The Future is Handmade:

The Survival and Innovation of Crafts

What is ‘craft’? The word has a complex history and equally complex associations. This special edition of the Prince Claus Fund Journal compiles writings and visual materials from across the world on the changing role of crafts in contemporary life. In it, writers and artists explore the emerging meanings of crafts in the global arena, with emphasis on innovative practices in the production, circulation, and consumption of crafts in contemporary social and aesthetic contexts.

Crafting is a material process, as a skill by which a material product is created, but also as an immaterial skill or practice by which a service is offered. Contributors to this Journal examine the developments and initiatives that explore innovation. It does not focus on crafts as preserving a particular heritage, but one that relays the perpetuation and transformation of skills and motifs in new media and changed social contexts. This wider context necessitates seeing how crafts practices migrate, bridging one medium to another, linking crafts and mass culture, high art and artisanal practices, formal and informal economies.

Indeed, crafts today can be seen as a medium through which some of the most significant issues of contemporary life are articulated. How do issues such as mass immigration, the creation of multicultural cities across the world or accelerated tourism and travel relate to the ongoing transformation of crafts? Crafts, as readers will discover, are not silent agents in these processes. In the following four sections, this edition of the Prince Claus Fund Journal hopes to reflect this and contribute to the contemporary debate.

Tradition and Innovation

With the loosening of the formal language of Modernism, many fine artists now draw upon crafts practices to explore social and aesthetic dilemmas, by creating works which refer simultaneously to the specificity of artisanal practices and objects, while making works that address global issues. The essays on the remarkable works of the Indonesian artist Heri Dono, who deploys puppets to comment on contemporary political situations, explore these emergent relationships between fine art, crafts, and society.

Popular Design and Crafts

If the received image of crafts is that of a medium unresponsive to change, consider J.D. ’Okhai Ojeikere’s photographs of elaborately sculptured Nigerian hairstyles detailing a map of the country’s roads, or Sandra Klopper’s essay on how beadwork has evolved in post-apartheid South Africa. The designers of these

beaded ritual ‘skirts’ have more in common with the works of a designer such as Versace than realised at first. International trends-forecaster Li Edelkoort explores the transformation of fashion and interior design, and articulates the role of crafts in fresh contexts. These are just three examples of how the extended range of crafts practice addresses the larger world.

From Arts to Crafts

Crafts practices remain important for groups affirming their identity. Their sphere of informal production and consumption demands a new understanding, which is not easily read in terms of traditional/modern, public/private, sacred/secular, and craft/non-craft distinctions. The Colombian artist Nadín Ospina’s appropriation of cartoon icons revitalises traditional forms, while new trends in Dutch design explore crafts in a thoroughly modern context. For Laila Tyabji, crafts is a vehicle for social change introduced by the women’s DASTKAR cooperative in India, which offers new possibilities of positive transformation.

Globalisation and Crafts

Crafts practices today intersect with techniques of mass production. While it may appear that crafts is antithetical to the latter, in reality, their mutual relationship is far more complex. To what extent, and in which sector, are urban habitats, machines and industrial practices helpful to the production of ‘crafts’? Essays on the confluence of the folk with urban mass culture in Latin America and the world of plastic toys in South Asia scrutinise the meeting point of craft and mass culture, while the Buddha as a tourist souvenir serves as a reservoir of memory and identity.

Finally, the survival of crafts in very difficult circumstances is eloquently exemplified by the 2003 Principal Prince Claus laureate. In his long career that spans the turbulent years of the twentieth century, including the Cultural Revolution, Wang Shixiang has not only studied and conserved the important and sophisticated crafts of China, but has retained his interest in its most minor and ephemeral expressions as well. This issue of the Journal includes his extraordinary writings on the craft of pigeon whistles, which are equally a meditation on the passage of history, and its embodiment in crafts.

Iftikhar Dadi, Special Guest Editor,

and the Prince Claus Fund