Hello!

Below please find Bruce’s introduction and presentation.

If you have just joined us, please see the original post, confessions.

***

Author’s introduction

This short speech was intended to address the establishment of SNAG: jewelry makers and educators over the age of 35. This group, in my experience, is unsympathetic to most manifestations of alternative craft. In fact, many are not familiar with it at all. As for me, I’m quite sympathetic to alt-craft (despite any appearances to the contrary). My tactic here, however, was not to dispute the old-guard’s preconceptions. If they want to think alt-craft is suffers from insufficient training and bad aesthetics, fine. Instead, I wanted to show how such qualities could be seen in an altogether different light. Can alt-craft be kitschy? Yes, but the embrace of kitsch is part of a larger, thoroughly self-aware movement in American culture. Can alt-craft be ironic? Yes, for much the same reasons. Can alt-craft be commercial? Yes, but that’s a tendency that’s at the very core of studio craft as we know it.

I was surprised to find that Annie (and others) were offended by this
speech. I asked her to publish it on her blog so all observers can draw their own conclusions. Having re-read it, I would change only one thing. I would enlarge the reference to “untrained” crafters in the fourth paragraph to specify that I meant these crafters often have no formal training in the crafts they practice. Otherwise, I stand by what I said. In a more perfect world, I would have had more than 25 minutesto speak, and I could have enlarged on many points. But I decided from the beginning to include a younger voice in the presentation: Andrew Wagner was there because I invited him. His inclusion cut my speaking time in half.

There are two issues about representation here. First: are my facts
correct?

Second, there’s a question about colonization. As an admitted member of the craft establishment, do I have a right to represent alt-craft? Am I moving in on territory that is not properly mine, colonizing it for my own benefit? I would answer that alt-craft is public property now, and is available for commentary by anyone. To claim otherwise is to propose limits on free speech. (As for my benefits: I was paid $300, not nearly enough to justify my labor and time.) Furthermore, I was personally invited to speak at SNAG, and to choose my own topic. I used that opportunity to introduce hundreds of people to alt-craft. At present, such opportunities are not usually extended to alt-crafters themselves, except by the ACC. So I decided to step in and fill the void. Was that good or bad? Was my representation of alt-craft better than none at all, or worse? Let the reader decide.

***

“DIY, Websites and Energy: The New Alternative Crafts,”
Bruce Metcalf

About 18 months ago, I attended the American Craft Council’s big
conference in Houston. The agenda was heavily skewed towards a view
that the future of craft lies in installation art that employs bits of
craft mediums here and there. I didn’t find this vision futuristic at
all, but merely a description of a 20-year trend that is currently
reaching its peak. (Onscreen image: Renée Lotenero, “La Casa da
Signora Fendi e I Giardini #5,” 2004.)

Around the edges, however, there was modest talk about grass-roots
craft that was altogether different in character. Populist, upbeat and
almost completely foreign to the conventional institutions of craft
like the ACC and the established craft fairs, this stuff interested me.
I’ve spent the last year-and-a-half poking around that world–or more
properly, those worlds–and this presentation is one of my reports.

For convenience, I have called it alternative craft, underlining its
alternative status when compared to the craft mainstream of medium
groups, craft galleries, craft museums and so on. There are several
overlapping manifestations. One is DIY (do-it-yourself) the phenomenon
of ordinary people (mostly young) taking up crafts to make useful and
decorative objects. (Onscreen image: two projects from Greg Der
Ananian’s DIY book, Bazaar Bizarre.) As I understand it, DIY craft is
rooted in punk, indie music and street culture, but it has lately been
appropriated as a hip thing to do.

DIY shades rather quickly into new marketplaces of websites and small
craft fairs–fairs like the Renegade Craft Fair or Bazaar Bizarre and
websites like Etsy.com. Exhibitors and sellers are mostly young and
often untrained, and they’re mostly looking to make some money. They’re
also looking for a sense of community. And then there’s activist craft
(“craftivism”) which shares attributes with both DIY and the new
marketplaces, but is primarily motivated by radical social and
political critique. (Onscreen image: “Peace Knits” demonstration by the
Revolutionary Knitting Circle, March 2004.) In general, craftivism is
anti-globalist, anti-corporate, green, enthusiastic about any attempts
to get off the grid, and deeply sympathetic to populations who feel
marginalized from the mainstream. There’s even an active homocraft
scene.

