Ephemeral Adornment: Jewellery as idea, image and absence.

Kimberly Johansen ART HISTORY 312 Maping Modern and Contemporary Art November 9, 2007

Contemporary jewelry places value on content rather than materials. Its origins can be found in the work of the Surrealists such as Merrit Oppenheim. The Surrealists made jewelry from non-precious materials such as champagne corks, wire and fur as a way to poke fun at the establishment (Stokes). Temporary, momentary, or ephemeral jewellery is a part of this modernist movement to challenge the traditional role of jewellery as either purely decorative objects or indicators of status, wealth and social position. Contemporary jewellery examines the role of jewellery in society; our preconceived notions about what jewellery is and what it should look like; the meanings and messages embedded in it; what the objects we choose to adorn our bodies with reveal about ourselves; and wearability which is often considered to be the same as function.

Is temporary or ephemeral jewellery still jewellery? That is a question that most jewellery artists are content to let the viewer decide, but it is the question I decided to pose for purposes of this essay. Temporary jewellery often exists only a short period of time. If the work does continue to exist, it generally does so in a photograph that has been taken to record or document the event. What then is the focus in such an ephemeral event: the adornment of the body or the body as adorned? Is it body art or performance art? What are the qualities that make it jewellery? Concept or composition? Idea or intent?

I believe that it is all these things and more. Jewellery, even if it is unwearable is defined by its interaction with the boundaries of the body, concept and intent. In many ways, the performative aspect of jewellery is already contained within the object by the fact that it is made to be situated and displayed on the body. As a result, jewellery naturally has a dual life as both public art and private art. As public art it takes on meaning in its social aspect; it is only possible to send and receive messages through jewellery in a social

context. In its private life it will come to encompass memory, history and ritual significance through acts of making, giving, receiving, remembering and wearing.

Temporary jewellery examines the nature and meaning and jewellery. It comments on the fetishization of jewellery as ritual objects objects encoded with messages about wealth, status, social position. It seeks to point our attention to jewellery as carriers of meaning, memory, history and sentiment. It helps us to understand the space that jewellery objects hold by focusing our attention on the space from which it is absent yet nevertheless marked by its absence.

As Paul Mathieu calls the ceramic objects in Lopold Foulems Monochrome Abstractions a radical act I would call temporary or ephemeral jewellery a radical act as well. Foulem establishes a distance between form and function with his objects by adding bases, exploring the void rather than the fullness, speaking to formal and conceptual concerns and challenging our expectations about function. In doing so, he brings them closer to museum type sculptures (Mathieu, 139). Ephemeral jewellery challenges our assumptions about the materiality of jewellery, ideas of preciousness and value, and expectations of wearability. Some of the examples Ive chose are fully dematerialized and some are not, but all qualify as conceptual art in that the idea is more important than a tangible or functional product.

The New Jewellery

Since the 1950s and the rise of the New Jewellery as an identifiable movement, jewellery artists have sought to have their work recognized by the fine art world and added to museum collections just as paintings and sculptures are. Museums as institutions of authority and culture represent a form of classification and embedded meaning: the presence of a particular work of art in a museum is enough to elevate the object to the

position of Art. If nothing else, it confers upon the object values of prestige and authenticity (Barker).

Yet jewellery has long been categorized as Craft by museums. Museums have been embedded in the public consciousness as cultural institutions since the end of the nineteenth century when they achieved their ideal form. In nineteenth century Europe the social lite tended to value those things associated with the Fine Arts painting, sculpture and souvenirs of the aristocracy as defining the parameters of taste, education and value (Cummings and Lewandowska). Furthermore, art critics and writers began to use the term craft to distinguish unique handmade objects from those that were considered poorly-designed, anonymous consumer goods or mass-produced industrial objects. Craft came to be synonymous with functional objects and the decorative arts, while the term Fine Art came to be associated with painting and sculpture which were considered high arts.

These denominations reflect the power structure and classification system that developed in the art world. The fine arts were assumed to carry greater social, aesthetic, and philosophical meaning, while craft always linked to the material world of objects rather than spiritual ideas was considered lower in the hierarchy of artistic creation(Museum of Arts & Design).

