The Meaning of Making

Stephen Bayley - Design writer, former head of the London Design Museum

Asad Raza - Producer of Tino Sehgal's 2012 Unilever Turbine Hall Exhibition

Sam Bompas - Jellymongers co-founder

On the whole, making things is satisfying - all the more so when you get paid. Giving flesh to something which was once an intangible idea is an unassailable joy. Recently, I was moonlighting, helping my mother with her specialist paint work (below).

  

Putting in a trompe-l'oeil cornice with specialist painter Alice Clark

Contact: alice.clark1@btinternet.com

Clearly, I was a slave to the master. The execution is but half the job: the colour of the paints, method and design were all decided before we even arrived, and therein lies the value of a specialist painter. So, on the one hand, it is the expertise and aesthetic sense for which people pay - choosing elegant colours for a room (let alone a pattern) is a fine art - on the other hand, being an obedient part of a workforce (however small) is a rewarding kind of work.

For good measure, here are the stone-layers from the same site.

There was a miracle one day, as an enormous piece of wax was released from one of their ears. The news went out and soon there was a queue on the street.

At our Meaning of Making event in Brunswick House Cafe, Stephen Bayley voiced these intuitions forcefully, tying them into an intelligent holistic social critique. He criticised the management consultancy mentality of 'if you can measure it, you can manage it' and questioned our default recourse to cost. 'From the moment an idea is worth having', he said, jubilantly screwing up the next page of notes and tossing it aside, 'no one cares what it costs. Who ever saw a profit and loss account for St. Paul's?' He cited how the Mini made a loss and quoted the film director Billy Wilder: 'No one ever says “I have to see that movie, I heard it came in under budget.”' His basic point was that we should be shackled less by the cost of a process and follow our creative intuitions. As Simon Woodroffe said in his talk, accountants are often overly cautious entrepreneurs - the figures always argue against. 

Making things, Bayley argued, allows you to 'intuit from first principles the relationship between form and function, between effort and reward.' Furthermore, manufacturing hierarchies are good for society: they teach respect and give people a sense of worth. And this is a matter of national pride, too. 'It is one of the great unanswered questions in history. How did a culture like ours in Britain, which invented the idea of industrial mass-production and consumer products – how did we ever give it up?' (That we have given it up can be disputed – we are still a net exporter and the sixth largest manufacturer in the world, see BBC account. Still, we are primarily a service-based economy.)

Bayley makes a powerful point, without pretending to know all of the answers. He admits that he can be inconsistent, yet he knows that what he has to say is worth listening to. His point about cost reminds me of William Blake's view of time. Blake argued that the division of time into equal linear segments was a construct of the industrial revolution. The hour was treated as a productive unit. But that, said Blake, is a second-rate way of conceiving time; rather, time should be measured experientially – sometimes we feel it to be passing slowly, sometimes faster. So measurement and management distort time, too. No doubt Bayley would disavow this, but it struck me as a similar chain of thought.

Yet this rejection of the 'McKinsey attitude' is at odds with industrial principles. Mass-production, the loss of which Bayley laments, was driven forward by measurement and management and calculation of cost – by a Taylorist pre-occupation with efficiency. And efficiency, in turn, recommended outsourcing manufacture to countries with cheaper labour costs and less red tape. So there seems to be a contradiction in willing mass-production back, but resenting cost-driven approaches. Mass-production calls 'efficient' what produces the biggest profits, rather than what creates the most beautiful things or the happiest kind of community.

But it needn't be a contradiction. Industries might have different criteria for success than profit, such as the splendour of their output and the sense of community within a healthy workforce - rather like the Mini or the films that lost money. It sounds a bit like a 'community interest company', a category between a charity and a for-profit company. And we could have more small companies, like the Formula One manufacturing teams which Bayley insisted should be on the school syllabus.

The audience were persuaded that we should be more in touch with making, and the path was laid for the next talks: what would have to change to bring back that culture? 

Sam Bompas was like a mad and passionate magician, and demonstrated the happiness that comes with making in an electronic age. Britain has nothing to fear in the jelly stakes: we are top dog. Sam began the evening by passing around exquisite alcoholic jellies and rags to sniff. The former would not have looked out of place at Versailles, and one of them was in fact Henry VIII's favourite dish - so much so that he ordered it for his first and second course at a banquet. Sam and Harry Parr set the jelly company up in less than a week before approaching Borough Market, 'the zenith of our ambitions. They just turned round and said flat out "No, get lost, we don't want anything to do with your ridiculous jelly; who wants jelly anyway?" And that's when things really kicked off.''

Bompas & Parr realise all sorts of breathtaking projects.'We invited every architect to design whatever they wanted in jelly. We'd make them their heart's desire. It was a learning-curve, because then we were asked to make a bridge. Jelly doesn't make very good bridges'. But they don't stop at jelly: they have flooded the roof of Selfridges and made breathable G&T clouds, for example. I particularly admire the way that they have pursued their outlandish vision and turned it into a commercial venture which employs people.

Asad Raza came at making from a different angle. He is the producer for Tino Sehgal's 2012 exhibition in the Turbine Hall, and that exhibition will not involve any physical objects. Rather, it will consist of 'constructed situations'. In fact, Raza came directly from a workshop at the Tate Modern. He arrived in a taxi just in time and ambled towards the stage without discarding his coat or bag, which I had to whisk away from him. He invited members of the audience to workshops with the artist in the Tate Modern, which was a thrill.

His main observation was that we are very good at producing stuff, and this has reduced the value of an object when viewed out of context. The value of an object now lies in the thought-process behind it, in the fact that 'there was a brilliant combinatorial thought, or there was a brilliant move somehow made'. Raza used the example of polenta which he saw on the menu in an expensive restaurant. Polenta was originally a simple, peasant dish; here its value was in the novelty.

Asad Raza sees this as a development in art: in the past, the meaning 'went with the object', now it is context-dependent. He clarified his position to me after the talks: 'I don't think there is such a thing as the perfect object - to me a certain car makes sense in a certain context and not in others - and I think that at this moment in history obsessive attention to object production is a niche activity, not a vanguard activity relevant to the current problems of human societies.' 

Raza objects to the use of the word 'performance' with regard to Sehgal's exhibition. Performance is for the stage - the museum space is different. The museum is a relatively new medium (only a few hundred years old). It therefore has greater potential for involving an audience. The museum space's flexibility brings the audience to contemplation of their own position.

Read more about the Tate Modern exhibition here.