Machine knitted fabric by Veronika Persché

At my Viennese knitting workshop, I produce fabrics for use in the creative professions in both Austria and abroad. My knitting expertise is in demand by both (fashion) designers and artists—these customers select colours, materials and designs in order to create the fabrics with which they themselves want to work.

I am open to inspiration anytime and everywhere—it can come from posters, signs, lettering and packaging as well as from façade ornaments and from the colours and patterns of others’ clothes. As a textile designer I am constantly trying out new materials, patterns and effects—be it mohair, polyester, rubber or metal threads. Ever the experimenter, I enjoy knitting together things that at first glance don’t seem to belong together at all.

My working method is somewhat bipolar. First there’s the construction—strict, perfect and regularly textured, the opposite pole is the material: this is organic and often imperfect or irregular, making it a good source of surprises, coincidences and accidents. I discover inspiring textures in the architecture of the Bauhaus movement, of Viennese public housing and of Italian fascism, as well as in Russian Constructivism and M.C. Escher’s drawings. In processing these, I orient myself on the great role models provided by the Wiener Werkstätte and numerous traditional arts and crafts.

Since I not only design new patterns but also produce the fabrics, technical realization and selection of material play a major role. Working with the machine and experimenting with various materials transforms the pattern, often to the extent that it is not possible for people outside the process to trace it back to the thing from which it originated.

I create various fabric structures with the help of computer-driven knitting machines. Combining materials and altering the design, I can create a variety of different effects from the same starting point. My fabrics range from the organic to high glamour.

Machine knitted fabric by Veronika Persché

The machines I work with are semi-industrial ones, they were build for the needs of small knitting mills or designer/makers. Unfortunately they are not produced any more, even more, one of the companies went out of business.

So you still can buy some of these highly elaborated knitting machines with the according software at second hand dealers, but the numbers are limited and prices rise. In the last few months I experienced serious troubles with one of the control units, the software was not working anymore and I couldn’t access the system. This experience of depending on a proprietary software by a no longer existing company lead me to the decision to find a way to create an open source software for these knitting machines. Unfortunately, my computer skills are far from dealing with tasks like programming etc., so I have to find computer geeks who are able to help me develop the software. Right now I’m in the phase of getting smart people from around the globe together to discuss this theme. If anybody’s out there who wants to get involved in this project, please get in touch with me!

Veronika Persché is a machine knitter from Vienna. You can find out more about her work and make contact at her website www.persche.com

Photo of impressed gable by Don Shall, creative commons license

Traditionally, craft evolved in guilds that limit access to technical knowledge and controlled prices. Today there is talk of ‘digital guilds’ that use open platforms to freely share information. Yet, the modern design industry depends on the notion of intellectual property to encourage investment in innovation. How do current systems like Creative Commons relate to the spirit of craft – past, present and future?

Read feature article Virtual Guilds: Collective Intelligence and the Future of Craft by Leonardo Bonanni and Amanda Parkes from issue 3.2

Join our guest bloggers to consider the role of intellectual property in the ongoing craft movement.

The problem is that “place” itself is a constantly shifting term that is not confined merely to static physical geography. Recent scholarship on the concept of the global emphasizes that overarching, transnational movements are built through (and in turn inflect) local cultural agency. To study this mutuality, metaphors such as the network, the narrative, or the imagined community have been proffered. So have distinctive methodologies such as the micro-history, in which a person or object is used as a lens through which large-scale movement can be brought into focus. The writings of the postwar Marxist theorist Henri LeFevbre have been influential in this context. His project was to understand how place was a means through which capitalist modern culture produced and reproduced itself. The seemingly neutral medium that we traverse is, in LeFevbre’s account, always politicized, always filled with ideological content. We cannot help making space into place, and place makes us in turn.

