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Utah State University DigitalCommons@USU All USU Press Publications USU Press 1987 Exploring Folk Art Michael Owen Jones Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons Recommended Citation Jones, M. (1993). Exploring folk art: Twenty years of thought on craft, work, and aesthetics. Logan: Utah State University Press. This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the USU Press at DigitalCommons@USU. It has been accepted for inclusion in All USU Press Publications by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@USU. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Exploring Folk Art Twenty Years of Thought on Craft, Work, and Aesthetics Exploring Folk Art Twenty Years of Thought on Craft, Work, and Aesthetics by Michael Owen Jones t Utah State University Press Logan, Utah Copyright © 1987 Michael Owen Jones All rights reserved Cover design and art by Mary P. Donahue Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Jones, Michael Owen. Exploring folk art: twenty years of thought on craft, work, and aesthetics / by Michael Owen Jones. p. cm. Originally published: Ann Arbor, Mich. : UMI Research Press, c1987, in series: American material culture and folklife. Masters of material culture. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-87421-165-4 : $19.95 1. Folk art-United States. 2. Material culture-United States. 3. Folklore-United States. 1. Title. NK805.]665 1993 306.4'7-dc20 93-9969 eIP Contents Foreword vii Simon J. Bronner Prologue 1 Part One: Making Things 1 Violations of Standards of Excellence and Preference in Utilitarian Art 13 2 A Strange Rocking Chair ... The Need to Express, the Urge to Create 41 Part Two: Sensory Experiences 3 L.A. Re-dos and Add-ons: Private Space vs. Public Policy 59 4 Modern Arts and Arcane Concepts: Expanding Folk Art Study 81 5 The Proof Is in the Pudding: The Role of Sensation in Food Choice as Revealed by Sensory Deprivation 97 Part Three: Art at Work 6 Creating and Using Argot at the Jayhawk Cafe: Communication, Ambience, and Identity 109 7 A Feeling for Form, as Illustrated by People at Work 119 8 Aesthetics at Work: Art and Ambience in an Organization 133 vi Contents Part Four: Methods and Concepts 9 Aesthetic Attitude, Judgment, and Response: Definitions and Distinctions 161 10 The Material Culture of Corporate Life 177 11 Preaching What We Practice: Pedagogical Techniques Regarding the Analysis of Objects in Organizations 187 Epilogue 197 References 205 Index 215 Foreword In the forest of studies on American material culture and folklife lie a few giant redwoods that consistently provide inspiration for generations of students. Books that offer an appreciation of the "masters" who have planted these redwoods and have had much to do with shaping the scholarly landscape have been lacking in the field of material culture studies, although it boasts its own cast of leading men and women. Several interdisciplinary conferences on material culture studies during the 1980s pointed up the need for collections of essays that would allow students to appreciate and analyze the contributions of the field's leaders and their disciplinary homes. With the end of the twentieth century in view, there is also a sense of closing a productive chapter in interdisciplinary studies on art and artifacts. The period from the 1960s through the 1980s witnessed a tremendous surge of colleges, museums, institutes, and endowments devoted to the study of American material culture and folklife studies. With a new generation of students and a learned public eager to move forward, the object lessons gained from this period deserve, indeed demand, renewed attention. The Hand Made Object and Its Maker (1975) by Michael Owen Jones is one of those redwoods that students look up to. Coming at a time of preoccupation with reconstructing the past through artifacts, his book broke new ground by bringing study back to the present. It asked exciting questions of the relations between craftsworkers and their products and communities. Observing living craftsmen at work and recording life histo­ ries, Jones showed art and creativity, and indeed tradition, to be dynamic processes requiring reexamination of previously held assumptions. Since he introduced his ideas, Jones can lay claim to a long list of books and articles in material culture studies informed by his perspectives. Yet the celebration of his book can obscure the contributions he has made to other areas besides crafts-foodways, workers' lore, medical belief, language, play, organizational culture, and fieldwork technique. This volume allows Jones to integrate some of these studies, to view their underlying themes, to comment on their development. He brings his philosophical and historical perspective to bear on his unifying concern for "Exploring Folk Art." Consistently throughout his essays one finds an viii Foreword interpretation of life and art bound together and examined as expressive behavior. For many, the main contribution of this volume will be easy access to the master's work. The essays included in the volume are often difficult to find; they are drawn from conference papers, regional journals, festschriften, and symposium reports. Some have beeen published earlier; many have not. But each represents an important contribution. The author himself may wonder why he once said what he did in some of his essays, but he has preserved the integrity of the originals to allow readers to see that scholarship, like art, is subject to change. Some alterations to correct errors or to smooth out phrasing have been made, but the essays generally stand as originally written. Adding to the value of the essays in this volume, however, are Jones's headnotes, in which he explains what led to the writing of the essays and the ideas that they contained. Indeed, as he has been devoted to understanding kinds of artistic behavior in context, so he has put his writing-his expressive behavior, one might say-in the context of the organizations and endeavors of which he has been a part. The gathering together here of these papers certainly does not signal the end ofJones's scholarly production, but it does allow him, and us, to take stock of a distinctive period of scholarship leading up to this pivotal point of American material culture and folklife studies. It also allows a chance to look once more at an interesting array of behavior-from crafting a "strange rocking chair" to arranging the trash-and ask anew about meanings in material culture. Simon j. Bronner March 1993 Prologue Several years before I began exploring folk art, first as a graduate student in folklore at Indiana University and later as a professor of history and folklore at UCLA, I was an undergraduate student ( 1960-64) at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. During the spring semester of my freshman year I heard about a class being taught by someone named Stith Thompson, who was a visiting professor from Indiana University; the course concerned "folklore." Although intrigued, I could not take the course because it was an upper division one; in addition, I had begun an art major which absorbed my attention. When I was a sophomore at the University of Kansas, I met someone who told me excitedly about this class he was taking on "folklore." It was being taught by someone named Butler Waugh, who was completing his graduate work at Indiana University. The folklore course sounded interesting; however, I was still taking art courses and had just started a history major as well. By my third year at the University of Kansas I had completed most of the requirements for my history and art majors and also had begun taking courses for a third major in international relations. One day somebody mentioned an exciting course on "folklore" that he was taking. The instructor was Alan Dundes, who had recently completed graduate work at Indiana University. Vowing then and there that I would take the folklore course my senior year, I made an appointment to talk with Dundes. I vividly recall walking up the several flights of stairs in old Frazer Hall to reach Dundes's office in one of the towers (the building was razed later as unsafe, and replaced with a modern edifice more or less reminiscent of the original building in outward appearance but having none of its charm and sense of history). I explained to Dundes that during the years I had been majoring in other subjects I had heard about a course on "folklore." I was anxious to take the course, I said, and looked forward to seeing him in the fall. He wouldn't be there, he told me, since he had just accepted a position in the 2 Prologue Anthropology Department at the University of California at Berkeley. I was crestfallen. After having heard about this course for three years, and looking forward to taking it at last, I was apparently too late. Fortunately for me, the course would be offered by Dundes's successor' at the University of Kansas, Robert A. Georges, who was just completing his Ph.D. degree in folklore from Indiana University. I knew nothing about Georges or the Folklore Department at Indiana University. My concern at the moment was that in my last year at the University of Kansas I would be taking that much-talked-about introductory folklore course in fall semester, 1963. After the fIrst lecture, I knew that the wait had been worth it. I began to realize why I had taken several majors; I was seeking something. What I had been looking for I now had found: folklore studies. In spring semester I took the only other course on folklore that was offered, a graduate-level class on the folktale taught by Georges.

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