shot from the hip

***update below***

a few weeks ago i gave a talk on the arts & crafts movement that emerged during the latter part of victorian britain, from roughly 1860 to 1900, and i was taken with the similarities between now and then, in relation to the changes and/or transformation our culture has undergone over the past twenty years or so; and i think i’m still in teacher-mode, so this is a bit of a long post. while the circumstances and contexts are very different, there are arguable parallels in the nature of how people responded. lately i find myself more and more fascinated by the past incidents of massive change, thinking about what insights into the future can be gained by looking back.

bit of history…. originating a few centuries prior with the printing press, the industrial revolution took hold in the early 1800’s with the advent of mechanized innovations in the textile industry, and the mechanization of labour quickly spread to other industries and spurred the production of goods towards extraordinary volumes, creating a greater need for regulated tradeways (rail, road, canal, etc) and urban development. mass production of goods was rampant, newly established factories hired workforces in the thousands, and a new middle class of entrepreneurs and nouveau riche emerged.

by mid-century, the industrial revolution was reaching the crest of its first wave, transforming every aspect of british culture while it gained strength as a global empire. it’s critical to remember that these changes were happening for the first time ever, accelerating human life into the modern age at a pace that barely allowed time to gain vantage on the present before hurtling into the future, all the while changing the expectations of what that future might hold.

more after the jump…

the arts & crafts movement arose through william morris, in turn inspired by the writings of john ruskin, one of the most renowned cultural critics of the victorian age before he cracked up. ruskin’s writings had a decidedly socialist slant, and rallied strongly against the standardization, dehumanization and commodification of labour that occurred with increased mechanization.

factory work was degrading, the creative maker had no relationship with the object as a spiritual or holistic endeavour – people’s behaviour became oriented towards singular tasks, and were thus expendible. he was a strong supporter of neo-gothic architecture as he believed that it embodied the social values, community practice and non-standardized production of guilds, where the makers (architects and stonemasons were viewed on par) could find pleasure or purpose in the creation of things beautiful and aesthetic. there are huge assumptions here, however, about the quality of life and reality of labour, as well as value systems of taste, to be sure.

That good art is done with enjoyment. The artist must feel that, within certain reasonable limits, he is free, that he is wanted by society, and that the ideas he is asked to express are true and important.

skip on over to morris in the 1860’s, influenced by ruskin’s writings, the effects of industry in society and the lavish, opulent display of the high victorian period, and an interesting conversation begins to happen. where ruskin thought mechanization and industry to be the root of all evil and decline of man, arts & crafts was neither anti-industrial nor anti-modern, though it embodied a strong reaction against many industrial practices and encouraged individual handwork over mass production.

in some respects (and there were strongly  divided camps on this) the movement sought compromise between the efficiency of the machine and the skill of the craftsman, considering it useful to figure out how someone could master a machine to perform creative or imaginative endeavours, as opposed to becoming slaves of the industrial machine.

A&C was primarily a movement in architecture and the decorative arts (though later influencing such ‘fine art’ movements such as Cubism) which emphasized and championed the unity of the arts, the experience of the individual craftsman and the qualities of materials and construction in the work itself. as well, it’s practitioners held a strong relationship to process versus result, encouraging apprenticeships and the social exchange of knowledge, the traditional forms of which had been in decline with mechanization.

while utopian in theory, morris’ intentions were to create affordable, handmade goods that reflected the imagination and individuality of the maker, though the irony of handwork (often to this day) is that despite the “democratic” choice of materials the time invested often made the goods expensive. morris, to his credit, fully embraced the values and practices he espoused – his arms were regularly stained blue from the indigo dyes used in textile production, he led reformed guilds and the goods sold through his firm were relatively affordable.

and finally, the arts & crafts movement sought to breakdown the hierarchy of the arts, promoting the decorative arts in the same manner and value as traditional fine arts. traditional gender roles were suspended as men and women discovered new practices. techniques, trends and aesthetics gained fluidity and cultivated transdisciplinary literacies, embraced by creative practitioners and having a pretty substantial influence on subsequent cultural movements.

the parallel threads that i see linking that age to this one talk about many of the same issues – cultural responses, enabled by new technologies, seek to extend the role of creative individuals and communities beyond the restrictions of previous media generations. the democracy – or meritocracy – of creative practice and dissemination of ideas, practices and values, and it’s potential impact for transforming g/local economies and communities can more accurately embody the principles of each participant.

recent media’s enabled a more ‘human’ representation in communicating remotely – social networks encouraging slivering identity, mobile platforms mapping new topographies of social presence and ambient intimacy, media bricolage creating expression economies. the rub here is what those principles are motivated by – sometimes positive, sometimes negative, sometimes social, sometimes decidedly alienating, and always relative.

in ways similar to what we are experiencing now, though scale is relative, the industrial revolution raced across modern culture and embued it with an irrevocable sense of newness and of the future – new money, new ideas, new technology, new society, politics, culture – it aligned the eyes of the known and connected world towards what might be around the next bend.

as it’s been with every new discovery, the developments and invention of past decades and the current froth are transforming the current state of our existence into something new, that we most certainly won’t be able to return from – knowledge changes everything. i wonder though if our insights into the past can aid us in creating the future? our principles and values are embodied in our ideas and practices, often surviving long after us – what will be said about this era in a hundred years?

***update***

so i post this big long essay on arts and crafts… feeling good about it, glad i got it out of the drafts folder…
this morning i’m reading a new short story by bruce sterling in mit’s tech review (def worth a read)… and come across these paragraphs:

Nowadays, Preston spent his lonely hours grooming architecture websites. There he gamely removed the moronic popular commentary and tried to drum up some intelligent interest in the doctrines of Arts & Crafts, Futurism, the modern movement, the postmodern movement, and New Urbanism.

These were architectural schemes that long-­forgotten people had created with pencils on paper. No proper 21st-century person could tell these primi­tive notions apart. Still, some critic was bound to take a keen interest in such efflorescences of human genius, and it was bound to be some weedy obsessive like Preston Mengies.

i love it – feeling more archaic with every moment! ;)