A story of DIY craft in interior design responding to a south-east Asian environment

I am a student and plan on remaining so until long after I graduate. I’m also a self-declared ‘itinerant architect’, and during the past couple of years I have travelled to a number of countries as I develop my craft – and passion – of architecture. I have explored these different cultures as a way to understand the role of architecture and craft in a contemporary society – the chosen topic of my current graduate architecture thesis. My most recent foray into foreign territories found me in Bangkok as I began the fourth instalment of my two year degree, after having spent time in Europe, South America, and Canada. While in Bangkok, I developed the latest chapter of my thesis narrative which is essentially a documentation of the design and craft of a series of interventions that serve as a means of understanding my transient environment.

I began the Asian component of my thesis in Bangkok, and invariably began to compare it to Lima (Peru), both of which I had chosen to spend time in as the challenges of these foreign environments offer learning curves not readily available in the comforts of Canada or Europe. Bangkok made a great place to start for a number of reasons, including the large international airport and a relatively low cost of living, and so I looked forward to starting work in the city. I would describe Bangkok as a relatively easy city to navigate as it has some incredibly friendly people, a highly advanced public transit system, a great (and affordable) cuisine, and a shockingly low crime rate for a metropolis of its size. As I am interested in understanding culture through craft, I was eager to get started, and before too long I found myself in the district of Dusit. Situated north of the city centre and east of the Chao Phraya, Dusit has a network of canals that are reminders that a vast expanse of wetland once existed under the tonnes of concrete we now call Bangkok. The majority of the existing canals are no longer used as they feature black water that is far too polluted to be of much use, and in my exploration of these canals I caught a glimpse of an environment in which the craft involved in the informal housing typology deserved a closer look. Makeshift bridges and gates in various stages of disrepair spanned the terror of the canals below and had me cringe whenever someone dared to venture across. The building materials of choice ranged from cheap corrugated galvanised iron plates to beautiful weathered timbers, and as is the case in many of my interventions, I decided to allow the latter to inform the materiality of my ninth project.

My ‘client’, or ‘host’, depending on one’s perspective – perhaps I’ll just call him my friend, as this is now certainly the case – was one of Thailand’s top fashion designers, and had transformed his apartment into an atelier. It featured a plethora of clothes, sketches, and material samples, and I truly enjoyed the entirety of my twelve days here. Of particular interest to me were the two balconies that adjoined either end of his living space and faced north and south; they were critical in bringing in the summer breeze during the swelteringly hot days of mid-April. Although the north-facing balcony featured several plants and a quaint seating arrangement, its southern counterpart was comparatively hot, sunny, and arid to such an extent that the southern windows, which actually received very little direct sun, had been covered up, leaving the balcony largely forgotten. And so, in accordance with my thesis ambition to realise the fullest potential of designed space by means of an intervention, I decided that this balcony needed to become integrated once again into the main living space, and that I would utilise the qualities of reclaimed wood as a means for achieving this.

The ensuing design was simple (it often is), and yet infuriatingly complicated (it always is). I decided to compliment the ‘wet’ daytime northern balcony with a dry, evening-oriented southern counterpart. A key component to this would be the lighting system, and how I could use this to highlight the reclaimed wood I would soon obtain. As I had no tools aside from a hammer, drill, and a rusted antique saw that I obtained from a neighbour, I had to meticulously plan everything in advance as I would need all the pieces measured and cut prior to bringing them back to the apartment. I set out one morning armoured with a lavish amount of sunscreen, my sketchbook, and a few key phrases in Thai to help me in communicating with those who lived alongside the canals.

Although I had seen a lot of promising wood in my days of exploration, it somehow seemed to vanish as soon as I went looking for it. The amount that I did manage to come across was either rotten or critically important to the residents as they simply weren’t selling. I had assumed that wood would be relatively easy to find, but it turns out that the supply of wood in Thailand is shockingly low. The current king, who has now reigned for over sixty-five years, has driven the economic growth of Thailand through the expansion and export of agriculture. As a result however, many of the forests in the country have disappeared, and as of 1989, a complete logging ban has been in effect, although it does continue illegally in some regions. This has increased the cost of wood accordingly, and has made reclaimed wood a popular (and aesthetically pleasing) choice for many builders. Although there are several areas just outside Bangkok where one can obtain large quantities of this wood at a reduced rate, I didn’t have this luxury, and had to find something local. And as my day of material sourcing proved fruitless, I turned to local wood suppliers, where convenience begot inflated costs. It turns out that reclaimed wood is also very expensive (close to one hundred USD for a single timber that would suit my purposes), and so again, I had to make sacrifices and decisions as my options dwindled. I opted to source plywood for 80% of the project, a glulam board for the ‘highlight’ piece, and an old Venetian blind to provide the textural quality that the balcony needed. Many of the measurements had to be adjusted, and I managed to resize everything appropriately with one exception (that took one frustrating hour with the saw to remedy). Although I didn’t end up with the end result I had envisioned, the craft involved in working with unexpected challenges and assembling a kit of parts from a variety of sources yielded a product that is far more valuable to my evolving thesis narrative.

This Bangkok intervention was the ninth in a series that has driven my thesis narrative to date. Designed as a space activator, it is successful in improving the spatial quality of the associated living space while maintaining as nominal a footprint as possible. This is a perfect example of how minimal my constructions are, and yet are crafted to have as large an impact as possible. The balcony garden is but one of my interventions that achieves this, and in doing so, I impart upon the owner a greater understanding of the value of craft in a contemporary environment that is ripe with misguided attempts to improve daily life.

