Modern Craft and the American Experience

Abstract

In the late twentieth and early twenty-fi rst century, the word “craft” has often been the subject of a tug of war between two groups in the United States: enthusiasts who argue for craft as a nonhierarchical, democratic activity, open to all and necessary in a world supersaturated with impersonal consumables; and sophisticates who think that “craft” is a pejorative term, too often associated with kitsch, macrame, stoneware pots, and DIY (doit-yourselfers). Some of the latter dismiss craft entirely. Others believe that a certain class of craft worthy of recognition as art has emerged and should be recognized as superior to “mere” craft.1 Th ese struggles suggest that we have arrived at some commonly understood notions of “craft.” But the truth is that this contested landscape of unstable meanings is merely the latest chapter in a history that stretches back to the 1870s, when the term really began to be used as a noun to defi ne a broad cultural construction. Since then, craft has been alternately linked to or separated from a number of other subject fi elds—including decorative arts, folk art, design, and modern art. Each has its own institutional framework, writers, and exemplary practitioners, but at times has developed common ground with craft. For example, in the 1940s important museum shows of American craft and writers such as Allen Eaton lumped craft and folk art together in contrast to modernist design, whereas in the 1950s curators and writers distinguished craft from folk art and linked it with good design, idealizing the designer-craftsman.2 Design historian Paul Greenhalgh refers to this everchanging notion as a “consortium of genres in the visual arts” and “a fl uid set of practices, propositions, and positions that shift and develop,” but it is also important to recognize that craft often defi nes itself not so much as what it is but what it is not, in opposition to other endeavors.3 Instead of conceiving of craft as a fi xed entity, a diachronic perspective (looking at how things change across time) combined with synchronic theorization (considering the situation at a single moment in the language of that period) allows a more dynamic and nuanced consideration that places the practice of craft within American cultural history. Th e concept of self-conscious craft, fi rst really articulated by British designer-writer William Morris in the 1870s and 1880s, was part of a reaction to industrialization and the seeming abundance of necessities. Before this time, there had been no division of craft from the trades or manufactures and no specifi c cultural meaning attached to “handcrafted” as a category of evaluation. From the seventeenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries, American craftsmen used whatever technologies they had at hand to produce “neat and workmanlike” products that satisfi ed specifi c notions of acceptability. Th e economics of Commentaries