Crafts Without Art
By MARY HOLLAND More often than not I will end up with some singularly hideous piece of craft which I am per- suaded is aesthetically satisfying because people have been making it (by hand, of course), in this way, in this place, for generations. How else can I explain those highly varnished wooden bbwls painted in garish reds and greens from Russia, the copper beaten in shrill designs from Israel, the questionable pottery from Italy? And I write only of things I can see around, not the Plethora of objects rejected with horror as soon as I took them out of the suitcase at home. Usually they are bought in handicraft shops redolent with folkloric atmosphere. In the best organised countries these are even run by the gavernment, like Israel, where one gazes aghast at large matrons from the Mid-West buying traditional Bedouin robes to grace the bridge-club evenings back in Illinois. Not quite aghast enough, I admit, in view of the copper ashtrays I acquired.
Of course, the craft shop idea isn't surptising. After all, most people would never buy the lop- sided pottery and hand-woven skirts elsewhere. It's only the homely nonsense about the rich full life of craftsmen working with their two hands close to nature which sells the stuff at all. People who make functional goods superlatively well With their hands in a way that machines can't equal—which is surely what craftsmen should be--don't need all that nature bit to shift their Wares. Whether they are making mistily coloured tweeds in the Hebrides or fine silver off the Tottenham "Court Road, people will buy their goods for what they are, not because they repre- sent an ideal of hand-made, whole-meal living. They are made with an imagination, a delicacy and a distinction which we can't yet, and may never, get from machines, and it is these qualities which make them attractive and consequently commercially viable, not some magic endowed by contact with the human hand. The selling image of the honest craftsman is too often a sentimental and nostalgic excuse for wares which are too dull to get by on their own merits.
Which is why I mistrust the current furore about the closing down of the Crafts Centre in Hay Hill. From the newspaper accounts the affair seems sorry and riven with internal strife. I don't want to aggravate the position, just ques- tion whether crafts which are concerned with providing the ordinary furniture and goods of daily life ought to be subsidised at all. I have visited the centre on a few occasions—most re- cently this week in the first enthusiasm of Christmas shopping—in the hope of finding some-
thing more beautifully designed and made than is readily available elsewhere. There have been occasional exhibitions of work by individual craftsmen who obviously could and do survive in the tough competitive world of mass produc- tion outside. Their work offers something more to look at or touch, a pleasure in the using greater than any comparable object made by machine. But for the most part what I have seen there, as in most self-consciously 'craft' displays, is folksy, faux nail and drab, the kind of thing the very word `craft' has unfortunately come to evoke. You feel that most of the stuff would never pass a self-respecting design inspector in a factory, let alone stand up to being examined in the context of the best mass-produced goods at the Design Centre.
This seems pointless to me. Contrary to what ,a lot of people believe, the virtue of hand-made clothes isn't that pampered women get a sensa- tion of voluptuous, luxury from knowing that hundreds of underpaid seamstresses have sewn all those stitches far into the night. It is simply that clothes cut, made and finished by hand fit and handle better. The value of any crafts- man is not that in making things with his .own two hands he represents a lone human dignity in the machine age. He succeeds over the machine because he makes the same things better in terms of design, manufacture and finish. This is why he survives. When machines can give us his goods cheaper, faster and better, then let's have them. In the mid-twentieth century handwork alone is not enough.
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