In light of such theoretical accounts, the certainty that one often encounters in discussions of craft’s rootedness seems badly in need of revision. This issue offers several contributions to that effort. We lead off with a short report by our own Digital Editor, Kevin Murray. In past months, he has been building the Journal of Modern Craft website into a lively forum for scholarly exchange. His discussion here, in the same spirit, summarizes the results of a “south–south” conversation held in Chile recently, at which Australian, Asian and Latin American craft specialists convened. Murray’s probing consideration of this debate introduces themes that will reappear throughout this issue. As he suggests, being faithful to tradition is never easy, and sometimes not even preferable as a way of empowering “local” craftspeople.

This issue’s articles by Lily Crowther and Suzette Wolfe Wilson show how the study of craft upsets our geographical instincts. Crowther argues that the early twentieth-century British studio craft movement found its most hospitable milieu not in the traditionrich rural landscape, or the innovative city center, but rather the much-despised suburbs. In her case study of Camberwell, a residential area of South London, the very characteristics for which craft is usually seen as an antidote—homogeneity, consumerism, and institutionalization—were precisely the variables that permitted studio practice to thrive. Wolfe Wilson’s study of contemporary activity in Jamaica shows us that craft is not necessarily compatible with a healthy relationship to an underdeveloped environment. “Traditional” making is not necessarily sustainable, as it exacts too great a toll on the island’s limited timber and mineral resources. She argues that it is only through an informed, globally aware strategy, in which local materials are used in a manner fully cognizant of the possibility of imported substitutes, that Jamaican craft can be rendered truly sensitive to its locality.

Patricia Ribault’s Statement of Practice for this issue offers another method for studying craft and place: the technique of comparison. Though primarily a theorist, Ribault has a background as a glass blower, and has completed residencies around the world. Her article is a prime example of passionate argument drawn from direct experience. She juxtaposes three dramatically different situations in Italy, Afghanistan, Tunisia, all of which present their own challenges for glass production. Like Wolfe Wilson, she argues that even in the most hallowed craft sites, “tradition” cannot be regarded as sacred and inviolable. Curiously it is Sadika Kamoun, an artist and impresario working in Tunisia—where there is no recent history of glass-making to speak of—whom Ribault sees as having achieved the most successful relationship with her surroundings, through a creative mixing of techniques and tools picked up through her own global travels.

The issue also includes several contributions that concern craft’s role within design practice. Often, in collaborations between designers and artisans, the latter are considered to provide local depth and authenticity. (The designer, presumably, provides cosmopolitan sophistication and knowledge of international markets.) Again, our authors suggest it is not always so simple. Both the innovative Droog Collective, who re-branded our concept of Dutch design in the early 1990s, and the contemporary “digital guilds” described by Amanda Parkes and Leonardo Bonnani, center on a more recursive relation between conceptualization and craft skill, in which the latter seems to be the most innovative element within the design process.

This topic is also explored in depth in this issue’s Primary Text, an extensive survey of leading designers’ attitudes to craft circa 1959, taken from the pages of Zodiac magazine (an organ of the Italian product design firm Olivetti). As Catharine Rossi notes in her introduction to the text, “Craft offered both cultural legitimacy and a means of production to designers in the context of a rhetoric of industrialization that fell down when confronted with reality.” As we read the various designers’ views, we cannot help but notice how much geography informed their ideas about “cultural legitimacy.” What Italy or Scandinavia had to offer to international markets, for example, was entirely dependent upon their national skill bases, as much as some designers may have hated the idea. The Zodiac texts were published exactly half a century ago, but the questions they raise have never been more pressing.

The Craftifesto was written by Cinnamon Cooper and Amy Carlton who started the Chicago DIY Trunk show, illustrated by Kate Bingaman-Burt

The Craftifesto was written by Cinnamon Cooper and Amy Carlton who started the Chicago DIY Trunk show, illustrated by Kate Bingaman-Burt

At the American Craft Council Conference Creating a New Craft Culture, keynote speaker Richard Sennett spoke briefly about the distressing doctrine of user friendly and intuitive products which, he believes, perpetuate laziness and the disinterested use of a “thing.” I began to wonder if “the hack” of material goods, or what I then understood to be “hacking,” was an individual’s direct reaction to this need for involvement in the goods we consume; goods which we supposedly desire to be unable to fix. I wondered if what I considered to be an act of making something had been co-opted by this new social condition and redefined simply as assemblages or detournements. Had the same social and technological forces that had combined to create a culture of hackers also influenced the characteristics of the so-called DIY craft movement? How were these makers and hackers functioning under an umbrella of political activism and craft?