Gordon Hunt is a graduate student currently researching his thesis at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture in Canada. Originally from Hamilton (Canada), he has lived in New York, England, Sweden, Italy, Australia, and Peru. He is now writing from Asia, the fourth and final continent of his two-year global trek as an itinerant architect. You can follow his thesis travels at www.gordonhunt.tumblr.com.

Abigail Newbold Crafting Settlement installation view, Currier Museum of Art, 2013

JMC: Settlement implies a collective process of finding a place in which to live continuously. In your show, this seems to become a purely personal matter, associated with camping paraphernalia. Is this intended to be ironic?

AAN: Yes, there is irony on a lot of levels here. I am referencing the history of Shaker design philosophy as well as the Shaker’s work ethic as a model for a Utopian community (comprised of many), while making it very clear that this Settlement is designed and inhabited by an individual. While it is a personal narrative about character development, it is also a commentary on the more modern issues of isolation within dense urban environments and our propensity to remain estranged and physically distant from our immediate families as we travel for work and schooling. Given this scenario I take comfort and humor in the notion of an individual having the capability to design, make and erect a settlement on this scale autonomously. It would be ridiculous, and yet there is something so inspiring to me about projecting the hope that there are still multi-talented individuals out there who could and would go to such an extent.

I am also intentionally speaking within a tentative language with these new dwelling structures, which appear half-way between tent and more permanent home—an inference to the mobility that camping affords as well as lack of long-term commitment to that specific spot—referencing the other meaning of the word “settle”—which connotes compromise.

To understand the layout of the gallery better it might help to have a description of what’s present: the installation is comprised of two main components: on the main platform are a series of unique dwelling structures that I’ve designed and made displayed in a spartan context with only an inference of old city infrastructure as back drop (water, power and fuel). Around the periphery of the gallery are six vignettes that address some of the more philosophical concepts I am dealing with around domesticity at large. The vignettes are more abstracted arrangements of both found and made objects that speak to more directed subject matter: “Porch Time”, “Scullery/Larder”, “Hope Chest”, “Workshop”, “Garage/ Stable” and “Antechamber”.

I make many references to a community just out of reach of the immediate sphere that this installation presents. Take the trophy mailbox that appears in the Porch Time vignette—it represents a conduit to the outside world without breaking the continuity of isolation. I have also placed the dwelling structures within a skeletal infrastructure that might have been previously occupied and has since been abandoned—a hand-pump that powers a fire hose, a hickory dovetail outlet box providing the power to the electrical lights in the dwelling structures, and an old water heater re-purposed as a propane tank. These all serve as references to the existence of electricity fuel and water—all massive systems that reach beyond an individual simply fending for herself in the wilderness.

It is my use of craftsmanship that is most strategic in this dialogue as it is imperative to my manifesto of survival. The individual inhabiting this settlement could not survive without the practical hand skills presented here: timber framing, basic woodworking, sewing & pattern drafting, weaving and caning. Hand skills are occupation and a means for survival and to make comfort.

Abigail Anne Newbold, Crafting Settlement: detail of garage/ stable vignette

JMC: You seem fond of fluorescent materials. These seem quite artificial and at odds with the natural environment. Is this also ironic?

AAN: This palette comes from an urban or industrial aesthetic. The implication is that the materials are industrial cast-offs. My use of synthetic, fluorescent materials presents a future–hopeful look forward– a re-purposing of available materials applied to older, found objects with a traditional sensibility for craft. The effect is intended to carry tradition from the past into the future tense.

This is not about rural or wilderness survivalism so much as surviving within the context of a more familiar environment—take the de-volution of industrial cities in the “Rust-Belt” of America, where factories and mills are being re-purposed as housing, artist spaces, and markets. Vacant lots become sites for community farming initiatives. The natural world is creeping back into cities—pheasant populations are growing, and sightings of deer, bear and turkey are more and more prevalent. I am presenting a view of a self-sufficient life within this reclaimed industrial context—a life that might have only been possible in more rural landscapes just a couple of decades ago.

I guess you could call this tension between past and present, natural and artificial ironic, but what I am presenting is intended to be more of a realistic future hybrid of re-purposed objects mixed with traditional making techniques and more common industrial cast-off materials.

Abigail Anne Newbold, Crafting Settlement: detail of hope chest vignette

JMC: It appears that your work is about re-purposing consumer camping materials, rather than making new objects. What relationship do you see with craft?

AAN: Crafting Settlement is a conglomeration of newly made objects, re-made and repurposed objects and found objects. Again, I am presenting a model of what it is to live a hand-made life; not in a purist extreme, but in a more realistic manner where objects and materials are harvested, gathered and incorporated as they are useful and or valuable, and new items are made where there is necessity for something custom or unique. Through my incorporation of traditional techniques- quilting, the weaving of chair seats, woodworking and knotting I am advocating for the continuance of such skills of craftsmanship. The character’s survival in Crafting Settlement is contingent upon their ability to make the objects that serve as tools to make means of transportation, shelter and any manner of domestic goods.

I am interested in advocating for the accessibility of making and craftsmanship to a broad spectrum of people and for hand-made objects to be used in our daily lives, not merely relegated to a collector’s shelf. By presenting these objects in a context representational of where they would likely appear (as opposed to the more formal museological method of display in which an object is often isolated from similar functional items and taken out of all visual context of its use) I hope to make them more familiar. The sleeping bag I custom made is an example of how I’ve expressed this philosophy in Crafting Settlement. I made the exterior shell to be like a more modern bivouac sac made of waterproof cordura nylons with an industrial zipper. The interior is lined with a quilt that I made by hand, and refitted along with a black rabbit skin to insulate the interior. I would prefer to use my quilts in this manner then have them hung decoratively and stripped of all relationship to their functionality. That said—I do not want to discredit the very important role decoration and aesthetics play, as I cannot deny that they play a large role in my work as well.

