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

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

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

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

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

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

The Editors
The Journal of Modern Craft

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

Editorial introduction

Articles

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

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

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

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

Primary text

Gail McGarva Daughterboats

Statement of practice

Margaret Merwin Patch The Craftsman

Glenn Adamson Commentary

Book reviews

Adrienne Childs Material Girls: Contemporary Black Women Artists

Exhibition reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Singer 160™ – Limited Edition Machine (www.mysingerstory.com)

(Margaret Atwood: “The Road to Ustopia”, The Guardian, 15.10. 2011)

In 2011, to celebrate the 160 years of the company’s commercial success, Singer launched the 160™ Limited Edition Machine. The design reflects back on the years of the brand’s worldwide growth and if unaware of the image source, some of us might suspect this machine belongs among the last creations by “Jake” von Slatt of steampunkworkshop.com. Thus, a temptation arises to ask: What is Singer® trying to communicate by this Victorian retro design? And why right now – with its 160^th anniversary? Wouldn’t such a nostalgic look back on the company’s famous history have been more appropriate for say the 150^th anniversary?

Without a doubt, over the years of its existence, Singer® has become synonymous with home sewing,
self-sufficiency and individual creative expression. Singer machines have from the time of the patent issue for the first Singer brand machine in 1851 enabled many a woman around the world to make her fashion dreams come true for an affordable price. “Singers” have also been helping families to get by on limited resources, and, very often too, a home sewing machine would have been a source of some extra income for those able to offer their sewing skills to repair, alter or even make clothes locally.

Coming from a post-communist country, I remember how these skills were still essential for households there thirty years ago. I learned how to make my own clothes for the simple reason that to make one’s own was much cheaper than to buy them from a shop. Also, not less importantly, what was actually available from shops, would hardly ever please anyone’s eyes… With all this in mind I then recollect a story of a friend, who shortly after the fall of the communist regime, went to visit her family in the United States. At one point of her stay, she asked her hosts to advice where to buy a nice fabric that she wanted to bring back home to make a skirt. They seemed rather puzzled by her enquiry and asked with a great surprise: Why would you bother with making a skirt if you can get one for $15?

This story certainly isn’t meant to glamorize the make-do attitude rather unfortunately imposed on people by the communist regimes. Yet, I believe, it points to one of the crucial roles craft has to play in re-thinking the contemporary textile industry. No one who has ever tried to find and buy the material, made or copied the pattern for and sew a skirt, would ever expect it to cost $15.

In this sense, our lost skills make us unaware of the real cost of things and enable the ever expanding textile industry to produce garments sold at $15 whilst polluting lands and waters worldwide and employing very problematic work policies in countries like Bangladesh, Indonesia, China or India (and many others).

Here, Singer® comes in again. The economic report of Singer India Ltd from early 2004 announced:

New Delhi: Singer India Ltd is restructuring its business operations which would see it generating more revenues from its non-care area of consumer durables in future. As the domestic sewing machine market is stagnating due to changed consumer aspirations, Singer is now focusing on home appliances and consumer electronics while entering the industrial sewing machines business, which is expected to boom in the coming years due to the Indian garment sector…
(Economic Times, January 16, 2004)

At the same time, during the last couple of years, Singer domestic machines market in the US or the UK has been gradually growing. Craft writer Cat Rossi in her thought provoking post ‘All Sewn Up: Antique Singers and (De) Industrial Aesthetics at All Saints’ (29.1.2012) draws attention to the UK clothing brand All Saints that uses displays of vintage Singer sewing machines (mostly imported from India) across its shops as a branding signature. Rossi proposes that the philosophy of this branding strategy might aim to ‘to show off the fact that in an increasingly intangible world and service-led economy, All Saints actually make stuff, that they rely on craftsmanship and old fashioned quality manufacture.’ This then serves to ‘suggest a redundancy of the mass, industrial production in which these machines were complicit and the oft-cited advent of a new, localised, small-scale manufacture system.’

