The Journal of Modern Craft

Theme for 4.3

What is the place of craft in the 21st century textile industry?

The story goes… In the 19th century, industrialisation was at odds with traditional crafts, particularly hand-weaving. In the 20th century, this conflict was diffused with the emergence of the studio craft movement, which found a secure place for the handmade in the context of art. The reduction of craft skills in factory production continued with relative little resistance.

In the 21st century, much textile manufacturing has moved West to East, particularly southern China. While this was initially associated with lower consumer prices, it is now linked to loss of jobs in the West. As many question the future of the consuming West, craft skills are being re-valued as testimony that not all productive capacity has been lost: there is still a place for local manufacture. Some craft artists are using denim as a natural medium of democracy. What does denim, and other ‘industrial crafts’, say to us now?

Table of contents for 5.1

The pleasures of craft work are often said to reside in its immediacy: the direct access to materials, the handling of tools, and the sense of accomplishment. Even watching a demonstration in person can be an absorbing experience. Yet texts about craft, including this journal, must necessarily present secondhand the process of making. Language alone simply cannot account for craft’s scope of experience. Drawings, paintings, photographs, films, and virtual simulations, all in their own ways, would seem to fill this evident gap, transmitting the reality of skilled work in something closer to its fullness. However, they usually fall short. In the representation of process, such images create a new, different level of material reality, one that needs to be analyzed in its own right.

In this issue we concentrate on the phenomenon of “showing making,” a phrase proposed by Dutch scholar Ann-Sophie Lehmann. When welded together, these two verbs suggest the complexity of craft-in-representation, which always involves a dynamic interplay between artisan, artifact, tool, and image. Each of our contributors examines instances of such convergence. Three articles are drawn from a conference held in 2009, which was organized by Lehmann with Nico de Klerk at the Filmmuseum in Amsterdam (EYE), supported by the Meertens Institute (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences). Lehmann’s own theoretical overview presents a methodology for the study of “showing making,” and then applies it to the example of hand-colored Japanese photographs. She demonstrates the recursive logic of these images, which offer a kinaesthetic pleasure to the viewer while also constructing a self-referential impression of a craft formed at the intersection of traditional painterly skills and new technology.

The papers by Victoria Cain and Irene Steng, also drawn from the 2009 conference, illuminate two other contexts in which photographic images extend and transform the meaning of craft. Cain focuses on an intriguing case study: the preparators who made dioramas at the Natural History Museum in New York City in the earlier 1900s, especially in the 1920s and 1930s. These workers’ skills recall those of taxidermists, propmakers, and scientists, but had a specificity and theatricality of their own, which were exploited enthusiastically by the museum in its programmatic   and promotional activities. Cain situates staged photographs of the preparators within a broader range of images of craft process circulating in the interwar period. Her argument is that these decades—often thought of as a period fascinated with machines and technology, to the exclusion of handwork—were in fact saturated with such pictures. This widely shared “craftsmanship aesthetic,” she writes, offered an ameliorative or reassuring counterpoint to narratives of technological progress that were equally current at the time. Cain’s article can be set alongside Ezra Shales’s analysis of the Empire State Building (published in our July 2011 issue) as a major contribution to the understanding of modern craft in interwar America, outside the boundaries of the incipient studio movement.

At first, Stengs’s article, on the representation of kingship in Thailand, could not seem more different. She shows how the carvers and gilders who make sculptures of the Thai rulers operate in relation to popular photographs. Another example of “showing making” arises in her discussion of live demonstrations that are conducted in markets and temple complexes. This performance of craft takes its place within a diverse image-scape which has as its goal the consolidation of national identity. Perhaps it is only through the unstated relation of these various representational registers that such an impression of unity could be achieved. Henrietta Lidchi’s discussion of Native American jewelers also involves the analysis of a single craft from multiple angles. Historic photographs and live demonstrations again play a role in her account, as do written texts, oral history interviews, and Lidchi’s firsthand observations of the Southwestern markets in which iconic silver and turquoise jewelry is displayed and sold. The article is exemplary in its juxtaposition of past and present, showing how the tools of anthropology can be brought to bear on both history and the present day.

