artesanía en usa

El nuevo diseño artesanal en el mundo.

61

9
El Nuevo Diseño
Artesanal en
el Mundo
9.1 El Nuevo Artesanado en USA.
Al día de hoy el diseño estadounidense no es muy popular, ¿cómo es posible que un país
tan grande no haya sabido generar su propio potencial creativo?.
La respuesta puede ser el hecho de que se busca generalmente en los productos
estadounidenses el modelo industrialadoptado por los Estados Unidos, modelo donde los
productos son portadores de un valor eminentemente comercial. Los pioneros del diseño
industrial del período comprendido entre las dos guerras mundiales crearon una base sólida
que sin embargo que se ha ido diluyendo con el styling, “[…]. There are, of course, many
differences between styling and engineering.” “[…] designer as stylist and in partby the
advertiser. Both the stylist and the advertiser work to increase the general metaphor of a
product’s invincibility and inherent goodness. […].”1 (Existen muchas diferencias entre el

1

Dormer, Peter: The meanings of modern design, Thames & Hudson, London, 1991, pp. 13 a 32.
DESIGNING STYLE. The Relationship between Style and Engineering. “With new material have come new freedom forstylists.
[…], innovative work in what might be called ‘narrative’ design is emerging from the United States. The architects Michael
Graves and Robert Venturi have been most influential in laying down a groundwork for this style and among the new generation
to thrive in the atmosphere of expressiveness are the graduates of the Crankbook school of product semantics.
The idea of ‘narrative’ indesign requires closer investigation. American ‘popular’ taste of the early 1950s, as revealed by the
domestic design of the period, produces parallels with developments in the late 1980s. (It is of interest that Helen Drutt, gallery
owner, collector and critic, maintains that the much-lauded Memphis style was an intellectual high jacking of American 1950s
home style). There is a house inPhiladelphia with a collection of 1950s artifacts that would have made Andy Warhol blench with
envy. Cookie jars, TV lamps, curtains, table cloths, pinafores, clocks, chairs, lunch boxes and condiment sets have been
gathered together in an unassuming row house by two astute collectors. All the objects are figurative, colorful, mass produced
and cheap. We see clocks in the form of TVs or teapots, aradio in the form of a Firestone sparking plug, TV lamps in the form of
animals and ballet dancers, or even constructed as Virgin Mary grottos. There are condiment sets in which the salt is a nude

62

El nuevo diseño artesanal en el mundo.

Figura 4. Neo-artesanado SteveKoki, Piazza Collection, Estados Unidos 1993.

recumbent woman and the pepper is a nude recumbent man. Every flatsurface, whether kitchen table (plastic top and chromed
legs) or side of a paper napkin dispenser is embellished with pattern, sometimes abstract but more often of figures or plants or
animals. There is a continuous demonstration of the art of making one object suggest another.
The narrative is sometimes very specific -a lunch box done up like a loaf of bread- but often more general. Much of thedecoration of the textiles, for example, is quasi-ethnic and depicts happy Mexicans, or happy black mamas, or happy non-whites
of some sort. There are references to film and TV characters. The context of these little narrations is much bigger narration:
advertising and the substructures upon which advertising is built, from cinema and films to TV and radio, all of which provided
further images thatare reflected in the designs. The TV lamps of the period are fascinating in that (a) the television was the
focal point of the room, therefore the TV lamp was an artifact of great importance; and (b) the lamp was an opportunity for a
utilitarian work of domestic art in which the exotic, the decorative and quite often, the religious were brought together.
Consequently, it presented a very...