Satō Keizō consults with printer Nakayama Makoto (left) and carver Kitamura Shōichi (center) about reproducing Rebecca Salter’s series of paintings.

Outwardly, visual artist Rebecca Salter based in London and the Satō Woodblock Print Workshop situated in Kyoto occupy the disparate worlds of contemporary art and traditional Japanese woodblock prints. Salter works in an irrevocably contemporary idiom of fine art abstraction seemingly disconnected from the history, material culture and linear aesthetic of Japan’s heyday of woodblock prints during the Edo period (1603-1868)—a world that Satō Keizō and his team of artisans seem hardly to have left with their authentic reproductions of Hokusai’s and Hiroshige’s.

Salter’s and Satō’s worlds converged twenty-five years ago when the contemporary artist and traditional artisan first met through Akira Kurosaki, woodblock print artist, teacher and preservationist of the medium. Since then, Satō, with his sharpened eye for interpreting contemporary art in woodblock and pigments, and Salter, an established print artist and global proponent of woodblock printmaking, have become regular collaborators. Just a few months ago, I was visiting Satō’s workshop when an international express mail package of a series of Salter’s watercolor and acrylic and paintings arrived. Salter’s request was to reproduce her contemporary originals as limited edition woodblock prints in anticipation of a retrospective on her artworks to be held at the Yale Center for British Art February-May 2011.

Carver Fujisawa Hiroshi demonstrates how one of his blocks captures dimensions of Salter’s design.

While Satō indisputably identifies his shop’s work of recreating Hokusai and Hiroshige ukiyo-e masterworks as reproductions, with equal certitude, he asserts that his recreations of Salter’s contemporary originals are themselves original works of art. To better understand Satō’s claim of originals of Salter’s originals, we return to Satō’s Kyoto workshop where Salter’s originals traverse the steps in the (re)creative process. Satō arranges a meeting with his senior print apprentice and the two master carvers who will cut Salter’s designs into woodblock. After rapid confirmation of the timeline and logistics of the project, the foursome slides into a detailed assessment of Salter’s originals. The different artisans discuss the materials and techniques Salter used in her creations and determine how best to translate them into woodblock prints. Theirs is not simple tabletop talk, but a full sensory analysis in which they turn the originals over and over in their hands to evaluate the texture of the paper, the qualities and layers of paint and the luminosity of the image at varied angles. They debate the challenge of reproducing Salter’s trademark diffusions of blacks and grays that while conducive to color-wash techniques in woodblock printing are nevertheless daunting in their randomness and profusion. At times, in a display of generational divide, the younger of Satō’s two carvers counsels his senior how conventional tools and techniques might render some of Salter’s expressionistic contemporary effects.

At the conclusion of the consultation, Satō divides Salter’s series of originals in half, entrusting to each of his carvers, working in their separate studios, the task of faithful interpretation. Senior master carver Fujisawa Hiroshi, who became an apprentice woodblock carver at the age of thirteen only a few years after the end of World War II when he realized he was not inclined academically, says his comprehension of Salter’s work is mediated by his training as a traditional artisan. Adamant that he lacks sufficient knowledge of contemporary art to fully appreciate Salter’s work, he credits his Buddhist beliefs for enabling him to maintain proper conduct (kōdō) in order to produce his high-quality work. He concedes that having never met Salter in person, he cannot know her œuvre. But he is quick to acknowledge that what he sees as vestiges of traditional Japanese aesthetics in Salter’s paintings allow him to interpret her work. Her asymmetrical contours; bold, scapular lines; and flourishes and fusions of light and dark all seem familiar to him as traditional aesthetics that run through calligraphy and ink painting. Through these resonances, he gains the confidence to cut Salter’s paintings into wood.

Carver Kitamura Shōichi works through a stage of the woodcutting process for one of the four blocks that will capture a single original painting by Salter.

Kitamura Shōichi, the younger carver Satō commissioned for Salter’s project, has engaged in numerous collaborations with contemporary artists, from Singapore to Melbourne. A graduate of Kyoto Seika University’s art department whose woodblock print major was launched by the aforementioned Akira Kurosaki in 1987, Kitamura represents a contemporary variation of the artisan; unlike his senior Fujisawa, he consciously recognizes his roles as both artist and artisan. Moreover, he inherently understands the abstraction that pervades contemporary art and the infinite interpretations it invites. His selection of commonplace veneer plywood for his carving, he explains, though a far different medium from the tight, smooth mountain cherry preferred in traditional Japanese woodblock printing, better suits the expressionistic effects in Salter’s work. Although Kitamura is also an experienced printer, in his carving, he concerns himself only with the microsecond decisions necessary to capture Salter’s originals on his blocks, leaving the effects of his blocks in the printing process up to Satō to resolve.

