In the eighteenth century, European philosophers began a serious examination of the nature and purposes of art as well as the role of the artist and the significance of artistic production. Art became an important site for considering the intersection of human intellectual powers and material form, and the means of its creation began to receive attention as a highly meaningful endeavor. Kant and Hegel gave art a prominent place and purpose in human activity, creating a foundation for thinkers such as Marx and Ruskin who developed more detailed accounts of the nature of the artist’s labor and its role in society. With the growth of industrialization and the accompanying social upheavals the nature of work became a pressing issue, and the artist’s work served as a conceptual model for fulfilling labor that was taken up by the Arts and Crafts movement. The notion of art as fulfilling labor not only affected analyses of work, it also became a central concern for discussions of leisure and therapeutic activities that would ameliorate the deleterious effects of modern life. Art making became a widespread activity in the nineteenth century as more and more people had the leisure time to devote to amateur arts and crafts. This expanding public engagement with the processes of artistic creation set the stage for the increased importance of process in modern art.
In his enormously influential Critique of Judgment Immanuel Kant established what distinguished artistic production from other forms of production. Kant relied on earlier notions, but his contention that the experience of beauty was a means to discover the powers of the human mind had the effect of providing the fine arts (and, by extension, artists) with a claim to a more exalted role in human knowledge and experience than they had been traditionally granted. Following the Aristotelian tradition Kant addressed the relation of theory to material craft, and he distinguished art from science on the grounds that art requires material skills developed through practice in addition to theoretical knowledge.1 He also distinguished art from craft on the grounds that art is “agreeable on its own account” and thereby a free activity of the spirit, while crafts are “mercenary”—a description reminiscent of the Greek view that craftsmen were not free because their labor was directed to satisfying the requirements of others. Kant described craft as disagreeable labor, made attractive only because it results in payment. Fine art, however, cannot be remunerated according to any determinate standard, a distinction that seems to derive from Renaissance developments when successful artists were paid for their experience rather than the time involved in producing a work.
Unlike craft, fine art is mentally stimulating in itself without reference to any other purpose (I:44). Kant was quick to limit any extreme interpretation of art’s freedom, though, and insisted on the necessity of constraints for the successful embodiment of artistic spirit. Because art is the product of thought rather than chance, it requires a mechanical component that can be encompassed by rules. Genius provides material for fine art, but it must be processed and given form by academically trained talent (I:46–47). In keeping with tradition, Kant outlined a balance between the artist’s free activity, which allows for the original creations of genius, and necessary rules and constraints. The mechanical component of art is learned, but art should nevertheless appear natural and give no evidence of painstaking adherence to rules (I:45). The education of the artist requires a complex negotiation that develops the artist’s natural abilities and mechanical skills, and Kant implicitly described the artist’s successful process as achieving a balance between established rules and freedom. This process must be taught by demonstration and example rather than rule:
So in fine art there is only manner (modus), not method (methodus): the master must show by his example what the student is to produce, and how. He may in the end bring his procedure under universal rules, but these are more likely to be useful to the student as occasional reminders of what the main feature of that procedure are, than as prescriptions. . . . The master must stimulate the student’s imagination until it becomes commensurate with a given concept; he must inform the student if the latter has not adequately expressed the idea, the idea that even the concept cannot reach because the idea is aesthetic; and he must provide the student with sharp criticism. For only in this way can the master keep the student from immediately treating the examples offered him as if they were archetypes, models that he should imitate as if they were not subject to a still higher standard and to his own judgment, [an attitude] which would stifle his genius, and along with it would stifle also the freedom that his imagination has even in its lawfulness, the freedom without which there can be no fine art. (I:60)
The dangers of overly explicit teaching must be avoided, but so also must the opposite, a laxity in educational direction. Kant criticized “some of the more recent educators [who] believe that they promote a free art best if they remove all constraint from it and convert it from labor into mere play” (I:43). For Kant such freedom turns art into the production of chance rather than the stimulating exercise of mental powers.
