Gerhard Demetz
It might be telling too much about my upbringing, but I’ve been whittling since I was a kid. It’s a creative activity, sure, but it’s not a challenging one; it’s more just time consuming. The only real challenge is not cutting yourself, which is not much of a challenge at all after a while. If you want to carve a duck, just think about what a duck looks like, and keep carving things away until it looks like that. Simple. It might not turn out to be the most realistic and beautiful duck ever, but people will be able to look at it and know it’s a duck. Gerhard Demetz has probably never made a duck, but if he did it would be an amazingly realistic duck, rife with subtle meaning and potential. Probably more philosophical weight than you would want to place on a poor duck. The children he carves seem to work pretty well for just such a purpose though. I know they weighed me down with introspective thought. I will say this about whittling a duck: it never made me question any foundational societal behaviors. That’s more bunny-carving behavior.
