Food for Thought: Craft and Sustainability
BY Julie K. Hanus
The article below was originally posted on the American Craft Council blog here
http://www.americancraftmag.org/blog-post.php?id=12554 I enjoyed it and wanted to share it unaltered, it is a good blog worth following. Craft and sustainability is a hot topic at the moment and I’ll be attending this conference in a few weeks.
“As American Craft‘s senior editor, I get to meet a lot of great people in the craft community. And I’m often asked this question: What do you make? I make magazines, I answer. And gardens, food, and preserves. But because I don’t primarily channel my creative impulses into one of the “big five” mediums, a second question often follows: So what’s your connection to craft?
To me, craft’s draw isn’t a particular medium (though I’ll admit to having favorites). It’s about a way of working – an emphasis on skill and a relationship to materials – that can inform and enrich all parts of our lives, if we let it. Which is why I was riveted (and as a words person, you may be certain I don’t use the term lightly) by the new issue of craft + design enquiry, recently published by the Craft Australia Research Centre.
Guest edited by writer/independent curator Kevin Murray, PhD, volume three of the peer reviewed digital journal deals with sustainability – specifically how craft and design might respond to our environmental challenges by facilitating social change. Sounds like a tall order, I know. But Murray’s editorial and the six scholarly papers offer compelling, fresh insights.
To point: Murray opens his editorial with a familiar contemporary image, an anecdote about a craft center working to “green” its operations. But the story is not a thematic introduction to the issue; it’s a baseline, a jumping off point. “The particular role of craft and sustainability is broader than a series of discrete energy-saving acts,” Murray writes. “The question is not limited to the immediate environmental impact of craft production. Rather, it extends to the symbolic value of craft as an alternative way of being in the world.”
Recent critical writing on sustainability, Murray explains, has worked to broaden our view of it from technological fixes to an ontological approach. That is, faced with environmental crisis, our road forward cannot be consumption-as-usual, mitigated by energy-saving technologies and token concessions to a changing climate. What is needed is a new relationship with resources and materials, a new way of being in the world. Or an old one: “While this ontological approach to sustainability is new,” Murray writes, “it resonates with the birth of modern craft, more than one hundred years ago.”
The papers that follow are delightful, densely packed with ideas. I won’t recount each one individually, but here are two of my favorites…
In his contribution, Peter Hughes argues that the mainstreaming of environmental issues provides an opportunity for craft to re-politicize, re-engage, and play a role in “negotiating our way out of hyper-industrialism and turbo-capitalism.” He points to a rising change in sensibility, “in some sense prefigured by [John] Ruskin and the Arts and Crafts Movement,” in craft-minded phenomena such as the slow food movement or “emotionally-durable design.” Here’s a taste of his writing:
In recent years, the Crafts have been engaged in an increasingly desperate struggle to remain relevant in a hyper-industrialized world. Over the last three decades the two dominant alternatives to oblivion seem to have entailed either absorption into the field of design or into that of the “fine arts.” The three areas of practice, craft, art and design, share many concerns and should be considered overlapping fields within visual culture that nonetheless have distinct identities. The design profession separates the act of design from that of making, which is usually done in factories by people who have no, or minimal, input into the design of the objects they produce. Art has been increasingly conceptually driven for well over two centuries, during which it has been progressively divested of its associations with craft, with particular materials and their skillful manipulation. … The key to craft, however, is the fusion of design and making and the ongoing dialogue this establishes between maker, object, materials and process. By collapsing, to greater or lesser degrees, the distinction between mind and body, the object and subject and, ultimately, the material and spiritual, craft represents a challenge to the dominant conceptual framework of our society.
Matthew Kiem, in another paper, examines craft’s sustaining and transformative potential through various fruitful theoretical lenses. He begins by picking up a framing thread from theorist Tony Fry, who argues that contemporary design and manufacturing practices construct and normalize a state of unsustainability. “Designing and making is therefore directional, in that it creates and negates possible futures, and political, in that it creates and negates certain arrangements of power,” Kiem writes. “…Just as we may identify design as a source of ontological transformation, it is also possible to identify craft as a mode of production that gathers and shapes a particular manner of being-in, of, and towards the world.”
Kiem is full of interesting observations. He examines Ezio Manzini’s “garden of objects,” for example, which he describes as “a condition in which our interaction with the material things of our everyday world is like that of the relationship between a gardener and a garden.”
“The experience of this world names something more than the mere satisfaction of brute needs, economic interest, or a concern for calculable efficiency or frugalness,” Kiem writes. “Rather it describes a disposition of care, wisdom, and respect towards our material/temporal existence that enables what is truly important to flourish and endure.”
But while Manzini’s focus is on the potential of design to facilitate such a shift, Kiem sees the potential, even the necessity of craft:
“While we might recognize Manzini’s scenario as something like a condition of Sustainment, what would be fundamentally necessary for a ‘garden of objects’ to work is, firstly, a certain material quality of things that make up this world, and secondly, practices that would foster what we might call ‘cultures of quality.’ By cultures of quality, I mean complex and highly-attuned practices of workmanship that incorporate a deep concern for the sustain-ability of people, practices, and equipment. …The health of a ‘garden of objects’ is dependent on the development – and in some instances the re(newed) development – of the kinds of socio-technical modes of being that exist within various craft practices.”
