June 12th, 2010 07:06
On Saturday 15 May 2010 a group of jewelers, artists, writers, curators, scholars, dealers, industry insiders, and lovers of jewelry gathered in the luxurious University Club in New York City to discuss the idea of fakes and forgeries throughout jewelry history. For as long as there has been jewelry there have been people using lesser materials to create ‘knock-offs’. From Ancient Greece and Italy to modern day America some of the greatest capers, counterfeiters, and con-artists were discussed.
Keynote speaker Jack Ogden showed examples of ancient ‘fakes’ along with tips for recognizing them - one should take note of style, technology, manufacture, and design composition when looking at all jewelry, including ancient. One must ask: could this have been made in the period it’s said to have been? Does the design make sense for the period? This discussion nicely dovetailed with Janet Zapata’s discussion of revival motifs in nineteenth century jewelry. During a period of great interest in the past, with many archeological digs and discoveries taking place, ancient designs were seen as a ‘fresh new design source’. Revivalist jewelry is different than that of the ancients, Renaissance, or Gothic cultures in that it appropriates imagery from the past but uses modern techniques for granulation, micro-mosaic, and filigree.
Talk of forgeries and fakes was followed by insight into some of the twentieth century’s greatest heists and hoaxes, including the Great Diamond Hoax and the 1960s robbery of the American Museum of Natural History by ‘Murph the Surf’. It’s important to realize that the robbers were eventually caught, most of the jewelry was recovered, and the hoaxes were eventually foiled.
The afternoon’s sessions dealt with re-use of materials. Ursula Ilse-Neuman of the Museum of Arts and Design, New York City, spoke on the use of recycled materials in jewelry, ranging from work by contemporary studio jewelers such as Jennifer Trask’s use of butterfly wings and animal bones and Jan Yager’s crack vial necklace, to high-style jewelry like Marjorie Meriwether Post’s art deco style brooch which includes a 60-karat Mughal emerald that dates back to seventeenth century India. Harrice Simons Miller spoke about the appropriation of imagery by Kenneth Jay Lane and Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel, famous designers of costume jewelry who both favored Byzantine crosses among other things.
Faberge expert, Geza von Habsburg ‘properly confused’ the audience with his discussion of ‘fauxberge’, explaining that 95% of the pieces he receives inquiries about are copies – but ‘good fakes’ that are often difficult, if not impossible, to decipher from the real thing. Often these fakes are correctly marked and sometimes are even in an original box. These tend to be well-made and can puzzle even the most devoted scholars of Faberge—beware!
The highlight of the afternoon session was learning about the recent scholarship surrounding the Hope and Wittlesbach diamonds from ‘the world’s greatest diamond counterfeiter’, John Nels Hatlenerg (he admits he doesn’t have a whole lot of competition) and Gary Roskin, scholar and author of the website www.roskingemnews.com. Together with curators and conservators at the Smithsonian Institution, these two men examined both of these famous diamonds to determine whether or not the two diamonds were originally cut from the same stone. The Hope diamond was cut from the famous ‘French Blue’, a 67 1/8 carat blue diamond also known as the ‘Blue Diamond of the Crown’, which was owned by Louis XIV in 1678 and disappeared during the French Revolution. Unfortunately, initial analysis seems to say this is not the case. However, this led to an interesting discussion of why stones are re-cut in the first place, Roskin explaining that even with minor changes in cut (which actually don’t change the stone’s weight all that much) a diamonds clarity, color, beauty, and value can vastly increase.
The symposium was followed by a study day on Sunday where participants were welcomed into the studios of jewelry artists Tom Herman, Jamie Bennett, Pat Flynn, and Jennifer Trask before getting a chance to view the treasures of the metalsmithing department and the Samuel Dorsky Museum at The State University of New York at New Paltz.
Overall the weekend was a huge success and the conference organizers, Elyse Zorn Karlin and Yvonne Markowitz deserve a round of applause for all their hard work. As participants left the conference on Saturday I heard more than one comment this was the most interesting conference they had been to in a long time – possibly ever.
May 29th, 2010 07:05
Contemporary art? Yes! In México we have the biggest contemporary art collection in Latin America, owned by the Jumex Foundation. (To visit their website, click here.) Contemporary jewelry? What? It was the first time for many people to even hear the term. It was even more shocking for jewelry designers and crafters attending the Gray Area symposium to discover there was something called contemporary jewelry. Didn’t the word contemporary mean ‘something of the moment’?
The symposium lasted five days, full of activities throughout the days that ended either in openings, dinner parties or even on one occasion danzón. (To find out more about this style of dance, click here.) The Gray Area involved approximately 44 lecturers from Europe and Latin America, four round tables, one worktable, twelve openings in different gallery spaces, and one workshop. And of course the public who came from around the globe. What a week!
Manon van Kouswijk opened the symposium with the idea that ‘jewelry can be many things but not anything can be jewelry’. Then came Caroline Broadhead, who talked us about our senses and the way in which the visual sense for the viewer is completely different from that of the wearer, who has already activated different senses. Clemencia Plazas was next, talking about the American (as a continent) way of seeing through metal and through history. After lunch we heard something about the use and meanings of materials for different cultures, to end the day with what for me could define the whole experience of the Gray Area symposium: ‘What does jewelry mean to us?’
For many people attending the symposium this first day was shocking. Many of the audience considered themselves as designers, some others just crafters or artisans and some others contemporary jewelers. The discussion heated up the auditorium at the Biblioteca Nacional Jose María Vasconcelos where the symposium was held, when some felt their professions attacked by the labels and the tags. International participants came mainly because they were either artists showing at an exhibition, lecturers or interested in contemporary jewelry. But for many Mexicans it was just a jewelry symposium. Many of the Mexican crowd couldn’t understand the differences, so out again came the discussion of: ‘but I have to sell, and therefore it has to be wearable, affordable, commercial, likeable and why not beautiful!’ A never-ending discussion. Valeria Vallarta, curator, organizer of the symposium and president of the Otro-Diseño Foundation said to us: ‘We won’t get anywhere with this discussion, the eternal question keeps on. What came first, the egg or the hen?’