These diverse tendencies may or may not sit well with each other. Some
craftivists criticize some of the market-based outfits for being
insufficiently radical, for instance. But I’ll overlook the differences
for the moment, and put them all under the umbrella of alternative
craft.

In my conversations with academic types, students, and even some
seasoned craft fair exhibitors, I find there is a considerable amount
of resistance to alternative craft. This resistance seems to be
pervasive in the established craft community: the worlds of academia
and high-end craft fairs and galleries. My friends say they’re so tired
of all that knitting (Onscreen image: Cat Mazza’s knitting website.)
or they think most of the work is dreadful. Students object to the
taint of hipsterism, of hyper-trendy urban cool.

My opinion is that there’s tremendous energy and optimism in
alternative craft. I think the established craft community–in which I
include SNAG and myself–would do well to look at this phenomenon with
an open mind. So I want to talk about alt-craft today in terms of its
parallels to the history of modern craft–of which there are many–as
well as its differences. I hope that these similarities and differences
will help us all better understand what’s going on here.

I’m going to speak about four basic attributes I see in alt-craft, each
with a specific relation to craft history. They are: community;
commerce; opposition and changing taste.

The idea of community pervades the history off studio craft. William
Morris hoped to create a brotherhood of designers and makers who would
all pursue the ideal of bringing beauty into ordinary life. His first
communal project was the decoration of his new home in the countryside,
Red House, built in 1860. (Onscreen image: William Morris and
collaborators, “St. George’s Cabinet,” made for Red House about 1861.)
He invited his friends up from London to paint furniture and to
embroider hangings. It was a noble experiment but a short one: Morris
moved back to London five years later. Even his interior decorating
firm, Morris and Company, was initially conceived as a co-op.

This pattern of organizing communities around the production of craft
objects has been repeated many times since. (Onscreen image: Guild of
Handicraft, silver and glass decanter, 1904.) The dozens of Arts &
Crafts societies in England and America, Utopian communities like
Charles Robert Ashbee’s Guild of Handicraft and Elbert Hubbard’s
Roycrofters; 1970s co-ops like the Baulines Craft Guild in California
(Onscreen image: group photo of the Baulines Craft Guild about 1972.)
and even medium groups like SNAG, NCECA and GAS– all of them followed
the same impulse.

(Onscreen image: Etsy.com’s website community page.) So, when Etsy’s
website supports forums, a chatroom, virtual and live classes, teams
and a list of resources, the pattern is familiar even if the technology
is new. The Etsy website is an online community based on communication,
sharing and mutual support. Participation is quite active, and the
range of topics is broad. It appears to be grassroots democracy in
action.

(Onscreen image: Etsy.com’s website homepage.) Despite the glow of
participatory democracy, I should point out that there’s also a bit of
elitism at Etsy–just as there is in almost every craft organization.
Etsy’s homepage always features a few “hand-picked items” selected out
of the thousands of Etsy listings by a staff member or sometimes an
Etsy user. Either way, questions of choice and taste emerge, even
causing a little friction in the community. As one said, “And why isn’t
it me?”

•••••••••

(Onscreen image: exhibitor at Bazaar Bizarre.) One of the things that
fascinates me about alt-craft is that it is so thoroughly involved in
commerce. A few artists and craftivists shun the sales opportunities,
but money-making seems to predominate everywhere else. Alternative
craft fairs a full of cheerful young entrepreneurs eager to make a
buck, and the basic raison d’etre for Etsy is selling. Again, this is a
familiar pattern in the history of craft.

(Onscreen image: Roycrofters “Morris Chair” advertisement, about 1905.)
Elbert Hubbard’s Roycrofters existed only because a market developed
for objects originally intended to furnish the inn Hubbard built to
accommodate curious visitors. Rookwood Pottery was a business from the
get-go, as were the vast majority of the Arts & Crafts potteries. Even
the ACC was founded in part to develop an urban market for rural
crafts. The studio craft movement and the marketplace have been
conjoined from the beginning.

