The Enduring Appeal of “Ugly” Design
There’s something irresistible about the ugly duckling, even before its grand metamorphosis into (spoiler alert) an adult swan. He’s gangly, his feathers look weird, his proportions are off, and every other animal he encounters on his journey notices this and comments on it. The moral of this beloved fairy tale? Beauty and its antithesis, ugliness, are meaningful only in context. The ugly duckling was just the victim of a temporary category error – he wasn’t actually ugly.
It’s a question that’s plagued philosophers and artists for centuries: Is beauty really in the eye of the beholder? Two and a half centuries ago, the English artist, satirist, and social critic William Hogarth devoted an entire book, The Analysis of Beauty, to its study, delineating six elements that together created the right conditions for the ineffable quality to take shape: fitness, variety, uniformity, simplicity, intricacy, and quantity. That several of these qualities – variety and uniformity, for instance – are antithetical to one another suggests that Hogarth was concerned above all with harmony and balance: a little of this, not too much of that.
These principles have worked their way around design throughout the ages, from the simple elegance of a Shaker chair to the just-right proportions of a Gio Ponti desk. But today, among aesthetes in interior design, furniture, fashion, and more, there’s currency in the objects that defy these rules. What are we to make of them?
Consider the English designer Faye Toogood’s recent exhibition at Friedman Benda, Assemblage 7: Lost and Found. Her works of mammoth furniture, bearing clear evidence of hand-tooling, have names like Barrow Mound Plot and Cairn. For a viewer unaccustomed to furniture that looks like this, an internal dialogue not unlike the well-trod response of “my kid could do that” to a Jackson Pollock painting could ensue. Chances are, most kids can’t do exactly that, and even if they could, the implication is that by definition, kids lack the decades of skill that make an artisan a master.
Toogood’s three-dimensional works in this exhibition are made from oak, a signature material of both medieval and Arts and Crafts makers in Britain, and as the gallery notes, they look as though they’ve been excavated. Curator and critic Glenn Adamson, who contributed an essay to the 2022 monograph Faye Toogood: Drawing, Material, Sculpture, Landscape from Phaidon, tells AD PRO that these works “engage with materiality on its own terms, letting the wood assert itself in a semi-raw state.” There’s an idea there of minimal transformation, just getting the material far enough to play the part of a functional object and no further. They’re chunky, rounded, asymmetrical, and they sport tool marks that are the lasting trace of her every decision about the surface of each piece. Unskilled? Hardly. But there’s something rough about them that a Hogarth aficionado might find suspect.
Avery Trufelman, the host of Articles of Interest and a former member of the 99% Invisible team, knows that there are pockets of surprising beauty to be found in the prehistoric. In 2014, she produced a story about the humble Acheulean hand ax, which at over a million years old is arguably the first designed object on earth. Carefully chipped to form a palm-size object, it’s rough but recognizable as a cutting tool of some kind. Or is it? “The intriguing thing about it,” Trufelman says, “is that no one knows exactly what it was used for.” And I think that is part of what makes an object ugly – its lack of clarity, its muddled sense of purpose. It may have been an all-purpose hand-tool, it could have been made primarily for display to suggest sophistication and prowess to a potential mate, it may have been designed as a throwing ax to subdue prey, and it might have been for something totally different.
The muddledness that Trufelman points out is both conceptual and literal. In the case of the ancient hand ax, we truly do not know. But in the case of one of Aaron Blendowski’s floor lamps or Rogan Gregory’s immersive sitting environments, we can’t really be sure: Are they for use? Are they art? Are they something else? All of the above?
Some of this ambiguity comes from their shapes and the way in which these objects disrupt what we’re used to seeing. In a market where design reigns supreme and objects are built for increasingly specific subsections of every conceivable need – a knob to help you hold your iPhone, a plug for the hole in your to-go coffee cup – there is something nice about ambiguity. “Mystery. Freedom,” Trufelman says. “An object that makes you feel like you have to get to learn it, rather than expecting that it automatically caters to you.”
Monica Khemsurov, co-founder of Sight Unseen, says this was the genius of Surrealism, but its effect was only temporary. “The reason people were creating these objects was because they wanted to shock people or make people feel scandalized, and it was meant to freak people out. Think of the Lobster Telephone – you were supposed to feel uncomfortable.” But people got used to it, and it was the same with postmodernism. “Eventually, nothing is shocking.”
There’s a section in her new book, How to Live With Objects, co-authored with her fellow Sight Unseen co-founder Jill Singer, called “Uncomfortable Objects” that advocates for living with things that are uncomfortable or ugly. “Technique and vision don’t always go hand in hand with superficial perfection these days,” she adds.
