 Thank you. There we go. I think you got it. Thanks, Kristin. Good afternoon and welcome back everyone to the Julia of Ideas Symposium. Can you hear me now? Okay. Well, wonderful. Thank you and welcome back everyone to the Julia of Ideas Symposium. My name is Cindy Trope. I'm the Associate Curator of Product Design and Decorative Arts and I'm here to welcome our first afternoon panel. Jeweler Myra Mimlich Gray and Helen Drutt Educator and Curatorial Consultant will discuss communicating ideas through jewelry moderated by Jeweler and Metalsmith Kiff Slemmons. So please everyone welcome. I'm thinking of a quote from Susan Sontag that I read once saying that all art is made either out of celebration or lament. I think that this whole gathering I hope is out of celebration and celebrating jewelry and it's important in our lives. And certainly I thank Susan for her gift and for the artists for their gifts. This morning I just happened to be looking at this catalog and there was a quote by Albert Einstein. The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift. This afternoon we three Myra Helen and me will talk about our work to give specific examples of how jewelry may be used to communicate ideas. Where an idea or set of ideas figures directly into our intentions. Certainly ideas are the underpinnings of all the jewelers in this exhibition. Whether design ideas, formal ideas or content driven ideas. Ideas matter. And figure into the critical discourse around contemporary jewelry. What and how jewelry can communicate is a question we'd like to address both individually in our presentations and the discussions that follow with each other and with you the audience. Tools and jewelry define us as human. The first jewelry from thousands of years ago indicates symbolic thought in early humans. The first tools were often intricately worked stone points used for survival. Such workings of the hand are common to all early cultures and for us indicators of the ultimate in design where form fully fit function. These stone points also call up questions of purpose. When sometimes function slips from necessity to ceremony and are saved for the afterlife. The tools you see here contain tools. Neolithic stone points from West Africa. These are tools of the imagination made into jewelry. The value of tools is beyond measure. The hand is the prototypical tool. What the hand holds and serves pervades my work. As technology evolves in more complicated ways in response to culture, what the hand knows holds its own. Much of my activity in jewelry has been open-ended exploration. Evolving bodies of work rather than individual pieces intended as ends in themselves. I veered away from the masterpiece idea and craft for its own sake. I often work in series preferring to produce exhibitions of closely related work partly to avoid the pitfall of style but more importantly to cultivate a wider examination of an idea. Exploring it from many angles. I owe a great debt to jewelry from other cultures both in the chosen material and in designs and forms capable of great drama and also of a kind of fierce subtlety. This work produced by non-industrial societies is ingenious in design and engineering. Radical by our standards in range of materials and often highly symbolic. Charged with meaning. In this jewelry material value was often given metaphoric dimension in the organic synthesis of idea and form. The content was expected to be socially or spiritually generated and the form of visual analog of the content. In the necklace electric claws, Bakelite knobs from all manner of electrical devices replaced the claws and teeth used by many tribal cultures who appropriate an animal spirit and power by wearing its weapons. This necklace as well as the breastplate piece are parts of a project commemorating historic body ornament that has influenced me through the ears. Most of my pieces use look-alike modern objects to refer to and comment on the original context. These are not always simple references however. They are more like collaborations between me and the traditional artists trying to understand more about one culture collecting and adopting the art of another while perhaps participating in its disappearance. My breastplate called protection is made of pencils rather than bones referring in this case to the lack of protection written treaties provided native peoples. A very recent version still unfinished on my table now is called Milagro. It is made up of written requests and thank yous by the artisans and me at Arte Papel in Oaxaca where I have now worked for many years. It is a gesture to provide protection for the survival of the paper making workshop. We make these written beads at the end of our sessions working together once a year. I then make the rolled messages into jewelry. I have used my work as a way of talking about historical and contemporary issues of art in general and jewelry in particular. I have tried to examine the difference between the authentic and the synthetic and between copying and appropriation. Aesthetic political and poetic questions surrounding the language of materials are not new but not resolved and still open for exploration as are the conventions of representation and abstraction and the issue of scale as a measurement of value in the context of contemporary art. A hard one for jewelers. In the fields of craft and design perfection is often the measure of value. However imperfection has its place too and I wanted to explore its attraction further but being somewhat of a perfectionist myself how do I proceed to make something imperfect to break through what sometimes seemed the barriers of perfection. Much of my work involves dislocation and a kind of tension in the use of material and such practice finally flowed into the project an exhibition called Repair and Imperfection. Here the idea was to examine perfection as a criterion for craft of originality as the measure of authenticity and of reuse and the value of repair. I asked 18 artists whose work I greatly