 Welcome to Cooper Hewitt, fellow jewelry enthusiasts. I think we had such a rousing time last night that we're not exactly punctual this morning, but here we are and very much looking forward to a sensational day, which we really owe a great deal of thanks to many people and obviously most of all to Susan Lewin herself. It feels something like a reunion, although I must say I feel I know most of the people in the room by name and by their objects and by their interests more than by face. So this has been an enormous treat for me and I am Sarah Koffin, head of the product design and decorative arts department here at Cooper Hewitt and who with Cindy Troupe made the selection of objects in consultation with Susan and with Ursula also for additional comments. And I actually think now that I've gotten to know a number of you, that I'm really glad that I knew you by your objects first because it made the selection, I think, more museum-like, shall we say, but it was a very hard choice and believe me there are many more things in Susan's collection that we'd love to have. So we hope this is the first of a long series of talks of interest of education and the edu in si.edu stands for education and we hope very much that this wonderful gift and this wonderful collection will continue to lead to other educational exploration. Many, as I said, many thanks are in order, first of all, to the artist, designers, jewelers, the range of your creativity on display in the exhibition which, when shown together, highlights each person's individual creativity as well as Susan's collecting aesthetic. I have just been informed that Thomas Gentili has been named fellow of the American Craft Council. A great honor, so wanted to introduce that as he very much helped us with some of the conceptual and execution part of the exhibition design. Susan, there's no possible way we could thank you hugely enough for identifying Cooper Hewitt as the place for your collection. I think you've seen over the years of, even before you did start talking about the jewelry of how much we use gifts of collections to interact with other parts of our collection and while we're looking at the jewelry together as an ensemble right now, we see it in very much looking forward to exhibitions on nature, on other topics where it can interact with other design areas. This is a historic moment for the museum. Every once in a while, a museum receives a collection which is a game-changing moment that helps determine the museum's personality and future collection, collecting. Susan's gift is one of those. She's really a passionate collector who gets in there. She has an independence of eye and obviously as many of you know, she gets to know the maker. Ursula Neumann, consulting curator of the exhibition and author of the beautiful catalog, we relied on her professionalism, expertise and finesse every step of the way. The catalog itself, many discussions took places how it could really be a contribution to scholarship, not just another publication. And Ursula's essay and the individual statements from many of you here today all made for an important addition to the field of jewelry. And I would also like to say that we had a wonderful opportunity to work on creating a book as an object of design itself. I hope you will find as well as for its scholarship. Through all these conversations, we realized how many opportunities there are for further scholarship as I mentioned and I wanted to single out Susan Teichmann who's here today and Sebastian Grant who may be here but I can't see him who were both fellows from our master's program who worked from the inception right through to the opening of the exhibition on very much in curatorial capacity to interview to add information and so forth. And this is one of the great benefits of being connected to a graduate program that we have lots of opportunity for scholarship of all of you and many more. I wanted just to also review on a practical basis the schedule of the day. We will start out with the keynote address by Iris Eichenberg who is jeweler artist and educator and this will be followed by a discussion with Bruce Metcalf and jeweler author and educator also and Thomas Gentile who is Ditto Ditto. So we will focus on trends and developments in European and American jewelry. There will then be a lunch break from 12 to 130 and then the afternoon start session will start promptly at 130 and run till three and we will then have a short half hour break in the middle of the afternoon and the second afternoon session will start at 330. I urge you to be extremely punctual in returning this is being live streamed and so we have a double reason to keep to our schedule. So with, and lastly but far from least I just want to remind everybody of the wonderful support we've had from a variety of sources. The Rotasso fund, the Society of North American Goldsmiths, Helen Druth English, Trustee Al Eiber and his wife Kim, Gallery Loop. I think I've seen both Patty and Eileen here today or at least Patty, Sienna Patty, William Short in memory of Nancy Jean Phillips Short and Ornamentum Gallery and I believe Stefan is here. So without further ado I would like to turn over the podium terrace for what I'm sure will be a wonderful talk and follow up discussion with Bruce and Thomas. Thank you. Thank you Sarah. This is a hard one to follow. You Americans are such good speakers. It's unbelievable. I know it's not a gene but you must learn it very early on. Good morning everybody. It's my pleasure to see you all. Although I have to lift the reading glasses then. Welcome, welcome to this day. I'm very excited about it. It's special to me to be here as I walked through these doors 20 years ago. First time in America and to you who are from here you will never get what that means. I would like to thank Susan who took interest in my work, collected it and secured it alive beyond my studio. Again, you don't know what that means. I want to thank Sarah and Susanna and Cindy who put swords into an exhibition which is a reflection of a curious person and a certain taste. A certain taste which gives us the starting point to have a conversation and hopefully insight and some disagreements today because we face a choice of one person who shows us how history is written by those who speak up. Often men and art historians who clamp us down into autobiographic renderings, therefore we depend on idiosyncratic collections which might interrupt the notion of given genres and fixed binaries. I'm aware that we start this day with some questions above our heads and the assumptions of the binary, discourse between Europe and America and the mundane wonder about trends. Let's walk away with long strides from narrowing in assumptions that those things exist fixed over time and as a constant. I have a few thoughts here to start this commutation. Trends, how long can one identify a trend? What is the relevance to identify them? And is that question, is this a question of inclusion or exclusion? Who calls it a trend? Does our political situation influence our perception of trends or what occurs as trend? Are we in need to hold onto a certain trend for a certain reason? Right down, thanks, René. Where stems millennium pink from? Have you heard about it? Trends which I can only be identified from a certain perspective. What might have been a trend 20 years ago might be significant for very different reasons now. And what bores me might be of importance for a new generation. What I might dismiss as superficial and per se, like the representational work of the body, is of a different importance for a young generation. Am I old when I dismiss certain subjects and can it be trendy again for the reasons I do not understand or relate to at all? The body and how its representations fails to address