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A new publication by the head of graduate studies at the Victoria & Albert Museum will be published in October this year. Craft Culture offers a special preview of this very important work in craft theory. |
Even if you've never done it yourself, you can probably imagine what it's like to depart from a summer craft program after a few days, weeks, or months. Ideally, you are refreshed and ready to rejoin the regular flow of life, but you also look back on your time with a twinge of longing. You might even be nostalgic—though your longing will be for something that has only just ended. This sentiment might be fleeting, or it may stay with you for a time, but eventually it will fade from memory. After all, the whole point of summertime idyll is that it doesn't last forever. Yet, despite its seeming transience, it might be said that this backwards-looking moment, and its distinctive tenor of pleasant regret, is in fact the big payoff for spending a summer in the woods. It is a feeling of having participated in something pure and fragile, which is distant from the ‘real world' but also yields deeper understanding of that world—a bit of perspective, perhaps. It is, in short, the pastoral feeling.
Pastoral. The word, and the sense of removal from worldly affairs that it connotes, has been a fixture in literature since classical times. In ancient pastoral poems the main figures are shepherds ( pastores in Latin ) , whose freedom from labor permits them to spend their time indulging in philosophical rumination. The shepherds' meditations are invariably set in idealized natural surroundings, a fictional ‘no-place' ( Utopia ). The Roman poet Virgil set his pastoral works in Arcadia, named after a region of Greece renowned for its scenic rusticity. The first known pastoral poems, the Bucolics of Theocritus, amount to a loosely organized evocation of the pleasures of tranquility. The shepherds in the narrative discuss matters of philosophy and love; as far as subject matter goes, their conversation might be occurring at any place and in any time. Their removal from the world of affairs is not only spatial, but also temporal: the shepherds played the starring role in ancient pastoral literature not only because they stayed in the fields all day, but because their profession predated the dawn of civilization and law.1The shepherd is, then, an allegorical figure, who stands for removal not only from the city, but also from history itself. The countryside that the shepherd inhabits is an asylum that, even in the earliest pastoral poems, seems to be in the process of slipping away.2
The crucial feature of pastoral, then—and the aspect of it that makes it so useful as a stance in everything from art to literature to the crafts—is that it occupies two levels of meaning simultaneously. While reading a pastoral text, we are aware that the action is intended as a symbolic ideal, rather than as narrative for its own sake; furthermore, we are aware of our own awareness of that fact, and it is this higher order pleasure that constitutes the interest when reading the text. In his 1935 study Some Versions of the Pastoral , the literary theorist William Empson broadly reinterpreted the mode as the general practice of ‘putting the complex into the simple.'3 With this formula Empson claimed for pastoral a whole range of literary phenomena that had nothing to do with retreat into nature per se . As the art historian Thomas Crow has written, Empson saw the pastoral as ‘any work in which a distinctive voice is constructed from the implied comparison between an author's suitably large artistic ambitions and his or her inevitably limited horizons and modest strengths.'4 This strategy would include such conventions as placing great poetry into a shepherd's mouth, or setting out the hard truth about King Lear through the words of a fool.
Despite Empson's attempts to rehabilitate it, however, pastoral has always occupied the lowest rung on the ladder of literary modes. It has often been said that the pastoral mode wins its reflective qualities only at the price of an inability to deal concretely with cultural reality, as the author takes refuge from complex cultural problems in evocations of an imagined, simpler realm.5 And it is striking how completely craft exemplifies both the positive and negative aspects of pastoral: its double structure—in which making a chair or pot is valued not only in itself but also as a symbolic gesture about the value of lifestyle, integrity, and so forth—but also its tendency towards sentimental escapism. Both aspects of the pastoral lie at the heart of the history and the mythology of the craft movement. The summer schools just mentioned, places like Haystack in Maine or West Dean in Sussex, are obvious examples. Sited at a conspicuous remove from cities, they are places where one encounters vernacular architecture, natural food, and fund-raising events that recall a livestock auction at a country fair. Yet despite their seeming purity and innocence, summer crafts schools are highly self-conscious and purposefully constructed places. They are the direct descendants of such reformist enterprises as the Byrdcliffe colony in Woodstock and Dartington Hall in Devon, sites that were organized by wealthy benefactors for the purpose of idealistic social experimentation. From William Morris' rural retreat Kelmscott Manor to Sam Maloof's woodworking studio in an Alta Loma lemon grove, the pastoral stance has animated many of the sacred sites of the craft movement.6 It would not be too much to say that the ambitions and limitations of craft as a cultural force cannot be sufficiently described without using the self-reflective language of pastoral. In schools, communities, and individual workshops, the dream of wise shepherds is re-enacted annually, as craftspeople eagerly suspend their worldly entanglements and join in the collective pursuit of ‘true' experience.
