one month passes...
in fact it's possible to see in that specific element and the general motif (I was going to say 'overall motif') an attempt to resolve some of the things we're talking about.
the general motif is industrial labourer or czech robot if you like. the specific pocket is individualism, and a gesture to idiosyncratic amateurism of the sort Treeship was talking about upthread.
i kind of differ on this point. in furniture the main thing i admire is the enthusiasm of the novice.
― fervently nice (Treeship), Friday, 26 July 2013 17:10 (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
i think that view represents - if you'll forgive me for pigeon-holing, TS - the post-machine age view of craftsmanship (I'll keep what historically speaking i think is an inaccurately gendered... sexed.... word (i'm tempted to say 'cisword' - is that a thing).
Romanticism is the lodestone here, (or maybe Rousseau) but the useful waymark is William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites. There's a fetishisation of a projected pre-renaissance Merrie England in their approach - utopianism partly defined by 'pre-knowledge'. Don't want to get into scholasticism v renaissance approaches to knowledge cos i'd totally expose myself, but part of the reason I used the phrase 'machine age' rather than 'post-industrial' is because between the 13th and 15th centuries I think notions of craftsmanship were essentially forged by early forms of industrialism which ran in together with the early renaissance and urbanisation - there is an assumption implicit in fetishised medievalism that links pre-knowledge with pre-accountancy, pre-urban, pre-industrial landscapes. And not entirely wrongly so - it was the moral fetishisation that was surely wrong.
What characterised those pre-machine age notions of craftsmanship? Guilds, towns, money, men, Hansa, weaving, credit, merchants, houses and families, division of labour. (One point is that pre-machine money=fineness, with post-machine age craftsmanship money=uniqueness or at the least localness/individualism, not precluding fineness). Craftsmanship had a reason for its guilds, its closed shops, its special language, its rituals, its special taxes, its houses, its special days, and artisanal rarifying of skill, all designed to keep people from imitating and replicability - a monopolistic administrative con, a controlled market. . We want it industrial, but not tooo industrial dahling (see again the denim overall). We want what our neighbours have, but not what too many of them. Craftsmanship was controlled industry, the start of the industrial revolution.
In fact the actual making of things took place everywhere - villages of course had their cartwrights, their shoesmiths and - worth saying they needn't be *fine* in such circumstances, though no doubt some had better reputations than others. This is the late 19th C 'medievalism' aspect, I think. Towns themselves were still heavily rural:
Things had barely changed in 1722, when a treatise on economy deplores the fact that artisans instead of peasant were concerning themselves with agriculture in the small towns and princedoms of Germany. It would be better if everyone 'kept in his own station'. Towns would be cleaner and healthier if they were cleared of livestock and their 'piles of dung'. The solution would be to ban all farming in the towns, and to put it in the hands of those suited to it'. Craftsmen would be able to sell goods to peasants; peasants would be sure of selling the regular equivalent to townspeople, and everyone would be better off.
(this is Braudel, btw - it indicates that the simplistic town/rural pov wasn't entirely true, and also that it was true enough to attempt to see a theoretical division).
What's really interesting is that even at the time the holders of the money - men, Houses, guilds - looked to inexpensive labour out of town:
Moreover, in Flanders and elsewhere, where the towns had established a sort of industrial monopoly in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, there was a massive exodus of urban industries to the outskirts of the towns in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in search of cheaper manpower, outside the protection and hawk-eyed supervision of the urban craft guilds. The town lost nothing thereby, controlling as it did the wretched rural workers outside its walls and managing them as it wanted. In the seventeenth century and even more in the next, villages took upon their weak shoulders a very large burden of craft working.
+
'the putting-out system' – 'The rural artisan worked at home, helped by his family, while still keeping a field and a few animals. Raw materials - wool, flax, cotton - were provided by the merchant in town who ran the operation, received the finished or semi-finished product and paid the bill. The putting-out system thus combined town and country, craft and farming, industrial and family labour, and at the top, mercantile and industrial capitalism.
Marks and stamps of fineness were needed to preserve against imitators or interlopers, but were also needed because, like most industrialists, they were always looking for the cheapest form of labour to provide the best quality producet. I'm sure the were workers more skilled than others, that's because they didn't allow others a look in. Division of labour also helped - you could split the highly-skilled and more expensive from the mere producers. In terms of gender, families, women and children all worked beside men at the lowest-paid levels. Once you start getting getting into more specific and higher-paid areas, you start to see gender division, not all one way. Are the words a guide here? Tailor, sempstress etc. Probably not entirely.