our messy relationship with it. The body is their body without a cultural placement and understanding of the body as a concept, as a product, only understandable if constituted within the context. Feminist art, which only now is shown in New York, how has the impact changed? How common that the shock value is lost on us? How unimportant is the discourse of America versus Europe? Do we not have a different focus on the world right now? My concern is that in time, like these, we might be infected by superficiality. Let it be nice. Do not be so heavy. Let's enjoy the pretty. Do we reverse the jewelry after all just to be one thing decorative? That is my fear. As the Trump time opened up a cans of worms where everybody just wants things to be nice. But first let me show you what triggered my love affair with this museum. I fell in love with those staircases. Indeed, beautifully crafted, but not to impress for the sake of craft, but made by makers who sought through the hands. There for no other reason than to celebrate the richness and diversity of ways in which one walks from one floor to the other. Pointing out an unlimited vocabulary of climbing in circles and rectangles. Made for a moment of transition and never with the aim to be a place of permanent residence. Designed to be a gem of a house, crafted like a piece of art, but not engaging with all the criteria we want to apply to make sense of objects as such. And here now coming some visuals to keep in mind and I would hate myself and I'm not sharing also some work of myself. But let me first address some other subject matters. Coming here with a question being asked to think about trends. I asked a group of young people to pick some images and show me what they consider trends. And it was one ramshackle mixture of things I had not seen for years. I was surprised. They had no idea. They pointed out things. They had very little historical references. And this is just parts of it. I could talk about it forever, but I think it's really important to know this is what a young generation identifies at trendy work. And then there's another concern I would like to share with you. You've all seen it. You've all followed the discussion around it. I didn't know where to take it. I think it is clever. It's really stupid. It's banal. It also addresses something which is going on in our culture. I'm really wondering where it's going. I don't wondering what's happening to it. But there's also such a small line when works like that can be clever, especially when you think about minimalists in the field who make really minimal comments which are sharp and poignant. I don't think that Tiffany is sharp and poignant, but I think they are really clever. And then a jump. There's another thing, another sort of which I would like to start here today, and I really hope that you can help me to think this thought through. Certain work seen, and this was for Claire Kiff's work. Thank you for making it. This was for sure my introduction to America. This was for sure my introduction to Narrative Jewry. This is the invite of a young artist, Mark Monso. I don't know if some of you might know him. An exhibition which is right now in the Netherlands. And I was really bending my head over the fact that with that work in the world, we look very different at Kiff's work. Mark Monso, who is a minimalist and known for his very minimal jewelry, is using pencils and very figurative objects. And it is still minimal. And what does it say about Kiff's work and how do we perceive it now? So I'm really inviting you to revisit works you know for years and years and years and how they, under different light in a different time, are perceived as something totally different. And then I'm going to continue, sorry for doing that with my own work because I can best talk about that and I know what I've done, what I've done, what I've not done. It's kind of an endless learning project. And I'm showing you this work because this work has been produced while, a short while after I moved to America. Full of opinions with the idea of having a certain taste, being the taste police, being really astonished about the fact that colors and materials were mixed here, that you would enter rooms with at least five different kinds of wood. And I was confused and I think I made this work to actually work through it and sometimes working through something means also you fall in love with it. Not necessarily with my own work but it's the fact that moving to a different context gave me the possibility to see things in you and to develop a different taste, a new taste. Somebody once sat in a commencement speech at Cranbrook that if you think you have a certain taste, it's like walking through the world with a big wet blanket over your head. So, let me run to a few years, 20 years of my work with you and I promise you I'm going to run fast. This is work I made, indeed, nearly 25 years ago, knitted hearts and I'm showing you this wool work which I made at that time because that was the moment where I had my momentum in my life or as an artist and I set a trend. I started knitting in order to break with the limitation of everything what is constructed out of hard materials. I needed to find a language and a technique which was as fast as I could think, a technique which I could move forward, backwards and correct and technique which got as close as possible to something what you might call a growing process. And I had mentioned in the conversation before the interest in the body and I think I did, was a lot of young people do a lot and I would say I'm interested in the body. Only in retrospect, I can say it was a lot of other things I was interested in but it was not the body as such. Those knitted pieces you see are portraits, portraits of individuals around me and I portrayed them by their malfunction and dysfunction rather than their beauty. So what you see is necklaces and brooches. I didn't know I already engaged with Millennium Pink in 1995. And sometimes you walk into trends without actually knowing it. And here is where I think I was a good American without knowing it. If America can claim the narrative jury, I probably knew I would end up here before I moved here. This body of work is called Heimat, place of belonging. You might be familiar with the German vocabulary of Heimat, Fernweh, Weltschmerz, all these really heavy words. And this work is based on memory, how I remember, how I remember what my grandmother remembered. And what you see here, those hands in this piece, my grandmother's hands, what you see under it is what I imagined she would have produced 100 years later. And again, something very, another cliche, very German, earth and silver. And this is, it's not a portrait of a girl, it's actually the outline of Germany. So it took me quite a while to be away from Germany before I could touch the subject matter, Germany. So I also really believe that you need the distance, the distance to your origin, the distance to your source in order to reflect upon it. I was by then 15 years in the Netherlands before I would touch the subject German, Germany, which I believe in inherited guilt. So it took me a while to touch the subject. And here we move from Heimat to a body of work which is called Zunen. And what, the reason why I picked it to show it here today is this work is made out of three times nothing. My interest in overcoming unprecious material, nothingness, things which have no value, no significance. What do you do in order to charge them? So the pieces you see here, which is each time it's a car mirror, an old car mirror, a mirror from, which has been discarded, and a pile of old rags and a jerry can from the beach. And I said, how can I conquer them? How can I charge them? What is an ornament? What can you turn into an ornament? And