Craft/Crap

It was so great to hear from folks who posted replies to my last entry on "survival skills" and the idea of archiving dying practices. I wish I had a chance to respond to every single one of you, but Blogger is totally lame in that it won't let me reply to individual posts, ack. But let me stress that it really makes me feel all warm and fuzzy to know that (as valerie says) "there's something in the air"--or maybe the water, even, in terms of people feeling like they want to be proactive about "making" their own lives.



On a related note, hearing everyone's interest in picking up new skills, it definitely seems like there's a renaissance in the amount of online sites, books, and groups that are formed around the idea of contemporary crafting (craftster.org, the upcoming CRAFT magazine launch, Readymade Mag, etc etc). I wonder, however, if it's just yet another nefarious attempt to market products at a growing market of consumers: buy this book and these types of materials (or a prepackaged kit) and learn how to make stuff. The chainstore Joann Fabrics is especially freaking me out by the fact that they seem to have exploded everywhere and now offer all the "correct" materials for creating "crafts". Don't get me even started on the whole scrapbooking phenomenon, which encourages people to make nostalgically-tinged family mementos using fragmented pre-fab stickers of text or sepia-toned images. I noticed a few years ago Target started their own scrapbooking aisle, with bits of patterned paper and miscellany that you rearrange to make your own "personalized" collage.

The word "craft" has such baggage attached to it. It's overly feminized and makes you think of "unimportant" stuff that women are supposed to do while the menfolk do the real work. The art college I teach at, The California College of Arts (CCA) changed their name from The California College of Arts and Crafts (CCAC) a few years ago to try to divorce themselves from the stigma associated with the big "C-word". I thought they should have been brave and kept the word, attempting to change the meaning of it as opposed to just dropping it entirely. Like, "we don't DO craft--we make ART."

I like what sites such as Extreme Craft, MicroRevolt, Knitta, Lisa Ann Auerbach, and Craftivism push--alternate visions of making that are based on tradition and craft but then purposefully go beyond the societal limitations posed on them. It's less about buying crap to make more crap, and more about the tenacity and envelope-pushing.

So here's my question to you all who may be interested in semantics like this one:

Does a new word have to be formed entirely to denote the creation of something that is not a "traditional" form of craft, but springs from it and relates to it directly? Like, what if it's called "Kraft" instead? Like how the term "Black" (capital B) was coined by the African-American community as a conscious political and social label, as opposed to the generic term "black".

Or do we revamp and embrace the word "craft," despite all the cutesy and insipid baggage that comes with it, and stay solidly under the same umbrella, asking the word to become more expansive?

I sort of think it would be hilarious to coin a new term (like Betsy Greer's term "crafitivism"), not to try to create divisions between disciplines, but to consciously state that a new direction is being attempted. Not to try to stigmatize or overthrow the validity of weavers, artisans, and other craft-ers, but to give folks a new term to think about and perhaps identify with more readily than just being a crafter. I'm beginning to get annoyed with the word craft, actually.

Just a last note: The one thing that the word "craft" has going for it as opposed to "art," and why I am so fascinated with it right now despite also having one foot firmly entrenched in the fine art world, is that I feel like craft is more deeply rooted in everyday experience and more accepted by society at large as not being threatening or "high-falluting." I like that it can slip under the radar and exist comfortably outside of gallery spaces and be perceived as nonthreatening. Labeling something as "art" automatically puts the thing on a pedestal and takes it out of an everyday and perhaps catalytic framework.