Bursting The Bauble

Avant-Garde Jewelry That's About Everything but Prettiness and Wealth

SLIDESHOW

Previous Next

Broken Pieces from Moritzplatz Berlin, a 1984 necklace by Bernhard Schobinger, from Switzerland. Moritzplatz was where Berlin's punks once gathered, and Schobinger's piece borrows their aesthetic. It insists that glass beads can appeal as much as diamonds, that shards of TV screen can function as black pearls and that broken bits of Coke bottles can take the place of fine enamels. (Bakker And Van Leersum Images: Artists Rights Society/pictoright; Other Images: The Museum Of Fine Arts, Houston)

A stainless-steel armband made in 1974 by Dutch jeweler Emmy van Leersum, who died in 1984 . This piece leaves behind the traditional jeweler's bench, materials and hand tools. Van Leersum worked with an Austrian steel mill to perfect the art of crimping and slicing cylinders of metal so that they gently embrace the human arm.

Goldfinger, a bracelet designed in 1969 and made in 2003 by Italian jeweler Bruno Martinazzi. When a man offers to deck his partner in gold, claims of ownership can always go along with the offer. Martinazzi's bracelet makes the man's grasp explicit. Or do its male fingers represent a tender embrace? Perhaps it explores the kinship between a clutch and a caress.

A 1994 necklace made from a book sliced thin by Finnish jeweler Janna Syvanoja. Finnish design has long had a strong link to the environment. In Syvanoja's work, that environment is urban and tarnished. She finds beauty in well-used materials, while reducing landfill by just that tiny bit. Her object's beauty is also in the message that it sends. (Janna Syvanoja - Museum Of Fine Arts, Houston)

With 81 Fingerprints, a gold collar by Gerd Rothman, who's from Germany. Rothman's piece, conceived in 1988 and made a decade later, capitalizes on many things that gold can do: The metal's softness captures fine detail; its sheer presence makes it stand in for its owner; its value lets it function as coinage. Rothman's showy neckpiece, with its coinlike fingerprinted disks, refers to all these roles, but always with a hint of irony. And then there's the question of what it means for an artist to leave his prints around the neck of a patron. (Gerd Rothmann - Museum Of Fine Arts, Houston)

Moses, a 1987 brooch by Dutch artist Gijs Bakker. Bakker was already a well-known pioneer in avant-garde jewelry when he became famous as the co-founder of Droog, the Dutch firm that inserted content and social conscience into the world of modern design. As a jeweler, he had been one of the first artists to transplant images from pop culture into the world of wearable art. Here Edwin Moses, the great American track star of the 1984 Olympics, is shown clearing a hurdle made of precious metal -- a black man shown "going for gold" and ending up on the chest of a wealthy jewelry collector.

Discussion Policy

Comments that include profanity or personal attacks or other inappropriate comments or material will be removed from the site. Additionally, entries that are unsigned or contain "signatures" by someone other than the actual author will be removed. Finally, we will take steps to block users who violate any of our posting standards, terms of use or privacy policies or any other policies governing this site. Please review the full rules governing commentaries and discussions. You are fully responsible for the content that you post.

By Blake Gopnik

Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 30, 2008; Page M08

We all know what important contemporary art is supposed to do: move us into untested waters of experience and thought.

Jewelry has always been one form of art. So why is it that a good 99.99 percent of what is made today doesn't come close to passing that test? Make that 99.999. Considering the bulging display cases at Zales and Kay, you might even have to add another bunch of nines.

This story is about the fraction-of-a-fraction left.

It's about necklaces made of sliced books, shards of Coca-Cola bottles or colored fishing line. They categorically refuse to help their owners show off precious-metal wealth.

And it's about a chunky bracelet made of black rubber that conceals a ball of gold. It caters to its owner's urge to ostentation while mocking it as well.

Or how about a golden ring that sports a little mirror with a tiny coral death's-head staring into it? Every time you look down at your hand you're rudely reminded that, unlike the gold you're gazing at, you're destined to decay.

"Ornament as Art: Avant-Garde Jewelry From the Helen Williams Drutt Collection," a landmark show now at the Smithsonian's Renwick Gallery, includes these and almost 300 other objects equally designed to stir things up. From 1973 to 2002, Drutt, who's now 78, owned a gallery in Philadelphia that was this country's most important and ambitious venue for "wearable art," as this work is sometimes known. (Another term is "body sculpture." I prefer "excellent jewelry.") After the dealer had wound down her business, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, acquired more than 800 items from Drutt's personal holdings. It then organized this show around them.

In the tiny world she worked in, Drutt built a collection that surveys the field as few private collections of fine art ever could. It covers almost all the angles on the last 40 years of radical jewelry. That means it has the goods on an era that is possibly the first in a century or more when jewelers have made work that stands up as important art.

In the 1960s, jewelers experimented with the most radically modern forms and materials, as the minimalist sculptors did. In the 1970s, many pushed away from slick modernity toward funk and mess -- further from Donald Judd and closer to Keith Haring, that is. In the 1980s, others used images pulled from pop culture to touch on gender, race and sex, as fine artists were also doing around them. And in the 1990s, some of the best jewelers took the same high-concept tack that many artists did, concentrating on ideas more than on a signature look. They also touched on global politics and the environment.

There's one crucial difference between contemporary artists and their jeweler cousins: The artists make the kind of trouble everyone expects of them; the jewelers push against a norm that still assumes that they'll use gold and gems to decorate the status quo.

Ornament as Art: Avant-Garde Jewelry From the Helen Williams Drutt Collection runs through July 6 at the Smithsonian's Renwick Gallery, Pennsylvania Avenue and 17th Street NW. Call 202-633-2850 or visit http://americanart.si.edu.