Unsolicited, each carver identifies budget as a limiting factor to how precisely he can interpret Salter’s paintings in wood. Satō directs them, for instance, to generate only four blocks per print for each of Salter’s originals, inevitably altering the precision of their final result. This reality, a scourge to artists and artisans alike, is heightened in Japan where the relative cost of labor, and also in this case, of high quality timber exacerbate the challenge. But the carvers both emphasized the importance of interpretation over materials in their final product.

Fujisawa’s and Kitamura’s woodblocks of Salter’s originals have yet to undergo their own interpretation by Satō and the team of printers in his workshop, but already Salter’s originals are begetting new originals. Whereas duplication defines the reproduction of historic masterworks, artists and artisans engaged in contemporary art printmaking participate in a creative process that demands constant interpretation on the part of artist-artisan carvers, such as Fujisawa and Kitamura, and printers like Satō. Far from standard notions of duplication, Salter’s works become originals again.

Claire Cuccio is an independent scholar based in Kobe, Japan, writing on woodblock craft and printmaking in China and Japan.

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.

Second issue of 2010

Editorial Introduction

Articles

Exogamy in World Craft: A South-South Perspective by Kevin Murray

Et in Suburbia Ego: A Cultural Geography of Craft in the London Suburbs by Lily Crowther

So-called Craft: The Formative Years of Droog Design, 1992-1998 by Timo de Rijk

Virtual Guilds: Collective Intelligence and the Future of Craft by Leonardo Bonanni and Amanda Parkes (pdf)

Towards Sustainable Craft Production in Jamaica by Suzette Wolfe Wilson

Statement of Practice

Tradition in Question: Glassblowing in Murano, Tunisia, and Afghanistan by Patricia Ribault

Primary Text

• Commentary by Catharine Rossie
• An Enquiry on Handicrafts Zodiac no. 4/5, 1959

Exhibition Reviews

• The House of Words reviewed by Helen Carnac
• Unresolved Matters: Social Utopias Revisited reviewed by Liesbeth Fit
• Gone With The Wind reviewed by Louise Schouwenberg

Ken Kagajo "Fold-Metropolice" Dyeing cotton laid on Board (2009)

A convention holds that craft reveres the repeatable, through which standards, techniques and a particular aesthetic or style may be maintained.  The same repeatability, however, could lead to more spurious ends. It was the fate of Mingei wares in the wake of WWII which became clichéd, standardized, poor in quality and featured in high-end department stores in “Mingei corners” or, at the lower end, in tourist souvenirs from which evolved the euphemism “making Mingei.”  It is not, however, the case that repeatability must obviate creativity as craft too, both modern and traditional, maintains a reverence for originality, though often within vaguely circumscribed bounds.

A diary entry by the Japanese garden designer and tea connoisseur Mirei Shigemori (1896-1975) is telling. In 1958 he recorded that the modern Japanese/American sculptor Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988) had gifted him a tea kettle of his own design, which violated every concept of what a conventional kettle should be. “Noguchi doesn’t understand what ‘new’ means for tea ceremony,” wrote Shigemori. In art, as not in tea ceremony, Noguchi’s design could freely follow the artist’s creative impulse without care for traditional tea values and aesthetic concepts.  The creativity in tea wares, however, would find their genesis not in the liberation from rules or tradition, but freedom from the kind of arbitrary and impulsive behavior that resulted in Noguchi’s tea kettle.

That kind of creativity, one tempered by the rules and traditions established by Sen no Rikyu (1521-91), continues in the present, as evident in 2009 at the National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka. Here the Senke Jusshoku (a term coined in the Taisho period, 1912-26, to denote ten designated craft producing families) were invited to the museum to survey their collection of over 260,000 objects from disparate countries and cultures, select a few the hand and eye took fancy to, and then create something of their own in line with their tea traditions. The Jusshoku, or “shokka” as they are referred to in tea circles, are the artisans who have served the major Kyoto tea schools for over 3-400 years. The family representatives were present in the Osaka exhibition in their 11^th-17^th generations.

