Cultural Ruins
by Daniel R. Hirtler on 12/22/10
I was walking past a house in town which is strewn with architectural objects, not attached to the house, but peppering the land around it. Today I focused on a machine made corinthian capital which was embedded in the lawn. Each of the acanthus leaves was depicted individually up the shaft in full relief.
I thought about how the intention turned into a drawing, and how the drawing was translated into that particular form, simply repetative on the one hand, and complex on the other. The person who would carry out that sort of work has been expelled from our community, and the remaining object has taken on an air of mystery in his absence.
When one thinks about the kinds of work we produce now, and the way we carry them out, it is evident that we don't have a very diverse interest in the world, but an interest in defining the world in a relatively narrow and controllable, safe way. Even as we can appreciate the wonder and strangeness of some things, we have chosen to leave them outside our cultural boundary, we don't carry with us an internal understanding of their defining features; particularly how they are made.
Our culture is in a state of transition, away from the physical form of things, toward a point where function and aesthetic lies in the realm of information, shown graphically, disengaged from the hand. The corinthian capital sticking out of the lawn is seen as a set of overlapping patterns. The forms creating the patterns carry with them a mystery as to how they are there at all; attached, embedded, co-formed, and to what balance do they represent the hand of the designer, independent from the hand of the maker (carver, mold-maker, assembler).
The thing we are told is that since the jobs that used to employ the skills of our hands are being put in cheaper hands, our citizens are required to leave those skills of the hand behind, and they need to become educated in some occupation that someone will pay them to do. It seems to me that, personally, and as a culture, learning new skills to add to the old ones that we have, rather than trading skills is a way to maintain a cultural continuity, and to enrich both the past and future skills through a richness of understanding and dexterity - a merger of mind and hand. As a culture, we would be healthiest if we made the conditions for all these skills to be valued here; not simply for us to value the benefit that the skill might bestow in its finished form.