ART REVIEW : A REVERENT SIMPLICITY IN SHAKER CREATIONS

The Shakers never set out to be artists. They wanted to live simple, reverent lives away from “the world” in communes established from Maine to Kentucky in the mid-19th Century.

At its height about 1840, the community numbered 5,000 members in 18 large “families” of men, women and children who dwelt together and were dedicated to hard work and celibacy. Founded by an Englishwoman named Anne Lee, the Shaker movement--the name comes from a frenzied dance performed at religious services--was the most successful of various American Utopian ventures.

They would probably be surprised to find their Spartan furniture and artifacts displayed in a sophisticated museum, under the scrutiny of visitors whose eyes twinkle with the hectic glitter of shopping fever (“. . . this stuff would look great in the summer house on the Cape”). Nonetheless, there it all is, exposed to general ogling at the Whitney Museum of American Art (to Aug. 31).

Surprised but not altogether displeased. The Shakers clearly took pride in the utility of precise craftsmanship, exercising pristine care in the proportions of their elegant ladder-back chairs, dignified cupboards, oval boxes and all manner of utensils from wheelbarrows to drafting tools. Many objects were produced for sale to “the world,” and their commercial success for a time contributed to Shaker prosperity. That it was a limited success finds testament in some pretty scathing contemporary reaction. Charles Dickens found their dwellings as barren as English factories. Nathaniel Hawthorne said their workmanship was “so neat that it was a pain and a constraint to look at it.” Humorist Artemus Ward evaluated Shaker fashions by describing one sister as “last year’s bean pole, stuck in a long meal bag.”

Gallant fellow.

Well, the Shakers would have taken it for praise. Their attitude to the practical aspect of life was summed up in their dictum, “Set not your hearts upon worldly objects, but let this be your labor, to keep a spiritual sense.”

They did that with unsettling accuracy. What really surprises about Shaker design is that it often has an unintended emotive edge we expect to find only in the best fine art or in the magic of tribal art. That quality also makes viewing it vaguely embarrassing in the same way one is sometimes slightly chagrined in looking at African ritual objects. You sense this material has been unceremoniously wrenched from its real context and plopped down for vulgar scrutiny like some miserable exotic dragooned into a sideshow.

The compensation we can offer this work for nosing into its privacy is breathless appreciation for emotive vectors even its makers may have sensed imperfectly.

Shaker furniture has an expressive serenity and perfection usually reserved to a metaphysical painter like Giorgio Morandi. Smaller objects like little boxes of spools have the innocent magic of a Joseph Cornell. The use of a table swift (for winding thread) is obscure to modern viewers, so it takes on some of the Dadaist wit of a Duchamp. The way these objects displace space sets one thinking of California light-and-space artists like Irwin and Turrell and their capacity for lending spiritual presence to emptiness.

Maybe the worst disservice one can do this work is to equate one’s feelings around it with the malaise one senses on entering certain dustless, Draconian modern households where neatness and good design equate with fastidious nervous tension.

There are barely any Shakers left. Social factors contributed greatly to their demise, but one cannot escape the feeling that it was built into their own celibate habits. The logic of their beliefs suggests that if everyone saw the light and joined up, the human species would vanish in one generation. That would presumably be a good thing, as we would all be spirits residing in a better world. That willingness to joyfully let this world go is somehow built into Shaker design. A worldly person would be less that candid if he did not admit that there is something subtly unsettling about its degree of spiritual self-confidence.

It gets beyond art.