When True Simplicity is Gained
A Shaker notebook.
One of the most important questions in artistic practice concerns the importance placed on one’s commitment to one’s convictions, not only in their work but in all aspects of their lives. This relationship is sometimes distorted, misunderstood and exploited, because in examining an artist’s life one can find plenty of contradictions and weaknesses, and often judgment can be misplaced. But at any rate, and particularly in times of great uncertainty just as the one we are currently living, I have been drawn to the cases of those —not necessarily artists— who operated not only with a firm sense of what they needed to do but how their creative actions perfectly aligned with their morals, their ethics, and overall worldview.
I thought about this last week when visiting a remarkable exhibition at the Folk Art Museum in New York, titled Anything But Simple: Gift Drawings and the Shaker Aesthetic. which in turn reminded me of how two decades ago I was intensely drawn to the Shakers.
The period after 9/11 was marked by the rise of the Bush doctrine, a kind of national paranoia billed as “The War on Terror”. The consequences of the disastrous American incursion into Iraq resulted in the further erosion of trust of the U.S. in the global stage, loss of credibility of its diplomacy, and a further rise of anti-Americanism. So, the early aughts marked the first time when I just did not recognize the country I was living in, or rather, became aware of my own obliviousness regarding some of its enduring contradictions. To paraphrase Robert Frost, I had realized that America was hard to see, and I needed to get a better understanding of the cultural and political roots of the United States.
Then, when I was in the process of researching utopian and pacifist thought in American history, I thought of a melody in Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring”, composed at a time when many composers in the first half of the 20th century were turning to the folk traditions of their respective countries in order to produce a modern language with an autochthonous aesthetic DNA (such as Stravinsky had done with Russia, Béla Bartók in Hungary, and Carlos Chávez in Mexico). What Copland drew from in composing “Appalachian Spring”, was “Simple Gifts”, a popular Shaker song that I had learned while taking singing lessons at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago in the 90s:
'Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be fair,
'Tis the gift to wake and breathe the morning air.
To walk every day in the path we choose.
'Tis the gift that we pray we never, never lose.
When true simplicity is gained
To bow and to bend we shan’t be ashamed
To turn, turn will be our delight
‘Till by turning, turning we come round right.
The United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing emerged as a Christian sect in Manchester, England in the 18th century, which later fled from persecution and in 1774, two years before the Revolutionary War, established themselves in New York, at a site known as Niskayuna or Watervliet, close to today’s city of Albany. It was the first religion founded by a woman, Mother Ann Lee.
All I knew about the Shakers during that time, like most people, was of the existence of the chairs, furniture and oval boxes inspired in their aesthetic. As I decided to take a look at Shaker songs and dances, I started to understand not only their religious ideas, but also the way in which the objects, drawings, dances and songs they produced conformed to a unified worldview.
What I later learned about the Shakers was, first, how their social views were so progressive in so many respects (they were pacifists, abolitionists, and practiced gender equality in ways that were unthinkable in the 19th century). In addition, and contrast to other religious groups, they did not seek to actively convert others (the people “of the world”) or force them to adapt to their ideas, and also did not shun technology (as for example the Amish did). On the contrary, many Shaker inventions made it to our modern world, such as an early version of the washing machine, seed packaging, the flat broom, a modern version of the clothespin, and many other items that we still use at home today. Shaker schools were also highly regarded across rural communities, and many non-Shaker children attended them.
But primarily, I was interested in how the key principles of their faith (for example, simplicity and usefulness, to name two) led them to produce extraordinary objects that would serve as inspiration for 20th century design and contemporary art (such as minimalism; Donald Judd owned various Shaker objects and furniture items, some of which are still at the Judd Foundation in SoHo, and Dan Graham famously referenced the Shakers in his video “Rock my Religion”). “Do your work as though you were going to die tomorrow and yet as if you had a hundred years to live” was Mother Ann’s precept, passed down the various generations of Shakers.
I spent most of 2002 and 2003 making works that reflected on the history and cultural legacy of the Shakers, including the first Shaker community, in Albany (which resulted, among other things, in a documentary that to this day is used as an interpretive tool at that historic site).
