The beauty of everyday things

February 23, 2024 7:23 PM

For the past hundred years we’ve had people championing machine manufacture and value-adding design for objects that did perfectly well without it. [Yanagi] had several criteria for these everyday miscellaneous things and all of them are worth revisiting because we now know that some things are best when precision machined and manufactured and other things benefit from showing signs of a human hand at work.
posted by johnxlibris (7 comments total)

This is an amazing blog, thank you for posting it.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 9:26 PM on February 23 [2 favorites]

That was interesting. Hereabouts all the farms have wrought iron gates which were made to order at a local forge - up until about the 1970s. Each smithy had a distinctive style which was more similar to the work of nearby forge-workers than to gates from distant counties - like the dialects spoken were influenced by what when down in the pub. When we stripped 100 years of paint from our gate, a little floral design appeared in the top roundel of each upright strake. It was delightful: each 'petal' whanged out with a hammer and cold-chisel so each flower different but clear the work of [the same] human hand. I should really pick them out in a different colour. No working farm could afford such a gate today - even if there was anyone able to make it. New farm yards are built so that the entrance is exactly 12ft or 16ft wide to fit a factory-made galvanized gate of tubular steel - functional; cheap enough; much lighter; efficient; unlovely.
posted by BobTheScientist at 3:23 AM on February 24 [9 favorites]

This is an amazing blog, thank you for posting it.
posted by neuron at 9:27 AM on February 28

Mod note: This post has been added to the Sidebar and Best Of blog!
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 6:41 AM on March 1

I like the attention paid to things that might be machine made but an attempt was made to make them look handmade, irregular. I'm reminded of Quantum Enterprises's handwriting fonts for pen plotters. The basic fonts themselves look like handwriting, comic-sansish. But the font includes variants of each character and they have the Scriptalizer, a text rendering tool that introduces errors and crossouts to look even more like hand writing. I suspect the primary use of this is for creating bespoke junk mail. Here's example output (watermarked).
posted by Nelson at 7:48 AM on March 1

This is brilliant! Picking up the book today!

I find myself reminiscing on Marcel DuChamp’s Readymades. Long before there was Andy Warhol, DuChamp took “everyday objects” and combined or just displayed them: it questioned their beauty, it questioned what is art. I think it’s easy to see his work as so rarified to believe it only applies to some overlearned peoples ivorytowered away from the world. But (not an original idea of mine) I see them as the great democratizers of Art. Instead of an elite determining taste, it irreversibly threw open the door for everyone to ask “is this Art?”

The artisanry of Japan is so well known, I don’t think it could diminish it for me to wonder what influences The Readymades had on Soetsu Yanagi‘s thinking, or that relationship in reverse, the zeitgeist reified, or post-WWI tearing down the conventions that had failed us. Looking forward to making this a longer read.
posted by rubatan at 9:40 AM on March 1

Last night I was watching Primitive Technology on YouTube, and the person was building yet another forge to smelt iron from his local creek.

I noticed he's been using his home-made Terra cotta buckets to move charcoal, instead of the baskets he wove a few episodes ago. I love his clay pots, bowls, and buckets. When one breaks, he makes another.

Made me think about the few bowls I still own. Most are similar to the ones in this blog post - handmadeesque, with prints in a Japanese style.
posted by rebent at 5:57 PM on March 1