Future of Craft 5-20-2020

Future of Craft

Jason L. Starin

5-20-2020

Science fiction, a genre I often pull from for my artistic inspiration, readily utilizes the shift in time as a transparent device. The futures it describes are extended versions of our present social and political circumstances in the forms of narrative premonition. It is also said that if our depression is rooted in our past, than our anxiety stems from our concerns for the future. Writing this presently, I am in week nine of quarantine. Time as been put on pause for the inhabitants of Earth due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Without much distraction, I have had nothing but the static present moment to consider my life and art practice. 

Speculation concerning the future of the craft field has always felt ominous to me, even before the pandemic. I am a maker, not a historian. Nor am I a writer. Regardless, I do become impassioned when discussing craft. Unfortunately relatable, my interest tends to focus on crafts constant anxiety concerning its identity as a field within the contemporary arts. Assessing my personal life experiences associated with the field of craft over the past decade, I will take this opportunity to share my thoughts on its future as best as I can surmise from a current perspective.

The problem with trying to predict the future of craft is its current lack of criteria of which to make an assessment by. It lacks structure, or more appropriately, a fixed position to be agreed with or argued against. It does not hold onto an identity. I believe it used to, our art history museums are filled with examples of craft, for example the specialized tools which have helped build our humanity, but craft has lost its self-awareness over the past few centuries. Craft today finds itself trying to fit in with everything else, forgetting that it created the sub-genres of art and design, as well as science and religion. It has forgotten its accomplishments and its self-worth. 

Craft’s origin value is being further erased by the current rise in virtual technologies. Much like the industrial revolution, digital and virtual technologies threaten to further extinguish our material consciousness, as they have become more readily accessible from individual home studios and garages. Arrogantly touting the virtues of technology above all other notions of human progress, academic institutions have begun to rapidly develop new media labs, displacing previous established craft studios and values. Craft, if still valued within the institution, has passively accepted the monikers of an ancient or analog technology, an insult to the hard fought labors of humanity. 

Making room for virtual facilities, and consequently curriculums, universities have been rashly eliminating craft programs and departments nationwide. Over the past decade, a number of craft organizations and institutions that I personally owe a great deal of gratitude for having been part of, have been shut down, decidedly by financially focused entities. 

In the past few years, and seemingly over night, the Museum of Contemporary Craft, of which I was an intern for during grad school, disappeared. Shortly after, The Oregon College of Art and Craft, one half of my alma matter, followed the same demise. Apparently, there was just no more money left to support these nationally recognized and foundational craft institutions. I watched my mentors, professors, and peers lose their jobs instantaneously. Their financial stability as well as their professional and artistic identities lost. They lost a notion of themselves as educators, those who care about continuing the values of craft thinking.

Presently, I have lost my five year standing job as the ceramic technician in the Craft and Material Studies program at University of the Arts, the best job I have been able to procure in my profession and chosen artistic medium since my graduate education. Furthermore, there has been rumors of shutting down the C+MS program for many years now, and presumably, the pandemic, due to finical reasons, is speeding up the process. We have been told by higher administration that the craft program does not have enough student enrollment to cover the costs of its facilities. It was also said that our undergraduate programs were not contemporary enough, a subjective parameter when craft is compared to the perspectives of either art or design. Many full-time positions have been cut, leaving only the department heads who have been teaching for thirty or more years to run the individual departments of craft themselves, teaching most of the classes, save a few intro courses which are picked up by one or two from the roaming hoards of adjunct instructors. This does not facilitate younger faculty into moving beyond adjunct status into more grounding positions which could usher in more contemporary dialogs with new craft students.

Universities forget that craft skills were not only the first human technologies, but are also what helped build and fortify academic institutions, many, more than one hundred years ago. The arbiters of sustaining human ingenuity and thought, universities and colleges are systematically decimating the foundations of humanity.  Eliminating craft thinking and material knowledge from the educational system is not only destroying the craft fields notion of self-worth, but worse, our human identity. Not to make with our hands is in its very nature, inhuman. Without craft programs, who will teach the values of crafts to the people who would inform its future? Without the support of our academic institutions, the keepers and protectors of history, the craft field is hard pressed to stay self-aware. 

Craft has gone through a major shift in our culture. As a means to invention, craft had purpose. Craft’s pursuit of survival, helped humans create advances in civilization, for better and for worse. Through craft we developed simple tools which lead to machines as well as belief systems that lead to science, religion, and law. Those developments created categories of understanding less broad and better utilized than craft. Anthropologically speaking, as relics from the past are discovered in amorphous bogs, these shifting circumstances have left craft in a bit of a cultural quagmire. 

The resilience of craft lies within its ambiguity. It is a defining aspect of human nature to be perplexed, to be more intrigued with the question more so than the answer. With answers curiosity ends. Questions, on the other hand, continuously spur material investigation and critical inquiry. Humans like categories, they help us to accept new ideas by connecting them to similar old ones. But categorical thinking can also create impenetrable barriers to new ideas, especially as we get older. The container has become too full; doors close. The craft field is trying to predict its future in the context of a bleak present. Schools, programs and institutions for our young scholars and makers are being eliminated. Crafts says it wants ingenuity but seems to only to reward those who brand their works as elite commodities or overly technical formalism, or worse, by allowing it’s artisans to be exploited for the sake of exposure.

My past relationships with academic institutions associated with the craft field have been erased. My present craft identity in relation to establishing an academic career has been eliminated. I no longer have a record of my past, and disappointingly, I have nothing in my present to help me project a possible future within the craft field. 

If there is any future for the field it will be at the risk of self trauma. For my creative practice, that means surpassing self-doubt through continued material experimentation, creating new forms within the process regulated by ceramics. I must be vigilant to not let technical and process based obsessiveness take over conceptual and social awareness. Craft runs dangerously close to perfectionism and escapism, a head space that is often definitive, leading to anxiety. Escapism is like trying to guess the future, an experiment in existential crisis. My practice must stay in an amorphous state, adaptable like clay, set between the realities of both hard and soft, internal and external, solid and hollow; between fantasy and reality.

It’s healthy to think about one’s death. Maybe that is where humanity sits now, anxiously considering where it’s been and trying desperately to reconcile how it lost touch with craft. If there is hope for craft, it will be found in the deep recess’ of our basic need to make and understand our place in the world. It will continue in workshops and in homes, passed down from family member to neighbor, although void of the academic rigor that our educational institutions once valued. Craft traditions will continue to be observed and it’s acts imitated as long as people can still get there hands in the dirt. As for my part within the field, I will keep making and thinking through craft. Making has always been part of my past as well as my present. And, as the most reliable part of my identity, making will carry me into the future. Like a spaceship built for one.