The 14^th generation woodworker Komazawa Risai (b.1930) was intrigued by wooden wares from Kenya and, in particular, a colorful woven bread basket from Morocco. He followed its hexagonal form in his own creation of a mostly unadorned wooden sweets container. The 13^th generation lacquer practitioner Nakamura Sotetsu (b.1965) settled on Iranian tiles decorated with geometrically arranged floral patterns, which she transferred into her own work, though further abstracted and more subdued.  The point, at least in part, was that any number of exotic wares from far flung centuries could function as stimulus in the creative process. But the elements foreign to or unharmonious with the tea aesthetic must be removed or refined and tempered to practical uses for which the objects were destined. They also needed to observe an aesthetic humility, be free from affectation, and follow simple decoration that brought out the natural state of the materials used in construction. Working within the rule-governed expectations of tea tradition resulted in refined and tempered originality. Throwing away all constraint of rules as in Noguchi’s kettle, resulted in nonsense.

Ken Kagajo "Fold-A boy" Binder on and dyeing cotton laid on board (2010)

There is another way in which originality in craft may be traditionally broached in contrast to the production of a single masterpiece as understood in a fine art context. It is by following a practice concerned with unrepeatable effects in a repetitive context. Ken Kagajo (b.1974) brings together the traditional craft world with contemporary art.  Initially he wanted to be a painter, though he entered the dyeing course at Osaka University of Arts because he thought he would succeed more easily in the entrance examination. Indeed, Kagajo takes a pictorial approach to his dye work that he conceives of as having affinities with nihonga (Japanese painting). His work has also been compared to mid-20^th century Abstract Expressionism, although the artist is careful to point out that his work is firmly engaged with the characteristics of dyes. He seeks to find an expression appropriate to his materials and medium which obtain in the blurring, penetration and run of color that result in subtle effects and ultimately unintended errors.

Kagajo learnt the traditional paste resist dyeing technique while in university along with katazome (stencil dyeing), though he has taken to bleaching commercially produced patterned cloth in recent work in order to achieve gradated effects between bleached and unbleached areas.  Many of his works are produced at home where he fixes fabric to the floor and then goes to work with his paste resist on fabric sheets often over a metre in length.  Before beginning this process he finds it necessary to consult the weather forecast for five day stretches without rain as the dyeing and fixing from beginning to end takes about this long.

Although Kagajo traces traditional continuities in his hybrid practice, some traditional purists have taken exception to Kagajo’s work and processes because they resist easy duplication and so seem to aspire too forcefully to originality.  Perhaps such criticism is also representative of a tension between the traditional and the contemporary, though in Japan it is frequently the case that contemporary artists have traditional craft technical training due to the structure of the art university system. It seems, however, that easy duplication, as it went for many later Mingei products, can be synonymous with creative stagnation and in the end, mass production.

Ken Kagajo "Manipulation-Inner Space" Hydrosulfite on velvet laid on board, (2010)

Kagajo offers a different route.  While he pursues unrepeatable effects in a repetitive context, he has also put his dyed and bleached fabrics to very practical uses, as may be expected of craft, such as the fabric framing a tent support or as the material for handbags.  Kagajo’s relation to the dyeing tradition, then, is not merely the skills, techniques and visual resemblances that are a repetitive force of habit, but more like the definition that art historian Michael Baxandall proposed: “a discriminating view of the past in an active and reciprocal relation with a developing set of dispositions and skills acquirable in the culture that possesses this view.”

Images courtesy of YOD Gallery, Osaka

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.

‘Soul is anxious for wing in the air’ (1998)

‘Soul is anxious for wing in the air’ (1998)

Kenji Toki (b.1969) took his Master of Arts in the lacquer section of Kyoto University of Arts in 1996 though he has been exhibiting in dozens of group and solo exhibitions since 1992 and international shows since 1995. His work is a hybrid of craft and design that also engages fine art, photography and architectural installation. While he uses software applications and rapid prototyping to arrive at finished works, he considers this less a break with long held craft traditions than a fusion of lacquer with technology. He positions himself as the present manifestation of the spirit of progressive kogei he discerns in Japanese lacquer since the 7^th century. Indeed, he considers his computer a ‘craft tool.’