the medical images, cell divisions, pandixes, I believe as soon as you, whatever you do repeat ultimately becomes an ornament. So that way I treated this work and this complicated or object this body of work might be. I think it was for me, one of those bodies of work which I like to return to and it's still some things. There's still aspects of it. I am trying to understand and I think that's a very important, it's a very important aspect of making work, make something which is not immediately understandable to you at that moment in time. So I mean, there are certain bodies of work to me really, really precious because I can, there's an ongoing dialogue. As well, I made other bodies of work which I'm not showing today, which were finished. I was done. I worked something through in the moment. I finished a body of work. I could also depart from it. And then I like to bring things to the table. What you see here is an installation I showed in Seattle years ago. And I think that was the first time I started to foreground the notion of synesthesia, how the expectations of material, of weight, of sound and smell are totally mixed up and how can you evoke it? How can you evoke sensibility? How can you evoke your senses with not a linear offer, with an offer which actually is provoking something else? So what you see here is cast iron and doll stands with wool wigs and a mapping system on the ground. And what you see in the far distance is leather next to it is a piece of embroidery and the embroidery represents the back of the hand of my mother. Sense mapping. Making sense of my own work very often brings me to the point that I reintroduce works to each other even if they come from different bodies of work. And this work was shown at Platinum and Stockholm about five, six years ago. And I really try to map out the different bodies of work I've made which all ran around understanding and a sort of neediness about the body and indeed the messy relationship we have with it. Pink is later. And again, pink. And these, it's called pink is later because it's all about sort of revisiting a moment in time years later and facing the fact that you might feel something again but then you never feel the same quite again. People were disgusted by this body of work and especially this one, while this one worn actually is really beautiful, we should try it out. So as much as I think that this body of work steered up a conversation back at the time, I have the feeling it has totally lost that trigger. So what is it that works? Not, they don't age that fast but I think they lose, not significant but what it seems to be provocative at one moment in time a few years later just has totally disappeared. What does it say about us and are we falling flat? Are we getting used to many things which should actually shock us? What is the shock value of things? And how short is that lift? This is the same body of work which I'd like to walk through with you. Again, it's the choice for material like pantyhose. I'm really, I'm really, really disgusted and I hope I don't insult anybody by white skin beige colored pantyhose. I'm sure I can smell it even if I see it on a photo but to work with it, to figure out how I can introduce that to my work is one of those pleasures that overcoming that the mixture of tension for repulsiveness and strongly being attracted to it. And then we move on and this is an object. It's a hat, form of a hat, 12,000 nails and again a very different way of charging an object and we literally go from millennium pink to dark black and which brings me to two bodies of work which I've just finished and one has been on show at Platina in the last few weeks. And it's driving from an interest in, I think the interest and the core aspect why we make what we make and why we're interested in objects of that size. The power of longing, the power of wishing, the fact that we can materialize the desire, hope and longing within objects and this body of work is called I Do Not Wish. I think we need objects in this time and age which put a spell on certain moments and put a spell on situations and so this body of work is its approaches but it's all based and strongly engaging with ex-votos you might be familiar with is this grouping of hands and tongues, what you handle and your speech and that is a very recent body of work. At least not last, I gonna show you a few images of another show I just opened in Detroit. It's clear my work is never really happy. I wish I would make happy work and I would be far more funny than I am. So these are objects burned and weighed down by sex, the bags were sent and then again trying to wipe out the world, trying to wash out the image, trying to make things unhappen and what you see here is two objects, or let's say it's a three-dimensional painting. I can't paint, so this is as close as I get to a painting and under it you see a rolled up landscape resting on a bed and I don't need to explain that one, I think we all feel that pull to a place, to somewhere and some sort of belonging and that's an overview of the exhibition. Thank you for listening and now it is my pleasure to introduce two wonderful gentlemen, Bruce Metcalf and Thomas Gentili. It's a pleasure to be here with you today and I'm really looking forward to what you have to say. I'm gonna start by reading a really wonderful little text I read last night in the catalog and for this show I'm assuming you haven't read it yet and Thomas wrote it, so it goes. Once upon a time, a very long time ago, the 12-year-old daughter of friends asked me while sitting around the dining room having lunch, what is jewelry, how do you make it? I suggested when we finished our meal, if she would like to, let's take a walk in the backyard and I'll show you how and so we did. I asked her to gather anything that she especially liked, twigs, stones, feathers, weeds, flowers, anything. Elizabeth, for that was her name, gathered from her favorite tree nine beautiful large green maple leaves. I asked her if that was all she wanted and she with great wisdom replied, that is all I need. We went into the house and I asked her mother, Shirley, for some string and from upstairs her father, Bill, brought down a ball of finely spun bright orange yarn that his wife, Shirley, had given him for us. Elizabeth and I carefully made some little holes in the maple leaves next to the stems where the leaves were stronger. Between small knots we strung them one by one, overlapping a little bit. I tied them over her shoulders with a little bow on the back of the neck and said to her, that is what jewelry is and that's how you make it. She wore her emerald green necklace with great contentment for the rest of the day. Elizabeth spoke about her necklace every time I came back to visit. When I asked if she kept it, she said, no I liked it best when it was fresh and green. I like very much the memory of it and anyhow I can always make a new one. That small, very real afternoon of what seems like a fairy tale has often taken on a nearly mythic proportion in my mind. For I often wonder if this is how jewelry began. The gathering of organic things somehow held together. Always with the desire to have the chosen objects made wearable in some way. Whatever the root of this desire, this need to wear or adorn us with something other than clothing, it has held on to the human psyche warmly and gently. Much to our pleasure, it has happily never let go. So what do you think the sources of that psychic need? I don't know. They gave me very careful instructions on how to turn this mic on, which I said, oh I can do that, no problem. What was your question, Bruce? Where, I mean, I actually believe that there's something in our genetic makeup that makes us want to need jewelry. Do you think so and where do you think that comes from? Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think once human and kind got it clothing on to stay warm, it really needed to ornament itself. And there were a lot of reasons for that. One is superstition and religious ideas, all kinds of ideas, but basically I think we like to ornament ourselves. We enjoy dealing with other materials and other things. So you think it's all, Iris warned us against getting to engage with decorations. So do you think the source of it is in decoration? Well, we use the word decoration. I don't know that they use decoration. I think that they just admired the things around them and they wanted those things around them to be part of them. This is all speculation. I mean, that's how I put things on myself. It's not for decoration, it's because I like them and I like looking at them and I like to have them on. So, you know, when I think about it, I think that the source of jewelry is not so much in decoration, but as a badge of both belonging and not belonging. I'm a member of this group, but I'm not a member of that group. Do you think that's part of it? I think it is for some people, for me it's not. I look at the object itself and I like the object and so I either wear it or I don't wear it or I make it or I don't make it. My work has no content whatsoever, except I like to give you everything in the work. Everything. By giving you nothing, I like to give you everything. So, it's a bit hard to explain. Is this in master? By the way, this is all planned just to be an open dialogue. We're just gonna go back and forth with these ideas and if anybody has a question or wants to make a comment while we're talking, feel free to raise your hand and we'll try to answer it as well as afterwards. So you believe in the sight of everything in nothing? I guess the most classic statement is less is more. And I do believe that if you, how do I explain this exactly? For me by doing something very minimal, it gives you the opportunity to give your own story to the work. So by giving you nothing in a minimal way, it gives you the opportunity of a huge story which is way beyond the one that I can give you. So the object becomes a screen for you to project your own story onto it? No, the object is just the object. It's just the thing. The only thing that counts for me is the work itself, the final work. And everything I put into it, the craftsmanship, all the thinking behind it, what's important only for me is the final piece. See, this is where you and I depart because I think more is more. Yeah, so this is why we think we make a good team. We've discussed things a lot and I think it's the fact that Joy has so many varying points of view is what makes it really interesting. And for jewelers who speak together, what makes it also very interesting is that sometimes we're completely opposed to the way the other person thinks and works, but in the dialogue between us we're all the same and this sameness is very interesting. One of the things that I've read about Bruce that Bruce said he got into metal because he was doing clay and he got into metal because he didn't, he liked things that resisted him. And I've never said this to Bruce but that's one of the reasons I got into jewelry. When you put your saw blade, those of you who are jewelers are here, when you know that when you put your saw blade into a saw frame, you have to flick the blade with your fingernail to find out if it's, there's enough tension for it to cut the metal. And my first day in jewelry class, the Cleveland Institute of Art, we had to do that. I was trained to be a painter and a sculptor and the minute I flicked that blade and it fought me back, I thought this is what I want to do and I hadn't even made a piece of jewelry yet, but the saw frame grabbed my attention and that's how I got involved with jewelry. Do you think we're all control freaks? I don't know if I'd put it that way exactly. I would. But I do think that when we get into our studio, that we get into our own world and nothing else matters except what we're working on, the world disappears. From that point of view, I think you might use the word we're control freaks. You know, I got into jewelry because I'd been in architecture school and it became clear to me that architecture was surrounded on so many sides by other things, the desire, the client, the requirements of the structure, the fact that you have to put in a bathroom and a stairwell, all this stuff, this seemed to me extraneous from what I wanted to do and when I moved into jewelry, suddenly I was in total control and that meant two things. One, I was totally responsible and if I screwed up, it was me, it was nothing else, but also that I could impose my will on this stuff and it was in my control totally and the material responded to my will in effect and that to me was very, very powerful but in a way also very egotistical. Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, it's interesting, I don't quite think about controlling the material although to get where you're going you have to control the material but I kind of try to listen to the material and see and feel what it's telling me so although I like to think I have the control I think it's giving me back a lot of feedback. And you know this brings up a topic that maybe should be talked about here today is not just trends but generational changes and what I see in a lot of the new jewelry going on is that there's this idea of relinquishing control. So I just bought a piece by Ansofi Vallet, a young jeweler in Montreal and what she does is she puts fragments of colored plaster in a little vessel and pours colored plaster over it and that becomes like this big stone that she sets and what she's doing is actually letting go of control which is anathema to everything I've ever thought about. Do you see the same thing? Well, I believe in chance. So chance is losing control. So I don't see it, for me I'm not interested in losing control on my work. I wanna be able to get the material to do what I wanted to do because it's telling me what I should be doing but I believe totally in chance. And when I first started making jewelry when I would make a piece and it wouldn't work out why I just throw in a box and start making another piece of jewelry and throw that in the box on and on until I had a box full of nothing. Not the kind of nothing I was talking about before but just a box full of junk. And I suddenly realized if you keep doing that you're gonna not have a body of work you're just going to have a box of junk. So I started making mistakes and thinking how can I use that mistake to make the work better? And when I began doing that the work took on another direction and the work got better. So chance is extremely important for me. Do you think that... So Thomas told me yesterday he's been in the field for 60 years. 