While there is never at any one moment a singular, all pervasive and universal narrative being written in design or art, occasionally there emerges a critical mass, a ‘tipping point’ as author Malcom Gladwell calls it, of influential designers and artists, some established and some perhaps little known outside their professional circles, whose work simultaneously addresses similar issues or reflects similar contemporary-culture realities (perhaps aesthetic, or political, or economic, or sociological in nature), embodying certain across-the-board characteristics which cumulatively have the potential to create a social epidemic, like a virus moving through the population.

“MAKE ME.” presents a small but diverse body of work by an otherwise un-related collective of artists and designers, which together celebrate a rough-hewn, virile, reductive, anti-academic, craft-driven, ‘tool-belt and heavy-lifting’ aesthetic, paradoxically realized with such sensitivity and finesse, often embodying subtle, complex theoretical, structural, formal, and compositional aspects, and infused with such poetic narrative as to be necessarily characterized as ‘butch’, a word defined in today’s vernacular as a stereotypical ‘brute-masculine’ approach taken by a stereotypical ‘sensitive-feminine’ personality.

We introduce the term ‘Butch-Craft’ in an effort to articulate a phenomena: that after years of an increasingly accepted yet hard-won broader, more inclusive definition of design, liberated only recently from the once mandatory ‘form follows function’ credo, we are witnessing a kind of backlash. Not a retreat from the now-accepted practice of infusing poetic narrative into functional objects — we still want to engage more fully with our object culture, not simply regard it as a ‘tool for living’. No, rather than a retreat from this positive development, we are seeing the emergence of an alternative means of giving this ‘art content’ form and expression in functional objects. Poetic narrative no longer needs to be dressed in traditional ‘Art’ garb — it no longer needs to ‘pass’ as Art. Gilded bronze, exotic regionalisms, complex and immaculately executed 3-D printed abstract futuristic forms, while still employed as critical elements by certain recognized masters, no longer exclusively define art-in-design. Works, both past and present, that overtly resemble ‘furniture’, executed in wood and iron and steel and stone, are now in fact automatically assumed to contain a narrative, a poetic gesture. Function no longer is presumed to neuter any potential for Art; we accept that addressing a prosaic function doesn’t lead necessarily to a prosaic object.

Through the examples we present in “MAKE ME.”, we acknowledge a tipping point, where art-in-design no longer needs to look like what we recognize as Art; art-in-design no longer needs to wear its art on its sleeve.

Murray Moss
August 2010