To begin to construct a critical discussion of what is currently termed the Maker/Hacker movement, it is necessary to consider the creation of the Internet and open source technology to establish a starting point for the current social condition of connectivity. These ideas are significant to us today because the current trend of hacking consumer products, or being a maker/hacker, is directly linked to the creation of the Internet and the communities of software hackers who initially formulated the beliefs, politics, and ethics which developed as a result of its creation.

While “hacking” has always existed in some form, for our purposes, the clearest foundation of the Maker/Hacker movement is found in the tinkering of ham radio operators and the modding of cars in the 1920’s. In 1969, the earliest incarnation of the internet appeared. The 1970’s saw major universities utilizing email applications to connect individuals. This development later gave birth to a community of computer and software hackers who operated under the philosophy of hacker ethics; a ideology which included collaborative working methods, open exchange of information, and challenging bureaucracies who sought to limit this free exchange of information. In 1991, The World Wide Web first appeared, making our current social condition of connectivity a little less than 20 years old (Chandler). This period also produced the new media boom, or the creation of self-authoring software, which allowed individuals to edit their own photographs and videos, blog, and create web pages. These advances in technology resulted in a lasting cultural and structural impact. Society embraced the heightened sense of interactivity and self-authorship desktop computing allowed. By 1999, new media, the dot-com boom, open source technologies like the Linux operating system, and hacker ethics officially reached the mainstream.

Blue Footed Bobby (an IKEA Hack + old suitcase) by leel

Blue Footed Bobby (an IKEA Hack + old suitcase) by leel

Today’s privileged moment of interconnectivity and self-authorship has given rise to makers and hackers, both of which function within the ethos of post-production, and utilize the internet as the expression of supposedly subversive and avant gardist creative endeavors. Without this distinction, I would have to believe that I’ve been both DIY and a hacker all my life without knowing it; I’ve been subversively undermining capitalist society when I fix an appliance, sew clothing, knit a scarf, and wire up my rusted out muffler. I did all of these things, often in creative ways, but never thought to post them on online forums so an unlimited number of anonymous browsers could see that I had indeed done these things. Without a community, or network, the Maker/Hacker movement in its truest and most modern form could not exist. Online communities, such as Hack a Day and IKEAhack, enable individuals to operate dialogically by freely dispersing information to large groups of people quickly and easily. Hackers place their ideas into the public domain to collaboratively build an idea and democratize user innovation, helping to drive a user centered marketplace. DIY makers become “hobbypreneurs” who embrace notions of ethical consumerism and create niche markets and customized products (Intuit). Makers connect with customers both online and through events such as Maker Faire; networks become the most important source of meaning. Various forums, such as Etsy labs and craftzine.com, provide a place for free exchange of knowledge, ideas, and skillsets. This being the case, the internet serves to amplify our own social tendencies as humans; both hacking and DIY become a theater of production where an audience is both needed and required, where the individual work is not as important as the collective effort, and where the network, not the work, has aura.

Are the notions of a bottom up capitalism which promotes ethics over profits through hacking and making idealistic? Has the methodology of these movements become an aesthetic or a trend as it has been appropriated into the marketplace? Is the hacking of consumer goods and the DIY craft community acting critically, politically, or disingenuously?

These questions reflect a difficulty in ascertaining intent amid a flurry of websites, books, terms, films, articles, and lectures on this subject. It becomes challenging to tell practice from practicality; to tell social from cultural from economic. This fluidity promotes what Lane Relyea calls a “premature triumphalism.” This outcome plagues many social movements whose 1960’s style utopianesque rhetoric creates an artificially heightened sense of expectations. At the ACC conference, I repeatedly noted that the DIY discourse suddenly merged with Feminism, the Green movement, and the Bicycle movement without clearly articulating this tenuous relationship. Certain parties believe a revolution is coming; their social system has been identified as superior if only for the short term. A critical observer recognizes the “premature triumphalism” Relyea cites. Victory has been claimed too soon.

