Intro
Crafting Error is about creation. What do I look at? How do I make sense of these things? How do the tensions between my various influences bend my objects away from what they may have been if I consumed other things? These words are about source material, specifically my own. These paragraphs are observations about the things I read, look at and the forces they exert on the things I make in my studio. These experimental essays, aphorisms and poems work through my objects, ideas and identity. I speculate about why things attract my attention and how and why they relate to designcraft.
“The world is given but once. Nothing is reflected. The original and the mirror image are identical. The world extended in space and time is but our representation.”1
I’m a visual artist. Specifically I design and make things that are jewelry and product-adjacent. I’ve tried to generalize the topics of this book to be of some value to anyone who takes the time to read it. But the primary chemistry is the recursive reaction between the particular sources mixed together in my studio beakers. They’re different from yours, and I’m looking at what comes out of them in Phil-centric ways.
In trying to explain what I’ve been writing over the past year I’ve been tempted to call it a work on design theory. But that’s too broad, while I engage in some theory here, it isn’t a general theory of design. It isn’t even a special theory of design, or a single narrative idea. The chapters in Crafting Error are the product of one person typing in the late two thousand teens, and were written consecutively, but they draw from decades of collecting, reading, and thinking about art, design, craft, culture, the individual, physics and even a little metaphysics. There are fairly big swings of style and substance. The two consistent elements are pairings of the image and the word — which doesn’t really separate this work from any other effort at explaining art and design. Sometimes my verbs correspond directly to my image, but other times the links are pretty loose; maybe even broken. You won’t find these things neatly unpacked and examined in a way you can directly apply to your own work — partly because I’m not sure I want to do that and partly because I’m not sure I can do that. It’s an anticonfluential approach2; not a highly portable theory. This is a journal about my things and thing-making, about atoms and forms and symbols as I have measured them. It gets messy.
Crafting Error was made possible by a sabbatical granted by Kendall College of Art and Design, where I teach jewelry as well as industrial design. It was primarily written during the fall of 2015 and owes its existence to the patient and generous mentors, colleagues, friends, family and students who have indulged me over the past few decades.
Skip Hunter, Bob Chew, John Marshall, Dan Loewenstein and Mary Lee Hu were exactly the professors I needed. They taught me some of the things I needed to know about my field; but more importantly they helped me develop a critical posture I could use to see how my work might relate to the world outside my discipline. Consistently, I was pushed to test my ideas against others; to discriminate between various options, to slow down and consider the consequences of my actions. (Then I sped up to collect more junk — I am still working on this project.)
Pamela Argentieri, Boris Bally, Doug Bucci, Tom Edwards, Susanna Engbers, Teresa Faris, Mike Gayk, Matthew Hollern, Stanley Lechtzin, Adam Schuitema, Brent Skidmore, Heath Satow, Courtney Starrett, Rebecca Strzelec, Annie Wassman, Don Freidlich and other peers, colleagues and mentors helped me to keep the important things in focus while keeping my temper from overexposing the scene. I have misanthropic tendencies, but the few truly exceptional people I’ve met have kept me from becoming entirely estranged from the community of man. They read and react to my dumb ideas, give me feedback on my stream of ill-considered objects, and inspire me to work a little harder, a little smarter and to be a little nicer. I am lucky to have smart friends who make time for me.
I think of myself as a designer, but the truth is that I am a teacher. That is a professional distinction — as I have made far more money and have had many more clients as a professor than as a graphic or jewelry designer. But it’s also a point of view; to the extent that I am still an artist it is because this work keeps me thinking and learning. This monologue is my aura in the classroom — it’s what I draw on as an instructor and as a mentor (and it is ongoing.) We could think about students as raw materials, work products, agents and the creators of the knowledge they acquire; and all of these perspectives are correct in at least some situations. Facilitating these requires a designer, a maker, a critic and a reader — I help craft students. And that work, in turn, reshapes me.
I’ve led a privileged life which would not have been possible without the support and encouragement of my family — especially my mother, Marietta. Although I am partially her fault, it takes a tough, generous, wise, tolerant, farsighted, crazy or just persistent woman to have supported me during my adolescence and early adulthood. It has taken an altogether different kind of person to have put up with me in my fully formed condition. My wife, Elizabeth, spends much of her time feeding and cleaning up after a herd of goats, dogs, cats and a horse; sweet, strong, but hopelessly unruly creatures. While I’m more or less housebroken, I am messier, less obedient and far less cuddly than Saul, Mocha, Maggie, Mila, Pablo, Luna, Betty, Bob, Memo, Angel, Cosimo, Penelope and Picasso. Elizabeth puts up with my fleet of Pontiacs, my heterochromic shoes and year-round shorts wearing, my pathological narcissism and my reticence to engage with human beings that I don’t have to interact with. Elizabeth is my loving enabler.
My instinct is to dedicate this work to my brother. But since he has been dead for twenty-three years, there is no Brian to read or try to make sense of the inscription. He exists in the dry chemistry of photographs, memories, and decisions. He catalyzed every image before 1993, whether resting in albums or constructed in my mind. And he has been a reagent in every choice I’ve made since. I don’t so much ask what he would have done in my place, as try to use what time I have to synthesize something that will outlast me; things that may provoke in others the longing I feel for his presence. So I dedicate the matter and meaning in this book to me; or to the parts of me that still remember him, the parts of me still capable of change — the fair, funny, and sweet parts of my solution that buffer the acrid.