This is the eleventh essay in a collection of twelve written by Byron Ferris for the "Design Sense" feature of the Sunday Northwest Magazine insert of The Oregonian during 1984 and 1985. The Editors.
Grand Ronde, a small town on the way to the Oregon coast, has a feeling of being quite remote. The "Grand Ronde Shopping Center," a general store, apparently has to stock a bit of everything for those who can't get to the bigger centers in Willamina and Sheridan.
Browsing around the store is a pleasure; I find myself drawn to the tool bin, a lush jumble of shining wrenches, drill attachments, electric cords, screwdriver sets "Anything on This Table for $2.99." On my last visit I suddenly realized I needed a hammer, a brilliant chromed-head hammer with an inviting matte-black hand grip. When it practically leaped into my hand I knew I'd found a friend, a user-friendly tool that would help me to attack with unerring balance the most dull-pointed 10 penny nail. The hammerhead was sleek and beautifully sculptured with a claw end that flowed gracefully down in a luscious curve. The connection to the handle was continuous and streamlined, and I knew I was in the presence of true art.
I thought back to the year I served on the Art Selection Committee of the Portland Art Museum and the time that an ancient, red-lacquered Japanese stirrup was presented as an objet d'art to be purchased for the museum collections. The stirrup, designed for use, was no more beautiful than My Friend Hammer. Because the Japanese stirrup was from the historic Edo Period and was presented in a richly brocaded box, it commanded a high price. My hammer was new, a product of current industrial art - and only $2.99.
Most people think of "Art" as paintings and sculpture on display in art museums, separated out, in a way, from daily living. Another kind of art expression, however, is called "crafts." Beautiful pieces of sculptured furniture, fabrics, individually designed jewelry, ceramic ware and porcelains are on selected display at Oregon's nationally noted Contemporary Crafts Gallery as well as at other galleries and shops around the state. These objects are useful and necessary in daily life, but, using the language of art, extremely well-made.
A question: "OK, art - so what's the use?" Answer: Viewing visual art can elevate one's aesthetic sense in ways that can be refreshing, useful and in tune with moments of human excellence. That's the "use" of Art.
The same principle works at home when we select objects that include the simple language of art. The kitchen shears, simple and sculptured, give us great joy in their use. The Alvar Alto glass bowl that holds our spring flowers is a pleasure in the early morning light. Even my typewriter, sculptured by the Italian designer, Etore Sotsass, is a delight for the eye as I write. And I have my hammer, a nice statement of American design art.
It seems to me that a good deal of the usefulness of museum art is the preservation of the moments, styles and attitudes of our ancestors and of past cultures. The grace and beauty of the people illustrated on Greek urns, for instance, are captured in a way that we still can see, and the color and mysticism of early Northwest Coast Indian cultures are preserved in museum collections in artifacts that are disappearing from the real world.
The function of recording a past moment is part of the art of a Japanese print in my family's collection, a print by Hiroshige made about 1836, well before Adm. Matthew Calbraith Perry prevailed on Japan's Tokugawa shogunate to open the feudal island to trade with America in 1854. Hiroshige's picture records a windy day on the lakefront marshes of Yokkaichi station in sensitive line drawing and subtly colored woodblock printing. Though the drawing is assured, alive with wind and wetness, the picture is just a country scene, an occurrence of gentle amusement in which a man chases his hat as it rolls off in the breeze. It is really what we would think of today as a cartoon.
The Portland Art Museum has had feature exhibitions of the prints of Hiroshige and other Japanese block-print masters, and the museum's Asian collection includes many similar prints. The "block-print" method of multiple reproduction allowed many people 150 years ago to have copies of these pictures, often the onlY pictures many Japanese citizens of that time had seen.
Come to think of it, the print method used by Hiroshige, a black drawing with added color tints, is similar to the technique The Oregonian uses for the Sunday comic pages.
I wonder whether this comic art will be housed in future museums as an artistic record of our culture? At the very least, it is available to all of us now home-delivered.