Liesbeth den Besten
Ever since Deganit Stern Schocken became interested in value, she has shown a
preference for the everyday, and the ordinary, to elusive things that normally don’t
catch one’s attention. Stern Schocken works with chance finds from the street or the
market, with molds used in the jewelry industry, and with fragments of things—she
deliberately lets chance play a role and does not worry about pieces that might have
unclear, fragmented, and blurred forms. There is the feeling of a latent or hidden
design which might show itself as “not-designed.”
Her first series of jewelry (1979/1980), entitled Function as Expression—Expression
as Function, and Movement in Jewellery—Jewellery in Movement were inspired by the
functional and mechanical character of the brooch. As an architect by education,
she was captivated by the brooch—something that embodies function—and started
making silver brooches that were all about the mechanism of the pin. This fascination
could have easily resulted in modernist pin designs, but her jewelry was characterized
by an ambiguity because the actual pins were part of a coagulation of circumstantial
forms and materials referencing mechanics, toolboxes, and the joy of fixing things
and making them function. This jewelry, carefully designed and based on the idea of
function, did not only express modernism’s adagio of form follows function; instead,
form and function conspired, which resulted in jewelry with small and moveable
connections, screws, eyes, catches, hinges, wires, and other technical details. Playful
and appealing.
Deganit Stern Schocken made many drawings of pins during this period. Every
detail was studied, calculated, and engineered; no detail was there without a reason.
Already at that time, we can sense her interest in the ordinary, where each form,
thing, or fragment was valued equally by her and could end up as part of a piece of
jewelry.
Because of its casual and ambiguous character, her work does not fit in any
category. She doesn’t embrace a unified aesthetic (“style”) or a programmatic
approach by using a coherent set of materials, tools, and techniques. She finds
freedom in an unbounded exploration, without rules dictated from outside.
Deganit Stern Schocken is an architect who turned to jewelry, someone who
wants to unite the communal and the everyday of our environment with the private
and the special of jewelry. Although her jewelry is rather elusive, it has an indefinable
political load through her choice and combination of materials.
This raises questions about value: if there is no obvious artistic or material value
at stake and her jewelry evades conventional ideas about taste, what other values are
there to be found? And how do these relate to jewelry as objects with a special human
dynamic?
It is especially Deganit Stern Schocken’s later work that reminded me of Judy
Attfield’s inspirational ideas about wild things. Let me explain. In Wild Things:
The Material Culture of Everyday Life, Judy Attfield, a design historian and one of the
pioneers of material culture studies, introduced some interesting notions.1
Things,
according to Attfield, are all non-special, unobtrusive, and disordered objects that
form the totality of the material world and that we need in our daily life. There is a
difference with design. Design, she writes, is “‘things with attitude’—created with
a specific end in view—whether to fulfil a particular task, to make a statement, to
objectify moral values, or to express individual or group identity, to denote status or
demonstrate technological prowess, to exercise social control or to flaunt political
power.”2
Jewelry could well fit in this description, expressing identity, denoting status, and
making a statement. An inherent problem of design is its claim on “good design,” and
elitist taste, something that can also be applied to contemporary jewelry. Good design
has market value but is remote from the daily rituals and habits of people. Deganit
Stern Schocken’s jewelry does not fit in the category of “good and tasteful design.”
Instead we could call her work in Attfield’s way “undesign” or “wild.” But where
“undesign” presupposes a certain anti- mentality, “wild things” don’t fit anywhere;
they are undisciplined but important because they are common and, therefore, make
connections between people—like the small joints often used by Stern Schocken
which are originally part of a fisherman’s equipment. These wild things are her
material.
She picks everyday things as tokens of people’s connectedness and existence, as
indications of the society of which she is part. Bobbins, cake forms, badges, smashed
Arab cans found near a roadblock, memorial candles, jewelry molds, Arabic text plates,
flight safety instructions, the Star of David—they are all small stories; they talk about
the mass produced and the mass used, the daily things we need, and only notice
when they fail or are missing. Stern Schocken turns these wild things into jewelry by
minimal, well-thought intervention. Often, she attaches more than one chain to them,
inviting the user to decide how to wear it. The artist only offers possibilities for use.
Summarizing 40 years of jewelry making by Deganit Stern Schocken, we hit upon
a constantly changing identity in her work; it is not recognizable per se, nor should
it be because of its elusive character. Which makes us realize that human identity is
also constantly changing, it is fluid, it can adapt to a situation. Also Stern Schocken’s
jewelry is elusive, fluid, and human. The hand of the master, this so honored sign
of individual artistry and uniqueness, with which contemporary jewelry sought to
gain an entrance ticket to the art world, seems at first glance to be absent in Stern
Schocken’s work, yet it exists on a deeper intellectual level. Her jewelry is not meant
to glorify a God, or many gods, or to offer people an entrance ticket to the hereafter,
which was the meaning of jewelry in prehistoric and antiquity. Nor does her jewelry
protect against evil or disease, like jewelry was believed to do for millennia. Likewise
her jewelry is not meant to show the economic and social status of the wearer, to
impose, or show off. The value of her work is the objectification of humanity.
Value for Deganit Stern Schocken is found in the material world; she understands
how things create connections between people. Living in a country that is deeply
divided between two populations, these connections are her concern, interest, and
drive.
- See Judy Attfield, Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life (Oxford, UK: Berg, 2000).
- Ibid., p. 12.