60 years this year, yeah. How do you think it's changed? Yeah. Thank you very much. How do you think the field has changed over that period? Oh, I've seen it change a lot. I think Americans work is much more sophisticated now than when I started. They've gotten a lot of skills involved. The community that is now involved with the European community and the American community it's very interesting to see the differences. The Americans don't have the basic training that is given in Europe. The Europeans have wonderful schooling and they can still technically run circles around me. They're just, the students are unbelievable. But on the other hand they had to go through a very rigid training as far as I can see it. A very good training. But then they worked into spontaneity and the Americans are just the opposite. We didn't have the training but we had the spontaneity and some looseness of creativity which was really wonderful. And now I see those two things crossing over as we become more sophisticated craftsmen and they become looser in their ideas. So it's very interesting to see that development. Do you think that's leading to a kind of sameness between American and Europe? Well there's a lot of sameness going on now. A kind of a homogenization. But it's because people aren't thinking individually. You have to, I see a little bit too much of well this looks nice with that so I'll put that together without the thinking behind it. And I like to see work that has the thinking behind it. You know one of the things I see in European jewelry and maybe the last 15 years is what I call crusty clunky. And I look, that comes from Carl Fritsch and some actual guys even before him. And I think the Germans, well the Europeans found that very attractive because it broke the mold of that technical training. Whereas the Americans not having that training was never an issue and in fact some of the earliest American art jewelry going back to 1903 was clunky as all get out. That's Madeleine Yale Winn. And there's famous jewelers like Claire Falkenstein or any number of people who worked within the context of kind of poor craftsmanship. But in Europe that became a thing and then that kind of reinfected America to the point where there was a show called Monochrome Noir where the whole show looked like was made by one person. And I thought that was kind of appalling. Do you agree or disagree with that? Well I didn't see that particular show. I think, we're speaking about Claire Falkenberg which Susan was wearing a necklace of hers last night. She was of the period of abstract expressionism and so the metalwork was kind of abstract expressionism. I don't think it was a lack of control. I think it was a very intentional direction. Certainly there were maybe some skills that weren't there that could have been there but I think that each period shows its kind of own thing. Yeah well. That's not very fair. I'm sorry about that. Do you deplore trends? Yeah, I don't deplore trends but I don't think them in terms of joy. I think of them on the computer where you look up the weather and it says trending and then it shows a tornado or shows something. Trends have no interest for me at all in the field of joy. I mean looking at Iris's network which is what 25 years ago now and I think she said something was true that she actually started a trend there and I think there's a stage where a trend is actually an idea that's alive because it's new and it opens up a territory for exploration but then there's another point where a trend becomes a rule and it's that point where it shifts where I lose interest in trends and so that whole thing in black jewelry became trendy and I just got so fucking sick of black jewelry after a while, you know? Oh sure. I did. Yeah I mean it's interesting because in Iris's work which we just seen of course we're just now on my mind a lot. What I respond most to in your work is the thing that I respond to the most is color. I love your palette. It's really beautiful as we were looking at the slides. But trend, I don't know. Trend means you're following and not leading and I believe in leading, not following. I guess that's- Yeah that's the way of putting it. Right. Yeah and I think one of the things about the collection upstairs is that Susan identified people who are all leaders and I don't think there are any followers up there and none really which is actually quite an accomplishment for a collector to be able to single that out with some discernment and choose that work, identify it and choose it and now it's become in a sense institutionalized as a record which I think is pretty great. Yeah I mean not only do I thank you for the major collection you've given to the museum but the fact that you now have it put before the public so that the public can see it. So in a way you honor the public but you also honor us because through our work being in the museum now after we're gone we'll still be contributing and I thank you for that. Yeah you give us a voice that is greater and longer. Yeah we're so silent we really, no but it really does. Because it's very interesting when I go look at the show because I know Susan's collection well and have seen the pieces come into it and but suddenly when it was in all the cases and it was closed last night I viewed it from a completely different experience than I had ever seen it before. Susan said in her speech last night it was interesting because she had the stuff in her closet and she picked it out and wore it and when we were there yesterday they made us put gloves on to touch everything so we're handling my own work with gloves and Susan and it's just a whole nother experience. Do you collect jewelry? I yeah I have a small collection of things that I like very very much and I wear them. You wear them all? I wear them all but not all the time. I collect too I mean I and you talked about identifying experiments and that's what I do and when I see something new and fresh and the offense is very cheap and I just bought that piece from Ensofi of LA for $400 for Christ's sake. So I value the same things and I put them together but I don't wear them ever. I wanna look at them and I put them on a wall and I don't wear them which is I guess kind of interesting for a jeweler. Yeah I have things setting out that I just look at as well but I like to wear them from time to time. Do you think of a home for your jewelry collection in the future? I am thinking about it a little bit now but right now they're just for me. Yeah me too I can't, I couldn't bear to part with them just now. So I'm not, I'm not where Susan is yet. I couldn't leave them my poor things. And that gets to, are you an object guy? No, I'm really not, if I could I would live in a very very minimal space. I don't know if you know the architect Alberto Campo Baesa, B-A-E-Z-A. If you get a chance to go on the computer and look him up I think he's the world's greatest living architect in my point of view. He does the most wonderful minimal houses that are involved with lots of light coming in. And for me light is very important for my jewelry. Everything I do I hold up the way that it's going to be worn so I can see how the light hits it and how it's reflected and absorbed and refracted. And I would love to live in one of his house. But then I'd have to have a house next door. So that, me I'm totally an object guy. I just love objects and I love having objects. And I live in a very small house and it's become a problem. Now my new wife is gonna move in and it's become a huge problem. I mean for me there's something about a certain kind of object and for me it has aspects of miniature and it has aspects of craftsmanship whether it's of the hand or industrial craft it doesn't make much difference. But I just love these small things and my house is packed with small things and again I'm a maximalist. But that is what has driven I think my love of jewelry is I get to make things that I wish to exist and they have those same characteristics of miniature and reproduction and image and kind of a window into a fanciful world that is other than here. Something like that. I have a very small apartment. Yes Susan. I have to say that a question that I'd like direction and I want to make sure it's covered is when you talk about how you like to work and you don't want any of the encumbrances for example as an architect who has to worry about where the elevators go in the staircase and the people that give them the client. You both really talk as if you're artists, not designers. And one of the subjects that I would really like for you to discuss is contemporary art jewelry, art or design? Because it seems to be. I think it's. It seems to be the topic that we're going to have. Is contemporary