Introduction: Middle Eastern Crafts

The essays assembled here represent a selection of the papers presented at the international conference, “Middle Eastern Crafts: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow”, held at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London in October 2018.¹ This grew out of a research and collecting project, funded by one of Art Fund’s New Collecting Awards, to investigate North African contemporary craft and to develop strategies for ways in which the V&A’s world-class collection of applied arts from the broad region of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) could be brought up-to-date. There was no ready-made body of research on this field to tap into. While contemporary visual arts from the Middle East have been a burgeoning field of interest among collectors, public and private, over the last two decades, the perception of the plastic/decorative/applied arts – what we could simply call “crafts” but feel uncomfortable doing in this context – has been very different. When applied to Middle Eastern and North African geographies, as with many non-Western societies, the word “craft” equates to “folk art”. This is defined by the Folk Art Alliance as an “expression of the world’s traditional cultures; rooted in traditions that come from community and culture; made by individuals whose creative skills convey their community’s authentic cultural identity, rather than an individual or idiosyncratic artistic identity”.² The key notions here, that distinguish “art” from “craft”, are those of “tradition” and “authenticity”, issues that arise repeatedly in all the essays in this issue. The matter of authenticity and the question of who determines this dubious and contested quality is one that will not go away. The Western curatorial eye still expects, indeed demands, regional references in non-Western art and design.

The V&A project has attempted to position crafts from the Middle East (in which we encompass North Africa and Central Asia and everything in between) within a theoretical framework of “contemporary craft” that has been emerging among Western academics during recent decades, but which tends not to look outside of Europe and North America, unless it is to Japan. In the twentieth century, these regions in particular embraced the so-called studio crafts – objects made by hand in the spirit of innovation, or with knowing reflection on historic or vernacular craft, often by art school-trained makers. These are far from being the whole story, but they do affect and perhaps limit our understanding of what craft might be, and lead to too narrow a definition.

Craft in its broadest sense is an endlessly shape-shifting concept, a word with almost too many associations. Craft practice all over the world has been repositioned under colonialism, has responded to tourism, has found a context in the art and design world, has abandoned or adapted skills in response to industrialization, or has found its place within industry.

The story of modern craft in Europe, as well as in the Middle East, is invariably a story of loss, an entity that modernity appears to undercut and diminish. The cultural polymath Walter Benjamin, writing in 1936, chose to quote the poet Paul Valéry: “the time is past when time did not matter. Modern man no longer works at what cannot be abbreviated”.³ This sense of loss, of abbreviation, is a theme which emerges from several of the articles in this issue. The context of Marcus Milwright’s paper, for example, is one of perceived decline and adaptation as the Middle East became the recipient of imported goods from Europe – textiles, ceramics, glass, petrol cans. However, the fact that many crafts during this period did manage to flourish suggests that we should resist the idea of loss and focus instead on a story of adaptation, recycling, revival and persistence. Sam Bowker and Seif El Rashidi’s discussion of the cotton appliqué craft of the Egyptian Tentmakers shows how their skills continue to be reconfigured in a post-modern spirit. Through interactions with tourist desires, and with quilters globally, taking us from Matisse cut-outs to Etsy and Facebook, this is a tale of adaptation and survival.

Early twentieth-century European visual modernism often looked to countries outside Europe and its own distant past for sustenance, in the process collapsing hierarchies of art by drawing on archaic or vernacular culture, in other words, craft. Roger Fry and his acolyte Clive Bell explored Chinese Sung dynasty vases, pre-Columbian sculpture, and Persian bowls.⁴ For the Blaue Reiter painter Franz Marc, the exhibition, Meisterwerke Mohammedanischer Kunst [Masterworks of Mohammedan Art], which took place in Munich in 1910, made him want to place the work of his colleague Wassily Kandinsky beside the Islamic carpets.⁵ This essentially formalist appreciation of pre-modern decorative arts is still part of the Western gaze, and reveres such objects on a purely aesthetic visual level without considering the intellectual dimensions that led to their creation – what Margaret Graves has recently called “the intellect of the hand” in discussing the making of medieval works of Islamic art.⁶

