Person, Place, or Thing

Artists “Forging a Link” in the Context of Henry Mercer’s Collections

As published in "Forging a Link: Metalsmiths Respond to the Mercer Collection," Exhibition Catalog, Mercer Museum, 2019

Maria Eife's "Dress Flanges," Nylon, 2019

During the years that Henry Chapman Mercer was assembling his collection of early American tools and artefacts of material culture, the United States was industrializing at lightning speed. In Mercer’s lifetime (1856–1930), factories, railroads, radio, automobiles and home appliances transformed American cities and farms, as well as the interior spaces in which Americans lived and worked. Just like the tools Mercer loved so much, work itself looked, smelled, felt and sounded one way when Mercer was a child, and by the end of his life, it was something else entirely. Just as labor changed, the product of a particular kind of labor, works of art, changed along with them. In 1917, one year after Mercer opened the museum that bears his name, Marcel Duchamp premiered his sculpture, Fountain, which comprises a cast porcelain toilet inscribed with the curious signature “R. MUTT.” Duchamp described the piece as a “readymade”: a new kind of artwork in which the artistic skill was all in the gesture of presentation and context, and the raw fabrication of the object in question–in this case, a piece of industrial ceramics—was anonymous. After thousands of years of ever more refined works of drawing, painting and sculpture, the “deskilling” of art seemed to strip craftsmanship of its importance.

It’s no wonder that Henry Mercer was worried about this. Even if he was unaware of Duchamp’s game-changing Fountain, he observed a rapidly changing society in which old-fashioned tools and methods were being set aside in favor of faster and cheaper alternatives. In her 2003 essay “Work Ethic,” from the catalog for the exhibition of the same name at the Baltimore Museum of Art, curator Helen Molesworth identified a theme that seemed to unify the remarkably diverse and disparate forms of art practice that had flourished in America since World War II. Molesworth argues art changed in large part because work changed. As office work became the norm for many Americans in the mid-20th century, and fewer people performed physical labor, contemporary art was less and less apt to evince the physicality and heft of manual labor. Particularly in the 1960’s and later, typical office tasks like reading text, typing, or later, staring at a computer screen, were all fodder for works of sculpture or performance art that were increasingly cerebral and conceptual. Andy Warhol’s ubiquitous Brillo Boxes (1964) gave viewers the chance to imagine themselves as either advertising copywriters or (more likely) supermarket shoppers, making the relationships that govern manufacturing and retail the very medium of the work itself. The boxes and their colorful surface designs are secondary; we have no idea who made the pulp that formed the cardboard, or who stamped the cardboard into squares, and we were never meant to know.

This change left craft as a standalone artistic practice in the breach. As works of contemporary art increasingly derived their meaning from context and setting, and when a “work” could be comprised of a gesture or an idea, people who made things, particularly traditional sorts of object by hand, were sometimes seen as mere fabricators who lacked ideas. The exhibition “Forging a Link” demonstrates that this perception is, happily, a dated one, and it makes the case for an American craft culture as a context all its own. The twenty-three artists whose work appears in this unique installation were inspired by the Mercer Museum as the product of a time and place. The museum is emblematic of the moment of its creation, in the early 20th century, and it says something about our moment right now that an artifact of Arts and Crafts era collecting and display offers so much inspiration and wonderment in visitors and artists alike. 

The variety of the artists’ responses is inspiring. Each project connects back to some aspect of Henry Mercer’s installation, but in wildly different ways. If there is a pattern, it might be found by starting close up and zooming out; some artists engaged with the objects on view in a deeply personal way, referencing home, family, and the body. Many artists—a plurality of the group, in fact—choose tools and making as their theme. Zooming out further, another group chose the physical site of the Mercer Museum as their inspiration. A few artists conducted thought experiments, and their projects are the fruits of their imagination. Lastly, a group of artists addressed change: technological, or political and social. From the body and its adornment to the tools we use, the places we find ourselves, the ideas we conceive from all of these influences, and the way we observe change over time, each one of the artists in the group defined their own rich context for this exhibition, demonstrating just how dynamic a static collection can be. Though the installation of the Mercer collection has changed little in the last century, the world has changed around it, and as a result, the collection actually has changed, because with each passing year, it holds more and more objects that visitors have never seen before, rooted in an increasingly distant past.

Three artists drew inspiration from the physical, domestic, and personal aspects of Mercer’s collection, and all of them are women. Enchanted by the delicately carved butter prints housed in the museum’s dairy room, Maria Eife realized she had encountered a now-obsolete object that mirrored the daily reality of her own life. In the 19th century, women would press butter into the prints, molding it into a distinctive, decorative shape with a pattern that would distinguish their butter from that other sellers. “It was not until after my daughter was born that occurred to me, I was a “dairy” now too,” Eife notes in her artist's statement, where she points out that breast milk, unlike butter, is something that new mothers are urged to keep under wraps in our society. Eife’s quietly radical solution was to create 3D-printed, lace-like “Dress Flanges,” which lend the style of jewelry or clothing to a hidden object, the breast pump flange, that’s necessary in early parenthood, but almost never seen in public.

Like Eife, Melanie Bilenker captures a domestic, interior scene, in the form of a self-portrait that depicts her folding laundry. Inspired by Mercer’s stereoscope and his collection of stereo view cards, “Gems of American Life,” Bilenker uses Victorian technology to frame her own American life as Mercer himself might have seen it, and makes it permanent with 19th century-style hairwork, connecting two time periods through aesthetics and technology.