admired to contribute an abandoned damaged or incomplete piece of theirs for my reworking and or repair. I tried to complete the piece as part of my inquiry into a deeper understanding of the value of imperfection. Imperfection can provide openness a way in whereas perfection is often closed and frozen in place. Imperfection can contain energy can make for flow yet so often craft is defined by perfection examining imperfection led to its clear cut manifestation repair and what it might indicate in contemporary culture. There were many layers to this project raising many questions where does the original maker's work end and mine begin? How do I maintain the integrity of the original? How much do I refer to what I know of the intentions of the artist in terms of repair what is broken and what needs fixing? Is this collaboration or something else? A repaired object can be charged with so much other than its perfect self. It reveals human intervention the intervention of the hand as well as ingenuity of thought. I want to show a few examples from the exhibition where 33 pieces were shown in handmade boxes along with a framed photograph of the fragment that instigated each piece. In addition one or two pieces completed by the artist were shown to represent their own work. Here there were many parts to the whole where the exhibition became the piece. Approachable from many angles and layered a kind of geology of presence. For Otto Kuntzli the idea behind the work is inextricably connected to its appearance. His rubber bracelet called Gold Makes You Blind is to me a nearly perfect piece of jewelry. Inside the rubber tube is a gold sphere. Jewelry's value is so often determined in our culture by the value of the materials but here the gold is invisible and the simple rubber bangle is beautiful too in a stark and tactile way. After a long time where the rubber wears away exposing the gold like an eye as Otto described in his letter. He is adamant that the gold remain hidden and therefore agreed to replace the bracelet when this happens. The small partially crushed sphere he gave me was damaged as he pushed it into the rubber tube rendering it useless in the new bracelet. As I read Otto's letter a poem called The Panther by Rene Marie Rilke came to mind. I decided to refer to this poem directly by making a tiny cart of silver and rubber. The cart was eye shaped from above and the undamaged side of the gold sphere became the pupil of the eye extending up out of the cage. This poem was shown in the box with the piece. There is a broad range to Daniel Joseph's work from the narrative to the abstract. This adventurousness leads to a greater understanding of how images work so that a piece of his like American Requiem a series of six pins made after 9-11 can have real impact without exploiting built in emotional charges. When Daniel wrote that he was sending cast lettuce leaves I thought they might be a possibility for an unrealized idea of a few years before involving a news story I had heard on the radio. When the fragments arrived they were less leaf like than I imagined but still I wanted to try. I got some AK-47 shells thanks to a Vietnam friend and cut them to fit on the leaves. For this piece it seemed important to include the story the news story on the inside lid of the box which was one day during the war in Bosnia a report on the radio ended with an arresting image a resident of a village that had come under attack the night before answered a journalist question. This morning when I looked out my window at my garden I knew the fighting was very close there were bullet casings on the lettuce leaves. Bruce Metcalf is well known as both a consummate craftsman and artist the term narrative is often too loosely used to describe any jewelry that is figurative in the case of Bruce's work however it is pertinent and accurate jewelry is seldom the place for angst but Bruce tells this story well when he sent the unfinished carved wood figure I responded to the angst it contained I really didn't want to disturb the figure by painting it cutting it up or altering it too drastically I liked its naked naked refinement I made a dark aura for it with my own narrative twist adding a bright hat for contrast though most of the artists did not see their pieces until after the exhibition Bruce happened to see this one his comment was I think I would have put a feather in her cap Jay Fred Wool is another artist whose work I deeply admire along with his sense of social justice and the value of jewelry as standing for something beyond its decorative purpose in material discussions have found objects selected objects there has been a missing depth in critical discourse and Jay Fred's work is under acknowledged I feel feeling kinship with Fred's work I thought that his contribution might be the least difficult to resolve but it turned out to be otherwise as I received these unusual at least to me fragments what was evidence however was the delicate ingenious way he had cut and interleaved the stamps to form a bouquet he indicated that the title of the piece was I never promised you a rose garden but the flowers in the stamps were tulips and I'm not sure whether Fred was being ironic or funny or or both lisa ground next project called the gold standard involves another take on narrative she sees it as conducting an inquiry into the value systems through which contemporary jewelry negotiates progress accumulates knowledge and promotes physical comfort through consumerism and as she says gold as an infinitely recyclable material embodies both the potential for the noblest testaments to the history of civilization and the disturbing ability to erase that same history by being melted down and recycled she made plaster casts of many familiar objects and included one detail in enough solid gold to represent the value of the object one gold standard piece involved plaster casts of her hands as we were standing in her studio looking over the cast I remarked that if there was ever a finger that got broken off