‘Fewer, Better Things — The Hidden Wisdom of Objects’ by Glenn Adamson
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Notes on a book I found valuable & loved reading
This book was recommended to me by a tutor on my course, BA Ceramics at Central Saint Martins. At first the title and cover page underwhelmed me as I really don’t need any convincing that fewer, better things is the way to go and I thought it might feel a bit boringly virtuous.
However, I was entirely wrong.
Glenn Adamson, a rather distinguished writer/curator/scholar based in New York, dives into science, history, politics, literature, philosophy, economics and more. It’s a multi-faceted exploration of materiality and material intelligence that brings with it so much insight as well as a very sound counter narrative to the stupid hole of digitisation and bottomless consumption we find ourselves in. He puts forward a clear and intelligent call to reconnect with our world. I found his writing both warmly conversational and beautiful. An absolute pleasure of the best kind.
If you are a maker, if you like working with your hands, if you miss working with your hands, if you are wondering why life on screens feels unsatisfactory, if you are irritated by the steady decline in quality of products you buy or increase in cost to products that are actually made well, if you like to learn about and collect things, if you are curious about objects and like looking at them in museums — if you answered yes to any of that, I’d recommend this book. You will feel less alone with those feelings.
Below is a (highly personal & biased) list of key things I took from the book, my reflections and a short list of further reading and resources.
A little chink of light onto my biases & background:
I am a maker, I have been engaged with art my entire life, I collect and study objects of interest to me and I am currently doing a degree in ceramics, exploring the medium as a doorway into sculptural practice. I also find a lot of digitisation, manual de-skilling and life on screens deeply problematic. As an American living the UK, as a neurodivergent and highly sensitive person, as a woman and mother I identify with being a bit of an outsider and this leads me into lots of exploration of counter narratives. I’ve worked in museums and with various collections as well as commissioned public art.
I’m not anti-technology and I’m not anti-capitalistic. I am pro-question, pro-active, pro-consciousness and definitely pro-material intelligence. I found this book very validating in terms of clearly expressing why we may feel a mist of dissatisfaction lurking as we grow more and more separate from the world around us. The circumstances of being a human can never be expected to be jolly all the time and I am not one to throw a tantrum or be caught surprised by the human capacity to make mistakes and messes. I hope my notes here do not dwell too much on critique of the world we live in, I am trying to better understand challenges & their roots in order to leap over them and possibly propose alternatives through my practice. That’s the hope, at least. (I’d love to hear any thoughts in the comments.)
- What is material intelligence and what role does it play with empathy?
- How does sensitivity to matter & materials impact our experience with objects — what happens within us when we ponder or know: where things come from, the hands objects have passed through, the unseen intentions, the impact of markets and geopolitics? I would say this creates a space for expansion of humanity, empathy, intelligence. This could also influence our choices when it comes to consumption.
- Aa things are digitised more and more, we buy clothes without touching them for instance, we are more and more separated from the world of matter/material/nature — perhaps this diminishes us in some way, personally I believe that’s possible.
- My relationship to a quilt my grandmother made is very different from my relationship with my hairdryer.
- William Morris, and many others, were onto suchlike positions…yet, perhaps in large part due to the context of neoliberal capitalism, it’s a tricky business to create objects with provenance, hand-skills etc and not end up with an exclusive luxury item.
- Drawing is good. Draw whatever, make the time, allow it to suck according to limited ideas of what a drawing is supposed to achieve. Observational drawing, look, draw, look, draw — what do you see?
- I’m a little allergic to the word ‘craft’. I’m definitely allergic to anything that outs virtuosity first. I suppose I prefer ‘craft’ as a verb rather than a noun, it’s the noun that brings about the hives.
- The author defines craft as making or having a making practice. But then how is is different from ‘making’? There are intentions in there that include relationship with a material perhaps? Training and practice, knowing your stuff, honing skills (ideally for communication purposes rather than just skill display…is this my fine art bias and world view showing through?)
- The Nature of Art and Workmanship, written by design writer David Pye in 1968 distinguishes between: “workmanship of risk” and “workmanship of certainty”. USEFUL to know which one we are doing. One art or design piece for instance can include many steps and each step may be different. Risk creates discovery, certainty keeps utter chaos at bay.
- “FAST, GOOD & CHEAP” you can pick two, but not all three.
- (page 22) “If you have problems at the end it’s probably because of something you did at the beginning.” Oh hell yeah, this should be printed out and put on our workshop wall at school. The potters wheel is a merciless place to learn this lesson…
- I need to spend some time on pinch pots…often over looked as a process and so wonderfully tactile.
- Tools matter. I prefer less that do more. I am happy to adapt my making so that I am not overwhelmed by tools, this is personal. I like wood with clay, I have my favourite sponges. I could organise my tools better, I could interrogate them more. My hands are excellent tools, as well as a table top and water. I am not so psyched about having created a beast of a plaster mould that needs an air gun to free the piece from the mould…
- Looms were the first computers. Binary code.
- (I love textiles.) Before looms — textiles were often the most expensive items in a household and passed down through generations as well as down the social ladder as items wore and were cut down for another use.
- Lots of cars started life as clay models. Magic markers created the lines of muscle cars. Ferrari is the only company that still creates clay models — I want to see one IRL.
- Prototypes, choosing mediums for prototypes, how that medium injects itself into & influences the making process.
- Up until the late 18th century, most everything was made to order. Just imagine. Here we get into pondering the impact globalisation, mass manufacturing and neoliberalism has had on material culture. HUGE. Fucking HUGE, like hard to describe huge.
- What happens when place is removed from an object? {Roman: genius loci} Things get a bit dull.
