Nobody feels nostalgia for axes, yet people collect them anyway. These days, virtually any attractive or weird-looking tool, utensil, measuring instrument or useful thingamajig qualifies as a design object worth collecting.
As it turns out, axes are among the more visually compelling tools exhibited recently in ”Utilitarian Objects as Art” at the American Primitive Gallery in New York.
Forged in the 19th Century or earlier, the 10 iron axes and blades included the hefty and lethal as well as the thin and sharp. Among the latter were a three-sided cleaver, a grafting froe with a tang for trimming branches and a thin arrow-tipped ax for mortising fences.
”Some of these axes have the look of antiquity,” said Aarne Anton, the gallery owner who organized the exhibition of 200 items. ”Their forms have been around forever.”
What collectors admire, he said, are their pitted surfaces, resulting from a century or more of use, and their rich coloring-a mix of black, gray and brown.
Assembled by a collector of barn-building tools, the axes were one of eight mini-collections in the show. The others were leg-shaped calipers, glove forms, saddle-making tools, iron hooks, people-shape slingshots and wash sticks, which were used to stir and remove laundry from tubs of scalding water.
10-year love affair
”I`ve been collecting wash sticks for 10 years,” Anton said.
”Initially, it was a love affair with the form-the forked base and, on the best of them, the near-human shape.”
The surfaces of these wash sticks have a special patina-velvety soft from handling at the top and worn from bleach and water at the bottom.
Anton`s collection of 10 wash sticks is his fourth in a decade. ”I`m not a collector,” he said. ”I hold onto things for a period of time to form a collection to sell. I always want to exhibit the best I own.”
Most of his wash sticks were made between the Civil War and World War II, after which washing machines made them obsolete.
”I may see 25 wash sticks in a place and buy only one,” Anton said.
”Most are just forked sticks.” What sets his apart are the abstract anthropomorphic forms and the worn surfaces. To Anton, the ultimate such device was ”a zigzag-patterned wash stick Brancusi could have created.” He sold it as part of a collection several years ago.
The exhibition`s wash sticks, which are one to three feet long, are priced from $250 to $650. Other items range from $30 for a hinged shoe form used to make uppers to $4,500 for a century-old pair of cast-iron horse hitches from Massachusetts.
Offbeat wooden objects include a hand fan made like a jigsaw puzzle:
irregularly shaped strips, cut from one piece of wood, are hinged at the base and interlocked in abstract patterns at the fan-shape top.
Shaker lap table
The most meticulously crafted of the show`s one-of-a-kind items was a Shaker tambour lap table, made of alternating strips of dark and light wood. When open, the table is braced by two wooden slats and, when not in use, it can be rolled up.
”This carved-wood iron is a visual pun,” Anton said. ”Real irons have traditionally been used as doorstops-they work wonderfully because they are weighty, and it`s a way to store the iron.”
Among the esoteric offerings were outsized 19th Century implements. A pair of 4-foot-long thistle tongs looked like giant pliers, with tapered wood handles and flattened needle-sharp grippers to wrest the plant from the earth. A stately 12-foot pole with a bentwood hoop was a shad fisherman`s net from Delaware.
Anton`s favorite item was a 4-foot-tall field measure, carved by a Shaker in Harvard, Mass., more than a century ago.
”I`ve had a half-dozen different types of metal or wood measures, but nothing approaching this scale or subtlety,” he said. ”The four spokes are arced and dovetailed. Even the hardware is special.”
As with so many Shaker products, the smallest detail is worth noting. In this case, it was the gracefully curved wing nut on the crossbar between the wheels.
Anton savors the occasional mystery he encounters. For example, he cannot fathom why anyone ever made the skates on view, each of which moved on a roller larger than a croquet ball. Even more puzzling was a 3-foot-tall block of wood with a four-pronged base, painted bright green on top. ”It may be a wash stick or a buoy,” he suggested.
”These objects speak to me as sculpture,” Anton said. ”I don`t think anybody visiting this show would have bought an ax head to use as an ax or a fish decoy to go ice fishing with.”