Day Two started with Ruudt Peters talking about his amazing work. This was followed by a teleconference with Mónica Gaspar, who was saved from some difficult technical issues by Valleria’s other half, her husband who really knew how to run the show in all technical aspects. Monica talked about jewelry as a metaphor, and then came Manon Van Kouswijk who explained that technique for her is a means to get somewhere else. After a short coffee break Jorge Manilla and Marta Hyrc talked about their own work. Marta discussed substitutions in objects, and Jorge about his migration to Europe leading him to understand his own history from a different perspective, and creating his own narrative through objects and materials. Afterwards came Beat Eisman who expressed her personal view about when she was living as an exchange student here in México, and Mirla Fernandez who discussed her body consciousness with her latex pieces. After lunch we heard the exciting presentation of Jiro Kamata, who made everybody laugh after he revealed the ‘behind the scenes’ of the Tessa rings. Before the round table of the day we heard Xavier Andrade’s lecture about how jewelry is inserted in multiple social relations.
At this point in time let’s be honest, if you are not in this contemporary jewelry business the artists presentations during the day could have been shocking. I mean come on: a latex necklace? a ring made out of kissed tape? a bone necklace? or a lingam piece? The round table wasn’t that packed which made it less heated because many of the attendants had already made up their minds about what kind of jewelers they were (or at least thought they were!). It was about the role of the academies in the encouragement of formal and conceptual experimentations in jewellery. The discussion was more about the lecturers talking about their own experiences and strategies in their schools: the Escola Massana in Barcelona, Spain, the Academy of Fine Arts in Havana, Cuba, UNAM in México city, the Rietveld Academy in the Netherlands, and Centro in México city. As for my own experience in this field I think we first need in schools a more conceptual and abstract way of thinking. We have to learn how to question ourselves in order to seek for answers. Our country – and indeed all Latin American countries – are rich in artisans, crafts and culture. We just need to think differently.
Day Three was a mixture of everything. We heard Walka studio talking about their experiences in migration and how migration is transformation, then we heard Sarah O’Hara explaining her laser technique, and then came Felieke van der Leest talk about her interesting zoo. Nuria Carulla showed not only her work but also many artists, which she has supported and trained in Colombia. Nanna Melland talked about her almost surgical work with body parts or pieces. Ximena Briceño talked vey little about her personal work and more about the history of filigree. Francisca Kweitel and Estela Saez Villanova talked in a very informal way about their personal relationship and personal work, living in different continents but sharing the same passion. Miguel Luciano talked about his Puerto Rican-rooted point of view living in the USA. The round table was about management and promotion of contemporary jewelry in Latin America. Mónica Benitez got a lot of cheers and attention among the jewelers who already know her, as she represents the biggest silver industry in Mexico, Industrias Peñoles. Many of the attendants found finally a place as she talked about the space and promotion this industry gives to young and elder jewellery designers. For many it was finally talking about reality, more than talking about ‘dreams’. It was the most tangible talk they had experienced up to that moment.
Day Four, and the last day of lectures, a number of which were rescheduled. Jurgen Eickhoff talked about the history of Spektrum Galerie in Munich with its ups and downs. Cristina Filipe then explained the PIN project and the welcome they had in Portugal. Liesbeth den Besten talked about her private passion, the art of collecting wearable art and art not as qualifying but identifying. Then we had two round tables. In the first one we had the name Gray Area explained to us as ‘a border in-between, two or more things that are unclearly defined, a border that is hard to define or even impossible’ (Wikipedia). I would say this was the most relevant explanation not just of the name of the event, but the description of the attendees mood. Many of participants were in a ‘gray area’ state of mind and many others were not, but at least they understood what this was about. They seemed to be clearer about what they were or where wanted to go. People from different countries started to mingle, exchange e-mail addresses and share their trades. A Mexican jeweller called Lorena Lazard started gathering information to create a directory of Mexican jewellers.
The mood was very joyful specially when Valeria gave her wonderful personal talk and placed herself in an Italo Calvino story from his book Invisible Cities. My personal view is that this person whom I just met and was in physical pain at the moment galvanized the whole audience with her reading and her presence and managed to have the people giving her a standing ovation for the whole symposium. She managed, for the first time ever in México, to present – not only to the participants at the symposium but to a big audience through galleries, art spaces and even in a candy shop – what contemporary jewellery is. The day ended first with Ricardo Domingo’s talk about our own DNA search for a perfect commercialization, giving many examples, but specially answering many enquiries people had. Some had already been in his course and some others just signed in. The last round table was about the position of jewellery in a truly global context.
Day Five was a work table divided into different themes. Some of the tables were a little bit of a mess, as it was difficult to communicate in different languages, but in the end it was the first task to accomplish the organization of all these active viewers into groups, to talk to each other about our own experiences outside of the spaces of socializing.
All in all it was a magnificent experience. Not just an eye opener but also opening doors to an international level which is always very attractive, and is now spreading into new projects here in Mexico where the contemporary jeweler will look and search and work and move and act.
May 13th, 2010 10:05
While one jewelry world was meeting at the centre, another was gathering at the western edge. As the Gray Area Symposium celebrated the mixing of North and South in Mexico, the conference titled Resources: Prospects for Contemporary Jewellery & Object Making in Perth, Australia, revealed a more black and white picture in the world of body adornment. (To visit the conference website, click here.)
Formed thirty years ago, the Jewellers and Metalsmiths Group of Australia (JMGA) is defined largely by its biannual conferences. In the past, these international gatherings have served as landmarks, heralding new ideas in the jewelry scene and revealing the unique jewelry scenes in each host city. The last had been in Adelaide, where there had been much talk about the relational paradigm.
This year, Perth – supposedly the most isolated city in the world – had its turn as host. Perth is the state capital of Western Australia, whose sales of raw materials to China are partly responsible for Australia’s relatively soft landing after the Great Financial Crash. But as well as iron ore and gas, the state is also the repository of much of the world’s precious jewelry materials. In Perth itself you can find two or three jewelry outlets in each city block – the CBD seems to drip diamonds and pearls.
The conference theme confronted this extraordinary wealth with a focus on ‘resources’. Glenice Lesley Matthews started with a fascinating overview of the state’s industries of gold, diamonds and pearls. While the Kalgoorlie gold rush has well and truly passed, it is interesting to learn that there are prospecting jewelers who still venture out after the monsoonal rains. After two or three months, they have gathered enough alluvial nuggets to supply their own business.
Diamonds are a massive industry here. By 1983, Argyle diamonds were contributing 40% of world production. The imagination seems to play a critical role in its success. There was much discussion in Perth about the almost psychedelic naming of different diamonds variety – Tiffany & Co. had just bought rights to the canary diamonds from the Allendale mine. What doesn’t feature in the marketing are the cavernous open cut mines in the north-west – so much dug up for such a small result.