In pursuing a concept of progressive tradition, Toki overturns long held ideas about lacquer. It is conventionally used to coat the kind of tableware objects kept and used indoors. The novelist Junichiro Tanizaki (1886-1965) wrote of lacquer in his eccentric aesthetic treatise, ‘In Praise of Shadows’ (1993), that darkness was indispensable to its beauty. Toki, however, for the Kyoto Art Festival (1998), created curved lacquer sheets called ‘Soul is anxious for wing in the air’ that were elevated above the ground and arranged along a bridge that spanned a pond. The purpose of such a setting was to bring the craft out of the shadows so that lacquer’s brilliant color could be appreciated. It was also a mild riposte to objections about keeping lacquer out of direct sunlight due to the damage it causes the surface, dulling its sheen. Toki’s work, too, chimed suggestively with his inspiration, form and material. The lacquer sheets were inspired by the surface of water and their evident droplet shapes further conspired. Lacquer too is a liquid material that hardens by chemical reaction with moisture. It was perhaps fortuitous that the exhibition coincided with Japan’s rainy season.

‘Form for Wish’ (1999)

Kenji Toki ‘Form for Wish’ (1999)

While previous work was intimate, works like ‘Form for Wish’ (1999) in the collection of Ayabe City, Kyoto Prefecture, assumed a monumental scale. Once again Toki coated the abstract work with his trademark red lacquer, but used carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) to create the form. Such fiber is more often used for applications in the aerospace and automotive industries. It helps  Toki achieve a thinner, stronger and lighter construction. ‘Form for Wish’ is approximately six meters high, a centimeter thick, but weighs merely seven kilograms. The uptake of the material seems like a shift away from tradition, but Toki notes that practically any surface can be covered in lacquer, and part of his attraction to the space-age material is that there are no preconceptions of how the material may be put to use. The form further reengages traditional lacquer craft ideas through an attention to the molding of the surface.

‘Latency#9’ (design process) (2003/4) Kenji Toki ‘Latency#9’ (design process) (2003/4)

Latency Concept Kenji Toki Latency Concept

‘Latency#8’ (2003/4) Kenji Toki ‘Latency#8’ (2003/4)

Since 2002 Toki has conducted his artistic research in computer assisted design (CAD) and rapid prototyping to search out the implications of new technology for craft in his hybrid digital/hand practice. Toki extracted curves based upon the natural forms of leaves and entered these into computer software where he created a seamless surface between the lines. He then used the automatic construction process of rapid prototyping which converts a design into a solid object through the build up of layers. These layers are sliced in the CAD model and that data directs a laser on to the surface of a tank of photosensitive resin. Where the laser strikes, the resin solidifies. The layers accrete into a final form which is then coated in lacquer by Toki. The point of these experiments, which Toki calls ‘Latency,’ was to arrive at forms mechanically created though finished by hand. These were based on nature, though not found in it. The result was something that also retained connection to traditional lacquer ideas of flowing curvature, lightness, organicity and a certain cleanliness.

‘Forms that are too fine to waste - Chicken Thighs’ (2006)

Kenji Toki ‘Forms that are too fine to waste - Chicken Thighs’ (2006)

Further reference to mechanical construction arrived in a series of individually produced and hand finished copies exhibited at Kyoto’s Gallery Gallery in 2009. These works took their formal cue from the mass produced polystyrene trays found in supermarkets for food packaging and display. Toki’s trays are again homage to mechanical reproduction and traditional craft. He uses his computer to generate an object as a body for lacquer and he uses his superlative lacquer coating skills to create objects which are almost perceptually indistinguishable from the visual and formal characteristics they ape. Indeed, Toki compares his lacquer application to both the skill of the painter, and his minute and precise hand movements to the precision of digital measures.

Traditional lacquer production fell into decline in 19^th and 20^th centuries as it could not compete with the mechanical production methods that turned out copious quantities of inexpensive products for a receptive and burgeoning consumer class. Toki, however, inverses that trend, utilizing technology to produce individual mechanically produced works which straddle a virtual-handcraft divide. Such an inversion allows Toki to individualize the reproducible.

Matthew Larking is a lecturer at Kyoto Notre Dame University, Kyoto, Japan, and has written as an art critic for The Japan Times since 2002.

All images courtesy of Kenji Toki http://www.kenjitoki.com/

Take the ukiyo-e series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku sanjūrokkei) that includes the iconic prints The Great Wave off Kanagawa and Red Fuji. Under the supervision of a publisher, the original series was designed by Katsushika Hokusai and produced in collaboration with a team of woodblock carvers and printers between 1826-1833 in the latter years of the Edo period. Reproducing such canonical ukiyo-e series constitutes one mainstay that keeps the shingle hanging outside traditional Japanese woodblock printing workshops like Satō’s. Reprints of Hokusai’s Fuji series are sought not simply to satisfy enduring consumer demand for the visual frames that merge landmark, landscape and daily life, but also as manifestations of the virtuoso display of woodblock techniques that reached their apex in Hokusai’s era: the multitude of straight and curving hairpin-thin lines carved in relief; the layering of primary-color pigments printed as many as 20 times over to achieve different hues, tones and degrees of saturation; gradations of color finessed through various styles of the technique known as bokashi, among others.

