Metalsmithing in the Sister Cities: Lawrence and Eutin -- Remembering Carlyle Smith

This week the Lawrence Arts Center is opening the exhibition "Metalsmithing in the Sister Cities: Lawrence and Eutin." The city of Lawrence has two such sisters, Eutin, Germany and Hiratsuku, Japan. The arts connection with Eutin has included several exchanges between metalsmiths over the years--the latest installment being the current exhibition at LAC which will run through August 2008. 

Mounting this exhibition, and working with curators Carol Ann Carter and Lin Stanionis of Lawrence and Marleis Behm of Germany, has caused me to reflect on the history of the metals program at the University of Kansas and its founder, Carlyle Smith, whom I first met in 1967 as a freshman art student. I was only briefly a student of Carlyle's at that time but years later, after having spent twenty years on the east coast, I re-encountered Carlyle who in 1992 was renting a small studio space in a Lawrence building owned by my family. I began to see Carlyle from time to time and we struck up a friendship which I came to feel very privileged to have. I was never a metalsmith-- or even close to it-- but it was clear how significant Carlyle's vision, integrity and strength of will was in shaping the work and lives of countless students during a 30 year teaching career and a professional life in metalsmithing that spanned over 60 years.

Carlyle was an internationally recognized jeweler who made a profound impact on the field of fine art jewelry. His work is in major collections such as the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, The Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution and on the face of the supreme court building in San Jose, Costa Rica. His personal papers are included in the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution and he is recognized as one of the pioneers in American arts education, perhaps the formost educator in his own field of jewelry and silversmithing. It is difficult to point to any artist who had a more positive and sustained influence on his field than Carlyle Smith.

Originally from Connecticut, Carlyle had a prodigious interest in jewelry from an early age. He graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1931, at the age of 19, and proceeded to teach metals courses at the junior and senior high school level in Providence, RI and Princeton, NJ. In 1947, he came to the University of Kansas at the invitation of Design Department Chair, Marjorie Whitney. Over the next thirty years he built a department of jewelry and silversmithing (the first at a state university) that was to produce some of the finest jewelers in America. The accolades from students would fill volumes, but the consensus is that Professor Smith was a profound influence on the lives of those with whom he worked by virtue of his constructive outlook, his availability, directness and humanity, not to mention his virtuosity as an artist. His devotion to his students was reciprocated through numerous testimonials; he was named Professor Emeritus upon retirement from the University of Kansas; and the jewelry and silversmithing studio at the university was named to honor him in 1977.

A key to Carlyle's success as an educator was his commitment to the highest artistic principles. During the period in which he was establishing the program at KU he traveled to hundreds of high schools across the state to talk about the "art" of jewelry and metalsmithing. "It was not always easy to do," he remembered, "Many people understood silversmithing to be a trade or craft and, therefore, out of place in an academic institution." But over time his commitment to quality, his forceful imagination and his insistence on appropriate design changed attitudes and expectations. Students who had the good fortune to study with him continue to spread the word.

Carlyle lived into his nineties, in the last years caring for his ailing and beloved wife Isabelle. He was very much "on the scene" in his later years, never losing enthusiasm for his art or the community of artists he helped to build and inspire. An article about him appeared in the winter, 1994, issue of Metalsmith, written by his former student and longtime professor of art at Montana State University, Richard Helzer. In January of 1995, I worked with Carlyle to present an exhibition of regional jewelers and metalsmiths at the Lawrence Arts Center. 

Carlyle could have lived and worked anywhere but chose Kansas in which to develop his own career as an artist as well as the renowned program in metalsmithing at the University of Kansas. Other, very able artists and inspiring teachers have taken his place including those who are in the current "Sister Cities" exhibition at the Lawrence Arts Center. It is a fine legacy.

