maker's guilt

over the last few months I have started in on a side project making musical instruments, the beginnings of which I wrote about here.   I have started a side blog about this project, which I am calling "Salt City Found-Object Instrument Works" and which can be accessed at that link.  Syracuse got its start because of the salt flats here and so is informally known as Salt City, which I really like.  It is gritty, just like the town is, and utilitarian, just like the town is.  The new blog is really just a place for me to chronicle the instruments that I make, it is not too terribly deep an exploration into what they are conceptually, but that is okay, that is the kind of thing I reserve for this blog.

As I have been making more and more of these found object instruments out of tins and cans and sticks, I have been trying to approach the whole process by applying an absolute minimum of "woodworkeriness."  Whenever I pick up a hand plane I stop and try to come up with a different way to accomplish what I am doing.  Before I go to the table saw I ask if that is really necessary.  The idea is that I want to make these instruments as accessible as possible, right down to the manufacturing of them.  If I can really make a twenty dollar guitar using only the most rudimentary hand tools, then anyone can.  Which means (I hope) that the ability to make music could be at anyone's fingertips.  I have been working lately on a commission for a banjo, which I will write about over at the Instrument Works at some point, I think, that has turned into quite a wood working project, and I feel myself slipping away from the original roots of this endeavor.  The next one will be  more direct, I hope, and a little more basic.

The part of these that I have not tried to make yet is the tuning pegs.  There are friction-fit pegs in fiddles and dulcimers, of course, but I have not yet broached that, instead going to the local music store to buy tuners that actually I can get on line.  I have a couple of problems with this:  one, that I should probably just order these, since it would be cheaper and more convenient, and two, that I am just buying pre-packaged tuners and that feels like cheating.

I have been noticing this phenomenon occurring more and more in my life lately:  what I have started to call maker's guilt.  Whenever the subject of buying something comes up, I have started to instinctively recoil and think "but I could make that!"  It has started to seem counterintuitive to me to buy something that I could make myself.  This is a relatively new phenomenon in my life and it has not started suddenly.  Rather, it has been a slow washing in of a tide over several years as I learn the processes behind bringing objects in to being.  Not too many years ago I thought nothing at all of buying Ikea furniture, as I like the æsthetic and it was cheap.  Now the thought of doing that really gets under my skin, even though there is no way I could ever make it as cheaply or get it into our lives as quickly.  Knowing that I know how to do it and that it is only a lack of will or desire that stands in the way of me making everything in our house sits poorly with me.

Obviously this is unrealistic.  Obviously I can not make everything in our lives.  It would take the fervor of an extremist to try to do so, and even then, I would not make very good shoes, probably, or particularly flattering clothes.  Or a car that works.  Or a stove or a computer or a bike.  Or even guitar tuning pegs, really.  There are things that it has to be okay to have other people do, there are objects that it has to be okay for other people to make for me or do for me.  I have no trouble, for example, hiring electricians to do electrical work on the house, or plumbers either.  And doing so keeps money in the local economy and allows those people to help provide support for their families.  So it is not reprehensible, it might even be socially and economically necessary.

That knowledge does not change how I feel, though.  I have felt maker's guilt rising more and more strongly in me in the last few months, and I have had to be pretty thoughtful about quelling it.  It takes a real effort to let go, to not cringe when I buy something that I could make if I tried, even if I could not do it very well.

None of this is intended to be an apology for being a consumer.  I think it is more that I am trying to figure out where I sit relative to the things that I consume and more importantly how to talk to my sons about that.  They are coming in to a world on a precipice, and their generation will have to be so much more thoughtful about what and how they consume and about their responsibilities as denizens of an extremely rich country.  I hope that I can help them find a meaningful and less damaging way to negotiate their world by thinking about how I negotiate mine.

travelling

this past weekend I traveled to Texas Hill Country.  I spent four days under a cloudless sky out in the wilderness surrounded by (mostly) graphic designers.  New territory for me in many ways; geographically, professionally, contextually.  It was great fun, and the trappings were outstanding, of course.  There was an obscene amount of Texas-style barbecue and other delectables, the country was beautiful in a rocky way, the accommodations were lovely, complete with a hat rack in the room (thank God for Texas and cowboy hats).  But it was the contextual territory that was the most interesting for me.

I had been asked to lead a workshop about wood, giving it three times for two hours each.  This is tricky, if the desire is to have everyone leave with something.  I can spend two hours just turning a couple of planks over and over and switching them end for end to find the right combination of grain pattern and patina, of live edge and machined edge.  In the end we decided to make lamps out of locally found dead-fall trees, which ended up being pretty successful.

When I have been involved with this kind of workshop in the past, many if not most of the participants have had some experience with making things out of wood and working with their hands in a particular way.  That was not the case here.  These people were (in many cases) very experienced designers with many years of professional accomplishment behind them, and some are even very used to making books or screen printing (a process that remains opaque to me to this day.  Some day I shall have to remedy that), but that have little experience with wood or with wiring.  Not that they should, of course, that is why they were in the workshop.