Kant’s discussion of the artist’s education and the artistic process remain relevant. As we shall see, many contemporary artists and systems of artist education have developed artistic processes devoted to the exploration of chance as a producer of artworks. While some of these, such as Allan Kaprow’s early Happenings, seem at least on the surface to be “mere play” in Kant’s terms, others are not devoid of rules and constraints. Artists such as Sol LeWitt explore chance processes within carefully defined limits that resemble the parameters of scientific experiments. The works these processes create are not intended to be aesthetically beautiful, which is what Kant considered the most mentally stimulating aspect of fine arts. They do, however, stimulate and exercise the mind by demonstrating the complex tensions between rule and freedom involved in the artist’s process as described by the philosopher. Thus, although beauty is no longer the primary goal and definition of successful art, Kant’s brief description of the artist’s process delineates concerns central to contemporary artists’ self-conscious investigations of their own processes of creative production.
Like Kant and most writers on aesthetics, G. W. F. Hegel devotes relatively little attention to the artistic process. His efforts are primarily engaged with the relation of art to the historical development of the human spirit conceived as the embodiment of Absolute Spirit coming to its ultimate self-understanding. Nevertheless, because Hegel considers the fine arts to be a significant moment in this teleological process, he does provide some description of the artist’s labor. Following his predecessors, Hegel distinguishes between art and mechanical production according to rules and specifications.2 Also echoing earlier theorists, he is quick to assert that while art requires freedom from rules in order to allow for the inspirations of genius, it also requires talent and development “by thought, reflection on the mode of its productivity, and practice and skill in producing” (27). What is interesting regarding the artist’s activity as described by Hegel is his notion that the artist’s labor is a means of objectifying thought and feeling, a belief that derives from his overall conception of art as the materialization of spirit. This idea will become fundamental to conceptions of the modern artist’s process as an activity of self-expressive production.
In Hegel’s view the need for art is a universal human constant, and it derives from human self-consciousness. Human beings have a basic need to alter the external world by making marks on it; it is “man’s rational need to lift the inner and outer world into his spiritual consciousness as an object in which he recognizes again his own self” (31). Hegel’s example of this fundamental human need is a child who throws rocks into a pond to enjoy the resulting circular ripples. In altering material reality, human beings find both self-knowledge and a means of communication with others. Another satisfaction that Hegel attributes to the self-objectifying process of making art is a potential therapeutic effect: “It may often be the case with an artist that, overtaken by grief, he mitigates and weakens for himself the intensity of his own feeling by representing it in art. Tears, even, provide some comfort. . . . But still more of an alleviation is the expression of one’s inner state in words, pictures, sounds, and shapes” (49). In connecting the artist’s creative process to the externalization of personal emotion, Hegel articulated a cornerstone of Romantic art theory and provided a foundation for modern expressionism.
Hegel evaluates the artist’s emotional expression and its relation to inspiration with care. First, he notes that inspiration does not arise on demand; it requires specific promptings, which may (or may not) be the artist’s own feelings. According to Hegel, “Inspiration is the state of the artist in his active process of forming both his subjective inner conception and his objective execution of the work of art, because for this double activity inspiration is necessary” (287). Having determined that an inner drive fuels the artist’s inspiration, Hegel then considers it in relation to external motivations. He notes that artists have created great works whose subjects were commissioned and that artists often complain of lacking subjects as the basis on which to create. For Hegel, the artist’s inspiration is not completely self-generated, an act of pure self-expression. Inspiration is “being completely filled with the theme, being entirely present in the theme, and not resting until the theme has been stamped and polished into artistic shape.” The artist must “forget his own personality and its accidental particular characteristics and immerse himself . . . entirely in his material . . . [to become] the living activation of the theme” (288). The artist’s activity is thus a combination of self and external reality in which the artist’s subject is first internalized and then expressed (pressed out) in the shaping of artistic form—material marked by the artist’s activity. Whereas Kant conceived the successful artist’s process as achieving a balance between rule and freedom that would allow for the creation of beauty, Hegel provided a broader conception of the artist’s process as manifesting an integral relationship between mind and physical matter. Furthermore, in describing the artist’s need to immerse himself in his subject to the point of self-forgetfulness, as well as the therapeutic aspects of artistic production, Hegel articulated psychological aspects of the artist’s process that would become central themes for modern artists and theorists.
