Craftsmanship

I have written down my words to make sure that I approach at least what I want to say.

I am a weaver, that is, a craftsman, and therefore I stand for a number of unpopular notions. For instance, I believe that it is right to lose yourself in your work, to lose your self-awareness and thereby the self-insistence that we know so well in the subjectiveness of the much discussed, and/or verbalized, art scene of the last years. And strangely, what I am saying here may not be as outdated as it may have seemed some months ago, but possibly may even be a glimpse of the future. For it looks as though the depth of decomposed self-presentation has been exhausted, and composed craftsmanship may, perhaps once more be considered a prerequisite for authenticity.

I realize that craftsmanship does not sound seductive. Maybe a new term could be coined, such as “work with non-aleatory elements”, with “controlled chance”, etc. We may have to get busy on that.

Craftsmanship extends, of course, from useful to useless things and at its best to art, though art has not necessarily to be useless, as architecture sometimes proves.

By useful and useless, I mean purposely useful and purposely useless in a practical sense. But, alas, since the crafts of today are outside the general course of production, their products are often found to be senselessly useless. There are those teapots that drip, those plates too poorly glazed to get clean in a dishwasher, those draperies that hold together only long enough to put in an appearance before a jury. The purposely useless I call art, which I see as the final aim of all crafts. For, if good enough, a work in any material in no matter what way can be art. If a work is clearly headed toward the useful, on the other hand, it can be a model, a direction-setter, for industrial production, that is, today’s production.

The danger to the crafts is not, to [my] mind, their being out-of-date with respect to modern technology, but an over-experimentation in which anything is not only tried—that would be healthy and is necessary for new articulation—but is considered an end in itself and acknowledged as avant-garde by the trend-detectors of the art—as well as craft—scene. Interpretation is made, of course, in words, often by those who mainly think, and think they see rather than see.

For countless centuries a craftsman was one who gave form to material—his ally sometimes, sometimes his opponent—with respect and care. Untouched by trends and countertrends, such respect and care are still good things.

Anni Albers