Blog B-Day

Happy Birthday little Blog. You are one year old today.

and Happy Birthday to me. I better be one year wiser.

(top image French Vanilla Ooh Lah Lah cupcake from Cupcake à la Mode...)

Designer: Johnny Swing

Johnny Swing is a pseudonym for a furniture designer who has created a series of chairs using ordinary items as material for his work. He is a trained sculptor and licensed welder, and not a porn star as his name might suggest. (Did anyone else think that?)

Born in Salisbury, Connecticut in 1961, he studied at Skidmore College (I almost went there) and then the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He has been working as a professional artist for the past two decades: first in NYC’s Greenwich Village and now on his farm in Vermont. His past experience includes creating furniture and interiors for corporate clients, as well as appearing on the Discovery Channel show, "Junkyard Wars” (2001-2003 seasons). His works can be found in the Robert Crowell Museum in Newfane, Vermont and the Storm King Arts Center, Mountainville, New York.

His interest in coins isn’t anything new. When he was five, he set up a toll both during his parent’s parties where guests would have to buy one of his drawings before they were allowed to pass through the hallway.

Johnny Swing has created his Obsessive Furniture Line which makes use of common, everyday materials like glass jars, nickels and coins repurposing them to give new life to ordinary objects.

He has also created a series of chairs created from coins -- functional furniture creations which also serve as unique pieces of sculpture.

QUARTER SIDE CHAIR (2002)
This is the fourth in his coin series, but my favorite. The coins are not welded together which lends to a clean, floating appearance. Instead, they are held together with a U-shaped metal wire which is welded at the back side edges of the coins. The legs are stainless steel.


Some critics have said he defacing money by using it in this manner. But there is something so slick, cool and shimmery about his chairs -- like a bonefish quietly swimming in shallow, brilliant tropical waters before it darts away. At first, they seem unyielding and cold, but there is something so tactile and intriguing. I’ve been reading that one of these chairs will set you back anywhere from $10,000 each to $25,000.

NICKEL COUCH (2001)

This sofa is the second in a series of furniture made from coins. Created from 7,000 nickels, it is fixed together with 35,000 welds and rests on a substructure of stainless truss work. It weighs about 125-lbs. Johnny Swing spends about 300 hours sculpting one of these. I read it retailed for $51,000 a few years back.

Above is the artist in his creation. However, there is something about this arm I find a little… threatening. Anyone see this too?


BUTTERFLY CHAIR (2002)
This is the third in the series: each chair uses 1500 half dollars and is created with 7000 welds. It looks comfortable, no doubt. I’d put a pillow behind my head, curl up sideways and flip on Bravo TV. (A bit reminiscent of Eero Saarinen’s Womb Chair.)



You can purchase this one on Vivre for a small $59,000 – yes, the amount of 0s I typed are correct.

See more on his Johnny Swing site HERE ; And on Design Boom ; Top image from Metropolis Magazine click HERE to read an interview

Anyone? Thoughts?

More "Falling" Women

William Holman Hunt shocked his female viewers when he painted “The Awakening Conscience” in 1853. This melodrama of sin and recognition was meant to teach women a vital lesson about her role in society. Surely this gave cause for some women to be upset?

A new ideal of womanhood was developing in the nineteenth-century. Spurred on by the anxiety created by the Industrial Revolution, the expanding mercantile-industrial middle class needed to establish a new identity and self-justification. The world of commerce was becoming increasingly the play ground of corporations rather than individual entrepreneurs. (Does this sound familiar today?)

The Industrial Revolution promised material and cultural success. And it was delivered with the abuse of laborers, absence of personal tax and the marginalization of women. With the increase of money came vice and debauchery -- something the revolutionaries fought so hard against to win their independence from Britain -- which began to creep in and contaminate the new world. “Luxury,” one American writer urged Thomas Jefferson in 1782 “consisted of a dull, animal enjoyment which left minds stupefied and bodies enervated by wallowing forever in one continual puddle of voluptuousness.”

Women were advised to cover up their arms and legs. And after age 16, the wrists and ankles. This image dates from 1868. (I have no idea where I got this image, have had it for years, my apologies for lack of credit.)

Something had to change. Reform was needed. Instead of reorganizing and recognizing the greed of emerging capitalistic society, reform was controlled in the home. With economic changes came a new family dynamic. Men left the home to work while women stayed behind to care for the house and children. This is nothing new, this structure has worked in the past and it works for many today. However, back then a heavy burden was placed upon women to be moral guiders. This “new ideal of womanhood” created very particular attitudes about work and family. It was clearly defined and drilled into girls at a very young age. It essentially had four characteristics that any good and proper young woman should cultivate: piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness.

Religion or piety was considered the core of woman’s virtue. It was to be the source of her strength. Young men looking for a wife were cautioned to first look for piety; if that was there, everything else would follow. Religion was considered the divine right of women. It was a gift of god. Her piousness gave her the strength to control the naughty and vulgar world of men. Women were warned not to let their literary or intellectual pursuits take them away from religion. If so, she could risk being barren.

From Godey's Lady's Book March 1850, Philadelphia. Quiet moment between friends before THE wedding night.

Purity was the essential piety to a young woman. Without it she was considered unnatural, unfeminine or worse no woman at all. She was considered a ‘fallen woman’. The marriage night was to be the single greatest event of a woman’s life. It was then when she “bestowed her greatest ‘treasure’ upon her husband”.


