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http://www.aeo nmagazine.co m/being-human/philip-ball-art-o f-repair/

Making good
Philip Ball

T he 16th-century Japanese tea master Sen no Riky is said to have ignored his hosts f ine Song Dynasty Chinese tea jar until the owner smashed it in despair at his indif f erence. Af ter the shards had been painstakingly reassembled by the mans f riends, Riky declared: Now, the piece is magnif icent. So it went in old Japan: when a treasured bowl f ell to the f loor, one didn't just sigh and reach f or the glue. T he old item was gone, but its f racture created the opportunity to make a new one. Smashed ceramics would be stuck back together with a strong adhesive made f rom lacquer and rice glue, the web of cracks emphasised with coloured lacquer. Sometimes the coating was mixed or sprinkled with powdered silver or gold and polished with silk so that the joins gleamed; a bowl or container repaired in this way would typically be valued more highly than the original. According to Christy Bartlett, a contemporary tea master based in San Francisco, it is this gap between the vanity of pristine appearance and the f ractured manif estation of mortal f ate which deepens its appeal. T he mended object is special precisely because it was worth mending. T he repair, like that of an old teddy bear, is a testament to the af f ection in which the object is held. A similar principle was at work in the boro garments of the Japanese peasant and artisan classes, stitched together f rom scraps of cloth at a time when nothing went to waste. In boro clothing, the mends become the object. Some garments, like the f abled ship of T heseus, might eventually be overwhelmed by patches; others were assembled f rom scraps at the outset. In todays trendy Tokyo markets, the technique risks becoming a mere ethnic pose. But boro was always an aesthetic idea as much as an imposition of hardship. Although quite dif f erent in their social status, boro and the aesthetic of repaired ceramics alike draw on the Japanese tradition of wabi-sabi, a world view that acknowledges transience and imperf ection. To mend a pot, one must accept whatever its f racture brings: one must aspire to mushin literally no mind a state of detachment sought by both artists and warriors. As Bartlett explains in her essay A Tearoom View of Mended Ceramics (2008): Accidental f ractures set in motion acts of repair that accept given circumstances and work within them to lead to an ultimately more prof ound appearance. Mended ceramics displayed their history the pattern of f racture disclosing the specif ic f orces and events that caused it. Indeed, earlier this year, a team of French physicists f rom the Aix-Marseille University demonstrated that the starlike cracks in broken glass plates capture a f orensic record of the mechanics of the impact. By reassembling the pieces, that moment is preserved. T he stories of how mended Japanese ceramics had been broken in the f irst place like that of the jar initially spurned by Riky would be perpetuated by constant retelling. In the tea ceremony these histories of the utensils provide raw materials f or the stylised conversational puzzles that the host sets his guests. For years, I have been patching clothes into a kind of makeshif t, barely competent boro. Trousers in particular get colonised by patches that start at the knees and at the holes poked by keys around my pockets, spreading steadily across thighs with increasing disregard f or colour matching. Only when patches need patches does the recycling bin beckon. At f irst I did this as a hangover f rom student privation. Later it became a token of ecological sensibility. T hose changing motives carried implications f or my appearance: the more def iantly visible the mend, the less it risks looking like mere penny-pinching. T hats a f oolishly self -conscious consideration, of course, which is why the Japanese aesthetic of repair is potentially so liberating: there is nothing def ensive about it.

T his f eels like rather a new idea in the pragmatic West. But things might be changing. Take, f or example, the all-purpose mending putty called Sugru, an adhesive silicone polymer that you can hand-mould to shape and then leave overnight to set into a tough, f lexible seal. As its website demonstrates, you can use Sugru f or all those domestic repairs that are otherwise all but impossible, f rom cracked toilet seats to split shoes or the abraded insulation on your MacBook mains lead. (Doesnt it always split where it enters the power brick? And isnt it exorbitantly costly to replace?) Sugru was devised by Jane N Dhulchaointigh, an Irish design graduate at the Royal College of Art in London, working with a group of retired industrial chemists. Time magazine pronounced it a top invention of 2010, and it has since acquired an avid f ollowing of hackers who relish its potential not just to repair of f -the-shelf products, but also to modif y them.

It wasnt so much that things stopped working and then got repaired, but that repair was the means by which they worked at all

