Craft as reactionary

The emphasis on embodied knowledge, rather than written or spoken knowledge, found within ideas of craft can lend itself to an antiacademic spirit. However, unchecked anti-intellectualism can just as easily lend itself to reactionary politics.

Curator Glenn Adamson cautions against ‘Romanticised Pastoralism’ and denouncing intellectualism in all its forms.

He argues that romanticising the pastoral can feed into a conservative imaginary where all tradition is good and difference or change is bad. Notions of ‘truth in tradition’ or idealising an economy of artisanal and manual labour without considering contemporary reality can be reductive and dangerous. He locates Pastoral Romanticism in the artisanal symbolism of Italian fascism, the Trumpian political alignment with blue collar workers, and Brexit antiimmigrant rhetoric. I think of ‘made-in Australia’ nationalism. Romanticised Pastoralism cautions us to be careful when we idealise ’working with our hands’.

The curiosity and commitment to tools and material required in developing craft skills offers the potential for deeper relationships with the materiality of the world. Maybe this is code and hardware for the hacker, but it could also be wool, yeast, photo-film, or sound. These materials have their own sensations, their own set of problems to solve. Listening to oozy wet clay, brittleness of glass, the warmth of wood or the conduction of copper — being interested in how they slip, fracture, soak, or tether. These are material intelligences difficult to articulate through spoken or written language.

As a mode of labour, to be engaged in your craft doesn’t rely on competition, supply, or demand. The enjoyment of process, ritual and material is not a means to an end. To be entangled with material is to care and be invested in its properties, which potentially offers an alternative motivation to work. This work ethic tied to genuine engagement, in material and the processes they call for, is a work ethic that is neither uniform nor definitive – existing outside the binaires of labour and leisure.