This is an issue I’ve wrestled with as well - I feel like I’m
straddling both worlds. One side of me retains a perhaps romanticized
view of hand craftsmanship, as was espoused by William Morris and
Gustav Stickley in the original and revived Arts and Crafts
movements. I’ve devoted a lot of time to mastering traditional craft
skills, and value the insights and abilities I’ve gained through
them. The other side of me has an equally starry-eyed awe at the
possibilities offered by the amazing technology of our times. What’s
an artist to do?
Is the touch of a person’s hand a defining seal of authenticity, or
is it some unique quality of mind that gives an artifact truth and
beauty? Morris and Stickley were reacting to the Industrial
Revolution’s replacement of originally hand-crafted items (before
that, everything was made by hand) with mass-produced versions of the
same things. Elaborate ornament, which had added valueto objects (at
least according to Marx’s labor theory of value) became debased, as
an insignificant fraction of the work involved in creating a
mass-produced item. Although it took some labor to cut a mold in
steel, for example, once this stamped out a thousand pieces it had
added little time or expense to each unit, while consumers unfamiliar
with manufacturing technology still accorded it the respect
previously earned by individually-decorated pieces. So the
manufacturers had a free ride, at least for a while, producing
“pinchbeck” versions of classic patterns, until the consumers caught
on, and tastes changed to favor simpler designs. Against a background
of this, after most hand crafters had given up and taken factory
jobs, it was natural for a reaction to occur, and for some people, at
least, to crave the possibly rougher but more soulful work of an
individual’s hand. This was also the time when artistic painting was
going through a similar crisis, as photography grabbed the
once-lucrative portraiture market, and artist’s marketing changed to
stress the value of the master-touch and the drama of the artist’s
life, instead of relying on the verisimilitude of the product.
At this point, though, we (in the “developed” world, anyway) have
had a couple of centuries to accomodate ourselves to the Industrial
Revolution and the flood of mass-produced products that surround us.
While it’s still possible to make things entirely by hand, it is
rarely practical except in the context of a conceptual art
experiment. Even the Luddites among us think nothing of using power
tools, premade components, synthetic compounds, and borrowed imagery.
Anyone having the temerity to produce any sort of product on their
own is forced into competition not only with domestic manufacturers
engaged in mass-producing similar articles, but with a 'third world"
of people living in poverty and the companies which exploit their
labor, who sell their wares at prices that don’t sustain life in our
economies. If consumers really venerate hand craftsmanship, they can
obtain it much more cheaply from foreign sources than we can provide
it at home. So unless we have the means to swim against the economic
current, it seems that our only recourse is to come up with
innovations in design and to take advantage of whatever practical
means exist of implementing them. If the designs that we arrive at
can only be made by hand, then we either have to find customers that
can afford to pay us to make them, or hire others locally or abroad
that can do it for us. For better or worse, though, most customers
these days have little or no idea how anything is made, and could
care less. Calling something “hand-crafted” (a term that is defined
rather bizarrely by the US Federal Trade Commission) garners a few
points with customers, but not nearly enough to make handmade items
competitive with mass-produced ones.
Leaving economics aside, though, is there any reason an article made
“by hand” (whatever that really means) will be better in an aesthetic
sense than one that is produced with the aid of machinery? Certainly
these items will exhibit more individual variation than mass-produced
products, and that can be part of their charm. Although some of this
may be due to incompetence or carelessness on the part of the maker,
it is also true that a design can be refined as it is worked on, and
small flaws that are replicated by mechanical processes may not
appear, or can be dealt with. Inspiration often visits in the course
of making something, and will inform subsequent work. Some designs
and processes are simply not suitable for mechanical reproduction,
and either must be eliminated in the name of manufacturability or
done the old-fashioned way.
On the other hand, though, art does best if it is unfettered by
artificial restrictions on what artists can or cannot do.
Historically, big advances have been made when artists took advantage
of new scientific insights and technologies, such as the development
of perspective and oil-based paint. Much technological and scientific
progress has been driven by artists and craftspeople seeking better
or different solutions to issues that interested them, from the
investigation of human anatomy to the invention of film animation. In
our age, when the phenomenal growth of electronic technology has
provided so many new tools and techniques, bringing the world’s
store of into everybody’s homes and putting unimagined
power into the hands of artists, it would seem short-sighted to
dismiss all this as inauthentic, and to retreat into a restricted
world of traditional techniques. When every surface of a piece of
sculpture can be manipulated precisely in a virtual environment and a
one-off version produced as a physical model using Rapid Prototyping
machines, why is this less a work of art than one that is manipulated
with hand-held tools and produced by casting? If someone comes up
with an original jewelry design using computer programs and RP that
cannot be produced in any other way, should that be considered
inferior to something made by hammering and soldering? It seems that
any tool an artist chooses to use should be considered valid; it’s
the specific use of it that we can evaluate, using our own aesthetic
criteria, to say whether it was the right tool to use for that
purpose or whether other means would have worked better, and whether
the end justifies the means.
So taking all that into consideration, what’s the future for
hand-made arts and crafts? Is painting “dead”, sculpture moribund,
and craft obsolete? As long as these things provide pleasure for the
doer of them, they will survive in some form, although perhaps only
as a form of recreation or therapy. Some that were never much fun to
do or that compete with much more convenient modern methods and
materials have already disappeared; very few people bother building
birchbark canoes, making rope, or dressing timber by hand, unless
they are participating in a historical reenactment of some kind.
Others have achieved a sort of cult status, like patchwork quilting
or decoy carving, and will continue to be popular as long as the
demand continues strong. Art processes like oil painting or marble
carving will continue to be practiced, although practitioners of them
might use technical means that weren’t available to their
predecessors. But artists will have to become used to sharing the
galleries and museums with others, like photographers, film-makers,
and digital modelers, who may not have been considered fine artists
in the past. Jewelry is in an anomalous category of its own,
somewhere between art, craft, and industrial product, and it seems
that while those who stick entirely to traditional hand techniques
won’t vanish immediately, they will be squeezed from all sides;
between artistic innovators who feel free to employ modern
technology, large manufacturers who eventually follow the trends that
the avant-garde have set, and other hand-workers both domestic and
foreign who will end up scrambling for the scraps of the market that
are left. Like any vanishing species, they should be encouraged and
protected so that their skills don’t die out, but I doubt that more
than a few “national treasures” of this sort will find sufficient
support, in the face of economic realities.
Andrew Werby
We have a lot of craftspeople in the South, and a fairly new