Politics of Craft

trim3 Thematic Project: # Politics of Crafts #

Project tutor: Florian Cramer

The concept of 'crafts' has lately experienced a renaissance. We encounter it, most obviously, in DIY handmade film labs, hacker spaces, Fab Labs, printmaker workspaces, but also in socio-cultural initiatives and upper middle class-oriented lifestyle retail. (In Rotterdam and nearby, we find examples of all of the above: filmwerkplaats, RevSpace, PrintRoom and Mesh Print Club, Rotterdam Vakmanstad, Swan Market, to name only a few.)

Sociologist Richard Sennett wrote in 2008 that "craftsmanship cuts a far wider swath than skilled manual labor; it serves the computer programmer, the doctor, and the artist; parenting improves when it is practiced as a skilled craft, as does citizenship"[^1]. In this definition, "craftsmanship" does not simply mean practical making, but leaves behind the classical Western dualisms of theory and practice, thinking and doing, the conceptual and the applied.

In our Thematic Project, we will research the history and the politics of this notion of crafts from the 19th century to today: in the socialist Arts and Crafts movement and in Martin Heidegger's fundamental ontology, in the radical politics of Russian constructivism and Bauhaus, as a political undercurrent in Fluxus and the Situationist International, its reinvention as 'Do-it-yourself' movements in post-1960s countercultures including punk, riot grrrl, hacker culture and media experimentalist subcultures.

This Thematic Project is not at all about the nostalgia for craftsmanship that currently abounds in the Netherlands and elsewhere, but a re-reading of post-industrial and ultimately post-digital craftsmanship as (left- as well as right-wing) avant-garde politics that does away with the oppositions that still define contemporary art and design (including the very differentiation between art and design).

The Project will leave room to focus on specific subject matters depending on students' preference. We could, for example, give particular attention to artist-run film cooperative movement and, on conversely, to Marianne van Boomen's fresh research on metaphors in contemporary media and how to hack them. Most likely, we will also make good use of the two consecutive events "Off the Press" and "zine camp" in Rotterdam on May 22nd-25th.

The Thematic Project will conclude with some still-to-be-determined form of public presentation at V2_ Institute for the Unstable Media in the last three weeks of June.

• introduction: Thurs. April 3rd: 2 hours 11:00 - 13:00
• 1) Thurs. April 10
• 2) Thurs. April 17th
• 3) Thurs. April 24th
• [April 30th: May break)
• 4) Wed. May 7th
• 5) Thurs. May 15th
• 6) Wed. May 21st
• 7) Wed. May 28th
• 8) Wed. June 4th

• [build-up TENT & V2 shows Mon- 09.06 with opening on Friday 13.06]

• 9) Wed. June 11th
• 10) Wed. June 18th, individual tutoring on projects
• 11) Wed. June 25th, assessment

• 12)tentative -Friday June 27th, public presentation

1. Preliminary reading list

Sennett, Richard. The craftsman. Yale University Press, 2008. (Will be handed out as a PDF file.)

Ruskin, John. The Political Economy of Art, Addendum 8: "Silk and Purple", in: Ruskin. "Unto this Last": Four Essays on the First Principles of Political Economy. Smith, Elder and Company, 1862. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/36541/36541-h/36541-h.htm#Page_107

Morris, William. News from nowhere. Broadview Press, 2002 (1890). http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3261

Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society. Arts and crafts essays. Rivington, Percivāl, & Company, 1893. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/36250/36250-h/36250-h.htm

Gropius, Walter. "The Bauhaus Manifesto." The Administration of the National Bauhaus at Weimar (1919). http://www.thelearninglab.nl/resources/Bauhaus-manifesto.pdf

Zwart, Piet. "Het onderwijs aan de academies voor beeldende kunsten", in: Het Vaderland, September 8, 1928

Heidegger, Martin. The Thing. 1950. In: Hofstadter, Albert. "Poetry, Language, Thought." (1971): 149. (Will be handed out as a PDF file.)

Harman, Graham. Tool-being: Heidegger and the metaphysics of objects. Open Court, 2013 (2002).

Jorn, Asger. Notes on the Formation of an Imaginist Bauhaus. 1957. http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/bauhaus.htm

Flynt, Henry. My New Concept of a General Acognitive Cultre. 1962. http://www.henryflynt.org/aesthetics/acogcult.html

Maciunas, George. Fluxmanifesto (1963) and Fluxmanifesto on Fluxamusement (1965). http://fluxusfoundation.com/?page_id=480 , http://www.artnotart.com/fluxus/gmaciunas-artartamusement.html

Spencer, Amy. DIY - The Rise of Lo-Fi Culture. Marion Boyars Publishers. 2008.

Van den Boomen, Marianne. Transcoding the Digital: How Metaphors Matter in New Media. Institute of Network Cultures, 2014. http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/portal/publication/no-14-transcoding-the-digital/; chapters: Chapter 2: Material Metaphors & Conclusion: A Manifesto for Hacking Metaphors.

1. 1. With some grains of salt

Bierens, Cornel, De handgezaagde ziel. Mondriaan Fonds, 2013

Gauntlett, David. Making is connecting. John Wiley & Sons, 2013. http://www.makingisconnecting.org/