cabinet by James Krenov, detail, 1987 or ‘88

Apologies for the long hiatus here on FS After Hours. Sometimes life interferes with blogging. I have a lot to write about however and will try to put it all in some order over the next few weeks and months. Some of the stuff rattlin’ round my brain includes:

-Kerouac’s On the Road at 50,
-Shy Boy, She Devil and Isis, furniture from the Wornick collection at Boston’s MFA,
-also at the same museum, Jewelry by Artists, the Daphne Farago collection
-Rennsalaerville, N.Y., Donald Vaccino at the Far Out gallery,
-the latest book on Tadao Ando, Ando Complete Works by Phillipe Jodidio,
-Postmodern Ceramics by Mark Del Vecchio, intro by Garth Clark,
-the latest Art Forum on the art of production,
-web site and blog for the Pulitzer Foundation: Ando, Sugimoto, Serra.
-the new American Craft magazine and the “fabulous” opening party,
-Brian Newell at Pritam and Eames,
-The Poetics of Making, by Paul Harper, delivered at New Craft Future Voices, Dundee, Scotland,
-New Craft, Future Voices conference proceedings,
-Color,a Natural History of the Palette, by Victoria Finlay
-alumni dance performance, Bennington College,especially Art Bridgman and Myrna Packer’s Under the Skin,
-Has Money Ruined Art by Jerry Saltz, New York magazine online,
-Andrea Zittel at the Vancouver Art Gallery,

The Man Behind the Curtain

photo The Times (London) online

I spend most work days restoring antique furniture, so it was with some professional interest that I read about a group of underground restorers who sneaked into the Pantheon in Paris to undertake a clandestine restoration of a large antique clock.
The group calling themselves The Untergunther, a cell of a larger group of urban explorers called les UX, slipped into the Pantheon, the Parisian mausoleum that holds France’s greatest citizens, and worked over a period of months to restore a rusting clock mechanism connected to a large architectural clock. As reported by Adam Sage for the Times of London, les Ux are “a clandestine network whose mission is to discover and exploit the city’s neglected underworld. The urban explorers put on film shows in underground galleries, restore medieval crypts and break into monuments after dark to organize plays and readings. In the eyes of their supporters, they are the white knights of modern culture, renovating forgotten buildings and staging artistic events beyond the reach of a stifling civil service.”

With a professional clockmaker along, and reportedly with a set of keys to the building, they would slip into the building after hours. They set up a hidden workshop behind fake packing crates and restored the 150 year old clock to working order over a period of months. The workshop was never discovered.

I can understand the passion for restoration. I recently had a James Krenov cabinet in my shop for some finish restoration. The original thin shellac finish over open grained white oak and teak had become home to black mold spores. The thin finish was also deteriorated by sunlight in places. At first my instinct was to treat it the way we treat Shaker furniture with pristine (and valuable) original finishes: that is with minimal intervention. This is how I was trained. As a friend says, before you touch it, the condition is not your fault. After you touch it, it is. But the owners wanted a protective coat of shellac to see the piece through for a good many more years and mold can always come back if the spores are in the environment.

I lived with the piece for a while as I formulated my approach, and got up the nerve to actually touch the thing. You have to understand that Krenov was a minor deity to a young cabinetmaker in the 70’s. I used to see Tage Frid in the RISD snack bar as a student in the early 70’s, but I was a photo major and a painter. My first job after RISD – my day job – was in a traditional restoration shop. We regularly saw Samuel MacIntire pieces and other classic American 18^th century furniture from some very good private and public collections, and in this context Krenov’s first book was a revelation. It wasn’t just a 60’s thing, although that was part of the appeal. It was an artist’s thing. Krenov’s approach was as an individual artist exploring materials and methods wherever they might lead. The ‘moral’ content of his approach was strong (the 60’s thing) , but ultimately was not what drew me to the work. I also discovered Wendel Castle’s work around the same time, especially his trompe l’oeil card table.

It was remarkable to actually run my hands over every square inch of the piece 6 or 7 times. As I did, all the details began to reveal themselves to me: the slight flair of the legs which become the upright stiles of the upper case, the flair above achieved with just a few plane cuts and more a feeling than a perception (the photo above exagerates the flair), the different radii used in the rounded top of the upper case, and above all, the perfect and perfectly mysterious proportions. Bringing this piece into a shop full of Georgian and Federal 18^th century antiques, it was remarkable how the piece held its own as an individual. The thing about good, classic 18^th century furniture is that the best pieces have a proportion that an experienced eye can pick out across a crowded auction floor. A good dealer can often pick out the $100 k piece from a room full of more ordinary furniture by something in the proportion that communicates from a considerable distance. The Krenov piece has this quality.

I decided to wash the piece with a dilute solution of vinegar and water to remove the black mold. After rinsing and drying, I coated all surfaces with platina shellac, a high quality blonde shellac flake – just one coat. That was rubbed with Liberon 0000 steel wool when dry, followed by a coat of microcrystelline wax (Rennaissance wax). David Fleming confirmed Krenov’s finishing methods – shellac and Ren. wax or Goddard’s. He had an attitude towards sandpaper so I never touched the piece with sandpaper, although I think he might have used a little when no one was looking – some of the surfaces were awfully flat for hand tools only. The beautifully matched grain, the accumulation of design and proportion decisions, the combination of simple hand tool shaping with a few sophisticated techniques add up to a powerful object that never loses its appeal to the eye. I’ve worked on some wonderful pieces of furniture over some 30 years – from MacIntyre to Jacob, Robbesjohn-Gibbings to Carlo Mollino, and I’d have to say that working on this piece was a highlight of my career.

Doris Salcedo, “Shibbolith”, at Tate Modern, photo David Levine from The Guardian Unlimited

Also of professional interest to a restorer: Doris Salcedo’s “Shibboleth” at the Tate Modern’s Turbine hall. The piece is a crack that runs for some 550 ft. through the floor of the massive Turbine Hall. My professional response to a crack is to look for the causes and to consider the remedy – either to leave it as acceptable antique condition, or to consider interventions to cure the cause of the crack, sometimes involving fairly sophisticated cabinetwork, or perhaps just to fill it. In this case, the crack is a sophisticated intervention itself. Evidently the means of fabricating this crack remain completely mysterious to those who have seen it, allowing it to become a powerful poetic statement. This also ties in with the latest Art Forum on the art of production. This issue includes Josiah McElheny’s ” Readymade Resistance: Art and the Forms of Industrial Production”, a recent history of art fabrication, and a panel discussion that includes some of the principle art fabricators working in the U.S.today. Really interesting stuff. There’s a sidebar in which Andrea Zittel tells how her mom found a custom trailer maker to fabricate her escape pods. I was impressed at the Andrea Zittel show we saw in Vancouver last June, by how hand-made her life is.

Thanks to Tyler Green and Modern Art Notes for the Doris Salcedo story. I may have found the Untergunther there too, I can’t remember now, or I may have just been led there by something else on MAN. Such is the way of the blog.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 14th, 2007 at 10:45 am and is filed under FS After Hours. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.