Abigail Anne Newbold, Crafting Settlement: detail of scullery/ larder vignette

Abigail Newbold was interviewed by Kevin Murray, online editor of JMC.

Amateur crafts, hobbies, pastimes, and do-it-yourself activities constitute the most widespread type of craft activity in Western economies. Kirstie Allsopp in Britain, like Martha Stewart in the US, urges everyone to have fun on sewing machines. Regularly released “how-to” manuals within a single craft medium probably have a larger circulation than all the academic tomes on the subject combined. Encouraging leisure-time making is one of the big businesses that has shaped our cultural and economic landscape in recent times.

Has our desire to carve out an intelligent disciplinary terrain for craft left the specter of amateur making behind, lurking in a shadowy corner, like so many botched spice racks, half-completed cross-stitch kits, and handmade pots gathering dust? Amateur craft practice has been part of everyday life for the last 150 years, but scholarly treatment of the subject has consistently framed the phenomenon as supplemental and marginal. Karl Marx had no place for the occasional amateur maker within his broad theories of labor, while Thorstein Veblen saw the leisure-time accomplishments of late nineteenth-century America as affections of a former aristocratic ideal of autonomy. As for William Morris, it is not at all clear where amateur craft can be situated in his scale of “useful work and useless toil.”

Twentieth-century scholars—from the era of what Siegfried Kracauer called the “mass ornament” onward—have been slightly more concerned about amateur craft practice. Yes, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, and a whole range of thinkers from across a wide political spectrum do marginalize amateur practice (a good recent example is Andrew Keen’s Cult of the Amateur, a polemic bemoaning citizen journalism and crowd-sourcing). But studies from social history and anthropology prove more sympathetic. Among these, Steven Gelber’s Hobbies: Leisure and the Culture of Work in America sets the tone for a deeper understanding of how the work ethic drawn from professional practice structures freely chosen leisure activities. This interaction between spaces of work and leisure constitutes a major concern for thinkers studying everyday life, such as Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, Ben Highmore, and Elizabeth Shove, and their work helps inform much-needed critical reception of the recent amateur-led revival of many craft practices.

With the intellectual groundwork laid for a reassessment of this marginalized element of mass material culture, many historians have recently turned their attention toward the late nineteenth-century moment when domestic handicrafts became hugely popular among middle-class women (for example the work of Clive Edwards, Judy Attfield, Emma Ferry, and Talia Schaffer, whose book Novel Craft is reviewed below). Essays by Akiko Yamasaki and Janice Helland in this issue can be aligned with this scholarly trajectory, which considers handicraft as a site of female self-expression within hegemonic patriarchal structures.

Most existing work in this area focuses on Anglo-American geographies, but a translated chapter of Yamasaki’s 2005 work, “Handicrafts” and Gender in Modern Japan [Kindai Nihon no “shugei” to jendaa] attests to the global reach of this phenomenon. Like many accounts of nineteenth-century domestic handicrafts, Yamasaki’s research makes use of advice manuals and journals as historical evidence. She uses these sources to demonstrate the gendering of shugei, a term that simply denoted hand-skill at the start of the Meiji period, but came to describe distinctly feminine activities, such as sewing and cooking. Yamasaki explains how the semantic separation of shugei from associated terms mirrored the wider cultural expectation, advanced by advice literature and educational establishments, that women spend their free time engaged in domestic accomplishments that protected their gender identity.

Helland expands our understanding of domestic handicrafts at the margins of the British Arts and Crafts movement by recalling the early history of the Home Arts and Industry Association (HAIA), an organization that promoted domestic arts through regional education and annual exhibitions from the mid 1880s onward. There has been a tendency to view the HAIA as another example of Victorian philanthropy, with its moralizing instruction dispensed by approved arbiters toward subjects in need of improvement. Yet, Helland probes beyond the organization’s rhetoric of aristocratic cultivation to reveal how domestic handicrafts provided an opportunity for women to market their own skills, both as teachers and as exhibiting artists in many of the annual exhibitions.

Late nineteenth-century domestic handicrafts, often positioned as the answer to the perils of female leisure-time idleness, end up sharing the “undisciplined” qualities Judy Attfield attributes to the “wild things” of material culture. As Yamasaki describes, Japanese handicraft production not only beautified the home, but was sold as a desirable tourist commodity, and like the work of women in the HAIA, raised the prospect that female labor could be profitable, destabilizing traditional gender roles. Activities deemed appropriate to women facilitated self-expression that altered everyday productive realities, an example of what Henri Lefebvre termed “differential space.”

The tension between encouraging artistic expression among women while attempting to prop up existing gender norms is amply demonstrated in the advice books and journals of this era. In this issue’s primary text we publish a particularly flamboyant example, the Frenchman Oscar Edmond Ris-Paquot’s 1884 guide for the amateur enamel painter, which tries to emancipate female creativity with an art well suited to their “lightness of touch.”

Ruti Talmor’s ethnography of the Accra Arts Center in Ghana seems at first glance unrelated to amateur productions of the late nineteenth century. The article explains how the making of djembe drums has proliferated within the Center due to its popularity among tourists as a generic symbol of Africa, and how the proliferation of this craft has adversely affected the diversity of production that existed beforehand. Talmor skillfully explains the division of labor intrinsic to djembe production, and how it encourages de-skilling among young Ghanaian men who focus on learning one skill in the productive chain, rather than becoming multi-skilled through the traditional avenues of apprenticeship learning.

