From the Exhibition:
A
View from the Jeweler’s Bench: Ancient Treasures, Contemporary Statements
The
jeweler’s bench adheres to a simple design scheme. It is a wooden structure
approximately four feet long, two feet wide, and three feet high, somewhat
taller than your average office desk. A few more details round off this
picture. A semicircular shape is cut into the center of the worktop along its front-facing
edge. A built-in tray, or sling, sits just above the jeweler’s lap to catch
metal filings. Drawers on either side of the bench are used to organize the
files, punches, drill bits, and saw blades, to name a few types of common tools
that a maker needs to have within easy reach.
As a furniture form, this bench seems pretty straightforward.
Basically, it’s a compact working surface with storage compartments, yet it’s arguably
lacking in glamour and excitement as an object in and of itself. So why would a
curator choose this commonplace, utilitarian piece of furniture as the
narrative framework for an exhibition that prompts new perceptions about
jewelry through works by contemporary artists and jewelry-making methods? What
is compelling about the view from a jeweler’s bench?
A cognitive shift happens when we swap out prepositions. An
artisan doesn’t just sit down at this
bench. The hemisphere cut into its worktop, in fact, brings the body of the
artisan into the bench. This intimate
positioning of the body and bench can be seen in the mid-eighteenth-century
plate of the jeweler’s workshop from Diderot’s Encyclopédie
(fig. 1).
Let’s
consider how this relationship between
body and bench plays out in the context of the jewelry-making process. The
artisan, for example, sits down on a wheeled stool and pushes herself into
position within the bench’s curve. The bench peg, a V-shaped wooden piece that
is clamped to the edge of the worktop, is directly in front of her, at chest
level. She reaches into a drawer by
her side and pulls out a jeweler’s saw frame, an elongated C-shaped metal tool
with a wooden handle. She also extracts a saw blade from a little bundle of
them; it is just over five inches long and as slender as a stalk of grass. She
places the end of the handle against her breastbone for support as she leans
into the saw frame, whose top she has wedged into the V of the bench peg. This
action makes the saw’s metal frame flex, just a little, while she attaches the
blade by tightening screws at the top and bottom of the C, securing it in
place. She eases back her weight, and the saw frame becomes rigid again,
pulling the blade taut. As she holds the saw up to her ear, she tests the
tension of the blade by plucking it like a guitar string: it gives a strong,
ringing twang. (Too high a pitch means that the blade is too taut and will snap
within a few strokes; a wobbly sound means that it is too loose and will bend
under pressure and not cut the metal properly.) Satisfied, she places the piece
of gold that she has been working on onto the bench peg. Her fingers act like a
clamp, holding down the metal piece as she lets the saw in her other hand take
its first bite of gold with a firm, vertical downstroke.
The bench supports a system of activities, as well as the body of
knowledge that structures the techniques of jewelry making. Its function prompts
us to think of the bench as a form of technology, in terms of determining the ways
in which actions interconnect and affect the organization, procedures, and
mindset of the artisan. Materials also give sensual feedback as they are being
worked, such as conveying the feeling of sudden, sharp heat generated by the
friction of sawing the gold. Or how the sound of the steady rasp of metal being
sawed abruptly changes tone and speed as the blade approaches its terminus.
Each jewelry-making process, in fact, produces its own distinctive sound, like the
sharp staccato of a ball-peen hammer versus the thud of the rawhide mallet on
metal being shaped on an anvil. The rasp-and-click of the striker as it’s made
to spit out the sparks that ignite the hissing stream of propane released from
the soldering torch. The strange choking sound of hot metal being quenched. The
mechanical whirrings and buzzings of the flex shaft with its suite of little
rotary tools for grinding, drilling, and polishing. The rhythmic sound grating
of a file tearing up metal as it is pushed along a surface. The workshop
becomes a sensorium of experimental music.
Sasha Nixon MA’18, the curator of the exhibition, was right to
place the jeweler’s bench at the heart of her exhibition. It structures the
life cycle of jewelry making and the creative process—from what goes into the
workshop as raw material to be worked into diverse forms, to what comes out as
finished pieces. I think it is fair to say that every piece of jewelry you
encounter shares the bench as a central feature of its origin.
Donna Bilak, director of 12 Keys Consultancy & Design LLC, is a historian
of early modern science as well as a jeweler. An alumna of the Bard Graduate
Center’s doctoral program and a former fellow in Columbia University’s Making
and Knowing program, she taught “What is Jewelry History?” at BGC in spring
2019.
