Most everyone is familiar with the most famous line of the 1967 film, “The Graduate”. The young character played by Dustin Hoffman, home from college and confused about his future, is cornered by a friend of his parents. In a conspiratorial tone he offers advice about the future, whispering one word, “plastics”.
At the time this encounter seemed to summarize everything that young people mistrusted about the world their parents expected them to join. It reeked of dead end meaningless jobs in a crushing corporate world. And, more to the point, it described an economy which mass produced products for their monetary value at the expense of any connection to the natural world or creativity.
It is not surprising that this is a time which produced a great renaissance of craft. Young people (myself included) wanted to be more than machine operators or number crunchers. They wanted to have a greater connection to the natural world and have an outlet for their own creativity through the things they made.
In the thirty years from 1970-2000 an infrastructure grew up around the making of craft. Schools developed programs, magazines were brought out and shows and galleries were born and thrived. But every social and cultural trend is subject to transformation by forces both from within and from without and the craft renaissance was no exception.
Young makers of craft with dreams of a world where goods of greater integrity were bought and used by a mass audience slowly realized that they could not escape the logic of the machine economy. Producing things which were labor intensive made them expensive and limited their audience to the well-to-do. This in turn drove an aesthetic more linked to the art world and less to the use value of the object.
At the same time, the industrial design world became far more adept at designing mass produced objects which were quirkier, cleverer, and had more “feel” to them. And of course, mass produced objects were mass marketed at prices more within reach of the general public.
This transformation of the design world has been so successful that it is tempting when speaking to younger people thinking of a vocation in the craft world to whisper one word in their ear, “IKEA”.
But before we bemoan the shrinking of the craft world and start feeling sorry for ourselves, we need to pause with a thought about the present and also about the future. It is true that people are more interested in design now and less in craft. The back story of how the object was made seems to have less impact for reasons both monetary and ideological. But part of the reason people have a greater fascination with the design world is due to our very success.
Many of the ideas which I saw in the furniture my contemporaries showed and sold in the 70’s and 80’s are now commonplace in the design palette of, dare I say it, Ethan Allen. (It is also very possible that some of the drive for greater contact with the natural world inherent in the craft movement has been sublimated into the greater present interest in organic foods).
But one lesson here is we shouldn’t neglect our role as a kind of avant garde for the world of industrial design. Just as the wave of earnest young revolutionary artists of the 1920’s and 30’s Germany produced the Bauhaus, which sought to infuse the vitality of the art world into mass production, there is no reason that today’s craft artists shouldn’t explore designs and technics applicable to industry.
At the same time, there will always be a place for objects simply outside the capabilities of mass production. There will always be a place for the maker who responds to the chance encounter with the particular graining in a piece of wood or the unexpected glaze coming out of the kiln. We just need to realize that this will be a field with a more limited audience and one which we need to continually educate – both about the unique possibilities of the hand made object and about the richness which comes in a relationship with the maker.