Post-production allows an escape from interpretations, as well as an escape from the critic, as artists opt for experimentation and construction over deconstruction. Along these lines, French philosopher Bruno Latour notes that the present day role of the critic is “…not the one who debunks, but the one who assembles…[the critic is] the one who offers the participants arenas in which to gather” ( Abstract Hacktivism 28). My experience at the American Craft Council Conference showed me that DIY embraces such a doctrine: democratic and judgment free. For the Maker/Hacker movement to put itself forward as a subculture, as culture jammers, as grassroots activists of the everyday, as purveyors of ethical consumption, as writers of craftifestos, as creators of craft mafias, as yarn bombers, as something inherently political, they show that within this craft conversation there is something lacking. It is the political undertones which both groups embrace that have earned them the labels of Hacktivism and Craftivism respectively. The addition of the “vism” denotes the political and points to the missing element: An important component to any successful political movement is debate and criticism.

While cognizant of activist minded work such at Cat Mazza’s Nike Petition Blanket, in considering the Craftifesto by Amy Carlton and Cinnamon Cooper, I am struck by the appearance of a remixing of feminist theory, the heavily female demographic of DIY, and the use of women’s handicrafts such as knitting and cross stitch. I submit that much of DIY and Craftivism are operating under the assumption that “the personal is political.” This phrase, which was taken from a collaborative essay by Carol Hanisch in 1969, is often misinterpreted to mean that every personal choice, action, and inaction is fundamentally political. Considering the embattled quote in context, I interpret the phrase to describe women’s acts of consciousness-raising as a method to understand and challenge various power relationships. It was through these realizations that women could begin to recognize the potential for change, gain voice, and enact their own liberation. The mid 90’s saw this phrase become a slogan as it was co-opted by conservatives to promote personal sources of social change which resembled (but did not challenge) ideological structures and social values already in place (Hill Collins 170). This change in the definition of the personal is political, marked a change from Hanisch’s Marxist ideals of group struggle to an acceptance of individuals working within capitalist structures to profit in the marketplace. This shift resembles the creation of bottom up capitalism, of ethical consumerism and the creation of elitist niche markets by “hobbypreneurs”, of hackers and makers collaborating with large corporations to produce trendy new goods. Opportunistic semantics hide an ahistorical consumption of goods, handmade or otherwise, which are not necessarily political, subversive, or avant garde. Shopping as activism functions as borderline slacktivism. Anything existing in the mainstream cannot be subversive. True avant gardism lasts only until recognized.

In a generation of people who have come to age within a social condition of self-authoring software, interconnectivity, immediacy, social networking, and gadgetry, and are now faced with increasingly sophisticated and miniaturized technologies presented to them in uncustomizable goods, I postulate that what maker/hackers are really doing is bringing the condition of the everyday into plain sight by transforming the previously disregarded. Their approach to online forums and collaborative working methodologies highlights a fundamental human need: our propensity to form communities. These are not necessarily critical spaces. Hacktivism, which supposedly creates a conscious awareness of commonplace consumer goods, works within the formulaic design trend of sampling. The “handmade” often becomes a gimmick in this realm. Instead of embracing the entire spectrum of Hacktivism, Craftivism, and DIY as automatically political or subversive, we need to reintroduce a discussion of process and practice with vocabulary that provides a framework for reflection and self-criticism. DIY is a lifestyle and a trend; it is part of consumer culture. If we accept without question that it is indeed political or hermetic, we are complicit in activism as novelty; we forgo revolution for modification.

According to Otto von Busch and Karl Palmas, authors of the recent book Abstract Hacktivism, in this moment of interconnectedness, we must go beyond Derrida, beyond binary oppositions, and beyond Baudrillard’s simulacra. I conclude that we must begin to think relationally instead of oppositionally. This is not a struggle of the old versus the new or the institution against the individual but a call for a critical discussion of craft, a dissection of semantics, and an attempt to intelligently quantify a moment socially, culturally, and artistically. We need more than a building up; we need criticality. We need to be able to deconstruct what is built, we need to act responsibly, and we need to be able to (and do) make value judgments about how we use information, what we make with it, and how what we make functions in the world.