Then my attention turned to the one active Shaker community left, in Maine, constituted by only four members (at the time comprised by Sisters Frances and June and Brothers Arnold and Wayne). In the summer of 1996, the curator France Morin launched her first project of The Quiet in the Land (long-term artist-generated projects based in their deep interaction with specific communities and sites) that consisted in bringing 10 contemporary artists to live with the Shakers, which included Janine Antoni, Mona Hatoum, Wolfgang Tillmans, Nari Ward and others— probably one of the most important experimental projects of the 90s and a clear precursor to ideas around social practice that would emerge the following decade.
I emailed the Shakers at Sabbathday Lake sometime in 2002 (they had a collective AOL account). I requested an interview with Sister Frances Carr, the elder of the group and the last living Shaker to sign the Shaker covenant (a formal agreement tying individuals to the Shaker faith) before it was closed in the 1960s and when Shaker leadership decided to stop accepting new members; the Sabbathday Lake Community in Maine refused to follow the dictum and continued admitting new converts, which is likely it was the last one to survive.
The Shakers wrote back to me in peculiar, old-fashioned English language. They suggested that I could come to see them sometime in the early spring, “after the grip of winter” had subsided.
The only time when people “of the world” are allowed to visit the Shakers was on Sundays at the meeting house for afternoon meetings, a traditional practice followed with the intention to attract new converts. I was invited to attend the Sunday meeting at Sabbathday Lake sometime in early April of 2003. The meeting, which had a similar character to Quaker meetings, attracted a few neighbors and supporters of the Shakers, as well as a few enthusiasts. We sang a number of Shaker songs (which was enjoyable to me, as I had learned several of them). I was invited to noon “supper”, which as a simple meal in the Shaker kitchen. While I interviewed sister Frances, Brother Arnold sat by our side, which was customary. Shakers do not allow members of to be alone with people from the opposite sex — and Shaker tradition maintained a strict division between sexes, to the point that there were designated entrance and exit doors for both men and women in meeting houses and dwellings.
One of the things about the Shakers that have stayed with me over the years was how the intentional making, fueled by faith, made lasting and compelling objects, very much in the way that artworks are made. I asked Sister Frances about the commercial industry of Shaker items (furniture, boxes, cabinets, and other “Shaker-style” fixtures that are available everywhere). Sister Frances had to parse her words carefully, acknowledging that they had many non-Shaker friends who made these products inspired in the style and the overall simplicity of design, but added that, as far as those commercial objects were concern, there was “no religion in them”, which accounted to how they did not have the same beauty or resilience as the original things. “I mean”, she told me: “how does a bowl and a shovel and a table last all these years? Before they were place in a museum they were used daily, [and their durability] is because for the people who made them their religion was truly in their work. ‘Hands to work and hearts to God’ is the Shaker motto, and I think these were really put into effect.”
The other aspect of the Shakers that I always found remarkable was their stoicism and determination in the face of the almost certain extinction of their religion. Sister Frances passed away in 2017, and brother Wayne left the faith after becoming romantically involved with a female journalist who had come to interview the Shakers. The last two Shakers left are brother Arnold Hadd, 67, and sister June Carpenter, 86. Since the time I met the Shakers, it was clear that Brother Arnold played the multiple roles of historian, elder, spokesman, housekeeper and overall manager of the upkeep of the many buildings in the Sabbathday Lake Shaker complex, and it now appears to be likely that he will be the last living Shaker. Nevertheless, as he mentioned in a recent interview, “I was given an intuition 30 years ago: the work is going on. You have to hold on, and you have to stay focused, and they will come.”
The famous Shaker gift drawings —like those on view currently at the Folk Art Museum— stemmed mostly from a period in the Shaker communities known as The Era of Manifestations, a period comprised between 1837 and 1850 where Shakers —many of them younger women— were visited by visions and what they called “gifts of the spirit” and were recorded through songs and mostly through drawings that documented those experiences. Shunning anything that would draw attention to a single person, the Shakers never saw art as something to be exhibited (and they had rules that forbid the framing of drawings) or made for their own sake, but they existed as records of those spiritual experiences and many times they were given not as commodities, but as spiritual messages for specific individuals.
Being an unbelieving heathen, I nonetheless and sporadically (especially during dark times, when I question myself about the purpose of making art in the present moment) go back to thinking about the Shaker with their unique combination of sense of collective self, purpose, and the way in which the work process is in it of itself a form of fulfillment. The work goes on, as brother Arnold said.