This week lecture’s topic was Craft & Forms of Capital held by Hamid van Katen lecturer and researcher at University of Dundee. We had a lecture with him last year about sustainable design and I found his work very interesting. This lecture was more about the differences between art and craft and the role of craft people in nowadays’ society.
His first thought summarised the biggest difference between art and craft. Art projects something for the outside world which wasn’t there before by using imagination. Craft emphasises on functionality and using a set of skills to create. But it’s really hard to set up boundaries between the two things. You can have a set of skills it doesn’t mean you can’t use your imagination to create something new. And artists usually use their skills to express their imagination. They learnt how to paint or draw. Obviously they can be artist without those skills but you can’t knit a jumper without having the skills to do that. Probably the only reason we need to figure out under which category are we belong to is business cards and our website or blog. We have to write down our profession a couple times. I don’t think this is very important if we do that on a professional level.
But what about designers? Contemporary designers usually design which is an artistic method and then make the product which is craft. So you really can’t separate these things. As we found out from this lecture the first person who industrialised a craft was Josiah Wedgwood. He was a son of a potter but after he lost his right leg he couldn’t do pottery any longer. He started to research and invented new glazes and techniques. Then he built a factory and introduced what later became known as "division of labour". He subdivided all the skills of the potter (mixing, shaping, firing and glazing) and allocated each job to a specialist worker. This system devalued craft people to workers. He employed designers to do the creative part of the job and he made craft people do the rest of it. In factories it’s still the same but today’s designers or contemporary craft people resist against mass production. It makes their product more personal and unique but also more expensive. It has to be a lot of effort to sell their products until they become well known. Mass production is much more popular nowadays because it makes consuming quicker and easier.
“Humans are tool making animals”
The other part of the lecture was about the function of craft in people life. We always aim to make things more beautiful and special around us. We also want to make ourselves prettier and unique. There are jewellery artefacts from 70 000 BC so people always been the same, we try to express our personality to other people and make a statement. But craft used to have other functions too. For example Zuni pots from southwest America were maintaining their culture through pictures. Zuni pottery tells stories about their everyday life and they also could be prayers for damp earth, plenty crops, etc.
There was another very important function of craft which was associated with trade. During the early times people made jewelleries out of shells, pottery or anything hand crafted and then they exchanged them to something else. At first time it wasn’t even necessarily an equal exchange. It was more about building up a social network. It was similar then we use Facebook nowadays. They had a face to face regular contact with each other during making their goods together and then exchange them. People were more equal. Even their houses were very similar only the decoration made the chief’s look more expensive. But if we have a look at today’s China and their huge factories we instantly recognise the difference. People there are very rich or very poor. In a factory everything is about money, very small amount for the workers and a huge amount for the owners.
Factories devalued craft but they give us cheap products. We also buy services so things had been done for us. We don’t have to cook, grow fruits and vegetables or even walk if we don’t want to. So who cares about what’s the price of it. We pay with our planet and our own health. We are totally spoilt.
Our lecturer made another good point what I was always wondering about. Poorest countries with their proper social network, face to face relationships and being accordance with nature are much happier societies. I’ve done some research and it’s not clean-cut to be honest but the richest countries are definitely not the happiest ones. I also read a forum about this and it seems to be that poorest countries has much stronger relationships and instead of go window shopping or to the Mc Donald’s they are chatting with each other a lot, they have love and peace. Meanwhile we are working hard for money what we don’t actually need a lot of.
Relationships are very important in a society and in trade as well. Shopping centres ruin everything. I believe that we need more small shops and face to face contact between makers and buyers. If you want to make someone happy you have to make a product personally for him/her. So you have to know something about the customer to satisfy his/her demands. Just like when you give a hand-made present for your relative and it means much more. Christmas should be about presents like this. But we are too busy to make or find the small perfect gifts for our loved ones because we spend our time to work for money. So we will end up buying presents for £100 each for Christmas to show our love. This is probably the best way to make Christmas meaningless. But companies work hard to wash our brain it’s just a shame that we let it happen.