a discussion on handmade & machine-made crafts

crafts in the age of mechanical (re)production

A handmade craft object is closely associated with its maker and its culture. But in an age of mass-produced consumer goods, handicrafts have lost their authenticity and individuality. Syed Manzoorul Islam discusses the implications of the movement that is taking crafts away from humble artisans to factories and retail outlets.

Writing in 1936, when the technical reproduction of art – not just etching or lithography, but a whole of range of visual and auditory art as well – had become widespread, Walter Benjamin famously said that what “withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.” He also suggested that reproduction eliminates an essential element of art: “its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” And without its unique existence, an artwork loses its defining sense of history, its authenticity, its mysterious power, or to use a term Bordieu and Darbel have used in another context, its charisma. Benjamin however, believed that mechanical reproduction also freed art from its “parasitical dependence on ritual,” which then began to base itself on ‘politics,’ a term he used to suggest an act of intervention in the historical process. There can be no doubt that mechanical – or, to use a term more common in our time, technological – intervention in art has significantly affected not only its mode of production, but also the mode of participation in its form and meaning. The stress, indeed, has gradually shifted from an aesthetic of the sublime to an aesthetic of the spectacle. Art has assumed an exhibition value, and consequently a more pronounced consumer value. Some postmodernists argue that reproduction – or simulacrum, as they would put it – has taken away the aura of the original; others claim that kitsch has taken over much of what was once the domain of the sublime. These points may be endlessly debated, but they underscore Benjamin’s view that reproduction does away with “a number of outmoded concepts, such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery” (Benjamin 217-25).
Taking my cue from Benjamin (in addition to a part of the title of his seminal work) I may raise a pertinent question – not about the state of art but that of its lowly cousin (or its ‘other’), the crafts – and wonder what shape crafts will take in an age of increasing mechanical production and technological intervention. It is important that we ask the question not from a fear of the apparently all-consuming advance of mass production which threatens the very uniqueness of a craftwork, but also from the need to profile the users – the consumers – of the craftwork, if only to focus on their changing relationship with the crafts, which is now increasingly determined by the market. A craftwork, more than anything else, exists at the ambiguous juncture of art and its ‘other,’ of aesthetics and utility, sophistication and everydayness, cultivated value and received value, and, we might also add, the sophisticated connoisseur and the workaday user.
The craft-world has always straddled this uncertain ground between artistic practices that aim at superior standards of taste and artisanal traditions that subsume aesthetics to their utility value. In the west, where artistic and philosophical considerations have consigned arts and crafts to the realm of high and low art, respectively, craftworks have often been invested with a sociological function which arises from their opposition to the proliferation of machine production. Machine production and industrial design have not only changed the nature of the handmade – a term William Morris used to denote the distinctive nature of crafts which had historical, cultural, social and environmental imperatives behind their production – but have also made it problematic.
If the handmade is an applied form of art, a social and cultural product reflecting the low-toned, inclusive nature of the folk imagination, which, in a pre-capital, pre-technology world would fall back on standards set by tradition for evaluating artistic merits rather than exploring linkages with high value culture, what, then, happens to it at the time of increased hybridization? Hybridization is the danger that the handmade has been facing ever since it began to take on the characteristics of art and reshape its functionality towards a more aesthetic, preservable, and, we may add, auctionable value. A second question: how does the handmade cope with the pressure of replication, and the “anonymity of mass production”? (Metcalf 129) And a last one: how would the handmade negotiate both the challenges and advantages offered by computer technology? The postmodern promotion of kitsch apart, crafts stand to lose much of their authenticity when the market takes on the operation of micro-management as well as global distribution.
These questions are being asked again and again not just in the west, but in countries like ours where crafts are being ‘mainstreamed’ for an increasingly appreciative consumer class. Large distribution and sales outlets target middle and affluent classes as well as expatriates. They not only collect the craft objects from producers for sale but also provide them with necessary ingredients such as textiles, yarn, dyes or leather. A nakshi kantha sold at one of these outlets has the design and functionality of a traditional handmade one, but by substituting used or discarded textiles for new, machine-produced ones, the kantha sacrifices one very essential element of its production – its authenticity – and compromises on its uniqueness, thus turning it anonymous. A craftwork, which usually doesn’t bear the signature of its maker, retains a personalized aura. When we look at a fifty year old nakshi kantha we wonder at motifs and designs that point to the artistic ingenuity and the presence of the maker in it. The fact that we don’t know her name or any other details about her doesn’t take anything away from our appreciation of the artist. Indeed, the inactive nature of the kantha, its incorporation of the sense of the body, its reconstruction of the tactile feeling that both animates the work and makes it so inviting, lifts it from the sphere of materiality to that of aesthetic pleasure. A machine produced kantha, on the other hand, remains largely grounded in its materiality and its reconstructed consumer value.
