Books | Ezra Shales on Adamson’s “The Invention of Craft”

The Invention of Craft
By Glenn Adamson
Bloomsbury Academic, 2013
Hardcover, 272 pages. 6 5/8 x 9 5/8 inches

What’s most important about Glenn Adamson’s The Invention of Craft is that it is a good read, to dispense with an important cliché. The second is that the title, while in debt to Larry Shiner’s Invention of Art (2003), is not wholly accurate, for this does not extend to cover “the invention of studio craft” nor does it really look back in deep time with a shovel or pick axe. Instead, we are introduced to the long nineteenth century, albeit one that careens at the end of each chapter towards twenty-first century anecdotal parallels. If the author tests the elasticity of temporal constructs, he should be forgiven for trying earnestly to be a relevant and up-to-date pedant; he wisely wants contemporary readers.

The third most important aspect of the book is that it exhibits perhaps the most serious dismantling of “handicraft” to date, and for that reason might just as well have been titled The Invention of Mechanical Art. Of four chapters, focused nominally on “Mystery,” “Manipulation,” “Mechanical” and “Memory,” it is the third which gathers evidence into a symmetrical ring of fire. I could be wrong to think that the other chapters dash and prance around almost too much evidence to maintain their unity –the author’s brilliance and rhetorical fireworks are still only become more skillful.

“Manipulation” begins with the story of a sixty-year challenge issued from a locksmith, Bramah, lasting from 1784 to 1851, that inverts our understanding of virtuosity, making it pass as a gambit. The strategy is similar to defining mass-production in terms of contemporary so-called “green” disassembly lines of televisions into toxic and usable components–the inversion rattles our expectations. The subsequent undoing of skill, the locksmith by the lock picker, segues into a Foucaultian rumination on discourse formation and the creation of the Enlightenment’s view of craft, especially in the pages of Diderot and d’Alembert’sEncyclopédie. Adamson claims that in the plates of the Encyclopédie we behold “modern craft setting off on a bifurcated path toward abstraction and theatricality,” an important narratological assertion if one that seems at face value to contradict Diderot’s own declaration that he was rendering knowledge visible.

Next, the rise of the late eighteenth-century architect-designer is explained in terms of the institutionalization of line drawn pattern books and the rise of the first generation of “clip art” and poorly-applied ornament –and the concomitant increase in exploiting labor and increasing its skill through specialization.

We also get a glimpse of this turn of events making waves out into the colonies, although the McIntire chair from Salem, Massachusetts, seems to illustrate the ways that disciplined etiquette passes as aesthetics more than it presciently foreshadows the “undisciplined” contemporary landscape of makers subcontracting craft. Shifting to a contemporary coda, an all-too-brief passage focused on the “cutting edge” as a fulcrum ricochets into a consideration of the “hands of others,” and comparative craft exploitation in Wim Delvoye, Ai Weiwei and the Jabulani soccer ball.

The conclusion suggests that the division of labor is itself a conceptual trope and also perennial and endemic issue –as moral and work ethic, overt and covert aesthetic dimension.

The chapter on “Mystery” begins with a comparison between the creation of chess-playing automata and bound nature of guild knowledge, in order to probe the outer limits of the transmissibility of knowledge that is so regularly categorized as “practical” and “natural.” A contagious sense of wonder radiates in discussion of “smart” and “dumb” Victorian synthetics such as gutta percha, papier-mache, rubber and cast iron. Adamson here asserts boldly that “craft did not even count as knowledge per se for the Victorians,” and goes to show that such skills as Native American basketry the Victorians converted into “nature” so as to endow them with enchantment.

To unfairly emphasize the coda of this chapter, I will lurch forward to point out that it ends with a brief description of Ryan Gander, whose work is essentially museological in its reference and attempt to condense far-ranging allusions of naturalia and artificialia into small boxes. Mystery is something self-consciously defined and curatorially concocted, the chapter suggests in taking this route, a coping strategy more than an actual condition.

In the chapter on the “Mechanical,” Adamson writes from a passionate and empathetic perspective. This chapter has a genuine appreciation of technology and also a sense of discovery pervades the assessment of the “unwashed artificer” engaged in historical industrial craft. “Among the greatest failings of modern craft historians has been their neglect of this vast terrain of second-order workmanship,” he notes, suggesting that an “impure” definition of craft might be the better option for theorists (or makers) on the hunt.

Mechanical reproduction is reexamined and reclaimed as craft. The V&A’s court of plaster casts and also the colonial “mechanical bodies” are recuperated. Schools of art and design have forsaken the “culture of the copy” as academic in the most pejorative sense; Adamson questions this turn. If this argument, that copying might be the best proof of virtuosity, actually gains ground, the implications could be revelatory. Finally, “applied art” and “mechanical art” gets a defender of the faith.

The final chapter, on “Memory,” takes a Freudian turn, and is perhaps the most potent in the book because the author seeks to both slay the legacy of Ruskin and Morris with ferocity and also to salvage prison labor as worthy of contemplation. I’ll leave it there so as to build suspense.

I worry most that readers will assume what this book contains. Too many in craft take Adamson for granted because of his saturation in our small-scale pup tent. I have encountered few in the field who have really read the entire book. I would conclude by stating that this book is better than Thinking Through Craft, which has aged rapidly because of its range of illustrations and over-indulgence toward contemporary art’s existing hierarchies. One thing is certain, Adamson is less glib about craft’s “inferiority” in this book and more openly enchanted with people and social history, not individual artistic dramatis personae. As I put the book down, I felt his own paradoxical commitments —the desire to assert craft is a “domain of knowledge” and as a “culturally constructed taxonomy”—and wondered where the sequel would lead.

Ezra Shales Associate Professor Massachusetts College of Art, previously Associate Professor of Art Alfred University.