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Introduction to 4.3

January 21, 2012 in Editorials

Our sibling publication at Berg, Textile: The Journal of Cloth & Culture, has done a wonderful job over the years in exploring the many cultural, aesthetic, and technical aspects of its specialist subject. Here at the Journal of Modern Craft, we are equally aware of the rich history of textiles, and the unique part they have played in contentious debates about production, skill, and gender in the modern era. The cotton mills of England, the garment factories of New York, and the lace workshops of Ireland were all primary targets for reformers in the nineteenth century. Craft revival was in large part an attack on such exploitative industries. Though that impulse crossed over many media, it was the arts of the loom and the needle that were perhaps most highly charged in regards to process. The gendered organization of textile production has also been a continuous theme in the analysis of modern craft. Spinning, sewing, and needlework have particular associations with female skilled work, whereas the loom has a mixed gender heritage. As a result, woven textiles have received more serious attention than has needlework.

In this issue, we feature six essays that chart the fascinating course that textiles have taken since 1900. The geographical focus is on the USA throughout, with the semi-exception of Mallika Shakya’s carefully observed anthropological study of artisanal garment-making in Nepal. Though her article is saturated with national, local, and even intimate person detail, Shakya shows that even this seemingly remote locale has been reshaped according to American markets, as well as the sourcing of materials and skilled workers from across Asia.

This contemporary view into the daily experience of the global textile trade makes an interesting bookend to Sarah Archer’s essay on the Greenwich House Pottery, a settlement movement organization in New York City that is still active today. Though the GHP obviously made ceramics, lace-making was another important undertaking, and one that resonated particularly for some of the recently immigrated artisans who worked there. Archer shows how this Arts and Crafts-era organization was marked by a divergence of political views among its leadership, suggesting the complexity of craft reform at this date.

Alexa Griffith Winton’s study of mid-century weaver Dorothy Liebes, and T’ai Smith’s essay on the “architectonic” textiles of the late 1970s, are two major contributions to the history of fiber art, and the American studio craft movement in general. Much changed between the emergence of Liebes as the archetypal “designer-craftsman” and the development of tectonic, structurally oriented work by such figures as Gerhardt Knodel and Warren Seelig. In fact, this intervening period of transformation is at the heart of the recent book String Felt Thread, by our own exhibition review editor Elissa Auther. Our two essayists provide valuable extensions and modifications of the insights in Auther’s book, and also bring to life the way that Liebes, Knodel, and Seelig thought through (as well as about) their processes and materials.

Also in this issue, we feature a pair of Statements of Practice that are profitably read side by side. Alejandra Echeverria is a professional denim designer, and has worked for large brands such as Gap. She discusses her own skills, as well as the large and complex world of prototyping and mass production that she must negotiate to do her work. At the other end of the spectrum is Raleigh Denim, which is tiny by comparison (and serves a high-end rather than a mass market). Designer and co­founder Victor Lytvinenko gives us a view into this small business, which is completely based on “traditional” skills and tools that were developed for garment factories nearby in North Carolina many decades ago. Oddly, the evident differences between Echeverria’s and Lytvinenko’s work seem less striking than the similarities: both care deeply about the detail of the jeans they help to make, are technically knowledgeable about fabrics and sewing and machines, and are keenly aware of the importance of craft skill in their work, and the work of those who execute their designs.

Finally, this issue features a Primary Text that steers us away from textiles and into the much-neglected topic of skilled repair. Great science fiction has a way of ventilating contemporary anxieties, and Philip K. Dick’s short story “The Variable Man” (1953) is no exception. Set in the year 2136, the story takes place on the planet Terra, in a technologically advanced society that has lost all basic hand skills. When Thomas Cole, a handyman from the year 1913, appears on Terra in a time-travel mix-up, he becomes the most hunted man on the planet. That Dick should offer 1950s sci-fi addicts an unexpectedly profound discussion about tacit knowledge might seem surprising. But handymen and jacks-of-all-trades appear in many of his major novels—for instance in The Man in the High Castle (1962) and Martian Time-Slip (1964). Philip K. Dick left school early and never went to college. He was, nonetheless, an intellectual, a brilliant autodidact. But, paradoxically, his youthful heroes were the repairmen at University Radio, a record store in Berkeley, California. He saw genius and artistry in these tinkerers who could mend radios, record players, and the first TV sets. And he was prescient in predicting a world dependent on goods and systems that we mostly cannot fix nor even fully understand. We have almost got there.

The Editors

The Journal of Modern Craft

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Introduction to 4.2

August 28, 2011 in Editorials

One of the consistent preoccupations of this journal, over the course of its first ten issues, has been the politics of production. One of our guiding principles has been that the frictional qualities of craft – the difficulties that arise in acquiring and applying skill in labor – are an explosive and unpredictable issue within modernity. An important corollary to this idea is that the way skill is represented and discussed can itself be a political question. Much is at stake in the discourse surrounding craft, and one index of this fact is the many conflicting claims that have been made on its behalf.

This issue features three articles that address this theme. Together they tell an interesting story of continuity through the twentieth century. At the early end of the chronological spectrum we have Adam Trexler’s in-depth study of A. R. Orage, a figure who ought to be as well-known as Ruskin and Morris, but who has remained somewhat obscure. It is easy to understand why. Not only did he go in for currently unfashionable theories like Theosophy and Nietzsche’s principle of the superhuman, but his writings depart from (and sometimes attack) the hallowed principles of the Arts and Crafts Movement. To make matters worse, as Trexler writes, his ideas are hard to situate along a familiar left-right political spectrum. Orage’s emphasis on guild structures and higher consciousness can seem bewildering: simultaneously radical and reactionary. Yet precisely because of this unfamiliarity, his ideas feel surprisingly relevant today. To help readers come to grips with this important figure in craft’s historiography, in addition to Trexler’s examination of his intellectual trajectory we offer a reprinted text by Orage, entitled ‘Politics for Craftsmen.’