Middle Eastern Modernist movements looked to the crafts as a strategy to enter the field of modernism on their own terms, a means by which to differentiate their Modernisms from that of the Western colonial powers whose rule they were shaking off, especially in the 1950s and 60s. Drawing on a localized vernacular was a key way in which movements like the Casablanca Group and the École de Tunis sought to define their national identity through art. The Casablanca Group collected and foregrounded folk textiles, the decoration of plaster, wood, leather and mosaics, publishing images in their own radical journal Maghreb Art in order to create their own modernism – as discussed here by Salma Lahlou and by Toni Maraini in the Primary Text section. Jessica Gerschultz highlights another instance of this by focusing on case studies of women fibre artists across the MENA region: from the gendered role of weaving in art schools and studios, to the highly experimental and innovative artistic collaborations that grew from these projects. Anni Albers was not alone at this period in developing a career in art textiles, but she is well-known because she was a European artist emerging from the Bauhaus and operating in the United States within key educational institutions. Significant parallel stories from the MENA region are almost entirely unknown – even within the region itself – because the story of non-Western Modernism is only now beginning to be told. One hope we have for this volume is that readers will encounter familiar issues which they have not placed in a non-Western context before.

Colonial sensibilities in the Maghrib were informed by such modernist and Arts & Crafts formalist values with varied outcomes. The paradox is that colonial powers imported goods that undermined local craft; meanwhile colonial art educators sought to right that wrong by imposing their concepts of the authentic through teaching programs. The Moroccan scholar Hamid Irbouh has pointed out that in French Protectorate Morocco, the encouragement of traditional craft can be read almost as a distraction for the local population, allowing the Protectorate to get on with the real business of developing large-scale mining and agriculture projects for the benefit of France.⁷ This is an extreme interpretation but there can be a dark side to an apparently philanthropic interest in craft. Similarly, Clara Ilham Álvarez Dopico here outlines two examples of pottery projects in early twentieth-century Tunisia and Algeria, led by idealists within the French colonial administrations. They ultimately failed because of the regimes' unwillingness to compromise the advance of modernity in the face of much slower, much more expensive “authentic” production.

Anxiety about loss of craft knowledge has motivated all the projects that are described in the expanded section of Statements of Practice. Craft lacks notation – it is tacit, embodied knowledge, vulnerable when all knowledge becomes externalized and recorded. The restoration architects, design consultants and artists whose statements we include here have all developed their projects because of a deeply-held sense that we need to attend to such knowledge. Khaldun Bshara observes that the building crafts in Palestine were not easy to carry into diaspora and this has contributed to their decline. The still applicable Antiquity Law, introduced by the British Mandate in 1929, which grants no protection to anything built after 1700 AD, not only sheds an unfavorable light on British Arts and Crafts values, but puts at risk what he calls the “living testimony of continuing traditions” in the Occupied Territories. Sara Ouhaddou talks of the society of Tetouan being so “wedded to tradition that they are killing their craft”. There is a concentration here of craft projects in Morocco, reflecting the huge number of active artisans in that country. As Eric van Hove states, “Craft here doesn’t need safeguarding… What is needed instead is a vision of a future where these skills find a viable market and true purpose”. This notion of “designing future heritage”, as expressed in the title of Elizabeth Wright and Simon Fraser’s piece on the Safi ceramic community, links together all these Statements, and connects with the very personal story of master woodcarver Naseer Yasna Mansouri, whose lead Statement is the only one that might be seen as representing the artisan’s voice. His journey has led him to a point where he is “no longer content with mere copying… I realized that the old masters each in their own way had added parts of themselves to their traditions. I, too, wanted to create my own work, pushing myself to generate new pieces rooted in my heritage, yet clearly of our own time. I wanted to leave my own mark, to add to the lineage”.

