CFDA Newsletter

Announcements:

Our next meeting will take place on Tuesday, March 16 at 6:30pm at Goose Island Brewery in the Bier Stube room. 1800 N. Clybourn.

The removal of Tor Faegre's wood will take place on March 13 at 10:00. Please contact Bill First if you would like to participate.

Program Schedule:

March: Current Thinking on Sustainable Furniture
Lisa Elkins - Lisa has stayed abreast of the latest developments in the production of sustainable furniture. This is your chance to be informed.

April: Chippendale and Rococo
Lloyd Natof - Who knew that Lloyd was keen on this period? I can't wait to hear what he has to say!

May: Turning: From Craft to Art Form
Richard Dlugo - Over the last 50 years turning has evolved from a folksy craft into an art from that appeals to serious collectors. Richard will chart how this has come about.

April or May Alternate:
Getting Performance From Your Hand Planes
Garry Venable - Garry did time at the College of the Redwoods, so he's on top of this subject. Bring your underperforming planes for diagnosis. This meeting will be held at Jeff Miller's shop in Rogers Park. There's the possibility of a plane making session on some subsequent Saturday, if there's interest.

June: The Latest Photo Manipulation Software - Bill First
Bill will demonstrate how this latest software enables new possibilities for digital image enhancement.

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CFDA Meeting Report:

CFDA Minutes - February 9, 2010

Our first meeting at Goose Island Brewery was called to order at 6:35 with introductions all around for benefit of our new visitors.

Bill First announced that during late March, likely the 20th or the 27th, any interested parties should plan on meeting at Tor and Sue's place to pick up and divvy up the remainder of Tor's wood piles. Bruce Horigan has volunteered to supply the truck for the items destined for the nearby dump. The exact timing will still be forthcoming, but if you're at all interested please contact Bill directly.

John K. is still wrestling with the best options for Tor's memorial. As of this writing we're possibly looking at a bench for one of his favorite nature preserves, and making it in keeping with Tor's aesthetic would probably be advisable.

Dolly sent a thanks to Dick Dlugo for his help with the online survey that went out to members recently.

We're looking for ways to actively improve our online communications, and the Yahoo Groups page is being retooled and resurrected. Jamie Stevens is spearheading this effort, and emails have already begun to flow about this. Exact details, with instructions, will be coming via email.

If you would like to continue to be privy to all the good stuff that we're involved with it's imperative that you follow Jamie's instructions and get yourself hooked back into our Yahoo Group.   It will rapidly become our primary means of communication. It will NOT require you to go visiting any Yahoo site to receive communications - those will arrive in your email's inbox.   But if you don't associate yourself with the Yahoo group per the instruction set you'll be missing out on much of what is to come this year.

We also generally talked about the state of our website, both in terms of general presentation as well as the overarching message that we're presenting with it. John suggested that we look at Furniture New York's website and evaluate what and how they're presenting on the web.   Even with the migration to a 501(c)3 status, we should still be able to freshen up our look, and do a much better job of leading the motivated to contact any of our designers.

Regarding the Milwaukee FF&FC show, coming up in October, we're being actively pursued by Karla Little now. The booth commitment is due presently, and so we're mining our interested members for solid commitments. It appears that we've got a proposed seventeen pieces for the aggregated booth, and per John K., if you've committed then be prepared to pay for 1/17th of the cost of the booth fee.

Dolly and Matt visited several downtown buildings in early February, scouting possible locations for our upcoming Sustainable Show. Driving this effort was the Willis Tower (nee, Sears Tower) and their recent invitation to us to host a show. Dolly showed a slide show of several photos that she took on the visit, and she and Matt highlighted some of the benefits and some of the challenges associated with bringing a show into this space.

Interestingly, as it turns out, the Willis Tower isn't willing to accept a show purely on spec and a promise that it will be good. They need to see the show - see the pieces and the message - before they'll approve it. Which means that we're still casting out for possible 'first' venues for the Sustainable show as an advance scout, as it were, to lead us to the high-prestige venues.

As such, Hal mentioned that he's still efforting the Michigan Avenue storefront push.    He's gotten in contact with the people who are trying to fill the empty storefronts, and he's waiting to hear back.

Additionally, his artists-intensive building does have a roughly 5,000 square foot area on their fourth floor which could become something of an instant gallery. Their building does have a marketing arm, and they do reach out to the community. If we're in need of an inaugural venue so that we can then 'sell' the show to the street side glass downtown lobbies, then this could be an easy entry. Details and decisions will be forthcoming - likely by the Sustainable committee.

The Robbins Power Plant tour took place on February 20th, with a presentation about the history of, and the future of this power generating plant. As proposed, it will be fueled entirely by wood products when it goes online. The scope, scale and vision of the core authority group was impressive. And the machinery, being dormant, was able to be viewed and poked at in a way that would be simply impossible once it goes online. It was a rare opportunity.