Mrs. John Farrar (Eliza was her name) wrote in a manual The Young Lady’s Friend lending advice how to avoid trouble: “Sit not with another in a place that is too narrow; read not out of the same book; let your eagerness to see anything induce you to place your head close to another person’s.” It was a huge success in America with reprints well into the 1890s.

Were women really buying into this?

“The Old, Old Story Was Told again at 3 O’Clock in the Morning” chromolithograph (although this version in b/w) unknown printer, c. 1870.

I was walking Billy one warm summer night. A cab came to a screeching halt and out poured three young girls from the car door, falling over one another into the street. They were also falling out of their dresses and shrieking in drunken obnoxious laughter. One girl couldn’t find her 4” high-heel shoe and another was uncertain if this was even the street where she lived. In the darkness, a sneer of disapproval came over my face followed by a cold shudder. I thought – wow - my friends and I certainly dressed differently at that age. And then a cold clammy sweat began to seep from my pores in horror knowing years ago I had untamed nights like that. I felt a little ill, but why? Would I have not blinked an eye if this was a taxi full of three young males? What if these were older men? Would that be any less appropriate? Was I judging these girls because they were girls? Haven’t we come a long way?

One girl could not get her key into the door and began doubting that she lived in the house. So she decided to take a nap in the front yard. The other two girls were laughing and dancing in the street. The cab driver, concerned, got out of his car and came up to me. He said: “Is this how young girls behave in your country?”

Smart or safe are not two words that came to my mind to describe this behavior. But I am certainly glad to be a woman living in this country. Although his comment did make me wonder: has conventional gendering behavior not changed that much? Today, how many husbands sit at home anxiously taping their foot as they await their drunken wives to teeter-totter home giggling at 3 O’clock in the morning? Women seem to just get annoyed when husbands come home from a late night out drinking -- they hog the bed, they smell and they miss the toilet. But men seem to fear when women behave this way. As if they will sully their reputation or run off you a much younger man... Double standard still prevails.

Guess the Date: Shoes

My mom was flipping through a box of old photographs the other day and found an article she had forgotten she tucked away. Any guesses as to the year it was written? (Click on image to read the article...)

I've Fallen and I Can't Get Up: Rockingham Ware

For the women out there… Think about this: when was the last time you pulled out a household object such as a tea pot, water pitcher, baking dish, pie plate, or even a soap dish, and had to look at a pictorial image which reminded you to strive to be an “ideal” woman.

Today we have magazines pages to thumb through and commercial advertisements to watch on tv. Many of us pooh-pooh them as the messages are so trivial. We can close a magazine and turn off the tv. How many of us truly aspire to the media’s fabricated ‘idealized’ woman. Sure we buy the face creams, go to yoga to minimize the fatty texture on our bottoms, color the gray, and put on our spanx before a night out, but trying to look better doesn’t truly make us better women. We know this.

During Victorian America, women were bombarded with images of the ‘ideal’ woman. Problem was these images targeted core beliefs. Not superficial ones like today. They sent messages to women reminding them what a good woman was.

Pie Plate: Skinner, February 23, 2003

Rockingham pottery did just that. It was an inexpensive nineteenth-century ceramic widely used in America – an ordinary good. It performed a variety of tasks and played a variety of different roles in everyday life. But what is interesting is that much of Rockingham ware is pictorially embossed with an array of Victorian themes. The themes spoke of urbanization, nostalgia for country life and visually communicated hard messages. They depicted stories of men’s role in the world of hunting and woman’s role at home. How many men out there would like to have in their possession reinforcing pictorial images on every day wares such as a beer pitcher or a shaving mug of graphic hunting scenes?

10-paneled bulbous "manly" probably beer pitcher depicting a boar and stag hunt with hound handle. Awful to see those pronounced ribs -- feed the dog. Cowan’s, Cincinnati, Ohio, October 18, 2008.


Another pitcher of the same subject showing the other side. This one is attributed to E. & W. Bennett, Baltimore, Maryland, circa 1850. Cowan’s, June 21, 2008.

And how pleasant, hanging game... Garth’s Auctions, May 4, 2007
(Bummed the photo has been truncated.)

The embossed patterns on them maintained a cultural identity and the enactment of social roles. Although the ceramic was used at all social-class levels and in all types of communities from urban to rural, the images reinforced heavy expectations. Victorians were deeply concerned and conflicted about gender roles. And they were intensely materialistic people. For women, the theme of Rebekah at the Well was common. It reminded women to behave, serve and obey.

Garth's Auctions, Delaware, Ohio January 6, 2005.


D Marie's South Portland, Maine

Culture is a complex package of beliefs and behaviors. They are expressed through goods. Some of it we shape through our own preferences, and others forced upon us telling us what we need to choose and how we need to be.

These messages were seen over and over again every single day as the wares were used again and again. E. & W. Bennett pottery of Baltimore, Maryland is said to have first introduced Rebekah at the Well in the mid-nineteenth century and nearly all the potteries copied the pattern. In fact, by 1897 it was advertised in four sizes in the Sears Roebuck catalogue becoming the best and longest selling pattern in Rockingham history. The Rebekah at the Well theme embodied the Cult of True Womanhood which flourished during the mid-nineteenth century. (more of that in a post to come… as well as more Rockingham ware... for the darker, less mottled tortoise shell like glaze... Scatter ware, a colleague of mine likes to call it.)

Top image: Augustus Egg, Past and Present (1858)