The Inconsonant World

A father can rest if he knows his children can forgive the inconsonant world. I never blamed my parents for bringing me into troubled humanity for there was always beauty, mystery and unending fascination in life. It was their loving nature to bring me about--the most natural of outcomes, even if they did understand that the teeming earth could be dangerous and that the very fact of life itself was beyond rational understanding. I am largely at peace with the mysteries and if my children find such peace my conscience will be eased.

I am grateful to have lived in a time of relative material abundance. But as a father, I am now challenged to help my children-- and all children-- transcend old models and find high purpose in a less materialistic world that requires us to use less, grow less, and perhaps even do and make less--at least with fewer materials.

I look to artists, writers and other thinkers to lead us into the new world. It is they who will ask questions and develop ways of living that may not occur to less imaginative people. The good life of the future is a seedling now-- in the nurturing care of the youngest and least invested among us.  How will we have a good life in the new world? --the new world of renewable energy, reduced population, sustainable agriculture, economic equality and healthful racial and religious diversity? It is they who will describe it. How will we cope with the collapsing old world of dwindling and polluting fossil fuels, unchecked population growth, artificially supported and resource degrading agriculture, exploitive economic practices and racial and religious strife? It is they who will chronicle its demise, warn of its lingering effects and complain rightly and righteously about its moral and practical shortcomings.

Views of the future range from the Utopian to the Apocolyptic, sometimes expressed in ways that project ultimate outcomes-- the inevitabilities of behaviors that are imperative, or at least ingrained. Some visions are sweeping, energized by imagined historical events that transform life abruptly and irreversibly. But, I imagine that the most accurate descriptions and projections will be those that show a world changing subtly and pragmatically-- gaining and losing in turn, and governed by the natural physical justice of scarcity and abundance.

I recently read World Made by Hand by James Howard Kunstler, the author of twelve books, both fiction and nonfiction, that include, The Geography of Nowhere and The Long Emergency, which is about "peak oil" and what to expect from life after fossil fuels are exhausted. World Made by Hand is a novel-- a vision of life in one up-state New York town after the collapse of society in the late first half of the 21st century. The book tells the story of Robert Earle, a former software executive who now makes his living as a carpenter. He knows little of the outside world for communication has broken down. His wife has died and he doesn't know where his son is or if he is still alive. The former town dump has been re-opened as a store. Most of the comforts and diversions of his former life are gone. He, like everyone else, must forge a new life out of what materials are available, grow food that can be grown on the land and in the climate in which he dwells, and rely on himself and a few neighbors to provide his basic needs. But through the changes comes a deepening appreciation for life. The book is not apocalyptic. It doesn't judge or preach. It simply gives a picture of a possible future-- a picture from the mind of a writer who has imagined his way reasonably based on how we live now. 

Such imaginings by artists may be similar to dreams. An artist may apprehend intuitively-- as a vision or persistent thought--a sense of another time, such as a vision of the future. He may feel this as a visitation or as something that was received rather than imagined willfully. Dreams seem to come to us, often as confusing images or associations that defy rational interpretation. In a conversation with Rush Rhees in 1943, Ludwig Wittgenstein said, "It is characteristic of dreams that often they seem to the dreamer to call for an interpretation." An artist or writer who is attempting to imagine the future may be searching for an interpretation that makes rational sense of his hunches. Wittgenstein suggests that "When a dream is interpreted we might say that it is fitted into a context in which it ceases to be puzzling. In a sense the dreamer re-dreams his dream in surroundings such that its aspect changes. It is as though we were presented with a bit of canvas on which were painted a hand and part of a face and certain other shapes, arranged in a puzzling and incongruous manner. Suppose this bit is surrounded by considerable stretches of blank canvas, and that we now paint in forms--say an arm, a trunk, etc.-- leading up to and fitting on to the shapes on the original bit; and that the result is that we say: 'Ah, now I see why it is like that, how it all comes to be arranged in that way, and what these various bits are...' and so on."

In thinking about the nature of the world artists imaginatively link such "bits" giving us an interpretation that is rational and comprehensible. Conversely, an artist can reverse the process, taking a conventional thought, established practice or law, and remove the rational linkages, juggle the components and dispel the interpretation. Both seem healthful.  

