The peak of mail order commerce is behind us my friends…
Too often these days, I hear people talking about the “internet” and how you can find out anything and get anything online. I hear people talking about “googling for this”, and “buying that on Etsy” (what a shameless plug!). And to those of us that were born after the 1970 probably think this internet thing is the greatest thing since the Atari.
However, our elders know this isn’t the case…. They knew of a time before the internet, before computers, a time when they had the grandaddy of all mail order sources… the Sears Catalog. Now, I know the gen-xers are saying, “We had the Sears Catalog too!” And how the Christmas edition was the highlight of our pre-holiday season! What I wouldn’t give to flip through that now!
Listen closely… If all you knew was the post-1970 Sears Wish Book, then you are sadly mis-enlightened. In fact if you had the chance to flip through the sears catalogs of years gone by, I dare say you were robbed!
I myself have had a the great opportunity to flip through the 1963 Sears Catalog and was absolutely in awe… floored… get ready for a mind blowing afternoon people! My whole concept of how great the internet was was flipped upside down. It no longer deserves to be capitalized in my book. Aside from the usual clothes, bras, shoes, playground equipment, fishing poles, guns (real guns, not bb guns), golf clubs, vitamins, bicycles, mimeograph machines, typewriters (electric and manual), cameras (movie and still), wallpaper, paint, ladders, hardware, the most insane selection of tools, pet supplies, fencing, car parts, toilets, hot water heaters, all appliances, tv’s and stereos, guitars (electric and acoustic), bunk beds, couches, lawn furniture, you could get so much more! The only thing I didn’t find was liquor and food.
Quiz: In the 1960’s, which of the following could you NOT purchase through Sears?
A. A personal steam bath and belt massager
B.”Charmode” all-in-ones… (boned for firm figure control! hubba hubba!)
C. A Mail Man’s Uniform
D. A 14-foot Runabout Fiberglass Boat with 14 HP Motor (complete with optional trailer)
E. Frog Suits (everything you needed for scuba diving complete with harpoon gun)
F. A Pet Monkey
G. Scooters (the cool retro ones, oh wait they were modern back then… but still…)
H. or None of the Above.
If you chose “H. all of the above” you were most likely born before 1970 (Hi Mom!). Because you would be correct.
Here’s those pages… I’ll let you soak the gravity of this situation in for a minute….
The 1963 Sears Catalog I have is 1500 pages thick and is only for “Spring Through Summer”. I am still in awe. Sears did not accept PayPal.
Anyone born after 1970, probably selected option “F”. When you found out you were wrong you probably said, “Keith, you were right, we were robbed! Here we were, watching “Lancelot Link - Secret Chimp” on TV, wanting only one thing in the world and that was to have a pet monkey. And had we been born 10 years prior, that possibility could have been delivered to our door (sent by express via air or rail)… for a mere $28.95!”
In today’s terms thats a little under 300 cups of coffee (coffee was .10 back then right?). So if I went without a latte for a year, I could afford a pet monkey??? Mom, we are gonna need a lot of bananas.
A pet monkey is probably at the top of the pet chain. We (children of the 70’s) would be willing to sacrifice all other pets to have just one loveable adorable intelligent monkey. Say bub-bye to the hamsters, turtles, cats, dogs, puppies & kittens (gasp!), ant farms and say hellooooo to a new friend and distant relative - your very own pet monkey!
I find it amazing that monkeys, not only haven’t they been genetically bred into the perfect pet [yet], but they cannot even be purchased in the almighty online world of ecommerce (BTW - that guy selling them from Camaroon is a crook; and don’t even insult me by saying “Sea Monkeys”, but if you do find a source… contact me!).
This happens a lot to innovative technology, hell, they had hydrogen cars in the 70’s… where are they now? Why don’t I drive one? Your hybrid is a pale comparison to the one Jack Nicholson drove… just like the internet is a pale comparison to the Sears catalog… just like a pet fish is a pale comparison to a pet monkey.
Or is it?
At face value, a fish is at the very bottom of that perpetual pet chain. You can’t pet it (not sure you can really call it a pet if you can’t pet it), you can’t teach it tricks, it’s about as distant from you on the evolutionary chain as it can get. Sea Monkeys may be the only thing below below the pet fish.
