Author(s): Tanya Harrod

Art

A secret history of craft told through lost and overlooked texts that illuminate our understanding of current art practice."Craft" is a contested concept in art history and a vital category through which to understand contemporary art. Through craft, materials, techniques, and tools are investigated and their histories explored in order to reflect on the politics of labor and on the extraordinary complexity of the made world around us. This anthology offers an ethnography of craft, surveying its shape-shifting identities in the context of progressive art and design through writings by artists and makers as well as poetry, fiction, anthropology, and sociology. It maps a secret history of craft through lost and overlooked texts that consider pedagogy, design, folk art, the factory, and new media in ways that illuminate our understanding of current art practice. Recently, the idea of craft has been employed strategically: to confront issues of gender or global development, to make a stand against artistic academicism, or to engage with making processes--some distinctly archaic--employed to suggest the abject and the everyday. Craft activism, or craftivism, suggests a new political purpose for the handmade. Deep anxieties drive today's technophilia, and artists, designers, and makers turn such anxieties into a variety of dynamic engagements. The contributors' reflections on new technologies and materials, lost and found worlds of handwork, and the politics of work all throw light on craft as process, product, and ideology. Craft will serve as a vital resource for understanding technologies, materials, techniques, and tools through the lens of craft in contemporary art.Artists surveyed include Anni Albers, Magdalena Abakanowicz, El Anatsui, Carl Andre, Phyllida Barlow, Louise Bourgeois, Annie Cattrell, Richard Deacon, Sam Durant, Antje Ehmann, Harun Farocki, Lucio Fontana, Theaster Gates, Sabrina Geschwantner, Harmony Hammond, Brian Jungen, Henry Krokatsis, Jim Lambie, Ana Lupas, Enzo Mari, Ethel Mairet, Agnes Martin, Robert Morris, Simon Periton, Martin Puryear, Jessi Reaves, Hannah Ryggen, Gerhard Richter, Bridget Riley, Lu Shengzhong, Studio Formafantasma, Thomas Thwaites, Troy Town Art Pottery, Francis Uprichard, Peter Voulkos, Edmund de Waal Writers include Glenn Adamson, W. H. Auden, Elissa Auther, Reyner Banham, Jean Baudrillard, John Berger, Walter Benjamin, Juliet Bingham, Michel de Certeau, Iftikhar Dadi, Daniel Defoe, John Dewey, Vil m Flusser, Alfred Gell, Walter Gropius, Martin Heidegger, Joan Key, Primo Levi, Sarat Marahraj, Karl Marx, Lev Manovich, William Morris, Sadie Plant, Rainer Maria Rilke, Jenni Sorkin, Richard Sennett, Julia Bryan-Wilson