I'd be interested in having it without hesitation lisa reached over and broke off the index finger from the cast of her right hand I wasn't expecting such immediate service this finger also had the power of a medieval relic a piece of someone revered the finger can be worn as a pendant on a chain but while at rest it is strung up on the crane as a lover of puns I like the implications of lifting a finger taking the trouble to do something that might make it important what artists do and maybe what comes out of the repair project is once again how the act of making by hand matters travel has informed my work in different ways always widening my concerns around jewelry during a stay in Mexico in Oaxaca 16 years ago I was invited by the artist Francisco Toledo to work in a handmade paper making facility he asked that I might teach the artisans how to make jewelry out of paper how to make designs that could be reproduced I said no I couldn't possibly do that anytime I make more than one piece they get worse not better so I didn't feel that I could contribute in that way but it turned out that that's what I did since I don't like usually making some the same thing more than once this also gave me an opportunity to to make different things than I would ordinarily make if I were making them myself it was an entirely new way of working outside solitary work in the studio thinking more solely about design and in a country whose language I didn't know what started out as a one-time contribution of designs to the artisans has now continued for 16 years several years ago with an idea toward an exhibition at the cultural center in Chicago I started to think about how we could reaffirm the use of paper in jewelry and of jewelry in art as well as connect to the cultural past in Mexico where paper had a long history of importance two galleries were full of jewelry one all color the other only white pieces the ones I made for the exhibition the exhibition was not unlike the approach I have taken for many years where individual pieces are parts of a larger idea rather than complete on their own more than one to make one it is the experience of the exhibition rather than the experience of a single piece that holds my attention as an artist an installation allows the individual parts to come together to make something beyond their singular identities it is this kind of layering of visual language that is perhaps harder to expect from one piece and that may be more akin to poetry than product making jewelry out of paper is not the same as metal yet paper contrary to what people may think is strong the white pieces are wearable but they need particular care some became more like drawing or like architecture went off the body I don't always think of the body as the site for jewelry in the literal wearable sense but I like to think of the idea of wearing the implied site of the body and I also like the idea of wearing an idea in the case of the white pieces there might be unease in its usefulness as jewelry and I like that there are that there is that tension sometimes it is important to counter assumptions to work with the tension and release of such an encounter jewelry is often not expected to be art but its context can alter expectations and I would hope to do that now and then throughout the work in paper I continued in metal though at one point a few years ago I wondered about the longevity of both I made at that time a necklace called a reliquary of my own making it's a play on words as the necklace depicts in photographs the process of its making it's a reliquary I made and a reliquary for a form of making it was though in suggesting demise I was actually reaffirming the necessity of its survival here this one piece speaks for itself contemporary jewelry has continued to evolve in ever more complicated ways both conceptually and physically through material and process new technology has upped the ante of what is possible and now that I've returned my thoughts and my time to metal I seem to be looking farther back in an effort to think forward and also as some kind of offering for a rich working life I'm drawn to stone the earth's oldest material for my meditation on technology ancient african stone points were made by hand as a means of surviving often the makers of these early tools seem to pause when refining of the edge slipped beyond pure necessity to ceremony and yes beauty and were saved even to serve as tools in the afterlife the table is set where I go from here is yet to be determined though as you can see I have torqued their function as killing tools to tools for dining measuring building and offering and perhaps at the same time arguing for the cutting edge to coincide with the aesthetic edge thank you hello everyone I'm going to take a chance here I don't know how's that can you hear me really okay thank you for inviting me here today and uh Susan I know you're out there somewhere it's like it was yesterday but it was 1990 when I met you in a Chicago diner to learn more about your planned publication right one of a kind American art jewelry today and look how far reaching that project was and how far you've come and we've all been the benefit you know benefited from it so thank you so much for your generosity um you know I'm a professor of metal and jewelry and in the past 30 years I've been very dedicated to the active critical inquiry that exists within contemporary jewelry and as evident here by this great audience it has a long and healthy life and will continue to do so um so jewelry is one aspect of my practice and the way I entered the field but you may know me as a metalsmith or a silversmith or a sculptor even uh and so in this brief talk I'm going to show how some of my ideas have worked across formats and how the format can further inform the content I'm going to start with this work from 1990 entitled split spoon it is both jewelry and hollowware the work represents my interest in historical and contemporary objects of service and of use okay um split spoon