>[!INFO]+ Meta >Author:: Kevin Murray >Date:: 2008 >Reference:: 'The uses of craft: A reflection on Richard Sennett's The Craftsman' _Arena Magazine_ No. 97, October pp.45-47 (2008) >Tags:: #text #craft Review of Richard Sennett _The Craftsman_ New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008 Craft has been a consistent rallying call for Richard Sennett. In _The Conscience of the Eye_ he reflected on the dishevelled nature of the stories he was hearing in a local bar and concluded that ‘they lacked craft’—sure sign of a broken social structure. In _The Craftsman_, Sennett joins the front line in the long-standing battle between craft and modernity. He takes aim at the de-skilling which results from the trend to outsource labour. For Sennett, the essential role of craft is to underpin social cohesion. Where there is no respect for craft, there is little regard for the ecology of skills that constitutes a community. Sennett extends this vision beyond work practices: craft values inform how you engage with the world in general. For Sennett, taking a craft approach involves a threefold process: to localize, to question and to open up.  There’s nothing here about the trace of the maker’s hand—a thumbprint fixed in fired clay or the wooden tool honed with constant use. Sennett has a far more conceptual and, dare one say, unromantic approach to craft. He has more examples from the fields of architecture and urban design than pottery or weaving. For many years, the long-range artillery of design has been decimating the fragile redoubts of craft knowledge. The barrage of glossy magazines, corporate branding, government consultancies and retail marketing has left us with a sophisticated sense of what’s in fashion, but little skill in being able to produce it. Design has become the mantra of the information economy, reaching beyond consumer products to life itself, in designer genes. The recent Cooper-Hewitt exhibition _Design for the other 90%_ is the latest example of the evangelical belief in design a force of world transformation. There’s nothing wrong with good design, of course. But you can’t take the messy business of its execution for granted, even if it happens in a distant country. With _The Craftsman_, we have more sophisticated means to match form with content. Sennett helps counterbalance the bold sweep of the designer’s pen with the patient application of the maker’s tool. Sennett is clear about the dualities that guide his work. He identifies strongly with the school of American pragmatism, represented by John Dewey and William James. Accordingly, he favours the rational approach of Enlightenment philosopher Diderot, through his _Encyclopédie_ project, rather than the romantic sentiments of Rousseau. In mythology, Sennett applauds the character of Hephaestus, who is the source of great ingenuity despite his ugly appearance. By contrast, Pandora’s seductive beauty leads only to myriad problems. And in material terms, he naturally aligns himself with the honest brick, rather than superficial stucco. As is the nature of craft process, Sennett’s perspective needs a little tweaking to accommodate the particular. There is reason to think that Sennett’s pragmatism would be quite at home in the Australian scene. We quite often apply the adjective ‘well-crafted’ to a wide range of actions, particularly in the development of government policy. In Kevin Rudd’s recent Singapore Lecture, when he laid out Australia’s plan for the Asian region, he spoke about the challenge ‘to craft policy responses’ and that the current ASEAN ‘habits of cooperation have crafted a sense of genuine community.’ This governmental style of ‘craft’ supports sustainability and democracy (and appropriately, in the Australian institutional architecture where these policies are crafted, there is currently a revival of brick work). But I think Sennett dismisses too readily as ‘sentimental’ the role craft in our culture life. We find in the Australian contemporary scene a kind of ‘poor craft’, imbued with a romantic version of pragmatism. Through the use of recycled materials, this work attempts to give dignity to the discarded. Furniture maker Damien Wright’s use of redgum, previously seen as fit only for firewood, is an important attempt to acknowledge our place in the world. On more urban terrain, the Melbourne jeweller Roseanne Bartley makes elegant brooches and necklaces out of the packaging that emanates from her Coburg 7-11. Such crafts overturn the hierarchy of materials to tell new stories about who we are. But that’s only one side of the story. Australian cities are undergoing quite a craft boom at the moment. Charged with a DIY attitude, a young middle class is turning away from the aspirational consumerism and is looking instead towards more local goods. Boutiques have opened up particularly along Melbourne’s #88 tram route, down Gertrude Street Fitzroy and up High Street Northcote. But such developments can be a mixed blessing. Strangely, theses shops are filled with laser-cut objects inspired by iconography of the European forest, such as deer, foxes and owls. So while this development is to be celebrated as an outlet for local craft production, it expresses itself with a surprising bad faith. Whichever way you lean, such a trend gives craft an important ongoing cultural voice. Sennett