Craftivism 2000: Utopia of Socially Engaged Craft?

Throughout history, if perhaps somewhat surprisingly, craft has played a significant role in radically re-imagining existing societies. The reasons why it keeps reappearing in critical political and social debates are manifold and are as different as the worldviews that inspired them. Thus, craft has been a vehicle to think about self-sufficiency, self-empowerment, communal experience and happiness in work, as well as a tool for fighting poverty and oppression. Finally, it has been a crucial element in envisioning more aesthetically pleasant and sustainable futures for all. In one way or another, from monasteries through literary utopias, intentional communities, through the nineteenth- and twentieth-century art, craft and design reforms, the 1960s rise of DIY movement up to the quite recent phenomenon of Craftivism, craft has repeatedly been one medium through which political, social, economic and cultural crises have been critiqued. Despite the variety of approaches employed, one of the common features linking all these quests together have always been their vulnerability to the charges of ΄idealism΄ and ΄utopianism΄.

There is undoubtedly a good deal of truth in a recent remark by the craft theorist and historian Glenn Adamson, who in an article glossing the craft revival in the current recession wrote: ‘when things go spectacularly, complicatedly wrong, there is a temptation to get back to basics’, and craft, in this respect, ‘seems to provide a simple solution’ (Adamson 2011). But, as Adamson points out, craft is not a simple matter. It indeed is not. And human dreams and quests for a better world are not any simpler either.

The aim of this paper is therefore to look at the complexities of the relationship between craft, social transformation and utopianism. We will look at the connections between the legacy of the English poet, designer and socialist William Morris (1834 -1896) and the ideas of the currently flourishing Craftivism movement. Differences, as well as similarities between these two approaches are in many respects instructive and, we believe, aptly illustrate several topical questions in contemporary craft discourse.