art jewelry art or design? I think it's art. Design to me is involved with an industrial process about making a plan that's communicated for mass production. That's the core of design per se. Although it has changed in the last 20, 30 years but the core of design is the design, a drawing or a plan or a plot that is communicated to a minion somewhere else who turns it into a real object. Whereas what most jewelers, not all anymore but most is they're involved in fabricating themselves and that fabrication, the effort of making the thing yourself or very closely with your assistants is what separates it from normal notions of design per se. And because of that, that pushes us into another field which I think is more about art which is to me about these complex objects that are more than just decoration, more than just wearable, more than just an ornament that goes on the body but it's full of intention and complexity and layering of possibility I guess I would say that is identical to what artists do and think. That's what I would say. And I think at the end of the day I am an artist and I think that Thomas is also an artist. And I don't think we've been very well served by this idea of jewelry as decoration, you know all that thing that's coming out of precious jewelry, what Helen calls social jewelry or costume jewelry which is a very, very different thing. And so it's been problematic for the field to call ourselves jewelers when it's immediately associated with this stuff that's about ornament and social signaling whereas we're doing much, much, much, much more than that. And I think that that fact is somewhat been obscured by this lack of clarity about the distinction between what I call studio jewelry and what you probably call art jewelry. But yeah, I think I'm an artist, I think Thomas is too. In the old days when we all had, when I had business card made, the artist had business cards made, my first business card said Thomas Gentile Silversmith because I didn't know what a Silversmith was and I was working in Silver so I thought I was a Silversmith, not a Hollowware person. My second business card said Thomas Gentile Designer because I was doing some design things. And my third business card said Thomas Gentile Artist and my fourth business card and my last business card just says Thomas Gentile. I think it's really important to note that there are lots of kinds of jewelry. There are 10 billion pieces of jewelry out there. I've been at some of the jewelry manufacturing places. So 10 billion may be an underestimate. But there are all kinds of jewelry. There's junk jewelry, there's trashy jewelry, there's dime store jewelry, there's H&M jewelry, and there's Tiffany jewelry and there's artist jewelry. And I think it's important the public begin to see that there are different distinction in the jewelry. That jewelry is just not one all-encompassing word but it has many segments and many fields just like the arts do and just like music does. It has jazz and rock and classical music and guitar and flute solos and everything. And jewelry's the same way. And if we can get the public to recognize and see these differences, it's great. Yes. I'm sorry. You're sure? On the part of the museum, I would just like to interject a note on this discussion because as a design museum, I think it's important for us to give the way we interpret design and how this might play out, which is that, thank you, I was just gonna give back, that design essentially only means it doesn't distinguish between mass production or uniquely made and most of the pieces in the museum's collection are indeed one-off pieces made by someone, it's a recent development, the mass production in terms of art collection. Having said that, design essentially brings in function to what may or may not be art. I don't think they're mutually exclusive. We are looking on this as art and as design. I mean, ultimately, jewelry has, and part of it, that makes you want to adorn yourself or make a statement that has a design function in what that statement is without denying its artistic integrity. That issue of function is very problematic. If you know Howard Rosati's book about craft that came out a few years ago, he said that craft is defined by function, by which he meant physical function and once he went down that path, he actually excluded jewelry as a form of craft, which to me was just bizarre. And he also said that stained glass and mosaic was also not craft. So, I mean, function in the 20th century has been construed as something with a physical function. Historically, this is the case and jewelry doesn't do that. Jewelry has a social function, which is quite interesting and I think a lot of people are still kind of catching up to that. I mean, and that's why I brought up the question of the badge, is that a badge, to wear a badge that defines you as alike and unlike is a social function. And that's one of the central things that jewelry actually does. So let's open the floor up to questions from the audience and... When does any work become a work of art? I mean, a work can be very beautiful in itself and stay with its function and is then not a work of art. When does it become art? Take it away. I think it's very specific that we are sitting here again talking about when does what we make come out. Artists don't normally do it. I think I've never seen a painter discussing endlessly whether the painting is a piece of art or not. So I have the feeling that our conversations are very often driven by a minority complex and there's always a certain amount of defensive attitude involved. So I'd like to talk about the impact of our work and when we talk, I think we all cannot run away from trends and I'm not saying that there isn't something trivial about following trends, but they're all what you said, Thomas, they're a response, they're a consequence, they're necessary, they are something which point out circumstances, political situations. They're relevant, they're relevant in order to measure them. They're relevant to be there and it's relevant that they go again. But yeah, let me return to the fact that we very often waste a lot of time talking about what we are and what we're not and whether we are really seen for the true value of what we are making. And I'd also would like to return to the role of the museum and something we might, I don't know, I think we are aware of it. The role of the museum is actually to show work because only if certain work is shown in a museum, the public, most people believe it's for real. It does give value to the work we do, it puts it in a certain context, it makes it historically relevant and I think that that is a conversation to have had is we're still so excited when Contemporary Jewry makes it to a gallery in a museum and we're still so thankful about that and I think that's something we have to change. Well, me I'm kind of bitter because, really, because the Museum of Modern Art would not have accepted your gift. There's no, they just eliminated the design department and even when for, I don't know, the last 23 or four years they have not, they have refused to accept craft into their collection. That was Paolo Antonelli's policy and so everything that the three of us do is not legible within the Museum of Modern Art. So we still are fighting for something and in that world, in that institution, what we do, what Thomas does, what I do, what Iris does is not legible as art and that is a prejudice that remains. It's simply a fact. I can't go to a New York gallery and persuade them that what I do should reasonably be shown and sold. I mean, the stuff they're showing in the New York galleries is like jar, you know, it's terrible. So the battle isn't finished but at the same time I think we're making inroads and I think your gift