INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF LIVING TRADITIONS IN ART

Pine chips tumble into the carver’s lap as the glued-up boards rapidly take the form of a waterfowl’s body. His draw-knife pulls chips from the deftly rotated pine block in the foot-operated clamp of the weathered carver’s bench.

This is Paul McCain on one of the ten weekends a year that he donates to demonstrating the art of wildfowl decoy carving at Old Bethpage Village on Long Island. Paul does this in the dress and persona of the Bayman, Mr. Conklin, an eighteenth-century former stagecoach operator turned fisherman and commercial fowler under pressure of competition from the railroad. He sits at the bench in the open shed behind the Conklin House with a wagon, tools and some of the other necessities of life of a century and a half ago. A boy has wandered by with his father to sit down on a log to chat.

“Do you sell your decoys?”

“I make decoys so that people can display them,” replies McCain gesturing to a wheelbarrow filled with completed figures, “but Mr. Conklin would have made them for his own use. One of the differences is that my decoys are made with flat bottoms to sit upright for display, and they do not have a keel to help them float. Working decoys that were lost and damaged in use were generally replaced by their owners.”

“Were decoys very expensive then?” asks the boy.

“To a person who might have made $200 a year anything that he could make with his hands and skills instead of buying was money in his pocket. The decoys were not what we have come to think of as valuable, but functional. Today, as collectibles, some original decoys are extremely valuable. If I remember correctly a few years ago an antique decoy sold at Christies’ for something like $800,000.”

The boy and his father admire the deft sculpting of the form which had proceeded uninterrupted during their conversation, and with thanks to Mr. Conklin/McCain they wander on their way having raised a series of serious non-rhetorical questions concerning the traditional arts.

The questions they raised were of authenticity, intention and value. A truly American practice, Paul reports that the modern making of wildfowl decoys was adapted from a three thousand year old Native American tradition, examples of which will be found in the collections of The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian at the Maryland-based Cultural Resources Center. “The decoy was often made of bound rush and twigs. The native hunter would have been interested in attracting dinner, not selling game. Our later Long Island commercial hunter was interested in quantity to transport to market in Manhattan, and required the more durable carved decoy for his business. Some hunters even used what was called a punt gun, a small cannon, to bring down large quantities of fowl.” That device would have been hell on fowl and decoy alike, and its use was eventually outlawed.

“There were no duck farms then,” said Paul, “and most meat marketed was game. Today hunting is a sport, and there are limitations on when, where, how, and how much one may hunt.”

A hunter today can find animated decoys, folding decoys, and a dozen stacking plastic ducks for twenty-five dollars. They can be used to destruction, their parts replaced, and one would feel little aesthetic or financial loss in their demolition. It is unlikely that many present-day enthusiasts would use a hand-carved and carefully painted set of decoys in their sport, but it is also unlikely that some of the exquisitely carved and painted pieces sold at auction today were ever themselves so used. Some otherwise functional decoys were always collected for their exceptional quality, and some were made as wildfowl sculpture with no intention of their ever facing the business end of a shotgun.

What, then, is the exact definition of authenticity in the case of wildfowl decoys? If we decide that an authentic wildfowl decoy must have been created with the intention to be used, we are assuming that we know the intention of the maker, which may or may not be documented. A weathered decoy with shot holes in it would be evidence of such an intention, but these are not necessarily the most highly prized examples. If we decide that an exceptional attention to form that demonstrates the expression of a high level of sensitivity to the subject realized in the chosen medium is a valid criterion for authenticity, then we have defined formal qualities of sculpture aside from any other intention as necessary to authenticity.

The carver is engaged in solving qualitative problems qualitatively. What form fairly renders the appearance of a particular species? What position should it take given the constraint of naturalism? Is the coloration correct, appropriate to attract or give confidence to the desired species, and is it rendered in sufficient detail? The artifacts of this sort that are most prized far exceed what is necessary to perform the task of attracting birds. They are constrained by, but transcend their function. They satisfy the eye and mind of people, not the brains of birds.

A proposed criterion for intrinsic authenticity would be that performance which, while accepting a set of constraints, transcends them. This is demonstrated in Haiku and sonnet, where a severe set of constraints must be mastered, and the only examples worth considering are those which surpass those limitations. The vintage of a piece of work would then be extrinsic, and more relevant to questions of supply and demand and the market value of an artifact than intrinsic authenticity.

If it is so beneficial to witness and possess a superior performance in wildfowl decoy carving that people will spend tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege of owning masterworks, what is the benefit to the performer? Paul McCain does not make a living creating these objects. In fact, he donates much of his work to charitable organizations such as Casting for Recovery, a not-for-profit support and educational program for women who have or have had breast cancer. A reason is revealed as the form takes shape, chip by chip, on his workbench. There is mastery of this process, and an interaction between a not very eloquent material, glued-up pine boards, and a highly articulate vision of the result. The more one confronts qualitative problems the better one becomes at solving them. The carver is constantly thinking, using and improving his mind, a definite benefit.

The kind of person who engages these problems is also one who would buy a small house built in the 1850’s, which had been disassembled and moved to its present location in 1888 (as can be demonstrated by the numbering of beams and joists), and expand it as his family grows in the same way that Americans have expanded their homes for growing families for the last several hundred years. This kind of person is connected to history, not lost in time in a disconnected present, and is willing to share that connectedness with others. Such a person is Paul McCain