Toward Relational Craft

Abstract

This thesis report contends with the contemporary context of studio craft here in the USA. Studio craft is predicated on habits of a modern world, and the political and economic relations comprising our social landscape have left the viability of those habits behind. The framework of studio craft, i.e. the politics that form its enactment, is necessarily shifting with the pressures of the environment. This project identifies this shift as an opportunity to recognize and intervene in these politics, and thus craft's reproductive power. This report focuses particularly on craft's process of political reproduction as an ideological one, and thus an enabler of the status relations of its contemporary place. In addition, as an ideological process, whether they win or lose in the status reproduction game craft's participants are left unable to account for the relations they promulgate. This report identifies the characteristics of craft's modernist mode, including the dysfunctions buried in the practice of its forms. The report articulates frames for the shifting contemporary landscape that impose new pressures on craft. The report then moves toward modes of intervention in the political landscape that craft both is produced by and reproduces. The field of craft is conventionally assumed as an object moving on its own terms through the world. This report finds instead the field of craft to be an activity, i.e. the sharing of sensibilities which enable action, and those sensibilities to be rooted in the political economic relations of its location. The force of this report then, in interventional terms, is to locate craft's material effects within the site of those relations. Here we can account, and thus take responsibility, for the habits of craft's enactment.