Paige Van Doren

Contemporary Jewelry in Perspective

Seminar Notes
09/14/2022

Essay 1: Jewelry in the Expanded Field…

By Monica Gaspar

“These practitioners don’t stay only within academic communities but also use their potential to
reach new audiences, setting up their studios and businesses that challenge the way jewelry is
traditionally communicated and displayed. Internet platforms and social networks are having an
unprecedented impact on the debate culture around contemporary jewelry.” (Gaspar, 232)

As discussed in seminar, Instagram is a complex space. It can be a tool to show work or to find
research avenues. It is also a space rife with copy cats and pitfalls. However, what is perhaps a
more valuable dialogue to engage in than whether or not instagram is truly a legitimate source is
to tease out how work actually operates in that sphere. The work, an object of some kind,
generally three-dimensional, is first flattened into an image, perhaps taken on a proper DSLR,
which is then reformatted for a mobile device. It is then mediated by the instagram format, a
small square and it is thrown into a feed and will be viewed by x amount of people for likely no
more than 3-5 seconds and then gets scrolled right past. The image can be recontextualized
through reposting, you can determine the value of the image based on who deems it worthy of
reposting on their own feed… The work is no longer just an object or just a piece of jewelry, it is
a piece of social capital. What does this DO to the work?

There is something sort of DIY about putting images of work on instagram. Showing work in
galleries or museums is exclusive, challenging, and often inaccessible. Instagram is a space
where you can circumvent the system and disseminate what you have made quickly and easily.

Essay 2: Thinking Process…

By Helen Carnac

“Contemporary jewelry is mostly made to be displayed in exhibitions, photographed, and written

about, collected and put into museum vitrines--watched but not worn.” (Carnac, 235)

I make work that hinges upon its wearability or explicit relationship to the body. However, my
work is hardly wearable. It is unwieldy, heavy, and burdensome to wear. It is typically only ever
looked at rather than worn. Is the relationship to the body more of a poetic gesture rather than a
practiced reality? I am curious about how to determine when the work needs to be jewelry or
what other ways the body can have a presence in the work? How do we look at something and
know that it is wearable? How is jewelry defined?

“I hope we’ll see a return to provocative acts in jewelry making that can maintain a social, real-
life, and outward facing view-- that remind us of the importance of wearing jewelry. If we can
remember what’s important while discarding what’s not, we may see something more connected
to life, place, and people than the contemporary jewelry we have come to know.”
(Carnac, 238)

I am not convinced that this is a fair assessment. While there are certainly contemporary
jewelers whose work is self-reflexive or is so embedded in the jewelry conversation that the
work is inaccessible to anyone outside of that discourse, that is not the field at large. I think
about Melanie Bilenker’s work, intimate moments of the everyday. The work is smart,
accessible, and masterfully crafted. Or MJ Tyson and her collecting and reimagining of found
objects. Her piece Pray For Us feels particularly relevant. The “importance of wearing jewelry”
as Carnac discusses it is relational. Why must contemporary jewelry adhere to that format? Isn’t
complicating the importance of jewelry compelling? Why deduce it down to something so
simple?

Essay 3: The Political Challenge to Contemporary Jewelry

By Kevin Murray

The text suggests a tension between galvanizing action and raising questions in the realm of
political art work. An overwhelming amount of work poses questions but does not incite action.
What is achieved through this questioning? Is Bruce Metcalf right in his declaration that political
artwork is meritless and futile? Can political work in the contemporary jewelry field be effective?
What is it about jewelry that seemingly limits its operative ability when it comes to the political
sphere? Is the audience too narrow or insular? Who looks at the work? Where do they engage
with it? What does that engagement do for the viewer/wearer? Can an institutional space like a
museum or gallery really lend itself to effective political statements?