Is it possible that there was a very similar rationale behind the Singer®’s launch of the retro Singer 160™ Limited Edition Machine on the occasion of the company’s 160 years anniversary in 2011? And if so, what does this [so far] wishful trend for a shift from quantity to quality mean for the future of the textile industry?

In fact, can we really look forward to better quality clothing and more sustainable textile industry when most of us desperately lack the practical experience that would help us distinguish between the well and the poorly made and between good and poor quality material? Most importantly still: Are we ready to pay for clothes the price they are really worth? Or would we still rather own pairs and pairs of ill-fitting $15 mixed fiber jeans instead of a pair of real denim pants famous for their comfort and durability?

The decision is ours to take. Denim jeans might then once again become a symbol of freedom and revolt against the status quo.

Tullia Jack, a Masters Design student, conducted an experiment/performance where she asked 30 participants to wear a pair of jeans for 30 days, five days a week, without washing them. Responses from participants are used to demonstrate that entrenched cultural habits cause us to wash clothes more than necessary. It’s notable that denim jeans were chosen as the crucible of cultural values.

A 2009 Levi’s campaign ‘We are all workers’ evokes a nostalgia for manual labour. The link between denim and US nationalism is further strengthened in the ‘Go America’ campaign. This begs the question again of whether the current post-industrial craft revival is mere costume-dressing. Victor Lytvinenko’s article about the revival of the denim factory in North Carolina suggests what an authentic revival of industrial craft might be like.

Meanwhile, the symposium Craft in the New Economy has just closed in Toronto. Its aim was ‘to address the relationship between craft and issues of sustainable business practice, technology, DIY and social responsibility.’ The notion of craft practice in the 21st century seems to be broadening beyond the studio to include industry. Is this a trend in the arts generally, or specific to craft’s mission of social transformation? It promises much interesting writing for future issues of JMC.

Theme for 4.3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Editors

The Journal of Modern Craft

The final issue of 2011 continues to look at craft and industrialisation, with a particular emphasis on denim.

Articles

Editorial introduction

Craft, Class, and Acculturation at the Greenwich House Settlement by Sarah Archer

None of Us Is Sentimental About the Hand: Dorothy Liebes, Handweaving, and Design for Industry by Alexa Griffith Winton

Architectonic: Thought on the Loom by T’ai Smith

Bridging the Design Gap: The Case of the Nepali Clothing Industry by Mallika Shakya

Telling a Story: The Art and Craft of Denim by Alejandra Echeverria

Made in North Carolina: Skill Versus Scale in a Modern Jeans Workshop by Victor Lytvinenko

Primary text

The Variable Man by Philip K. Dick

Exhibition reviews

• Raw Goods: The Transformation of Materials by Local Industries by Sarah Johnson
• Making Is Thinking by Joana Ozorio de Almeida Meroz
• The New Materiality: Digital Dialogues at the Boundaries of Contemporary Craft by Kate Smith

This article is by Gillian Montegrande , the founder of Made by Hands of Britain, which promotes British craftsmanship and makes work from otherwise remote regions available for sale online.

Work by Rachel Carter featured in Made by Hands of Britain

What to do?

While there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution there are, in my opinion, things that can be done to provide these people once more with a sense of doing, being and purpose; to justify their existence.

What better way to show evidence of our existence and identity (apart from creating children), than to leave behind a tangible object created by hand?

Today the media is full to bursting, of programmes and articles dedicated to the tangible handmade achievements of the past, such as the Antiques Road Show, Victorian/Edwardian Farm and most recently, Handmade in Britain (to name but a few), where experts extol the virtues of craftsmen and craftsmanship. They talk about the detail, the design, the skill, the workmanship and the fact that many of these items are still in working use, literally hundreds of years later.

These antique objects and artefacts were as a result of ‘skilled manual labour’ the by-product of which was being usefully occupied. There was a time when the term ‘manual labour’ meant and (maybe in some eyes) still does mean today, demeaning, soulless work. However, we have forgotten (or choose to ignore) that manual labour, although sometimes hard, was also associated with an honest day’s work and more often than not there was something tangible to show for the efforts expended at the end of the day. In that time, it is possible, even likely, that when such a person put their head on the pillow at night, tired and aching, they did not realise the significance and importance of their exertions and maybe would not have been aware that they were satisfying an innate need to be manually as well as mentally occupied.

