Masculine Charms

"Woodcarver Bert Ohnstad carved canes, bowls, totem poles, and a number of sculptures, but his masterpiece was his Friendship Cane, to which he devoted more than fifty years in the making.  The cedar limb used to make the cane was cut in 1928, as Ohnstad led a Boy Scout troop on a hike in Oklahoma.  A fellow scout leader gave Ohnstad a memento to attach to it, a tiny gold heart with an inscription of the Lord's Prayer.  From then on, people gave him tiny charms and keepsakes to attach to what he had begun to call his Friendship Cane.  Ohnstad carved little niches into the cane and embedded such wonders as a tiny 64-square checkerboard, a shark's tooth, and a petite compass taken from a deceased German soldier's wrist during World War I.  Close inspection reveals six miniature peek-holes embedded into the body of the cane, which reveal glimpses of Niagara Falls ,the Golden Gate Bridge, the White House, a Greek nymph, the Washington Monument, and the Lord's Prayer.  Other attachments include a diamond-studded Rotary pin, a gold coin, a locket, a tiny "arrow head," a Scottie dog charm, a charm commemorating the Piccard statosphere flight, an eagle mascot pin from the 15th Wisconsin Regiment of the Civil War, and a Norse Immigration Centennial Medallion.  Ohnstad counted more than one hundred objects and images carved into, attached to, or embedded into the cane, which exists as a travel diary, masculine version of a charm bracelet, and a remarkable piece of art and Americana."

--Leslie Umberger, Messages & Magic: 100 Years of Collage and Assemblage in American Art

Leslie Umberger's account of Bert Ohnstad's Friendship Cane, a part of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center Collection, gives us a glimpse of an art form that clearly draws upon the much older tradition of the reliquary as well as the Victorian interest in keepsakes, secular relics, and tokens of friendship and memory.  Ohnstad's cane, produced between 1928 and 1979, is the material record of those with whom his life intersected through friendship. His efforts to embed keepsakes within the cane and to create nostalgic "peep holes" suggests privacy, insight, and interiority--a glimpse of the artist and of the era.  Yet in transforming the typically utilitarian cane into a numinous object, Ohnstad's artwork also prompts us to reflect more deeply  about our own private history.

Heirlooms

Today's quote comes from Tovah Martin and Richard Brown's whimsical book Tasha Tudor's Garden.  Text and image come together in this biopic to afford the reader/visitor intimate access to Tasha's world and the inspirations for her art.   Her rustic home in southern Vermont was modeled after an 18th century farmhouse and created by her son Seth with hand-tools.  Tasha's  rootedness in the past is manifested in the roots of her garden and gardening practices as well.  It is difficult to determine whether it is most accurate to describe Tasha as "out of sync" with the time period in which she was born or simply highly skilled at hitching historical time to the present. Her life seems to bear few of the "seams" of a reenactment of the past (in which one is always conscious of the closeness of the contemporary world--often jarringly so.)    If time in the garden is cyclical, heirloom plants and heirloom practices confirm the linear nature of time by underscoring the importance of repetition in promoting remembrance. Yet the very concept of the heirloom also acknowledges the passage of time.  The heirloom garden allows us to experience the excitement of the appearance--and reappeance of the past.  Curiously, heirloom plants are relics of the past but also made brand new ...over and over again.


"If Tasha's garden is a fantasy, its vision is rooted in the past... She plants varieties that would have been perfectly comfortable in a cottage garden several generations ago. The oldest roses nearly extinct dianthus cultivars, heirloom narcissus dug from her mother's garden---these are the sorts of plant[s] that find their home with Tasha....we are bound together by a mutual respect for heirloom plants.  Tasha lures her friends up to ther garden with descriptions of seldom-seen primroses, peonies, lilies, and cinnamon pinks.  And we come to discover those plants and more combined with inspired artistry.  We wander among divine daffodils framed in a lacework of crab apples and along forget-me-not paths disappearing into flowery glades.  We become transfixed by this place lost in time.  Then we tarry by lamplight until late in the evening, listening spellbound to stories of eccentric uncles with incredible green thumbs and chimney campanulas stretching nearly seven feet tall.  We come to share the fantasy."

--Tasha Tudor's Garden, Text by Tovah Martin, Photographs by Richard W. Brown (1994)