The self-conscious valuing of craft work and craft products has been with us, as a cultural force in industrialised societies, since the latter half of the 19th century, emerging with the acceleration and eventual dominance of industrialisation of work processes, commoditisation of products and expansion of trade across what had previously been geographically localised markets. We can for example see the process documented with clarity and deep respect for traditional craftwork and craftworkers in George Sturt’s classic, *The wheelwright’s shop*. Sturt 1927
Sturt writes in the late 1920s, of a period 1884-1891 when the traditional practice, of producing and repairing agricultural vehicles in village and small-town workshops, using local materials, by practitioners of traditional crafts and ways of working, was being disrupted: by changed usage of vehicles on changed roads, cheapened industrialised techniques in urban manufacturing, and ‘off the peg’ standardised wheels and components shipped from catalogues over long distances by steam- and later petrol-powered transportation.
Already in that period, Sturt - not a craftsman himself, but a writer and teacher and reluctant socialist owner of a wheelwright’s business - is aware of documenting (lovingly, with deep appreciation and deep regret, from the outside) a passing regime of long-unchanged, orally-transmitted, apprentice-trained, deeply embodied skill: in works in wood and iron, for particular long-unchanged everyday uses ‘in the countryside’, within the working lives of poor manual workers employed by wealthier farmers and landowners.
In Sturt’s time, local craft production by local craftworkers for local mundane use was being displaced from all kinds of goods, by metropolitan manufacture and trade. ‘Craft’ - as Sturt figured as the owner of a craft workshop and later wrote about - increasingly could not be made to pay; and when it came to their instruments of labour (in Sturt’s case, farm wagons), erstwhile users of craft products increasingly could not afford to value skilled and sensitive - and lovely, well-attuned, well-proven, generationally-endowed - production over cheapness and innovation in forms.
# An economic movement, a (conservative) aesthetic movement We can see this as an economic movement: a forceful movement in the forces of production, under the force of deepening and expanding capitalist relations of production. Distinct from this but in the same period, an aesthetic movement - promoting forms of artisanal ‘art-craft’ production - was foregrounded in cultural formations like the Arts and Crafts movement, through proponents like William Morris: a man of independent means and artistic sensibility. Morris was influenced, on one hand, by a Romantic attachment to Beauty and sublime ‘natural’ forms in reaction to industrialised manufacture, ungraceful forms of ‘machinofactured’ or cheap commodities and the meanness of dense urban living; and on the other hand, by a socialist principle of self-ownership of means of production and self-management of work by skilled manual workers.
In his maxim ‘Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful’, Morris attempted to conjoin traditional commitments and sensibilities of craft production with an aesthetic resistance to the perceived deepening ugliness in capitalist social, economic and cultural order. The economic and cultural institutions that this movement attached to, however, were ones in which ‘art’ was consumed by wealthy and conservative institutions (such as the Church) and by individuals of means, like Morris himself; the products of his business enterprises were luxury goods, affordable by few, in which ‘old’ material forms - tapestries for example (or wallpapers as tapestry-substitutes), and limited-circulation editions of finely produced books - were produced by ‘old’ artisanal means: small-scale hand-production.
On both fronts - the production of finely-fitted forms for everyday utilisation in the work and living of poor people, and the production of finely-wrought ‘art’ forms for luxury consumption by wealthy people and institutions - traditions of craftwork were pushed into shrinking niches, so that in both domains it was only as conservative ‘art’ or ‘heritage’ - as distinct from everyday production and use - that such modes of skill and production could be sustained, on a limited scale.
# Inventing neo-craft tradition? In our own times, then, we are left with questions of how ‘traditional’ (hand-work) craft production skills and values might be mobilised, in what kinds of economic niches. And rather more significantly, we have to consider how we may establish fresh forms of skill, which notably include both skills in *design* (to meet newly-recognised needs using new combinations of materials and new forms of labour) and other emergent forms of ‘mental’ work and work on ‘immaterial’ materials, including for example the production of digital media and configurations of digital means.
We also have to consider how we might establish versions of ‘craft values’ for present times - including some kind of ‘beauty’ and some kind of well-proven and well-fitting usefulness - as viable modes in the production of goods and tools; ideally, for mundane as distinct from luxury consumption, and for ‘productive consumption’ - everyday working and living - as distinct from ‘art’.
> The Leach Pottery in St Ives, founding a whole 20th-century practice of studio pottery which drew on Japanese traditional knowhow and forms, attempted this, producing standard ware alongside individual ’art’ pieces; but the everyday products were only ever open to users with middle-class levels of income.
This is new work. Tradition will not yield it up to us, ready formed and well recognised and practised. It is not indigenous anywhere, nor has it been. The genie is out of the bottle.