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CHAPTER 3

The Seductive Ideology of Craft

MY ENTRY INTO CRAFT was an intensely singular experience. But whether I was rinsing mung bean sprouts in the kitchen sink with Joni Mitchell’s captivating soprano on the stereo or out in the barn shaping the arm of a red oak rocking chair with a coarse Nicholson rasp, I was very much a product of the historical moment. It was no accident that a young person in 1974 was searching for a meaningful and fulfilling way to inhabit adulthood, nor that he would turn to craft. The culture of my time and place poured through me like water through a weir. Craft was a concept that lodged in the netting.

In furniture making, beginnings are critical. For a simple frame-and-panel cabinet door to stay flat over the long haul, and not become too tight in summer or overly gapped in winter, success starts with the choice of timber. Not just what species or which plank, but also from which part of the board one saws the stiles and rails, how dry the wood is, the method by which it was dried, and how it was stored and handled. All this before the actual work of milling the timber flat and square, laying out and cutting the joinery, making and fitting the panel, assembling, trimming, fitting, hinging, latching, and finishing. Throughout the entire process, the quality achievable at each stage is utterly dependent on the care with which the craftsman has accomplished every previous step.

Likewise, as someone trying to write about the nature and rewards of craft, it seems important to construct a sound foundation by being precise early on about what I mean by craft. The word is a chameleon. It is both verb and noun. It is used to impute quality to everything from one-of-a-kind handmade objects to mass-produced industrial products. It is closely linked to equally amorphous offshoots such as craftsman, craftsmanship, and the less gracious crafter. A lawyer may be said to craft an agreement with all the grammatical correctness with which a potter is said to craft a teacup. An actor practices his⁵ craft on the stage as readily as a blacksmith practices his at the forge. There is high craft, low craft, reproduction craft, and conceptual craft. There is craft in legacy materials such as wood, clay, fiber, metal, and glass, and there is anything-goes craft made with plastic, concrete, and duct tape.

Specifically, I am writing about craft as it is practiced today by professionals and amateurs throughout the United States, Europe, Japan, and other industrialized nations – countries where manufactured goods have almost entirely supplanted handmade products in meeting the material needs of society. In these countries, contemporary craft items stand in sharp contrast to preindustrial objects that we also designate as craft. Premodern craft was made to satisfy culturally prescribed, functional purposes. A hatbox held a hat, a snuff box held snuff, a clothes press held clothes. Contemporary craft, being economically marginal, is created primarily to address the spiritual needs of its maker. As a result, it often lacks utility and its practical disposition may be left to the whim of the purchaser. Wandering the aisles of a craft show today, you are likely to find everything from sturdy, utilitarian coffee tables to abstract wall decorations, with the middle ground occupied by chairs that are too angular for comfort, teapots that drip, and jewelry that threatens bodily harm to the wearer. This is not a criticism of nonutilitarian craft. Dysfunction, handled competently, generates significant emotional power.

It would be a pleasure to offer a concise definition of craft. People often assume it is either a timeless category of human endeavor (such as religion and marriage) or of manmade objects (such as tools and dwellings). But when it comes to definition, craft is a moving target. Like its cousins art and design, craft is a cultural construct that evolves in response to changing mindsets and conditions of society.

In fact, the concept of craft as we know it is a recent invention. Weavers and potters in the Middle Ages, woodworkers and goldsmiths during the Renaissance; cabinetmakers employed by Louis XV in the Age of Enlightenment – none of these practitioners thought of their work as craft. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow did not think his village blacksmith was practicing a craft in 1840, when he placed the fellow’s forge under a spreading chestnut tree. Our contemporary notion of craft, whether as a form of production or a type of object, originated with the flowering of the Arts and Crafts Movement in Britain, a mere 130 years ago.

