be easily dispensed throughout the jewelry world. I am trying to determine whether the success of my initial experiment was a combination of circumstance and luck or if this idea can stand on its own two feet. Involving Masterworks gallery makes sense, because it solves the logistical issues of the swaps. I have much less control this year, which is exciting and scary.  I get to observe the project a bit more.  It is the first step in sending this project off into the big wide world.

On a more personal level, I am also a maker in this project, so I have specific questions regarding new aspects of work I’m creating.

To find out more about BOM, visit the website by clicking here.

Here at AJF we have a recurring daydream of finding contemporary jewelry masterpieces in antique shops and garage sales. Not only are we slimmer and better dressed in this fantasy, but the people selling the jewelry have no idea what it is. Swooping in and making a canny purchase, we celebrate our good fortune, pour a strong gin and tonic, and sit back while the price spirals upwards.

Well, it turns out that this might not be the smartest way to fund our retirement after all. In his book The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art and Auction Houses, Don Thompson writes that even if you get lucky and manage to buy cheap the one work and artist that will make staggering gains in value, you still don’t usually outperform the stock market. One of his examples is Victor and Sally Ganz, who purchased a Picasso for $7,000 in 1941, and then sold it in 1997 for $48.4 million. While that appears to be a staggering increase in price, Thompson suggests that: ‘To put that gain in perspective, had the Ganzes invested the $7,000 in a portfolio of small-company stocks in 1941, the stock would have been worth $46 million in 1997. If we include insurance costs of about $4.9 million over the period they had the Picasso, the stock investment would have produced a greater profit.’ And then of course there is the risk of buying the artist and artwork that doesn’t survive the fortunes of the future in good shape, leaving you with a work that is actually worth less than what you paid for it.

All of which makes us think that is is lucky that jewellery looks pretty and you can wear it. (Maybe it’s not such a bad thing being a subset of the useful arts after all.) Still, part of a healthy contemporary jewelry scene is a flourishing secondary market, in which the best contemporary jewelry gets bought and sold at auction. Wright Auctions are selling some nice pieces by Art Smith, Sam Kramer, Harry Bertoia and Margaret de Patta in their Modern Design auction on tonight (23rd March 2010) in Chicago. (To view the auction catalogue, click here.) Indeed, the auction house has played up the jewelry component, noting that ‘This bi-annual auction of mid-century modern will showcase a collection of modernist jewelry including pieces by Sam Kramer and a collection of works by Art Smith. From a single original owner and never before been on the market, the works by Smith attest to his mastery of metal working. Works by Harry Bertoia and a selection of designs for Memphis by Ettore Sottsass, Peter Shire and Michele de Lucci will also be featured alongside other noteworthy Italian, French and American designs.’

AJF board member and Californian citizen Susan Cummins recently sent us a page from Wallpaper* magazine, which celebrated a new collection of Van Cleef & Arpels jewelry. Each to their own, you might say, and here at AJF we would normally have no problem with such a thing, except that California Reverie, as the collection is called, won Best Jewelry category in the magazine’s annual design awards. Here’s what Wallpaper* had to say about the jewelry and their decision:

It’s not the first time Van Cleef & Arpels have based a collection on an actual place (in 2006, Une Journee a Paris celebrated the house’s birthplace), but it is the first time it has so successfully captured in metal and gems both an era and a sense of place. Based on the premise that Californian imagery from the 1950s to the 1970s resonates strongly in our subconscious, California Reverie draws inspiration from such cultural big hitters as the Beach Boys, Ansel Adams and Henry Miller. The collection includes a pair of diamond palm trees, a necklace depicting a Pacific sunset, and cacti clips. The extensive use of coloured stones, such as turquoise, opal, chalcedony and coral, and the inclusion of larger cocktail pieces, ensures the collection is evocative of the given era – and our favourite of the year. As CEO Stanislas de Quercize poetically puts it, “It is like a half-real, half-imaginary trip down the West Coast, where memories give birth to unique, colourful jewels”.

(You can see the entire California Reverie collection at the Van Cleef & Arpels website by clicking here.) There’s a certain faux naive, self-conscious exploration of kitsch that is charming and amusing in this collection, but certainly from our perspective, this jewelry is not equivalent to the winners of other categories like fashion, interior design or furniture. It would seem, given Wallpaper* magazine’s continued favoring of conventional bling year after year, that they haven’t yet discovered contemporary jewelry. That is a worry – and not just because it makes Wallpaper* look a little silly, as if they were judging furniture and hadn’t realized that Italian design existed. It demonstrates one of the unhealthy outcomes of contemporary jewelry’s decision to align itself with fine art rather than design or fashion – and why organizations like AJF are so important in publicizing contemporary jewelry’s achievements.

