The Foundations of Privilege, from Portland to Philadelphia with Goblins, 2014.

I’ve been living in Philadelphia for six months now.

After six years of living in a utopia bubble, my wife and I moved from Portland, Oregon so she could go to graduate school at UPenn.  Ivy league, social work, full ride. Of course you leave / go.  She’s been learning about mass incarceration, race and gender inequality, and interning as a transitional counselor for soon to be released inmates.  We are an interracial couple, married for one year, have been with each other for ten. 

Privilege has come up often.  In our time together, I have learned a lot about mine.  But not as much as I have learned about it than in the past six months living in West Philly.

I didn't grow up in a household that talked about religion, politics or race.  We ate dinner together every night and mom, sister and I went to church every Sunday morning. Dad stayed home, we never talked about it.  These subjects were considered impolite I supposed. We were kept safe and then we watched TV in the evenings.  Around ten years old I started drawing cartoons and making ceramic animal sculptures delving into my own fantasy world, filling in the gaps of my ignorance about the world.

The first time I was introduced to the idea of privilege, the word, the meaning, was during my first art critique in graduate school.  It happened so fast, in the middle of confusion, art history and theory.  At one moment we were talking about holes in ceramic work and why mine didn’t have any, and then the next moment the professor was saying he wanted everything I had always had as a child.  I said I wanted what he had, I felt so empty and naive at that moment.  It all ended abruptly and the group moved onto the next students work.  

Philadelphia is the biggest city either of us has ever lived in. We found our place on Craigslist from Portland, took a FaceTime tour with our iPhones.  We asked about the neighborhood and she was honest, Philly is divided block to block.  It was close to the school for my wife and a landing place for us.  We took it and signed the lease contract from a Fedex Kinko’s. Nine days driving and we pulled in front of our apartment in West Philly.  One of the first things our new landlord said, upon meeting in real life, was don’t walk anymore north or west from our new apartment, ours was the last block.  We are on the edge. Safe for others but not me, it’s not my culture, I don’t fit in here and I’m not welcomed. I am an uninvited guest. 

We’ve driven around and can see why.  Abandonment, undefined masses, rubble and debris, black windowless structures, and garbage slowly fills the streets the farther you drive in either of those directions.  My co-worker said once when he was growing up that his mom wouldn’t let him go past 40th.  We live on 50th and I haven’t walked past 52nd, and I only do that if I need to catch the train, but usually walk the opposite direction to 46th for the same reason, it feels safer.  The ten blocks past University City, from 40th to 50th, are a mix of housing for home owners, students and low income renters, and abandoned lots and buildings, the contrast from block to block, even from building to building is jarring.  I stay in my apartment most of the time, usually only going out side to walk the dog or go to work.

I have an upbringing in building, making and maintaining things, objects. I place a high value on material and space.  They are precious to me, I identify with them.  Material is potential, expression, thinking with my hands, exercising my imagination, and has always helped me to understand the world.  Material lies around in mounds and as discarded waste in empty lots where buildings once stood in West Philly.  Broken cement chunks and bricks randomly thrown in heaps in the allies. It’s a chaotic mess, I have to watch where I step. There are whole abandoned lots in my neighborhood that could fit every tiny shitty apartment I’ve every lived in. Philadelphia is old, one of the oldest cities in the United States, layers upon layers of rebuilding and change. I know, but still vastly different from Portland. 

I did not know how much organization and maintenance played into feelings of safety and beauty until I moved here.  I keep thinking that all this potential is lost when I walk outside.  I think, if this material was maintained, it could still be what it was intended for when it was originally constructed, or, after its demolition, it could be recycled and made into something new.  And this is when I start to be aware of my privilege. 

Make. Build. Maintain. New. These are the ideals of my culture, I was afforded to think in this linear fashion.  Some call this progress, but now I'm learning that maybe it is the foundation of privilege.  It was my upbringing. I had the time, money, material, and space, the resources to create.  I had abundance and didn't know it, didn't know it truly on a level of comprehension that was specific to my learning language, until now, seeing, being, and living here in this neighborhood. 

I don't live in a place that can afford the criteria for life that I had / have.  I’m having a very hard time understanding that. I'm left wondering who made this place, who left this junk here, what happened here, how did it happen and how come no one seems to care? Who would choose to live like this? As I did when I was a child, I am filling in the gaps of my ignorance with fantasy explanations.  Goblins must have constructed these surroundings and I am a goblin for thinking that as well.  I feel like shit, no one chooses to live like this, they have to, and they have for some time now, this is and has always been life.  I am the unwelcome guest and they have never been to, or will probably never go to an overly well manicured place such as Portland, Oregon.

In Oregon I was poor, as I am now, but there I could still fake like I wasn’t.  And before Oregon, living outside of Detroit, I was poor too, but we just called it young, stupid and searching.  Now, here in Philadelphia, the curtain is raised, I am in my late thirties and for the first time in my life I am living in a place that fits my financial situation. It’s ugly, depressing and heartbreaking.  Everyday I walk the dog trying to become more accustomed to it all, but find a quick reason to return back to my apartment, hiding in my fantasy world, drawing and making dumb ceramic sculptures, furiously processing these feeling in starts and fits, scratches and smashes.