We might bemoan the neoliberal economy that has flattened craft diversity within the Arts Center, but as Talmor describes, many young men find a quick way of acquiring the skills needed to ensure their subsistence by sidestepping apprenticeship learning. Just as was the case for the late nineteenth-century handicraft practitioners, an accessible skill (even if it has to be learnt and honed) has become a means of quickly attaining a foothold within the marketplace, and this accession is both speedy and disruptive.

Stephen Knott, Managing Editor

The Journal of Modern Craft

See contents of 5.3 here.

Yamasaki, Akiko Handicrafts and Gender in Modern Japan

Helland, Janice “Good Work and Clever Design“: Early Exhibitions of the Home Arts and Industries Association

Talmor, Ruti Masks, Elephants, and Djembe Drums: Craft as Historical Experience in Ghana (download article)

Statement of Practice

Harrod, Tanya Interview with Romilly Saumarez Smith and Lucie Gledhill

Commentary

Author: Knott, Stephen

Paquot, Oscar Edmond Preface to A Practical Guide for the Amateur Enamel Painter, or the Art of Imitating Ancient Enamels and of Making Modern Enamel Designs

For more details, go to the Berg site.

In a fit of enthusiastic hubris we decided that we needed to write the (Affective) Craft Manifesto.

Unlike most manifestos, our intent was not to make declarative statements that dismissed practitioners who did follow our logic, but rather to create a document that would provoke a discussion and, hopefully, illuminate new possibilities within the craft disciplines. The result is a patchwork of ideas gleaned from innumerable sources. Our desire is for this document to find a practical resonance that catalyzes divergent potentials, productive debates and unique collaborations. It is in the spirit of curiosity that we offer up this list of thematic statements for comment, interrogation and experimentation; please consider this an invitation to use this document however you see fit.

Matthew Friday, Assistant Professor of Critical Studies and Graduate Coordinator, Art Department, State University of New York at New Paltz (www.matthewfriday.net)

Kerianne Quick, Visiting Assistant Professor of Metal, Art Department, State University of New York at New Paltz

Graduate Students: Martin Anderson, Eun Jae Baek, En Sang Cho, Gale DellaRocco, Maggie Dubler, Douglas Eberhardt, Douglas Fertig, Aran Galligan, Sara Glaberson, Elana Goren-Totino, Jiyoung Hong, Angelia Lane, Joseph Mastroianni, Lacey McKinney, Kathleen Rearick, Regina Ruff, Lesley, Wamsley, Paul John, Celine Browning.

Boundary Conditions

Craft exists within a historically determined space. Frequently positioned as the contingent frontier against which art is defined, craft mobilizes specific material practices, institutions and discourses. Any assessment of craft must confront and, perhaps, confound its discursive boundaries. Craft itself is a slippery word; at once a verb and a noun, craft can connote both a process and a category of object. We suggest that a third avenue exists; craft is a disposition, a mode of self understanding that opens up unique possibilities for making and use.

Everyday Practice

Unlike the modernist myth of autonomous art, craft has no pretence of standing apart from the world. Through craft’s engagement with everyday use, craft makes the world intelligible. Historically the craft object is indelibly connected to practical uses. While we do not deny this, we feel it necessary to clarify certain terms. We argue that it would be more proper to say we attain uses through practice and that utility is never simply practical. We act as if we owned the uses that craft objects satisfy when, in fact, the reverse is true. The necessary and the ornamental are not simply partitioned by pre-existent needs, but rather emerge as an immanent collaboration between social practice and the material world. Although craft has been conceived as that which addresses function, to think that these functions pre-exists the object’s entry into the world is to miss a valuable opportunity for experimentation. The confusion between function and purpose is one of the more insidious infections spread by capitalism. Purposes are never simply utilitarian, being, as they are, caught in the dynamic of production and consumption. Our habits often mystify and obscure our practices, making them seem necessary, autonomous and pre-determined. To exert care towards craft means addressing the history and contemporary implications of the practices sustained by craft.

Material Attunement

Materials are neither silent nor passive; matter has both history and agency. Makers do not give form to content, but rather their skill attunes them to the affordances of their material. Affordances, as a set of possible actions, emerge only through rigorous experimentation and are never solely inherent in the material. Much like evolution, the accrual of enough affordances pushes an object across a threshold, allowing it to link to an adjacent set of meanings, practices and material assemblages. Skill, as the engagement with the exterior world, can only be conceived in opposition to creativity when creativity is positioned as the sole provenance of interiority. Authentic skill is not teleological; it involves an experimental dialogue with the world.

Embodied Relations

Craft objects have a unique relation to the body; jewelry and clothing can be worn, cups and plates held. Furthermore, craft objects gather up the body for specific purposes, mediating the relationship between self and world. A ceramic mug full of coffee, lifted by the hand to the mouth, is part of a larger apparatus involving geology, ecology and evolution. Craft should revel in the ambiguity it grants to our notions of bodily autonomy and seek to create new human and non-human assemblages.

Beauty and Sensation

The world is irreducible; our language and representations can never exhaust or encompass the world. To experience beauty is to feel the weight of the ineffable pull you into new modes of sensation. Craft objects engender new desires through daily practice, producing radical pleasures that are far more transformative than any simple critique. By freeing sensation from cliché, beauty cultivates wonder and curiosity. To say that beauty exceeds definition is also to acknowledge that it is in dialogue with and delineated by discourse. Thinking about aesthetics means considering both the affective power of beauty and its relation to cultural and material configurations.