But if craft and capitalism have always been in bed together, I should
note that Craft has always advocated capitalism on a very small scale,
with modest investments and face-to-face marketplaces. This is
small-money, small footprint, intimate capitalism, designed to solve
one of the most urgent questions posed by industrial society: How does
one find dignified labor? (Onscreen image: workers at the Guild of
Handicraft, about 1905.) This was a question posed by Ruskin in 1853,
and its still relevant today. At its best, craft is work with dignity,
work that allows the worker to call the shots. In that sense, craft is
inherently anti-corporate, as craftivists have recognized. Craft
capitalism encourages self-determination and a degree of self-reliance.
It also suggests a partial divorce from consumerism, at least the kind
practiced by Wal-Mart and Target. I’m not sure about the claims that
studio craft short-circuits the global system of sweated labor: many
craftspeople still barely break the minimum wage, and I suspect that
the majority of people on Etsy do not make a living wage at their
craft. But at least the potential remains for persistent and talented
young makers to quit their day jobs and achieve economic
self-sufficiency.

••••••••••

(Onscreen image: “Peace Knits” demonstration by the Revolutionary
Knitting Circle, March 2004) I’m also fascinated by the reappearance of
craft that is oppositional in nature: opposition to injustice, to
global corporatism, to social prejudice, and even to war. Politicized
craft was not unusual in the 60s–take Fred Woell’s subtle commenatray
on the connection between pop culture and violence. (Onscreen image: J.
Fred Woell, “Pepsi Generation,” c. 1965.) But political craft seemed to
die down during the 80s and 90s, and at upscale craft events like SOFA
on might conclude that the craft world has gone completely apolitical.

However, there’s a good number of craftivists out there. They don’t
necessarily repeat the old Marxist slogans about the evils of
capitalism, the inherent corruption of the bourgeoisie, or the
superiority of socialism. The new generation seems too smart to replay
those old tapes. Instead, they tend to focus on the problems of
unchecked global capitalism: sweated labor and the loss of local jobs.
They also critique militarism, often making jabs at the American war
machine. (Onscreen image: Marianne Jørgensen and collaborators, “Pink,”
2005) That strikes me as the agenda behind Marianne Jørgensen’s
wonderful tank cozy, a collective project that transforms an old
American tank into something warm, fuzzy, and exceptionally silly.

Craftivists, like local food advocates, think about shifting production
back into the hands of ordinary people. They promote the same ideals of
self-empowerment that motivated both Ruskin and Morris. (Onscreen
image: Revolutionary Knitting Circle storefront with sign promoting
free knitting lessons.) By getting people to make useful objects for
themselves, they hope to decrease complicity in modern consumer
culture. Handmade objects could last longer, or be used longer, than
their mass-marketed equivalents. Handmade things could have a smaller
carbon footprint. They could reduce the need for income, and if pursued
in the community setting I mentioned before, they could become agents
in social bonding and mutual help networks. The point, I think, is that
if craft is practiced on a massive scale, the world would be better off
for it.

Craftivist opposition to consumerism and corporatism can take many
forms, but I’ll just show two examples. (Onscreen image: microRevolt,
Nike swoosh blanket.) One is a pieced-together crocheted image of the
Nike swoosh by microRevolt. The intention is to deliver the swoosh
blanket to the Chairman of the Board of Nike as a protest against labor
exploitation. (Onscreen image: Allyson Mitchell, “Lady Sasquatch”
installation) Another, by Canadian artist Allyson Mitchell, is an
installation that features, among other things, two large fake-fur
female sasquatches. Besides being a lot of fun, Mitchell’s sasquatches
are intended to protest consumerist ideals of feminine beauty,
asserting that big, hairy and lesbian is every bit as valid as pretty,
petite and smoothly shaven.

The oppositional impulses behind craftivism go way before the 1960s.
William Morris was one of England’s leading Socialists in the 1880s,
and he was a very early opponent of industrial pollution. (Onscreen
image: William Morris tapestry, 1879.) While his craft work was a
tangible protest only against shoddy goods and tasteless design, he set
the tone for much of the best Arts & Crafts production that was to
follow. (Onscreen image: Ernest Gimson, sideboard, c. 1915) A
particularly English form of craft-as-protest was a movement to make
furniture without the aid of any machines in the studio. (Morris
himself never avoided machine fabrication, but his followers did.)
Another form of opposition was the way early Arts & Crafts jewelers
avoided precious metals and gemstones. For instance, take Madelaine
Yale Wynne, one of the first recorded American studio jewelers.
(Onscreen image: Madelaine Yale Wynne, silver belt buckle, c. 1900.)
She used mainly copper, silver and roughly-cut stones, as in this belt
buckle from around 1900. Clearly, the relaxed craftsmanship is a
visible protest against trade standards of both skill and design. In
her own day, a critic called Wynne’s jewelry “barbaric.”