Today, not only is very little built to last but also few people expect things to last, in their constant search for ‘the next thing’, this ‘have it all and having it now’ approach has been of no help and indeed has caused the financial mess the planet now finds itself in.

Nevertheless, there are some who are fully aware of the significance of such noble exertions, which I repeat; we celebrate on a regular basis. Manual occupation is still one of the best ways to satisfy this primeval need and that there is nothing wrong in going to bed tired and aching, knowing that the day has been used to its full with something to show at the end of it. Some have become obsessed with jumping the gun, to get to the destination without going on the journey, let alone enjoying it! The concept of physical struggle is now perceived as bad, to the extent that we are desperately trying to eliminate it (in the western world at least), to our cost. The advancement of human knowledge and discovery has done much to improve the plight of humanity but it has also done much to take away the privilege of physical occupation and endeavour. Many children, from underprivileged and privileged backgrounds alike, with their parents’ blessing are very ready, to replace hands-on experiences with virtual ones; the gaming industry was worth $105 billion in August 2010.

But physical exertion, endeavour, struggle even, is still to this day, necessary in every human life. When that is not present, an emotional as well as physical vacuum is created, which as we all know, must be filled. Are our lives any “easier” today? I doubt it. We’ve simply replaced physical struggle with mental anxiety.

Art, Craft and Manual Production satisfy that need on every level.

When making, a process is gone-through, which uses pretty much all of our faculties, including desire and/or need; concept; design; sourcing of materials; establishing the strengths and weaknesses of both material and maker and then through trial, error and ingenuity working with or around those attributes and limitations, to finally be confronted with something that is real, knowing that so much of oneself has gone into the very fibre of the work.

But there are obstacles in the form of modern-day fears and insecurities that currently pervade every aspect of modern life which is so readily passed on to our children. They are no longer allowed or encouraged to go out, to discover the world around them, in order that they might take risks, to discover how things work, how they themselves work and how the two work together. They no longer have the opportunity or are encouraged (as previous generations were) to find discarded raw materials such as pieces of wood or old bicycle parts, to transform into go-carts or wooden boats, that really do work. Making is as much a way of discovering how they work as how the world around them works. We need to restore this human right to them and making – structured or otherwise, can do that.

Using our hands to create things of beauty, use or both; using the raw materials we find around us, where a battle of wills ensues between maker and material, grappling and tussling with that material, until a truce – a compromise and understanding – is achieved and something beautiful emerges. It is this struggle that helps define us as human beings and we need this affirmation, pretty much on a daily basis, to keep us sane and healthy.

If we know this then why can making not become once more an integral part of our society and the way we (parents and teachers) teach our children? What happened to Woodwork, Metalwork, Needlework, Home Economics in the classroom? The old adage, “The only way to learn how to do something is to do it” has never been more true. It is in the classroom and at home where we need to start again, showing little children that those appendages called hands have a direct link to the wellbeing of their mind and psyche as well as their sense of place and belonging. Today, a three year old child has far more idea of what to do with a computer game controller than he does with Plasticine, Playdoh, Lego or Crayons. I fear that the prophetic vision depicted in the (ironically) computer-generated animation Wall-E, is much closer than we think!

If such a vision is to be believed, then we may be further down that path than is comfortable to admit. I would argue that the recent inner city riots have been carried out by people who have come to believe that there is no point in having a go at anything because it “won’t work” or at least they have not been shown that it could. Some of us know it can work and that trying is part of the fun, adventure and fulfilment. These unfortunate people are afraid to take the risk of discovering how to do something that may or may not have a positive outcome, but from which they can learn and improve. Instead they do something, which achieves instant gratification with the least effort and ironically they feel more secure in doing because they are sure of the outcome. You throw a brick through a window; you know what’s going to happen! But that is all that is ever going to happen- no wonder frustration and violence are never far away. With making, there is always new territory to be discovered, in the skill and in oneself.

