"bang on shit with a hammer" class continues apace. Turns out if you alternate bludgeoning with blowtorching you can turn a disk of metal into a cup of metal. Of course, out in the real world we do this with a hydraulic press and a die and do it several times a second. In "bang on shit with a hammer" class it's a little slower. I can decrease the radius of my "vessel" by about 3/32" of an inch every half an hour. That's "blast it until the flux melts", "soak the flux off of it because it was only there to keep you from turning it into slag", "bang on it once around", "bang on it twice around", "bang it smooth with a rawhide mallet", "measure your pitiful progress", "coat with flux" and repeat. "Soak the flux off of it" is a 5-minute rest period. I started with a six-inch disc. I now have a cup with a diameter of about 3 1/2 inches. You do the math. I'd like that cup to have an upper diameter of about an inch and a half. Kindly do the math again. Here's where it gets offensive: I decided that since I was going to be spending the better part of a month beating the shit out of something with a hammer, and since my instructor observed that every studio you go to has these shitty-ass copper cups that everyone hates because nobody enjoys raising but everyone has to do it so we all hang onto these ugly beat-to-shit copper cups forever, that I wouldn't make mine out of copper. I got some goddamn fine silver. Hundred twenty bucks worth. Know what? You can move silver faster than copper. And you can enamel on it. And enamel on silver is Faberge, not some shitty beat-to-shit copper cup that you keep your pencils in. What's offensive about that, you ask? Well apparently if you spend $10 on something you're going to hammer on for a month and then keep forever, you're an artist. $120? You're Donald J. Trump. The amount of side-eye I'm getting for working precious metal is fucking mystifying, especially considering we were forced to spend three hours watching an "expert" who makes his "living" doing what? Banging on silver. My materials cost is fully 1200% higher than anyone else's but also less than $40 a week. Yet here I am, traitor to the proletariat. But wait! There's more! See, if you're a true artist you use Thompson enamel because it's grainy, it's shitty, it's opaque and it looks like ass. I did this once. I have enamel samples that are shitty, opaque and look like ass. When I inquired about this I was told "oh, yeah if you're serious about this you use Japanese enamel and you wash it in distilled water and it looks dope." So I said "Okay, I can buy twelve colors of Japanese enamel for a dollar each, I'ma do that and see what it looks like because watchmakers use nothing but Japanese enamel because lead and cadmium and other delicious snacks." But apparently nobody was expecting me to call their bluff so we've gone from "oh yeah you'd love enameling if only you had decent materials" to "oh shit make sure you only do that on Friday and don't tell anyone and keep it under the fume hood Daddy Morbux". Materials cost? $132. Jewelry class. The utter defensiveness of this poverty mentality blows my mind. You can't play bingo for $132 a month and I'm a race traitor or some shit because I want to make pretty things in jewelry class. The self-reinforcement is the thing that really gets me - it's not "fuckin'A, you go gurl" it's "are you sure you want to draw the ire of The Man by stepping above your class? Oh wait - maybe you aren't really one of us! I got a river of grief last year for mauling the shit out of a sacrificial component that you buy six for a dollar. I said "sorry, that seemed unavoidable, here's twenty bucks for the student fund 'cuz I'm going to mosh the shit out of more of them and want to do it with a clear conscience" and that caused awkwardness. I donated about eight pounds of chain (that I bought for $5) and everybody has been using it on everything for like nine months and isn't that great but when I say "you just gotta buy the stuff used" they look at me funny. It's like "chain is hard to make therefore it's valuable" but also "chain is made by a machine therefore I'm guilty if I use it" but also "since I didn't pay for this chain I can use it without losing my virtue" but also "but it's machine-made chain brought to us by the rich dude therefore I should feel guilty". I had to buy $2200 worth of tools for CNC class. So did everyone in the class. I guess people just sucked that one up because they weren't staring down a future of selling trinkets on Etsy for beer money. But maybe if they worked in real materials they wouldn't have to sell trinkets on Etsy for beer money. It's this vicious cycle of bullshit that grinds my gears. Now if you'll excuse me, I might be able to decrease the diameter of my cup by 9/16" if I hurry.
