ART REVIEW : Shakers’ Life of Simplicity Explored

The Shakers, celibate men and women who lived separate-but-equal lives and shrewdly marketed their expertise to the outside world, were probably America’s best-known communal society.

Now reduced to a handful of aged members, the Quaker sect (derisively named for the shaking frenzies of its worship meetings) attracted about 6,000 followers in the East and Midwest in the mid-19th Century. The World--as they called everyone outside their strict communities--best remembers them as the folks who turned out plain wooden boxes and unadorned pieces of furniture so strikingly “modern” in their simplicity.

The boxes and a few pieces of furniture surface once again in “Community Industries of the Shakers,” an exhibit at the Fullerton Museum Center through July 3, together with a sampling of workaday implements and products that allowed each community to be a nearly self-sufficient entity.

Assembled by the New York State Museum in cooperation with the Shaker Heritage Society, this is a show-and-tell display that doesn’t do enough telling. Tantalizing facts about the sect remain unexplored, and even the workings of the odd-looking gadgets on view are unexplained. In a lithograph of rows of men and women extending their arms like paws as they perform a charismatic dance, a black man is clearly visible. Was he unique? The exhibition doesn’t let on.

A photograph from about 1870 of the first American Shaker community in Watervliet, N.Y., shows a group of three men and nine women. The women wear the white caps and big white bibs prescribed as appropriately modest dress. One woman holds a bunch of small flowers, another holds a jam pot and still another has rather touchingly stretched out her hand to the thigh of the woman next to her.

What was it like to be a “sister” living apart from the world but (unlike a nun, say) in close daily proximity to a tiny group of men with whom one was forbidden to become intimate? The exhibit is mute on that subject.

Then there is the separate-but-equal aspect. A wall label says that each “brother” was assigned a “sister” who washed and mended his clothing. Were the men considered unfit for such tasks? Did they perform reciprocal deeds for their “sisters”? The viewer hasn’t a clue.

One wonders if any Shakers left diaries or wrote essays about their lives. But maybe they were too busy doing practical things.

Everyone worked in a Shaker “society” (their word for each of the separate communities), even the children. A photograph shows young boys in straw hats squinting into the sun while they rest from picking the particular varieties of herbs assigned to each of them.

The Shakers believed in rotation of labor, so followers generally pursued a series of occupations during their lives. The 20-minute movie accompanying the exhibit explains that one Shaker man worked successively as a blacksmith, tinsmith, printer and editor, beekeeper, stonecutter, dentist, cabinetmaker, tailor and teacher. (Dentistry was presumably still in its infant stages at the time!)

Believers in the virtues of honesty, thrift, order and cleanliness, as well as in the cooperative handling of all their enterprises, the Shakers kept afloat by means of various cannily chosen industries.

Access to a limited group of raw materials (either home-grown or imported from the World) gave them the basis of their economic future: processing, packaging, labeling and selling dried sweet corn and apples, medicinal herbs, tonics and even wine and liquor (which they drank “in moderation”). The women also turned out fancier versions of the bonnets and capes they made for themselves.

The tonics, with their aura of hucksterism and spurious claims, come as a bit of a surprise from this rigorously devout group. A “hair restorer” packaged with the claim that “It is not a dye” promised to return gray hair “to its natural color, beauty and softness.” The tag line, wrestling valiantly with sterner virtue, reads, “Gray hair may be Honorable but the Natural Color is Preferable.”

As they sought out increasingly efficient ways to work, the Shakers claimed inventions ranging from clothespins, flat brooms and the circular saw blade (actually developed in Europe more than a century earlier) to the notion of selling seeds in individual packets.

Confusingly, a wall label says that the Shakers didn’t believe in patenting their inventions, yet the catalogue reprints an 1875 patent drawing of a corn cutter invented by one Brother William J. Potter.

On a purely visual level, most of the Shaker implements are as anonymous and “basic” as the illustrations that accompany dictionary definitions. It might have been helpful to contrast such items with their fancier “Worldly” cousins to point up just how severely functional these items were during the period of their use.

A few of the tools and products are especially pleasing to the eye, such as the seed packet designs and the rake-sized, three-tined barley fork fashioned almost entirely from a single piece of wood. But confronted with an item as charming and mysterious as a wooden “butter worker” that resembles a folded parasol lying on a bread board, the curious viewer is annoyed not to find an explanation of how it worked.

Very different in appearance--so ornate, in fact that they are very difficult to read--are the Shakers’ “spirit drawings,” handwritten poems with dots of ink garnishing the letters and floral borders encircling the texts. Why, one wonders, do these private creations depart from the sect’s belief in “the gift to be simple”?

The decline of the Quakers is attributed variously to the inroads of mass production in the World and the proliferation of orphanages established by charitable groups--a serious problem for a non-propagating sect whose future depended on turning parentless children into “brothers” and “sisters.” Absent in the exhibit, however, is a sense of what this slow erosion of strength meant to the surviving members.

It is also a pity that an exhibit ultimately dedicated to the triumph of “form following function,” as the 20th-Century catch-phrase has it, is so clumsily designed. The piped-in Shaker tunes add a welcome measure of warmth and atmosphere, but the unimaginative use of signs within the show and the homely catalogue that accompanies it fall short of the simple, utilitarian comeliness of the Shakers’ own products.

“Community Industries of the Shakers,” at the Fullerton Museum Center, 301 N. Pomona, continues through July 3. Hours are 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday; 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursday and Friday. Admission is $2. Information: (714) 738-6545.