All these projects are in the realm of craft, making something by hand or outsourcing its making. Perhaps significantly the importance and communicative power of craft in many of these examples is being foregrounded by imaginative artists. Artists all over the world have recently turned to craft to make social and political points; they can have a shaman-like ability to make meaning out of craft and how it interacts with our lives. But this leads to the vital matter of what Australian design historian Kevin Murray has called a “symmetry of opportunity” between all parties.⁸ When an artist or a designer works with an artisan how much agency does the artisan have? How does the artisan experience the middleman, the supply chain for materials, pricing and value, when his or her existence is often unacknowledged? Are these collaborations the way to make a bridge between traditional and modern craft and culture? How market focused should they be? How can goods be made exportable while maintaining a specific cultural heritage – as with the Safi potters and their problematic lead glazes?

Craft in the Middle East is still alive and changing shape again and again. Throughout the region, often in unimaginably difficult conditions, skills survive in every craft medium in an abundance that is simply unavailable in Europe. Craft operates at the level of the decorative arts of carpet making, ceramics, jewelry, leatherwork, metalwork – that is perhaps the side of craft seen by visitors from abroad in the souks of, say, Morocco. But equally in Morocco, traveling though towns and villages where tourists are not to be found, there is a rich culture of make-do and mend involving machinery and vehicles and, probably and less visibly, new technology. A culture of hacking, recycling, adapting and fixing must also surely be seen as craft.

Craft matters; and in the Middle East craft, broadly interpreted, matters a great deal. It can confer agency, bear meaning and memory, be vulnerable, create work, be strong and adaptable, reminding us that looking at any society through the lens of craft is invariably valuable and revealing - and at times disturbing, always telling us far more than we might have expected.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tanya Harrod

Tanya Harrod is the author of the prize-winning book The Crafts in Britain in the Twentieth Century (Yale University Press, 1999) and in 2012 her book The Last Sane Man: Michael Cardew: Modern Pots, Colonialism, and the Counterculture (Yale University Press, 2012) won the James Tait Black Prize for biography. Her latest books are The Real Thing: Essays on Making in the Modern World (Hyphen Press, 2015), Leonard Rosoman (Royal Academy of Arts, 2017) and the edited volume Craft: Documents of Contemporary Art (Whitechapel Gallery, 2018). She is one of the founding editors of The Journal of Modern Craft.

Mariam Rosser-Owen

Mariam Rosser-Owen has been a curator in the Middle Eastern Section at the Victoria and Albert Museum since 2002. She specializes in the arts of the Arab World, in particular the Islamic Mediterranean, and much of her work focuses on the study of materials and techniques. She has published widely on ceramics and ivories, especially from medieval Spain. Since 2015, as a recipient of one of Art Fund’s first round of New Collecting Awards, she has been researching and collecting contemporary craft from Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt. She organized the conference “Middle Eastern Crafts: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow”, held at the V&A in October 2018. She is curating the exhibition "Contemporary Ceramic Art from the Middle East", which will show at the V&A from autumn 2020.

Notes

1 This introduction is partly based on the closing remarks presented at the conference by Tanya Harrod, entitled “Middle East Crafts: a Response”.

2 International Folk Art Market (IFAM), “What is Folk Art?,” http://www.folkartalliance.org/about/what-is-folk-art/ (accessed August 9, 2019) [authors’ italics].

3 Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller” in Illuminations (London: Fontana/Collins, 1970), 93.

4 See Roger Fry, Vision and Design (London: Chatto & Winus, 1920); Clive Bell, Art (London: Chatto & Windus, 1914).

5 Rémi Labrusse, “Islamic Arts and the Crisis of Representation” in A Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture, Finbar Barry Flood and Gülru Necipoğlu eds., volume 2 (London: Wiley, 2017), 1212.

6 Margaret S. Graves, Arts of Allusion: Object, Ornament, and Architecture in Medieval Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), especially Chapter 1.

7 Hamid Irbouh, “French Colonial Art Education in Morocco,” Ijele: Art e-Journal of the African World 2, no. 1 (2001): 1-15.

8 Kevin Murray, “Outsourcing the Hand: An Analysis of Craft-design Collaborations Across the Global Divide,” craft + design enquiry 2 (2010): 59-73.