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.

Hair Part II: Pieces of Me

Today's quote for this multi-part series on Hair  is taken from Helen Sheumaker's fascinating study, Love Entwined: The Curious History of Hairwork in America. This study traces the rise and fall of hairwork (hair jewelry, wreaths, portrait miniatures including locks of hair) as an object of sentiment and devotion as the once hand-made fanciwork became increasingly commercialized:

     In the eighteenth century, the sentimental associations of hair were obliquely displayed; by the nineteenth century, hairwork and the sentimentality it conveyed was worn for others to observe. This practice revealed a paradox about sentimentality. While display of one's sentimentality was essential to being regarded as sentimental, that same exhibition could easily be construed as ostentatious, vulgar, and insincere. Fashion was constantly in flux, it was superficial, and it was self-aggrandizing. It opposed the sincerity that women in particular were supposed to possess. Fashion was expressed with goods, and therefore was opposed to the domestic sphere. Thus, those constant fluctuations in styles threatened to undermine the premise of sentimentality itself.
     Even as hairwork revealed the dissonance between genuine emotion and frivolous fashionableness, it attempted a remedy.  Hair's undeniable relationship to an individual asserted a sincerity of character that transcended the hypocrisy that fahionableness implied.  The mid-nineteenth century was the height of the popularity of hairwork perhaps because as fashion was criticized as being particularly hypocritical, hairwork's genuiness was being asserted.  On the one hand, hair jewelry was very much a commodity, buttressed as it was by marketing and salesmanship; on the other hand, it was exactly that which could not be completely commodified.  Hair jewelry provided a way to forestall the apparent effects of fashion in the market and in the social world" (20-21).

--Helen Sheumaker, Love Entwined: The Curious History of Hairwork in America, (2007)

Boundaries Part VI: Inconceivable

In this final selection for "Boundaries" I offer you the gift of a poem by Donald Hall from his collection, Without, which documents his wife Jane Kenyon's bout with leukemia and eventual death in 1995 at the age of forty-eight. Today's quote is the third section of "Song for Lucy." It features an object--a tourmaline ring--that underscores the boundary between life and death, the material embodiment of their desperate hope.

     Alone together a moment
on the twenty-second anniversary
     of their wedding,
he clasped her as she stood
     at the sink, pressing
into her backside, rubbing his cheek
     against the stubble
of her skull. He gave her a ring
     of pink tourmaline
with nine small diamonds around it.
     She put it on her finger
and immediately named it Please Don't Die.
     They kissed and Jane
whispered, "Timor mortis conturbat me."

--Donald Hall, Without, (1998)

Boundaries Part V: Dead Bodies

Today's quote comes from Michael Sappol's study of the rise of anatomy as a medical discipline in the nineteenth century and its relationship to racial, gendered, and class-based identity politics. This study moves fluidly from the dissection table to the funeral parlor, dime museum, and literary works and treatises to trace the complex way in which nineteenth century persons located identity within the body. Here Sappol considers the role of funerary practice in securing the meaning of selfhood:

"If death was a haven in a heartless world, then here the anatomist and the grave robber willfully transgressed. Against the invasion of the body snatchers, the living struggled mightily to protect the honor of their dead, to safeguard the material integrity of their helpless dead selves, to narrate their lives and therefore their deaths. For them selfhood did not terminate with death; rather, death stripped away the duplicitous masks and inessentials of being, leaving an existentially pure residue. Post-mortem photoportraiture, which from the earliest days of photography emerged as one of the most popular genres of the new medium, was intended not so much for spectatorship, but to freeze the self into an iconic last frame--many of the pictures were tucked away as keepsakes, never meant to be displayed, viewed only infrequently or not at all. Nineteenth-century Americans of all classes took this very seriously: how one died fixed symbolically how one lived"(39).
--Michael Sappol, A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Ninteenth Century America (2002)