In her manifesto on “showing making,” Lehmann alludes to the oft-used phrase “the social life of things,” originally formulated by Arjun Appadurai. She insists that this biographical model needs to be extended to include the making of objects, and to this we might add historical precedents—the crafts of the past that make present endeavors possible. A biological or familial metaphor is at the heart of this issue’s Statement of Practice by boatmaker Gail McGarva. She has dedicated her life to the replication of open-sea working vessels, vernacular designs carrying strong associations with particular stretches of the British shoreline. McGarva refers to her lovingly made copies as “daughterboats,” a way of capturing the generational rhythms of craft succession. Given her interest in such legacies as the taproot of contemporary communities, it is perhaps no surprise that she makes her boats in public and invites others to watch, and even participate in the building process. This is another example of “showing making,” this time to the same community that developed and supported the regional product in the first place.
Finally, we include a primary text that is not a description of craft process, but rather a spectator’s response. The author is the indomitable Margaret M. Patch, who, despite her relatively advanced years, went on an extraordinary, round-the-world-ineighty- days-style tour (though it took her a bit longer than that) in the early 1960s.

Her mission was to compile a list of the leading contemporary craft reformers, activists, and developers in advance of the inaugural conference of the World Crafts Council, held in New York City in 1964. As she traveled, Patch paid close attention to cultural differences in practice and attitudes to skill. The previously unpublished text we include here was written early in her journey, and compares the craft cultures of Japan and India. Patch had a high regard for the artisans she found in both places, but was dismayed at the low status of those she encountered in India. This prompted her to reflect on questions of aspiration and recognition that had implications for craft anywhere, including back home in the United States. This is one example of the way that “showing making” can be an invitation to consider one’s own act of looking, and hence position in the politics of skill.

The Editors
The Journal of Modern Craft

The first issue of 2012 considers the way in which craft is represented on the public stage.

Editorial introduction

Articles

Ann-Sophie Lehmann Showing Making: On Visual Documentation and Creative Practice (free download)

Victoria Cain The Craftsmanship Aesthetic: Showing Making at the American Museum of Natural History, 1910-45

Irene Stengs Sacred Singularities: Crafting Royal Images in Present-day Thailand

Henritta Lidchi Material Destinies: Jewelry, Authenticity, and Craft in the American Southwest

Primary text

Gail McGarva Daughterboats

Statement of practice

Margaret Merwin Patch The Craftsman

Glenn Adamson Commentary

Book reviews

Adrienne Childs Material Girls: Contemporary Black Women Artists

Exhibition reviews

Dave Beech Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture by Gregory Sholette
Eileen Boris The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine by Rozsika Parker
Meredith Goldsmith Extra/Ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art by Maria Elena Buszek (ed.)

Anne Elizabeth Moore’s Garment Work unpicks the denim trade

Anne Elizabeth Moore: Garment Work, 2010, photo: Elizabeth White

The current resurgence of craft and hand making — especially among a new and often self-taught generation of makers — is often theorized as a contemporary reaction to (indeed as an act of resistance against) the forces of economic globalization, mass-production, and consumption. But as Julia Bryan-Wilson astutely observes, the relationship between craft and mass-production is much more complicated, for craft ‘is also a thriving enterprise that exists within a larger geopolitical context of mass production’ (2011 p.73). While craft is an artistic practice, it is also ‘dominated by women making consumer objects in factories in China and elsewhere’ (ibid). Bryan-Wilson’s points help shed light on the complexities of hand crafting in the larger context of economic globalization. Consider for example, that all of Apple’s iPhones, iPads, and iPods are assembled exclusively by hand in Chinese factories, raising compelling questions about the distinctions between the hand crafted object and the mass-produced one, and about the value of hand work itself. Do we truly appreciate the toll this method of assembly takes? The hands that craft these objects belong to a person — to a factory worker — thousands of whom suffer serious, debilitating, and preventable injuries sustained performing the endless repetitive gestures required to produce them.