here and the fact that it is here is a sign of progress but it's not over, folks. So. I have two ton of England's. Oh, good for them. That Stuart Reed acquired because he was a curator before Paolo. But that was a long time ago. Well, maybe 20 years. Yeah, 20 years ago. But they do have to, which they haven't shown. They have a Magdalena Apoconovitz. They have Lenore Tone. I'm just saying they do have certain selected artists. They showed fiber. They did show fiber because of Mildred Constantine and Jack Larson. Right. It was a long time ago but I'm just saying that in their archives there was a beginning only because two of the curators collected the work not because the museum collected the work. They were collected on personal reasons. Arthur Drexler collected Lucy Rhee. And so when they did the exhibition of the women's exhibition, they showed very meaty ochre works because they were not collected by the departments. They were collected by the personal relationships between curator and artist. I can't resist saying that it's a shame that the Museum of Modern Art is behind the times. They refuse all of us to do this. Yeah. Totally with you. But let's turn to more optimistic topics. Another question, please. Can you raise your hand high? OK. I'll come to you. One second. Hi. I was wondering if you could talk about the work that you're wearing today, each of you. Sorry. Could you repeat that? The work you're wearing. The work I'm wearing? The work you're wearing today. It's a pin of mine. Thomas Andrews. It's made of solid aluminum. I don't know what else to say about it. Can you tell us more? He's a minimalist, you know. But you know, when I started making Drollway, I studied with Fred Miller at Cleveland Institute of Art. And Fred was a hollowware man. And we were only allowed to work in silver and brass and copper. And I wanted to make a piece in ebony. And he wouldn't let me do it because he said it wasn't a Drollway material. It was a material that was used for teapot handles and the feed and lids. So I made it outside of class. And that's what sent me on my road to working with all kinds of different materials. And at that time, the only people who were working with other materials were people who were working with beach stones and beach pebbles. That was maybe a trend, which would call a trend. And so from that time when I started working, you'd ask me about changes in the Drollway world. I think now everybody's using all kinds of materials and all kinds of different ways. And I think that's the biggest advancement that Drollway has had, that it's gotten away from gold and diamonds as being the precious, the important part of Drollway. Now that's not the important part of Drollway at all. Something done with sandpaper and wood can be every bit as important as something made in gold and diamonds. And I find that thrilling, that people are beginning to understand that material in itself is a wonderful thing and a precious thing. So I'm wearing a, this is from the series called Nuke Stans. Nuke Stans comes from bothius in his book, The Consolations of Philosophy. And it refers to the time and its duration, kind of the idea of what we would now call stop time or freeze frames. And this is actually, well, depends on your opinion of erotica and pornography. But these were taken from pictures of Bukake, which is a Japanese art form of pornography, which shows basically flying cum. And so these were carefully called from the web of actual images of flying cum and then carved in delrin and then pieced together to create this erotic object. Because I've been very interested in this sort of intersection between sex and jewelry. So this is kind of a fairly pure representation of that. And I'll tell you right now, this has been a very hard sell. Well, I have found out something interesting that the material that this is made of is called delrin. And in the Spanish language, delrin refers to a man who is super macho. So a macho man may say, boy, I'd like to be as delrin as he. The fact that they've used that as delrin, and he's using it as cum as he, the word he was, I use a different word. So that word, it brings me back to this, that in the description of trying to describe pornography, it's very hard to describe pornography. But we all know what it is when we see it. It's like trying to describe art. It's very hard to describe. But we all know what it is when we see it. So. Shall you want to know what I am wearing? I'm wearing. I'm wearing about five rings, which you could, which is a good example for those generic rings, which only gain meaning when somebody gives it to you, when it marks a moment, when it makes something significant, that makes those rings so special, like no other ring. So that's my engagement ring, my wedding ring, another ring for my wife, two rings from two friends, Susan Pugh and Rebecca Frank, who are grinding along with each other. And then art jewelry, I think, I would say. An oval ring with a fading toilet part on it, and a bracelet, which I got from Doris Betts as a present. So all these things are very dear to me. They mark friendships and love, and they're special to me and not to somebody else. So we have a question right here. Sorry. Yes, hi. You guys were talking earlier about stuff and Bruce about the many things in your house. And you both make objects that are very much about sculpture and things, that they can exist alone, or they can exist in a room, they can exist on your body. Could you address the sculptural aspects of jewelry? I don't do sculpture, period. Sculpture is its own thing. It has to do with form and space. You walk around it. Somebody said sculpture is what you bump into when you're backing up to look at a painting. But no, I mean, I believe that fields are defined by their discourses. And there's a very particular discourse about sculpture that is not involved in this. This is jewelry. It is not sculpture. So I think it's kind of a misrepresentation to call this sculpture. What do you think? I think it can have sculptural form to it, but jewelry is jewelry. And for me, jewelry, it's something that you wear. I think there's a lot to do with how far you can revive a certain term. I think objects for a long time, there was a certain taboo to use it. I find it really joyful to call myself an object maker because I'm specifically interested in the fact this other way of variability, the fact that you actively place those objects in your surrounding, that you relate to them, but you clearly can listen to the combinations that strike up with other combinations, the inter and co-dependency with other objects, the fact what kind of effect those objects have on you, how much we are affected by the things with which we surround us as ourselves. So I think there are more lines of interaction among objects than most of the time what I perceive or experience with sculpture. You're actually talking about the power of jewelry, that the fact that jewelry is necessarily embedded in being worn and going out into social space and then attracting these meanings like all the things that you're wearing. And that's what jewelry really does and that other forms don't, I think. Sculptor doesn't do that so much. I think we're again trying to compare certain things, these binary things. Yeah, let's concentrate on what do those things do which we make and why is our choice to have those objects which do indeed change positions. They have a dependency on those who place them, who put them in boxes, put them in drawers, take them out of drawers. And I think that active engagement with them on a daily basis, that's what I'm interested in. Yeah, me too. I mean, although I don't always make jewelry that can be worn, most of it is durable enough to be worn and I'm very interested in that the things get purchased