Which leads nicely to my last topic: changing tastes. It seems to me
that mainstream craft has become institutionalized over the past 30
years, with the (perhaps) unintended consequence that a certain taste
has become enshrined within the culture. (Onscreen image:
advertisements for ACC Baltimore exhibitors, Ornament magazine, 2007.)
When you go to a major craft show, for instance, there’s a glossy
professionalism about everything. Designs are consistent, craftsmanship
is uniformly good, displays are neat. And how could it be otherwise,
since jurying standards have become so uniform? There’s nothing messy,
nothing contradictory, nothing off-the-cuff. There’s no high-jinks, no
rank amateurism, no cluttered card tables. And to my mind, all that
slick professionalism has become dry, airless, and boring. The same
with SOFA, the same with a lot of craft galleries. And frankly, the
audience tends to agree. I have talked to a number of people who don’t
bother to go to the Philadelphia Craft Show anymore. Everything looks
the same as it did last year, they say, and nothing excites them
anymore. No wonder attendance at most craft fairs is flat or declining.

(Onscreen image: Bazaar Bizarre homepage.) Not at alt-craft fairs,
though. I went to the Brooklyn Renegade Fair last summer and it was
packed, even though it was held in an empty outdoor swimming pool and
it was broiling in there. Why the difference? The alt-craft fairs
represent a relatively new taste: ironic, kitschy, trendy and
relatively free of both hierarchies and standards of professionalism.
And this taste speaks to urban under-35 types. These are exactly the
people who will be the next big audience for craft–and they definitely
aren’t going mainstream.

In the alt-craft fairs, the differences in both taste and standards are
easy to spot. (Onscreen image: exhibitor’s booth from a Bazaar Bizarre
fair.) About two-thirds of the booths in Brooklyn had T-shirts for
sale; a solid majority had some other kinds of silk-screened products.
Most booths had work at a wide variety of price points, which gave any
given booth a pretty inconsistent look. Furthermore, most crafters were
wholly unconcerned about the preciousness of handwork. Low-end products
were usually printed or silk-screened. Nobody cared, and the young hip
audience seemed to eat it up. The average level of craftsmanship was
low, but again, nobody seemed to care. I’ll say this: the level of
energy was high.

Some of my acquaintances can’t stomach alt-craft, finding much of it
crude and unsophisticated. But the Renegade Craft Fair reminded me of
nothing so much as the 60s–and the people who were young back then are
now the craft establishment. They should remember that 60s craft was
often crude and irredeemably ugly. Remember all those hideous brown
pots? (Onscreen image: Rita Schumaker, macramé halter top, c. 1972.)
Remember macramé? Baby boomers who look askance at alt-craft should
recall our roots before we pass any judgments.

(Onscreen image: cover of Readymade magazine, December 2006.) So here’s
a cover of Readymade magazine. While some crafters might disavow this
publication as altogether too trendy and slick, I think the image
summarizes many aspects of alt-craft taste that I find most
interesting. I can see four interconnected concepts at work here, all
of which divide the new taste from the old. They are semiotics, irony,
kitsch and play.

Semiotics is the business of interpreting social systems. From
clothing, cars or jewelry all the way to categories of
kinship–semiotics sees them all as languages. You learn to read and
speak and decode all these different signs. The under-35 generation is
much more adept at reading visual languages than any prior generation.
They’re like fish swimming in a sea of signs. They’re the children of
channel-surfing and the internet, and they’re comfortable with sensory
overload. What this means is that under-35s often regard meaning as
endlessly mutable: an enormous kit of parts that can be recombined at
will. Furthermore, many of these people are comfortable with the
constant flood of signs that emerge from American consumerism–all that
hype and advertising is actually a vast pile of raw material to them.
My generation eyes consumerism with deep suspicion, but to the
under-35s, it’s just another language, another resource.

But they don’t necessarily take it seriously, and that’s where irony
comes into play. Irony is distance. It clears a space for the
individual to watch the chaos of modern life with some detachment.
(Onscreen image: Natalia Gianinazzi, “Mickey Grüsli, 2005) The icons of
consumerism can be treated with utter disrespect, as with Natalia
Gianinazzi’s “Mickey Grüsli” here. (This, by the way, is a
one-of-a-kind handmade object.)