is very clear about his side of the equation. He claims to be more interested in experience as external knowledge (_Erfahrung_) rather than inner sensation (_Erlebnis_). For Sennett, craft is an essential part of the greater good, rather than a set of values that is alternative to the mainstream. This turn away from the inner world of craft leaves Sennett with a very workable, but ultimately sterile concept. As Australia itself is a Protestant country with powerful Catholic undercurrents, so there needs to be room in our picture for the more romantic Ruskin-esque approaches to craft that underlie its pragmatic purpose. This applies not only to the enchanted subjects of much Australian craft, but also the enduring mystery of working with materials. This situation is even starker outside the Anglo realm from which Sennett speaks. The middle class patronage of crafts is relatively limited to the Protestant cultures influenced by the values of the Arts & Craft Movement. In areas like Latin America, crafts are often associated with the struggle of marginalised peoples, such as indigenous or those living in remote rural locations. This comes through loud and clear in the poetry of Pablo Neruda, who proclaimed solidarity with the working people, and in particular those who work with their hands. This continues in Chile today with the importance of crafts to the identity of the two main indigenous groups, Aymara and Mapuche. The currently taste for ‘folk arts’ has led to fashion designers appropriating local indigenous crafts, which has added more fuel to the fire of resentment that burns among Mapuche. The cultural left in Chile maintains values that were forged during opposition to Pinochet, upholding the struggle of marginal groups, but lacking the language to appreciate craft as an independent form of cultural expression. Nonetheless, textiles continue to play a critical role in holding together the fragmented pieces of Chilean history. For instance, the Spanish-born artist Roser Bru, rescued by Pablo Neruda from the Franco dictatorship, made a large appliqué work for the UNCTAD building, constructed in 1971 for the Third United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, a key event in the Allende regime. Bru’s monumental work had been lost during the dictatorship, but has since been recovered and with private support is being painstakingly restored by local textile artists, supervised by the artist herself now in her 90s. In a country with such a fraught sense of historical continuity, the opportunity for any kind of connecting thread, however material, plays a critical role. Partly emerging from the South Project, these textile artists are now starting their country’s first craft magazine, _Mano de Obra_, which is an idiom for ‘workforce’. For someone like Sennett, this use of craft might seem purely symbolic and irrelevant to mainstream change. But in the Chilean context, it is an important opportunity for strengthening democracy. While the issues in comfortable Australia might seem to be of a different order to Latin American struggles, the plight of craft is a source of solidarity. Our continuing romance with European painting has left us with largely public institutions that continue to subscribe to elitist notions of ‘fine art’. When the National Gallery of Victoria opened at Federation Square, the failure to adequately budget for plinths left us with a largely two-dimensional gallery.  At certain times, there is not one single work of Australian contemporary craft on display. The building epitomised the ‘flat world’ of late capitalism, where labour is washed away by the continuing stream of information and images on small and big screens. Supporting this is the narrative that design has replaced craft. The story goes that we have progressed from the nostalgic and romantic 1970s to embrace a global platform where effective changes can be made. This kind of progress consists in outsourcing the messy business of production to poorer countries so that clever nations like Australia can enjoy the more creative tasks of designing and buying. The stuff in between—the making—began to be seen as increasingly backward. The limits of this approach are now apparent on many fronts. Design itself is now turning to craft skills as markets have become bored with the international style associated with centres such as Milan. The slow movement and ethical consumerism challenges us to consider the miles entailed in producing the products we buy. And on a broader political front, the critical value of craft was evident recently in the management moves in Fairfax, which oppose profit to journalistic standards. The decision by _The Age_ to withdraw support from the Graham Perkin award was described by Corrie Perkin as a ‘disconnect with the past and the paper’s history’ which discouraged a ‘sense of pride in our craft’. If only there was a political party that had a craft policy. Sennett’s book emboldens those fighting the good fight for craft. It opens ranks beyond craftspersons to include everyone who engages in some kind of productive activity. He offers a universal language to match the rhetoric of design and profit. But that said, _The Craftsman_ by itself won’t necessarily help with the passion required to go against the tide. In the end, that kind of commitment is DIY.