The recent Phillips x Sight Unseen collaboration with Phillips Los Angeles features a constellation of whimsical objects that could aptly be described as “chonks” in the manner of an endearingly rotund pet. It features sublimely substantive footstools by Christopher Norman, totemic sculptures by Casey McCafferty and Ryan Bellis, and furniture which is inspired by rock formations in Bryce Canyon and looks almost ancient in its simplicity. The reason these objects look “chonky” is that they’re handmade. “Casey McCafferty is a carver, it’s an aesthetic choice,” Norman explains. “Ryan Belli makes all his pieces in his garage by himself. These makers have to choose: Do I want it perfect or wobbly?”
And this, it turns out, is what the avant-garde Italian design polymath Gaetano Pesce has been arguing all along. Decades ahead of his time, Pesce – affectionately dubbed “The Pope of Gloop” by Curbed in 2021 – developed an aesthetic mode of working called “malfatto,” literally “badly made” in Italian, that he describes as “a way of creating that admits mistakes, which allows us to be different.” Making mistakes is human; repeating the mistake is stupid and diabolical.
Trained as an architect at the University of Venice, Pesce did pioneering work with resins, plastics, foam, and molds in the 1960s and 70s. His iconic chair “Nobody’s Perfect” is quintessential “malfatto.” He uses molds to cast each element by hand, but the colors and dimensions are always different. Each chair in this series even came with a birth certificate to underscore its unique status in the world. For Pesce, this way of working is much more than aesthetic: he predicts that “manufacturing itself will become radically customized. I am certain that in the near future, aleatory random production will involve many types of products such as cars, clothing, and any other object that is needed for everyday life. In other words, the future will give us the opportunity to each possess the one unique product such as it was in the past to possess art, which by its nature is unique.”
Sight Unseen’s Khemsurov agrees. “What’s ugly to me is mass-manufactured knockoffs. Maybe there was an original design once, but now it’s gone through this process of endless reiteration – so it has no soul, no personality, it doesn’t move you.”
For Trufelman, the challenge and pleasure of contemplating beauty and ugliness is all part of being open to new ways of seeing the world and re-envisioning one’s aesthetic place in it. “Not like I can afford a couch that looks like it’s made of boxes or a lamp that looks like a lava flow, but I really dream about it.”
Replacing the Myth of Modernism
There’s a movement afoot to declare that the conflict between art and craft is dead, that the struggle has been won, that craft is art. We can all congratulate ourselves and go home happy. But art has its own rules and its own language, which make implicit claims to dominance over all other codes. If you want to join the club, you have to speak, act, and think like the club members, and they are not particularly interested in being challenged. If craft wants entry into the temple of art, it had better change its clothes – and be very polite.
My thesis is simple: craftspeople should stop trying to make modern art. Assimilation into art is deadly to craft and should be avoided. After 20 years of observation and a dozen years of teaching, I believe that there are important distinctions between craft and art. The clearest evidence I can point to is that when craftsmen and sculptors make sculpture, the results are different. Craft-based sculpture tends to be more decorative, more richly visual, more respectful of material and process, but also less cognizant of the history of sculpture and art world issues. I can only conclude that craft constitutes a different class of objects and also springs from a different set of values and a separate historical consciousness. These differences are essential to craft, and they are in peril of being lost.
In its broadest outline, art in the Western world is characterized by limitlessness. Since Duchamp’s urinal, art is constituted by the authority of the artist. If a convincing argument is made, the thing he names or points to is newly understood as art. Duchamp pointed at the urinal and the bottle rack, and they became art. Joseph Beuys painted his face gold, walked around a gallery explaining paintings to a dead rabbit in his arms, and it was art. Warhol filmed the Empire State Building for eight hours straight, and that was art too. Anything can be art in this intellectual climate, and such permissiveness is not necessarily bad. The limitlessness of art acts as a metaphor for freedom, disturbing or frightening as that may be.
But not anything can be craft.
Craft – the kind of craft this magazine is devoted to – is defined by four simultaneous identities. First, craft is usually made substantially by hand. This is the primary root of all craft, the wellspring and reference point for everything else in the field. Additionally, craft is characterized by references to three traditions that evolved before the advent of mass-production: craft is medium-specific, it is always identified with a material and the technologies invented to manipulate it; craft disciplines are traditional groupings of functions, like jewelry, furniture, or clothing, with irregular boundaries and no direct correspondence to material; and each craft discipline has a multicultural history that is recorded mostly as objects, many from societies that have long since disappeared.
Thus, craft is a series of limitations suggested by tradition. By nature, craft looks backwards, which is no longer supposed to be a virtue. But all those ancient usages provide a sourcebook from which craft can clarify its essential distinction from fine art. Once that is done, craft can develop its own conceptual approach.
