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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

The Editors
The Journal of Modern Craft

Table of contents 4.1

Neil Gall, ‘Unable to Separate their Identities’, Cast and painted resin, 15 x 15 x 15 cm, Photo: Bernd Borchardt (Courtesy the artist and Aurel Scheibler/Scheiblermitte, Berlin).

I wanted to focus here on a work by Neil Gall, ‘Unable to Separate their Identities’ (2008), because it probes the dichotomy between different types of making. It appeared in an exhibition I co-curated with Stephen Feeke, ‘Undone: Making and Un-making in Contemporary Sculpture’ (Henry Moore Institute, 30^th September 2010 – 2^nd January 2011), which examined sculpture through the prism of making and materials. The show looked at works which were made by hand using everyday materials and ad-hoc craft techniques. The works retained an air of spontaneity and improvisation – an elusive, intoxicating freshness, contingent on provisionality – but, as a corollary, they were not predicated generally on specialist technical skill.

Amongst these objects, Neil Gall’s ‘Unable to Separate their Identities’ was something of an imposter. It appears as an assemblage of ping pong balls bound together with yellow duck tape. In fact, it is a detailed resin cast of such an assemblage, painted meticulously by the artist. Gall identifies himself primarily as a painter. He makes sculptural constructions from discarded rubbish at his kitchen table in a swift, experimental and spontaneous way. He then uses them as models for his paintings, photographing them, and recreating them with extraordinary accuracy over the course of several months. ‘Unable to separate….’ is a development of this process: it is a highly-detailed model, cast in resin and coloured in minute detail by the artist, which serves as a three-dimensional painting. It is almost indistinguishable from the original construction – unless you were able to pick it up when its substantial weight would come as a surprise.

Gall regards the original constructive process as highly creative – ‘the object being made in the everyday rather than the rarefied atmosphere of the studio somehow releases the unconscious, it frees me up, gives me the ability to make something nonsensical’ – but he has never, to this point, considered or shown his ad-hoc objects as finished works. The planning, the patience, the hard labour and not least the professional, technical skill required to translate them into paintings (whether in two or three dimensions) seem to be equally necessary to his practice. By these means, he transforms playful constructions into something heavier both physically and conceptually. Like an ambitious alchemist, a master of the dark arts, he attempts to capture and make permanent a provisional act. He embraces the sinister undertones of such petrification, creating an ‘unnatural’ object which is the exact opposite of what it seems.

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

A picture of the pole lathes (also made by Leitz and volunteers) in the context of the entire workshop

Down a small in lane and up a mud track in deepest Herefordshire, a white canvas structure emerges from Clissett Wood: an unplugged greenwood furniture ‘bodging’ workshop that hosted ten prominent designers during the wet week of March 30^th – April 5^th 2010. The designers had cut themselves off from the infrastructure of their respective studios, with straight edges, electrical power and machinery swapped for hand-made tools, local wood and fingerless gloves, in imitation the of bodging techniques of countryside carpenters.

Rory Dodd on the pole lathe

This year Eckersley returned to Clissett Wood with nine designer friends, and, with the exhibition platform of the Spazio Revel in Milan secured by Dodd at Designersblock, engaged in a week of making greenwood chairs using traditional techniques under Leitz’s instruction. Her methods echo the processes adopted by Philip Clissett, the nineteenth century Hereford greenwood furniture maker who inspired figures of the Arts and Crafts movement, including Ernest Gimson. The same attraction that led Arts and Crafts figures to Clissett led to the fruition of this project: to get away from the machines and tools that define modern production and become familiar with the manually powered pole lathe (constructed from pieces of wood from the forest itself), shave-horse and an array of hand tools.

The influence of William Morris’s elevation of good workmanship was evident. Leitz straightforwardly admitted that the course was run according to a specific philosophy that stresses sustainability, quality craftsmanship from local raw materials, manual skill, and the retrospective reconstruction of folk traditions.

A shave-horse made by Gudrun Leitz and her volunteers with various hand tools

So how did the metropolitan designers mix with the bodging techniques? I arrived one day before the deadline to finish, and the workshop was a hive of activity, with the practitioners pushing tired limbs in an attempt to finish on time. All the processes – including cleaving, lathing, steaming, shaping, sawing and assembly – were powered by hand, a physical exertion that was taking its toll. The tools demanded a great deal from the human body. The pole lathe, which the designers learnt how to use on the first day, not only required repeated pedalling but also the need to cup the wood in the lathe with your hand to offer it up to the blade of the chisel. This offered greater manual control over the turning process and an intimate relationship between the body and the machine, but more muscles were involved in the making procedure than might be expected in a conventional machine powered workshop. This cohered with Leitz’s philosophy of making the body a craft machine, rid of all the technicalities the mind mulls over. But the consequences included aches and pains, too.

Chris Eckersly cutting off the bottom leg of his Windsor chair

Designers responded positively to the new experiences of using manually-driven machines and hand tools, and to the close connection between labour and the material. However, the lack of a straight edge in the haphazard workshop meant geometrical designs were hard to achieve, and uneven chairs resulted. For practitioners used to the accuracy of computer machinery this caused particular problems, relating to Pye’s hypothesis on the workmanship of risk: with hand tools there is greater likelihood of a misplaced intervention, which could ruin the desired outcome.