But by and large these are people who design digitally, and design for print.  Their application of their craft and their design skills has a radically different user interface and a profoundly different expectation in terms of life-span, usually.  As we all worked, and as they grew comfortable exchanging a mouse for a screwdriver, an amazing and heartwarming shift began to occur.  As each person plugged in their nascent lamp to test it, their faces registered delight of a level that really moved me.  Many of them went from "I am not sure I can do this at all" to "I want to make everything into a lamp!"  And the really amazing thing is that by the end, many were helping their fellow students, showing them how to use the crimper or to wire in an in-line switch, people who two hours before did not know what an in-line switch was.

Some of the student work.  Photo by Andy Birdwell

This starting to sound self-serving, which is not my intention.  This shift that happened, this empowerment (pun intended) of all of these people, is less about any ability that I have and more about something much more important and profound:  A willingness to learn.  I have taught this information to hundreds of NYU students, only to look up and see them drooling on their t-shirts.  It isn't about the information, it is about being receptive.  The 60 or so people that I spent time with this weekend came to the class with something that can not be bought or sold, and that can not be injected from an external source.  They wanted to learn.  They were invested in their education for those two hours.  They sat down from a place of "I'll try that" instead of "I can't do that."  It was really inspiring.  This experiment would have been a dramatic failure without that attitude on their part coming in.

It served as a real object lesson for me with regard to changing contexts.  There is such a tendency on my part (and on many people around me) to approach the world saying "I know my place here and I know what I do well, and that is what I am going to do."  This is often a reasonable approach, and certainly is a comfortable one, like putting on a straight-jacket that you know and love.  Comfortable, but ultimately stultifying as far as growth.  Change is hard, of course, and new experiences can be painful or scary.  But I am inspired to adopt the attitude of the people I was so recently surrounded with to try to maintain that openness, that desire to learn new things, and the willingness to take on things that are likely to fail, simply because when they don't fail the triumph is that much greater.

delight

as most people do, I have a set of objects that are part of my daily accoutrements. Nothing earth shattering, most of it, probably very similar to the things that you carry. About six months or a year ago I decided I wanted one of those things to be a pocket knife. For many years a pocket knife was a standard part of my life, but I sort of fell out of the habit. It seemed a little too macho so I kind of let it go.

But I decided I wanted to carry a small knife, one that I could use to open letters, that kind of thing. What used to be called a "pen knife" in the days when pens were made of feathers or reeds and had to be constantly trimmed to stay sharp. So I started combing the flea markets and antique shops looking for the right pocket knife. Something small, with only one blade (maybe two), wooden scales on the handle. Something that is clearly a tool not a weapon, so that there is no false manly implication that I know how to defend myself. We get so specific with this kind of thing, and often I find that I get too specific and can not find just the right thing, so I never have it at all.

Karen found one for me for Christmas:

It is small, and I like the squared-off blade (developed by a Civil War amputee who needed to use the edge of his pants pocket to open his pocket knife as he only had one hand). The handle feels good in my hand and it is nice to have a good, sharp knife sometimes. So even though it was not quite what I had in mind, it has rapidly become a part of my daily coterie of objects. And it got me thinking about delight.

We all have objects that delight us, that have an emotional resonance beyond mere use. Many of the objects that I have made have this quality for me, that when I sit in them or hold them or stir scrambled eggs with them the experience is heightened and made more important and exciting, somehow, than they would otherwise be. I find that, for me, it is often objects that were made by someone I know and given to me that have this quality, though that is not true across the board. And though it is not true for everyone, I wonder how many people respond more to a made object than a bought one.

Of course, this gets into a bigger discussion about what is actually made and what is manufactured, and where the line is drawn, and whether there is any way to draw that line. This is a discussion that many much more erudite people than I are having, and is not really the thrust of this entry. I am more interested at the moment in celebrating the objects (bought or made) that bring me delight on a regular basis. The pocket knife (which is bought, after all, and industrially produced) is one. It is the kind of object that I enjoy holding in my hand, and that I enjoy using. And it has made me think about the objects that I have made for other people, and about whether they bring the same kind of delight to them.

What are the processes by which delight can be woven into the making process? How does an object move beyond being a mere object, and become my knife or chair or spatula or hat? Of course retailers have been trying to figure that out for years, and are not any closer to figuring it out, which makes me wonder if it is impossible to mass-produce.

Maybe delight is about stories. Maybe it is about memories that an object contains. Maybe it has to be about what the end user brings to it, and how the object gets woven into the user's lives.