I hear ya. When I finally got around to getting a degree in my late 30's, I went for Fashion Design. Every single other person in class was an 18-25 year old woman who thought they could draw bad pictures and hand them to someone else to actually draft a pattern, cut it out of material, and ... ya know ... SEW it together! So I focused on drafting and construction skills. Fuck drawing. Anyone can do that. Trade skillz are hard and people will pay you for a garment, while nobody will pay for a drawing of a garment. Learned to use industrial sewing machines. Thread a serger properly. Replace needles. Lube and oil and service the equipment. Learned all the tricks to drafting an armscye so a garment fits properly over the shoulder, neck, chest, and arm hole. And how bodies change as they get bigger, and which measurements actually increase as the garment's size increases. (Hint: people don't get equally fat of muscle-bound over their whole body. Fat pools in certain places. Muscles bulk differently in the legs and chest.) So I bought an industrial straight-stitch machine ($350) and an industrial serger ($750) for home, so I was using the same equipment I would be using out in the real world. Everyone else bought a $75 Bernina from JoAnn Fabrics, that is about good enough to sew through tissue paper, if you have a sharp enough needle. I bought a French Curve ruler. And several pairs of Fiskars scissors, each for a different material. All-in, probably $1500 in materials for a class that was what... $12k? People looked at me like I was crazy for actually using the tools I would need to have experience with when I graduated. Note that almost every single one of my classmates drove to school in an Audi, Escalade, BMW, or other vehicle, and had the latest cell phone, $200 shoes, and the finest set of Pentel drawing pens (a gift from Daddy, no doubt). But actually learn the TOOLS OF THE TRADE they claimed to be interested in?!? Oh gosh no! That's so expensive!
To a point I get the awkwardness around materials and money, wealth and the display of it is used as a marker of status. That said, "hey I'm going to keep this thing around forever so I better make it nice" is a really sensible perspective.
EXACTLY that. What I realized here: Is that our natural instincts, as tribe animals, are to self-censor and persecute those within our own class who attempt to mark their status as anything other than where we are now. The fundamental deconstruction of "dress for the job you want, not the job you have" is "if you signal a higher status than what you have, higher-status individuals will respond." The signaling is far more subtle than most people think, however; Primates of Park Avenue spends easily two chapters on the Birkin bag. Here's the issue: goldsmiths, silversmiths, fine craftspersons of all intricacies must necessarily signal to the people who can afford their products. If you're working in copper or nickel, you have a few deficiencies - they color the skin, people are allergic, they have zero scrap value. One of the reasons I love Art Nouveau is that Lalique and crew created bijouterie, adornments made out of crap materials that they sold for the same prices as gold and gemstones because the value was in the effort: ...but unless you're bomb.com your efforts into garbage materials just make things look more garbage-ey. And here's the thing. If you're going to spend 10 hours making something, and you're assuming a 40% markup, and you think you're worth $15 an hour, that means your labor costs alone are $200 or so. So congrats: at minimum wage, you're making $200 "objets d'art" that nobody wants. That Faberge cup? That was turned on a lathe. Probably took half an hour. Then they did some engine turning. Probably took an hour. Then they did some enameling and polishing. Probably took another couple hours. They're selling it for $2300. They can do that because (A) they're a big jewelry house (B) their shit actually looks good. I gave a presentation yesterday on automata. I pointed out in every slide that they're the playthings of kings and rich people. Everyone oohed and aahhed in the right places. It's okay to like jewelry. It's just not okay to make jewelry. In jewelry class. Because if you can't afford it for yourself it's baaaaad. Those rich people can do whatever they want but as soon as you put on airs of being one? You too are baaaaad. Grinds my gears.To a point I get the awkwardness around materials and money, wealth and the display of it is used as a marker of status.