asserts the idea that objects can act as portraits and that today the traditional objects literal function is second to its social identity this work portrays a spoon and pearls rather directly while it invites us to consider the social role of each and it imagines the identity of the wearer split and splayed the spoon arches mimicking the curve of the collarbone unwarrable perhaps unbearable the spoon appears bowed by the weight of the strand and by extension the burden of the pearls themselves and all that they may stand for in one social circumstance this is split split slab a double platter from 2013 and reflects my long-standing interest in table wear and the table as a rich stage for dialogues between objects and audience in jewelry and hollowware I explore ideas related to value and that can be expressed through the material's resonance I consider the imposition of a material's social history and I make forms that reflect my point of view I manipulate the material conditions to construct fictions and parodies this slab split and splayed landed hard on the table a material thud a sense of gravity is often present in my work there's a sense of happening along with the possibility of transformation this is mantelpiece from 1994 the body is present coupled with a sense of place in mantelpiece the candlestick is wrought then bisected and then represented the cut edge drawing the object as subject in its new configuration the candlestick is both present and absent its cavity represents the figure while the overall piece plays with the possibility of figuration that some may seek in the grain of wood these heels from 1990 are in a more forceful conversation with the body somewhat wearable one needs only to screw them into the bottom of your foot to make them work I recall making these heels was such a strong sense of purpose and a silly sense of humor perhaps I was so determined to make these objects of futility as a raw critique of vanity and to condemn the expectation that women should conform to patriarchal ideas about beauty I know these heels are a one liner and somewhat superficial and today they seem outrageous to me but then again I'm still outraged in 1988 I made a series of timepieces that were intended to self-destruct through wearing I'm certainly not the first person to use the image of the diamond as a way to critique jewelry as status symbol and I'm certainly not the last this ubiquitous approach has been surprisingly long-lived but in the 80s many artists were compelled to engage the subject using art as a self-critical tool for me the idea of featuring the diamond as an abrasive in order to undermine its authority was but one approach you know at the same time Otto's Quincy's gold makes blind bracelet was going around Joan parter was making graphite pendants that were putting stains on people's shirts when they were worn and my teacher Gary Griffin was drawing on sandpaper with platinum stylus and of course the Dutch were very active in their critique of preciousness at that time my work at that time was informed as much by Margaret de Padde's jewelry as by Duchamp's sexist mechanistic brides and by the sculptor Chris Burden who made Samson a large geared turnstile fitted wall-to-wall in the gallery each person that entered caused the turnstile to push against the bearing walls the premise was that if enough people ever actually came into a gallery they could collectively destroy the institution Samson was a huge statement and a huge object and I know that my broaches were not operating in any way close to that work but I recall being very motivated by such thinking and at the same time being firmly committed to the field that I was in and to jewelry as its outcome jewelry has unique agency it takes advantage of its intimate connection to the wearer who so crucially participates in its presentation and contributes to its meaning through wearing jewelry praise on the unsuspecting audience who happens upon it on the street this is valuable territory and art jewelers productively explore this here are some other approaches to the gemstone as subject or portrait in my work on the right I rendered the diamond in grizzai enamel on a flat plane the painted illusion suggests the magnifying lens or a blueprint on the left this four prong standard pendant from the mid 90s features the prong setting the customary support for the stone exaggerated in scale the empty setting presents a loss and a sense of longing while it also questions the relevance of the stone and its imposed standard the armature comes to represent a crown my fingers slips through it as a ring the chain passing through calls to mind the traditional gifting of a ring think classic high school insignia ring as a token of young love and a promised future in these pieces we see the similar idea becoming more mannered in the making on the left this bunny pendant it's reaching out to you a cloying and annoying caricature it's a fairly large pendant the object is fabricated and hollow and its emptiness is revealed on the inverse on the right hand brought prongs clustered together to form a skeletal heart it is somewhat gothic and melodramatic with its bloody garnet teardrop cascading down both are also for me a celebration of the craft itself goldsmithing metalwork fine soldering and precision i enjoy when craft demonstrates or inspires critical thinking skill indeed has agency this work entitled purge from 1993 puts it all out there it's the jewel unwearable except in the hand where one can intimately enjoy the splendor of so many obnoxious charms all in one place the pieces hollow a sham a goal-plated monstrosity of empty sentiment that i sometimes call sentimentia purge is one multi-headed emoticon ahead of its time also in the category of productively useless objects is this work object tray relationship from around that same time frame the design was conceived spontaneously i encountered the packet of green felt dots and immediately envisioned the perfect object emerging from that graphic card of