Sugru doesnt do its job subtly, which is the point. You can get it in modest white, but f ans tend to pref er the bright primary colours, giving their repairs maximal visibility. T hey present mending not as an unf ortunate necessity to be carried out as quietly as possible but as an act worth celebrating. A similar attitude is f ound in the burgeoning world of radical knitting. Take the textiles artist Celia Pym, who darns peoples clothes as a way of brief ly making contact with strangers. T here are no invisible mends here: Pym introduces bold new colours and patterns, transf orming rather than merely repairing the garments. What Pym and the Sugru crew are asserting is that mending has an aesthetic as well as a practical f unction. T hey say that if youre going to mend, you might as well do it openly and beautif ully. T heir approaches also ref lect another of the aesthetic considerations of Japanese ceramic repairs: the notion of asobi, a kind of playf ul creativity introduced by the 16th-century tea master Furuta Oribe. Repairs that embody this principle tended to be more extrovert, even crude in their lively energy. When larger areas of damage had to be patched using pieces f rom a dif f erent broken object, one might plug the gap using f ragments that have a totally dif f erent appearance, just as clothes today might be patched with exuberant contrasting colours or patterns. Of course, one can now buy new clothes patched this way a mannered gesture, perhaps, but one anticipated in the way that Oribe would sometimes deliberately damage utensils so that they were not too perf ect. T his was less a Z en-like expression of impermanence than an exuberant relish of variety. Such modern f ashion statements aside, repair in the West has tended to be more a matter of grumbling and making do. But occasionally the aesthetic questions have been impossible to avoid. When the painting of an Old Master starts cracking and f laking of f , what is the best way to make it good? Should we reverently pick up the f lakes of paint and surreptitiously glue them back on again? Is it honest to display a Raphael held together with PVA glue? When Renaissance paint f ades or discolours, should we touch it up to retain at least a semblance of what the artist intended, or surrender to wabi-sabi? Its saf e to assume that no conservator would ever have countenanced the repair last year of the crumbling 19th-century f resco of Jesus in Z aragoza Ecco Homo by Elas Garca Martnez by an elderly churchgoer with the artistic skills of Mr Bean. But does even a skilled retouching risk much the same hubris? T hese questions are dif f icult because aesthetic considerations pull against concerns about authenticity. Who wants to look at a f resco if only half of it is still on the wall? Victorian conservators were rather cavalier in their solutions, of ten deciding it was better to have a retouched Old Master than none at all. In an age that would happily render Titians tones more acceptable with muddy brown varnish, that was hardly surprising. But todays conservators mostly recoil at the idea of painting over damage in old works, although they will permit some delicate inpainting that f ills cracks without covering any of the original paint. Cosimo Turas Allegorical Figure (c. 1455) in the National Gallery in London was repaired this way in the 1980s. Where damage is extensive, it is now common to apply treatments that prevent f urther decay but leave the existing damage visible.

Such raref ied instances aside, the prejudice against repair as an embarrassing sign of poverty or thrif t is surely a product of the age of consumerism. Mending clothes was once routine f or every stratum of society. British aristocrats were unabashed at their elbow patches in truth more prevention than cure, since they protected shooting jackets f rom wear caused by the shotgun butt. Everything got mended, and mending was a trade. What sort of trade? Highly skilled, perhaps, but manual, consigning it to a low status in a culture that has always been shaped by the ancient Greek pref erence f or thinking over doing (this is one way in which the West dif f ers f rom the East). Over the course of the 19th century, the pure theorist gained ascendancy over the applied scientist (or worse still, the engineer); likewise, the prof essional engineer could at least pull rank on the maintenance man: he was a creator and innovator, not a chap with oily rag and tools. Although central to our relationship with things, writes the historian of technology David Edgerton, maintenance and repair are matters we would rather not think about. Indeed, they are increasingly matters wed rather not even do. Edgerton explains that, until the mid-20th century, repair was a permanent state of af f airs, especially f or expensive items such as vehicles, which lived in constant interaction with a workshop. It wasnt so much that things stopped working and then got repaired, but that repair was the means by which they worked at all. Repair might even spawn primary manuf acturing industries: many early Japanese bicycles were assembled f rom the spare parts manuf actured to f ix f oreign (mostly British) models. Its not hard to understand a certain wariness about repair: what broke once might break again, af ter all. But its neglect in recent times surely owes something to an underdeveloped repair aesthetic. Our insistence on perf ect appearances, on the constant illusion of newness, applies even to our own bodies: surgical repairs are supposed to make our own wear and tear invisible, though they rarely do. Equally detrimental to a culture of mending is the ever more hermetic nature of technology. DIY f ixes become impossible either physically (the unit, like your MacBook lead, is sealed) or technically (you wouldnt know where to start). Either way, the warranty is void the moment you start tinkering. Add that to a climate in which you pay f or the service or accessories rather than f or the item inks are pricier than printers, mobile phones are f ree when you subscribe to a network and repair lacks f easibility, inf rastructure or economic motivation. Breakers yards, which used to seem like places of wonder, have all but vanished; car repair has become both unf ashionable and impractical. I gave up repairing computer peripherals years ago when the only person I could f ind to f ix a printer was a crook who lacked the skills f or the job but charged me the price of a new one anyway. Some f eel this is going to change whether because of austerity or increasing ecological concerns about waste and consumption. Martin Conreen, a design lecturer at Goldsmiths College in London, believes that T V cookery programmes will soon be replaced by how to DIY shows, in which repair would surely f eature heavily. T he hacker culture is nurturing an underground movement of making and modif ying that is merging with the crowdsourcing of f ixes and bodges f or example, on websites such as if ixit.com, which of f ers f ree service manuals and advice f or technical devices such as computers, cameras, vehicles and domestic appliances. Alternatively there is f ixperts.org, set up by the design lecturer Daniel Charny and Sugrus cof ounder, James Carrigan, which documents f ixes on f ilm. T he mending mindset has taken to the streets in the international Repair Caf movement, where you can get f ree tools, materials, advice and assistance f or mending anything f rom phones to jumpers. As 3D printers which can produce one-of f objects f rom cured resin, built up f rom granular inks, layer by layer become more accessible, it might become possible to make your own spare parts rather than having to source them, of ten at some cost, f rom suppliers (only to discover your model is obsolete). And as f ixing becomes cool, theres good reason to hope it will acquire an aesthetic that owes less to a make do and mend mentality of soldiering on, and more to mushin and asobi. Published on 29 May 2013