However, my stereotype and taxonomy of the lowly pet fish has changed ever since I meeting Uncle Gravy. Uncle Gravy was a bulbous eyed fancy gold fish. Not really gold, not really fancy, and one eye looked fake, I think it may have been a glass eye. He was mostly gray, peppered with black spots (thus we have “gravy”) with a few shiny silver and gold scales here and there.
Never having fish that lasted very long, I found it remarkable that Uncle Gravy kept living past day 3, and it was an outright miracle when we hit two months together.
He sure was a kooky fish, and kept me on my toes. Sometimes I’d find him floating at the top, belly up literally and think, well, I knew it was too good to be true. I’d go to scoop him out with the net and Ha! He’s swim off laughing and chuckling to himself. “You… you got me Uncle Gravy, you had me for a sucker!” That trick never got old.
Turns out his floating wasn’t just trick, but a result of his bad diet. The food we were giving him made him gulp air and it would get trapped in side, causing him to “lose balance”. It’d start with him swimming funny, looked like he was trying to balance himself on a beach ball that was floating in a rough ocean. Eventually he’s grow tired and succum to the physics of nature and float at the top upside down until the air “expelled” itself and he could swim normally again. I bought a more expensive food for him and it seemed to help his situation.
You know your in neptunic love when you buy “special” food for your fish.
Shortly afterwards, I started having coffee in my Orange Chair next to the fish tank and Uncle Gravy and before long, we started talking about art. I suppose the distance between my brothers and sisters is so great and our chance to talk about and explore ideas so few and so short that I must have looked to Uncle Gravy as a surrogate muse. He’s helped me as an artist.
Yeah, there I used it. I called myself an “artist”. You will probably notice in the past two years of this blog (has it really been two years?) that I’ve neglected to call myself an artist, I’ve never really been comfortable with the term as it applied to me.
Sure I went to college and “studied art”, and the majority of my income the past 12 years has been from graphic design. I’m fine with being called a “designer”. That’s where I take what the client wants to communicate and express it in visual form. But the message is always the client, you never communicate what you want to say as a designer. I’m also what you would call a mediocre designer, I’m a “client’s designer”. I give the client what they want, not necessarily something that is going to win any CA awards, or push the boundaries of design. Don’t get me wrong, I am fine with that, no complaints. But on the other hand, I don’t think I am especially happy being a “designer”. It paid the bills.
However, during the past two years, I’ve been looking at my income and have seen a steady increase in money coming from things that were not done for a client, they were just “done”, and then they were sold to someone who liked them. Pottery, quilts, prints, whatever. These didn’t fall under the category of design, because there was no client - so what were they? I am still hesitant to say it.
Labeling an “artist” is frought with consequences. The word alone can conjure up so many various stereotypes, but most of all it’s frought with responsibility. I’ve thought that being an artist meant that you put your art first, before everything else valued in life. If your art was pure, it would move society further from the status quo and help us as a society grow in terms of how we think, interact, communicate, love and die.
That’s a huge responsibility and I want none of it.
#1 I tend to put my family first. I mean how could I explore a sexual dialogue in my art and at the same time responsibly raise two kids. It’s not appropriate… and if I am willing to put my kids first, then the art will have to suffer.
#2 I’ve got nothing to say. I was raised in the burbs, middle child of 5, military brats were we. We were loved greatly by our parents. I do not ever remember suffering. We were encouraged to explore and create. We were raised with a consistent foundation in the beliefs of the Catholic Church, by parents who understood personal faith, but we were never reprimanded or belittled when we started exploring other religions and philosphies. I wish every child could have half the love I did growing up.
Sadly this wonderful childhood does not seem to be the ideal making for a “great artist”. How could I rage against the injustices of the world without truly being able to empathize with the suffering of others? You will not see the likes of Guernica pouring out of me.
I suppose that’s why functional pottery seems appropriate. Just like suburbia was created to be functional, so is a mug.
So why not call myself a craftsperson? Well, this “blog post” is long enough already without going into the great debate over craft vs. art, but lets just say I feel the two are not mutually exclusive, you can have one without the other, and you can also have both. It’s not a debate I am too concerned about anyways… However it was from this seed of dialog that Uncle Gravy started making some progress in getting me to label myself as an artist.