BARB SMITH received her B.A. in Fine Arts and Art Education from Purdue University in 2003 and her M.A. in Photography and Related Media from Purdue University in 2005.  After teaching jewelry, metals, and design at Purdue University for three years, she moved to New York to study under Jamie Bennett and Myra Mimlitsch-Gray at the State University of New York-New Paltz. She received her Master of Fine Arts in Metal in 2010.

Works Cited

Chandler, David L. Who ‘Created’ the Internet? It’s a Tangled Web. The Boston Globe. October 2000. http://www.seattlepi.com/business/nett20.shtml. Accessed 12/6/09.

Hill Collins, Patricia. From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism. Temple University Press, Feb. 2006.

Lane Relyea: Bricoluer as Entrepreneur. SMAC: scribemedia art culture, May 27, 2009. Accessed 12/15/09. http://www.smac.us/2009/05/27/lane-relyea/

Research Brief: Today’s Hobbyists are Tomorrow’s Hobbeypreneurs. Intuit Future of Small Business Report, Dec. 2009. Accessed 01/11/10. http://http-download.intuit.com/http.intuit/CMO/intuit/futureofsmallbusiness/ifosb_hobbyists_report.pdf

Von Busch, Otto and Karl Palmas. Abstract Hacktivism: The Making of a Hacker Culture. http://www.scribd.com/doc/21277/Otto-von-Busch-AbstractHacktivism. Accessed 12/6/09.

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Spring has finally come to the upper Midwest, and with its arrival Hongtao Zhou’s installation Snow Furniture is an increasingly distant memory (fig. 1). Over three intensive days in late January, Zhou, a woodworker and sculptor based in Madison, Wisconsin, used snow, ice and sticks to create a set of chairs outside the East Galleria of the Milwaukee Art Museum. Part performance piece and part political statement, the installation was one of the more unusual and provocative works in an exhibition of “green furniture” Zhou and I curated at the MAM.

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As performance piece, Snow Furniture featured Zhou and a team of local school children (fig. 2). Bundled in down parkas to withstand twenty-degree temperature, these energetic assistants helped create the slushy material used to build the chairs. Zhou equipped them with an aluminium bucket, and sent them to fetch water from the shore of Lake Michigan, a few steps away from the museum. Snow was mixed in with this water, and then applied to an armature of sticks (fig 3). Within minutes, this mixture froze and the chairs took shape to the delight of the children and the audience of adults watching from inside the museum.

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As the winter went on and temperatures continued to vary, the chairs continued to dance. To return to the installation each morning was to see a fresh and reinvented work. One morning in late-February after a snowfall, the chairs looked like fluffy, upholstered divans. After a cold snap in March, they were icy and skeletal (fig 5). These variations tracked something more than the effects of climate change. The constant evolution of Snow Furniture showcased the artistry and animism of nature, the obsessive inventiveness of her masterful hand. Like the artist David Nash, who builds wooden sculptures out of unseasoned wood that changes shape as the material dries and shrinks, the aesthetic power of Snow Furniture hinged on nature’s power and unpredictability, on changing temperatures, wind speeds, and uncertain patterns of rain and snow. What was truly green about the installation was the way it called attention to this power—to nature as agent and artist.

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Zhou, who is fond of such sagely pronouncements, is a fascinating character with an unusual background for an artist. Born in China, he came to the US in his mid-twenties to do a PhD in furniture engineering at Purdue. In his coursework and dissertation, he focused on the “lifecycle” of furniture. His challenge was to design a chair that would last for a definitive period. The goal was five years. Zhou mastered this challenge but wasn’t fulfilled by it. After he finished his degree, he moved from the factory to the studio to take up an MFA in woodworking under Tom Loeser at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His focus has been on sustainability and environmentally-friendly furniture.

Snow Furniture reflects Zhou’s unusual training. Like any good engineer, he harnessed a force larger than himself to craft the chairs. And like his work at Purdue, he created a set of chairs that only existed for a fixed amount of time.

