The craftsman can sustain his or her self-respect in an unequal world.
The idea of craft as an act "right in itself" is, however, not always consoling.
The catalogue introduction to the Saatchi Gallery's New Labour exhibition in
2001 celebrated "laborious physical involvement" and the democratic nature of craft - "anyone can learn these crafts". The craft employed in Grayson Perry's ceramics, Enrico David's "gesturing abstract patterns with a grouter (palette knife) on MDF" and Michael Raedecker's paintings is DIY and homely; these are the skills of evening class pottery, "granny-craft stitching", "knitting and darning". The subject matter of the Saatchi exhibition was far from reassuring, however, and part of the impact of these artists' work depended on a disjunction between the medium and the message - between vases and child murder, between DIY shelving systems and home-made pornographic movies, between cosy stitching and the emptiness and anomie of modern living. We might argue that in this instance craft is employed ironically. Form and context are incongruous.
Then again, in 2004, the Prince Klaus Fund in Denmark published a book of essays entitled The Future Is Handmade, which further underlined how contingent are our ideas about craft. An essay by the art historian Iftikhar Dadi argued that cheap toys made in Pakistan, using recycled plastic and handoperated plastic moulding machines, can be viewed as a species of urban craft. Fifty or even twenty years ago, a plastic toy was craft's antithesis. But these objects with their crude facture -the all-too-visible seams and hand-painting -now fill us with nostalgia. They remind us of the homogenizing effects of globalization but at the same time of the local -of how South Asia has its transnational corporations but, also, its unplanned urban slums and informal networks of production. These modest examples of backstreet manufacturing typify the way people keep on making, keep on being inventive.
Although skill is seen as central to the idea of craft (indeed is often seen as its essential core), it has had an uneasy relationship with the subtle aesthetics of the twentieth-century craft movement. After the First World War, the nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts Movement splintered into a series of individuated studio-based disciplines. In England, early twentieth-century craft (particularly in the fields of textiles and ceramics) was central to an insular eclectic Modernism. Skill came to seem at best an irrelevance, at worst a hindrance. This was particularly marked in the field of studio pottery, where apparently appropriate skills -accurate fast throwing, a firm grasp of ceramic science and efficient, successful firing -were no guarantee of aesthetic success.
What was sought was a kind of embodied tenderness within the world of things.
Thus a figure such as Michael Cardew embraced chaotic experiments with clays and glazes, unsatisfactory potter's wheels and long, often disastrous firings to produce objects of great resonance.
Craft can bestow dignity on individuals, can be employed knowingly and ironically and can encompass plastic toys as well as neo-primitivist modernist textiles and studio ceramics; it is a technology that offers a critical riposte to the present, and in particular to ever-expanding mass production. But, paradoxically, it can also be found in industrial production -in the expertise of, for instance, the Sheffield steelworker who had twenty-six criteria for judging when steel was ready for cooling. All this suggests that "craft" is a word almost too pregnant with meaning, allowing us to associate the principle of skilled making with virtuoso technology of the kind that causes us, as Gell argues, to "see the real world in enchanted form": a handmade technological sublime.
