C O N S I D E R I N G .
. .
C R A F T ’ S
H O R I Z O N S
With this issue we in-
troduce Considering.
.
a column shared by
Glenn Adamson, who
kicks off here, and
Akiko Busch, whose
first essay will appear
in the October/
November 2009 issue.
S T O R Y BY
Glenn Adam son
T he skilled w ork that w e call craft comes at you from all directions.
But som etim es it’s hard to know exactly w hat path it took.
For example, I was in Istanbul recently and met a jew eler named
Sevan B ifak ^ i. His signature pieces are enormous rings set w ith
semiprecious stones like tourmaline and topaz. T he gems are carved
from underneath, so once mounted they have the appearance o f
wearable magic tricks. B ifak fi is a master goldsmith, and each piece
seems at first to be the obsessively w orked masterpiece o f a genius.
But his jew elry is really made by a team o f 40 or so skilled locals, each
o f whom takes on one task w ithin a seam lessly organized produc-
tion line.
O r take contem porary art, w here the trend is increasingly
towards outsourced, highly skilled labor. Dam ien H irst’s iconic
diamond-encrusted platinum skull,
For the Love of God,
is an obvious
example. It was made by the Bond Street firm Bentley and Skinner.
R oni H orn’s recent retrospective at T ate M odern featured
Pink
Tons,
a huge cracked and rippled block o f glass that looks like an
enormous chunk o f frozen rosewater. It w as manufactured for her
by the German firm Schott. A t the A rt Institute o f Chicago’s new ly
opened w ing for m odern and contem porary art, m eanwhile, you
can view
Hinoki,
an exact replica o f a fallen tree that the artist
Charles R ay saw in California. It was fashioned by a team o f wood-
carvers in Osaka. In all o f these cases, the people w ho made the
art go largely unmentioned.
H ow about industry? Y o u might think craft is the opposite
o f mass production, but in fact artisans w ork at factories across the
globe. T h ey make prototypes out o f clay and plaster, keep creaky
and outdated machines running, or carry out the same highly skilled
but repetitive w ork day after day, for wages most Americans would
consider exploitative. A gain, their names are typically effaced
w ithin system s o f design and distribution, but w ithout these
craftspeople the global econom y w ould be in even more trouble
than it already is.
Contrary to expectation, then, making something by hand is not
a secure form o f authorship. Quite the contrary, in fact: craft is easily
rendered the silent supplement to other disciplines. This is infuriat-
ing to traditionalists, w ho value responsibility to one’s w ork and
oneself above all. But the role o f skill in contem porary life is big,
messy and complicated. An old British term, “ applied art,” captures
this reality nicely. C raft skill today is usually “ applied” indirectly,
w ithin increasingly elaborate and interconnected netw orks o f pro-
duction, exchange and consumption.
A ll this spells trouble for the studio craft m ovem ent, in w hich
single makers produce unique objects as a w ay o f expressing their
ow n aesthetic. G iving up on this once-vital approach to craft w ill
be a painful process. But the time has come. T oo much o f craft pro-
duction offers itself as an alternative to the vertiginous challenges
o f the present. Such headline events as
s o f a
(in N ew Y o rk , C hi-
cago and now Santa Fe) and C ollect (in London) are still important,
but they feel increasingly outdated, stuck in a modernist, formalist
conception o f value. A s long as the craft com m unity considers its
goals to be the creation o f autonomous and rarefied
objetsd’art,
it
w ill remain trapped in a retrograde exercise.
I’m a historian by profession, but w hat I hope to do in this regular
column is to look at craft’s present and possible future: craft’s hori-
zons. I use the phrase advisedly, o f course. Especially in its incarna-
tion under its editor Rose Slivka, betw een 1959 and 1979, this
publication’s precursor,
Craft Horizons,
w as restless, intellectually
engaged and globetrotting. It w as not a perfect m agazine, but it
brought its readers into areas that many o f them would have pre-
ferred to ignore: the luxury econom y, the fine art gallery, the fac-
tory floor, the poverty-stricken village. M odern craft history has
moved on since then, o f course, but all o f these contexts (and new
ones too) are still vital for us to understand.
So in this column, I’ll be looking at craft skill in action: on televi-
sion, in couture, in the hands o f architects, within tourist trade. N ot
all o f these stories w ill be uplifting ones. Y e t at a mom ent w hen
many studio craftspeople and their advocates feel a sense o f crisis,
I w ant to sound a note o f optim ism . T h e sense o f mission once
shared by a certain range o f practitioners has been lost. But for pre-
cisely that reason, craft has never seemed more exciting. T he mo-
ment calls for critical inquiry rather than idealistic celebration. For-
ty-five years ago, at the First W orld Congress o f Craftsm en, during
w hich the W orld C rafts Council w as form ed, Slivka addressed
herself to this question, and her words, from the published proceed-
ings, still ring true: “T oday the craftsman is expressing for all men
the dilemma o f man in a m echanized civilization. H e is affirm ing
that man has prevailed not by his physical strength, but by his calcu-
lation in w eakness.
.. not because he could w in, but because he
could lose and not perish, because he could suffer and still not only
be, but continue to be, in a state o f becom ing.” Craft is always on
the m ove.+
Glenn Adamson is head o f graduate studies at the Victoria and Albert
Museum, London, and co-editor ofthe
Journal o f M odern Craft.
036 american craft aug/sep09
