MAKING: Then and Now
Hancock Shaker Village
Gregory Crewdson
Don Gummer
Stephen Hannock
Jenny Holzer
Maya Lin
David Teeple
Forward to the catalogue
“Embracing the daily experience was fundamental to the Shaker’s way of life. Central to this understanding was the knowledge of craft; the act of making with remarkable design and skill. MAKING: Then and Now is a wonderful celebration of this understanding.”
Twenty-five Cuboid Stack
Sixteen Cuboid Float
“This project was an opportunity to activate and bring to the surface a foundational aspect of a remarkable and historic social experiment.”
The Shakers socio-hydrological system was sophisticated and incorporated a shovel dug reservoir above the village, with a series of below ground channels to supply the needs of the village below: direct drive water power for a machine shop and the laundry; nourishment for the gardens and livestock as well as the community of inhabitants. Without their inventive water system, the village would not have thrived as it did for 170 years.
By symbolically reversing the direction of the waters movement by building a structure composed of glass, water and aluminum that emulated the reservoir, and by placing another installation on the surface of the reservoir that spoke to the system of channels, I proposed a mirroring of it’s history, nodding to the past, embracing the present and perhaps finding equanimity in the future.
The placement of the two elements in opposition initiated a proposition that asked the viewer to look below the surface to find what might lie at the essence of the community. What were it’s driving forces: did the communities formal and rigid social structure allow for a sustainable relationship to nature and each other; were personal freedoms eroded or amplified by the de-emphasis of the individuals ego and focus on the greater community; were there any anthropogenic hazards initiated by the controlling of resources and if so might there have been controls in place to mitigate any such hazards?
How did the elemental and geometric simplicity of the structures speak to the traditional and utilitarian architecture of the community? Was it in opposition to the community, or potentially a futuristic glimpse and reflection backwards?
On one occasion there were two viewers that offered their impressions of the installation: one described the grouping of tanks in the village as a solar collecting apparatus or some other functional or utilitarian device, connected underground to the village infrastructure; the other playfully imagined the tanks as a grouping of pods, placed to incubate alien life forms who were there to re-occupy the village.
Was this a subconscious articulation that the shaker experiment was arcane or at best foreign to the viewer? These radically oppositional subjective narratives articulated a mysterious quality of the installation, but also may have revealed a failure of the work to integrate with the historicity of the location.
Yet the formal dialogue of the square grid of tanks to the nearby round stone barn was of primary centrality to the work, regardless of the differences in function and material choices.