But while Zhou’s earlier designs failed and then endured as a series of parts, the dancing chairs evaporated into thin air, leaving no residue.

Gone without a trace and largely crafted by the power of nature, Snow Furniture invites us to reflect on the way we value art, and the premium we place on durability, artisanal skill, and the marks of the artist’s hand. Though his installation no longer presides in front of the museum, Zhou’s other-directed, ephemeral aesthetic raises questions for every artist to think through.

Ethan W. Lasser is curator of the Chipstone Foundation

See also the website for Hong Tao.

A picture of the pole lathes (also made by Leitz and volunteers) in the context of the entire workshop

Down a small in lane and up a mud track in deepest Herefordshire, a white canvas structure emerges from Clissett Wood: an unplugged greenwood furniture ‘bodging’ workshop that hosted ten prominent designers during the wet week of March 30^th – April 5^th 2010. The designers had cut themselves off from the infrastructure of their respective studios, with straight edges, electrical power and machinery swapped for hand-made tools, local wood and fingerless gloves, in imitation the of bodging techniques of countryside carpenters.

Rory Dodd on the pole lathe

This year Eckersley returned to Clissett Wood with nine designer friends, and, with the exhibition platform of the Spazio Revel in Milan secured by Dodd at Designersblock, engaged in a week of making greenwood chairs using traditional techniques under Leitz’s instruction. Her methods echo the processes adopted by Philip Clissett, the nineteenth century Hereford greenwood furniture maker who inspired figures of the Arts and Crafts movement, including Ernest Gimson. The same attraction that led Arts and Crafts figures to Clissett led to the fruition of this project: to get away from the machines and tools that define modern production and become familiar with the manually powered pole lathe (constructed from pieces of wood from the forest itself), shave-horse and an array of hand tools.

The influence of William Morris’s elevation of good workmanship was evident. Leitz straightforwardly admitted that the course was run according to a specific philosophy that stresses sustainability, quality craftsmanship from local raw materials, manual skill, and the retrospective reconstruction of folk traditions.

A shave-horse made by Gudrun Leitz and her volunteers with various hand tools

So how did the metropolitan designers mix with the bodging techniques? I arrived one day before the deadline to finish, and the workshop was a hive of activity, with the practitioners pushing tired limbs in an attempt to finish on time. All the processes – including cleaving, lathing, steaming, shaping, sawing and assembly – were powered by hand, a physical exertion that was taking its toll. The tools demanded a great deal from the human body. The pole lathe, which the designers learnt how to use on the first day, not only required repeated pedalling but also the need to cup the wood in the lathe with your hand to offer it up to the blade of the chisel. This offered greater manual control over the turning process and an intimate relationship between the body and the machine, but more muscles were involved in the making procedure than might be expected in a conventional machine powered workshop. This cohered with Leitz’s philosophy of making the body a craft machine, rid of all the technicalities the mind mulls over. But the consequences included aches and pains, too.

Chris Eckersly cutting off the bottom leg of his Windsor chair

Designers responded positively to the new experiences of using manually-driven machines and hand tools, and to the close connection between labour and the material. However, the lack of a straight edge in the haphazard workshop meant geometrical designs were hard to achieve, and uneven chairs resulted. For practitioners used to the accuracy of computer machinery this caused particular problems, relating to Pye’s hypothesis on the workmanship of risk: with hand tools there is greater likelihood of a misplaced intervention, which could ruin the desired outcome.

Carl Clerkin and Gudrun Leitz measuring up Clerkin's Windsor chair

The products that resulted from the week’s endurance were whisked away to Milan a week after. Like Clissett’s handmade chairs that made it to Heal’s in London in the early twentieth century, the chairs of these designers may well ignite a romanticism attached to local production and craftsmanship amongst a metropolitan crowd. In addition to this direct output, the bodging course provides a lesson in the value of craftsmanship without power machinery. But however pleasurable, interesting or eye opening this experience in the woods may be, it does not constitute a viable modern day production strategy. As David Green from Sitting Firm mentioned, his £8,000 machine can cut the same seat bottom in 30 seconds as it takes his hands to make in a day. These realities of production seem to limit’s the experiment’s scope. But using a different set of tools, materials and skills does have the potential to renew or reinvigorate furniture practice.