Ezra Shales’ study of the Empire State Building carries us a few decades on, to the interwar period (often thought of as a depopulated valley in craft historical terms, caught between the twin peaks of the Arts and Crafts Movement and the post-1945 Studio Craft movement). It may be surprising to consider a skyscraper as a handmade object, but as Shales demonstrates, that is exactly how it was presented at the time. A rhetorical appeal to artisanal values was crucially important to the triumphal rhetoric of the Empire State Building’s financial backers and key spokesman, including bricklayer-turned-master-politician Alfred E. Smith.

If Orage were alive today, he might very well love steampunk – not only because that subculture refers back to his own Victorian and Edwardian moment, but also because this contemporary DIY-based subculture operates through precisely the combination of collectivity and hyper-individualism that he favored. Up-and-coming craft theorist Ele Carpenter gives us a report from the front lines of steampunk, showing how artists use its apparently eccentric, science fiction-derived imagery to create persuasively critical works at the intersection of the physical and the digital.

Finally, in this issue we are pleased and honored to feature a Statement of Practice by Robin Wood, the chair of the Heritage Crafts Association. Devoted to the preservation of threatened artisanal skills in Britain, the HCA is politically active in a way that, again, cannot be easily located on a left-right spectrum. It is equally ecumenical in its self-imposed mandate. Wood wants to celebrate the full range of skilled labor: not just pastoral crafts like pole lathe turning (his own craft) but also light industrial trades like blade-making. Though his viewpoint is perhaps closest to Morris’s, one suspects that he would have found much to discuss with Orage, and it is certain that he would have been fascinated by the plumbers, hoist operators, and asbestos handlers who helped erect the Empire State Building. It is just such unexpected discursive connections, over space and time, that this journal aims to foster.

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Introduction 4.1

April 24, 2011 in Editorials

It is an honor to include, in this issue of  The Journal of Modern Craft, an interview with Dame Antonia Byatt.  This statement of practice, transcribed from a conversation that we had with the novelist last year, introduces several themes that run through the other contributions in these pages.  The most obvious link is with Elizabeth C. Miller’s discussion of  “slow print” in the work and thinking of  William Morris. Byatt’s most recent novel,  The Children’s Book, sensitively examines the ethical and personal considerations that attended craft at the end of the nineteenth century. Miller and Byatt alike are interested in the fragility of these hopeful ideals (Morris’s death is briefly noted in The Children’s Book as a symbolic loss of innocence), and also their continuing resonance today.

Yet Byatt is also supremely pragmatic, and suspicious of falling too deeply into an idealized dream state. In the interview she offers a lovely example of utopianism gone astray, on the occasion of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II:  “We were going to have a new Elizabethan age and people were going to write verse plays, Shakespeare was going to come back, and energy and color and beauty were going to return to Britain. Buildings that had been painted green, cream, and a certain dirty brown were suddenly painted a very hopeful pale blue.  This was before the Clean Air Act and they very quickly became dirty.”  This is the sort of observation  —grounded in hard, sometimes unpleasant, material facts—that gives her fiction its grounding.

Sarah Fayen Scarlett’s article on the craft of patternmaking looks at a similar down-to-earth movement. She examines the career of American furniture-maker Charles Rohlfs (who, interestingly, began as a Shakespearean actor), pointing out that he could never have realized his magically ornate chairs and desks without long experience as a carver of patterns for a stove manufacturer—a professional training he later tried to hide. Here is one idealistic Arts and Crafts maker whose skills were nurtured within the context of industry. Fayen Scarlett argues that we should take this lesson to heart, not only paying attention to the craftspeople who work in factories, but also the part that their often-invisible skills play in shaping our mass-produced environment.

Joshua Stein also argues for the relevance of craft in an unexpected production context: computer-assisted architectural design. He applies the theories of David Pye and (a writer perhaps less familiar to our readers) Manuel De Landa to show how architects can shift across vastly different scales—from tabletop models to full-scale buildings—using digitally-fueled craft as a connective tissue. Stein finds in this method a way to invest even indirect operations with “material intimacy.” It is a phrase that Byatt might like. In the interview, she vividly describes the process of inventing her characters with her body:  “I sit there and I think their fingers with my fingers.  And if they get hurt I feel it.” It is a suggestive parallel with Anselm Stern, the beguiling puppet-master in The Children’s Book, and also with Stein’s architects, who try to invest their structures with tactility through remote control.

A final inclusion in this issue of the JMC is worthy of note: our primary text, an excerpt of Jean Baudrillard’s 1973 book The Mirror of Production. Here we have a writer who is definitely not reminiscent of Byatt—her carefully observed, empathic humanism finds little place in his critical theory. Interestingly, however, this passage shows him engaging in his own puppet act, manipulating craft for his own theoretical purposes. Baudrillard presents the artisan as a figure who inhabits a symbolic realm, outside of modern productivity. His target is orthodox Marxist thinking, which treats all work as exchangeable labor—rather than as an irreducible experience unto itself.  Against this conception Baudrillard offers a vision of craft that is completely contained within community and materiality—which are, in fact, two primary concerns of Byatt’s. Readers might be surprised to find some common ground between these two powerful, and very different, thinkers. But then, for both, common ground is what craft is all about.

The Editors
The Journal of Modern Craft

Table of contents 4.1

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