This obviously bears more examination. In the meantime, though, it is nice to be aware of the delight that we feel in the world around us, even in carrying a humble pocket knife.

questions

the proprietress of Waypoints wrote about artists operating at a remove, and it got me to thinking again about my relationship to the material I use and how I work. She was writing about the conductor’s remove from the music, in the sense that the conductor uses musicians who use instruments to make the music, and that there is a remove there that is not present for, say, a writer, who crafts words directly to give shape to thought.

What we are talking about, of course, is what filters we use to touch the divine, What lenses we employ to refract capital-T Truth, to portray capital-B beauty in a meaningful and honest way.

This conversation bubbles up frequently in the woodworking world as the conversation about dovetails. It is a conversation about the relevance of what is referred to as “hand work” in a machine age. One camp says that it is more honest and pure to use traditional hand tools and to lay out and cut the dovetails one by one, the implication being that because the tools are not plugged in they are more honest, more direct, and that they speak more about craftsmanship. The other camp says that the tools used are irrelevant , that as long as the end product fits tightly the methodologies used to produce it shouldn’t be questioned.

Both camps are right, of course.

The underlying question that is relevant to what Cheyenna was writing about is the question of operating at a remove from our work. How many tools have to be involved before the integrity of the work is compromised? If I use a table saw (which was invented in the 1850’s by a Shaker woman) am I at more of a remove from my work than if I write with a ball point pen (first patented in 1888)? How about if I use a computer to write, which is a device that is not only so complicated that I have no idea at all how it works, it stores the words I write in a way that without another computer they can not be accessed at all? If I cut my dovetails with using a marking gauge, a bevel gauge, a handsaw and a chisel, am I closer to the work than if I use a routing jig and an electric router? The electric methodology actually requires fewer tools, but is typically seen as being less “pure” somehow (especially by me).

This question of being at a remove, of operating from a distance, is central in my own studio work. The more we are aware of the origins of the things we make and their place in the “enormous long river” of history, the more thoughtful we can be about our own place in the same river. But it is interesting to me how selective I tend to be when choosing in which arenas I can be distant and in which I must be directly involved in all steps.

When I use a guitar to play notes and sing words that some one else wrote I do not feel at all that I am operating at a remove from the beauty of the song. Nor do I feel that I am not somehow making the song. In fact the sense of ownership over singing that song as beautifully as possible in that moment is incredibly raw, and comrades joining in the moment are bound very closely to me as the singer and musician, with them as fellow makers in a very real and relevant way. The fact that none of the craft involved is necessarily mine, that I neither wrote the music or the words, nor made the guitar, does not diminish at all the profundity of the moment nor my sense of ownership of and participation in it.

What, then, makes using non-electric (“olde-timey”) tools allow me to feel closer to my work? What is more “honest” about having to think about every saw stroke than about having to be thoughtful about how I set up a routing jig to make routed dovetails?

Part of it is that it is easier for me to connect to craftspeople that have come before me if I use the tools that they used. This is a limited view, though, as it is thinking about making in a physical sense only. Consider instead the modern cabinet maker whose livelihood is cranking out cabinets: This is a craftsman that has a clear and present need to produce as many cabinets as possible in as short a time possible, which connects him philosophically and practically to his forbears in a pretty direct way, which not only necessitates using power tools, it encourages it. My romantic attitudes about craft and its place in society is actually divergent from the day to day thought processes of the very craftspeople in the 19^th century that I wax so lyrical about.

Yet again, we are at an impasse. What it comes down to is value systems, and about continuums of honesty and where we make a stand relative to where others make a stand. And the landscape on which we make that stand is constantly shifting, making it hard to plant a flag anywhere with absolute conviction.

What is important as an outcome of this rather circular thought process is that as makers we have an obligation to continue to be thoughtful about what we make and how we make it. Though these are questions without answers, they are important as questions, and the act of constant questioning is what, in the end, makes possible the most relevant making.

a new start

here we are at a new start. Always intoxicating, a new start. Like the idea of leaving everything behind you and taking only what you can carry and a guitar and striking off into the woods. A lovely thought, but then you think about how the North Carolina mountains get real cold, and how you can only carry so much food and well, you know, you get lonely, after all, and so you don't go wandering off after all.

But new beginnings are pretty sexy. And here is one for me. Seems good so far. I think I will do a Hudson's Bay start though.

The Hudson Bay Company, chartered something like four hundred years ago, began with a mission of provisioning camps and forts in the far reaches of wilderness in New York and Canada. Voyages into the unknown, exciting and perilous. And so the first day they would go only a few miles, and then make camp. Check things out. Do we have what we need? Is the food packed well? Do we have enough whiskey? Anything missing? If anything is awry, we can go back now, in a way we can not in a few days.

So I will start out slowly, with a statement that I miss writing, and that I think it is important to my making. There is nothing in my life that is as important to me as making, in whatever form that takes, and writing is a part of it.

Maybe that is an okay start. We'll camp here, and see what the morning brings.