If we could only pass on to others that sense of achievement and what it feels like to stare upon the tangible and positive result of one’s own useful endeavours, then it will go at least some way to improving the lot of individuals who currently have no hope.

Steampunk is the intersection of technology and romance. www.steampunkworkshop.com

Daniel Kreibich 'William Morris' 2006 (combined technique on cardboard 100 x 70cm)

Could there be some bond between Morris’s interest in the Middle Ages and Steampunk enthusiasm for the Victorian era? Is it ironic perhaps, that with a time gap of almost one and a half century and all the disparities, there still seems to exist an enemy common for them both – ever-accelerating progress? Further connections might start springing to mind.

There is much in common between Morris’s nostalgia for genuine medieval workmanship and Steampunk longing for ‘the days before machines were build to build other machines’ (as Ele Carpenter comments in the current JMC issue, p 148). In both cases, their romanticization of a historic period is tied to a desire to opt out of the dreary reality.

Steampunk has been accused of glorifying the past. Fictional author Paul Jessup criticizes Steampunk as ‘escapism that tells us Empire is grand.  (Indeed one could say with Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray) that ‘the one of the charms of the past is that it is the past.’ Escapism and its troubled relationship to utopianism would surely make a fascinating topic for a discussion. Let’s try to approach this from a different angle for the moment.

The portrait of William Morris by Czech artist Daniel Krejbich reproduced here hints that there is more to Morris than the black and white picture we’re often presented with tells. As Edward Palmer Thompson brilliantly noted, Morris was “absorbed in a world of “romance””, however, “the world of “romance” was not incompatible with the closest observation and study wherever his interests directed him…” (E. P. Thompson William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary Merlin Press, London 1977, p 17).

It has often been suggested that Morris was a Luddite. This is quite true after all. Morris, just as Luddites, was revolting against replacement of human power and creativity by machinery. Positively, though, this didn’t mean he wanted to ‘go back to some rose tinted vision of Middle Ages’ – to borrow words from Robin Wood’s comment to the previous post on Craft and Utopianism. Morris’s position is quite clear from his lecture Art and Its Producers:

I do not mean…that we should aim at abolishing all machinery: I would do some things by machinery which are now done by hand, and other things by hand which are now done by machinery: in short, we should be the masters of our machines and not their slaves, as we are now. It is not this or that tangible steel and brass machine which we want to get rid of, but the great intangible machine of commercial tyranny, which oppresses the lives of all of us.

In short, what he despised was not machines, but the human drive to move forward at all costs without any forethought for consequences. Similarly, today’s Steampunk does not object against technology. Let the Steampunk computers, Steampunk ipod cases or Steampunk electric guitars speak for themselves. However, their retro style gadgets have their own way of suggesting, that although time flies, it doesn’t necessarily need to fly as quickly as our obsession with all things new makes us believe.

Here then, unfolds the connection between Morris’s medieval and Steampunk Victorian nostalgia. Neither Morris nor steampunks want to stop the clock. Yet, if implicitly, they’re asking what it is that is driving us forward this fast? And, more importantly still, do we want to be driven there?

In his Social change with respect to culture and original nature (1922), William Fielding Ogborn coined the term “cultural lag” to describe the common phenomenon when the changes in material culture (technology especially) often outpace the changes in the non-material culture (ideas, beliefs, symbols etc). Adaptation to new technology thus becomes difficult, as one part of culture virtually lags behind another. Although the term “lag” may suggest so, this doesn’t mean there is no choice and we should simply adapt to and be constantly dragged by technological innovation. The possible misreading of Ogborn’s concept was thus addressed in Alvin Toffler’s famous book Future shock (Random House, New York 1970), where Toffler makes clear that rapid change is not inevitably beneficial and that it might be for our own good to slow down “the future” and adapt to innovation at our own pace. He writes: “… we need neither blind acceptance nor blind resistance, but an array of creative strategies for shaping, deflecting, accelerating, or decelerating change selectively” (p 331).

Perhaps Morris and steampunks are doing just this.