Circulation and Community

Within the increasingly globalized scale of economic exchange craft often resonates with a nostalgia for pre-industrial modes of production. This fantasy, common in so-called, “first-world” nations, frequently privileges certain ideas about authenticity and autonomy. Rather than envisioning craft as a retreat from the complexity of contemporary social relations, we argue that its value lies in recognizing and challenging the ways it is entangled with the global flows of capital, materials, meaning and modes of production. Although they are often consumed as commodities, craft objects have a long tradition of existing within the economy of gift exchange. Gifting involves a very different type of transaction, one in which production, distribution and consumption are not broken apart by market forces. We argue that an authentic disposition towards craft means resisting its commodification; something isn’t craft just because it is handmade or done with skill. The exchange of crafts should intensify and multiple the relationships between people. Because gift economies have the power to manifest a community, the various modes of solicitation and conviviality in which craft participates should receive equal consideration.

Responsibility and Preservation

Crafting also entails the creation of a craftsperson. Becoming an authentic craftsperson involves learning to care for one’s craft. This care entails responsibility and preservation towards both the discipline and the materials one takes up. Like ecologies, disciplines thrive on diversity, collaboration and rupture. The most interesting disciplinary history is the one that has yet to be written and the one that has been excluded. Learn to ask the difficult questions. Where do your materials come from? What relations does your consumption of these materials sustain? How can you develop more sustainable and resilient ways of using materials? Who benefits from the current structure of your discipline? Where can you locate leverage points from which to activate change?

The (Affective) Craft Manifesto is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 3.0 License. Licensees may copy, distribute, and display the work for non-commercial purposes only if they give the author or licensor the credits in the manner specified by these. Licensees may distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs the original work. For more information please contact Matthew Friday: rodechenko (at) yahoo.com.

Maria Nepomuceno, 'Tempo para Respirar' (Breathing Time) detail of installation at the Turner Contemporary, Margate, 14th September 2012-17th March 2013

My writing on the subject of craft was really limited to a certain period, around 1994-2000 and reflected particular discourses of that period about craft in the art gallery, which was the subject of the ‘Craft’ exhibition shown at Richard Salmon Gallery and Kettles Yard. In current practice such issues are less contentious because strategies engaging craft are more dispersed into a wide range of cross-generic fine-art practices. Even so, some residual observations may be relevant.

The communal ethos of makers/making craft artefacts can suggest a social context of the works’ production as a subtext to the work of art. At the period in which the Craft essay was written, I was thinking along these lines in an unpublished seminar paper about the Hohenbuchler Sisters’ work, seen in London at the ICA and at Camden Arts Centre around 1996. The communal aspect of the Hohenbuchler’s ‘sisterhood’ and their collaborative work with institutions lent a positive and attractive aspect to their practice, in spite of a darker side to the sisters’ therapeutic narratives. More recent examples could be Anthony Gormley’s clay works, ‘Field’ or Ai Wei Wei’s porcelain Sunflower Seeds, shown to popular acclaim at Tate Modern Turbine Hall and recently the subject of a purchase for the collection. The idea of community draws in viewers of such projects, not only as viewers of the artists’ work but as interpreters of the social construction that produced the work. The imaginative elaboration of this wider nexus of productivity may even be encouraged in documentation within the exhibition, as with this year’s exhibition of Alighiero e Boetti’s embroideries, Mappa Mundi, at Tate Modern.

Such histories of working collaboration may never be perfect. This was clear in the exhibition, also this year, at the Courtauld Institute, of ‘Working Papers’ drawings by Donald Judd which formed part of the history of his interactions with the professional metal workers who fabricated his sculptures. Judd’s historic example demonstrates the importance of understand the specific relation of the individual artist to collective productive practices. Craft’s relation to art-work offers opportunities to consider such issues, including contracts and conditions of employment, as questions to be made transparent within Fine Art. But the more general concern about this strategic and at times didactic approach to presenting craft in the art gallery is that art galleries contain their own historic narratives, and craft’s positive ethos within these contexts may not leave sufficient space for the viewer to consider such issues but supply ideological and methodological suggestions with too immediately positive certainty: the therapeutic relation in the case of the Hohenbuchlers exhibition ‘We Knitted Braids for Her’; creating projects that enhance local communities in Gormley’s widely toured exhibition of clay figurines; or engaging with positive aspects of volunteering in Maria Nepomuceno’s work currently on view at the Turner Contemporary Gallery in Margate,

Nepomuceno’s work is a case in point. Publicity about this exhibition suggests the beauty of the traditional Latin American craft techniques this artist employs: ‘woven forms made of rope and straw, along with beads and other objects, often in fiesta-bright hues, resonate on a fundamental level’. This presents a happy, mythic picture, both inclusive, ‘from the genetic to the cosmological’, and spiritualised, emphasising symbolic interest in spiral systems and natural rhythms. These works tend to support a primitivising Western anthropological account of the communities and work-histories of Latin America. Nepomuceno’s textile structures also resonate with forms and practices developed in historic feminist works relevant to celebration of the generosity of histories of women’s domestic textile labour reminiscent of the quilting groups of North American women in the nineteen-sixties, in the way a collective, the Maria Nepomuceno study group of volunteers and craftspeople, continues to extend textile productivity during the course of the exhibition, out of the museum and into the sea.

