important threads that continue to characterize craft, and from the crucial part it may play in its contemporary fluid form.

Something Old…

In the traditional view of craft, the object is predominantly handmade, and those technologies in use have been an integral part of specific techniques for hundreds of years—witness the jeweler’s saw frame and workbench, found in illustrations of 16th-century workshops and earlier. A romanticized vernacular vision, this version of craft is often portrayed as somehow closer to or representative of some utopian ideal. Pugin, Ruskin, and Morris and their followers explicitly combined lifestyle with aesthetic choices that championed the medieval as an ideal. The Arts and Crafts Movement had an unprecedented global impact in its own time, but it has also handed down a legacy that has proven difficult to escape. The complexity of the movement’s history and personalities is often lost in a kind of shorthand for its most renowned tenets [ 4]: Craft sits in opposition to industrialization; craft centers on the experience of hand-making; all beauty derives from nature; and the worker must be free for the work to be good.

Authenticity had a distinctly
socialist political flavor as well
as an ideological approach to
form. The roots of Arts and
Crafts lay in a concern for a
respectful relationship between
design, society, and nature,
which appeared to be in danger
as the Industrial Revolution
progressed. Manufacturing con-
ditions, formal attributes, and
the way designs could inform
engaged ownership were all
important in the creation of
goodness and beauty, which
were in fact synonymous to the
movement’s leaders [ 4]. Integrity,
holism, and authenticity were
expressed in a number of ways
through form: Materials were
respected for their own char-
acteristics, to be understood
through hands-on engagement;
the function of things was not to
be disguised; and any ornament
should arise from structural ele-
ments rather than through arbi-
trary application. Beauty could
be present only in an object
made by a contented worker,
or could emerge from use over
time. In this way, we might say
communities of practice and
social conditions were important
to Arts and Crafts not only in
the manufacture of goods, but
also in the manner of their con-
sumption.

ing landscape. That is, until New Craft, as distinct from the traditional model, emerged as a paradigmatic shift in Western culture in the 1960s. “Studio craft” assiduously maintained that craft was “an artistic practice equal to all others” [ 5], and argued for “parity between pots and paintings” [ 6]. This status was, and continues to be, engineered through a number of key strategies, including framing mechanisms such as critical discourse and display cultures, a rejection of functionality and the domestic, or a rejection of material itself. Expressions of individuality took the place of craft’s traditional user-centered-ness and work was produced in studios by individuals, who made the explicit decision to be in control of both the conception and realization of their work (thereby implying new modernist models of authority and ownership). This individualism was also extended to the experience and consumption of craft objects, as they became exhibited in rarefied gallery environments, surrounded by white space, and bought as the ultimate statement of individual connoisseurship and identity. Craft emulated fine art’s claims to authenticity through its use of these strategies and valorized the ideals of the Enlightenment: the purity of the conceptual untainted by worldly bodies or material, and the artlessness of spontaneous expression [ 7].

It has taken some time for craft to reflect more deeply upon its own rather messier and contingent forms of authenticity. Rather than merely defining itself in relation to art, contemporary writing in the field is

[ 4] Rosalind Blakesley provides an excellent overview: Blakesley, R. The Arts and Crafts Movement. London: Phaidon Press, 2006.

[ 5] Mazanti, L. “Super Objects.” Ph. D thesis, Denmark’s Design School/the National Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture, Copenhagen, 2006.

[ 6] Metcalf, B. “Contemporary Craft: A brief overview.” In Exploring Contemporary Craft: History, Theory and Critical Writing, ed. J. Johnson, 13-23. Ontario: Coach House Press, 2002.

 

Something New… The beliefs of the Arts and Crafts movement continued to play out through other movements such as the Jugendstil and the Bauhaus, as the economic and political forces of the 20th century began contributing to the industrialized manufactur-

[ 7] A clear example would be the Shaker style furniture of the American Arts and Crafts movement, which removed orna-ment and promoted an austere form of honest existence.

September + October 2010