Looking out at the world from behind a pane of glass: it’s an image that sums up many of our experiences of late, urged to stay indoors as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. Even for those who spend most of their time outside, farm, or have gardens, the window is still a powerful metaphor for the current paradigms of maintaining social distance and setting up bubbles in which to conduct our lives. We can see the outside world, yet its potentially dangerous residue, air, noise and heat are kept at bay.
Two articles in this issue focus on glass, and though both were in development long before the onset of Covid-19, both bring poignant attention to the motif of the window. In Joseph Larnerd’s study on the spectacle of cut glass in turn-of-the-century America, we are transported inside a small workstation installed in the window display of Charles Mayer & Company, a department store on Washington Street, Indianapolis. For four days in June 1910, an anonymous craftsman from the Wright Cut Glass Company worked away for all to see, an attempt to lure passersby into the store. Larnerd positions this retail stunt as just one example of a broader fascination with the spectacle of cut glass in the United States between the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876 and World War I.
Larnerd takes us right beside this glass cutter, inhabiting the claustrophobic space of his workstation. A small, grainy diagram from a Charles Mayer & Company advertisement that promoted the spectacle acts as a springboard to imagine the conditions of the laboring class of the glass factory. It’s an innovative approach to historical writing; Larnerd combines speculations on what it might have been like for the craftsman in the window with erudite historical research and a theoretical juxtaposition of working bodies with the phantasmagoric properties of cut glass.
The magic of glass is also centre stage in the Czech film Inspirace (1949), which Rebecca Bell introduces in the beginning of her article on glass figurines in Soviet Czechoslovakia. In the opening scene we are again at a glass window, where a worker looks out of a rainy window beyond his gas-fired blast lamp, and sees a raindrop transform into an enchanting, effervescent scene of moving glass figurines. This begins a mesmerising stop-motion animation made by Karel Zeman that features glass figurines made by Jaroslav Brychta, one of the glassmakers central to Bell’s analysis. Each shot, incredibly, required a glassworker to reheat the figurine to a new position. The film is dedicated to the large network of Bohemian artisans, like the man at the window who returns to his lamp work at the film’s conclusion.
This cottage industry continued the region’s preeminent craft tradition under the new conditions of socialist modernity. Glass figurines, as explored by Bell, reveal the full complexity of that relationship. The article draws a number of compelling links between post-war figurine production and the inter-war development of a specifically Czech approach to glass, influenced by the late-nineteenth sentiment of national renewal. This trajectory was heralded by the founding of the Železný Brod Glass School in 1919, once Czechoslovakia secured independence of the Habsburg Empire; it ran classes in Czech, not German. Under socialist auspices of production, glass figurines cultivated vernacular, or popular “folk” elements - lidovost - while depicting new socialist subjects: a rural worker with sickle in hand, or athletic gymnasts. Bell’s account of the figurines counters their presumed frivolity and associations with kitsch, and foregrounds such objects in a discussion of socialist material culture.
Our third article in this issue argues for a “restoration” of George Sturt’s 1923 book The Wheelwright’s Shop as we approach its centennial. Paddy Bullard provides a comprehensive assessment of the book’s changing fortunes throughout the twentieth century, noting its initial popularity in the 1930s and then its fall from fashion from the 1970s on account of its presumed sentimental relationship to the past. In 1884, Sturt - then a teacher at a grammar school - took over the management of his father’s wheelwright’s shop in rural Surrey. This put him in charge of a number of craftspeople, inheritors of a vernacular tradition of making wheels for horse-drawn carts with knowledge locked in their hands.
Bullard teases out the key attributes of the book: it was part-technical exposition, part-lament for skills that might be lost in an ever-industrialising society. Although Sturt ran the wheelwrights’ shop, his book-based education meant that the gap between his own quite genuine appreciation of wheelwrighting and the actual practice of it was never truly surmounted. Bullard shows how the text conveys this unease, despite the incredible detail of Sturt’s prose and his close investigation of the contexts of communal making in which tacit knowledge flourishes. With references to Sturt’s other writing, theory that is cognizant of craft’s inability to be satisfactorily committed to text, and the book’s critical reception, Bullard provides a thorough reassessment of this important text.
This issue’s Statement of Practice transports us to a workshop of a completely different kind. Tom Cubbin interviews Skeeter, the owner of Mr. S Leather in San Francisco, a retail store and mail order company that makes and sells products for gay leather and fetish scenes. A craft practice inconceivable in Sturt’s time, Skeeter’s workshop employs a number of skilled craftpeople working in leather, latex and neoprene. Due to the niche nature of fetish cultures, Mr. S Leather’s products are largely made by hand. The interview covers how Skeeter came to make fetish ware, the problem-solving that is integral to the job and the particular demands exerted by the materials that she works in, from the unyielding properties of leather to spongey neoprene.
What would Ralph Waldo Emerson have made of the world of Mr. S? For this issue’s Primary Text – our earliest yet – we reach back all the way to 1837, when the American Transcendentalist wrote his essay “The Doctrine of the Hands.” Strangely little known in contemporary craft circles, it feels amazingly relevant today for its refusal of instrumental economy (forced to Emerson’s attention by the industrial revolution) and its insistence that making is its own, entirely valid, form of thinking. Strikingly for a man of letters, Emerson goes so far as to compare skilled labor favorably with intellectual pursuits, for “Our manual activity has this advantage over the liberal employments, that the thing must be done.” In this and many other respects, “The Doctrine of the Hands” anticipates another, much more famous Transcendentalist text, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854). Did Emerson, in further proclaiming that “Every man’s art should make him happy,” also foreshadow William Morris’s “joy in labor”? The diverting fantasies conjured by Karel Zeman and Jaroslav Brychta? The sense of deep satisfaction that Skeeter derives from her involvement in the world of sadomasochism? Such are the adjacencies of The Journal of Modern Craft.
Journal Editors