comforting pads the object and tray are empirically codependent the shiny surface is beholden to the fuzzy dot its specific purpose is to protect this specific object jewelry can be held and presentation silver is beholden it's spectacle is often a static experience you approach the mantle the sideboard the table and there it sits presenting this prompts me to more deeply consider the personification of the owner or the user of the objects that i create in salver from 2002 i imagine the server and the anxiety of the social situation or the anxiety of service itself this piece is built to reflect that tension it portrays the struggle of holding it together right before totally losing it and then it all gives way to this surreal transformation a hand wrought rendering of silvers ebbs and flows its components devolving and reconfiguring this cantalobrom is as much a portrait of the formal setting as a portrayal of the history and the future of silver itself where has it been where is it headed as a field a practice a place in our lives this work imagine silver in a state of flux its seeming collapse is also its reimagining that exploration of fluidity led me back to jewelry and i began to imagine these forms on the body and rather than smithing these forms with trump Lloyd precision as i had in the earlier pieces i found myself just pouring molten tin all over the place and giving myself permission to work in a really loose way letting the form emerge i learned from this a more spontaneous approach and a clearer state of mind the chain on the left is called penny lane reflects a certain tentative nature mine as well as my imagined wearers while the pendant on the right sergeant pepper is the raw release corners which is the piece in the exhibition juxtaposes the spontaneity of the metal form with the control parameters of the frame i consider the work from this whole series to be in conversation with costume jewelry perhaps by virtue of its freedom and its artifice it is tin after all a base metal pretending to be something that it's not and at the same time the piece conforms to the conventions of adornment as it imitates higher aspirations costume jewelry is an opportunity for play in step with the whims of fashion it can be a lighthearted comment meant to last no longer than the trend or the topic itself it is consumable one size fits all this summer i made jewelry by happenstance one minute i was processing wire in the rolling mill and by day's end i had these silver rings based on bread twist ties they're ephemeral like chains constructed from dandelions or folded gum wrappers nearly everyone who has seen these rings admits to having made the exact same ring during summer camp or with their grandmother perhaps recalling some other time of simple pleasure these narratives demonstrate jewelry's rich capacity to connect us to draw us in and this field is indeed rich with artists and designers who are invested in this realization and we're all the better for it thank you i look forward to our discussion you'll have to excuse me i'm having problems with my eyes my name is helen draught and i'm very happy to be here and i would like to sort of celebrate susan and this amazing exhibition and i would also like to thank the cooper hewitt for asking me to participate in this symposium and panel in celebration of jewelry with ideas i would also like very much to thank kiff's lemons our moderator who guided us for the last two weeks and encouraged me since i am not a maker i am the only one who is not a maker or an artist uh to show six or seven images of objects during the past few years which who in which the ideas that were contained with within these objects drew my attention like thomas i think thomas i bit i have beaten you i'm 62 years in the field since 1955 when i bought my first nakashima chest for 15 dollars so i was 25 years old so that was my entrance into the world of contemporary craft and i must say that i'm very much interested in the resurgence of the craft movement beyond just jewelry but jewelry was important to me because you could wear it and if you wore it and you walked into a room it acted as a catalyst for inquiry you couldn't take a chair into a curatorial meeting and you couldn't carry a pot into a curatorial meeting but if you wore a brooch i remember distinctly calvin s hathaway who was once the curator at the cooper hewitt looking at me in 1967 or 68 and saying what are your plans for that and i said what do you mean he said i said when i die he said no i don't want to wait that long and so jewelry has always been extremely important and i consider myself part of the golden triangle you have the artist you have the object and you've got to have the audience and without the audience you have nothing so i am the audience and that's why i am here today i looked up in the oed 22 i actually looked up in the oed and it said jewelry is an article of value used for endowment or an ornament worn as a badge of distinction i was really amazed that it wasn't really a greater you know explanation in the oxford english dictionary it also said that an idea is the conception of a standard or principle to be aimed at so that's what we're doing today we are aiming at ideas that are contained within jewelry i hope i have this correct i do all right so what was the first piece of jewelry that really caught my eye the first piece of jewelry in which an idea was so strong that i remember screaming and saying bye bye circle pins bye bye to the to the string of pearls it was 1967 or 1968 and i was at a meeting with stanley lexen in his home and he carefully went up to his studio and brought down this amazing brooch of electroformed silver with tourmaline but the tourmaline wasn't wrapped up with a wire like a caulder it was merged and embedded in the silver and he explained to me that the electro informing process made it possible for you to unite alien materials i looked at that brooch i screamed and i knew that forever my life was going to be changed and then there was another