The ongoing project Garment Work by artist and writer Anne Elizabeth Moore considers these questions in the context of the global garment industry. In Garment Work, Moore methodically takes a pair of mass-manufactured jeans apart by hand, and in the process exposes the harsh labor conditions under which textile workers toil to produce the garments we purchase.

It is estimated that during the manufacturing process, each individual pair of jeans can be touched by as many as 60 pairs of hands that guide it through the various production stages: cutting cloth, sewing seams and hems, adding pockets, belt loops, buttonholes, labels and grommets. Moore deconstructs this process, taking the jeans apart until nothing is left of them but neatly organized piles of threads. Using one’s hands to tear apart industrial-machine stitched seams is a strenuous job, and in so doing, Moore calls attention to the labor required to produce the jeans, and by extension, to the appalling labor practices that dominate the global garment manufacturing industry: relentlessly long hours, low pay, risk of injury, exposure to toxic chemicals, lack of benefits and healthcare, precarity, harassment, and the absence of collective bargaining rights. Garment Work — with its emphasis on the artist’s labor — examines the abusive working conditions in the factories that produce the majority of the world’s garments, and connects them back to the American retail outlets that sell them.

Moore first performed Garment Work in 2010 during an artist residency at the Leipziger Baumwollspinnerei in Leipzig, Germany, formerly one of the largest textile mills in the world. East German textile manufacturing shifted overseas following German reunification in 1989, when the state subsidies upon which the industry was dependent were cut — leaving it vulnerable to global economic forces — and abetted by international trade agreements designed to facilitate the entry of Third World countries into the garment industry. Moore’s taking a pair of jeans apart served as a metaphor for the destruction of East Germany’s textile industry but also, to embody current working conditions in the global textile industry — conditions once endured by workers at the Baumwollspinnerei.

More recently, Garment Work exposed working conditions for women garment workers in Cambodia, where Moore spent time as a Fulbright scholar, artist and writer. Her ongoing collaborations with Cambodian garment workers — Cambodia is home to over 350 000 of them — provided the raw material, so to speak, for the performance of Garment Work at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 2011. This iteration of the project examined working conditions at H&M — the second largest clothing retailer in the world — by taking apart a pair of H&M jeans, manufactured in Cambodia and purchased by Moore at H&M’s flagship Chicago store, located around the corner from the MCA. Garment Work exposed the links between difficult working conditions in the Cambodian factories that manufacture clothing for H&M, and those endured by workers in its retail stores here in the USA.

Garment Work at the MCA was participatory, with members of the public invited to join Moore in taking the jeans apart. Viewers would sit around a table as they picked the cloth apart, all the while discussing abusive labor practices in the garment industry and at H&M in particular. Many visitors to the MCA often shop along Michigan avenue before or after their museum visits, and Garment Work brought people together to reflect upon the working conditions in the garment industry both here at home and abroad. Poignantly, a group of former H&M workers discovered and subsequently participated in Garment Work on a visit to the MCA. They had resigned en-masse to protest abusive working conditions at the nearby H&M store: understaffing, low pay, long hours, and lack of benefits.

Garment Work is performed — whether individually by the artist, or collectively with viewer participation — by hand. The hand is central to the garment’s manufacturing process, as well as to that of taking the jeans apart. While mass-manufacturing and artistic crafting (considered here in the form of unraveling and unpicking) are vastly different processes that unfold in dramatically different contexts, Garment Work reveals the overlap between them. Through the act of unmaking, Moore draws our attention complexities of production and consumption; in so doing, she asks us to value the labor of the workers who make and sell the garments we buy, and to make informed decisions about the products we consume.

Citation: Julia Bryan-Wilson, Sewing Notions, Artforum vol.49, no.6, February 2011, pp.73-74.

A 10 minute edited version of Garment Work can be seen here.