Pearling is another lucrative industry and most of the world’s South Sea pearls come from the north-west coast. Matthews spoke caringly about the oysters as ‘animals’ that are farmed for pearls, stressing the importance of healthy and calm habitat. A few in the audience squirmed to see these hard-working animals turned into a hearty meal for pearl workers once their productive life was over. Matthews painted an epic scene of West Australian mining, but it seemed a world away from the new movements like Ethical Metalsmiths.
The conference provided an opportunity to launch the history of West Australian jewelry by Dorothy Erickson. Her impressive tome represents twenty years of work researching the story of jewelry in this far-flung corner of the world. The size of the volume testifies to the depth of jewelry history here: from the struggles of lesser gentry to maintain European lifestyles, to the Linton family’s production of silverware according to Edwardian taste, and the international centre for contemporary jewelry established by David Walker. Sadly, many of her slides were prefaced with a story of their theft from various private homes. It’s a salutary lesson of the critical role played by public collections in preserving this history.
A number of key overseas jewellers came out to talk and give workshops. Fresh from their ‘homecoming’ to New Zealand, Lisa Walker and Karl Fritsch each gave intriguing talks about their idiosyncratic responses to jewelry conventions. Fritsch’s Quixotic story of panning for gold in Germany was quite a contrast to the epic scene in this new world. Helen Britten, who has lived in Perth, outlined the Deleuzian basis of her work as an exercise in ‘slowing down chaos to create a plane of organisation’. Taking the artificial as nature provided an important model of practice in the context of the conference.
There was talk about the place of jewelry beyond body adornment. Melissa Cameron gave a well-considered presentation on the relationship with architecture, which Eugene Keeffer Bell continued with her discussion of the public art of Arthur Paley. There was reference to pre-modern forms in Patricia Anderson’s encyclopaedic overview of classical sources and Maureen Faye-Chuahan’s artist’s talk about Muslim designs.
This outward continued with Oron Catts from the Symbiotica, a laboratory of biological art. Catts gave a sensationalist account of projects that make out of off body tissue. In a similar vein, Rick Spencer’s philosophical paper celebrated subversion in art. As with the Matthew’s tribute to mining, the dominant theme was the adventure of ornament. Whether you see this as bold, or reckless, depends partly on your point of view.
From the other point of view, Elisha Buttler spoke about FORM’s exhibition Signs of Change in which jewellers seek to be creative with ethics. The potential of this curatorial strategy to contest the more libertarian positions was unfortunately lost due to lack of time. But an intimation of where this might lead was evident in a joint presentation by local jewelry elder Bronwyn Goss and indigenous Wongai elder Josie Wowolla Boyle. In an enchanting exchange, they swapped stories of the ‘seven sisters’ found in both Greek and Aboriginal mythologies of the Pleiades. This is the alternative scene to diamonds and pearls in the West – ‘bush jewelry’ produced by artists using materials found directly from the land.
It was a shame the two sides couldn’t come together in debate. Having pushed the ethical barrow myself, I’m aware of the reservations many have about ‘political correctness’. There is the strong Nietzchean strain in contemporary beauty that seeks to defy conventions. Some can argue that beauty itself is a form of subversion which should not be reduced to bland notions such as ‘community’ or ‘sustainability’. How can we engage in the ethical dimension without being completely subsumed by utilitarianism?
As with most such conferences, the success of Resources can be heard in the buzz emanating from dozens of conversations as a contemporary jewelry world comes together to witness each other’s work. Despite the online networks now available like Kit and Caboodle, jewelry in particular seems to still need these kinds of face-to-face encounters to constitute itself as a scene. At their best, they also tell an unfolding story about the relation between body ornament and the world. There are many more stories to tell about how jewelry engages with the epic narrative of Barack Obama, the challenges of Copenhagen, the ascension of emerging nations and the growing clouds of Google, iPhones and Facebook.
May 7th, 2010 08:05
Recently we published a talk by Dutch writer and curator Liesbeth Den Besten called ‘The Power of Jewelry’ on the AJF website. It was first presented in January 2009 at Out of the Box, a symposium organised by the Françoise van den Bosch Foundation (of which Den Besten is the chairperson) at the Stedelijk Museum ‘s-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands. Den Besten reflects on the fact that despite acceleration in the contemporary jewelry field (more graduates, more galleries, more schools, more fairs presenting jewelry), ‘jewellery still doesn’t count as a serious market where money is made and earned. Author jewellery is not a hot topic – the way design has gained a sexy status.’ Contemporary jewelry, she concludes, has ‘an uncomfortable feeling of isolation, and preaching to the converted.’ Her paper is essentially an analysis of jewelry’s current position and potentiality, how it got to be where it is and what we might do about it. (To read the full text of Den Besten’s talk ‘The Power of Jewelry’, click here.)
Here’s some of what Den Besten concludes:
Den Besten is talking about the fact that contemporary jewelry allied itself with the gallery, and with fine art, rather than design and fashion. In doing so, it made a few gains, particularly in the heady days of the 1960s and 1970s when everything seemed possible, but it also suffered significant losses, most notably its ability to communicate with people, with a wide audience. Her description of contemporary jewelry as a matter of faith is perfect: that is exactly what attracts most of us involved in contemporary jewelry, but it is also what keeps us isolated and unwilling to actually pursue an audience. Like religion, contemporary jewelry is getting smaller every year as the pool of believers shrinks. Sure, every now and then a new church gets built, a new gallery opens, but it just moves the audience around, shifts it from one place to another. It does nothing about growing the audience, reaching new people, evangelising to the unconverted. We’ve been preaching to the art crowd for years now, and they just aren’t convinced. Like any missionary movement, perhaps we need to recognise that and shift our focus to new mission fields.
Den Besten talks about Damien Hirst’s diamond skull, For the Love of God, as a work that can provide some possible directions out of jewelry’s dead end. As she concludes, ‘What can we learn from this? Well, that there are certain things that attract people, things like uniqueness, craftsmanship, shine, and preciousness – things you can easily handle as a jeweler, things you can all deal with as jewelers, when you like.’ And she talks about the strategies of design and fashion, identifying these as possible worlds the contemporary jeweler can infiltrate, along with the world of conventional jewelry. Why not, she provocatively asks, start working with diamonds, precious stones, all the things that sparkle and glitter and which already have an audience?
Den Besten would no doubt agree that there are no simple solutions to the problem of jewelry’s future, and whether or not you are convinced by her proposals, she appears to be right when she says that the boxed-in contemporary jewelry scene will have to change – and sooner rather than later. ‘I think it is time to step out of the comfort zone and make yourself seen’, she concludes, and that’s a challenge that everyone who cares about contemporary jewelry should take seriously.