piece that he brought and he was the father of electroforming just as he was probably one of the great innovators of cat cam today correct me dog if i'm wrong all right the other work was this amazing brooch with two pieces of mica that almost mirrored each other again electroformed in the silver and then coated in gold and then these amazing pearls that just perched on top of it it almost looked as if it were were part of a mars landing gear i actually wore this brooch to the opening of objects usa and the second time that i wore it which was extremely important i had it wrapped in an afghan and i took it to dublin for the world crafts council meeting in 1970 and graham hughes looked at it and that was the catalyst that made it possible for stanley lexen to have his solo exhibition at goldsmith's hall because hughes had never seen an electroformed ornament before it was an amazing amazing moment lexen of course was teaching at tyler's school of art and his good friend olaf scooper's was teaching at what was then called the pencil the philadelphia college of art and now we're talking about ideas ideas in jewelry the brooch on your on your right is the dimsdale machine the dimsdale machine caused an amazing controversy during a panel in 1970 the dimsdale machine was made in 1969 but in 1970 there was a panel and olaf explained how them the piece was named after ellen dimsdale who was a student of his at haystack but really in effect it was responsive to antoni ony's the red desert and that if you look at it carefully you'll see the subtraction of an italian lamb steak with you know industrial elements rising from the landscape with a moon and stanley lexen got up and said jewelry should be decorative not intellectual but it was it was very interesting in the sense that finally i began to understand that jewelry was not just an object to be worn that it was an object that could communicate many many ideas the piece on your left is a belt buckle and i'd like to read a letter that olaf scooper's wrote to david hanks in 1975 i tend to work in series or variations on a theme most noticeable in the last year are the belt buckles for men they explore the possibilities of limited design fields much as joseph cornell did with his boxes many people have influenced by work anonymous workers craftsmen who have put together things and artists in all fields who have devotedly dealt with the exploration of form and images on a personal personal quest unfortunately olaf died that year at age 45 in 1975 it was a great loss for our field and for him as well of course it was not easy to select six or seven artists within the range of all the people that i have met during the past 62 years but i'm trying to in some way show you some of those works which were extremely important in my development and in my education among them was meeting claus burry in 1973 or 74 when he first came to the united states as a as a gift from ita bolin who was one of the major collectors of jewelry in in in the globe ita bolin in asenbaum in europe and i was introduced to his work and among the most important pieces is this construction that was made in 1973 it has two layers of drawings and beneath it a very complex interchangeable acrylic terminals and pinbacks and and and and extensive drawings it's actually a book there are one two three pages and if you i here's the pointer if you look over here this is the brooch and then you can remove this section here and you can place this piece or this piece and you can change the the coloration and the configuration of the brooch and the pinbacks are all in case didn't hear and you have these amazing engineering drawings which show you his cerebral thinking as he develops this piece uh i will tell you the story of how i i acquired this piece this piece had remained in a box in the safe of a major collector in europe for decades well not for decades but for two decades and in 1996 right after the air crash the air the air france air crash air crash in new york i received a call from claus telling me that this piece was becoming available it had never been taken out of its box would i come to frankfurt immediately and get it i said i can't do that i can't just fly to germany said yes you can because if you don't it's going to go into auction and so i flew i was on the plane after the plane crash and i acquired i acquired the box with terms of course and then uh and brought it back but it is an amazing piece and it is a piece with extraordinary ideas which really leads us into the intellectual basis of of of claus borie's work and claus borie is still working now but he's work he's now a sculptor and also if you can look there's another brooch right here this brooch here over here for me this is one of the most complex broaches i have ever known it is completely constructed in white and gold the exterior of the brooch is so intricate that it's impossible for me to describe and i'm sorry that i do not have an image that will reveal it but his interest in landscape is revealed in the ornaments that he made and his interest in space and if you look you can see now he's building structures throughout germany uh large large uh sculptures sculpture and in this particular case this piece is in it's in beatersfelder which is a very depressed area in germany and this structure allows you to climb over and look at the landscape look at the depressed landscape but also beginning to view the reconstruction of that area in germany so it's a a structure which invites tourism to come from all parts of europe and it also shows you in looking at this piece you can see how the structure of this amazing you know staircase also comes forth out of the ideas that were generated in the early works by burry i was intrigued very much by the work of betsy king i think she's probably been forgotten in the past 20 years there were wonderful things about her narratives and the way in which she took the memories of her childhood and and other episodes that occur that occurred during her lifetime