Blogorrhea Junior: Craft, Art, Mass Production, Women's Work

Getyercrafton Been thinking about a couple of conversations I've had recently about the nature of craft and the sudden rebirth of what has traditionally been "women's work." When Helen was here a little while ago, we talked about the letterpress production of broadsides and she wanted to know why I wouldn't produce 1,500 of them to sell at, say, Sheds & Commoner. My reply was because then it's mass-produced, which is, yes, what printing presses were designed for. But in producing a broadside, I'm producing a work of art rather than a medium of information, which is what the original broadsides were, and mass production cheapens art. A mass-produced broadside becomes a poster, morphing from art to mass media. Mass media convey information (including advertisements), where art conveys something much more intangible, a different kind of information that has nothing to do with knowledge or fact (though it may also convey both). By definition, art pieces are limited editions or one-of-a-kind. It's their uniqueness and scarcity that makes them both interesting and valuable.

A couple of days ago, I had a similar conversation with Dr. Em, in which she wondered if the whole handmade book movement wasn't stopping at the wrong point by focusing on letterpress rather than on calligraphy. Wasn't that the ur-point of bookmaking, she said? In some ways she's right: illuminated books are the prototype for anything printed today. The real problem with them is that they take so long, though they are indeed works of art. One peek at the Lindisfarne Gospels will tell you that. But they were also methods of disseminating information. The monks (and it was always monks) copied works to expand their libraries, or, in the case of missals and such, copied and illuminated them as commissions from their patrons, to add to the house's coffers. More often, it was was to expand the monastery's library. For the monks who worked on it, it was a form of worship.Occasionally as in the case of the Holkham Bible, people used it as a mode of self-expression. The invention of printing made calligraphy and hand illumination unnecessary, turning it into an art.

There are still plenty of professional calligraphers and illustrators around who do this kind of work for themselves. Most of them do corporate commissions in addition to their own work. And none of them make books anymore, that I know of. The closest I've come to seeing that is a guy I met in my Coptic stitch class who was going to make hand-bound copies of the Gospels and was designing his own typeface for it, but printing it digitally.

The St. John's Bible is the exception to this rule and is actually being produced in the medieval way, copied and illuminated by hand. But it's a one-of-a-kind and extremely painstaking. It's also a masterpiece in the literal sense of the word, and priceless. The economic structure is so different now that producing this kind of work is almost impossible because of the expense. It's also completely unnecessary, which is one of the factors that makes it art. (Others include the physical skills of the artists, and the originality of the designs.)

Letterpress printing falls somewhere in between calligraphy and digital production, and gives you a different kind of control over the words and letters than either, in addition to the ability to print multiple editions. Unlike a calligrapher, you have access to a vast number of typeface styles (a calligrapher will know maybe half a dozen different "hands"). Unlike digital production, letterpress allows you to get exactly what you want in typography. Only recently has this been possible with a program like InDesign, and I maintain it still has its failings. There's an interesting little video over at YouTube exploring this clash of technologies at the London College of Printing. Having done both, I can say that the hands-on experience of setting type gives you a different view of typography than just working with it on the screen.

Letterpress is painstaking enough that printing huge numbers is now more problematic than it is with say, offset or digital production, or even Linotype. Because it's no longer a cost-effective way to disseminate information, letterpress has become a tool of artists. Like most art, the end product with handset letterpress is less perfect, more subject to the vagaries of its tools and process than digital printing, but less subject to the skill of its maker than calligraphy. Letterpress is tactile, even when there's only the faintest of impressions, because there will always be some impression; digital printing lies only on the surface of the paper, making it both literally and metaphorically slick. There's nothing slick about letterpress. It looks more like a human produced it, in other words, and less like the work of a soulless machine. This is another facet of art, all of which is handmade in some manner: it connects the observer or purchaser with the individual maker.