April 17th, 2010 04:04
The final day of the Gray Area symposium kicked off with a talk by Jurgen Eickhoff from Galerie Spektrum in Munich. Titled ‘The jewellery – the gallery – the future’, Eickhoff’s presentation was partly a history of the gallery he co-founded in 1981 and an analysis of the problems and opportunities facing the dealer gallery system, and in turn the infrastructure of contemporary jewelry. Dealer galleries, he noted, are a conduit between jeweler and audience, and they support makers, develop audiences and provide connections to public galleries. Overall, Eickhoff’s prognosis was negative – or perhaps melancholic is a better description. While he described a definite growth in the quality (and quantity) of contemporary jewelry being produced, he also noted the aging population of both gallery owners and contemporary jewelry collectors, and talked about a reduction in the applied arts programs, and general commitment towards contemporary jewelry, on the part of museums and galleries.
Next up was Dutch art historian Liesbeth den Besten, who talked about ‘Private passion: the art of collecting wearable art’. Explaining at the beginning that she hated the term ‘wearable art’, never used it but this time fell under the spell of the rhythms of language, den Besten went on to give a wide-ranging presentation about the history and issues of collecting contemporary jewelry.
Art jewelry, she said, is made by artists who use jewelry as a medium for artistic expression. It bears the signature of an individual maker, and it liberates jewelry from private sentiment and ritual significance. Contemporary jewelry is a single aesthetic unity, and this stops it from being able to be recycled or reset – as frequently happens with conventional or precious materials jewelry – since to do so would be to destroy an art work, to ruin an artistic statement. The rest of den Besten’s talk was a survey of different collectors and collecting institutions – including AJF, which, in her opinion, helps to link collectors with makers, and to restore a dynamic to the contemporary jewelry scene that is much closer to the way it used to be in the pioneering days of collectors such as AJF member Helen Drutt.
Christina Filipe from Portugal introduced the history and activities of PIN, which was established in 2004 to promote contemporary jewelry. PIN is the Portuguese Association of Contemporary Jewelry, and it is involved with promotion, training, educational events and residencies at both a national and international level. Filipe’s talk confirmed one of the big themes of Day Four: the feeling that taking action and working hard is the best way to address the relationship between Latin American and European jewelry. And it was inspiring to see how actively and enthusiastically organizations such as PIN and others tackle issues like the lack of infrastructure or the paucity of contact between their local jewelry communities and the rest of the world, often with very few resources. It is clear that you can achieve a great deal if you set up an organization and create events, and Portuguese contemporary jewelry is more widely recognized because of PIN’s activities. It isn’t necessarily clear what difference such activities make in the long term (PIN has only been going for six years) but it certainly can’t but help by opening up channels of communication between Portugal and the rest of the world.
The round table titled ‘Dialogues of the Gray Area’ included ValeriaVallarta (one of the conference organizers, and co-curator of the Walking the Gray Area exhibition), Jose Manuel Springer (Mexico), Andrea Wagner (The Netherlands, and co-curator of the Walking the Gray Area exhibition), Carolina Hornauer (Chile), Hanna Hedman (Sweden), Andres Fonseca (Mexico-Colombia), Ineke Herkens (The Netherlands) and Miguel Luciano (Puerto Rico). The purpose of the session was to explore the dynamics of cultural mediation and exchange that informed the Walking the Gray Area exhibition, in which Latin American and European jewelers were paired and asked to dialog with each other on the Gray Area blog. Like most of the round tables, the opportunity was lost under a series of too-long presentations that swallowed up the time available for actual dialog. This was more bitter than usual because the interactions that were in some cases presented in painstaking detail were available for reading/viewing on the blog, and the audience received information and images that they were going to see again that evening at the opening of the exhibition. Still, it was interesting to hear of both successful and unsuccessful interactions between artists, and to get a greater sense of the project from the perspective of the curators.
‘In search of the missing DNA: From contemporaneity to commercialization’ was a talk given by Ricardo Domingo, a jewelry maker and marketer from Spain. This was a bemusing and entertaining talk, with Domingo being an enthusiastic presenter (as one colleague noted to me afterwards, it was as though he was dancing) and offering a useful reminder that branding is a critical aspect of success for any jeweler – whether in the world of design or conventional jewelry, or at the high end of the contemporary jewelry scene. The almost audible groans of the audience as Domingo trotted out some pretty crass examples of design and marketing at the beginning of his talk gave way to (a grudging?) respect as he began to speak about contemporary jewelry, and even though some of his suggestions of branding techniques would not work for contemporary jewelry, it did provocatively suggest that marketing strategies might be able to bring contemporary jewelry into better contact with its audience, and left me wondering why we don’t act more like marketers in how we approach our field. Probably the most profound piece of advice came from Domingo’s father, who told him: do whatever you want, but be a man of your time.
The final session of Day Four was another round table, called ‘The positioning of jewellery in a truly global context’. The audience, thinned by the attrition of conference fatigue, were treated to a discussion between five panelists: Christina Filipe (Portugal), Benjamin Lignel (France), Ricardo Pulgar (Chile), Mirla Fernandez (Brazil), and Damian Skinner (myself). The session was thrown open to questions from the audience and the result was an interesting grappling with the larger themes of the Gray Area conference. How do you address the imbalance of power between Europe and Latin America? Who defines what contemporary jewelry is? What is the difference between an individual experience and a national experience in terms of globalization? What is required to ensure Latin America is represented at a global level? Sometimes spirited, always passionate and warm, it was a suitable ending to four days of intense encounters and stimulating exchange.
April 15th, 2010 01:04
The third day of the Gray Area symposium had a late start, giving people time to recover after a late night learning to dance Mexican style. The theme, ‘Two sides of the same coin: the state of contemporary jewellery’ was a continuation of Day Two, and most of the presentations were artist talks. Claudia Betancourt and Ricardo Pulgar from Walka Studio in Chile kicked off with an interesting discussion of their practice, and in particular their engagement with what people in Chile call ‘chilentity’ – and the materials that might help articulate an identity that is sometimes subconscious. Migration, they concluded, is being transformed, and their story involved a change of scene to Melbourne, and a cultural investigation informed by the dynamic of living away from home.
