Nationalism seems to be a consistent issue in craft practices, one we can’t really easily get away from. Why is this? Because craft processes are not only linked with “tradition,” but also, intertwined with production: labor practice, economic recovery, and collective pride. No matter that craft is still, more often than not, inefficient and expensive, and a touch utopian. Hand-dyed, hand-spun cotton and wool from a knitting store—you know, those lovely ones, independently owned and run—often go for $9 or $11 a skein, versus the yucky acrylic stuff sold at chain craft stores that sell for $3 or so. Much like farmer’s market produce versus the conventional supermarket, there is no comparison, of course, in terms of quality, but the small, independent stores more often than not end up belly-up. The intent is there: to ignite a revival, a community of like-minded souls who turn up for knit class, or collective quilting sessions altogether, but such publics are usually made, and not found.

Adamson asks pointed questions about whether or not there is a utopian imperative inherent in craft. Byatt redirects her answer, positing that utopianism is “…actually dangerous. Certainly in the 1960s it was. I decided that a kind of rather flat skepticism, and making things, making things well, is better than a utopian attempt to reform society.” I found Byatt’s statement a very useful correlative in re-thinking the de-skilled artistic practice that exists broadly throughout visual art training—the idea that one acquires skill based upon the sorts of projects one decides to execute. This is an anathema to traditional craft practice, of course, but now that the two are mostly merged—I don’t really make a distinction between contemporary art, per say, and contemporary craft, they are one and the same—that is, both camps are working conceptually. Furthermore, craft-based processes have been co-opted by visual artists of all stripes invested in issues of design, labor, and community. Yet, when Byatt says, “I believe in making things,” she hits on a tender nerve in our community, the seeming wedge between conceptual art and craft practices, which no longer exists. All artists believe in making things, it is just that the definition of “thing” is imprecise, and always in flux. That is also the beauty of artistic practice, in that there are so many kinds of “things” to make, be it a book, a tea cozy, an installation, or a You Tube video.

Articles

Editorial introduction

Sustainable Socialism: William Morris on Waste by Elizabeth C. Miller

The Craft of Industrial Patternmaking by Sarah Fayen Scarlett

Speculative Artisanry: The Expanding Scale of Craft within Architecture by Joshua G. Stein

Statement of Practice

Interview with A.S. Byatt including Tanya Harrod and Glenn Adamson (PDF)

Commentary by Glenn Adamson

“The Artisan,” from The Mirror of Production by Jean Baudrillard

Exhibition Reviews

The Art of Gaman: Arts and Crafts from the Japanese American Internment Camps, 1942–1946 reviewed by Bibiana Obler

Japanese Sashiko Textiles reviewed by Moira Vincentelli

Book Reviews

Made in Newark: Cultivating Industrial Arts and Civic Identity in the Progressive Era reviewed by Ellen Paul Denker

KnitKnit: Profiles and Projects from Knitting’s New Wave reviewed by Sue Green

Coined by artists and collectives in the wake of the September 11^th, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, the term “craftivism” relates to creative, traditional handcraft (often, assisted by high-tech means of community-building, skill-sharing, and action) directed toward political and social causes. For this special issue of Utopian Studies, we invite practitioners, scholars, and curators to submit work related to the history, criticism, and myriad practices of craftivism. Subjects and strategies might include: historical or present examples of activist practice that uses craft; issues of production, manufacture or use that might intersect with craftivism; discussions of the successes or limits of craftivist practice; considerations of feminist craft practice that traverse (or are collapsed into) wider social issues and movements. Papers might also take a wider frame, looking at craft and economic globalization, NGO work or the use of craft in cultural brokering. Please note that this issue’s editors are interested in praxis as well as scholarship, and encourage makers to submit statements, manifestos, and/or imagery for consideration.