The gallery text invites the viewer to relax with Nepomuceno’s work ‘whether spreading across the floor, rising up or suspended like hammocks, the works’ relationship to the body is key’. The cultural relevance of craft and body may be strong but should be treated with caution. An apolitical benevolence in small scale art-world models of production may give permissions in wider but not unrelated contexts. The question ‘who is the artist or the maker’ can imply hierarchies, and opportunities for understanding the internal dynamics of craft and art collaborations be lost.

Joan Key’s article for 5.2 Readymade or Handmade is available for download.

Anne-Mette Manelius: Detail

Introduction & brief overview:

Flexible formwork is a relatively young technique of casting concrete. The earliest patents appeared at the very end of the 19^th century, and the first decades of the 20^th century. With the exception of James Waller, who in the mid 1950s enjoyed commercial success with fabric formwork, most practices remained privately held techniques [2]. Amongst pioneers such as Miguel Fisac and Kenzo Unno, Mark West is considered one of the ‘father figures’ of the last resurgence of development in flexible formwork, which began in the mid 1980s. And since then, and perhaps as a consequence of, research interests sprouted spontaneously and globally, establishing organisations such as ISOFF, which stands for International Society of Fabric Forming.

The conference in Bath is the second organised event, engaging a confluence of just under a hundred delegates from various disciplines, ranging from architects, researchers, contractors, artists, engineers, to textile specialists. The three-day proceedings were hosted by the department of Architecture & Civil Engineering on the campus of Bath University, and an intensive series of theoretical presentations were sandwiched between practical workshops and social events. The academic papers were delivered in a tight succession but in a genuinely convivial atmosphere, and lively discussions often spilled out into the interval space. A great proportion of the participants were also presenters, and despite the fact that one could regularly rub shoulders with eminent professors and experts, I was taken by the lucidity and openness in their manners of speech, their indisputable intellect and sincerity when engaged in conversations.

To summarise such widely divergent interpretations and techniques of flexible formwork from the conference proves almost an impossible task – one that has to be attempted and contested, nevertheless. Speaking in a very broad sense, the speakers roughly divide into five difference categories.

The first group approaches fabric formwork through material theory and practice. They are theorists / practitioners who sought to find formal expression of concrete through a process – set up to make visible the dynamic interactions between the structural behaviours of fabric, and the chemical forces of concrete when setting – Mark West, Remo Pedreschi, Walter Jack Studios, Alan Chandler, Katie Lloyd Thomas and Anne-Mette Manelius. They share another common ground, that is of their preference to low tech, craft techniques in concrete casting, making the technology more widely available to low capital building cultures and a design methodology relying partly on intuition.

The second group of speakers focused on formwork’s flexibility in the process of form taking and de-forming, with this end they developed alternative materials other than fabrics. They are industrially orientated and market driven researchers who aim at finding the correct balance between the efficiency of formwork fabrication, re-usability and control. Their techniques are innovative, deploying technologies ranging from cad controlled tools to domestic utensils: point-controlled non-porous membrane; wax; pneumatic shell structures with segmented flat sheets; vaccumatics (a vaccumed sac filled with expanded clay); flexible grid shells; flexible rods and ice sheets, so on and so forth.

The work of Heinz Isler stands in a category of its own. Isler was a Swiss engineer who developed sophisticated shell structures and precise sets of construction procedures at the time when digital technologies were unavailable. He experimented with various techniques: mount dug from a ground, wet hessian draped over reinforced mesh, latex rubber, until finally settling on a way of using timber lathes supported by an elaborate structure of timber falsework. The lecture was delivered by Professor John Chilton, who is currently authoring a larger and more comprehensive book on Isler.

Amongst others there were also contractors who developed a specialism in using fabric formwork, and were able to deliver difficult project on tight budgets exploiting the economy of fabric formwork system and its adaptability in difficult site conditions.

The last category comprises of experts who specialises in computer modelling and analytical programmes, and highly complex systems of calculation.

The ideas presented by the first group relate most closely to the set of arguments developed in my own dissertation on rigid formwork, thus I have expanded these lecture notes into an extended review.

Critical Review of Group 1

Conditions of Fabric Formwork

Mark West: Hanil Visitor Centre Guest House

Mark West relates that learning how to use fabric formwork relies on building an intuition of what the fabric can and cannot do – the flexibility of the material and how it offers form [3]. ‘Buckling is a natural phenomenon associated with compression’ [4], and West experimented with the structural possibilities of the ‘pull buckle’ and the ‘push buckle’ [5]. Reflecting on the process, West attempted to distinguish the structural from the decorative, and this is never straightforward. In concrete casting the fabric performs two structural functions – first it rigidizes in tension providing supports to the wet concrete mix as it sets, and second it gives concrete a formal structure which can potentially optimise its strength. The example Mark gives is the creation of a scissor column by shifting the angle of one side of the formwork, constructed out of a piece of fabric hung between two flat sheets of timber. This results in a hydraulic torsion along the vertical axis of the column [6].

