The Original Arts and Crafts Movement and the New Impulse

Meaningful Labor

It started with a yearning in the hearts of men and women. The Arts and Crafts movement arose out of a quest for the spirit of life.  The populations of cities were rising dramatically and industry was beginning to permeate the lives of people. People began working in factories where they performed the same repetitive tasks day after day. They felt a lack of self importance and searched for meaning in their lives. Goods formerly made by artisans were replaced by low quality goods without soul. These mass produced goods lacked the feeling of simple products that were artfully made. Their daily work was meaningless and the products they used a home were equally meaningless. People wanted more from life. They wanted a relationship to life. 

This desire for a relationship to life is as present today as it was during the rise of the Arts and Crafts movement. Have you ever asked yourself “Is this all there is to life?” Our search for meaning is clearly evident. Though perhaps not prevalent, it is even discernable in the mainstream. From Good Morning America to Oprah, mainstream news and entertainment has covered many individuals and movements that seek to help us to answer the question “What is the meaning and purpose of life? 

From its inception as a social revolution in the mid 1800’s through the publication of the Craftsman magazine in 1901 to the rise of the Bungalow as a typically American home, the Arts and Crafts movement represented a quest for spiritual and moral renewal. In 1971 Gillian Naylor introduced the movement in The Arts and Crafts Movement as “…inspired by a crisis of conscience. Its motivations were social and moral, and its aesthetic values derived from the conviction that society produces the art and architecture that it deserves…and the realization that technical progress does not necessarily coincide with the improvement of man’s lot brought with it the long campaign for social, industrial, moral and aesthetic reform that is still unresolved today”.^[i]  

Early voices of the movement rejected the mass production of goods, their lack of individuality, and the conditions laborers faced in producing them. They sought to establish alternative methods of consumption and production of goods. They believed that hand made goods, improved working conditions, the integration of art into everyday life, and an aesthetic resulting from the use of indigenous materials and native traditions would result in a moral and spiritual redemption.[ii] 

John Ruskin, was the most prominent and influential art critic of the nineteenth century as well as one of the period’s most articulate social critics and he set the stage for the social uprising that was to come. Ruskin was a poet and an artist who wrote and lectured prodigiously. He began his career as an art critic and evolved into a sociologist who examined the phenomena of art in order to find “the economy of life.”[iii] After a forty year focus on reform, at of the age of 72 in The Stones of Venice Ruskin set out three rules that became the principles on which the Arts and Crafts movement were based. Ruskin stated 

“And the great cry that rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace blast, is all in very deed for this, that we manufacture everything there except men; we blanch cotton, and strengthen steel, and refine sugar, and shape pottery; but to brighten, to strengthen, to refine, or to form a single living spirit, never enters into our estimate of advantages….And all the evil to which that cry is urging our myriads can be met only in one way:  by a right understanding on the part of all classes, of what kinds of labor are good for men, raising them, and making them happy; by a determined sacrifice of such convenience, or beauty, or cheapness as is to be got only by the degradation of the workman ; and by equally determined demand for the products and results of healthy and ennobling labor. 

And how, it will be asked, are these products to be recognized, and this demand to be regulated? Easily: by the observance of three broad and simple rules:

1. Never encourage the manufacture of any article not absolutely necessary, in the production of which invention has no share.

2. Never demand an exact finish for its own sake, but only for some practical or noble end.

3. Never encourage imitation or copying of any kind, except for the sake of preserving record of great works.^[iv]”

The theory that mass production of goods, and the loss of humanity that factory workers faced in performing the same repetitive tasks all day long soon became an ideology. Proponents argued that the industrial revolution was associated with a loss of spirit, not only in the mass produced goods it created, but also in the quality of lives of the people who made them as well as those who used them.

William Morris, often considered the father of the Arts and Crafts movement, was not against mechanization, but as Morris put it, “the great intangible machine of commercial tyranny.”[v] Morris sought to infuse machine production with standards of craftsmanship and a spirit of self-expression. He argued that work could itself be a “pleasurable exercise of our energies is at once the source of all art and the cause of all happiness”.[vi]

As David Gorman described Morris’s philosophy in Work and Communism: The Vision of William Morris, 

“Think about the machinery developed by capitalists in the nineteenth century. Its purpose was to impose control from above, to regulate the very movements of every worker in a factory, to force the worker to work at the rate set by the capitalist. This was built into its very design. Such machinery could not provide the basis for the free, creative labour that Morris saw as the need of every human being. It could not be the basis for creative self-expression. 

Morris opposed the reduction of the worker to a mere appendage of a machine, forms of production which denied the worker any kind of freedom of self-expression. The machinery necessary for mass production, of which the assembly line is merely the highest form, could never have permitted the free creativity necessary for communism. Insofar as it denied the needs of the worker in production, it required external discipline of one kind or another. Ideally, Morris would have automated all work that was unpleasant or mere drudgery, leaving us free to carry out tasks that were more congenial. He also suggested that we might want to think whether we really needed to perform such work as was not intrinsically fulfilling.”

Many argue that despite its high ideals, the Arts and Crafts Movement was essentially flawed. That its opposition to modern methods of production, rather than forward to a progressive era made it a failure. But this view fails to embrace the fact that we, as a global society, continue to be inspired by the products of the movement and its underlying quest for meaning. In our time of radical change the possibility of a better life is more relevant today than it was one hundred years ago. 

I argue that the new Arts and Crafts Movement is already underway. The New Arts and Crafts movement is alive and growing out of a rebellion to the technological revolution, the industrialization of agriculture, the rise of the corporation and everything that diminishes the value of the individual. 

The very things that were supposed to make our lives easier; e-mail, PDAs, and wireless data, have only sped up our lives leaving us little time to slow down, re-energize and connect to nature, our families, our friends and ourselves. The new Arts and Crafts movement is alive in the dilemma we face with the double–edged sword of technology; technology that has tremendously improved the quality of human life, yet whose negative side is potentially devastating to human life. It is alive in scores of bungalow associations across the United States that seek to preserve their sturdy housing stock which is greatly in need of restoration and updating. It is alive in Sustainable development, a growing concept that ties together concern for the viability of natural systems with the social challenges facing humanity. 

If you live in a Bungalow, if you have a yearning in your heart for more meaning to life, or you have a desire to heal yourself, others, or the natural world, the New Arts and Crafts movement is alive in you.

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[i] Naylor, Gillian; The Arts and Crafts Movement (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 1971) 7

[ii] Kaplan, Wendy; The Arts and Crafts Movement in Europe and America (Thames & Hudson in association with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2004) 11

[iii] Ibid 14

[iv] Ruskin, John; The Stones of Venice, (John Wiley and Sons, New York 1891)

[v] Ibid 165

[vi] Gorman, David Art, Work and Communism: The Vision of William Morris (New Interventions, Vol.10 No.2, 2000)

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~ by beaudrydesign on June 15, 2010.