Becky McDonah’s “Seeds and Synthetics” looks at first glance like a ceremonial object in the mode of a Faberge egg, or perhaps an elaborate Victorian jelly dessert. Red, round and tempting, McDonah’s sculpture is a kind of memento mori, warning observers that some materials we rely on for food will never decay, and that’s not a good thing. Thinking back on her visit to the museum where she was enchanted by the fruit preservation tools she saw, she also noted that there was no plastic to be found in the collection. For “Seeds and Synthetics,” McDonah used real apple seeds as well as pieces of plastic (known as “nurdles”) that form the cups that contain commercially produced applesauce. The piece asks viewers to consider what “preservation” might mean, for good or for ill, in their daily lives as consumers.

There are some intriguing objects in the Mercer collection that defy classification because their function remains unknown. For artist Lynn Batchelder, this mystery was an invitation to explore the form of a particular tool without knowing how it was used. The object in question, a heavily scratched wooden board, inspired Batchelder to create “Inscribe / Erase,” a piece in which the visual language of a series of scratch marks are literally framed by elegant metal rectangles, capturing the tension she describes as “a record or a removal, hovering somewhere in between.” Like Batchelder, Myra Mimlitsch-Gray is fascinated by tools and their marks. Her piece, “Hewn,” with a surface she describes as “hyper-wrought,” is inspired by the gouged surfaces of metal and wood so plentiful in the collection. The piece is like an extreme close up of what happens when a sharp tool scoops away a strip of a softer substance, digging into its mass and transforming it in a single gesture. By making her piece luminous and highly refined, Mimlitsch-Gray pays tribute to the workers who used these tools in the past, as though “Hewn” were a grand memorial statue that glints in the sun.

Katja Toporski drew inspiration from the fact that Mercer classified light itself as a tool. Noting that without light, no other tool can be made useful, Toporski describes it as “the tool that rules them all.” To create her series “Lights for Mercer,” she studied the physical forms and made 3D scans of a “Betty” lamp, a candleholder and an oil lamp, then cut sheets of acrylic to form new versions of the antique objects in layers. The resulting forms are devoid of function, Toporski says, “just like the tools on display in the museum.” But they do a serve a different kind of function, which is to remind contemporary viewers how precious light was in Mercer’s time, and how makers living a century ago and earlier would never have taken it for granted.

As much as the Mercer Museum is a collection of tools, it is also a unique and idiosyncratic place, and its unique structure is almost like a curious Victorian artwork in its own right. Adam Whitney was fascinated by the museum’s architecture, and draws a direct connection between the shape of the museum itself and the forms of the thousands of tools it houses in his series “Mercer’s Molds: Nail, Pin, Castle, Grain & Mullion.” Three of his pieces echo features of building, including the design of its graceful windows, and the bold texture of wood grain that left its imprint on the building’s concrete surfaces. Whitney also notes that the mold is a classic culinary tool, one that calls back to Victorian dining, and his suite of works could almost be understood as a five-course meal with a narrative arc. “A copper mold referred to as aspic, gelatin, jellie, or Jell-O mold,” he writes, “[and] captures a motive of the Mercer collection which is ‘America’s transition from a pre-industrial to an industrial and consumer culture.’” Jera Lodge was similarly inspired by the museum’s unusual proportions and mysterious attributes: the spiral staircases, irregular lines, and unexpected turns that give the museum the feeling of an ancient ruin rather than a building that was designed to feel rational or intentional to visitors. Lodge sketched the architecture, which she describes as “elegantly haphazard,” then translated those into a series of delicate metal sculptures that capture the museum’s unique geometry, like the pristine shapes of shells or ferns unfolding in a spiral.

For Michael Gayk, the Mercer’s “place” is not just a fact of geography, but of time. Just as most of the antique tools on view are largely obsolete, from whale oil lamps to spinning wheels, there are objects in the collection that call back to an American understanding of race and ethnicity that is both antiquated in its embrace of white supremacy, and alarmingly relevant in today’s national discourse. For his piece “No Longer Your Intoxicant Muse, “ Gayk chose to study three 19th century trade figures depicting a Native American Indian chief, a court jester, and a minstrel sporting blackface. Like the proverbial “cigar store Indian” that became a 20th century cliché at antiques markets, figures like these were used to advertise businesses that sold tobacco and alcohol, the primary intoxicants of their day. By virtue of their presence in this collection, Gayk points out, we can infer that for Mercer, they objects counted as “tools.” Gayk used 3D-printed steel to fabricate new versions of these figures in the form of commemorative medals. Each one strikes a contemporary pose that reflects gestures from civil rights struggle, from the mid-20th century to today: kneeling, and raising a fist in the air. The medals could almost be mistaken for antique objects from Mercer’s day, but for a closer look.

Gayk’s piece deftly captures the spirit of “Forging a Link,” by approaching a group of artifacts in their own context, on their terms, and drawing a direct, powerful connection between their making and meaning, both in Mercer’s time and in our own. And what would Mercer himself think? Though it’s impossible to know for sure, it’s hard to take stock of the virtuosic craftsmanship on display and creative responses to the collection in this exhibition and not be impressed. Mercer himself couldn’t know how far technology and society would speed past his favored moment of 19th century ingenuity, and it seems likely that a cursory description of 3D printing—absent a nuanced explanation of its creative possibilities—would have horrified Mercer. But adaptation is the only alternative to obsolescence. Mercer wanted to protect and preserve the artifacts that so moved him, and keep something of their spirit alive, and that means keeping the museum's doors open, literally and figuratively. The title of this exhibition suggests that these works represent a link in a larger chain, connecting Mercer’s time with our own. And that subtly suggests the exciting possibility that as the future unfolds at this museum, there is more to come.