ARTS
Crafts
Furnishing the World: The East London Furniture Trade 1830-1980 (Geffrye Museum, till 3 January) The New Spirit in Craft and Design (Crafts Council, till 15 November and touring)
Garret slaves
Tanya Harrod
Perhaps it is unfair to compare these two exhibitions: one serious and deeply researched and one essentially light- hearted; one rooted in the East End community around the Geffrye Museum, the other rootless and declaring with pride its confused bundle of cultural references.
The small, well documented exhibition at the Geffrye Museum (Kingsland Road, London E2) tells the story of the furniture trade which flourished until relatively re- cently in the streets and alleys around the museum: by the end of the 19th century the East End was the hub of cheap furniture- making in England. The wholesalers had their warehouses in Curtain Road, Shoreditch, and they, together with shop- keepers from the West End, bought in from the garret masters working from cramped backyards and tiny rooms. These were small businesses with a vengeance, and indeed the whole exhibition puts Victorian capitalism under the microscope.
`It's as easy to get men as it is to get herrings from Billingsgate,' said one West End buyer to a garret master he intended to underpay. Employees had to be `squeezed', that is to say, worked to the limit; if they objected they could easily be `shunted' or dismissed. There could be no real apprenticeship system under these conditions. Furniture was kept cheap by using an unskilled workforce trained to perform one simple task — the turning of chair legs, the making of drawers or the fitting of handles. It was this division of labour combined with the superficially high quality of the goods made under the `sweated' system that horrified exponents of true Victorian values like Ruskin. Those `accurate mouldings and perfect polishings and unerring judgments of the seasoned wood' were read by him as 'signs of a slavery in our England'. Ruskin's antidote was radical and high-minded — no manu- facture of unnecessary objects, no imita- tion or copying and no exact finish for its own sake. Nothing could have been further from the reality of the late 19th-century furniture trade with its huge variety of fancy, highly finished pieces styled Eli- zabethan, Jacobean, Louis XVI, Neo- Grec, Aesthetic, Art Nouveau and Quaint.
The entrepreneurial spirit of the success- ful furniture manufacturers made the em- Ployment of designers redundant. Vision- ary turn-of-the century emigres like Hille had no practical experience of making furniture: his daughter explained that his ideas were 'all in the brain — he couldn't handle a hammer'. Hille was later to hire top designers and move up market, but among the small workshops of Shoreditch a rough sketch made by the boss after a visit to the V&A or a quick look into the windows of the West End stores sufficed. A plethora of styles continued to be made until the second world war when utility regulations imposed Gordon Russell's brand of restrained modernism on the trade. Lucky firms — by the 1930s many had moved out of the East End to the Lea Valley — got the big war contracts: the fuselage of a Mosquito was so elaborately wooden that it was known as the cabinet- maker's plane.
After the war — just when conditions were getting better and the furniture trades unions had established basic rights like holiday and sick pay — the larger firms began to face intense foreign competition. By the end of the 1970s even the small furniture firms had all but disappeared from the East End. The Geffrye Museum has bought the contents of one typical workshop which closed recently, and has made a charming short film of its owner, Nathan Rosenberg, demonstrating how to make a sideboard of his own design — all bleached walnut veneer and evocative ocean-liner curves.
The New Spirit in Craft and Design, at the Crafts Gallery (12 Waterloo Place, London SW1) is dominated by furniture which would make old Nathan Rosenberg blench. Almost all of it is trying hard to be sculpture and tends to be strictly non- functional. The chairs are particularly lethal. Found materials are much in evi- dence. Of course, where such recycling is a necessity of life beautiful objects tend to be produced. I am thinking of the wonderful things made in Africa and Indian cities out of every kind of urban junk. Here in London, Andy the Furniture Maker was the first to salvage rubbish in a convincing way. His louring tables are contructed from massive bits of timber from skips and demolition sites and far outclass anything in The New Spirit. But there are some fine examples of the genre in this show — Sue Golden's mirror, a clock by Andre Dub- reuil and a fountain by Raef Baldwin — as well as straightforwardly beautiful rugs, textiles and pots quietly sitting on the breeze blocks and rubble employed to Bicycle cabinet made by W. H. Vaughan and Co, Old Street, EC1. From the Cabinet Maker, 1897. transform the Crafts Council's genteel galleries into an urban wasteland.
`How dare these people earn a living?' asks the catalogue whimsically. I suppose the phony tone of the catalogue — 'The Crafts Council celebrates the defiant spirit' — is the saddest thing about this interest- ing exhibition. It is terrible to find crafts- manship being sold as style, when with its combination of strong presence and beauty of material it can put a good deal of what passes for art to shame.
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