Utopian Studies is a biannual, peer-reviewed journal publishing scholarly articles on a wide range of subjects related to utopias, utopianism, utopian literature, utopian theory, and intentional communities. All submissions must be sent by JANUARY 17^TH 2011 via the journal’s online editorial manager at: http://www.editorialmanager.com/uts/ Utopian Studies’ submission guidelines are also available online: http://www.utoronto.ca/utopia/journal/guidelines.html

Queries concerning the issue’s theme and guidelines may be directed to the guest editors via e-mail: Maria Elena Buszek: maria.buszek@ucdenver.edu and Kirsty Robertson: kirsty.robertson@uwo.ca

In Mourning and in Rage (1977) by California artist Suzanne Lacy (now recognised as a distinct politically relevant performance art 'school of thought', out of the West Coast of North America). Protestors are in robes and hoods; this isperformance art using textile arts (costuming) as a social-change activist strategy, to protest against the murders and rapes of ten random women in Los Angeles.

In Mourning and in Rage (1977) by California artist Suzanne Lacy (now recognised as a distinct politically relevant performance art 'school of thought', out of the West Coast of North America). Protestors are in robes and hoods; this isperformance art using textile arts (costuming) as a social-change activist strategy, to protest against the murders and rapes of ten random women in Los Angeles.

A 2009 heightened anxiety (about the self’s connection with ‘the other’ and ‘the material world’) has driven us to Craftivism. Ever since the advent of the mid-1990s information age when ‘the screen’ took precedence over real-time relations and touch, Western conceptual craftivists have rebelled against ‘time management’ and ‘efficient production’. “The hand-crafted artefact” is a labor-of-love: by engaging in craft as a practitioner, craftivists reject conspicuous mass consumerism (I am speaking as a resident of a Commonwealth country). We also reject ‘the discarded readymade’ as the primary medium of the installation artist. When I am working as a craftivist, I think that I am hoping for some kind of physical confirmation of my attempt to be a more fully humane human being.

Authentically crafted objects offer enjoyment simply in the material pleasure of their awkward existence. In craftivism, the artist is able to enjoy the notions of ‘sustainability’ and ‘civility’ because the making of The Crafted Artefact takes time and, often, a long-term connected relationship with both the materials and other people in public and in private. Craft circulates in a gift economy rich in relationships, but not necessarily in cash-flow.

By continuing as a craftivist artist – designer, or a place-making site-specific sculptor, since the advent of high speed internet, late 1990s, I have accepted being a luddite. Kevin Murray and I laughed that we were both luddites, over a fair-trade chocolate in Tasmania last July. (The word luddite refers to the protesting British textile workers of 1811-16 who destroyed labour-saving machines which represented technological advances in their industry). But craftivists don’t really reject technology, we rely on it too much for communications. Craftivists like myself are concerned with the lack of e-civic activism or ‘real-time’ civic participation in the public sphere since people’s really human links with one another have become deadened by the constant anaesthetization of the extreme juxtaposition between ‘the intimate’ and ‘the anonymous’ (due to digital communication advances). Our lives seem to be tenuously based upon ‘only-the context-at-the-time’; connection, once dependent upon human warmth and kindness to one another are, therefore, always at risk of fracture. Craftivists comment upon this state of a lack of sustainable community relations, and the building and mending of the social fabric of our lives, through their making of ‘things’ and performances with these crafted things in public space.

My Background:

I am an installation artist-turned Craftivist who used to work as a site-specific, public artist, mainly in compressed earthen materials, a different branch of the fiber arts: organic conceptual minimalism (see www.lyciatrouton.com).

Now, as a textile installation artist – craftivist, I am curious how women’s leadership roles in community(ies)-of-violence have been impacted. The community with which I have chosen to be most concerned with, as an artist, is a community-in-crisis: that of North and West Belfast, Northern Ireland, my neighbourhood-of-origin,. This is a place that has sustained 40 years of extreme violence and a very high rate of inter-urban migration.

Women artists employ gendered ‘textile arts strategies’, together with oral storytelling or silence, in various protest-vigils which use cloth /costuming as metaphor(s). A typical artform for women makers and craftivists is commemoration. For example, a Northern Ireland example of  Craftivism and “The Art of Survival” to communicate the personal experience of war, loss and grief was a quilt exhibit, 2008. This was curated by Roberta Bacic and was funded, in part, by the European  Union Programme for Peace and Reconciliation. The exhibition included 10 small-scale Peace and Reconciliation quilts and circulated with the Londonderry/Derry Council Heritage service, Northern Ireland. Examples of various late 1960s to 80s public needlework protests, different from quilting but referencing the art of textiles, are included in the images and captions at the end of my response (to be continued).