ART & ARCHITECTURE INTERVIEWS for FIVE BOOKS, ESSAYS, FIELD NOTES

No. 5 - Arts & Crafts, Materials & Making

Welcome to Appel Art Journal No.5, featuring the latest Five Books interview relating to art and architecture, and things that have crossed my path. The International Arts & Crafts movement upheld ideas very much for our time

INTERVIEW | In Conversation with Julia Griffin| 15.01.21

International Arts & Crafts

Though it may conjure images of the Liberty Print, Arts & Crafts was an ethos and not just a style. Originating in 19th-century Britain, it became an international phenomenon and extended to Europe, America and Japan, and encompassed everything from painting and woodworking to architecture and stained glass. Gustav Klimt and the Vienna Secession drew direct inspiration from it, as did Frank Lloyd Wright in the US. In my latest conversation for Five Books, Julia Griffin, who has examined its impact in Poland, tells us how Arts and Crafts advanced notions of national identity.

It also holds important lessons for us today. “If I was to explain William Morris’s design and social philosophy to a child,” Julia says, “I would probably say that everyone – irrespective of their financial or social status – deserves to derive pleasure and fulfilment from useful and creative work, and live in a beautiful home. Looking at our current times, I believe these are real preoccupations and urgent needs, and reimagining Morris’s ideals may suggest some universally applicable solutions for providing people with the basis for a good life.”

WHAT’S CAUGHT MY EYE & CROSSED MY SCREEN

The Warp and Weft of Many Hands - El Anatsui

Textiles and patterns put me in mind of El Anatsui, the Ghanaian sculptor of woven wonders from the most mundane materials. His magnificent tapestries are pieced together from bottle caps, wrappers and fastenings. I first saw El-Anatsui's work hanging off the facade of the Palazzo Fortuny in Venice, looking as though it had always been there. Is it a sign that we are in the presence of great art when it reveals seemingly eternal truths? How wonderful to be reminded of that moment in this profile of the artist in The New Yorker. “What I’m interested in is the fact of many hands. When people see work like that, they should be able to feel the presence of those people,” says El Anatsui.

There is a poetry to the very materials that make up his work, having been handled many times by people in the communities where this detritus, his raw material, was gathered. Do we even know where the majority of the objects that we surround ourselves come from? Manufacturing in our globalized economy surrounds us with objects that embody anonymity. We are wrapped up in the slick film of the screen-based interface, heightening our alienation from others with whom we might otherwise find kinship. On which point, more below….

Beauty Is A Basic Service - Theaster Gates

As many of us head back into quarantine, I am taken back to Lockdown 1.0 and Wallpaper’s excellent ‘At Home With…’ series, which helped get through early months of isolation. After studying the life of Victorian Renaissance man William Morris for Five Books, I was reminded of this excellent profile of polymath, artist and social reformer Theaster Gates. “I believe that beauty is a basic service,” says Gates. The words might have been spoken by William Morris himself. Formally trained in an eclectic array of urban planning, ceramics and religious studies, Gates’ creative practice is about create spaces, especially physical ones, that allow for cultural production to occur where it wouldn’t otherwise.

“Changing building codes is like working with clay,” he has said, embarking on projects that combine urban planning with artistry. At Dorchester Industries participants create both beautiful objects and receive training for jobs in the building trades and creative professions. In another project, acolytes create the very bricks that go to build the very facilities that are to become factories of urban renewal. Pictured here, the Stony Island Arts Bank of his Rebuild Foundation in Chicago, which has hosted weekly screenings and discussions of films by and about black people, and also houses a variety of archival collections in a relic of a bank building, once an active symbol of the financial discrimination the local community faced. As he says in this interview and video profile, “I’ve fallen in love with making again.”

Polymaths, Makers and Their Materials

In confinement once again, how wonderful it is to have artists and creatives to keep us company. The screen has none of the immediacy of experiencing art in real life (remember that feeling…?) but high production values can nonetheless make for some spellbinding viewing. Take for example another virtual studio visit very much in the spirit of Arts & Crafts, in which writer and ceramist Edmund de Waal invites us to watch the creation of some winter pots.

Dinner party conversation is scarce, but in the second season of The Art Newspaper’s excellent podcast interview series ‘A Brush With…’ Ben Lukes brings Rachel Whiteread, Roni Horn and others into our virtual lives for a fireside chat. Working with absent objects as her material, Whiteread conjures up the ghosts of people and places that have come before us. Horn takes us on an armchair travel trip to Iceland, a continual source of inspiration for her, where she has created among other things a Library of Water. Both make the list for invites to my fantasy dinner table. Who would you invite for dinner?

