Defining how we fucked things up so badly is close to home. Fuck it, it is home. Or the obsession with homes. Even on the brink of environmental disaster and during a huge recession we still have reruns of the property porn of grand designs. Kevin McCloud has taken steps to avert karma by making some Eco homes but will surely be remembered for his role as exponent of property ownership just as Blair may hope to remembered for creating equality yet it is Iraq that will always come to mind when people think of his time in power.
The middle classes have moved on to food now and define themselves by what they eat now. Farmers markets, organic, locally sourced are the terms that single out the status anxious these days perhaps down to guilt, who knows.
For my lot the saddest part is that, as youngsters, we pulled off creating an alternative society. We created this culture yet couldn't carry it through. We all live by adhesion or separation from the pack. Either way we are defined by our relationship to it. If only we had stuck to our beliefs we may now be well placed to enjoy the collapse of capitalism. The counter culture rejected material wealth and having no stake in property ownership little to fear from recession.
But I can not claim innocence. I was complicit in obsession with objects, even if it was as a maker.
It was with some revulsion I read about a current design project where a group of selected designers have been asked to produce and exhibit work on the subject of 'thrift'. Can they not see the irony? This metro centric design tribe have spent their lives devoted to materialism and the fetishisation of objects. How are they to respond? Do they tow the jaded politicians line of fighting from the inside? A belief that they can steer the system from within for the greater good? This is the last line of the uninspired, those without the originality to see a different way.
The fine furniture posses straw poll sees a downturn in the publics interest in their work. The objects of desire, once revered now look like embarrassing idols in the worship of wealth. In post modernist craft maybe we saw its dieting gasps. The clutching at straws in recycled materials and ideas, digitised cabriole legs or other messengers from the past reheated like yesterday's cabbage.
We are undergoing a spiritual, philosophical crisis. In politics it appears that the environmental and economic crises have triggered little change. Our leaders fiddle at the edges trying to recapture the elusive god growth.
We need to make a paradigm shift. In material culture a project promoting an elite group entranced by their own myth, failing to see the ironic stupidity of further baubles on the subject of 'thrift'. We should be aiming to reclaim craft as a communal activity. Once woman knitted, made dresses, men pottered about in sheds, fixing, making. Now we have a clutch who have neither the eye to succeed in art nor the ingenuity to succeed in design taking a third path we call craft. But it isn't what once was but a middle class activity whose exponents require the approval of media. Nothing done for its own ends or in the service of clients. Only for the self aggrandisement of public exhibition.
Here comes my excuses. I may be making a glass chair for exhibition that no doubt will be a fetishistic object made for my own glory. But I have come to think of making furniture without a client as like having sex on your own.
We have got ourselves in a right old mess. All those possibilities for better lives reduced to massive debt and a world in tatters. John Maynard Keyenes in 1929 spoke of a future with greater leisure time. From the Victorian working week of 60 hours we got it down to a humane 40. Since 1980 it has been picking up again. We have made a kind of capitalism characterised by "trampling, crashing, elbowing and treading on the others heels".
A gallerist I sometimes exhibit with boasts of having russian oligarch Abramovich as a client. Such are the clients we furniture makers are assumed to be aspiring to have. It would be hard to change direction, find a new way at my time of life. I like making things too. This is why I do what I do. It is that simple. I have found a niche I am happy with. It is true that craft may be the perfect medium to address 'thrift' but this surely should be in the craft of make do and mend rather than in the sub art, sub design world of London based attention seekers.
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