Of course, it would be wrong to say that the pastoral inclination is particular to craftspeople. Empson found it throughout modern literature, and as we will see, it is a theme that runs strongly through postwar art as well. Nor would it be correct to say that craftspeople are universally in thrall to the pastoral ideal. The ‘designer-craftsman' impulse of the 1950s, in which traditional hand skills were placed at the service of mass production, is an obvious exception. So too are the ambitious artistic careers of such figures as Peter Voulkos and Dale Chihuly—or, at the other end of the status spectrum, the small-batch commercial producers who ring the cash registers at innumerable high-end craft fairs. Yet even such attempts to insert craft into the center have won much of their success from an underlying pastoral myth. Designer-craftsmen, for example, often appealed to the argument that a craftsperson offered a pre-industrial legitimacy that would indirectly ennoble the eventual mass-produced object. It is crucial to the lasting reputations of craft heroes like Voulkos and Chihuly that they are seen as outsiders who triumphed over the supposed prejudice of an unsympathetic art world. And similarly, the main thing that distinguishes the craft fair from the suburban mall that is supposedly its antithesis is the resonance of the ‘old days' when vendors pitched their booths in the fields. From such examples it is clear that in the crafts, authenticity always seems to be just out of view, around the historical bend. This way of thinking can be seductive, but it can also be misleading. As the literary critic Raymond Williams has observed, the pastoral often hides the hard truths of commerce behind a veil of decorous sentiment.7 Yet when the pastoral is not simply a pair of rose-colored glasses—when it is occupied self-consciously, rather than in a celebratory or promotional manner—it can be a powerful way of envisioning social and artistic change.
The question of pastoral cuts to the core of craft's potential as a cultural instrument. To what extent does craft constitute an opportunity for real creative freedom, in which critique, perspective and individualism can flourish? And, conversely, to what extent is it simply a Utopian prop, a story we tell ourselves to assuage our anxieties in an increasingly fluid, technological society? This dilemma cuts across all cultural contexts for craft. A commune emphasizes process and experience over product and aesthetics; a museum, the reverse. But how should craft be grounded at these two sites economically, geographically, and spiritually? On what grounds should it be encouraged, by what standards judged? Many of the claims made for craft have been structured around varied and competing responses to this dilemma.
One can imagine these claims along a continuum. At the ‘right' end, to use an overly simplistic political metaphor, one finds artists and events that focus on elevating the mainstream status of the movement. The main venues for advancement at this pole are private galleries and museum exhibitions, particularly large-scale undertakings such as Objects: USA (which toured thirty museums in America and Europe between 1969 and 1972), The Craftsman's Art (held at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 1973); and Craft Today: Poetry of the Physical (organized by the American Craft Museum, 1986). The effect of such projects, whatever their internal variations and inconsistencies, has been to consolidate the idea of craft as an institution, a community, or a field. As weaver and basket-maker Ed Rossbach put it in 1972, Objects: USA ‘seemed to formalize the past, chronicle it into a permanent bound volume, the authorized version. Modifications and corrections would be accomplished only with great difficulty.'8 Against this centralizing tendency there has been a ‘left' leaning, pastoral desire to see craft as something loose in the landscape, unfettered by any particular institutional configuration. While less coherent by definition, this perspective has certainly had moments of dominance—the peak of craft's popularity as a cultural phenomenon, after all, coincided with the rise of the Counterculture and quintessentially pastoral ethos of ‘dropping out.'
As in electoral politics, however, it is not at the poles that craft's identity is decided, but in the broad middle. As palpable as the success of a big city museum exhibition or the purity of a backwoods pottery may seem, such extremes are in fact the exception rather than the rule. For most people involved with craft, advance and retreat are inseparable from one another, and blend in contradictory (or at least confusing) ways. Pastoral craft is at its most interesting when it collides head on with reality, and shapes itself to fit. For, as Fiona MacCarthy has written, ‘the simple life was never for the simple minded.'9
Notes
1 Thomas G. Rosenmeyer, The Green Cabinet: Theocritus and the European Pastoral Lyric (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969); Luba Freedman, The Classical Pastoral in the Visual Arts (New York: Peter Lang, 1989), p. 2.
2Laurence Lerner, The Uses of Nostalgia: Studies in Pastoral Poetry (London: Chatto and Windus, 1972), p. 41 ff.
3 William Empson, Some Versions of the Pastoral (New York: New Directions, 1974; orig. pub. 1935), p. 22.
4Thomas Crow, ‘The Simple Life: Pastoralism and the Persistence of Genre in Recent Art,' in Crow, Modern Art and the Common Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 177.
5Steven Walker, A Cure For Love: A Generic Study of the Pastoral Idyll (New York: Garland Publishing, 1987), p. 79. On the pastoral as a form of escapism, see Renato Poggioli, ‘The Oaten Flute,' in Poggioli, The Oaten Flute: Essays on Pastoral Poetry and the Pastoral Ideal (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975; orig. pub. in the Harvard Literary Bulletin , 1957); Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin Books, 1988 [orig. pub. 1982]), p. 134ff.
6Edward S. Cooke, ‘The Long Shadow of William Morris: Paradigmatic Problems of Twentieth-Century American Furniture,' in Luke Beckerdite, ed., American Furniture 2003 (Milwaukee: Chipstone Foundation/University Press of New England, 2003). For nineteenth-century precedents see Robert S. Fogarty, All Things New: American Communes and Utopian Movements, 1860-1914 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
7Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 54. Tanya Harrod identifies this sort of simplifying pastoral in the waning days of the British Arts and Crafts movement in The Crafts in Britain in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 23-28.
8Ed Rossbach, ‘Objects: USA Revisited,' Craft Horizons 32/4 (August 1972).
9Fiona MacCarthy, The Simple Life: C. R. Ashbee in the Cotswolds (London: Lund Humphries, 1981), p. 9.