Sarah O’Hana, from the University of Manchester in England, was up next with a talk called ‘Crossing boundaries’, in which she explored her decision to negotiate the frontier between engineering and contemporary jewelry, and in particular her use of laser technology to create color effects on metal. While she presented an interesting tale of science and art – and, as a colleague noted, she managed to tame technology, avoiding the aesthetic trap that technical experimentation offers to the undisciplined jeweler – her session was missing a companion talk by Raul Ybarra on pre-Colombian metalsmithing techniques. This meant that a certain amount of context was missing, and it was hard to see how her paper (quite technical, and a border crossing of art and science) linked to the larger themes of the conference.
Dutch jeweler Felieke van der Leest was a complete hit with her talk called ‘The zoo of life’. The story of her life and jewelry practice, and notably her fascination with animals and the use of crochet techniques, elicited a number of spontaneous emotions from the audience: clapping when van der Leest showed her camouflaged deer, and ohhing and ahhing when she showed her pregnant polar bear with baby.
Nanna Melland from Norway also gave an informative presentation of her work, not only in terms of explaining her practice but also in terms of her transformation from traditional goldsmith to contemporary jewelry. Particularly impressive was how clearly she articulated the relationship between the conceptual scope of her pieces, and the process of their manufacture. This, and her willingness to present ambivalent pieces of dubious beauty – ‘that force the viewer to contemplate matter that is neither social nor pleasing’- drew strong positive reactions from the crowd.
Francisca Kweitel from Argentina and Estela Saez Vilanova from Spain and the Netherlands staged a dialog that was in perfect keeping with the conference’s agenda as a kind of cultural mediation and encounter between Europe and Latin America. Sitting at the front of the stage, they took turns introducing themselves and their countries and cultures of origin. It was a great gimmick, perfectly tuned. Not only was it a great demonstration of the dynamic of exchange that underpins the Gray Area, but there was beautiful warmth generated by knowingly trading cultural stereotypes, of playing off against each other’s presentation. For example, Argentineans love to touch but only kiss on the cheek once, whereas the Dutch are much more physically reserved but they kiss on the cheek three times. And it was telling, too. There are 50 years of contemporary jewelry in the Netherlands, but in Argentina it is a much more recent tradition. In the Netherlands there is lots of government support, a major educational institution, and a number of galleries that exhibit and sell contemporary jewelry, but in Argentina there is really nothing equivalent in the way of infrastructure.
Nuria Carulia, a pioneering contemporary jeweler from Colombia, gave a paper called ‘In search of identity: contemporary jewellery in Colombia and its contribution to the craft field’, in which she surveyed the state of the field, and gave an important insight to the infrastructure – or more precisely, its lack – that supports contemporary jewelry in many Latin American countries. One of the most interesting things she talked about was Colombian contemporary jewelry’s responsibility to cultural preservation and regeneration. She was not the first person to talk about this responsibility that contemporary jewelry seems to assume in Latin America, and it was fascinating to see such a distinctive difference between contemporary jewelry in Europe and this part of the world.
Carulia talked about the importance of filigree in Colombian jewelry, and its transformation from an import of Spanish colonization to an important expression of Colombian culture and identity. This theme was picked up in Ximena Briceno’s talk, titled ‘A trans-Pacific technique: Filigree in Australia’. A two-part presentation in which Briceno discussed the history of filigree as an expression of complex cultural relations and trade, and then her reinterpretation of filigree in her own jewelry in terms of her Australian context, Briceno’s talk was a good example of adornment’s complexity, of jewelry’s rich analytical possibilities, its historical importance.
Miguel Luciano, a Puerto Rican artist living in America, paralleled the complexity of Briceno’s historical presentation with a recent project he completed that drew on jewelry forms to unpack the flows and eddies of cultural identity and politics of being Puerto Rican. ‘Pure plantainum’ is a plantain coated with platinum, the fruit inside rotting while the thin skin of metal remains unblemished. Transformed into bling and modeled with attitude by a young Puerto Rican man, the photograph has achieved an iconic status. Luciano spun a smart story of the plantain’s cultural dimensions, and its implication for narratives of racism and narratives of cultural survival within Puerto Rican society.
The afternoon concluded with a roundtable tackling the ‘Management and promotion of contemporary jewellery in Latin America’. Featuring Marina Malinelli Wells (Argentina), Ofelia Murrieta (Mexico), Mirla Fernandes (Brazil), Monica Benitez (Mexico) and Carolina Rojo (Spain), the session struck an odd note with its focus on silver jewelry that seemed to be aligned much more with mass production and conventional design. This was not contemporary jewelry in the sense that this term has been used during the rest of the Gray Area conference. I found myself wondering if I wasn’t experiencing a potential misunderstanding that is growing as the conference progresses. If this is considered contemporary jewelry in Latin America, then we are talking about a very different kind of practice to what is meant by that term in Europe and other parts of the world. (E.g. the work that the speakers presented in this round table would never be accepted for the Schmuck exhibition.) This would suggest that those of us not from this part of the world require more history in order to understand correctly, since the notion of contemporary jewelry we import with us is clearly inadequate as a framework to understand contemporary jewelry from Latin America. And if this isn’t contemporary jewelry, then I am left wondering why the round table didn’t address the subject of how contemporary jewelry is presented and promoted in this part of the world – an important issue if we are to map the potential of the Gray Area as a moment of dialog and transformation.
April 14th, 2010 01:04
The second day of the Gray Area symposium saw a few conference attendees looking worse for wear after a late night partying in Mexico City. The theme for the day was ‘Two sides of the same coin: the state of contemporary jewellery’, and much of the day was given over to artist talks. Ruudt Peters (The Netherlands), Manon van Kouswijk (The Netherlands), Jorge Manilla (Mexico-Belgium), Martha Hryc (Poland-Mexico), Beate Eismann (Germany), Mirla Fernandes (Brazil) and Jiro Kamata (Japan-Germany) all presented their jewelry practices in talks that ranged from the serious to the side-splittingly funny. (Single biggest laugh: a video of Jiro Kamata in action making his rings of gold and sellotape marked with lipstick kisses.)
While the jewelry was quite different, the presentations followed a general pattern: a cute baby photo, a brief biography, a precocious encounter with adornment in which the speaker’s future as a jeweler is revealed, and finally descriptions of their work and practice. In a few cases the talks were about history that flowed over and around the jewelry, setting the scene but refusing to explain the work. Some thoughts: in the east they give things to objects, in the west we take things away from objects (Ruudt Peters); standardized objects such as wedding rings are deeply personal and individualized, a contradiction that feeds investigation (Manon van Kouswijk); jewelry opens the wearer’s heart and reveals it to others (Jiro Kamata). There were others, but some of the ideas were (literally) lost in translation, the Spanish to English interpreters doing a good job but sometimes introducing a poetry that, on top of unfamiliar histories and practices, made it difficult to keep up.
