1 March 2009 - 18:09Shaking up Shaker

What words come to mind when you think of Shaker furniture?  Probably words like, austerity, purity, honest design, simplicity, unornamented, finely finished surfaces.   The Shakers produced some elegant furniture in the nineteenth century which are now rightly regarded as American classics.  In retrospect, the Shakers were much better at building furniture than at sustaining a religious movement.  The movement was founded in the mid-eighteenth century as a radical offshoot of the Quaker faith and by the mid- nineteenth century had a membership of six thousand souls.  But the austerity of their beliefs (speaking in tongues and no sex, ever!) limited not only their appeal, but also for reasons that are all too obvious, their numbers!  Apparently all their repressed sexual drive went into making furniture, which they considered to be an act of worship. Their austere beliefs are clearly reflected in the simple purity of their designs.  The Shakers produced designs to please God, so God must be a modernist.  For them He was definitely not a God who loved gilt or ornament!

The Shakers would no doubt have been consigned to the dustbin of history as yet another weird religious sect, if their designs had not resonated so clearly with twentieth century modernism’s embrace of simplicity and rejection of ornamentation as a crime.  In design terms, Shaker was admired as a forerunner of the modernism of Sullivan and Le Corbusier, and inspiration for the idea that “form should follow function”.

But how can we bring Shaker into the twenty-first century, not as American heritage, but an inspiration in the creation of something new?  The very simplicity of Shaker design and its association with particular styles of chair, for example, makes it difficult to transform it while retaining anything fundamental to Shaker. And yet, the urge to do nothing; to leave well enough alone, must be resisted.  For while it is good, and important even, to have classic Shaker furniture around, in museums, and in homes, this condemns Shaker to history with no role to play in the future of design. 

I believe that as designers we should not seek the wildly romantic and ridiculously unattainable goal of producing the absolutely new, as if it had sprung out of nowhere, but our individual genius.  Rather, I am much more comfortable with the now familiar postmodern view that the new is a transformation and reinvention of the old.  This can take various forms: a barely discernable blurring of one style into another, or a  pastiche, of things that were once seen as incompatible, but now merged and re-imagined. There are a number of ways in which one could begin to shake up Shaker.  I’m imagining a set of experiments in what one might call “affinities”. 

Clearly, there exist affinities between Shaker design, the simplicity of twentieth century modernism, and traditional Japanese design. Thus, I have included in my collection a traditional Shaker chair in black lacquer to reference Shaker’s affinity with Japanese design, but I can imagine going a step further by painting, for example, a pair of lacquered red and white koi circling on the seat, as if in a darkened pool, or perhaps a gold chrysanthemum, producing the frisson of Samurai-Shaker.  For now, I have opted for the simplicity of pure black lacquer joining clarity of line, lack of ornamentation, spirituality and seriousness of purpose as symbolised by the color black.

But what if one changes the color of the lacquer finish?  What new affinities are  invoked?  What if the chair was lacquered  Majorelle Blue?   The sensibility is no longer Japanese, instead it conveys an unlikely fusion; Shaker and whimsy, or Shaker and voluptuousness.  For Majorelle is the color that one associates with Yves St Laurent and romantic Marrakesh.  It is a color that makes Shaker pop. Like something that Michael Graves might have designed if he were Shaker!  Maybe Majorelle can finally put some sex into Shaker.  If the Shakers had thought of that maybe they wouldn’t have died out as a group!