At present, craft is sandwiched between two imposing neighbors. On one side are the mass-production technologies that have been superseding it for the last three centuries. The ongoing industrial revolution rendered most of the subsistence crafts obsolete. Pottery, yardage weaving, basketry, boatmaking, and hundreds of other crafts became marginal. Others were killed off – carving figureheads, fabricating wooden coaches, or making hatboxes are among the many that have vanished. Craft production, once representing most of material culture, was replaced by manufactured goods.
Mass-production, in turn, stimulated the rise of consumerism, which Edward Lucie-Smith defines as “the liberation of desire to own from strict claims of necessity.” As factory-made objects flooded the marketplace to be purchased by a growing middle class, these items no longer had to serve the demands of survival. Articles made strictly as decoration, once the exclusive property of the rich, became commonplace. Then, in a great irony of history, craft reentered the marketplace in response to consumerist values. Today, gifts and home furnishings constitute the most significant market for craft. No longer marginal, craft now competes in these markets on an even footing with industry.
The other neighbor of craft is modern art, along with its history and theory. Craft teachers and craft students – the majority of non-production craftsmen – have long envied the status enjoyed by modern art, as well as its financial rewards. This wistful desire for loftier status has created confusion, frustration, and guilt. The common strategy to achieve art’s prestige has been to adopt the style of any recently certified art movement, from Abstract Expressionism to performance art. Yet to perceive art as a parade of visual styles is an error, for modern art is principally an ongoing debate about the value and purpose of visual experience.
Where modern art is defined by theory, postwar craft has avoided it. Few critics have developed a career writing about craft alone, and even fewer ideas have emerged specifically from craft practice. Most writing in the field borrows ideas uncritically from painting and sculpture without questioning how appropriate they are to a craft object. Most writers on craft assume that the language of art criticism fits craft like a comfortable old pair of pants – no alterations necessary. One has only to read the words “expression” or “concept” repeated ad nauseum in articles about craft to see how the myths of modern art are applied indiscriminately. How can a pot be expressive? How can an object be minimalist and decorative at the same time? Which concepts are appropriate to jewelry and which are not? Such questions are rarely asked.
A pervasive anti-intellectual bias exists in the craft world. In books on craft, photographs dominate – two of the more recent surveys of 20th-century jewelry had a combined total of 51 pages of body text and 260 pages of photographs. The few monographs on established craftsmen read like extended publicity releases – seldom is heard a discouraging word. Perhaps the “know-nothing” attitude is most nakedly revealed in this statement from jeweler and teacher David LaPlantz: “Metalsmith magazine has been boring, uninteresting, and filled with pieces that once I read, I did not understand or even care to understand. Actually, I have stopped reading Metalsmith and now just skim the pages for interesting images and advertising.”
Such an attitude discourages critical thinking of any sort and does not bode well for the future of crafts. The paucity of thinking and writing on craft has led to a vacuum of both debate and standards. Teachers offer their students no clearly articulated direction, collectors and curators have no standards of quality to guide acquisitions, and the field lacks a distinct language to describe its own practice. The implication is that any craft object is as good as any other and that quality is chiefly a matter of star status.
If craft claims to be art, it will have to examine its ends and means more closely. Even in the current atmosphere of freewheeling pluralism, craft will not be taken seriously until it can demonstrate genuine significance and relevance. As Tom Wolfe said in The Painted Word, “Nobody sees art unless it comes with a text.” For better or worse, craft must develop its own theory about the meaning of handmade objects in this late industrial era. And the task must begin with understanding the theory that has thoroughly infiltrated contemporary craft: Modernism.
Modernist Theory, the Disinterested Gaze, and the Autonomous Art Object
There is a distinction between modern art with a small “m” and Modernism with a capital “M.” The term Modernism encompasses a group of ideas and the works that emanated from them. It is not a vague label for all the art made in the 20th century. The Modernist art object was made to support aesthetic contemplation, which was limited to a highly specialized set of conditions.
While the decline of Modernism has been loudly proclaimed for the past 15 years, the status accorded to the fine art object has yet to be overthrown. Postmoderns might admire strategies like appropriation and social engagement, but they remain reluctant to admit a potter or a weaver into the Whitney Biennial. All the old prejudices remain intact, and those prejudices are inherent in the theories of Modernism. At the same time, the doctrine of formalism and the concept of autonomy – two of the keys of Modernist theory – are taken as basic assumptions by many of the most respected craft practitioners. Ironically, contemporary craft is one of the last bastions of faith in Modernism.
Modernism emerged from the ashes of the First World War. The alienation that intellectuals felt from the self-destruction of European culture molded their ambitions for art and design. The new art was to be utopian. Proponents of Futurism, De Stijl, Constructivism, and the Bauhaus envisioned a new society that would be radically different, embracing machine production, completely redesigned to be efficient, and ruthlessly modern. To accomplish all this revision, the modernist had to cut himself off from the past, from all but one tradition. More than anything else, the new world would be rational, and in that respect, Modern