Only recently, after six months living in West Philly, have I been able to rest with it all.  My privilege is mine and I am thankful for that, from an early age I learned a way to cope with change and stress and loss.  But my fantasy world has been a blessing as well as a hinderance, and I see that now, I am hyper aware of my place and surrounding.  I am a humbled guest in the neighborhood, some people say hello now, and some don’t.  

http://www.fontichiaro.com/activelearning/2013/10/15/hbr-tactile-intelligence/
The more time our “digital native” kids spend on entertainment media, the more we lose the tactile intelligence critical to design and manufacture physical products.

The New Influence

Bruce Metcalf’s essay Craftsmanship in the Age of Hot Glue and Tape, edited and renamed Hot Glue and Staples for American Craft issue June / July 2014 irritates me.  I guess it has irritated many other folks as well, but I feel compelled to share some of my own thoughts.  I don't disagree with much of what he says about the importance of craftsmanship, but its a rather narrow perspective to have with consideration to the changing state of the object these days.  Metcalf is projecting his values based on his practice onto the entirety of art.  Doing so, he is perpetuating the classification of objects solely between art and craft.  His essay doesn’t include a perspective of the object beyond physicality, a world we have lived in for quite some time now.  The age of the internet has changed craft. 

Metcalf does highlight an important aspect of craftsmanship, the influence that practice has to change our minds, but fails to consider it in a much broader analysis.  Prolonged repetition does change neurological pathways, that is to say, how we think.  After twenty years of using the internet we are just beginning to catch up to the implications of this new information technology, this new medium.  With prolonged use, the internet has changed our minds.  Nicholas Carr, in his book The Shallows, proves that how we communicate, think, and create, have all been neurologically reformatted due to the internet.  After two decades of working within virtual systems, with virtual material if you will, how can I be expected to approach physical materials in traditional ways?  How can I think of objects by a purely physical description alone? How could I possibly approach them in the same way?  Furthermore, why would I want to? 

I believe that craftsmanship is on a sliding scale, a tool used incrementally from low to high, in order to support a makers intention.  I have witnessed two unspoken reactions to the internet over the past few years when it comes to object making in craft.  Very high craftsmanship, inciting an over fetishized product, both in form and nostalgia, and very low craftsmanship, creating haphazard, almost lackadaisical works which slightly refer to Process Art, but lack in the that movements intention.  The high end reaction feels stubborn, in denial of the technological change we are all going through, and the low end reaction is lost in the quagmire of infinite possibility, feeling half inspired and half defeated.  Given the overwhelming influence the internet has had on our notion of production, objects, and materials, I find it truly amazing that both camps are still making, with there hands, and with tangible substances.  It is a testament to our genetically formed relationship with all things tangible and the will of humanity.  Non-the-less, the notion of the object has been forever changed in the minds of all the internets users.  I do not believe sloppy craft exists.  The so called sloppy craft maker has purposely put that object into the public, opening it up for discussion. I have to at least meet the maker half way and believe that they choose that level of craftsmanship very intentionally.  Furthermore, I have to consider why they choose to do so, and by that I mean what context the maker producing from.  

I suspect that Metcalf is not so much upset with so called sloppy craft, as he is with wanting makers to have a sense of respect for material, with their work, and taking some pride in themselves.  I agree, but the classification of created objects must transcend the previous models of art, craft and design, and begin to include, in the very least, the awareness of virtual sensibilities.  Science fiction writer and design theorist Bruce Sterling helps to give some semblance to the virtual objects of the present and near future in his book Shaping Things.  The physical object, what he calls the artifact, is merely our first notion of the object, there are many more to come.  If form equals content, I suspect that there is a lot more understanding to be done and this can only happen with continued experimentation.
  

Metcalf calls for us to look through the surface of the object and into the meaning of it. I argue that lavish attention to an object completely hinders the disappearance of the surface and only reflects the makers technical ability.  This is not concept.  We need to think broader.  We can no longer rely on our previous definitions of what makes a good art or a good craft object.  To start, we all need to stop defining craft by material association and start defining it by the makers intention.  Even infinitely malleable clay has its limitations in use, which in turn creates limitations in practice and the associative maker’s identity.  Like the internet, intention has no bounds.  

Let us pretend for a moment, that craft, as a noun, has died.  It no longer exists.  Regardless of means of production, whether by hand or by machine, people will continue to produce objects, for there will always be an innate calling to do so, that is something we can always rely on.  Now, regardless of the inspirational source, utilitarian or not, people can now set there intention on only one aspect, whether an object is functional or is not.  There would be objects that are sculptures and there would be objects that are designs.  My point is, as makers we all side either one way or the other already, and that may change from day to day, but what I’m asking for is that makers get out of their own way and label the objects they make and not themselves.  Let intention drive form and thus content.

Playing out this thought experiment a little further, how would such an approach to material and making change how we think about craft?  Craft is reformed into a verb.  Craft becomes a means for sociology including, but not limited to, education, community awareness, sharing, empathy, thinking, and discussion. These craft qualities far exceed the stagnate limitations of the individual object.  

The influence of the internet places the maker in confusing territory, without a doubt, but that does not exclude us from trying to make sense of it.  Any reaction to a major paradigm shift, is a good reaction, it shows consideration and thoughtfulness, but if there is one thing I have learned from my considerations of the internet, is that it affirms that there is more than one approach to thinking about things and that includes objects.  The possibilities of a thing are endless, embrace them all, and let them influence what you love to do.  You’ll make better work for doing so.