None of the papers are what I’d describe as “quick” reads, but if you have some time to sit down with them – they’re all worth the effort.”
Julie K. Hanus
To me, craft’s draw isn’t a particular medium (though I’ll admit to having favorites). It’s about a way of working – an emphasis on skill and a relationship to materials – that can inform and enrich all parts of our lives, if we let it. Which is why I was riveted (and as a words person, you may be certain I don’t use the term lightly) by the new issue of craft + design enquiry, recently published by the Craft Australia Research Centre.
Guest edited by writer/independent curator Kevin Murray, PhD, volume three of the peer reviewed digital journal deals with sustainability – specifically how craft and design might respond to our environmental challenges by facilitating social change. Sounds like a tall order, I know. But Murray’s editorial and the six scholarly papers offer compelling, fresh insights.
To point: Murray opens his editorial with a familiar contemporary image, an anecdote about a craft center working to “green” its operations. But the story is not a thematic introduction to the issue; it’s a baseline, a jumping off point. “The particular role of craft and sustainability is broader than a series of discrete energy-saving acts,” Murray writes. “The question is not limited to the immediate environmental impact of craft production. Rather, it extends to the symbolic value of craft as an alternative way of being in the world.”
Recent critical writing on sustainability, Murray explains, has worked to broaden our view of it from technological fixes to an ontological approach. That is, faced with environmental crisis, our road forward cannot be consumption-as-usual, mitigated by energy-saving technologies and token concessions to a changing climate. What is needed is a new relationship with resources and materials, a new way of being in the world. Or an old one: “While this ontological approach to sustainability is new,” Murray writes, “it resonates with the birth of modern craft, more than one hundred years ago.”
The papers that follow are delightful, densely packed with ideas. I won’t recount each one individually, but here are two of my favorites…
In his contribution, Peter Hughes argues that the mainstreaming of environmental issues provides an opportunity for craft to re-politicize, re-engage, and play a role in “negotiating our way out of hyper-industrialism and turbo-capitalism.” He points to a rising change in sensibility, “in some sense prefigured by [John] Ruskin and the Arts and Crafts Movement,” in craft-minded phenomena such as the slow food movement or “emotionally-durable design.” Here’s a taste of his writing:
In recent years, the Crafts have been engaged in an increasingly desperate struggle to remain relevant in a hyper-industrialized world. Over the last three decades the two dominant alternatives to oblivion seem to have entailed either absorption into the field of design or into that of the “fine arts.” The three areas of practice, craft, art and design, share many concerns and should be considered overlapping fields within visual culture that nonetheless have distinct identities. The design profession separates the act of design from that of making, which is usually done in factories by people who have no, or minimal, input into the design of the objects they produce. Art has been increasingly conceptually driven for well over two centuries, during which it has been progressively divested of its associations with craft, with particular materials and their skillful manipulation. … The key to craft, however, is the fusion of design and making and the ongoing dialogue this establishes between maker, object, materials and process. By collapsing, to greater or lesser degrees, the distinction between mind and body, the object and subject and, ultimately, the material and spiritual, craft represents a challenge to the dominant conceptual framework of our society.
Matthew Kiem, in another paper, examines craft’s sustaining and transformative potential through various fruitful theoretical lenses. He begins by picking up a framing thread from theorist Tony Fry, who argues that contemporary design and manufacturing practices construct and normalize a state of unsustainability. “Designing and making is therefore directional, in that it creates and negates possible futures, and political, in that it creates and negates certain arrangements of power,” Kiem writes. “…Just as we may identify design as a source of ontological transformation, it is also possible to identify craft as a mode of production that gathers and shapes a particular manner of being-in, of, and towards the world.”
Kiem is full of interesting observations. He examines Ezio Manzini’s “garden of objects,” for example, which he describes as “a condition in which our interaction with the material things of our everyday world is like that of the relationship between a gardener and a garden.”
“The experience of this world names something more than the mere satisfaction of brute needs, economic interest, or a concern for calculable efficiency or frugalness,” Kiem writes. “Rather it describes a disposition of care, wisdom, and respect towards our material/temporal existence that enables what is truly important to flourish and endure.”
But while Manzini’s focus is on the potential of design to facilitate such a shift, Kiem sees the potential, even the necessity of craft:
“While we might recognize Manzini’s scenario as something like a condition of Sustainment, what would be fundamentally necessary for a ‘garden of objects’ to work is, firstly, a certain material quality of things that make up this world, and secondly, practices that would foster what we might call ‘cultures of quality.’ By cultures of quality, I mean complex and highly-attuned practices of workmanship that incorporate a deep concern for the sustain-ability of people, practices, and equipment. …The health of a ‘garden of objects’ is dependent on the development – and in some instances the re(newed) development – of the kinds of socio-technical modes of being that exist within various craft practices.”
None of the papers are what I’d describe as “quick” reads, but if you have some time to sit down with them – they’re all worth the effort.”
Julie K. Hanus
Returning to “food for thought” I feel the crafts have a lot to learn from the way the food industry has responded to market demand for more sustainable production, I think this rather cute youtube is nice. I imagine in 15 years time we will see a similar turn around with specialty clothing, furniture etc companies fighting to show how ethical their production is.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMfSGt6rHos]