Irony also signals disbelief. An ironic stance tells like-minded
observers that you don’t necessarily buy into the matter at hand.
You’re just appropriating the language for your own purposes. Your
reasons may point to politics or satire, respectful homage of pure fun.
But the ironic distance always signifies that you don’t necessarily
believe.

One of the favorite semiotic fields for appropriation is kitsch.
(Onscreen image: paint-by-number clock project from Readymade magazine,
December 2006.) My sense is that under-35s respond much more favorably
to kitsch than to refined good taste. I think they find it more
energetic and a lot more fun. Kitsch, after all, is the underbelly of
consumerism, the dregs and leftovers of all that was once shiny,
hopeful and new. To embrace kitsch, then, is to be an archeologist of
shopping–to dig into America’s humongous junkyard of things once
valued, and now thought to be in bad taste. Alt-crafters are mining the
landfill of abandoned consumerism, and kitsch is their vein of pure
gold. Put another way, kitsch is dead shopping brought back to life.

Which brings me to play. American craft used to be a lot of fun, with a
cadre of craftsman/comedians who were always wisecracking and pulling
pranks. (Onscreen image: David Gilhooly, “Merfrog and Her Pet Fish,”
1976.) Does anybody remember David Gilhooly’s world of frogs, or
Clayton Bailey’s skeletons and robots? Or the brick breast Ken Cory
built in somebody’s driveway while they were away on vacation? It seems
that mainstream American craft, in its ambition to be respectable, has
turned its back on the antic spirit of play.

But not the alt-crafters. Their manipulation of signs is, after all, a
form of play. Ironic distance can be quite humorous, and kitsch is
funny almost by definition. Because they are not all invested in being
taken seriously, alt-crafters are free to goof on consumerism,
politics, the war machine, homophobia, whatever. (Onscreen image:
Allyson Mitchell: “Sassquog.”) Some of my favorite pieces of
alternative craft/art are the animal familiars Allyson Mitchell makes
for her Lady Sasquatches–here’s her “Sassquog” in pink fake fur. Funny
on the surface, serious underneath–but not overly worried about
respectability.

•••••••••

Craft is a complicated thing, fluid and diverse. The alt-craft
sensibility I’m talking about is only part of the picture, but it’s an
important part. I think the mainstream craft community must come to
terms with it. Certainly, a big chunk of the craft marketplace is
headed in that direction. And besides, I think there’s much of value in
alt-craft, and the establishment had better pay attention.

Since the ACC meeting in October 2006, I undertook a program of
self-education. As a member of the craft establishment, I thought I
should learn something about it. One of my projects was to give a
month-long assignment to the junior and senior jewelry majors at the
University of the Arts in Philadelphia, at the invitation of Sharon
Church and Rod McCormick. I wanted to see what these students would do
if they were asked to address the sensibility of irony, kitsch and
playfulness I just talked about. Here are a few of the results.
(Onscreen images: Morgan Jameson, shower curtain made of plastic bags.
Chun Chun, bling jewelry with live mouse in a treadmill. Natala Covert,
T-shirts with images from American Apparel catalogue and quotes about
labor exploitation from American Apparel CEO Dov Charney. Genava
Gisondi, porn star enameled coasters. Carolyn Rogers, tapeworm costume
for her pug dog.)

••••••••

I want to close with a singular thought that occurred to me only a few
days ago. At first, I decided not to say this, because I find it rather
disturbing. On reflection, though, I think it needs to be said.

Almost everything about alt-craft challenges the conventional wisdom of
mainstream craft. That mainstream–largely populated and guided by
baby-boomers–has become totally invested in building and maintaining a
set of standards, particularly of quality and professionalism. And
here’s the sad truth: those standards are killing craft. Juries for
craft shows, rules of what’s allowed and what’s not, principles by
which teachers critique their students… all these standards make the
new kind of craft look amateurish or sloppy or insufficiently
aesthetic. But those old criteria are emphatically not the point. The
only conclusion I can reach is that those standards must be changed or
given up entirely.

Is my generation up to it? Having gained the wheel of control, are we
prepared to say we represent the old guard, and we must step aside so
all of craft can prosper and grow under a new regime?

I don’t know.