Dolly mentioned that member Jeff Miller's health is once again failing him. He has recurring kidney failure issues and is visiting with hospitals on a regular basis.   If you haven't done so already, take a look at the email that Dolly sent out in recent weeks, with photos of Jeff's recent ouvre, and drop him a line.   It would go a long way to making him feel less isolated.

The next meeting will be knocked back a week due to several officers being out of town for CFDA oriented events, and will be on Tuesday, March 16th, again at the Goose Island Brewery.

The business meeting was concluded at 7:20.

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Program:
DAVID ORTH
Aboriginal Design: Power & Shelter

Text books on design rarely consider the rich and evocative designs of aboriginal peoples. On the other hand, western museums, galleries, and auction houses show these items regularly, but out of context. Our dismissal of these items as real solutions to design problems, on the one hand, and our readiness to embrace them as objets d'art opens us up to a socio-political fallacy called Orientalism. How can we take into consideration non-western art, especially that of original peoples, in a serious, and politically benign manner?

Orientalism according to Edward Said is a 19th Century western art movement that projected a western fascination for the exotic, the sensual, the primitive, the outrageous, and even the criminal onto depictions of Middle-Eastern life. Said, went so far as to argue that the stereotyping and implied inferiority actually sets up these non-western cultures for western invasion.

Also consider how books and displays on aboriginal life almost inevitably suggest "primitivism". When Orth considered books and displays on tribal art, he was initially confounded by the number of weapons (clubs, spears, shields) and masks with disturbing or intimidating facial expressions that make up these collections. This gives us the false idea that aboriginal life is indeed particularly violent and intimidating. Instead, what is happening is that as westerners we are lumping together all kinds of anthropological "design data" together and calling it one thing: Tribal Art. When we consider our own western designs, we do not display our machine guns, side-by-side with our pietas. These, fortunately, end up in different categories, because we are not decontextualizing them (as much). Since, the aspect of aboriginal life that is concerned with power and threat, generates small, misunderstood items of remarkable interest, they end up scattered throughout our art collections and it is the collection itself which gives us the wrong impression. Also consider that in "civilized" design, intimidation is not expressed through facial expression. It is expressed through scale, speed, posture, quantity, and sound. Some of these are abstracted or unconscious allowing us our fantasy of civility. As designers we should all become more aware of how much of our "civilized" design (even architecture and furniture) actively expresses power, intimidation, and control. Consider the imposing lobby or board room of a corporation or the arrangement of chairs in a living room. This raises ethical questions for designers, but may also give us a little more sense of our cultural power and centrality.

That said, we can now better appreciate the aspect of aboriginal art which is concerned with dwelling and sheltering. If we look at these objects and structures (huts, utensils, toys, shamanic objects, and furnishings) in context, we can avoid so much "exotic projections" and consider the genuine operative solutions that have been achieved. A more direct relationship to nature generates distinctive solutions to shelter that are characterized by the way they secure a person from being immediately absorbed by the biomass while making use of the biomass to do so. Consider that we "civilized" are concerned with the safety of the chair itself, while an aboriginal is making a chair in order to achieve some sense of safety in the first place. An aboriginal "chairmaker" is discovering a broad range of operative solutions to establishing a small distance between their own bodies and the moisture, insects, fungus, and small chewing mammals that make up this layer of the biosphere. Their efforts result in hammocks, stools, platforms, mats, etc, (often highly decorated because this problem is not just seen by the aboriginal as a simple biological thing). As designers it might help us to consider more directly the question of design as sheltering and try to peer through the illusion of "style" that we readily overlay on top of our consideration of western design. Note how easily we apply the same fallacy of Orientalism to our own history of design. This oversight prevents us from noticing how style, even western style, really operates to outline different bio-social solutions and to suggest to us different psycho-spiritual orientations toward life.

For a benign relation to aboriginal art we might consider as a model the way Henri Matisse seemed to sit in the warmth of aboriginal form and color, but made it quite his own. He did not use it to conjure up exotic visions of "the other", but rather used it as a fresh language of form and color to express his very own "inside" of things.

Aboriginal design reminds us as does Martin Heidegger, that "Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build."

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Exhibitions of note:

Brian Mock & Split Brow/Matthew Hoffman: New Sculpture and Functional Art pieces.
Feb. 5 - Mar. 11
360SEE Gallery
1924 N. Damen
Chicago

KNOCK-KNOCK: An exhibition of antique tribal doors.
Feb. 27 - Mar. 29
Douglas Dawson Gallery
400 N. Morgan
Chicago

Scott Burton
Art that blurs the boundaries between furniture and sculpture.
Ongoing
Bluhm Family Terrace at the Art Institute of Chicago