Interesting to note India in this pre-colonial period - a 17th C (I think) traveller was astonished to notice their vastly superior metallurgy with vastly inferior production processes involving hoe-like instruments, and no division of labour:
'...they had succeeded .. in producing a crucible-fired steel of exceptional quality, which was exported at high prices to Persia and elsewhere. In this respect they were ahead of European metallurgy. They worked their own metal, producing ships' anchors, fine sidearms, swords and daggers of every design, good hand guns and respectable canon (not cast but made of welded iron bars hooped together).
er, regarding division of labour, i've found this scrawled note, and I'm not sure what's me and what's quoted, sorry:
By definition much of this form of historical craftsmanship died with the industrial revolution. And this pre-industrial version of craftsmanship, efficiency was a vital element to a good craftsperson - you can spend time making one good sword, but can you make many of them, over and over again. Technique means the ability to replicate the skill in a way that is able to generate you money. There is nothing utopian about this. We are not looking at the creation of a world of one-off ideal items, some sort of Platonic heresy - the craftsman who makes the single ideal sword, such a thing would be worthless. Or to put it in a less philosophical way a European traveller to India in the 18th Century was astonished at the deficiency of tools, which meant that a sawyer could take 'three days to make a plank which would take our workmen but an hour' (Pierre Sonnerat - p504 The Perspective of the World)Who could fail to be surprised that ‘the fine muslins we seek so eagerly are made on looms composed of four pieces of wood stuck in the ground?’ If the Indian craftsman nevertheless produced masterpieces, this was the result of extraordinary manual dexterity, further refined by extreme specialization: 'A job that one man would do in Holland here passes through four men's hands before it is finished'
Anyway, machine-age industrialism fucked up all that European protectionism of craft, and splintered notions of craftsmanship into all sorts of paradoxical and contradictory somewhat idealistic elements that were taken up late 19thC to form the modern notion of craftsmanship.
To take one example: if things aren't replicable by machine, and it's possible to get from there to saying it's the individualism that matters more than the replicability - ie it matters less whether it's a good chair, more whether it's a chair made by an individual.
It would be unfair to characterise the William Morris set like that of course - they were all about the design, and one of the more interesting case studies wrt the transmutation of notions of craftsmanship is typography.
It's essentially an inherently industrial method of formally necessary design. It does not require vast amounts of labour of course - that is where it differs to the industries around cloth, say. But that is also what makes it interesting. I'll take the William Morris set, who designed their own Dove typography:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d0/Doves_Press_Bible.jpg
It was designed by Thomas Cobden-Sanderson in the Morris environment of Hammersmith on the banks of the Thames. In an argument over the rights of who had to use it, ie replicate its image, Cobden-Sanderson, threw the matrices and letters over the Hammersmith Bridge by night:
And now I am on my guard, and throw only type, and clear of the bridge … I have to see that no one is near or looking; then, over the parapet a box full, and then the audible and visible splash. One night I had nearly cast my type into a boat, another danger, which unexpectedly shot from under the bridge! And all nights I fear to be asked by a policeman, or other official guarding the bridge – and sometimes I come upon clusters of police – what I had got in my 'box' … Hitherto I have escaped detection, but in the vista of coming nights I see innumerable possibilities lurking in dark corners, and it will be a miracle if I escape them all. I am doing this wholly 'on my own'; no one is aiding me, no one is in my confidence, no one, not even Alice or Albert, and of course not Annie, knows.
(Annie was his wife).
