Exploring Folk Art: Twenty Years of Thought on Craft, Work, and Aesthetics

228 Pages·1993·3.19 MB·English

by  Michael Jones

Exploring Folk Art
Twenty Years of Thought
on Craft, Work, and Aesthetics

Exploring Folk Art
Twenty Years of Thought
on Craft, Work, and Aesthetics
by
Michael Owen Jones
t
Utah State University Press
Logan, Utah
Copyright © 1987
Michael Owen Jones
All rights reserved
Cover design and art by Mary P. Donahue
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Jones, Michael Owen.
Exploring folk art: twenty years of thought on craft,
work, and aesthetics / by Michael Owen Jones.
p. cm.
Originally published: Ann Arbor, Mich. : UMI Research Press,
c1987, in series: American material culture and folklife. Masters
of material culture.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-87421-165-4 : $19.95
1. Folk art-United States. 2. Material culture-United States.
3. Folklore-United States. 1. Title.
NK805.]665 1993
306.4'7-dc20 93-9969
eIP
Contents
Foreword vii
Simon J. Bronner
Prologue 1
Part One: Making Things
1 Violations of Standards of Excellence and Preference in
Utilitarian Art 13
2 A Strange Rocking Chair ... The Need to Express,
the Urge to Create 41
Part Two: Sensory Experiences
3 L.A. Re-dos and Add-ons: Private Space vs. Public Policy 59
4 Modern Arts and Arcane Concepts: Expanding Folk Art Study 81
5 The Proof Is in the Pudding: The Role of Sensation in Food
Choice as Revealed by Sensory Deprivation 97
Part Three: Art at Work
6 Creating and Using Argot at the Jayhawk Cafe: Communication,
Ambience, and Identity 109
7 A Feeling for Form, as Illustrated by People at Work 119
8 Aesthetics at Work: Art and Ambience in an Organization 133
vi Contents
Part Four: Methods and Concepts
9 Aesthetic Attitude, Judgment, and Response: Definitions and
Distinctions 161
10 The Material Culture of Corporate Life 177
11 Preaching What We Practice: Pedagogical Techniques Regarding
the Analysis of Objects in Organizations 187
Epilogue 197
References 205
Index 215
Foreword
In the forest of studies on American material culture and folklife lie a few
giant redwoods that consistently provide inspiration for generations of
students. Books that offer an appreciation of the "masters" who have planted
these redwoods and have had much to do with shaping the scholarly
landscape have been lacking in the field of material culture studies, although
it boasts its own cast of leading men and women. Several interdisciplinary
conferences on material culture studies during the 1980s pointed up the
need for collections of essays that would allow students to appreciate and
analyze the contributions of the field's leaders and their disciplinary homes.
With the end of the twentieth century in view, there is also a sense of closing
a productive chapter in interdisciplinary studies on art and artifacts. The
period from the 1960s through the 1980s witnessed a tremendous surge of
colleges, museums, institutes, and endowments devoted to the study of
American material culture and folklife studies. With a new generation of
students and a learned public eager to move forward, the object lessons
gained from this period deserve, indeed demand, renewed attention.
The Hand Made Object and Its Maker (1975) by Michael Owen Jones
is one of those redwoods that students look up to. Coming at a time of
preoccupation with reconstructing the past through artifacts, his book broke
new ground by bringing study back to the present. It asked exciting
questions of the relations between craftsworkers and their products and
communities. Observing living craftsmen at work and recording life histo
ries, Jones showed art and creativity, and indeed tradition, to be dynamic
processes requiring reexamination of previously held assumptions. Since he
introduced his ideas, Jones can lay claim to a long list of books and articles
in material culture studies informed by his perspectives.
Yet the celebration of his book can obscure the contributions he has
made to other areas besides crafts-foodways, workers' lore, medical belief,
language, play, organizational culture, and fieldwork technique. This
volume allows Jones to integrate some of these studies, to view their
underlying themes, to comment on their development. He brings his
philosophical and historical perspective to bear on his unifying concern for
"Exploring Folk Art." Consistently throughout his essays one finds an
viii Foreword
interpretation of life and art bound together and examined as expressive
behavior.
For many, the main contribution of this volume will be easy access to
the master's work. The essays included in the volume are often difficult to
find; they are drawn from conference papers, regional journals, festschriften,
and symposium reports. Some have beeen published earlier; many have not.
But each represents an important contribution. The author himself may
wonder why he once said what he did in some of his essays, but he has
preserved the integrity of the originals to allow readers to see that
scholarship, like art, is subject to change. Some alterations to correct errors
or to smooth out phrasing have been made, but the essays generally stand
as originally written. Adding to the value of the essays in this volume,
however, are Jones's headnotes, in which he explains what led to the writing
of the essays and the ideas that they contained. Indeed, as he has been
devoted to understanding kinds of artistic behavior in context, so he has put
his writing-his expressive behavior, one might say-in the context of the
organizations and endeavors of which he has been a part.
The gathering together here of these papers certainly does not signal
the end ofJones's scholarly production, but it does allow him, and us, to take
stock of a distinctive period of scholarship leading up to this pivotal point
of American material culture and folklife studies. It also allows a chance to
look once more at an interesting array of behavior-from crafting a "strange
rocking chair" to arranging the trash-and ask anew about meanings in
material culture.
Simon j. Bronner
March 1993
Prologue
Several years before I began exploring folk art, first as a graduate student in
folklore at Indiana University and later as a professor of history and folklore at
UCLA, I was an undergraduate student ( 1960-64) at the University of Kansas
in Lawrence. During the spring semester of my freshman year I heard about a
class being taught by someone named Stith Thompson, who was a visiting
professor from Indiana University; the course concerned "folklore." Although
intrigued, I could not take the course because it was an upper division one; in
addition, I had begun an art major which absorbed my attention.
When I was a sophomore at the University of Kansas, I met someone who
told me excitedly about this class he was taking on "folklore." It was being
taught by someone named Butler Waugh, who was completing his graduate
work at Indiana University. The folklore course sounded interesting;
however, I was still taking art courses and had just started a history major as
well.
By my third year at the University of Kansas I had completed most of the
requirements for my history and art majors and also had begun taking courses
for a third major in international relations. One day somebody mentioned an
exciting course on "folklore" that he was taking. The instructor was Alan
Dundes, who had recently completed graduate work at Indiana University.
Vowing then and there that I would take the folklore course my senior year, I
made an appointment to talk with Dundes.
I vividly recall walking up the several flights of stairs in old Frazer Hall to
reach Dundes's office in one of the towers (the building was razed later as
unsafe, and replaced with a modern edifice more or less reminiscent of the
original building in outward appearance but having none of its charm and
sense of history). I explained to Dundes that during the years I had been
majoring in other subjects I had heard about a course on "folklore." I was
anxious to take the course, I said, and looked forward to seeing him in the fall.
He wouldn't be there, he told me, since he had just accepted a position in the