This method of categorization went largely unquestioned until the mid-twentieth century when an exhibition of jewellery made by painters, sculptors and art jewellers was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, 1946. The objective of the exhibition, titled Modern Handmade Jewelry was to bring together the artist as jeweler and jeweler as artist, a concept that had been neglected since the turn of the century (Lewin). In Britain during the 1960s an avant-garde group of jewellery makers also began to challenge the narrow conception of what the public considered jewellery to be. In doing so, they

established the roots of the New Jewellery movement, sought to distance jewellery from its traditional association with precious decoration by emphasizing form and concept. A vital part of the new jewellery movement was a bid for art status and inclusion in the world of art (Dormer & Turner).

Jewellery Artists

Dutch jewellery artist Gijs Bakker, for example, has been a significant force in wresting jewellery from its purely decorative status and giving it a meaningful place in the world of art and design (Joris). In 1973 he created the first documented ephemeral jewellery when he declared the impression left by a gold wire on a wrist to be a piece of jewellery. Specifically, a thin gold wire was tightened around an upper arm for a period of time and then removed. An imprint was left behind on the body of the wearer. This imprint pointed to both the missing object and our fetishistic relationship to the objects we put on our bodies. It also mocked the language of mark-making as art-speak employed the fine art world.

In 1984, Austrian jewellery artist Manfred Nisslmller made an acoustic piece of jewellery: a small tape recorder hidden on the body that repeated the word Brosche (Brooch) (Schloen). Nisslmller is interested in the nature of jewellery and the process by which it comes to be. He makes observations about this and responds to them in his work in ways that create an awareness of our assumptions about how jewellery functions (Stokes).

Heather White van Stolk is a master metalsmith who uses both traditional materials such as precious metals and gems as well as non-traditional materials such as plastics and botanical detritus in her conceptually-based jewellery work. She began a series of work called One minute piece of jewelry in 2003 in response to the number of botanical

specimens she was collecting on daily walks. Ultimately she chose to respond to one of the oldest and most primal of human instincts: to adorn herself with them (Harris & Lyon, 31). She also began to photograph these temporary adornments: Daisy Mouth - a mouth full of flower petals (ill. 2); a hatched robins egg nest resting on her pregnant belly; and Ear Moss literally, an ear full of moss (ill. 1).

Sarah Turner has investigated projecting images onto the body with If One Could Wear a Marching Band III (ill. 3) in an exercise to merge image and object. This ephemeral jewellery is an embodiment of the hyper-real, where the image has replaced reality.

Monika Bruggers Jeuje (ill. 7) explores way in which jewellery embodies memory. By projecting the pattern of a daisy chain upon the viewers neck, she recreates a childhood moment. The new work has the potential to last longer than the original object, which will shrivel and wilt in time (Sackville, 111). She also creates the potential for viewer to become wearer thus experiencing the jewellery in a particularly intimate way.

Tiffany Parbs made a series of beautifully crafted objects Rash Stamps (ill. 8) for the purpose of leaving temporary marks on body. Parbs is interested in the residue and patterns that jewellery can leave on the body; indexical signs that point to an absent object. She also forces us to confront the question of why the traces left behind by an object may be more disturbing than the actual object. Parbs work is influenced by groundbreaking avant-garde jewellers from the 1970s such as Gijs Bakker.

Suska Mackert, who studied jewellery in Neugablonz, explores how representation and status is conferred upon the wearer of certain kinds of jewellery. Her work has its roots in jewellery and is made in accordance with the craft; it requires painstaking attention to detail and technical skill. Even though she does not make actual pieces of jewellery, the themes that she explores in her work explore the reasons that human beings wear

jewellery and the idea that it functions as an image of the qualities we want to project into the world. Making use of a variety of media, she underlines that jewellerys complex grid of relationships between maker, object, message, wearer and spectator cannot be analysed solely from the viewpoint of the physical encounter (Jnsson). To be on display (ill. 5) is a video project that Mackert made in 2002 investigating the commercial world of jewellery, where as with many contemporary aspects of mass consumption, the brand has outstripped the actual product. Her goal is to call attention to the way in which these companies are selling a lifestyle rather than an object. In To be on display she is seen carefully painting replicas of Cartier, Piaget, and Tiffany & Co logos. Although at first sight this may seem to be a reaffirmation of the brand and status of these companies, the fact that these logos occur without referencing actual products draws our attention to the way the logos have become objects in themselves now (Jnsson). In Plschow (Germany) (ill. 6), within the framework of an exhibition, she painstakingly gilded the letters Plschow on an abandoned railway station with gold leaf. To mark the letters with gold was to confer respect and importance on a discarded building (den Besten). Mackerts 12 page booklet juwelen (ill. 4) contains descriptions of up-market jewellery that could be excerpts taken from an auction house, a manufacturer or a museum. Instead of an image showing the object, the rest of the page is left blank. These blank white pages force the viewer to confront the inconsistencies between the disinterested commercial world that jewellery exists in and the private and personal relationship that the individual wearer may have with the same object (Jnsson).