Carl Clerkin and Gudrun Leitz measuring up Clerkin's Windsor chair

The products that resulted from the week’s endurance were whisked away to Milan a week after. Like Clissett’s handmade chairs that made it to Heal’s in London in the early twentieth century, the chairs of these designers may well ignite a romanticism attached to local production and craftsmanship amongst a metropolitan crowd. In addition to this direct output, the bodging course provides a lesson in the value of craftsmanship without power machinery. But however pleasurable, interesting or eye opening this experience in the woods may be, it does not constitute a viable modern day production strategy. As David Green from Sitting Firm mentioned, his £8,000 machine can cut the same seat bottom in 30 seconds as it takes his hands to make in a day. These realities of production seem to limit’s the experiment’s scope. But using a different set of tools, materials and skills does have the potential to renew or reinvigorate furniture practice.

Stephen Knott is a doctoral candidate at the Royal College of Art and Victoria and Albert Museum, writing on the theory and practice of amateur craft.

More images can be found here.

As the Journal of Modern Craft enters its second year of publication, it seems an appropriate time to go back to basics. And so, after a year of trying to push the boundaries, this time round we offer a series of writings that go right to the heart of “modern craft” and its interpretation.

In articles by Tom Crook, a historian and theorist of nineteenth-century modernity, and Nicolette Makovicky, an anthropologist and material culture specialist, we are treated to two such methodological inquiries. Crook’s subject, the Arts and Crafts Movement, could not be more familiar to readers of this journal. By reframing the Movement as an ‘alternative modernity,’ however, he breathes new life into that subject. Crook’s account gives us new tools for understanding well worn aspects of the Movement like the debate over machines, medievalism and other forms of historicism, and the growth of interest in indigenous craft traditions from around the world. Of particular interest is his use of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of ‘dialogics,’ in which opposing positions and processes are seen as producing one another through continual interrelation, rather than resolving dialectically into new, stable syntheses.

Makovicky’s fieldwork among lace makers in contemporary Slovakia has led her to make a closely parallel argument. Just as Crook warns against seeing the Arts and Crafts Movement as either modern or anti-modern, Makovicky refuses the false choice between understanding ‘traditional’ craft either as a fictional construct, or as a fragmentary and threatened anachronism. Rather, she presents the choices made by individual lace makers as conscious responses to modernity, in which change and tradition are constantly reintegrated into one another. Especially when read together, these two essays exemplify this journal’s ambition to chart new methods in the study of modern craft, both by turning over old soil and ploughing new fields.

Much the same could be said about the prominent place given to British ceramics in this issue. Art historian Penelope Curtis outlines an unexpected comparison between the most famous name in English pottery—Bernard Leach—and the sculptor Barbara Hepworth. For many decades these two figures lived near one another in St. Ives, a small town in the west of England, but a notional art/craft divide prevented scholars from drawing connections between them. Interestingly, readers may feel that of the two, it is Hepworth who seems the more committed to the form-giving possibilities of handwork; but in any case, Curtis shows how the vessel form that forms the heart of studio ceramics can be seen afresh as it moves across disciplines.

Ceramics is also the focus of this issue’s Primary Text and Statement of Practice. In pairing David Queensberry and Alison Britton, we have intentionally taken a step back into the politics and possibilities of the 1970s. At that time Queensberry, a leading designer within the ceramic industry, was Britton’s tutor at the Royal College of Art. Despite his emphasis on functional design, she and many of his other students (including Carol McNicoll, Jacqueline Poncelet, and Elizabeth Fritsch) set off in a diametrically opposed direction. Britton turned to handbuilding, pattern and decoration, and fragmentary composition to forge a powerful new postmodern sculptural idiom. Now, thirty years later, it is Britton who teaches ceramics at the Royal College of Art. Her statement, written with the benefit of hindsight looking back at a long and successful career, describes her studies with Queensberry as the beginning of a journey of formal and conceptual experimentation.

Queensberry, too, has stuck to his guns. We have reprinted a talk he delivered back in ’75, in which he expresses alarm at the direction that young ceramists seem to be taking. In a new preface to this lecture, he reaffirms his convictions, arguing that the global transformations in production that have happened since make the teaching of design skills more important than ever. Queensberry’s and Britton’s positions reprise the old debate: should craft be oriented to design or fine art? But both write in full awareness that those two frameworks of reference are themselves fluid and unpredictable. 

The issue’s final article brings to our pages the work of Julia Bryan-Wilson, one of the most exciting new scholars working at the intersection of art and craft history. The lesbian identity politics that she locates in the work of Harmony Hammond might initially seem distant from modern craft’s fundamental concerns, as discussed elsewhere in this issue. But it is telling that Hammond, too, sought to break down false distinctions: “between painting and sculpture, between art and women’s work, and between art in craft and craft in art,” as she put it. In Bryan-Wilson’s analysis, Hammond looked to craft not as a reassuring source of identity, nor simply as a tool of Feminist critique, but rather as a means of queering seemingly stable oppositions and thus opening up new discursive possibilities.

Finally, we have the pleasure of announcing two new initiatives at the Journal of Modern Craft that are intended to embody this spirit of ongoing dialogue. This issue is our first to include a Response to a previously published article. We actively encourage such contributions, and hope to be able to feature other commentaries by our readers in future issues. Also, we are glad to be able to announce the launch of a new website at www.journalofmoderncraft.com. This new digital interface will carry selected content from the journal, and will also provide useful links, blog posts, and an open forum to which all our readers can contribute. Academic publishing is a slow and careful affair, and any scholarly journal—no matter how multiple and inventive—runs the risk of instituting a new orthodoxy. By actively promoting dialogue through printed and digital means, we hope to avoid this, and thus to do justice to the subject of modern craft, which is always on the move.