ARTH 388 - Narration and Art: Shaping Craft: Strategies of Making and Discourse

• M - 09:00-11:30
• EV-1.615
• INSTRUCTOR: SUSAN SURRETTE

Craft theorist Glenn Adamson argues that “Craft remains one of the most effective means of materializing belief, of transforming the world around us, and less positively, of controlling the lives of others.” During the last two decades craft scholarship has grown exponentially as scholars and makers wrestle with understanding why and how craft discourse and craft objects have become so potent. Terms such as Neo-craft, Modern Craft, Naked Craft, Sloppy Craft, Fine Craft, Amateur Craft, Critical Craft and Craftivism have been employed to shape analyses of ongoing and historical craft productions. How and why do these terms chronicle contemporary craft objects and practices and historically how does craft create a narrative for these terms? This course takes into consideration the fluidity of the definition of craft while asking: how have craft objects, materials and processes been inflected by the stories of makers, objects, consumers and writers extending from the nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts Movement through the twentieth-century studio craft movement to the present day and what are the consequences for craft as a field? By turning to historical texts and recent craft literature, we will explore how beliefs of what crafts can do have affected their design, making and consumption. We will consider objects in a variety of craft mediums within North American and British museum and gallery collections to interrogate how the discourses around them narrate tensions within colonial and gender relationships, between professionalism and amateurism, and regarding function and concept, designer and maker, and the local and global. As we discuss how craft objects, makers and consumers are entwined within the illusions and realties of hierarchies of power, we will tackle the veracity of Adamson’s contention: “the truth is that craft can be so powerful, …[a]nd, as with any form of power, it is crucial that we try to understand it, if only so that it might be reinvented – not just once, but again and again.”