Asa Christiana is on the defensive.
Editor of Fine Woodworking, Christiana posted this piece in the FWW editorial blog in response to a recent interview with Tom Loeser in American Craft.
Loeser is the head of the Woodworking department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His series, Flotilla, was featured recently in Woodwork.
While Christiana quotes only a snippet (in bold, below), I think we get a better understanding of Loeser’s argument by understanding the context in which the offending statement was leveled:
Loeser has been taking full advantage of this creative license. As an academic, he recognizes himself as a subversive in the field. “I think the woodworking world is too small, too limited and too defined by Fine Woodworking magazine. There is a slightly anti-intellectual slant to it. I am more interested in the ideas behind it and opening things up. I am interested in where we overlap with design and where we overlap with art.” Loeser has always worked from historical objects and sources, but he plays with ideas of function by deposing the users’ operational expectations. These days he welcomes escapes from his studio furniture oeuvre to explore other systems of generating form.
What is troublesome is that Christiana’s rebuttal sets Loeser up as a straw man, showing pictures of his most challenging work with no context, making him out to be some ridiculous figure, rather than a daring and courageous individual. As with all straw man attacks, Christiana sidesteps the earnest (and earned) criticism Loeser offers to FWW, that it is parochial (my word choice) and anti-intellectual, serving a focus-group audience.
Not surprisingly, Christiana’s followers, who like FWW just as it is, rally round the flag and take pot-shots at Loeser’s more challenging work.
This parochial and anti-intellectual stance within woodworking has made American furniture stagnant. We get really good at mimicking Stickley or the Shakers, and maybe we stretch a little to make these styles serve our 60″ widescreen displays.
Not enough of us are concerned about the direction of American furniture.
Studio furniture makers play an important role within the larger ecosystem that includes the magazines, the designer-craftsmen, tool-makers, amateur woodworkers, reproduction craftsmen, educators, and much more. Loeser and other studio makers challenge us to see beyond period styles, to remove our self-imposed constraints, to shake up our notions of how furniture should look and what it means. They challenge us to grow.
Notice, too, that I consider it an ecosystem, not an economy. This is an important distinction. If we reduce our craft to an economy, then we are merely consumers whose only role is to buy new machines with granite tops. By seeing woodworking as a larger, more varied endeavor, with broader (and maybe even loftier) goals, we can stimulate a creative renaissance.
It is Christiana’s loss, and ultimately a loss to FWW’s readers, if he fails to make room in the tent for studio furniture.
As an intellectual and a maker, I would hope Christiana might see an opportunity to bring Fine Woodworking out of stagnation. He has given us a taste of the intersection between design and woodworking with some great contributions by Michael Fortune. If only it were enough. Clearly we miss entirely the intersection between woodworking and art, the intersection at which Woodwork, by comparison, has done its best work.
While I hold out hope for a bigger tent for woodworking, it feels as if Christiana has come down on the side of the focus groups and the advertisers. I expect more tool reviews and a continuing disregard for daring, challenging, and thought-provoking work.
Meanwhile, I’ll cross my fingers that Tom Caspar won’t turn Woodwork into another American Woodworker. Maybe I should be reading American Craft…
