Immunology of Craft
/Men must endure
Their going hence, even as their coming hither.
King Lear. act 5 scene 2.
This is an essay on survival
The dominant culture values an ends oriented method of construction over processes of building which pay heed to means, aesthetics, and history. I’ve written at length in previous blog posts on the necessity of means which may be expressed as a simple truth maxim- “the process will save you from the poverty of your idea”. Our method of building necessitates a relatively closed loop of production, i.e., a resourceful approach to maintenance and an allergic reaction to subcontracting or outsourcing. This basic tendency manifests itself in a robust and often veiled attempt at maintaining our technological means of production. Industrial manufacturing divides production and maintenance of facilities and tooling among an increasingly specialized semi disparate work force which culminates in automated assembly lines, logistics companies, a competitive market, and subsequent market analysis. Our work on the other hand, despite common sentiment, is in no way specialized. In our shipyard we are expected to possess skills in lofting, finishing work, carvel planking, steam bent framing, sawn framing, heavy machinery operation, wood milling, welding, didactic public interfacing and cultural and historical or archival analysis to name but a few. Compare this to the work of my father the late Bruce Hilgartner who spent thirty-five years of his life maintaining and repairing laser functioning on one type of machine which folded and stuffed envelopes with paychecks. The work of my father being that of modernity, the hard fact of producer economy, and that of specialization; while my work being that of a slippery anachronism at worst or a revived sliver of craft ethic at best. How does an ends oriented manufacturing industry of complexity give way to a revival of handicraft holism- and in what ways are we knowingly or not, fighting in a kind of economic culture war?
I often tell people half jokingly that many of us in the shipyard seem to have a kind of vocational confusion, that is, we mistakenly call ourselves shipwrights; while what we actually do, the function we perform culturally and economically doesn’t lend the claim much clout. 20th century philosopher Martin Heidegger thought that we are essentially what we find ourselves doing. The world that we find ourselves in and the culture that we take part in with our host of fellow actor humans is the world that constitutes our vocation and vice versa. Shipwrights work in a competitive environment building and repairing wooden ships for clients using whatever means necessary to achieve client desired functionality. We on the other hand only half perform this role. While it may be true that the majority of us are technically trained as shipwrights and that that is our primary skillset, we do not work on ships or boats alone but on envelopes of historical fact which exist as accessioned museum collection items that must be maintained in order to better gleam the brilliance of their truth as historical monuments. We work for a 501c3 nonprofit, conform to restoration standards dictated by the department of the interior, are partially restricted by traditions of building and periods of historical significance, and we are expected to discipline our trade to a historically intelligible structural and aesthetic articulation. It is for the above reasons that it has become evident to me that we are not purely shipwrights but also stewards of history encompassing objects. Our non-specialization as stewards of focus (ships and boats) owes a debt to the predecessors of our movement, that is the rebellious dreamers of the 60s and 70s woodenboat renaissance and their forebears, the philosopher craftsman of the Arts and Crafts movement. In a previous post I made an attempt to work through the continued existence of traditional wooden boats i.e., their continuation alongside technological forms that seem to have eclipsed them in functionality and economy. How do traditional industries of means immunize themselves against the standardization of technological “progress”.
“Get but the back of that foliage, and you have the tree; but I cannot name the artist who has thoroughly felt it. So, in all drawing and sculpture, it is the power of rounding, softly and perfectly, every inferior mass which preserves the serenity, as it follows the truth, of Nature, and which demands the highest knowledge and skill from the workman.” Rushkin’s sketch of noble nostalgia for the Gothic in his 7 lamps would be fully metabolized as a modern expression by his heir William Morris, as the plain art nouveau aesthetic would speak to the necessity of simplicity in order to compete against a backdrop of industrial production complexity.
A heritage of restraint: we see what we must with William Morris in order to grasp the essence of a form, rather than attempt to show every detail which may do nothing but blind us.
It is on account of a few politically driven 19th century Englishman that we work and dwell in an interdisciplinary field only halfway in the door of the trade of de facto shipbuilding.
