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.

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

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

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

Lestina Malatjie and Calvin Machlawaule, (Kaross Collective), Community, 1999. Embroidery on black cloth, 60 x 115 cm. Collection: Johannesburg Art Gallery

Lestina Malatjie and Calvin Machlawaule, (Kaross Collective), Community, 1999. Embroidery on black cloth, 60 x 115 cm. Collection: Johannesburg Art Gallery

Shortly after the newly democratic ANC-led government of South Africa was installed in 1994, it issued a White Paper that announced a policy of using the arts for the purpose of social transformation and reconciliation. The paper asserted that “experiencing the creative expression of different communities of South Africa provides insights into the aspirations and values of our nation. This experience develops tolerance and provides a foundation for national reconciliation.” One outcome of this policy should have been to bridge the gap between art and craft in South African cultural property. Unfortunately, because government support for ‘craft’ was predicated on its ability to alleviate poverty– “to contribute significantly to the economy of the country by…creating employment,” its effect has been to maintain the hierarchical distinction between art and craft by reinforcing the divide between the aesthetic and the practical and between the rural and urban. The Department of Arts and Culture’s motto: “Design Feeds the Poor,” could hardly be expected to resonate with an international art market now free, after the lifting of sanctions, to scour the county for the next hot art star. Both the government and the museum/gallery system are driven by monetary concerns, but with radically different goals. In the end, one could argue that the gap between art and craft in the new South Africa is a reflection of the bottomless chasm between rich and poor.

When I first went to South Africa in 2000, I was exhilarated by the art world’s rethinking of the traditional categories of what constituted art. Universities were hurriedly revamping art history courses to include ‘traditional’ arts, and museums were not only purchasing the work of black painters, sculptors and printmakers, they were displaying both traditional and contemporary crafts along with the ‘high’ arts of painting and sculpture. The legacy of 19^th century concepts of what constituted art and art history was quietly being buried, or so it seemed. For over a century, the avant-garde had advocated the destruction of the very idea of ‘high’ art, whereas the history of art was narrowly confined to the study of traditional media. In South Africa in 2000, it appeared as if the internal contradiction within modernism was going to be resolved in favor of the avant-garde. From the perspective of this newcomer, the history of art was being reconceived as the history of cultural production, and the former hierarchies among media were being leveled.

In 2003, in the exhibition, “Coexistence: Contemporary Cultural Production in South Africa,” that I co-curated with the former Director of the South African National Gallery, Marilyn Martin, we included the work of rural needlework collectives along with that of university-trained artists working in cities in South Africa or abroad. Our aim was to bridge not only the rural/urban//craft/art divide but also the gender divide. The needlework collectives had been established for the most part by white women artists who had identified traditional craft skills as a means of income generation. Among the most successful was and remains the Kaross collective in Limpopo Province. Founded by Irma van Rooyen in 1988, it employs over 600 people today, the vast majority of whom are women. (B. Schmahmann in the exhibition catalog). Even if the role of these white founders might be considered a form of colonialism, it anticipated government policy and moreover has given disadvantaged women new status in their communities, answering the call of the ANC Women’s League “for the right to fashion feminism to suit their own worlds.” I will use the example of a stunning embroidered cloth to illustrate the complexities of the art/craft divide in the South African context post-1994.

Community (1999) is a subtle interweaving of voices—a textile in the truest sense of the word. The cloth was commissioned by the National Paper Prayers Campaign for AIDS Awareness (1998-2000), initiated by artist Kim Berman and administered through Artist Proof Studio. In collaboration with AIDS educators, the Studio members went to community centers in all of South Africa’s nine provinces to help address trauma and loss through the process of making a print as a prayer for healing. During its second year, the program expanded to three needlework collectives, each of which produced large-scale hangings—a sort of surrogate painting– that could serve either to inform the local populace if hung in a community center or as a collectible art work to raise funds for treatment programs. Like a storybook, Community visually narrates the story of the impact of AIDS on a rural village. As drawn by Calvin Machlawaule, who is HIV positive, and then embroidered by Lestina Malatjie, it emphasizes the tragic consequences of denial and stigma in the era of AIDS.

Clearly the cloth is a hybrid in more ways than one. At the Kaross collective, the women’s needlework skills had been transferred from creating clothing for personal use to making place mats and tablecloths for the tourist trade. Once the government-funded Paper Prayers program provided a tool for AIDS awareness, the resulting narrative cloths had a powerful content that transcended both its educational purpose and its ‘craft’ designation. Signed by the embroiderer, Malatjie, in order to satisfy the predominantly white collectors’ expectations of authorship, it was exhibited at the Vita Craft Awards, where it won a top prize and was purchased by the Johannesburg Art Gallery. Neither the format of the wall hanging nor its content was the result of Malatjie’s individual inspiration, however. The work, as its title indicates, was the collaborative effort of several of the participants in the training, as overseen by the artists and educators. And despite the exceptional quality of the work, Malatjie has not emerged as a recognized craft-artist. As for Community itself, it remains in storage at JAG, its status as ‘art’ in limbo.

Of course, ‘community’ is the problem. In South Africa, ‘high’ art is still thought of as the product of an individual sensibility, despite every effort to rethink categories to be more reflective of the values of a democratic nation. The fact that the needlework collectives consist predominantly of women has only contributed further to locking the art/craft hierarchy more firmly into place. Until very recently, ‘high’ art, as defined in western terms, was considered a male-only realm within the majority black culture. Although this is rapidly changing, the continuing rural/urban divide—men in the city, women in the countryside– also contributes to maintaining the status quo.

The situation results in an impoverished picture of South African art, as exemplified by the recent publication, South African Art Now, authored by artist Sue Williamson and produced by HarperCollins in the U.S. In this broad survey, the craft traditions are acknowledged only in terms of individual practitioners employing handwork skills to make ‘art.’ The important work of the embroidery or pottery collectives receives no mention at all. Of course, in the United States, one rarely finds publications on community-based art or artists’ collectives; monographic studies of individual artists still predominate. Although it is hardly surprising that HarperCollins, owned by the conservative propagandist Rupert Murdoch, followed this established hierarchy, the book does distort the South African picture, in my opinion.

The arts will never be able to adequately contribute to social transformation and reconciliation in South Africa until the art/craft divide is finally and firmly bridged. The country has faced and surmounted far greater challenges, so the cause is far from lost.

Pamela Allara is Associate Professor emerita, Contemporary Art and Visual Culture, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, USA