One day in the fall of 2006 I held the door for a
distinguished looking woman who was exiting El Pescador Fish Market in La Jolla
with a bag under each arm. As she thanked me for holding the door, I recognized
her as Martha Longenecker from a small photo of Martha I had seen in a catalog
of the Mingei Museum’s collection of artifacts. I rushed after her, introduced
myself, and asked if she was indeed Martha Longenecker. She smiled, and said
that she was. I quickly explained to her that I was researching a design
paradigm in surfboards; that I had read the Unknown Craftsman, and that I felt
that these surfboards were a compelling example of beauty and use in the
context of Yanagi’s text. Martha was intrigued, and invited me to visit her at
her home to further discuss surfboards and surfing in the context of mingei.
A few weeks later
I went to Martha’s house. Like most non-surfers (and many surfers, for that
matter) she had some preconceptions about surfboards. ‘Aren’t they all made
from molds out of plastic these days?” she asked. I explained that some were
indeed made entirely of petro-chemicals, assembled in factories with no
handcraftsmanship involved, wrapped in cellophane with garish product labels,
and then sold cheaply on the floors of big box stores as “seasonal” items
during the spring and summer months. Most, however, were still more or less
hand shaped, hand laminated, and hand finished, though they too were made
mostly from petro-chemical materials, and the blanks were usually 80% pre-shaped
by a machine. But regardless of the materials used, as a production item of
considerable volume made to meet a global demand, a remarkable amount of
handcraftsmanship still goes into in the large scale manufacturing of
surfboards. In fact, aside from the machined pre-shapes, the process of hand
finishing a blank of surfboard foam and then laminating the finished design
with resin and fiberglass had changed little for over fifty years.
In the Unknown Craftsman, Yanagi divided crafts into
three broad categories:
folk crafts, artist crafts, and industrial crafts. Folk
crafts are pure mingei, anonymous objects hand made to be used in daily life.
The alaias in the Bishop are examples of folk craft. Artist crafts are
consciously made and signed, with considerable value placed on the cache’
associated with the individual craftsperson. A hand shaped, custom surfboard
made by a famous shaper is an example of an artist craft. Industrial crafts are
made under the industrial system by mechanical means. The “seasonal” boards
sold at the big box stores are an example of industrial crafts. To a lesser
extent, so are the branded, high volume production boards made under the
“labels” of renowned “artist-craftsman” shapers. Discussing these divisions
with Martha, it was clear that most surfboards built today were a blend of
artist craft and industrial craft, to a greater or lesser degree.
But the boards I was inspired to share with Martha didn’t
come from a time or place of high volume production. In fact, many of them
qualified as pure folk craft. Others were artist craft, but tempered heavily
with the anonymous character of mingei due to the restraint, humility, and
aesthetics projected by the people who made them. Those who made these boards,
whether consciously or unconsciously, created their work in the true spirit of
mingei. The fish kneeboard designs of Steve Lis, built in the garages of Point
Loma and Ocean Beach during the late sixties, inspired me to take the first steps
on a journey that had led me to the alaias in the Bishop Museum, and now to
Martha Longenecker’s living room. Lis’s fish was a radical, progressive
departure from the conventional board design school of its time. And yet, it
revealed an ancestral path leading to much older designs, particularly the
paipo boards of Hawaii, the hydrodynamic planing hulls of Bob Simmons, and
finally to the traditional alaia boards of Hawaii.
These four types of surf craft are the major links in the
design chain I had been following into the past. All of them were examples of
mingei, hand made, unsigned, functional designs used for surfing. Steve Lis
once told me that ‘The real history of surfing was never on film, and it was
never in a magazine. It was just the guys on the beaches making boards, just
going and doing it.” A fraternity of
unknown craftsmen, building boards with their hands for themselves and their
friends to ride. I brought two boards to Martha’s house that day, a Steve Lis
fish, and a Simmons planing hull.
I showed them to Martha. I didn’t need to explain anything;
she saw them and understood. The boards spoke for themselves of functional
simplicity, of beauty and use, of shibui. As time went by I lost touch with
Martha. A year or so passed, and then late one night my phone rang. It was
Martha, she was in New York City. She told me she had been thinking about
surfboards and surfing, and that she now saw them as one of the most compelling
examples of the mingei philosophy in the realm of handcraftsmanship. ‘It really
is such a beautiful thing, such a powerful example of craft.”
Martha’s words that night strengthened and affirmed my
belief that Yanagi’s philosophy was a vital means of appreciating and
understanding surfboard craft and design. Ultimately, it was Yanagi and his
close friend, Shoji Hamada, who had inspired Martha directly to fulfill her own
quest, which was bringing mingei to America. She had succeeded in her mission
by founding a museum that collects,
conserves and exhibits arts of daily use – by anonymous craftsmen of ancient
times, from traditional cultures of past and present and by historical and
contemporary designers. Her quest had united with Yanagi’s in Japan 60 years
ago, and theirs in turn had intersected with my own when I found the Unknown Craftsman
in the bookstore of her museum. After reading the Unknown Craftsman, I never
saw surfboards the same way again. Now, like me, Martha couldn't either.
Yanagi’s words had taught us both how to see.