Of course, this is also sad because thinking about place is one of the things that contemporary jewelry from different parts of the world has done very well. You don’t have to look past what might be called the West Coast school of American jewelry (Margaret de Patta, Peter Macchiarini, Romona Solberg, Keith Lewis, etc) to find adornment that thinks about locality with wit and sophistication. It’s not just the diamonds that make California Reverie a bit of a dog – ultimately it is the reliance on cliches like palm trees and sunsets that ensures this jewelry raises a smile but not much else.

Based on the evidence of this blog, you would be hard-pressed to imagine that we here at AJF do anything productive at all. At the risk of cementing such erroneous impressions, here’s a jewelry game that we stumbled upon while researching serious conceptual issues. Yes, we stopped and played it, but that was only so we could be informed in writing this post. It’s not a great game (unless you are a tween, or enjoy the saccarine sweetness of mainstream animation), and the jewelry is pretty awful. We can’t even talk about the music. But its jewelry, and so we boldly go where no member of AJF should ever have to.  (To play the game, click here.)

Taking time out from thinking profound thoughts about contemporary jewelry, we here at AJF recently found ourselves watching Disney-Pixar’s movie Up! (the one with the old man, the kid, the house and all those balloons). It is, along with many other things, a moving meditation on the powerful nature of jewelry, in this case badges. From the grape soda bottle top with safety pin which becomes a treasured memento of one man’s love for his wife and a souvenir of memories of their shared childhood adventures and dreams, to the badges that cover the sash of a Scouts-like wilderness adventure group, Up! is an excellent reminder that jewelry’s significance doesn’t have to come from either precious materials or artistic statements.

Indeed, what is so notable about this movie is the way it reveals that one of the deep veins of meaning and significance for jewelry has nothing to do with the work of the jeweler – skill or questions of art – at all. Meaning is generated around the badge through personal and social relationships that can be attached to any object. It is an example of the talisman, which has a rich history in jewelry. Unlike the amulet, in which power comes from what the object is (a tooth or claw to ward off dangerous animals, for example), the talisman’s meaning is invested in the object through ritual. A talisman can be made of anything, even a discarded bottle top. After watching Up! we found ourselves wondering why contemporary jewelry seldom seems to achieve such significance. And how interesting it is that such potential remains alive in jewelry, waiting to be activated.

We were reminded of this while watching the 2010 Oscars award ceremony (research, we told ourselves, since it is important to know what kinds of jewelry is being worn on the red carpet). Along with an Edition Soir Yves Saint Laurent by Stefano Pilati titanium gown, Best Director winner Kathryn Bigelow wore a red Wounded EOD Warrior bracelet, made of silicon and costing about $1. The Wounded EOD Warrior Foundation is a not-for-profit organization which gives financial and other assistance to Explosive Ordinance Disposal technicians who are wounded in the line of duty. (You can visit their website by clicking here.) The bracelets are given to anyone who donates a small amount of money to the organization, and are an awareness raising exercise. (In case you didn’t know, Bigelow’s movie, The Hurt Locker, is about EOD technicians in Iraq.) Bigelow shunned the usual diamonds and platinum and managed to make jewelry say something – lots of bang without any bling.

It seems to us at AJF that all of this amounts to something important for contemporary jewelry to consider. Luckily, Australian writer Kevin Murray has already started to do just that. (You can visit Murray’s website by clicking here.) In an essay called ‘Value in rarity? Think again!’, he writes:

Once preciousness was tied to rarity. The less available a good, the greater its value. Modern jewellery was founded on this principle. Behind the romance of the diamond was a strategy to reduce its supply so that they would be associated with elite status. In the information age, this logic is reversed. In the case of computer software, the more available it is, the greater its value. The ubiquity of Microsoft is its greatest asset – owning a Microsoft product enables you to communicate freely with the vast majority of computer users currently working with compatible software. How might jewellery respond to this radical reversal of value?

It’s already there, all around us. So many people are walking along the street wearing that phosphorescent coloured wrist band which says “Make Poverty History”. This bracelet is not worn to distinguish the wearer from others, as a mark of distinction. Regardless of the particular cause, this band identifies its user with the people – those who stand in solidarity to support the suffering peoples of the world against the interests of moneyed elites. We wear it to belong to the crowd, not to stand out from it.

There are many reasons why this kind of street-wear fits uncomfortably with contemporary jewellery practice. It is anonymous, cheap, generically designed and industrially produced. Yet, maybe we glimpse within it the potential for jewellery to engage with a world where the commoner is King (and Queen).

Contemporary jewelry prides itself on its difference to the mindless bling that gets paraded on the red carpet every year at the Oscars. Yet if we are honest, doesn’t the glamour jewelry actually speak to more people than the art jewelry we care about? And what does it mean when a mass-produced bracelet is more engaging than either, without having value or art to rely on?