The spirit of enquiry, master of ones own stuff. Understanding and repairing the machinery of existence.
Freedom is found through submission to rules and it is through knowledge and skill that creativity comes. The analogy of learning to play a musical instrument . The novice is restricted. The idea that skill limits is modern propagana. Learning a new language. Colleges continue to pedal a myth of innocence. Fixing things is a cure for narcissism. The builder can attain a perfection where as a doctor or mechanic is forced to engage with a reality outside of their control. Craft theories based on making from scratch fall here, i suggest a fresh approach. Aristotle gave these arts a seperate classification; surgery and mechanics are stochastic arts, they require you to be attentive, like if you were in conversation, not assertive like when giving a lecture. We need to look at fixing stuff, the stochastic arts, the narcissism of making outside of societal context has led to a craft theory of ignorance.
At school we were all taught as if we were going to university even though few were and many would be builders, mechanics, machinists. Now, in colleges students are being taught by people who have never had to survive in the world, never spent long self employed. My final visits as a lecturer exposed me to exmakers who wre teaching blindly. They had lost touch with the real world. Projects such as coffee tables, hall stands, single throne like chairs were often run. Maybe ten people run businesses just doing this. The worrying part is those teaching seemed unaware. Students left college needing to relearn how to do it all over again. There are two types of knowing;knowing how and knowing that. It seems colleges are poor places for teaching know how. They can only successfully teach know that. Information, not tacit know how. In the information age it is argued that knowledge can drive an economy. This holds true untill you need someone to fit your wardrobe or fix your car. As a buisness I would be far more likely to employ a someone who has come through trade induction, apprenticeship, than a middle class exstudent full of diahorea about 'innovation'. These students are taught to get by by interpreting values in to work that are not real.
Architects rarely get to see their wild dreams, furniture makers do. Perhaps it is this that leads to the narcissism that drives them to construct false realities. Trade has collective, familial knowledge. This is lost when we merely produce innovative selfish types. Celebrity culture has seeped in. What once was our strength is being abandoned in the hope students will join a tiny elite, able to make incongruous objects. It seems as short sighted to teach the top few who may become designer makers as it is to just teach the few school kids who want to go in to what is wrong with honest trade?
I gave up teaching because of having to fit in to such systems. I would be asked to give a slide show on my work. At first such pompous acts served to flatter my ego. As time went on i felt the students were being sold lies. It wasnt that me and other visitting lecturers didnt make these things it was that it was irrelevant. Students believed there was room to make like there was a public there entranced by their creativity. In truth their jobs will mainly be in the service of others dreams. And what is more, this how it should be. I can imagine nothing worse than having to live with some of the monsters these designer maker students produce. I had been fooled myself by a previous generation of visiting lecturers in to believing I could survive through sales of exhibited speculative work. No one does.
What is wrong with having a context in society. There are pleasures to be had in collaboration. In making things other people want. Even if you dont always design it.
It was for similar reasons i gave up art to do joinery as a youth. Unquestionable values, shared with others. Supporting your art with theories so others can understand is isolating. I enjoy the silent admiration i get from making joinery well. You doint need to put a spin on it. Structure employing physical laws offers us a morality too. If your work is dependent on words it falls in your absence. Structures can be qualified as true and right. When your work requires interpretation it has questionable values. Herein lies the irony. Joinery gave solid ground underfoot, morality. Furniture designer making took this away. The foundations become unsound, the slope slippery. This is why I now make a different type of furniture on the whole. There will be the odd ego piece but I would not wish to be defined by this.
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