Commercially speaking, Satō Keizō maintains a sharp distinction between ukiyo-e reproductions divided between two broad categories: fukuseiban, literally “re-manufactured prints” implying machine production, and fukkokuban, whose expression swaps “manufacture” with the Chinese character for “carve” (koku) to generate something like a “re-carved print.” Satō believes that the presence of the human hand in the latter expression indicates a genuine remaking of the original imprint, and he and his team of three printers produce high-quality, exclusive reprint editions referred to as fukkokuban for their Tokyo and Kyoto publishers.

What is the process that Satō and his printers engage in when creating contemporary reprints of Hokusai’s Edo period originals? Their initial challenge is an analytical one: how to reproduce the remarkable effects of the originals. More precise, how do they create reprints without access to the exact materials and the same depth of experience that Edo master printers once passed down through full branches of uninterrupted lines of apprentices? They convene for candid, collegial consultation, pooling their knowledge to discern what combination of their techniques is most likely to achieve the effects in the original—defined in this case by first-edition prints pulled from woodblocks carved from these first-edition prints (shohanbon). When the publisher does not supply the paper to keep within a certain budget, they palpably examine the original paper in order to match it with their own paper selection by color, weight, texture and fiber count. In the next critical step of colorant analysis: the printers do not necessarily reproduce the colors as they actually see them in the original in front of them. Depending upon the condition of the original, the pigments actually range from faded tones to a nearly pristine brightness. Satō’s approach then is to select new pigments that match or at least closely mimic the qualities of the original colorants, while at the same time, diverging to mix shades of color imbued with faded tones. That is, the color in his copy incorporates a derivative blend of authenticity with a contemporary preference for more muted colors than those that would be found in the original in new condition.

The actual process of printing begins only after the arrival of original woodblocks from the publisher’s storage or of new blocks commissioned from a local carver that he generates from original Hokusai prints. Satō’s printers inaugurate the printing process by mixing small portions of five water-based powder pigments (ganryō) in red, yellow, sepia and two varieties of blue in addition to the basic black sumi. The team wets down high-quality, handmade paper known as hōsho, a variety of washi made of mulberry fiber time-tested to withstand multiple woodblock impressions. They arrange the paper and pigments around their workspace along with a bowl of nori, rice-starch paste that is mixed with the pigments to impart depth and hold, and a variety of specialized brushes for distributing the pigment, among other accoutrements. With swift orchestration of pigment and nori atop a block followed by careful alignment of a sheet of paper onto the block, each print is pulled from each block, layering one color at a time through the power of the hand that wields the traditional circular baren. For the observer, the hand printing stimulates awe in the utter consistency of color and effects across an average run of 70-100 prints, the same consistency that also must run across the 46 different prints in the entire Hokusai series.

Awe, of course, is normally the preserve of an original piece of art. And producing a reprint of an original ukiyo-e print merely yields a copy, doesn’t it? More than a century of technological improvements that have led to automated image production has demystified and simplified the process of producing a polychrome printed copy. The smooth regularity of a color-calibrated electronic copy renders superfluous the analytical process of the eye and the hand as well as the selection and regulation of materials required in traditional hand produced prints.

But deconstructing the process of producing a reprint of an original woodblock print on the second floor of the Satō house beyond Gion reveals the art in the copy. Embedded within is a storehouse of human capital that combines material and technical analysis with creative problem solving, physical strength and mental diligence. These qualities do not transcend the content of the artist’s original, but they honor and stand up to the original, and are valid, forceful expressions of materiality in themselves. Inverting the appreciation of a copy to begin with process also calls for participation in a practice that becomes ritualistic for both participant and observer as it approaches history and authenticity.

Claire Cuccio is an independent scholar based in Kobe, Japan, writing on woodblock craft and printmaking in China and Japan.

While the conflating of the values of the various arts is usually attributed to developments in art dating from the late 1960s, it was in the Quattrocento that earlier debate clearly arose  concerning what values were appropriate to each art and in which Onishi’s early work from 2004 is intricately woven.