A craftwork is distinguished by the feeling of the human body behind its creation. In its pure form it embodies both the irreducible individuality of its maker and its cultural everydayness, as well as the utility and ritual functions associated with it. Besides, a craftwork is replete with cultural and social references that any mechanical reproduction would eliminate. A nakshi kantha my father collected from a village in Mymensingh in the early 1960s, to cite an example, contained, along with the usual motifs of domestic life – paan leaves, betel nut cutters, kitchen utensils, children’s foot and handprints embroidered in coloured threads – also a puzzling inscription “mukti chai” (I want my freedom) placed at the bottom right corner, almost as an afterthought. That the maker of the kantha was literate enough to enunciate her message in correct Bangla made the inscription so poignant. Surely she was denied freedom in an unfriendly household where she had probably been dispatched at an early age. We can imagine how the woman’s life had been without any prospect of freedom, and probably no opportunity to pursue her education. The inscription is woman’s writing at its most tender, and thrusts upon us the task of reconstructing her personal history even at this distance of time. In such a reconstruction, the maker’s name, address or lineage becomes far less important than the coded message she embroidered as a form of personal protest. The handmade thus becomes a site of identity conflict and convergence of the personal and the plural. If the almost obscure inscription was to be taken out, the kantha would appear to be just another traditional artifact, reflecting tradition (the motifs, the style of embroidery, the materials), and indeed innovation (the kantha’s organization of the symbols and motifs appear a bit uneven; their sizes also vary, and the stitchwork appears finer than is usual in the region). But the inscription gives it a unique genealogy, and access to sociological scrutiny. I can’t imagine a machine produced kantha, even one replicating the ‘mukti chai’ plea, ever being able to move us the way that the handmade object did me. If the handmade is mass produced, it surrenders its logic of cultural production to the politics of mercantile production, and mutates into a mere artisanal object with different values and expectations attached to it. Besides, by disengaging the body from the work, machine production perhaps takes away the most intangible manifestation of its self-fulfillment – its premium on the personal satisfaction of the maker, although the work might satisfy an urban consumer totally.
A craftwork is made potent by the interaction of individual creativity and community aesthetics, utility functions and human values. It is distinguished by its maker’s desire to locate himself or herself in the wider and ever-changing cultural aspirations of the community, and subsequently of the market. But even when the market is a determinant factor, community aesthetics remains the factor determining the form and content of the craftwork. The exquisite terracotta dolls from Dinajpur dating back to early 1940s that form a part of the Bangladesh National Museum’s collection were mostly bought from village fairs by some patron. They were no doubt meant to be consumer items, but have retained their uncompromising and distinctive style because within the frame of their consumer matrix, the dolls inscribe their community aesthetics in such an indelible manner that the market has not been able to impose its own preferences on them. Or, perhaps, it was the dolls’ irreducible uniqueness that is responsible for their marketability.
The handmade thus is a dynamic object – always evolving, and always abreast of changing tastes and preferences as competing artistic/functional visions shape and reshape it. It also represents a way of life, and, according to social anthropologists, an intuitive social movement. Therefore changes in lifestyle and material conditions are expected to have their impact on the handmade and its production. But certain forms, shapes, styles and aesthetic preferences change little over time, suggesting that a craftwork can function as a stable signifier of community values and desires over time. Mechanical production takes away this feeling of assurance and stability and the sense of continuity that the handmade evokes. As a result, a reproduced craftwork often stands on its own as an object-in-itself, with its own set of references and meaning and its own ambience. It is true that the reproduced craftwork comes with a feel of hybridity, but hybridity doesn’t stand in its way of being accepted and appreciated by the user who, while (s)he might lament the loss of the real, would appreciate the craftwork for what it has to offer – an increased utility value, for example. In a lecture in 1901, Frank Lloyd Wright had said that “The machine, by its wonderful cutting, shaping, smoothing, and repetitive capacity, has made it possible to so use it without waste that the poor as well as the rich may enjoy today beautiful surface treatments of clean, strong forms” (273-74). The machine has no doubt enhanced the user value of crafts while adding a dimension of spectacle to them which, in the age of ever increasing visuality, has added a new sense of appreciation to one’s approach to them. And, to be frank, for a generation of urbanites growing up without any contact with the handmade, the machine produced craftwork is the real thing. For them, its hybridity is not a constricting, but an expanding and open-ended condition of its being.
In the context of the debate about the real and the reproduced in the craftworld, two sets of questions then arise: on the one hand, traditionalists will ask: What then can be done to preserve (i) the authenticity and naturalness; (ii) the sense of the body, (iii) associations with simple domesticity, (iv) links to the environment and (v) the artistry of the crafts in the age of machine production, and how can the tradition of craftworks be revived when the market reaches the very doorsteps of rural households? On the other hand, promoters of machine production and crafts people who use machines to fine tune their products will argue that the machine has helped restore the appeal of crafts due to their cheaper production costs. They will point out that in advanced economies, the handmade has, in many instances, priced itself out of the reach of low income users. They may even say, isn’t the increased visuality of machine-produced crafts now a sign of their widespread acceptance? If it is so, why lament the loss of the aura of the handmade, and why not celebrate the new craftworks as objects that are, if not authentic, destined to claim such authenticity in the future, helped by more sophisticated reproduction technology and more dynamic market mechanisms?
There are no easy answers to the questions, for while we may mull over the prospect of going back to tradition and restoring the ubiquity of the handmade, we know very well that the machine, backed by the market, has already made inroads into age-old artisanal practices. But such an admission doesn’t mean that we should give up on our heritage and allow the handmade to be condemned to extinction. The handmade can and should be revived, even where the machine has marred such a prospect; and where the handmade rules, it can be safeguarded and made to consolidate its position further. This can be done by providing grants, loans, assistance and other support to the producer, and helping him/her find a comfortable customer base. In western economies, the creation of narrowcast markets in cities has led to increased demand for the handmade. We have a long way to go to come close to such advanced urbanization and economic growth, but narrowcast markets can still be created by appealing to the urban rich and middle classes’ sense of nostalgia and their demand for the authentic. But more importantly, the handmade can be branded and successfully marketed throughout the country and beyond as there are always buyers and users of handmade products who desire to relate to the ecology of a culture.

Syed Manzoorul Islam is a member of the
Jamini editorial board.

A handmade craft object is closely associated with its maker and its culture. But in an age of mass-produced consumer goods, handicrafts have lost their authenticity and individuality. Syed Manzoorul Islam discusses the implications of the movement that is taking crafts away from humble artisans to factories and retail outlets. Writing in 1936, when the…