Then I ran into this posting over at Mrs. Eliot Books, which contained a disturbing clip from the Guardian's shopping supplement. The subhead was, "Is craft a radical re-evaluation of women's skills or is it a slap in the face of feminism?" Germaine Greer has apparently called all that knitting, sewing, and other crafts lumped into the domesticity bin "heroic pointlessness," an outlet for frustrated hausfraus. I can only respond that this is a woman who has never seen The Dinner Party.

It's easy to dismiss handmade work as trivial or pointless activity in the machine age, especially when it's made by women. Crafts traditionally done by women have been undervalued and dismissed by patriarchal society for centuries. And I have to say it pisses me off to hear Old Guard feminists dissing other women's work this way. Doing so just plays into the false dichotomy men have always built between professional and home production: between the male chef and the woman who cooks equally well in her own home; between a male ceramicist with a commercial studio and a woman potter who makes her own dishes; between a male fashion designer (or even a tailor) and a woman who designs and sews her family's clothing; between male fabric designers and women who batik and silk-screen and weave their own fabric. Whatever men do in a professional setting is traditionally considered more important and harder and more respectable than the same job done by women in their own homes. Bullshit, I say. It was women cooking, weaving, sewing, and potting who started all these so-called arts that men elevated into some lofty category. It's not who does it, it's the quality of the work the matters.

The article's author quotes Debbie Stoller, Bust's editor and founder of Stitch N Bitch, as saying that those domestic crafts were casualties of the first wave of feminism. Don't you believe it. Women sewed from both necessity and out of boredom but it was, more than anything, the cheap availability of mass-produced goods that made women's handicrafts unnecessary. Women could not have moved into the workforce without cheap manufactured goods they formerly hand-produced: bedding, clothing, even food (butter churning?). In addition, advertising created a desire for the manufactured rather than the hand-made. But in poor families where mass-produced goods were still unaffordable, women still continue to sew, knit, and crochet. Same hand crafts like tatting and lace making fell by the wayside for cultural reasons unrelated to feminism. Who includes lace-embellished linens in their trousseau anymore? Who even has a trousseau? Mass production put the majority of independent cast ironworkers, glassblowers, and cabinetmakers out of business, too. These are traditionally male handcrafts (like printing), and nobody blames feminism for their demise. Yet they're as scarce as or possibly more scarce than women who sew, crochet, knit, or weave.

There's a battle of dichotomies being fought out in the revival of the hand-made: women's crafts vs. men's art; the handmade vs. the mass-produced; beauty vs. necessity. Craft is more than women's work, and it's not, I would argue, less important or original than art. How much difference is there between a smith who designs elaborate, decorative ironwork for fences or staircases and a sculptor—a question asked earlier by the Arts and Crafts Movement. (It's mostly architecture and furniture that you hear about in the Arts & Crafts Movement, but it included textiles, printing, pottery, glass and yes, ironwork, as well.) The skill sets traditionally considered crafts are slowly moving out of that (largely female) ghetto and into the mainstream art world. Witness the number of fiber arts now displayed in galleries and museums (and what were all those tapestries now hanging in museums, pray tell?), just as fine bookbinding and printing (Kelmscott Press, anyone?) and artist's books are now common denizens of museums and art shows.

The common denominator in both art and craft, regardless of who's making it, is the desire to make something, to have a tangible product that you yourself constructed, simply because it's satisfying, because it says something about you and how you see the world, about what you value. Whether that object is also useful or not doesn't matter. Very little of what we call "work" today allows us that satisfaction. We don't even push paper any more; we herd invisible, intangible electrons. Whether it's a painting, a piece of music, a dance, a play, a costume, a dish, a book, a poem, a necklace, a scarf, a skirt, a tapestry, some of us want to be able to look at it, touch it, use it and know that it's ours, from our own hands and mind, a satisfaction mass-production can't provide. That's all arts and crafts are: someone saying, "I made this." As individuals, that's either important to us or it's not. The people it's most important to make stuff. People seeking a more human connection in the things they need or want, buy hand-made. And what they're buying is art, no matter who made it.