Of course there are books to keep us company too. Albers & Albers: Equal and Unequal documents a creative dynamo. This German-American power couple were pioneers of abstract art. And they were makers, in the true sense. For the first time, a single monograph presents both their beguiling relationship and exceptional creativity, from their formative years at the Bauhaus in Germany to their singular influence at the revolutionary Black Mountain College in the United States. Josef – painter, designer, and teacher – and Anni Albers – textile artist and printmaker – are among the twentieth century’s most influential artists, and this visual biography by Phaidon publishers does them justice, with a dazzling array of of bold colour photographs of their work in all its variety, certainly one of the most eye-catching art books of 2020. Peek inside below….

…and follow the link below for a selection of other art and architecture books that caught my eye over the last year.

Many Hands Make Light Work

Possibly the most recommended book on my shelf is by philosopher and mechanic Matthew Crawford, whose intellectual lineage goes right back to the Arts & Crafts movement. Don’t let the title mislead you. This is about much more than ‘shop class’ as it’s called in the US, or ‘the Trades’. The stakes are much higher.

Like many of us, he has intuited that there is something awry with the way the world is run today. We live in a society designed for alienation. Our socio-political systems claim to be "knowledge-based", but are increasingly ignorant of how thing actually work - we are routinely separated from the products of our own minds and hands. It was possible to repair one’s own car when I was growing up. Today, the only interface is a black box containing a computer.

This serves as an analogy for the managerial systems we comply with in the organization of our everyday lives. How much of the language of the corporate and political worlds rings empty? "The intent of this language is not to deceive," Crawford says, "it is to preserve one's interpretive latitude so that if the context changes a new, more appropriate meaning can be attached to the language already used." Does this sound eerily familiar? The financial crisis of 2008 was caused by economic models which had nothing to do with actual conditions (NINJA mortgages that were rated AAA, obscuring the true creditworthiness of sub-prime mortgage borrowers who were never going to afford their payments).

These words, too, might have been spoken by the likes of Morris or Ruskin over a century ago: “Out of the current confusion of ideals and and confounding of career hopes, a calm recognition may yet emerge that productive labor is the foundation of all prosperity.” Required reading.

Making is a form of thinking. And making is rarely taught in most schools these days. Students are given credentials while being deprived of an important source of problem-solving skill. Perhaps it is a growing recognition of the Arts & Crafts sentiments underlying the work of the artists, activists and writers featured in this edition that underpins the resurgence of making that we see today. Easily caricatured as hipster nostalgia, what if the impulse more than aesthetic? What if it is an ethos, an impulse towards a genuinely better way of organizing our individual and collective lives? An exemplary exponent of this world view is the publication Hole & Corner, which has given me much inspiration over the last year.

We think of ‘Luddite’ as a derogatory term. The Luddites were not, as capitalist apologists for unregulated innovation claim, technophobes. They were artisans –primarily skilled workers in the early-nineteenth-century English textile industry. Faced with the advent of machines operated by low-wages unskilled labor, they turned to productive sabotage. What they objected to was not only the threat to their wages, but also to the production of cheap, inferior goods which would damage the reputation of their trades. In an age of proliferating bullshit jobs, it may be instructive to revisit their bone of contention.

The epidemic has called into question many things, including tenuous and over-extended supply chains that produce some of our most basic needs. It may have prompted us to reflect on the goods and objects that we surround ourselves with. And it’s cast into sharp relief the contours and true ecological cost of our political economy, exposing the vulnerabilities inherent in systems generating and perpetuating extreme inequalities. If a terrorist bursts into your place of worship and starts shooting people, you will probably think it virtuous to intervene. Does the same hold when a fossil-fuel producer or industry poisons your children? Where are today’s Luddites? Is sabotage justified to save the planet? If so, how do we go about it?

Technology in our culture is called upon to do a lot of heavy lifting. For some technophiles, there’s little doubt that it will solve the climate crisis, alleviate global hunger, banish loneliness through connectivity. In short, it’s the miracle cure we’ve all been waiting for. Only what if it is precisely our blind faith in technology that got us into our present fix? Perhaps what we need is not more hi-tech, premised as it is on the extraction of ever-rarer precious metals and the uninterrupted hum of energy-thirsty server farms the world over, but more lo-tech. Perhaps what we need is more manufacture, in the etymological sense, from the Latin manu factum or ‘made by hand’.

Thank you for taking the time to read this newsletter. Now stop staring at your screen and go and make something…!

Romas Tauras