The artist talks bracketed Monica Gaspar’s ‘Versions of contemporary jewellery: differences, affinities, and influences between Europe and Latin America’, a talk delivered by teleconference. Gaspar’s paper was wide-ranging and provocative, addressing many of issues that structure a complicated project like Gray Area with its attempt at cultural mediation between Latin America and Europe. Gaspar began by quoting an art historical study of Spanish jewelry from 1500-1800, which suggested that the European discovery of the New World not only initiated a new period of globalization, but inspired European jewelry practices. Motifs from Aztec art, for example, began to turn up in Spanish jewelry, and objects engaging with the art of Latin America made it as far as the Medici in Italy. In other words, the evolution of jewelry in Europe can be linked to the encounter with Latin America.
Gaspar talked about the politics of centre and periphery, of being at the centre and being at the edge, and the series of questions that come with this hierarchy: where is the idea of contemporary jewelry produced and managed, and for whom? As she pointed out, these issues are not a problem for a European/Latin American encounter, but play a role in her experience as a writer and curator from southern Europe (Spain) traveling to central Europe (Germany, for example) where jewelry is dominant. As she tellingly suggested, when she visited the Schmuck exhibition in Munich in 1997 for the first time, she felt exotic, even though Barcelona had been a centre of contemporary jewelry since the 1950s. While she didn’t talk about this, the fact that she was curator of Schmuck 2010 must have been on people’s minds as one example of outsider successfully transforming their status into an insider – and a promising sign that the premise of the Gray Area project might be successfully realized.
One of the best aspects of Gaspar’s talk was the way she analyzed the Gray Area blog – the place where interaction between European and Latin American jewelers in the Gray Area exhibition took place – as a kind of fictional cartography, an imaginary space of encounter created out of various narratives (personal stories, stories of the workshop, stories of self and other, and stories of misunderstandings and mistranslations). (To visit the Gray Area blog, click here.) While Gaspar was not insensitive to the politics of North/South interaction, with Europeans coming from an undoubted position of dominance, she also argued that the conditions of the interaction (such as the blog, the time zone differences, the use of English as a global language) have created a particular space in which the Gray Area takes place. This is not a space like the ones we each inhabit, but a new space/place brought into being by the conditions of the project. And these conditions are the causal factors for a new geography in which interesting things can take place. What was so exciting about this is that Gaspar provided a way to escape the conclusions of centre and periphery power relations, without acting like this dynamic isn’t a real problem. She provided, in other words, an agency for the Gray Area, an ability to act and to engage which was still informed and political and grounded in the real world.
Xavier Andrade, an anthropologist from Ecuador, gave a paper called ‘Jewellery in Ecuador: practices, dialogues, flux’. He focused on the work of Santiago Ayala, a traditional healer who makes commercial jewelry to fund his more experimental pieces, and whose work deals with his experiences as a healer; and Hugo Celi, a shaman who studied anthropology and then jewelry, and whose work is concerned with recovering old practices, often through the use of found photographs. Andrade’s talk was a glimpse of a kind of jewelry that sits outside or apart from contemporary jewelry, and yet speaks directly to the conditions, practices and functions of jewelry in Latin America. It was excellent to escape the small and sometimes claustrophobic world of contemporary jewelry, and to have a new set of dynamics introduced into the conversation. Andrade also offered an anthropological critique of concepts like culture and identity, and made the point that such terms are often bandied about in a simplistic manner. Culture, he said, is a process not a thing, and contemporary art (understood in its widest sense) often talks about identity in an essentialist and stereotypical way. My feeling is that because we want to believe that contemporary jewelry is a powerful agent that transforms social relationships, we tend to think about concepts like culture and identity in an active way, but it was nice to be kept on our toes.
The final session of the day was a round table dealing with ‘The role of art and design academies in the encouragement of formal and conceptual experimentation in jewellery’. There were six participants: Ramon Puig Cuyas, from the Escola Massana in Spain, Marlen Piloto, from the Academy of Fine Art in Cuba, Andres Fonseca, from UNAM in Mexico, Manon van Kouswijk, from the Rietveld Academy in The Netherlands, Iker Otriz, from the Centro Diseno in Mexico, and Ana Paula de Campos from a Brazilian university (a late addition, and not listed in the program). Each person gave a short introduction about their particular ideas regarding the role of education in contemporary jewelry, and then the session was opened to questions from the audience.
It was interesting to have the opportunity to learn more about the various institutions in Latin America that teach contemporary jewelry, and it was also notable how similar the philosophies of education were. The round table, then, was part an introduction to the infrastructure of jewelry education in Latin America, and part a commentary about how contemporary jewelry should be taught, the issues that are impacting on education. It was less about how teaching institutions encourage formal and conceptual experimentation. One conclusion was that schools should be in advance of society, creating students for what the world will need in the future, not what is taking place now. And there was general agreement that trying to create contemporary jewelry specialists in three years is not going to work very well.
April 13th, 2010 01:04
At last, after a lot of planning, the Gray Area symposium opened at the Biblioteca de Mexico in Mexico City. For those of you who don’t know, the Gray Area is an ambitious project organized by the Amsterdam-based Otro Diseno Foundation for Cultural Cooperation and Development. As the program notes make clear, ‘Gray Area started as an urgent need: to diversify the international landscape of contemporary jewellery. Which turned into an idea: that of bringing enthusiastic jewellery devotees together in an unfamiliar, yet exciting place’. Taking place over five days, the symposium brings together speakers from Europe and Latin America (with a sprinkling of other countries) in what is effectively an attempt at cultural mediation – to insert Latin American jewelry into a European and then global jewelry discussion. (You can read more about the Gray Area symposium and associated exhibitions by clicking here.)
The first day of the symposium was dedicated to a fairly straightforward question: ‘What does it mean to us? Jewellery, identity and communication’. It won’t surprise you to learn that the answers proved not to be straightforward at all, as the various presentations and panel discussions raised a number of important issues that are currently impacting on contemporary jewelry practice around the world.