That Irregular Terrain

7/30/08

Ted Johnson handed me this morning the first poem he has ever written. Ted is a retired professor of French at the University of Kansas, also known for his amazingly informed day-long tours of the University campus. He is a member of the Committee on Imagination & Place, the loosely formed but intellectually potent affiliate of the Lawrence Arts Center. (www.imaginationandplace.org ) His poem, Moving Orchards, laments the degradation of Nature--especially in California's Santa Clara Valley, where he grew up. Here are a few lines from the three page poem:

"Where are the fields in which children cavorted,

the creeks, the sloughs, that irregular terrain?

Where are the clods of earth (mountain ranges!!!) we leapt over--

the sap in ground cover that went splat on our legs--

as we whooped and hollered--

and charged through wild mustard--

while sweet-smelling petals swirled around our young heads?"

A few days ago members of the Committee on Imagination & Place received an e-mail from Ted asking for an "emergency solon" to talk about the film "WALL-E" which he and his wife Mary had seen that afternoon. "Here is a film," he wrote, "wonderfully accessible to the whole family from the very young to the very old" (for whom he suggested it would stimulate memories of such films as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Contact, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Alien and Star Wars.) "In a world ruined and subsequently abandoned by humans some 700 years in the future, the robot garbage compactor Wall-E, through the power of his growth through collecting relics and reflection on the past and his discovery of love, gradually liberates himself from the supersizification promoted by the universal monopoly BnL" (Buy and Large.)

"Some of the numerous threads that weave through this extraordinary tapestry: pollution, belief in technology to solve all our problems, ecology, reliance on virtual realities as opposed to real realities, as well as Voltaires's message at the end of "Candide" to the effect that we have to "cultivate our garden." There are epic myths that course through this film, such as the Odyssey where Wall-E has to confront Polyphemus in the form of a "Hal the computer" look-alike from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and of course there is nostalgia (the desire to return home.) How not to think of the couple Orpheus and Euridice or Alceste and Admetos in operas and plays, of Beethoven's only opera Fidelio and any other "rescue" plot. Children will be impressed by the implications of indolence, obesity, mass consumerism, bloat, loss of character, individuality, and get-up-and-go, couch potatoism, and the like. The stories of the birds and the bees is told in an entirely mechanical environment, yet human courtship, dance, marriage and reproduction through sexuality are dealt with in ways acceptable to children who may or may not see at another level the story of Adam and Eve (thanks to Wall-E, the egg-shaped machine Eva bears within her organic life in the form of a plant and eventually brings Wall-E back from the dead.)

Ted told me this morning that the first film he ever saw was Walt Disney's Fantasia and that every film he has subsequently seen-- right up to Wall-E--  is measured against it. "This is a film that will mark all future generations in the way that those of us who were children at the outset of World War II permanently imprinted the images and stories of ...Fantasia."

Ted asks, "Where are the fields in which children cavorted, the creeks, the sloughs, that irregular terrain?" bringing to mind a world, less than one lifetime ago, in which walking was both a means of transportation and discovery. As a boy scout in the 1960's I learned tracking by following the footprints of animals and people through the woods near Bonner Springs, Kansas. These days, Ted reminds us,"We talk about "footprint" in terms of city planning, carbon dioxide, and for over seven years now, "boots on the ground." Remember that the word 'human' derives from 'humus' in Latin (cf. humble and the Greek root, 'chamai.' to lie on the ground.) Watch for the boot throughout the film (and) any number of other beautiful metaphors. Do bring this film to the attention of staunch supporters of paving over the wetlands so that they can 'imagine' (through the extraordinary images and narrative threads of the story easily accessible and retainable by (even) the youngest of children,) the consequences of their tunnel vision of a Polyphemus and their drive to pave over our immediate (Wakarusa) Wetlands and thus turn the paradise of our beautiful planet into a hell."