The issue concerned the Quattrocento conception of the two sculptural modes: that of free-standing, fully three-dimensional sculpture and low relief sculpture.  Leonardo da Vinci thought that the sculptor may claim low relief as a form of painting principally because it could be used to tell a narrative and operated in a near two-dimensional space impenetrable to the viewer.  In essence, low relief sculpture could be understood as a kind of ‘fat painting’ and virtuosic painters such as Andrea Mantegna could play on the conflation of sculptural and painterly values in grisaille works like his ‘Samson and Delilah’ (c.1505).   While the modern conception of sculpture favors the autonomy of the free-standing work operating in the real space of the world shared with the viewer, Nobuaki reengages these two sculptural modes and their relation to painting.

Yushitessen (Barbed Wire)’ (2006) (detail)

Yushitessen (Barbed Wire)’ (2006) (detail)

He did this by casting conventional quotidian items such as a pen or a rubber glove for his ‘Infinity Gray’ series from around 2004 and painted them with virtuosic flare so that those objects were visually indistinguishable from the object copied.  In as much as the superlative painting techniques were addressed to the eye, the technical craftsmanship, the portability of the cast objects, their original utilitarian functions and their evident touch-ability, were addressed to the hand.  Onishi left these visual illusions incomplete, however, and at some point in each work he would let the coloring fade to the clear resin beneath which gave the object its form as in ‘Yushitessen (Barbed Wire) (2006).  The point, ostensibly, was to show up the illusion for what it was – an artful fabrication.

‘Shoha Burokku’ (2006) ‘Shoha Burokku’ (2006)

‘Shoha Burokku’ (2006) (detail) ‘Shoha Burokku’ (2006) (detail)

These ideas were honed in his ‘Dress’ series along with the pursuit of repetition.  An example is his ‘Shoha Burokku’ (2006), cast from the concrete tetrapod structures placed along the shore board to limit erosion.  Onishi left his sculpture uncapped at the leg-ends so spectators could see inside the structure to its smooth white surface although the outer surface was painted in trompe l’oeil fashion.  In this sense the painted surface was the one common to painting or low relief sculpture though assembled into a three dimensional free standing sculpture.  The four legs were originally cast from the same single leg and then conjoined into its final structure.   What Nobuaki effectively achieved in ‘Shoha Burokku’ was an almost literal copy of the real world that made clear its artifice through its hollowness.

‘Chain/ banana, ice’ (2009) (detail)

‘Chain/ banana, ice’ (2009) (detail)

Onishi’s most recent work has turned to championing the value of the copy over the original.  In the work ‘Chain/ banana, ice’ (2009) the artist continues to distinguish originals from his copies by inserting his hand-crafted visually identical bananas and ice cubes among the real things and filming the decay of those real things while his own fabrications retain their pristine forms and colors.  The point, in part, is that the inorganic copies are infinitely more visually pleasing in the long term than the perishable organic originals and these engage, tangentially, through their subject matter, the 19th century shift from the art/nature opposition to the art/craft distinction in his ceramic works.

'Pottery 1’ (2009) 'Pottery 1’ (2009)

Pottery 2’ (2009) Pottery 2’ (2009)

In ‘Pottery 1’ (2009) and ‘Pottery 2’ (2009) Onishi has set aside the fabrication of the living world and taken to producing ceramics in authentic materials. ‘Pottery 1’ comprises four small dishes arranged side by side and ‘Pottery 2’ three mugs arranged similarly.  In the contemporaneous work ‘Chain/ banana, ice’ the subjects referred to their originals but in these ceramics it makes little sense to ask which is the original on which the others were based and which the copies. Each plate and cup is virtually indistinguishable from the others. Onishi has arrived at the easy duplication that many take to be one of the essential qualities of craft.  He too has arrived at the rigid craft distinctions proposed by the philosopher R. G. Collingwood who described craft as a predetermined result through means-ends relations such as planning and execution.  The exhibition title ‘Chain’ under which Onishi exhibited these ceramic works serves also to confirm such relations as the title implies both a succession of events leading to the present works from 2004 and also a concept of ‘servitude’ in which the creative process is circumscribed to the reproducible rather than the one off original.

The shift to craft becomes a way for Onishi to resolve the tensions of original and copy that had inhered in his sculptural works.  Craft, because it obviates such tensions due to the reverence for replication, becomes conceptually alluring.  Onishi has moved, then, from early works that cast copies from originals in which he had left the visual illusion incomplete to visually complete ceramics produced with authentic raw materials which are all conceived of as reproductions from the outset without reference to an original.

Matthew Larking is a lecturer at Kyoto Notre Dame University, Kyoto, Japan, and has written as an art critic for The Japan Times since 2002.

Images courtesy of NOMART, INC, Osaka.