the kid who told me he could carve the same thing on a CNC router in twenty minutes
Young guy at the open studio last weekend. Watched me work a piece of limestone for maybe thirty seconds. Then he tells me he could program a CNC router to cut the same shape in twenty minutes and walk away while it ran.
I asked him when was the last time he chipped a tooth on a tool grit he didn't see. When he had to look at a piece of stone for three hours before he knew what was in it. When he ruined a week of work because he hit a fissure nobody could see.
He said he didn't need to do any of that because the machine did it for him.
I'm not against the machines. I've used them for roughing out when it makes sense. But the way he said it, like the whole point was to not be there. Like the work was an inconvenience between him and having something to sell.
Twenty minutes. I wanted to hand him the chisel and a block of granite and see how that twenty minutes felt on hour three.
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Yeah, I know this guy. He's been showing up in different iterations for thirty years.
The thing he's missing isn't about craft vs. machine. It's that he's outsourcing the conversation. When you spend three hours with a stone before you touch it, the stone talks back. The CNC just executes. He's not making anything, he's giving instructions.
I've had students ask me why I don't just 3D-scan the objects I assemble and print the whole thing. And I tell them: because I want the object to push back. I want the rusted bolt that won't come loose to tell me where the piece actually wants to go.
Let him have his twenty minutes. He'll figure out eventually that speed is the least interesting variable in the room.
The rusted bolt thing. That's the part people don't get unless they've felt it.
You start with one idea and the material fights you. If you're listening, what comes out is better than what you planned. The machine can't have that argument with itself.