Key Pages
- |Changes [Feb 26, 2009]
The cameraTo accompany the discussion of a Wedgwood teapot - session 5 of the class Ten things - science, technology and design
became a key issue in 19th century design.
Machine and mass production made the achievement of highly ornamented surface easy. Ornament had been expensive an restricted to the wealthy. It came to be everywhere.
Ornament and the Great Exhibition of 1851. The question raised - had ornamentation gone too far?
19th century critics and many after, including Pevsner, saw machines as the cause of poor design; or the lack of artistic taste of workers and manufacturers.
NB the Luddites - who aimed to disrupt and destroy machic production.
1860s -
Morris shifted the debate from taste to design, from the aesthetic to much wider social issues.
'It is not this or that tangible brass or steel machine which we want to get rid of, but the great intangible machine of commercial tyranny which oppresses the lives of all of us.' Morris
His point was that the blaming of technology or machines for poor design diverts attention away from matters of the relations of production to technical and supposedly neutral matters.
The technical is not a field that can be isolated.
For Morris the division of labour led to alienation, and this was responsible for poor design.
Alienation: the separation of the worker from the product of labour.
The issue is/was one of the character of work.
For Morris the way forward involved:
Craft was less to be associated with the handmade than with an aesthetic based on the craft process (a denial of alienated labour).
The Arts and Crafts Movement:
1880 - 90 various guilds
All aimed to break down the barrier between art and craft.
Morris's stand against alienated labour was a political one.
He related design to politics and ethics.
'I don't want art for a few, any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few.'
NB the irony of his later work - expensive and for elite consumption - high-society commissions.
Studio crafts are a particular and complex aspect of contemporary production of goods.
They are not at all traditional but belong with a new environment for 'craft'.
Consider the following artifact:
Teapot by Helen Shanks
This is not just a handmade artifact.
Chracteristics:
In this way craft design aspires to an alternative aesthetics to industrial design (as initiated by Wedgwood).
Baudrillard - the ideology of competition gives way to a philosophy of self-fulfilment.
The craft artifact is both private and public. The creative fulfilment and expression of the maker, and shared principles of critique.
Craft is a potential unity of the scientific properties of the material, knowledge of the craftsperson, and the qualities we seek in order to be civilised.
It refers especially to the importance of surfaces - they are what we see and experience; they express both properties and qualities of things.
Morris on decoration:
"What we call decoration is, in many cases, but a way we have learned for making necessary things reasonable as well as pleasant to use. The pattern becomes part of the thing we make, its exponent, a mode of expressing itself to us, and by it we often form our own opinions not only of the shape, but of the strength and uses of a thing."
Craft indicates that we might ask in design not so much what does it mean? but also what does it do? This is a question of experience - how do we experience or get on with an artifact? How does it feel? What does it hold together? How well does it work?
Opposed to alienated labour, craft asks political questions of the relations of production.
Craft proposes models of apprenticed learning, rather than programed operations.