Stephen Knott is a doctoral candidate at the Royal College of Art and Victoria and Albert Museum, writing on the theory and practice of amateur craft.

More images can be found here.

Ise Grand Shrine, which is completely re-build every 20 years

Ise Grand Shrine, which is completely re-build every 20 years

The Japanese concept of dentō kōgei ( ‘traditional art crafts’) recognises the practice of reproducing classic works as an ideal of ‘formative expression’. By contrast, the studio craft movement of the West celebrated originality. Does the reverence for the copy in traditional Japanese culture inhibit its entry into modern craft?

Two articles in issue 3.1 cover this question:

• Kida Takuya ‘Traditional Art Crafts (Dento¯ Ko¯ gei): From reproductions to original works’
• Christine Guth ‘The multiple modalities of the copy in traditional Japanese crafts’

Join our guest bloggers to consider ways in which the process of re-making can be a meaningful activity in itself.

General view of the Handspring Factory

For those who’ve read the statement of practice from Handspring Puppet Company, you might be interested in the following short interview with Adrian Kohler:

How did you first become involved in puppetry?

My mom was a puppeteer and art teacher. Made and performed figures from an early age.

How did you learn puppetry skills?

From puppet manuals by John Wright and Hans-jurgen fetig and Margery Batchelder. Built puppets as a kid. Occasional films on bunraku and Czech puppet animation. Studied sculpture at art school. Mentored by Lily Herzberg at the Space Theatre in the mid seventies. Interned at the Canon Hill puppet Theatre in Birmingham uk for 6 months. Taught puppetry at Weld Community centre, Birmingham. Ran Popular Theatre program in Botswana in late seventies Where puppets were used. Formed Handspring inn 1981 and continued to learn on the hoof.

Is there a particular school of puppetry in South Africa?

Other puppeteers.

What do you think of the work of William Kentridge? Is your work in dialogue with his at all?

I and many others think William is a Renaissance man. A broad approach to art. Generous and fearless, particularly of new technology. My work continues to be influenced by what I have learnt from William and he says the same about me. As we are not making anything new together at the moment, this dialogue carries on at a distance.

In between performances, do you think it would be worthwhile exhibiting puppets like the war horses on their own?

Yes, the horses look good just standing there.

What are your upcoming projects?

A piece called ‘True’ with Neil Bartlett slated to open at the Cottlesloe Tyeatre in October. About which I am so excited it cuts down on my sleep.

The replica is, in a way, the realm of pure craft … Its objectness, its materiality, its form absorb the force that would otherwise arise from its “content.”

So wrote Rachel Weiss in the second issue of this journal, in an article on the Cuban contemporary art group Los Carpinteros.[1]

It is a fascinating but contentious idea: What if creativity as such lies outside of the realm of craft? What if the act of copying, which requires skill in an unadulterated state in order to achieve success, is the truest version of this journal’s core subject? What if the notion of a successful copy varies according to culture or context? What are the differences between content and intent?[2]

This issue provides ample opportunity to test this idea, in two very different cultural contexts. First up is a pair of complementary articles about Japan, by Christine Guth and Kida Takuya. The articles bring us from the long-established customs of the tea ceremony (chanoyu) to the delicate politics of the nation’s craft world during the reconstruction period immediately following the Second World War. Together, the two authors show that Japan’s tradition of copying, while very different from the emphasis on individuality in Europe and America, is no less likely to produce confusion and conflict.