that were important to her on the you see here it's called raised in promises this is a photograph of her fifth birthday party in which the innocence of being a five-year-old and playing with your friends and enjoying the moment was destroyed as she became a mature woman there is the lightning bolt that took away this kind of romantic childlike childlike view of what life would be and it's called raised on promises and it was done about 1990 and then in 1992 when it was announced that superman was going to be discontinued she was heartbroken and so she made this work called bound to be back and it was made in 1992 and it's a wonderful brooch and indeed there he is bound to be back so i like those ideas i like the ideas of her responding to pop culture responding also to her own biographical memories i have many other broaches that i could show but there's no time among the other artists who have generated ideas through their work are people like Bruno martinatzi who lives in torino italy and who is now 93 or 94 years of age but his iconic piece called goldfinger which was designed in 1969 and each one was made individually they were never cast they were all fabricated by the artists in his studio and if you look at one from 1969 to one that he made 15 or 20 years later the the addition is now going you can actually see the difference you can see how in the beginning they were very tight and they were very controlled and as it became older the fabrication of the gold was looser but in addition to that he was a sculptor and also very concerned with the the political the political aura of of northern italy and the fist that you see here is called contra legere against the war and there are two fists that are made of massive stone and carved by actually carved by Bruno martinatzi with one or two helpers and it's in the center of the fiat factory in torino and it is called contra legere against the war i have worked with heisbacher since 1974 it's a long time and i've always been intrigued by his commitment to the field not only in jewelry and design and furniture and also in environmental projects kiff asked me to talk about the madeline albright project and so i am which i uh i guess i inaugurated that in 1998 i believe when madeline albright was the secretary of state i'm not sure i'm correct with the date but she was secretary of state and it was well known that she was flying all over the world wearing jewelry that in some way responded to her meetings or to the the the political situation in which she was involved and i kept looking at the jewelry and i was saying oh no there goes that gold bird perched on a pearl again i said we have to do something about that we have to say bye bye birdie goodbye and so i invited a group of artists around the world to create a brooch for madeline albright and the project was called broaching it diplomatically and then they had they had to justify why they made the brooch and and and how she would in some way utilize that that object actually that project was the very project that served as the foundation for her now famous brooch collection that is you know shown throughout the world in various museums but but heisbacher made this brooch called the liberty brooch unfortunately my eyes are so bad i can't read it but i will tell you that he made this brooch and it is a liberty brooch and based on our statue of liberty but the eyes have two clocks and one watch is for her madeline albright to keep track of her time and the other watch is for you the audience to know when to leave then in addition to that he has recently i must say uh where is sarah's here he has designed this object and it is being made by other craftsmen but he has designed this particular neck piece which i find rather extraordinary it's called black to white and it's a neck piece of portraits of many many males from from black to white and they are they they move from white to black and they are all portraits of people who with whom he has felt he's had a personal interest in their in their lives or they are his heroes and they they include people like miles davis louis armstrong nelson mendela barrack obama and the great louis andresan who is the composer of one of the great operas of the 20th century called rosa and also philip hoffman and david bowie bowie and he has a conviction to their beliefs and a feeling of incredible integrity in the spirit of these male portraits manford bischoff uh manford bischoff a german artist mainly living and working in italy whose work has actually tantalized me since 1983 or 84 when i first saw a work of his documented in a an international publication and i finally met him through gay or dobler at ornamentum in in in in fortzheim in 1988 or 89 and i was intrigued by his absolute uh involvement with not only himself but his political beliefs and the conversations in this particular case that he was having right uh oh wait in here you see this piece is called creator and and the creator is holding a carl vessel and he always felt that the vessel was the container of everything that was important to the human being in addition to our soul and this particular piece is also uh attached to conversations that he's had with his psychiatrist so that we have many drawings that have some of his medical history and medical conversations or or psychiatric conversations and then as he began to move away from uh actually communicating those intimate ideas with us he began to communicate them in a more abstract manner such as madam i'm adam and there's no doubt about it that he is a male adam in this amazing brooch in which all the superfluous ideas have gone from his work in a piece like this and and what's only necessary remains for you to comprehend it from the actual creation of the piece itself uh manford unfortunately died about two years ago it will be two years this may and he is among one of the most important artists whose ideas i think will really permeate the 21st century we have lost many great artists in the past year and a half