and worn and what happens then when my client puts the thing on the body and goes out into social space is really, really, really interesting to me. And that is a process and an interaction that doesn't happen with most other art forms. It shares that only with clothing. And I hear wonderful stories about what happens with jewelry out in the world and I find that terrifically, terrifically interesting. Hi, sorry, I'm very nervous. So I guess I have a question about your thoughts on the future of studio jewelry and contemporary jewelry in relation to what you were speaking about before and the situation of our discipline between art and craft and design, I mean, because I don't know if you remember we spoke at Pratt about that the jewelry program had gone into the art department instead of design. And I was writing my dissertation at the time and I was writing as someone who is educated as a jeweler. Tony spoke, Tony was there too. And I was writing about the future of the discipline and I was interested in where it would lie between art and craft because I think there was Adi as well, disqualified jewelry from craft but also kind of disqualified it from being a part of fine art. I think he proposed that there'd be like a third thing in between because of the skill that it took and I thought it was interesting that you qualify it as art because of the skill that it takes. And so I guess I was wondering for the up and coming generation, is the future of studio jewelry within art or would it be within design or maybe it could benefit from a proximity to fashion like you were saying and what jewelry shares with wearability and whether or not jewelry is completed in being worn. Like does it depend on the wearer in that way and then following from that, if it depends on a wearer, does it depend on a consumer and where would up and coming jewelers who maybe the world that existed that accepted studio jewelry and collected studio jewelry doesn't exist as much anymore? Like where would they benefit most from being situated? Could I sort of enter that question from the back door? I think quite a few might have lined up for the show of Alexander McQueen Balenciaga. I just want to remind you those shows were at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and I think nobody was discussing whether it was fashion or art at that time. Thank you so much. That discussion, at least I couldn't follow it. I didn't see it. And then when you walk backwards and say, okay, fashion does exist in the context of art and then you were asking, does jewelry go the way to fashion? I must say I see recently far more interesting work in relationship to fashion in the, and I hate to say that, I really hate to say it, but I think the fastness, the concreteness, there's this alertness and political engagement with fashion jewelry right now, which passed a lot of studio jewellers by far. You know what I see among the young students now is that categories are almost meaningless and they don't care if it's craft or art or fashion or whatever, that is of no concern to them. And so if they're, the people I know, like Edgar Mosa, who's a student of yours is, I think that many of them are just seeking an audience and where that audience can be found is almost, not quite a matter of indifference, but a matter of maybe intention. And some will seek an audience in the fashion world and some will seek an audience in the art world. Personally, when I counsel young students today, I tell them to avoid craft like the plague because the craft world has come to kind of a dead end in terms of how it's received and how it's collected. And so if I meet an ambitious young student now, I say screw craft, go into art, show in art galleries, be an artist, don't mess around with that little world because that little world will punish you as it's punished me. So I just tell people to go somewhere else. You know, it's interesting because when you go to Europe, they say, are the Americans still debating whether it's art or craft? I mean, they say they're still talking about that. They can't believe it. You know, for me, the only thing that's important is the finished piece. All this discussion is wonderful and I really enjoy it. I love to hear how you wear it and what it means to you personally. I like thinking about what it means to me personally, but I'm only interested in the final object. When I look at that piece of work, do I think, is that a good piece? Do I like that? How do I respond to it? And for me, that's the ultimate thing that I'm interested in. I would like to come back to you. You're asking that question. What is your fear? Why are you asking that question? What would an answer help you to find out? I was directed for galleries and fine arts. My pieces never had a life outside of my studio because I never found that audience. I think that audience is very small. And so, I became interested in later years about how jewelers were educated. Because I think I was educated very much as an artist and in a lot of ways, I think it crippled me when I reached the market because I never considered it when I wasn't being able to see this. So, but I mean, that's just a question that I really forgot to talk about. Thank you for the answer. So, since it's five minutes to noon, we can take one more question and hopefully continue the conversation over the lunch hour. I know there are a lot of eager people in the room that really want to ask a question right now. So, forgive me to the people that don't get the mic this moment. And we'll take one more question and then we'll have a lunch hour for an hour and a half. So, we have Susan who... Based on what Thomas said, which is, we're not having, to me we're not having this conversation among ourselves. It's the institutions that are the problem. Do they see what all the people in this room are doing? They don't know how to collect it. They don't know, is it design? Is it art? Is it fashion? So, what Thomas is saying, he only cares about the finished piece, which is wonderful. But as a collector, and you want to give your collection to an institution, they don't know what to do with it. That's the only reason that I think that subject is relevant. Once a piece, even if it's not so great, is accepted by a museum. It's automatically a work of art or something worthy of admiration and so on. So, it goes both ways. I think museums have to be very careful also what they accept. Well, I think museums... It tears things down, otherwise. Museums are a victim of their own past, having come out of this kind of theory of categorization. It was a 19th century idea where there was art and then there was decorative art or applied art. And that's still a legacy that they're struggling with, that we would be regarded as applied artists. And the younger generation is, I think, less than married to those strictures, but it's ironic that the Museum of Modern Art is very much married to that topography of making. But it's our problem. I just wanted to say I do care about what the rest of the world thinks. It's only what I think about when I'm looking at a work. I think these other dialogues are very important. And on that note, and as a final point from Cooper Hewitt on this point, just to let you know that we have T.E.F.A.L.O. We have T.E.F.A.L.O. paintings. Why? Because we call them works of art. They are paintings. They are work of art. But we're saying they are also design objects because the paintings we have are designs for ceilings that he painted. So that's what I'm saying is that we are embracing both and all in this discussion. So I'm sorry that we're not gonna be able to take more questions because we're at noon, but there'll be an hour and a half break. So I hope you continue the conversation among yourselves. Thank you to the panelists.