Later in the issue, we are off to South Africa where, as Anitra Nettleton shows, there is a more informal but equally widespread practice of imitation and emulation. This is an unsettled (and perhaps unsettling) craft landscape, in which authorship and creativity are difficult to fix with certainty. In the entrepreneurial stalls of Johannesburg’s fleamarkets, tourists are faced with a dizzying array of wares, and geographically rooted traditions are lost in a shuffle of stereotype and repetition. This process of market homogenization is itself of great interest, and Nettleton details its mechanisms at length. As she demonstrates through an ensuing analysis of South African basketry, the only way to combat such erasure is through the specifics of production. In this same spirit, we have commissioned a Statement of Practice in which the potters at Ardmore Ceramic Art (also in South Africa) speak of their experiences at a socially progressive craft enterprise. Here we encounter another form of repetition, as many of the makers voice similar attitudes (gratitude, pride, ambition). How close do we get to these men and women? As the proprietors of Ardmore note in their introduction, it is difficult to capture the “true” voice of a craftsperson who makes within a highly structured entrepreneurial context, even when he or she is sitting directly in front of you. (The statements were originally delivered as oral testimonies in Zulu; Ardmore’s shop manager, Happiness Sibisi, translated them for us. While there are grammatical inaccuracies in these translations, the Ardmore proprietors decided not to make corrections. This appeared controversial to us but we let their decision stand.)

Elsewhere in the issue we explore the linked histories of queer identity and craft-based art practice—a subject first discussed in our pages a year ago by Julia Bryan-Wilson, in her brilliant reading of the rug works of lesbian sculptor Harmony Hammond. Now Australian scholar Sally Gray gives us a glimpse of the elusive aesthetic rites of underground gay New York in the 1980s. Artist David McDiarmid’s leather garments evoke a time and place in which self-fashioning was so important that it became an all-consuming craft in its own right.

Finally, we are pleased to offer our most extensive and important Primary Text to date. Taken from the pages of Overseas Education magazine (an organ of the British colonial administrative establishment) and Arts of West Africa, this set of texts offers a window into interwar modernist attitudes to African craft. The authors were themselves educators, and it is disturbing to imagine them inflicting their combination of paternalism and enthusiasm on young African woodcarvers. Yet these previously unexamined texts have tremendous historical value. As Tanya Harrod notes in her Commentary, “Only in the field of colonial art education was the relationship between modernism and primitivism examined systematically and a dialogue set up between the West and its ‘others.’ It may have been an imperfect, impoverished dialogue, but it did at least take place.” The contents of Overseas Education also resonate uncomfortably with the present day. Imperial rule in Africa may be history, but the tensions between progressivism and tradition (even if we no longer think of it as “primitive”) have certainly not been resolved.

[1] Rachel Weiss, “Between the Material World and the Ghosts of Dreams: An Argument about Craft in Los Carpinteros,” The Journal of Modern Craft 1(2) (2008): 258.

[2] For further consideration of this idea in the context of contemporary art, see Glenn Adamson, “Analogue Practice,” in Mary Jane Jacob and Michelle Grabner, The Studio Reader (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2010 [forthcoming]).

JMC 3-1 OFC

First issue of 2010

Editorial Introduction

Articles

The Multiple Modalities of the Copy in Traditional Japanese Craft by Christine M. E. Guth

“Traditional Art Crafts (Dento¯ Ko¯gei)” in Japan: From Reproductions to Original Works by Kida Takuya

Crafting Hip and Cool: David McDiarmid’s Handcrafted Lamb Suede Dancefloor Outifts, 1980–1989 by Sally Gray

Life in a Zulu Village: Craft and the Art of Modernity in South Africa by Anitra Nettleton (pdf)

Statement of Practice

Ardmore Ceramic Art introduced by Fée Halsted and Jennifer Fair Cohen

Primary Text Commentary

Overseas Education and Arts of West Africa by Tanya Harrod

Exhibition Reviews

Industrial Ceramics, or Ceramics at Home? by Alan C. Elder

Crafting Modernist Aesthetics by Hana Leaper

A Crafted Presence by Russell Baldon

Book Reviews

The Craftsman and the Critic: Defining Usefulness and Beauty in Arts and Crafts-Era Boston reviewed by Kenneth L. Ames

The Saturated World: Aesthetic Meaning, Intimate Objects, Women’s Lives, 1890–1940 and “Make It Yourself”: Home Sewing, Gender, and Culture, 1890–1930 reviewed by Leah Dilworth