Beauty, truth, sacrifice, power, life, obedience, and memory- these are the seven principles or “lamps” of architecture as laid down by English art critic John Rushkin (1819-1900) who would go on to influence the great revival of handicraft through a viciously anti industrial lens, later inspiring the American transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had proclaimed in his Self Reliance, “ Truth is the summit of being; justice is the application of it to affairs.” The emergence of industrialism was precipitated firstly by a metaphysical claim which then equates to an ethical one, that is, that of instrumentalism which asks, “may we instrumentalize the cultural intellect, our resource base, our technological capability, our capital, for the pursuit of ends.” This mode of homo economicus would lead to critique by such thinkers as Karl Marx (1818-1883) analyzing the usurpation of handicraft by ends oriented machinery in exploitative environments leading to what he termed “deskilling” and John Rushkin lamenting the martyrdom of beauty by that of the utility obsessed drive toward vulgar objects of bare functionality devoid of human care or cultural foresight (or indeed insight). These thinkers divulge sharply in their approach to the treatment of this industrial ill, Marx being toward a reappropriation of producer means to collectively shared ends in political communism through an intermediate nationalized producer economy and a rigid historical trajectory (historical materialism), the other toward a typically Anglo pragmatism of artistic renewal through reviving truth via the stewardship of means unto themselves.
Beauty shines forth as truth (ἀλήθεια), the sacrifice being the ability to resist the temptation at exposing the remaining mysteries of truth in an attempt at achieving further use value or optimization for the sake of market economy. Power being the abysmal aspect of this remainder, the poetically monstrous and everlasting potentiality of truth and beauty and the sway that it may hold over the imagination and over our potentiality. Power is life disciplining, as Plato had investigated seriously through the undemocratic conclusions of his teacher Socrates in the Republic- artistic disciplines are the most threatening to the stability of the state for they comprise the culture’s possibilities of perception through what beauty is professed, that is, what abysmal remainder of art (power) speaks over the external constraints of state endorsed values and in doing so destabilize them. Life is only proven by the observation of change and change occurs through a disciplining substrate, for if it does not the continuity of the object of change will no longer be evident for it will cease to be, this is called death. Death and Memory coincide in philosophies of Ends as utility runs headfirst into oblivion. There is an infamous example of such arrogant shortsightedness in recent modern history in the scientific ambitions of Julius Robert Oppenheimer. Beauty, truth, sacrifice, power, life, obedience, and memory (might we also recall the link between technological being and the greek god Epimetheus, the western origin story of forgetfulness, memory, and technology). These are the values that we have inherited whether we know it or not via the Rushkin derived Arts and Crafts movement of William Morris (1834-1896).
William Morris saw that in the changing economic landscape it would no longer be feasible to make a living as a craftsman unless one were to take on aspects of the craft that were increasingly specialized for oneself while simultaneously marketing this necessity as a niche craft holism, thus the criticized romantic and sentimental element of the tradition. The conservative designer-craftsman absconding from a world where it may be acceptable for an architect to say “I built that”. Morris apprenticed under a Neo-gothic architect, built a medieval inspired home for him and his family, and founded a kind of crafts guild with six craftsman which they referred to as “the Firm”. Their ambitious goal was to live out the teachings of Ruskin in their craft while thwarting their nearsighted architectural contemporaries through the making of furniture, architectural carving, metalwork, stained glass windows, and murals.
Als Ik Kan- flemish for “to the best of my ability”, was the trademark stamped upon the furniture of American Arts and Crafts movement furniture maker Gustav Stickley (1858-1942), a rallying cry for means based craft situated in the spartan American aesthetic value of simplicity- more than a step removed from the Gothic ideal of Rushkin’s ‘Seven Lamps’. Mimicking Heidegger’s famous essay “The Origin of the Work of Art”, Gustav Stickley finds respite in the material truth of craft where one may split the difference between vanishing the material in recourse to function and preserving the material completely in an ultimately misanthropic ethical paralysis. The question answered by Stickley being, “how does one allow the truth of material to speak wile deriving use from said material?” This is the greek conception of revealing truth or aletheia (ἀλήθεια) articulated or arguably denied by the Heideggerian analysis of techne (τέχνη) which is a creating that uses up, exposes, or exploits material quantitatively for an end (instrumentalization); in contrast to poeisis (ποίησις) which is an open truth that arises from the ground while keeping all sides from being seen, a showing from amongst the non-disclosure of boundless poetic truth. Beauty, truth, sacrifice, power.
