C O N S ID E R IN G .
..
Intellectually Speaking, there isn’t much difference
between a Pilchuck glassblowing demo
and a televised lumberjacking competition.
Timber!
E S S A Y B Y
Glenn Adamson
“Power, precision, speed, accuracy.” The
motto of the American Craft Council? No,
it’s the slogan of
Stihl Timbersports,
a tele-
vised competition in which contestants go
head-to-head cutting through logs with an
ax (this takes about twelve seconds), a two-
person bucksaw (thirteen seconds) or a
chainsaw (seven). The winners tend to be
macho men from countries noted for their
forestry, such as Australia, New Zealand,
Canada, Austria and Denmark. The atmo-
sphere of the show, however, is strictly
World Wide Wrestling Federation. The
audience hoots enthusiastically, and rock
music blares on the soundtrack. When I
caught the program on German television,
it was immediately followed by the World’s
Strongest Man finals.
Timbersports
is an example of a phenom-
enon I have been noticing a lot recently:
manual skill presented in as pure and ex-
treme a form as possible. In fine art, we
have Tara Donovan, who makes sculptures
like a three-foot-high cube of toothpicks,
held together with nothing but friction, or
Dave Cole, who has knitted giant teddy
bears from strips of lead. Until recently you
could watch the television show
Craft
ComerDeathmatch,
on which contestants
were challenged to glue-gun items into
existence in ten minutes or less, before
being judged by the Craft Lady of Steel.
Pushed to unreasonable lengths, skill is
066 american craft dec/jan 10
exerting an unprecedented hold on the
public imagination. Why?
Timbersports
may have something to tell
us about that. I would argue that it is actu-
ally a show about craft, but not in the artistic
sense. This is what a German would call
handwerk—
which implies a sense of skill but
not necessarily an aesthetic sensibility—as
opposed to
kunsthandwerk,
or “artistic craft.”
(The same distinction exists in other lan-
guages. In Japanese, for example, a sharp
distinction has sometimes been made be-
tween
dento kbgei
and
kbgei bijutsu
, “tradi-
tional craft” and “art craft,” respectively.)
Skill in this arena is judged objectively, in
milliseconds. When a crowd goes wild for
two large men in tight T-shirts wielding
axes, they aren’t looking for “art craft.”
They are after something more primal,
more certain, than that.
In studio craft circles, we are used to
dismissing such displays of raw skill. If
workmanship doesn’t lead to something
conceptually convincing or stylistically
arresting, it finds no place in craft museums,
magazines and history books. There are at
least two problems with this attitude. First,
the craft movement has long depended on
the instantaneous appeal of
handwerk,
in the
form of craft performances at expositions,
fairs, conferences and the like. Intellectually
speaking, there isn’t much difference be-
tween a Pilchuck glassblowing demo and
a televised lumberjacking competition.
But that doesn’t mean that either is inconse-
quential. Feats of pure skill, considered
independently from artistic achievement,
are a powerful force in craft culture.
Second, if craft is a process, it makes
little sense to judge it by its results alone.
An important new documentary by Faythe
Levine,
Handmade Nation
, attests to this.
The young crafters captured by her camera
are not necessarily great artists or design-
ers, but they are impassioned: anti-globalist,
environmentalist, feminist, queer, “slow,”
subcultural. Cutting down forests certainly
isn’t on their agenda. The men of
Timber-
sports
would have to agree with the central
tenet of
d i y ,
though: it’s the doing that
counts, not the product.
So this is one way that new audiences are
connecting with craft: as a stripped-down,
nonartistic, but nonetheless satisfying expe-
rience. This is probably because it feels
“real.” O f course, there’s no actual necessity
at work here. No one needs to chop a tree
down by hand anymore, nor do we need an
endless choice of bespoke mittens. At a mo-
ment when authenticity is a precious com-
modity, though, this is how people seem
to want their craft. Mediated, yes. But defi-
nitely uncut. ♦
Glenn Adamson is head o f graduate studies at
the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and
co-editor o f the
Journal of Modern Craft.
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Photo courtesy o f stihltimbersports.de.