Dutch jeweler Manon van Kouswijk opened with a paper called ‘Gray matter: no brain, no gain’. Beginning with a whimsical reflection on her present position as head of jewelry at the Rietveld Academy in a building that is painted Rietveld grey, van Kouswijk effectively asked a series of questions that were designed to introduce the theme. What is the grey area? The space between commercial and art jewelry? Between craft and production? Between the head and the heart, the head and the hands? It was a nicely positioned talk in terms of the larger cultural dynamic of the conference, with van Kouswijk speculating on how a European can take part in a discussion located in a part of the world about which they know very little, and asking what is left to exchange in a mediated environment when nearly everything is available in books or on the internet. Speaking in front of a steady stream of images pulled from different times and places, van Kouswijk’s paper was a plea for a subtly located making – quite different to her deterritorialized slide show, in which objects and images flowed together without regard for cultural and historical specificity.
Caroline Broadhead, a British jeweler who is head of the jewelry department at Central St Martins in London, was up next with a paper titled ‘Ways of seeing: the body as an area for experimentation; interaction between jewel, wearer and viewer’. She spoke about vision, about ways of seeing and not seeing, particularly from the perspective of the viewer, who relies primarily on looking in order to encounter the jewelry – unlike the wearer, who has access to various bodily and sensory information in their encounter with the work. The value of Broadhead’s presentation was as an introduction to a variety of contemporary practices more or less familiar to the audience, which had the encouraging effect of demonstrating how rich and critically engaged contemporary jewelry can be. She also played the potentially risky game of positioning contemporary jewelry alongside contemporary fine art, and asking it to stand or fall on its merits. The conclusion seemed to be that the best contemporary jewelry can indeed play with the big boys (and girls) of the art world, and that it has something notable to say about both the body and vision. It was also notable to see the role of photography in experimental contemporary jewelry, a means of fixing temporary effects or staged tableau, and a reminder of how ubiquitous photography is in our experience of work, shaping how and what we see in the absence of the actual object.
The third talk of the morning, by Colombian archaeologist Clemencia Plazas, was called ‘American cosmovision through metals’, and turned back in time to the history of metals and technologies of pre-conquest Latin America. Her paper was a classic display of archaeology, coming with x-rays of objects, for example, so we could establish precisely how they were constructed, and offering a series of close readings of objects in terms of manufacture and then the social or cultural uses to which these objects were put. Plazas discussed the symbolic potential of metals, such as gold and platinum, the ways in which these metals were worked, and the types of jewelry or body adornment that were popular. Nose rings, for example, were close to breath, which means life. A spiral nose ring represented energy that penetrates and at the same time leaves the body, and different forms of nose rings had aesthetic potential, disguising or obscuring the face in quite different ways.
After lunch Plazas gave another paper in a session called ‘The use and meaning of materials for different cultures’, expanding on the cosmological implications of metal, and the way such materials as gold and silver mediated between the three realms of life in the Americas: the superworld above, our world in the middle, and the intraworld below. The superworld is the place of sunlight, associated with white or yellow, and thus gold. This is the male domain, the rational world and a place of linear thought. The intraworld is its opposite, the place of darkness, represented by black or blue. This is the world of the feminine, a space of rebirth, of intuitive and circular thinking. The human world, the place of sky, water and land, requires all the cosmological forces in balance to guarantee fertility. Materials like gold and silver were used symbolically in objects designed to achieve balance. Plazas made the very interesting point that the development of metallurgy in Latin America was linked to ritual and the cosmos, whereas in Europe metallurgy was closely tied to the practical world, to technology and economics.
Spanish jeweler Ramon Puig Cuyas, who is head of jewelry at the Escola Massana, talked about the importance of materials to jewelry practice, suggesting that materials are critical to jewelry in a way that they are not for other fine art practices, like sculpture. The issue is not which materials, but that materials are the starting point – meaning that you cannot speak about jewelry without the language of materials. Jewelry has always been a vehicle for extraordinary symbolism, which is why humans have always looked for extraordinary materials to use for it. And he suggested that the dialog of materials is what links contemporary jewelry to its past, to its jewelry traditions, even as it moves into the fine art world. As the scientist explores the nature of the materials of the universe to unlock secrets and knowledge of the world we live in, so the jeweler explores their materials in a similar way, with the same experimental intention and opportunity for discovery.
The final session of the day was a round table discussion, returning to the theme of ‘what does it mean to us?’ The participants were Liesbeth den Besten, an art historian from the Netherlands, French jeweler Benjamin Lignel, Mexican jeweler Jorge Manilla, who is a professor at the St Niklaas Academy in Belgium, Peruvian jeweler Ximena Briseno, who is currently studying in Australia, Mexican art critic Jose Manuel Springer, and myself (Damian Skinner). Everyone began by discussing the practice of contemporary jewelry in their country of origin, and addressed, if only briefly, some of their questions and perspectives on the meaning of contemporary jewelry. Den Besten spoke about her notion of contemporary jewelry as a kind of faith, demanding belief and commitment, as opposed to design’s interest in seduction without commitment. Lignel talked about his background as a designer, and his challenge to the doctrine of originality within contemporary jewelry, and his belief that there is no requirement for him to make or fabricate his work. Manilla spoke about the importance of honesty and integrity in contemporary jewelry, which will guarantee the value of any given work. Briseno asked about the way in which contemporary jewelry in Latin America is engaging with jewelry practices from Europe and North America, and whether this is a relationship of servitude, of unhealthy emulation. And Springer spoke about the personal potential of jewelry in constructing identity and the self, and concluded that the value of contemporary jewelry is in its lack of easy classification, its liminal or intermediate role. This, he noted, is contemporary jewelry’s best quality, its most productive characteristic.
These presentations were followed by a period of robust discussion and questions from the floor, which debated the differences between contemporary jewelry and design (and the issue of how an object addresses needs and desires), the relation of art and craft (and the potential of jewelry in a time when fine art is seeking to become more relational, to move away from its autonomous status), and the double nature of jewelry as objects to wear and display.
April 12th, 2010 03:04
Joyeros Argentinos is an organization ‘which unites creators of contemporary jewellery in Argentina, recovering and projecting the exceptional value of each creation and each creator, the collective values of the group and its identity, and of the interaction with those towards whom the jewels are directed: those who look at them, those who wear them’. Their exhibition, Kaleidoscope, features the work of 43 makers who have come together to represent Argentinean contemporary jewelry in a satellite exhibition to the Gray Area symposium. According to the exhibition invitation, Joyeros Argentinos are ‘Bringing closer, with their southern way of seeing, their wish and their will for achieving regional and international integration through their art’. (To find out more about Joyeros Argentinos, click here.)