Mark West: Woman's Hospital Manitoba

Mark West: Woman's Hospital Manitoba

In my view, fabric formwork forces us to conceive of concrete, its mould, and the set of techniques for using it as a system. Prior to establishing this system, the individual components such as the concrete and fabric have reached a level of sophistication in their individual domain: the late development of concrete has been a gradual refinement of the mix that ends in self-compacting concrete and spraycrete; and materials such as geotextiles, latex rubber, pvc, etc. have been widely used commercial products. However, these knowledges exist as separate entities ‘working without knowing each other’ [10]. As such the initial appropriation of materials and techniques in fabric forming can be described as the ‘abstract stage’ [11], using the theory of the French philosopher Gilbert Simondon, where the placing together of the separate parts is hesitant at the beginning and create the zones of imperfection that provide the conditions for innovation and technical evolution [12]. The controlling techniques are gradually refined and specialised materials are further developed to that effect. The process of individuation of both the techniques and the material weaves in many different types of knowledges, and such was demonstrated by Professor Pedreschi in one of his student’s attempt at casting a complete spiral staircase using fabric formwork. The design of the process is extremely complex, as each component of the staircase – the treads, the risers, the balustrades and structural supports requires a different fabric cutting and sewing technique, as well as a different pouring position. Nevertheless the process integrates craft skills and digital technology, and human beings remain the tool bearer.

Remo Pedreschi: Disruptive Technologies 02

A Disruptive Technology, A Subversive Practice

Fabric formwork as a technical innovation has many advantages over traditional construction methods. According to Pedreschi, these attributes include 1. a fabrication method that can exploit digital tools, and not always relying upon skilled labour such as carpentry to achieve precision and control; 2. the optimisation of formwork re-use which results in reduced material cost; 3. the flexibility of form. These qualities make fabric formwork a ‘disruptive technology’ [13] that does not always bode well in the construction market. A disruptive technology, describes Pedreschi, is often cheaper, smaller or more convenient than those established technologies that dominate the market.’ [14]

One of the main difficulties with fabric formwork, is the transfer of knowledge – what language would be most appropriate for its documentation and specification? Fabric formwork is a technique, a series of actions choreographed by intuition and craft knowledge, and as Pedreschi puts it, ‘it is a piece of sticky information that does not translate. How do you specify that to the contractor?’ Lloyd Thomas provided the example of annotated sketches in the casting of Wall One for the Chelsea Flower Show, produced by Pedreschi and Chandler with their students. Manelius rigorously categorised the experiments according to the typologies of the elements (beam / slab / wall / shell / column / arch / other) and then the different types of formwork principles including the framing (rigid back / frame) and the role of textiles (hung / embraced/ etc). Whilst the former uses a direct visual language communicable to both the architects and the makers, the latter begins to develop a system of codification. Both methods however, face difficulties in its acceptance when the technique is inserted into the rigid codes of existing building practices and conventions. Furthermore, most architectural practice and construction process cannot accommodate the open-endedness in practices such as fabric formwork, as it requires greater flexibility from the client, architect and contractor than conventional procurement routes. Experimentation and knowledge production in fabric formwork find fertile ground in an educational environment as a process lead approach to design and research, where the students become lead users and inventors of formwork practice.

Fabric formwork leaves on the concrete surface an extremely expressive language, which sometimes can become problematic in a public context. West uses the anecdote of the canopy he designed for the Women’s Hospital in Manitoba, where the form of the columns and the fabric’s ‘buckling’ effect accidentally generated an eroticism that was considered offensive and irrepressible by any subsequent remedial actions. At the end, parts of the columns had to be buried – edited out, which was in West’s opinion a more powerful political and aesthetic/poetic gesture.

Does the column have to be square?

Fabric formwork experiments are radical in ways in which they directly challenge and probe the accepted codes of practices and aesthetics. The effects of which allow fabric formwork to be deployed under specific context to push the boundaries of social etiquettes. The tensions they set up bring to light the fact that building forms and architectural language are constricted and codified by established procedures and knowledge, and raise questions that would otherwise be muted by rigid formwork.

Notes:

[1] Pedreschi, Remo. ‘Smart Processes, fabric formwork as a disruptive technology’, 2nd International Conference on Flexible Formwork, Bath, 27-29^th June 2012.
[2] West, Mark. ‘How Flexible’, Ibid.
[3] – [8] Ibid.
[9] Pedreschi. Ibid.
[10] Simondon, Gilbert. ‘I: Abstract Technical Object and Concrete Technical Object,’ Chapter One, The Genesis of Technical Objects. On the [11] Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Paris 1958, trans. by Niniam Mellamphy (1980) p. 18
[11] Simondon, ‘II: Conditions of Technical Evolution’, Ibid. p.22
[12] Ibid.
[13] – [15] Pedreschi.

Nina Shen-Poblete studied at the Glasgow School of Art and furthered her architectural education at the University of Westminster, where she was awarded a first class masters degree in 2012. Her dissertation aims to establish a cultural history of concrete formwork, and parallel to becoming an architect she is also pursuing a career in researching, writing & teaching.

‘The realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations
ceases.’*

The lifestyle of a studio craftsperson seems an ideal vision of labour. Work is pursued for its intrinsic pleasure, rather than just the pay-check at the end of the week. Seen in this way, the craftsperson can be put forward as a model for other kinds of work, such as software coding.

To what extent can contemporary craft be read seriously as a space for alternative visions of labour practice?