Vincent van Gogh. Peasant Shoes. 1886
“In the work of art the truth of an entity has set itself to work. ‘To set’ means here: to bring to a stand. Some particular entity, a pair of peasant shoes, comes in the work to stand in the light of its being. The being of the being comes into the steadiness of its shining. The nature of art would then be this: the truth of being setting itself to work.”
Martin Heidegger. The Origin of the Work of Art
This “setting itself to work” is the truth revealing itself through an articulation of a world. The one who performs such direct setting forth is the steward. A pair of peasant shoes depicted by Vincent van Gogh resting within their place, the world rising forth from the earth, a dynamic of tension which would come to be a dominant philosophical movement in Heidegger’s work on truth. The well worn expression of labor and leather birthed upon something of personal utility, giving an idiomatic expression of care to material and showing to us the world that they’ve found themselves upholding and the earth that they’ve worked and turned and plotted and seeded and settled. The setting-itself-to-work of Stickley quarter sawn oak combating the homogenization of material found in architectural functionalism. Stickley’s chair shows us in plain American style the character of the tree, stability being provided by corresponding grain and laid bare for us in an object useful yet not used up. The careful balance, the middle way, the subtle drama of true craft, is expressed perfectly in the words of George Nakashima (1905-1990) in his ‘The Soul of a Tree’, splitting the difference between concealing and exposing in an artful revealing, "There is drama in the opening of a log — to uncover for the first time the beauty in the bole, or trunk, of a tree hidden for centuries, waiting to be given this second life.” It seems that the proper human vocation is to give “this second life”, whether it be a second life in word, in thought, or in material.
Gustav Stickley. Armchair c. 1907. oak & leather
George Nakashima. Conoid Bench c. 1960 A liberal display of ribboning in a large milled slab between the conservative philadelphia windsor back. A playful approach to the restraint and release of material, found less radically in American furniture makers such as James Krenov and Sam Maloof
The below quote by William Morris will segue our conversation from an ideal of beauty in late 19th and early 20th century craft toward that of wooden boat building as we are familiar with it in America today:
“It is for all these buildings, therefore, of all times and styles, that we plead, and call upon those who have to deal with them, to put Protection in the place of Restoration, to stave off decay by daily care, to prop a perilous wall or mend a leaky roof by such means as are obviously meant for support or covering, and show no pretence of other art, and otherwise to resist all tampering with either the fabric or ornament of the building as it stands; if it has become inconvenient for its present use, to raise another building rather than alter or enlarge the old one; in fine to treat our ancient buildings as monuments of a bygone art, created by bygone manners, that modern art cannot meddle with without destroying. [¶] Thus, and thus only, shall we escape the reproach of our learning being turned into a snare to us; thus, and thus only can we protect our ancient buildings, and hand them down instructive and venerable to those that come after us.”
-William Morris et al . The Spab Manifesto.
Today it has become cliche to speak of the “bespoke” or “handmade” or “artisanal”, but this has not always been so, and its recent prevalence as a market buzzword would lend itself to an essay on producer co-option some other time. To market something as “craft” is ultimately a contestatory discernment in word choice, albeit a soft one, as it poses the style of manufacturing of something against that of the dominant style (industrial and semi automated). Ultimately, to produce things by hand and to market the product of your labor is a display of conservative behavior in society and contains a preservationist ethic. By insisting on producing things in a manner mastered during a previous age, to not attempt to revolutionize such methods but to take part in them and perpetuate them, is in its very core style, anti modern. The only way in which such behavior could prove profitable would be to either bolster ones interests with symbiotic cultural institutions and sympathetic benefactors or to shift the cultural values perhaps by education (good marketing). The link between preservationism and craft movements should be made self evident by the above statement by Morris et al, and the acquisition of such an ethic by museums and historical societies or historically sensitive state departments a natural one.
In part two to this post on the Immunology of Craft I will conclude the proof of our inheritance through revealing a connection between three seemingly disparate individuals who have proven to be extremely important for the continued existence of wooden boat building in North America- that of Kurt Hahn, Pete Culler, and Karl Kortum. We will meander through the great intellectual brain drain of Nazi Germany, to a relishing of small things in a seemingly non threatening New England coastal town, to the towering loft of Hyde street with eyes lingering above San Francisco Bay.
Till next time
SH