Prior to the Arts and Crafts Movement, the English word craft was used predominantly to indicate a capacity for shrewdness and manipulation. (Think of coinages such as witchcraft and statecraft.⁶) Then, in the turbulent wake of the Industrial Revolution, craft was given new meaning by the founders of the emerging Arts and Crafts Movement. Foremost among them were John Ruskin (1819–1900) and William Morris (1834–1896). These early socialists took three strands of nineteenth-century thought – the applied (or decorative) arts, the vernacular, and the politics of work – and wove them into a single, compelling, counter-industrial narrative that they labeled craft.⁷ Fifty-plus years later, that narrative would powerfully inform the rise of the studio craft movement, my craft movement.

The best way to understand craft, I believe, is to think of it as a conversation flowing through time. Or, more precisely, as a recent eddy in a broad conversation about object-making that began at least 2.5 million years ago, when our hominid ancestors were making tools in the Olduvai Gorge, in Tanzania. Since then, the making of tools and objects has progressed to increasingly effective techniques, endlessly more inventive forms, and fantastically elaborate functions – from the chipped chert axes of the Stone Age to the flying stone buttresses of Notre Dame, the Indiana limestone–clad Empire State Building, and the silicon computer chips in the machine at my fingertips. The increase in sophistication has not resulted from any biological evolution of our species; instead, it illustrates the evolution of culture. Knowledge gained through experience has accreted from generation to generation (along with beliefs, values, and aesthetic ideals), passed on by example and explanation. This flow of information through millennia is the conversation of object making. We participate in it every time we make an object and, to a lesser extent, every time we interact with one.

When I began to make furniture in November of 1974, I was working in a partial vacuum. The craft of furniture making had been largely eradicated by industrialization. Like many woodworkers of my generation, I was on my own, feeling my way in the dark. Nonetheless, long before I picked up my first chisel I had spent my youth being informed by the built environment. I had internalized a rich vocabulary of materials, forms, functions, proportions, and emotional associations that strongly influenced what I would choose to make and why I chose to make it. And when I did finally grasp a chisel, I became the instant beneficiary of countless generations of accumulated experience in tool design and metallurgy.

That Christmas of 1974, my first woodworking books – Charles Hayward’s Woodwork Joints and Rafael Teller’s Woodwork – brought me deeper into the conversation of furniture making. But more profoundly, my hands began to discover the nature of tools and materials for themselves. Naturally, it wasn’t long before I started to hold up my end of the discussion. Sharing sharpening tips with a carpenter friend, or displaying a rocking chair in a gallery, I began to actively inform other people’s ideas about objects and making.

Over ensuing decades there would be an explosion of communication among neophyte woodworkers like myself. Fine Woodworking magazine began publication in 1975 and was soon joined by a half dozen similar publications. Through their pages – and books that would be published, schools that would be founded, crafts shows that would proliferate, and galleries that would open – we became what is now called an open-source community. A brief trip through the Fine Woodworking collection in our school library graphically illustrates the rising tide of refinement. Within a generation we had bootstrapped our collective skills to a level of knowledge and proficiency that arguably surpassed that of the eighteenth-century French and German ébénistes whose secrets we had presumed lost forever.

The conversation of object making has coursed through the emergence and decline of civilizations. New voices have interrupted it, new technologies have influenced it, and changing economic and political circumstances have reoriented it, but the conversation never abates. The currents we label craft, art, and design entered only yesterday in the time scale of history. As they evolve and, eventually, dissipate, the conversation will no doubt continue undiminished, for we are an object-making species.

The Axioms of Craft

When I was seduced by woodworking in my early twenties, I had never, to my knowledge, met a craftsman. Furniture makers, potters, glassblowers, smiths, weavers, bookbinders, and all their kind were thin on the ground. Then, when I was finally introduced to a skilled furniture restorer, on Nantucket, I couldn’t credit him as the real thing. He was a defeated alcoholic whose life was a shambles. In no way did he match up to the Hallmark-card image of the craftsman I carried in my head. I had never consciously thought about it, but I expected a real craftsman to be a skilled tradesman, secure in the knowledge of his hands and the strength of his character, calm at his workbench, pursuing a simple, peaceful life in idyllic surroundings. More like Carl Borchert, had he built furniture instead of houses.