Milli Cullivans lace collar (ill. 9) is a momentary work made lasting by the photograph. A lace pattern traced in white dust on the skin. Its relationship to jewellery is evident in both the memory of touch that the image evokes and evidence of contact with the skin.

Cornelia Parker created ear plugs made from dust and lint gathered in the Whispering Gallery, St Pauls Cathedral, London called The Negative of Whispers (ill. 10). The title

animates our imagination of the objects. We imagine that if we place them in our ears we may feel the vibration of all the secrets they have eavesdropped on; a memory of all the whisperings they have overheard. But in actuality, they will merely block our own ability to hear. Dust and the sense of disorder that comes with it reminds us of the process of selection with which we guard our own boundaries and body openings (Broadhead, 27). By returning us to the boundaries of our body, the plugs return us to our own human physicality as certain as jewellery does.

Conclusion

Jewellery has always had special significance for human beings. It has a rich history of being intertwined with peoples imaginations in a way that few other art forms can claim. Jewellery is its own social anthropology. We wear it for decorative, practical and symbolic purposes. It marks the meaningful events of our lives: birth, coming of age, marriage, celebration, death and mourning. It is embedded with ritual, memory and rich associations of identity and imagination. Jewellery, whether solid or ephemeral, object or idea explores the ways in which we adorn ourselves and the meanings we confer upon those methods of adornment. Works Cited:

Barker, Emma. Introduction. Contemporary Cultures of Display. London: Yale University/Open University Press, 1999. Broadhead, Caroline. A part/Apart. New Directions in Jewellery. Ed. Catherine Grant. London: Black Dog Publishing, 2005. Cummings, Neil and Marysia Lewandowska. The Value of Things. Basel, Boston, Berlin: Birkhauser- Publishers for Architecture, 2000. den Besten, Liesbeth. The joy of making the invisible visual by utilising the hand. Stockholm: Craft in Dialogue, 2005. Klimt 02 Community. <http://www.klimt02.net/ forum/index.php?item_id=4907> Dormer, Peter and Ralph Turner. The New Jewelry: Trends + Traditions. London: Thames and Hudson, 1985.

Galerie Spektrum website. <http://www.galerie-spektrum.de/mackert05c.htm> Harris, Patricia and David Lyon. What the Body Knows: The Evolution of Heather White van Stolk. Metalsmith. Volume 26 Number 2. Summer 2006. Eugene: Society of North American Goldsmiths. Jnsson , Love. Images, codes and poetry: the jewellery of Suska Mackert. Klimt 02 Community. <http://www.klimt02.net/forum/index.php?item_id=928> Joris, Yvonne. Jewels of Mind and Mentality: Fifty Years of Avant-Garde Dutch Jewelry. Philadelphia Art Alliance. November 11, 2000 to January 7, 2001 http:// www.philartalliance.org/exhibitsarc-spring2007.htm Juried Exhibition in Print 2004. Metalsmith. Volume 24 Number 4. Eugene: Society of North American Goldsmiths. Lewin, Susan Grant. One of a Kind: American Art Jewelry Today. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994. Mathieu, Paul. Leopold Foulems Monochrome Abstractions. Artichoke, 2002. Vol 12, No. 2. Museum of Arts & Design. American Craft Museum Changes its Name to Museum of Arts & Design. New York. Oct 1, 2002. <http://www.madmuseum.org/site/ c.drKLI1PIIqE/b.1118189/k.40E8/ American_Craft_Museum_Changes_its_Name_to_Museum_of_Arts__Design.htm> New Directions in Jewellery II. Ed. Amy Sackville and Maisie Broadhead. London: Black Dog Publishing, 2006. Schloen, Anne. Introduction Jewels of the 3d Millennium - Immaterial Jewellery. Schmuck2 website. <http://www.schmuck2.de/jewel_press.html> Sculpture Center website. Treble. Guest curated by Regine Basha. May 16 - August 1, 2004. <http://www.sculpture-center.org/pe_treble_img1.html> Stokes, Jayne. Louis Mueller on Contemporary Jewelry. A View by Two: Contemporary Jewellery. Rhode Island School of Design Museum website. <http://www.risd.edu/ jewelry_essay_print.htm>