It was one morning where I was feeling a little down on myself. At this time I had started exploring toner decals on my pots. This is a process that requires a fair amount of technology and industry. I was(am) using a combination of both vintage illustrations and images, along with my own drawings to decorate my pots. As an artist (an academically educated artist no less), and all things being artistically pure, shouldn’t I be using all original drawings, shouldn’t everything come from my own hand? I had been admiring for some time the pots of Micheal Kline. They are decorated with gorgeous patterns and motifs, all carved and painted by his own hand. Hats off to you sir!
Feeling myself “less” as an artist, Uncle Gravy started trying to steer the conversation… “You are completely missing the point”, he said.
Listen, if you want to start talking methods and placing values and economies of scale over one or the other, you are completely missing the point. I mean, we could sit here and talk about “toner” as a method for embellishment, and using computers etc. etc. But hell, you were taught toner method in Printmaking, it’s a legit process, using it to resist acid on plates, why would using it on a pot be anything less? But that’s not the point. And neither is whether you are using images drawn my you or others. It doesn’t matter if these visual concepts have been “filtered” through your head and ejaculated out of your pen…
Uncle Gravy sure had a way with words… and it still boggles my mind trying to if his metaphors are really what they are, or if I have a dirty mind…
You only have to look at the works of Rauchenburg and Warhol to see what I mean. That road has been paved, man, don’t worry about it. Why pick a battle that has already been fought and won?
You sit there going through vintage pages of encyclopedias, drawing or scanning from 1960s catalogs, and picking and choosing between what images you use and don’t. You scan these in using “tools” you have used for the past 12 years, manipulate them, print them on decal paper. You print lots of them on lots of decal paper, and then what do you do?
You sit and paint the surface of these mugs, cups and bowls. Painting, like a painter uses oil paint for a medium, only yours happens to be toner. Applying them using minute to minute decisions based on the particular form they are on. No two bowls are the same, even the sets. I’m not even going to get into mentioning that these pots have been thrown by your own hand, glazed and then fired, making all the hundreds of small decisions that go into firing a kiln to 2300 degree. blah blah blah…. And still you think yourself “less”?
Aw shucks, your making me blush…
But you are still missing the point!! I’ve listened to your dialog and I know what you are doing… You say you have nothing to say and that’s fine, and you say that the only meaning in your work is the content that is explored after the work is finished, that’s ok too, I can dig it. Does this make it less? When artists were exploring “art for art’s sake” who was “less”? When artists were exploring “content” who was less? And what about the whole ‘Shape of Content‘ deal? You musta read that book a thousand times!
About this time a lightbulb went off… I’m a little slow….
See, Now your getting the point…
I’m using content for the sake of pattern and design. Using content for art’s sake so to speak. These images are being subjected to the mundane task of embellishing a pot or mug, the whole function of the content is the design, but in the end, ironically, the content of what these images are is what takes precedent …swinging men, diving girls, shiva, acrobats, birds, the Virgin Mary, butterflies… it all seeps in, all these things mean something to people, in fact they mean different things to different people. Right?
You are starting to lose track again… save that discussion for your brother… The point is you are starting to have this dialogue with your art/craft and that is the driving force behind the decisions you make as you create. And you are putting this dialogue before all the cliche’s and “rules” that have influenced you in the past, and are simply creating what you want, creating what makes you happy, and BTW, what gives happinesss to others.
Is there really any other more lofty goal than to bring happiness to others? To share the love you were given as child with those that may really need it?
…….
A few days after this discussion, Uncle Gravy when “belly up” one last time. Only it was for real. For a year this little fish was a good friend to me. I didn’t have the heart to flush him and burying a fish in the earth seems ironically cruel. So I tossed him in the big pond out front… I hope he was cool with that…
Recently I was mindlessly working on some new decals, based on images both drawn and scanned and one of the results was gorilla in a top hat, riding in a wheel chair thingy. Mindless, yes, but images mean different things to different people. My imagination started getting the best of me, and I started thinking of this image as a metaphor for Uncle Gravy. If the monkey is at the top of the proverbial pet chain, then Uncle Gravy would have to be a steampunk gorilla. The daddy of all pets.