Where did that burnished image come from? It was a direct legacy of the Arts and Crafts Movement, a distillation of the three main ingredients – the applied arts, the vernacular, and the politics of work – from which the ideologues of the movement had concocted the idea of craft.

Right through the late Middle Ages there had been no historical distinction between fine and applied arts. Sculptors belonged to the same guilds as stone masons; painters associated with gilders and saddlers. All of their trades were accorded relatively equal merit. Only when the Renaissance began to elevate the life of the mind above the life of the body, approximately six hundred years ago, did hierarchical distinctions begin to emerge.⁸ The imposing rampart between the fine and applied arts that Ruskin and Morris confronted (and that many contemporary craftspeople continue to assault or lament) was long in the making. Three hundred years after da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa, the Enlightenment finally provided strong enough mortar. This was the philosophy of Cartesian dualism, which formally divided mind and matter into separate and unequal camps. Art happily snuggled into the category of mind, while all other types of object making were associated with the body, branded as “applied arts,” and banished to lesser estates.

The concept of the vernacular was a nineteenth-century invention, a reaction to the social dislocation of the Industrial Revolution. It surfaced as a nostalgia for objects and customs that appeared to have risen directly out of folk tradition, untainted by the artificiality, venality, or complexity of contemporary life. Within the Arts and Crafts Movement, it led to an idealization of rural, handmade production. Today, the notion of the vernacular remains firmly entrenched. I don’t consider myself to be particularly sentimental, for example, but when I see a wooden pitchfork with graceful steam-bent tines, a birch-bark canoe, or a centuries-worn Windsor chair, I can’t help but read it as a message from a simpler, more poetic age.

The third strand in Ruskin and Morris’s concept of craft, the politics of work, was inherent to nineteenth-century political philosophy. Primary concerns were the nature of work, the moral welfare of the worker, the health of society, and the causal connections among them. Karl Marx (1818–1883) was the most famous theorist to travel this road, but others included Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) and Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929). Ruskin famously wrote about the “degradation of the operative into a machine” in The Stones of Venice, where he went on to say:

It is not that men are ill fed, but that they have no pleasure in the work by which they make their bread, and therefore look to wealth as the only means of pleasure. It is not that men are pained by the scorn of the upper classes, but they cannot endure their own; for they feel that the kind of labour to which they are condemned is verily a degrading one, and makes them less than men.⁹

Ruskin and Morris welded the ideas of the applied arts, the vernacular, and the politics of work into a theory of production intended to counteract the evils of industrial capitalism. Their craft worker would make objects of aesthetic merit from start to finish in salubrious surroundings, with personal responsibility for quality. Such improved conditions of labor would promote psychological health and produce better citizens.

As it turned out, though, the Arts and Crafts Movement never realized its ambition to transform society. It foundered on two rocks. One was financial: The workshops set up by Morris and others could only succeed by creating fashionable consumer goods for the wealthy few. Work organized along the lines of craft simply could not compete economically with mass production. The other was the cataclysm of the First World War, which transformed the cultural landscape in ways that made the concerns of the movement seem irrelevant.

The Arts and Crafts Movement failed to deflect the juggernaut of industrialization in any noticeable way – either in regard to means of production or conditions of labor. Nonetheless, it left a lasting imprint on the conversations of design and object making. The aesthetic ideas of Ruskin and Morris would influence the Bauhaus in Germany, de Stijl in the Netherlands, art nouveau in France, the Wiener Werkstätte in Austria, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie School of architecture in the U.S., among other notable manifestations.

The ideology of craft continued to inform the conversation of object making throughout the twentieth century. It shaped the ways in which people thought about what should be made, who should make it, how it should be made, and why it was made. Although the Arts and Crafts Movement petered out, the discussion it inaugurated continued to reverberate, until finally the concept of craft so permeated the public mind that the making of most non-art, non-manufactured objects throughout history came to be called craft in retrospect. Certainly, for my generation of craftsmen, the theories of Ruskin and Morris were pivotal, whether or not we had ever heard mention of their names.