Politics of Craft

Thematic Project, trimester 3, 2013/14

tutor: Florian Cramer

Summary

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" (The Craftsman, 9). 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.

1. Introduction and planning: Thurs. April 3rd: 2 hours 11:00 - 13:00
2. Thurs. April 10: Discussion Richard Sennett, The Craftsman, Part one, chapter 1, The Troubled Craftsman, 19-53; please collect and bring along examples of art/design/media/other work to discuss in this context.
3. Thurs. April 17th: Continued discussion Richard Sennett.
4. Thurs. April 24th
5. (April 30th: May break)
6. Wed. May 7th
7. Thurs. May 15th
8. Wed. May 21st
9. Wed. May 28th
10. Wed. June 4th
11. (build-up TENT & V2 shows Monday June 9th with opening on Friday 13th)
12. Wed. June 11th
13. Wed. June 18th, individual tutoring on projects
14. Wed. June 25th, assessment
15. tentative: Friday June 27th, public presentation

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.

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/