Nicholas Higgins 11/05/2020

 On Antiques 

‘Remember that the most valuable antiques are dear old friends’, H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

‘Antique’ - the very word brings to mind the sort of fossilized, heavy oak furniture you’d see at your grandparent’s country cottage. Dusty, obsolete, outmoded, decidedly ‘not modern’. Doesn’t quite cut the mustard for my slick new Clapham flat I hear you cry?

My own formative years were spent amongst antiques. Visitors still remark that the family house looks like a ‘junk shop’, and ‘just doesn’t know what it is’. All accurate descriptions no less. Yet having been stranded in my house of late, it had me thinking that the house has taken on a life of its own because of them. I’d not be the first to point out that objects, like art, music or fashion, have the peculiar ability to change an atmosphere. A definitively ‘lifeless’ thing can transform a space with a fresh vitality. Antiques do this especially well, since they stir up the time, era, zeitgeist of their origin, now in the present, in your flat. 

Having a noted penchant for the 1950s, and despite his wife’s protests, my father recently installed a 1955 Wurlitzer jukebox in our living room. Even when it isn’t playing Chuck Berry, its timeless design and colourful lighting, arouse an atmosphere akin to George Lucas’s American Graffiti. Sat beside it in 2020, I can imagine myself as the King of Cool, James Dean, smoking a cigarette in some neon filled American diner.

‘Taste’ permitting, the same could be said for any other decorative style: Elizabethan, Georgian, Victorian, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Bauhaus, or Mid-Century Modern. They all bring with them the aura of an age far removed from our own, each with their different customs, values and beliefs. Of course this approach is unashamedly nostalgic. ‘Difference’ with the past, especially the 1950s, does not always mean better. This would be a problem if we were rarefied history academics. To the humble layman, however, antiques can be a channel into the more captivating parts of the past. A tactile, non-virtual way of life, unfettered by anxious modernity. The jukebox is the tangible tie to this now unreachable world, and while the 50s is not everyone’s cup of tea, this really does improve my thoughts, emotions and moods. 

This serotonin boosting quality of antiques is multiplied when they are tied to family histories. My grandfather’s pipe for example, bears the burn marks, cuts and scratches that would have come with 30 years of his using it. To an enthusiastic stranger, the now extinct pipe embodies old-world charm. It evokes the generation of pre-war bucolic Britain, of Glen Miller, Winston Churchill and Received Pronunciation BBC radio broadcasts. Yet for myself, I feel connected to a man I never met. Every time I use it or walk past it, I’m reminded of my grandfathers achievements. I’m turned to mull over the brevity of life, what will my legacy be? All this meaning through a modest tobacco pipe. Antiques tell stories, change thoughts and lift moods. Anyone that’s watched Antiques Roadshow knows this. 

Your laminated chipboard Ikea kitchen table cannot do the same. Also, it will last an average of 8 years at most, as fashions change, or more likely, as it deteriorates from flimsy build quality. A mahogany Victorian chest of drawers, by contrast, can last generations. It’s with good reason that these centuries old objects still exist today. Some kinds of antiques might be more popular than others at certain times, but properly maintained, antiques will always be. 

This durability is not least down to their quality. With the exception of most mid-late century antiques (properly labeled ‘vintage’), antiques were made by highly skilled craftsmen, with human hand and touch, not on the Fordist assembly line. When you realize that an object is the work of many laborious hours, and a lifetime of acquired skill, rather than stamped out by a mindless factory computer, how much more beautiful it becomes. 

Writing amidst Britains great ‘Industrial Revolution’, William Morris and John Ruskin could well be addressing todays audience when they lamented the declining quality of British decorative arts. They deplored the loss of traditional skill and craft, and the subsequent rise of ‘servile labour’. New mechanised factory labour degraded the workman and alienated him from his final product. Though this does not presently exist in Britain, corporations like IKEA choose to produce their disposable furniture far from home shores. In the relentless pursuit for profit, managers bury their heads in the sand and outsource to Far Eastern factories. As we all know, today these are places that harbour an all too familiar, Victorian ‘servile labour’. 

Buying antique spurns todays silver tongued conglomerates. It commends man over the machine, and the many craftsmen and women who found meaning in their work. To buy antique ceramic, metalwork, furniture or textiles is to honour the unique, the non-automated, the human hand. As championed by Morris and Ruskin, honest handwork and craft, merged dignity and creativity with labour. It acknowledged that something was only beautiful if it bore in mind how it was produced. How true! 

Antiques, moreover, are a valuable antidote to today’s frivolous throw-away culture. Since they avoid burning fossil fuels, an antique chest of drawers has a carbon footprint 16 times smaller than its new (made in China) counterpart. How much more respectful to re-use something well made and good looking. Rather than to dump its modern equivalent in a landfill, left to contaminate our land and our oceans. 

On a metaphysical level, there is also something thoroughly wholesome in that we are merely the ‘caretakers’ of antiques. They were made many years before us, and will last many years more than us. As Hannah Arendt points out: 

‘The reality and reliability of the human world rest primarily on the fact that we are surrounded by things more permanent than the activity by which the were produced, and potentially even more permanent than the lives of their authors’. 

In light of man’s impermanence, antiques are mortality defying. It is both humbling and beguiling that they have ‘seen’, and will see, things we haven’t or could hope to. In an Ode to a Grecian Urn, even John Keats described a humble Greek vase as a ‘foster child of silence and slow time’.... ‘Heard melodies are sweet, but the unheard are sweeter, therefore ye soft pipes, play on’. 

In spite of these terribly compelling reasons, it wouldn’t do to decorate our houses to look like old curiosity shops. One or two antiques in a modern room, however, would tie it to history, ground it in time and give it a narrative. Its autobiographical significance would give an otherwise monotonous space, a nice poetic, idiosyncratic flavour. It would shout originality and eccentricity. It would be a material reflection of the owner. It would say no today’s monochrome, one-size fits all culture. 

Nor is this article so regressive to say blandly that ‘old is bad’, ‘new good’. Rather it is simply highlighting some of the more meaningful aspects to antiques. Whether historical, emotional, social, environmental or metaphysical, these qualities have lied dormant too long and should be voiced.