not only manford but elizabeth codre deafener who died in vienna last april and then of course our beloved ron ho whose work i am actually wearing so that you could see it and and and also because he was so important in not only in the northwest but but his work is really important in many many parts of the united states hawaii and europe he is far better known than one believes he was uh very close to remona solberg and he's very close to kiff's lemons and to larry hall and he traveled extensively with remona and it was through remona that she helped him realize that all these objects that he collected all over the world and and and saved and and and that she also saved that that is that these objects could become part of very important assemblages and pendants and these two pieces contain two elements that were broaches with a kingfisher feathers which are now extinct i know for a fact that the that this particular broach was given to ron by remona solberg and this piece is in the shadow lane exhibition and it celebrates the last empress of china and and he has not only this wonderful kingfisher broach as the center medallion but also the fingers that the empress wore to extend her hands and she loved pearls they say that when she was buried after her death that all the empty spaces in her coffin were filled with pearls not bad right so and so this was his contribution to the shadow lane exhibition and and which was also an exhibition that i organized many years ago in which the traditional shadow lane which was a a french you know ornament which uh occupied which was used in the medieval times for keys and lockets and and allowed you to go from public places to private places and i invited artists throughout the world to do a contemporary shadow lane but also to at the same time to cite their role model and in this particular case ron cited the last empress of china uh oh wait wait a minute okay great ron passed away in september seventh of this year and on october 25th peter chang also entered eternity and peter chang as as many of you know was a scottish artist living and working in glasco scotland but peter chang became very well known in the past decades all of chang's ornaments also came from his imagination assemblages with fragments of old toothbrushes erasers and toys were inlaid in the plane rather than on a three dimensional form large biological fantasies grew undulated and became surfaces not unlike gaudy's park in barcelona his works are assemblages with endless possible permutations of forms which embodied intense colors reminiscent of comic books and carnivals i'm reading from something that i had written many years ago and this bracelet is a wonderful example of the fantasy uh okay wait a minute i'm sorry i'm not good at this right of the fantasy in which he allowed himself to create wearable objects not only pendants but also brooches and and about 10 years ago he created this amazing table for the british consul in hong kong and this image i was sent last week by his family this is his coffin that was painted by his son so he was sent off into eternity with this exuberant painted surface by his son leo and uh who sent me images of the coffin before they went into the crematory so i thought i would share it with you because it shows how exuberant exuberant it was the celebration of his going into eternity was a very festive on festive ceremony in which many of us contributed i was asked to write a poem other people were asked to participate by writing uh original musical scores and and then of course this amazing painted coffin okay here i am so why do we have bernard shovinger wearing a diving suit bernard shovinger is an artist whose ideas have propelled me into his work for since 1985 or 86 um he is a swiss artist living and working outside of zurek in ricksterville and he uses found objects uh found objects to create very idiosyncratic works of art i think the first the first necklace that i ever saw was made of coke shards that came from a trash can in berlin and it was inter-exchanged with 18th or 19th century cut crystals so you had the cut crystal and then you had the shard from a pepsicola or a coca cola bottle that he had picked up in rubbish uh this is bernard dressed ready to go into the bowels of lake zerk and for 20 years bernard went in underneath the lake and he collected fish hooks and he collected these fish hooks for over 20 years and created this necklace called mermaid's wedding and when i saw it i knew there was no way i could ever wear it unless i was unless i would allow myself to be pricked or pricked constantly but the concept was so extraordinary to me and the piece itself was so extraordinary to me that i decided to acquire it and i did and i must say that it's an extraordinary work of art and and i felt very strongly i must say that i offered it to one or two museums and they all turned it down because i felt it should be held in some kind of permanent repository there are many many artists you know whose ideas are essential and important in the history of contemporary and modern and contemporary jewelry these are just a few artists whose work i have personally been drawn to the artist as joseph cornell says the artist appeals to that part of our being which is a gift and not an acquisition and therefore more permanently enduring these artists move beyond ornament and explore sweeping changes in which they explore freedom and the expansion of expression thank you i can't see anything right is it all right really yeah i can't i can't i couldn't read my writing so you were both pretty damn good clarification there'll be a short conversation right now because we're we have a few more minutes so they're going to talk for just a moment and take questions if you need to use the restroom that's fine you can do that right now i know a lot of people are that's why we had a break but we're going to just talk for a few more minutes that was the the schedule and then we'll be break for half an hour just sorry for any confusion thanks