Contemporary jewellery?

No precious materials, often made by hand, and not always pleasing. Some are even annoying or hard to wear. What are they?

Marjan Unger (head of the applied arts department at the Sandberg institute, Amsterdam): Contemporary jewellery, art jewellery, designers jewellery or authors jewellery: All different names for pieces of art made by jewellery designers, often educated on art academies. Like Otto Künztli (head of the jewellery department of the Academy of fine arts in Munich) said, jewellery designers are artists. Much more then symbolic or traditional values, they express feelings, urges, drives, irritations and other emotions in their medium jewellery, just like painters or sculpturs do in their medium.

Just as contemporary art isn't commonly understood and/or appreciated, for many people it's still new when a jewel isn't made from gold and gems, even while jewellery made from common materials (like stone, leather and bone) are there from the beginning of history.
Contemporary jewellery designers choose materials which suit and express their ideas best. Whether a material is 'precious' or not doesn't play a role in that.
Besides their size, jewellery is special in the field of art because it's meant to be worn on the body. Some see this as a limitation, others as an enrichment: Intimacy seems inherent to jewellery design.
By wearing, an extra dimension arises; a unique bond between the piece and the person.

Amsterdam-Munich-Tokyo

The jewellery world is very international and very small at the same time. Worldwide there are only a few hundred jewellery designers, gallerists, collectioners, curators and critics, clustered around galleries and academies: Everybody seems to know each other in this very active but closed scene.

To open up minds and to generate new ideas, one of the initiatives taken was a project The Jewellery Quake in 1993 between the Rietveld Academie (Amsterdam), the Akademie der bildenden Künste (Munich) and the Hiko Mizuno College (Tokyo). Three students of each academy; Teruo Akatsu, Volker Atrops, Ela Bauer, Karl Fritsch, (Yoshihiko Imai, Shinichiro Kobayashi), Manon van Kouswijk, Karin Seufert, Norman Weber worked together in Tokyo. Now, 13 years later, they have become wellknown names in the world of contemporary jewellery and now they are the participants of the travelling exposition First We Quake Now We Shake. The enriching cooperation between the three academies still continues, resulting in new projects like 'Unlimited' in 2004.

Leaving one's own familiar surroundings to live and work in another country, works like a pressure cooker for new insights and ideas. Even today with internet, cheap airplane tickets and 100+ channels on TV, it's a revelation for everybody to see and experience how other people think, work and design in other parts of the world. It sharpens and forces one to a reaction, to an own opinion. It helps finding and developing one's way of thinking and designing. Everybody does that in his own way and this phenomenon is reflected in 'First we quake now we shake'. The works are all very personal and authentic.

Jewellery designers and the rest of the world

Marjan Unger: Unlike a lot of (singers-song)writers, painters, photographers and filmers, most jewellery designers aren't politically involved in their work. They comment on their own inner world and interests, not on the world around them. They put emphasis on being authentic and make very personal work.
Mass produced 'protest-jewellery' meant to change the world are created by others; the button for example, the Red Ribbon (AIDS awareness from painter Frank Moore) and the yellow LIVE STRONG bracelet (against cancer from bicycle champion Lance Armstrong). Jewellery designers almost never make series. Designers and stylists who do, and work for e.g. SWATCH or H&M, seem to be a complete other breed.

Why? Maybe because designers who work for company's focus on the taste and needs of a large group of people, and they have to deal with possibilities of production facilities, costs and marketing departments, etc.

Marjan Unger: Allthough some categorize and present their work in collections and send newsletters around by email, jewellery designers often don't have a real marketing strategy and if they do, they don't have the possibilities to produce for the mass market. They just work in their studios on what fascinates them and hope that somebody falls for their pieces.

It isn't about marketing and mass production. Where as accessories only are to embellish the wearer, art jewellery has another function. Just as other art they are outcomes of processes of research and experiments. They inspire, intrigue and make one think and wonder. The emphasis by designing jewellery is on being original. A personal signature is a condition to gain a position in the jewellery world.

Marjan Unger: Sometimes I regret that jewellery designers and galleries are so aimed at collectioners. The 'traditional values' of jewellery are a bit out of focus now while specially these jewellery can be so precious to someone. Not because of their material or their design but briefly for sentimental reasons. I have a large collection of jewellery but the jewel I cherish most is the bracelet given to me by my mother.

Luckily still some jewellery designers also make ‘functional jewellery’ with (a new look on) traditional values: In commission for a marriage, a jubileum, an award, the chain of office for the mayor, souvenirs and autonomous work like the silver baby toys Paul Derrez made. But that doesn’t attracts so much attention of the galleries, magazines and musea who mostly focus on the 'authors jewellery'.

Stories

Functional, traditional or autonomous, a good work creates a context for itself and evokes a story, like reading a book and visualizing how the characters and the landscape look like.

Marjan Unger: Out of principles or maybe because it's sometimes hard to 'verbalize' one's own work, some designers leave this 'story-making' up to their audience, gallerist or critics. Other, often more market oriented designers supply their work with a 'ready made' context with background information, their work categorized in named collections. A good story is very helpful for sales and publicity and journalists dealing with deadlines e.g.
Thereby, it's hard for a lot of people to read the visual vocabulary of a work of art, so they are glad with a given story. But particularly for me this decoding and translating a work in my own story is so attractive.

The position of a maker

Incidentally a larger audience is reached by the cooperation between a designer and a producer (with facilities for mass production and the channels for distribution) when 'accidentally' confronted by jewellery which is reproducible and suitable for (the taste of) a large group of people. 'By accident' because jewellery designer work like artists not like designers creating for studios or companies with a client in mind and bound by the possibilities of the facilities of production and sales.

Marjan Unger: But jewellery design is – and will likely remain – a small field. Television, newspapers, or other public media rarely devote attention to jewellery design as a form of contemporary expression. But designers have to present their work to find and maintain a network and an audience in order to survive. Certainly in the Netherlands and Germany the main podia for art jewellery are galleries and musea. So specially new designers search for other venues (and markets) for their work varying from very unorthodox and
colourful initiatives like the parade through Tokyo of 150 jewellers wearing grey T-shirts with a jewel on it, to making article's for magazines (like Gesine Hackenberg did for ITEMS) or exposing work as objects in unusual public places like in the toilets of a trendy nightclub.
Internet becomes of increasing importance for designers, it's almost a necessity now. As a way to reach new public, as a source of research and as a medium to start and maintain contacts (e.g. with galleries abroad) and to exchanges ideas. Many designers now have a website with images of their work. But jewellery are three dimensional and need to be touched and observed from up close so websites are a very good starting point for first impressions, but they cannot replace expositions.

The future of art jewellery

CADCAM (Computer Aided Design, Computer Aided Manufacturing), possibilities for mass production in low cost countries, manners for easy distribution and worldwide publicity and communication via internet e.g. What does this mean for jewellery designers?

Marjan Unger: Probably not that much. On the short term almost certainly they won't change the process of making the unique pieces manually while experimenting, looking and combining the materials. That's the hart of their work. The world of art jewellery is small and will remain so, fulfilling a necessary roll, like opera interacting and influencing other media but also just giving the pleasure of enjoying art.

And since mass production doesn't seem to be a goal for jewellery designers, they go on like Lucky Luke's, poor lonesome cowboys heading for new adventures, finding new ways to express them in new works and creating new stories for themselves and those who wear and watch.

(This text is based on an interview with Marjan Unger, her story in the catalogue Unlimited and personal observations and opinions).

Rein Hazewinkel

Amsterdam * Tokyo * Munich * Stockholm * Bern