- Helen Keller essay, The Seeing Hand. Touching her dog, so incredibly moving, made me think about how much I like to look at how people approach my dogs to pet them, to connect with touch, to stroke hello.
- Helen Keller: “every object which I touched seemed to quiver with life.” Thinking about touch and our skin (which I think about a lot as I am highly sensitive to it). Reflecting on ceramics that get touched, to create that sensory experience for people, to be utterly sensitive to it.
- Consider how objects invite or repel touch.
- Adamson provides entertaining stories of an old skule hardware store in Brooklyn, material intelligence backed by a world view that’s vanishing about capacity to fix the things in our daily lives.
- “The Myth of the Dumb Object”, great chapter title for exploring something I personally detest, so-called ‘smart’ products/crap we have been collectively deep throating for some time now.
- Turns out ‘smart’ is pretty banal, meanwhile widespread digitisation can actually be more perilous than just having objects. Obsolescence, hack-ability, badly designed user interface….for a start.
- An example — the difference I experienced going back to school — when I did my first degree (in the 1990’s) one goes to class and on the first day and is handed a sheet of paper. On that paper was the name of the class, the term, the Prof’s name and office hours, a list of reading and list of assignments/tests. That was a simple, useful system that wasn’t broken. However in the 2020’s things have changed and I have all these digital portals to contend with, the user interface at best provides a sucky and long winded experience and at worst just doesn’t do what it should be doing for some unknown reason. Complexity reigns, and there’s a weird air of surveillance to it. I suspect it’s the idea of a bean counting bureaucrat who wants data on education mostly because they don’t trust the educators…I’m being super biased here and accountability can work in different directions, I know this…but I can’t help but look at an old system that wasn’t broken and worked for many, many decades of education being replaced by something someone thought was ‘smart’ (likely the person selling it and being paid to maintain it) creating needless mind numbingly boring/frustrating complexity that adds time to our already alarmingly high screen time while mental health suffers from this very activity and more resources are needed to deal with that — and then ironically yet another complex digital process is created to ‘access support’…the author puts this all across in a much less rant-y way than I have and I am grateful for it!
- The collections manager from The New York Public Library, “the jury is still way out on how long digital surrogates will last. I believe they are much more imperiled than the physical original.” Consider the speed of obsolescence tech has, it’s astounding, I have digital files I have no idea how I can access anymore and what if we get rid of originals? Who owns the surrogate? Can it be hacked, can it be restricted easier when it’s a digital file? Who is the gate keeper? Who will be left out? How up to date is the digital data? How is it maintained? The actual object is the route to material intelligence and deeper understanding, as well as less mis-understanding and mis-information.
- How we imbue objects with meaning. Making RELICS. The psychological narrative that an object carries with it. SOUVENIR. Collections. On a deeply personal level, I collect things that make me feel less alone; objects that speak to me and connect on a deeper level. It’s not a logical head thing, it’s a feeling thing that connects me both to myself and the world in meaningful & unexpected ways.
- Objects that require care, tending. How does that change or relationship with it? What sort of object would I resent caring for? One that didn’t have that expectation built into it. And what would I like to care for? Cleaning, washing, caring — what does that process involve? How do I become aware of it? Caring for my home, cashmere. Do I have the agency to care for it or do I need someone else’s skill or permission? Where does the government limit me in this way, do I obey rules?
- Matter vs/ form; matter vs/ material. How do we understand the transition from one to the other? Spectrums of materiality understanding, purpose, intention. At what point has mud become clay? At what point does clay become pottery or sculpture? What is happening during that transition? Who is doing it, what is doing it?
- MUSEUMS. An area of interest & interrogation close to my heart, what is the experience of a museum, its collection and exhibitions? How museums generally revolve around collections of objects. How process is shown (if at all) alongside objects in the collection.
- MUSEUMS rank extremely high as ‘trusted institutions’ while other institutions decline like police, church, government — YET, they are not the neutral spaces they are often presented as. Few people understand the history of government collections, how we came to own our collections and the vast complexity involved in making sense of past events and places that no longer exist. The past is unstable, unknowable. And yet, and yet…we have these objects, we are attracted to these objects. They are testament to the power of materiality and material knowing; and despite pinning down meaning being problematic, we still pursue wisdom & knowing through direct experiences with objects. Museums visits are in the billions.
- What about the role of curators and role of counter narratives in museums, how might we use museum collections and presentation as a means to uncover and discuss bias? As a means to reconnect with the world of matter, raw materials from the earth. How to do this without creating a total overwhelm of information that severely interferes with our direct experience with an artifact, artwork, object.
- Mass production: I ask, ‘who is doing what to who and for whose benefit’ (from another book I’m reading). An amazing quote by Robert Own, 1813 (over 200 years ago!), “Since the general introduction of inanimate mechanism into British manufactories, man, with few exceptions, has been treated as a secondary and inferior machine; and far more attention has been given to perfect the raw materials of wood and metal than those of body and mind.”
- Artisans were needed to test and create and prototype for the industrial revolution and designers still design in such a way — we can certainly make a lot of shit, but we must still contend with materials, their behaviours and meaning.
- There’s a lot of evidence for a recent erosion of material intelligence due to both mass production and digitisation, yet there’s also a lot of evidence to suggest there is a hunger to reconnect and move away from the mass produced and digitised towards something more meaningful and“authentic” (an annoyingly over-used word that proves the point). How we go about this is up to us — it’s certainly worth understanding, speaking up & challenging the powerful systemic & institutionalised dynamics at play that reward blind, dull consumption alongside a de-skilling of our hands.