This is very much within the spirit of the Gray Area symposium, which is taking place in Mexico City this week, and ‘stands as an endeavour to not only encourage the cultural exchange among jewellery makers from Latin America and Europe, but to additionally create an interdisciplinary frame of reference for contemporary jewellery and its practices within a truly multinational discourse’. (To learn more about Gray Area, click here.) Hence the stated desire that Kaleidoscope might achieve ‘regional and international integration’. Joyeros Argentinos are making a gamble for a seat at the international jewelry table, and playing a game in which the goal is to assert both difference and similarity – enough exotic character to make it worthwhile for the world to look, and enough evidence of being up-to-date with contemporary jewelry developments so the world understands what it sees. The goal is to be contemporary jewelry (global) from Argentina (local).
It is very hard to know how to respond to an exhibition like this, which in this context is an attempt to make a larger statement – to claim a place within an international discourse of jewelry. A viewer is faced, firstly, with the necessary work of understanding their own assumptions, identifying the rules and conventions that structure ‘international discourse’, and which are necessarily biased against Argentinean jewelry. (Contemporary jewelry from Argentina doesn’t establish or set the canon, which means this work is already on the back foot.) And then, a viewer with no knowledge of Argentina or its contemporary jewelry does not have access to the appropriate cultural frameworks – not just in terms of Argentina as a cultural space with a specific history, but in terms of these jewelers and their practices, the history of their work.
What overall conclusions can be drawn from the jewelry on display in Kaleidoscope? There is a predominance of metal, of silver, which presumably relates to the kind of training available and history of contemporary jewelry in Argentina. A number of pieces do introduce other materials such as rubber, fiber, plastic and ceramic, but the logic of these materials seems almost to follow traditional rules – as if these materials were precious stones, set in a metal armature. The scale is definitely set to the wearable end of the spectrum, with a couple of large necklaces but nothing that would prove impossible to wear. Most of the work is a kind of polite contemporary jewelry scale – big enough to be noticeable, to make a statement, but still within the realm of jewelry expectations. The jewelry types featured in this exhibition are rings, bangles or bracelets, necklaces and brooches.
There is some interest in nature, with the use of forms such as leaves and flowers, and a few pieces that evoke natural textures, the surfaces of nature. For example, Leda Daverio’s Nido III brooch, like an urban soil sample, or Rafael Alvarez’s Surgimiento de la imagen bracelet, with a ‘weathered’ silver surface, or Marisa Alonso’s Rocio sobre las hojas bracelet, with silver leaves and crystal drops of dew. There are flashes of humour: Roberto Galvan’s Sputnik pendant, a cute space ship, or Lucia Brichta’s Vivitos y coleando ring, like a little abstract figure. There is a tendency towards figurative jewelry: Anibal Alvarez’s La Calesita brooch, the pictorial composition inside Paula Isola’s El Sueno pendant, the mermaid in Victoria Biagiola’s Sirena-transita suenos brooch, and the mechanical/abstract ‘landscape’ of Gustavo Paradiso’s Hangar pendant. And there is a notable use of fiber and weaving techniques, as in Graciela Lescano’s Illusion necklace, or Veronica Alonso’s Marea brooch, or Gabriela Horvat’s Sin titulo necklace. And aligned with this is a tendency to treat various materials in fiber-like ways – looping, threading, stitching, as with Andrea Bohnke’s Sur Norte necklace.
There were also displays of sensitive attitudes towards materials, as in Alejanda Agusti’s Infusiones necklace with its teabags of steel, wool and wood, or Magali Anidjar’s Luna 2 brooch made of worn MDF and acrylic paint, like intentionally poor reproductions of precious, faceted stones. Perhaps the most beautiful expression of this tendency was Jorge Castanon’s Dos cuencos brooch, made of nickel silver and wood. This piece in particular exhibits an international quality in its aesthetic confidence (so simple) and cultural aspirations (as good as anything you’d see anywhere else in the world).
Which leads to a space of judgment, in which it is necessary to hold the jewelry in Kaleidoscope responsible to its aspirations as an opportunity to integrate Argentinean jewelry with contemporary jewelry regionally (Latin America) and internationally. It is arrogant, perhaps, to conclude this, but not all of this jewelry seems ready to take its place in an international discourse. Only certain pieces and practices stand out as having the quality to transcend national borders. It is hard to know how to define the ingredients of this quality, and I am also wary of imagining this is a product of connoisseurship, a kind of neutral, absolute character – since clearly such a concept as ‘international quality’ will be conditioned by values that come from outside the work itself. But all of this jewelry, whether ‘international quality’ or not, proves an awareness of contemporary jewelry that certainly guarantees Argentinean jewelry the right to reserve a seat. What the other jewelry traditions will make of Argentina’s contribution remains to be seen, and that is the great challenge and opportunity that the jewelers in Kaleidoscope have shown themselves interested in addressing.
April 5th, 2010 03:04
Houston is a nice surprise. One arrives looking for big hair, big jewels, hips hugged by pearl-handled six-shooters and instead, one finds The Society of North American Goldsmiths, “Going to Extremes”. And these are just four (of many!) memorable moments.
Caroline Broadhead, who in person appears slight and wise, began the conference with elegant thought. Her first slide: a gate with no fence in front of a townhouse she walked by every day for 22 years. An anomaly. The image helped inspire her work and that image set the tone for the next three days. Favorite slides? An ivory necklace shaped like a knotted cord. A fingerprint bracelet. A long-sleeved shirt (really long!). Shadows that become the extension of the person.
Gabriel Craig reminded us of our history and of those shoulders we stand on: Pugin, Ruskin, William Morris. And the Arts and Crafts ideas that have led to such things as the INDY movement and the Radical Jewelry Makeover. How familiar the ring of the words: “I need to make”, “I create to serve a greater purpose”.
Bruce Baker set the Professional Development Seminar on fire! Brash and beautiful describe his fast-talking, idea-revealing presentation. He reminded the attendees that the first thing they need to do to sell their work is ask the “Yes” question by using the “IF” sentence: “If I can help you….”, “If you need….”, “If you want…” And, if the customer is rude, stupid or insensitive, “It Doesn’t Matter!” Bruce was irreverent but right on. “Getting their money is the best revenge!”
The Portfolio Review is one of the conference’s highlights for me. Makers tenderly and hesitantly show their images. Assured and advanced makers are there to tempt this gallery owner. A single student comes unprepared and chewing gum but absolutely charming. Everyone shares their soul. Fifteen minutes for an intense, pleasurable, demanding, revealing one-on-one session.
This was a conference that demanded an open mind. Thanks to the planners. Thanks to the presenters. Thanks all. The SNAG conference stirs the juices and reminds all of us why we bother.