Long Live the Dead Crafts

Response to Dysfunctional Craft

Isn’t the traditional purpose of craftsmanship is to provide the best possible function, durability, etc, without revealing the hand of the craftsman or the infrastructure of manufacture? As mechanical inventions of man supplanted or distanced the direct physical manipulation the economic factor of replaced workers resulted in the class-based reactionary Luddites. Today you have the current China price due to imperialist actions of conglomerate manufacturers and thus are witnessing a similar revolt in the form of the bourgeois DIY movement and the soon-to-be fully co-opted and incorporated “organic” and “green” consumption trends.

So, when one espouses the Marxist notion of all things being reduced to capital, I can’t argue with that. What I do question is the primacy of capital over emotion in the cost-value analysis of items for consumption. On a similar vein, the low retention rate in the crafts-artisan field, I would argue, remains the same across the board no matter the major. I certainly know plenty of English and Philosophy majors who work their share of McJobs. Certainly the decimation of the public funding of the arts would play some small part in such an American travesty.
Regarding the question of the death of “craft,” I would propose the sublimation a necessity for basic survival. As the modernist project failed to distill each subdivision into an essence and return the overly-specialized parts into some form of larger truth, I would propose that within the Culture War – specifically the War on the NEA – the divided Arts are facing the real threat of annihilation and those surviving on the poisoned breast of privatization and the wizened teat of evil big government have no choice but to regroup, strategorize and attack. Hopefully these are the seeds of a new front.

Personally my view of craft is supplementary, simply the optimization of the stated function of the object or creation. Moreover, I would suggest that it is not craft itself that has changed, but the function of craft, specifically the ends one seeks to achieve using craft as much as form.
Industrialization aside, the strata of the standard of living and the perceptions of class have remained constant and have thus always informed the public consciousness of consumption; therefore, when it is proposed that one must manufacture or starve I cringe. Oppositional thought patterns rarely find solutions, so I must implore a European path that requires public funding, namely educational and political solutions to educational and political problems. We certainly wouldn’t be where we are today without the GI bill.

I do enjoy the equivalence of the lone maker with the likes of Target. Should they both be using Chinese children or prison labor? I certainly think so, but for different reasons. Without a “personal vision,” wouldn’t you be making something that’s already been made? Wouldn’t innovation require a fresh set of eyes with which one reformulates given components? Wouldn’t those eyes have some history of their own from which they would pull, since they may have been born at night, but not last night?

Long Live the Dead Crafts.
Captain Ludd "The Gouger"