You can interpret this as expression of individual ownership, of idiosyncrasy, of the post-machine age Morris utopianism - reproduction of the product is post-lapsarian. After this reaffirmation and symbolic expression of the death of artisanship, it's interesting to follow typography in Britain. There is a direct line through Edward Johnston (tube typeface, + live near and knew Cobden-Sanderson), thru to Eric Gill (pupil of EJ's & famous designed of gill sans-serif of course), to David Kindersley (full-on morrisite, coulda shoulda woulda designed UK's new motorway and a-route road signage, honorary operation yewtree candidate), and his third wife, Lida Lopes Cardozo, who designed the gates for the British library:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6f/British_Library_Gate_Shadow.jpg
This is industrial artisanship - and let Lida Lopes Cardozo serve the death-knell on 'craftsmanship' as a word, and see this interesting quote – an English traveller (1793) registered surprised and delighted at the unwonted sight of peasant women near Peking breeding silk worms and spinning cotton: 'which is in general use for both sexes of the people, but the women are almost the sole weavers throughout the Empire'. ( (I don't know anything about the considerable and remarkable Chinese cloth industry, no doubt with its own fascinating development - it would be interesting to see whether notions of the craftsman are different in a society with a different development of pre-industrial industry)
BUT YES - weavers, always the weavers. Take 11th Century Flanders, with weaving an industry since Roman times, add English wool, and then a superplus of the Vikings, with their trade routes stretching into Russia and their wealth, a splendid market for high-quality textiles. This is on the start. The weavers are at the centre of everything imo. They smashed the traditional bonds of communal serfdom:
living near or on subsistence levels
traditional rights
hereditary and guaranteed tenancy of a piece of land
firmly embedded with kindred
they disappeared into something more volatile, more urban, psychopathically and heretically literate. I'd love to know whether their characteristic revolutionary chiliasm can be followed in any way to the late 19th Century craft utopianism of Morris et al, maybe via EP Thompson's revolutionary underground. Can't remember why this Hogarth pic seemed crucial to my argument at the time I was taking these notes, but here it is anyway:
http://www.shakespeares-sonnets.com/Archive/Images/Prent401.jpg
Can't remember what the title is either - let's call it The Industrialisation of Craft... wait! it's called Industry and Idleness. Maybe it was to reiterate the point about notions of craftsmanship essentially being merchant owned and governed:
Industries which made goods for export, on the contrary, had their economic basis in a rather primitive form of uncontrolled capitalism. notably in the great cloth industry it was merchant capitalists who provided the raw materials and who owned the finished product, which was sold on the international market. There the position of the skilled workers - the weavers and fullers - was precarious...
pp28-29 The Pursuit of the Millennium.
Possibly also illustrative of the genuine transformation of a craftsperson's occupation that was transformed to the point of notional destruction by the industrial revolution. Weavers! They're always at it:
www.youtube.com/embed/ekjSHUNODdg
(kinda prefer The Dixon Brothers version tbh, but couldnae find it).
Anyway the point, if I had a f'ing point, is that the denim overalls can be read in one way as a symbol of the complications of pre-industrial and post-industrial notions of artisanship. To bring it, importantly, to the pickles - notions of artisanship seem to me to be divisible between the individual amateur, but as the typographic example showed, that can grow into a meaningful tradition, that may or may not be contained within a family or House:
In answer to Hurting 2’s comment:
but it's just hard for me to believe that pickle-making is the kind of skill one needs to hone over a lifetime.
― PJ. Turquoise dealer. Chatroulette addict. Andersonville. (Hurting 2), Friday, 26 July 2013 13:52 (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
I agree with Hurting 2, but I might make a distinction is between a person who makes pickles whether over a lifetime or no, and a handing down over several lifetimes knowledge of pickle-making. the one year journeyman pickle-maker is different from the family of pickle-makers. Pickle-Makers to Their Majesties, with their carefully seasoned oak-barrels, their vinegars derived of the finest vintages of Burgundy vinegars, their cucumbers grown in secret locations, specific leeward riverbanks that catch both the morning and evening light but are shaded from the midday sun by the dappled shade of sycamores, the secret timing of their preparation, ritualised as entire religions, dependent on the cycle of the moon, the mansions of the stars, and the aphelion/perihelion distances of the sun, their hieratic picklemaker robes. The contents of the recipes split between nine unknown pickle men, matching the nine wise men of the east, whose identities are a closely kept secret, and who only convene at intervals of prime-numbers in cloisters inaccessible to all but the very poorest and most humble. their pickles so refined that only a few may be allowed to consume it, they only know the secret words to be uttered at a certain few, shabby establishments that will bring forth from darkened back room the specific gherkin or cornicon required.
One has the ritual and ceremony... and also reliability... of the early industrial, pre-machine age of notions of craftsmanship, and the other an individual and localness and non-guarantee of quality. they bleed into each other - would reiterate the hippie-morris intersect point about cold-war notions of apocalypse feeding into the need to be able to do things yourself.
I think i can probably make an argument of mobile phone companies being crypto-Hanseatic Houses or Guilds from the above, but i can't be aris'd rite now.
― Fizzles, Wednesday, 11 September 2013 21:12 (ten years ago) link