* Karl Marx, Capital vol. 111 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1972), p. 820 (quoted in John Roberts ‘Labor, Emancipation, and the Critique of Craft-Skill’ Journal of Modern Craft Volume 5—Issue 2 July 2012 pp. 137–148)

Articles

John Roberts Labor, Emancipation, and the Critique of Craft-Skill

Ulrich Lehmann Making as Knowing: Epistemology and Technique in Craft

Dominic Rahtz Carl Andre, Artisan

James Macgillivray Film Grows Unseen: Gregory Markopoulos, Robert Beavers, and the Tectonics of Film Editing

Joan Key Readymade or Handmade? (free download)

Statement of practice

Zoe Sheehan Saldana  How to Make a Strike-Anywhere Match

Exhibition reviews

• Jenni Sorkin California Design 19301965: Living in a Modern Way
• Ezra Shales The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman

Book reviews

• Anne Anderson The Poetic Home: Designing the Nineteenth-century Domestic Interior Stefan Muthesius
• Andrea Peach On Craftsmanship: Towards a New Bauhaus Christopher Frayling
• Janis Jefferies Machine Stitch Perspectives Alice Kettle and Jane McKeating

It is fitting that we should begin with John Roberts, whose 2007 book The Intangibilities of Form proposed a powerful new account of art production as labor, in the process restoring Marxism to a central position in current debates about craft. Roberts’s analysis of a triadic relation between traditional skill, conceptual deskilling (as in the Duchampian readymade), and innovative “reskilling” has been widely influential among craft historians. In his contribution here, Roberts takes a closer look at his third key term, placing reskilling in the contemporary context of digitization, service economy, and other forms of “immaterial” production. Taking issue with the optimistic comments of recent authors like Antonio Negri, who have seen in the fluid relations between productive and nonproductive labor (professional work and private life) a de facto process of liberation, Roberts insists that it would only be through a full “re-temporalization” of experience, not just a permeability of previously distinct categories, that de-alienation can occur. This argument has profound consequences for craft theory. Against those who would follow the Romantic/Arts and Crafts tradition, seeing the artisan as a savior for work as such, or even those who see post-disciplinary flux as a moral good in itself, Roberts reminds us of the intractable problem of “necessary labor,” which is difficult to aestheticize and impossible to escape.

Closely allied to Roberts’s perspective is that of the art historian Dominic Rahtz, who examines the sculptor and self-designated “artisan” Carl Andre. His principal concern is to examine Andre’s own comments on Marx’s Grundrisse, and then judge them against the artist’s work. Of particular interest is Andre’s sense of his own distance from the ideal of “living labor,” on account of his embeddedness in the prevailing conditions of postwar American industry. This discussion of Andre parallels that offered by another former Journal of Modern Craft contributor, Julia Bryan-Wilson, in her recent book Art Workers (2009). To her detailed investigation of the politics of artistic production in the Vietnam era—readers of that book will remember the revelatory moment when she describes flipping over one of the magnesium plates in an Andre floor work, and discovers the mark of the DuPont Corporation, a major military supplier—Rahtz adds a further layer of interpretation, showing for example how Andre’s use of materials established a fixed ground from which he could triangulate his relation to an idealized artisanal past, and the generalized, abstract labor of his own time.

Ulrich Lehmann’s text on techne and episteme seems initially to take us to a much more ancient body of thought. The article has a vertiginous quality, moving from the metaphorical use of textiles in the writings of Plato and Aristotle to examples drawn from recent fashion history. This itinerary would seem to take us well away from the Marxist framework explored by Roberts and Rahtz, but gradually it becomes clear that Lehmann is charting a spiraling motion (a cut perpetually on the bias, one might say) through established theories of dialectical materialism. The question posed by Lehmann is deceptively simple: on what grounds can craft—for example, weaving and tailoring—be legitimately considered an epistemological activity? The claim that making is thinking is routinely made in art schools these days, within the context of “practice-based research,” but it is usually adopted as a sort of slogan rather than being rigorously interrogated. Lehmann’s discussion will hopefully prove useful to those wanting to frame craft as a conceptual activity, as well as a reminder of how deep the roots of such thinking go.

Our final full-length article is also concerned with the question of the cut, but in this case the material is film rather than fabric. James Macgillivray’s study of Robert Beavers and Gregory Markopoulos shows that the physical manipulation of film by hand is not only a technical necessity for independent filmmakers, but also primary content in its own right. In addition to the obvious parallels with Lehmann’s article—the two would be read profitably in one sitting—Macgillivray’s discussion of the transformation of the raw material of celluloid into an experiential light projection recalls some of the issues that arise in Rahtz’s discussion of Andre. Equally, his vivid description of Beavers, hunched over his editing table painstakingly repairing the hundreds of hours’ worth of footage in Markopolous’s avant-garde epic Eniaios might be considered a personalized instance of Roberts’s fundamental opposition between necessary and artistic labor.

Elsewhere in this issue, we restage the opposition between handmade and readymade discussed above. Zoë Sheehan Saldaña’s deadpan Statement of Practice takes the form of a how-to guide for making a “strike anywhere” match. It is unlikely that many of our readers will be moved to follow the instructions, for they are forbiddingly demanding. This is the point, of course. What Sheehan is demonstrating is the byzantine complexity of the simplest objects around us, and hence the difficulty of retaking control of the means of production on an individual basis. That the phrase “strike anywhere” sounds like a sacred principle of organized labor is not a coincidence, but it would be incorrect to read Sheehan’s work as simply politics by other means. She is not so much interested in rekindling the flames of revolution as excavating the truth behind contemporary production through her own hard-won skills.

Finally, this issue features a Primary Text written by the artist and curator Joan Key only fifteen years ago. It is hard to believe, given the preoccupation of the relation between handmade and readymade among artists today (Sheehan being a good example), that Key’s text was virtually unprecedented when it was published as the accompaniment to a moderately sized exhibition (called simply “Craft”) in 1997. But in fact, the relation between the Duchampian tradition and the handmade would not be theorized as robustly until the aforementioned Intangibilities of Form, published a full decade later. In recovering this short critical essay, we hope to both expand the frame of reference for Roberts’s important work, and also to situate Key herself as a contributor to the historiography on the means of production, artistic and otherwise.

The Editors

The Journal of Modern Craft