#18 Craft (Fall 2024)
Craft is, by definition, any activity involving manual skill. And yet in the modern western world, the term typically connotes specific kinds of activities (carving, knitting, glazing) that produce specific kinds of things (scrimshaw, lace, pottery). In a culture that has historically privileged rationality and innovation, craft’s reliance on haptic knowledge and commitment to tradition have rendered it the minor counterpart to “major” forms of creative production. Accounts of modern art’s origins in the eighteenth century are built, in part, on craft’s subordination to painting, sculpture, and architecture. As Yuko Kikuchi has pointed out, however, craft’s supplemental relationship to art is not universal. In Japanese culture, for example, craft has long been enmeshed with design, industry, and national heritage in mutually sustaining ways. Along similar lines, we suggest that close attention to pre-industrial craft’s specific histories can both expand and enrich our thinking about art.
Accordingly, this special issue brings together studies addressing a diverse selection of eighteenth-century cultures: African-American, Anglo-American, California Indian, Bavarian, Mohegan, and Qing. Three full-length articles by Yve Chavez, Elizabeth Eager, and Hampton Smith interrogate the implicit and explicit use of the term “craft” to diminish the creative production of historically marginalized subjects. Indeed, it may be that craft’s historical usage sometimes renders it too problematic to serve as a recuperative term. In her comparison of loom-weaving and basket-weaving in late-eighteenth-century California missions, Yve Chavez explicates the use of “craft” as a settler-colonial term that elevated an imposed, assimilative practice, on the one hand, and diminished a Native practice, on the other. Chavez thus argues that the identification of indigenous basketry as art, as opposed to craft, is both analytically and politically important.
While the category of craft has been used to demote certain creative practices, the authors in this issue show how attending to the artistry and intelligence of craftspeople can help us reframe and reconceptualize the study of eighteenth-century art. Thematic connections between essays articulate some current strands of craft-thinking: the complexity of materials, the value of retracing toolmaking processes, and the significance of time as a factor in making.
One aim of this issue is to highlight the creative methods that the critical study of craft engenders, from interdisciplinary dialogue to hands-on making. The shorter essays in the “Atelier” section, in particular, serve as a virtual workshop in which authors share their experimental approaches to recovering artisanal operations. In their collaborative endeavor, Julie Bellemare, N. Astrid van Giffen, and Robert Schaut recreate realgar-colored glass through research conducted in the archives, laboratory, and hot shop. Taking the printed page as their space of experimentation, Natalie E. Wright and Glenn Adamson reflect on resonances between their quarterly journal, Material Intelligence, and the Encyclopédie (1751–1772), and argue for the enduring relevance of understanding the materials that make up our world.
Both Hampton Smith and Ellen Siebel-Achenbach work with lacunary source material to recover lost tool-making processes and their political and ecological entanglements. While Smith’s essay casts blacksmiths’ transformation of scythes into cutlasses as a usurpation of the iron wares of industrial slavery, Siebel-Achenbach’s reconstruction of a bookbinder’s edge plough sheds light on the instrument’s social currency in eighteenth-century Nuremburg.
From different disciplinary homes (art history and English, respectively), Elizabeth Eager and Caroline Wigginton illuminate the ways in which our understanding of craft, both as object and pursuit, are transformed by an attention to the procedures, and specifically the time, of making. By analyzing the techniques of Anglo-American needlework, as well as associated written and drawn sources, Eager demonstrates that women used sewing to explore alternative relationships to time and leisure in an ever-encroaching capitalist order. For her part, Wigginton offers a reading with material and textual forms to recover craft’s role in helping to establish and reinforce kinships across time and space. More broadly, this volume of essays shows that by similarly thinking with makers’ materials, tools, and processes, we can reshape our conception of eighteenth-century art.
Issue Editors
Jennifer Y. Chuong, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Sarah Grandin, The Courtauld Institute of Art
ARTICLES
Labor, Leisure, and Lost Time in Eighteenth-Century Women’s Embroidery
Elizabeth Eager
Eighteenth-Century Loom and Basket Weaving at the California Missions
Yve Chavez
Insurgent Tooling and the Collective Making of Slave Revolts
Hampton Smith
ATELIER
Encyclopædia Materia: Material Intelligence and Common Knowledge
Glenn Adamson and Natalie E. Wright
Hot Tempered: Recreating a Lost Glass Recipe
Julie Bellemare, N. Astrid R. van Giffen, and Robert Schaut
Bookbinding in Eighteenth-Century Nuremberg: Reconstructing an Edge Plough from the Hausbücher der Nürnberger Zwölfbrüderstiftungen
Ellen Siebel-Achenbach
Reading with Indigenous Form: Lucy Tantaquidgeon Tecomwas’s Moccasins (ca. 1767)
Caroline Wigginton
Cover image: Qing dynasty (1644–1911), Yongzheng period (1723–35), Small Vase. Glass, h. 8.6 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 (91.1.1174).