Chair / 19th ct., EMZ 20312
WHO MADE THE FURNITURE?
Aleksandra Muraj (Muraj 1998: 83), speaking of the handicraft skills of
the Croatian peasantry at the end of the 19th and in the early 20th century,
pointed out the differences in the manner of producing objects and
their purposes in the light of the way in which the producers obtained
their technological knowledge, the tools they possessed and the distribution
of the products. While the fine craft in the city predicated a
learned skill, an individual commercial and creative purpose, the peasant
craft primarily aimed at the satisfaction of private requirements.
Almost all men could make the simplest kinds of furniture for sitting
on, while the making of for example, chests or chairs with backs,
required greater skill. Levi-Strauss in Science of the concrete (Lévi-
Strauss 1962: 11) differentiates the self-taught producer, who knows
how to make everything with his or her own hands, calling this person
a bricoleur, from the village producer who has learned his trade;
Lévi-Strauss thinks that in a rural community a bricoleur cannot
subsist by himself, but depends on the help of other members of the
community and the transfer of knowledge to the new generations
(Lévi-Strauss 1962: 13). They did not consider pieces of furniture “consumables”
but kept them and handed them down, giving them particular
importance and value. The long-lasting making, from finding
the right wood in its natural condition to its shaping and decoration,
was imbued with the particular knowledge and skill of the individual.
Lévi-Strauss opines that the individual bricoleur puts a creative poetry
into every one of his works, based on the fact that through the medium
of the object, he invests his personality, through the creative selection
and the life environment with its limited capacities, concluding that the
bricoleur leaves a personal trace of himself on every object (Lévi-Strauss
1962: 14)