The significant role that Hegel (and other Romantic philosophers, theorists, and artists) ascribed to art in the history of human endeavor set the stage for a reconsideration of the artist’s role and its social and intellectual importance. Previously, the fine arts had largely been valued as a social commodity. They conveyed cultural distinction, provided luxury and enjoyment for the educated upper classes, served as a means to display wealth, power, and intellectual refinement, and purveyed knowledge and propaganda. As philosophers and theorists began to situate art as a central achievement of humankind, something that approached the importance of religion and philosophy, art and the processes of its making became a matter of widespread interest and importance. Hegel describes the artist as one who “acquires his subject matter in himself and is the human spirit actually self-determining and considering, meditating, and expressing the infinity of its feelings and situations: nothing that can be living in the human breast is alien to that spirit” (607). The artist has moved from being a provider of beauties and luxuries to being the representative of humanity, and the artist’s process has become the means for human (and thereby, according to Hegel, the Absolute’s) self-knowledge.
The philosophical elevation of the fine arts, and by extension the artist, that began in the eighteenth century was accompanied by a reconsideration of the artisan and his labors. An early indication of a new tendency to exalt the manual labor of the artisan appears in Rousseau’s Emile, where he declares the craftsman to have the best of all possible ways of life. It allows for the expression of what Rousseau saw as a natural human need for creative work, and it also answers fundamental requirements in producing necessary objects for practical use. Furthermore, Rousseau emphasized the independence of the craftsman and saw his labor as like the independent labor of nature. Rousseau promoted forms of labor in which physical work is balanced with mental/creative work, and opposed the free labor of the craftsman to the monotony of certain trades, which foster stupidity through their repetitious drudgery.3
Rousseau’s ideal of a balance between mental and physical work is an instance of what will become an enduring theme in discussions of industrial labor and the problems that arise with the increasingly narrow specialization of work. Concern for the mechanical fragmentation of modern society and individuals is a central issue in the late eighteenth-century writings of Friedrich Schiller. He described modern society, as it had developed after losing the wholeness and equilibrium characteristic of ancient Greece, as “an ingenious piece of machinery, in which out of the botching together of a vast number of lifeless parts a collective mechanical life results. . . . Enjoyment was separated from labor, means from ends, effort from rewards. Eternally chained to only one single little fragment of the whole, Man himself grew to be only a fragment; with the monotonous noise of the wheel he drives everlastingly in his ears, he never develops the harmony of his being, and instead of imprinting humanity upon his nature he becomes merely the imprint of his occupation, of his science.”4 Schiller proposed aesthetic education as the means to restore harmony and wholeness to modern society and its individual members.5 His discussion was primarily abstract and philosophical rather than practical, but Schiller’s vision of a fragmented and mechanized modern society became commonplace, and throughout the nineteenth century social theorists (and later psychologists) attempted to diagnose and find cures for its ills. These cures often included not only passive experience of the arts and artist-designed environments, but also direct engagement with artistic processes as a means to restore wholeness to individuals.
In his early writings Karl Marx, the most influential of the nineteenth-century social theorists, saw the artist’s work as exemplary of free labor in contrast to the labor of the factory worker under industrial capitalism. In his 1844 text Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts Marx described the condition of the modern wage earner as alienated from both his labor and the products of his labor: “He works in order to live. He does not even reckon labor as part of his life, it is rather a sacrifice of his life.”6 The products of the worker’s labor do not belong to him but to the owner of the factory in which he works, thus: “Labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his essential being; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself . . . does not develop freely his physical and mental energy. . . . His labor is not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. . . . The worker’s activity is not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self.”7 In contrast to the alienated worker, Marx conceived a non-alienated form of work comparable to traditional artisanal production in which the worker is in control of the means and products of his labor. He claimed that in a society that had abolished private property and established correct relations between work and product, “our productions would be so many mirrors reflecting our nature . . . a free manifestation of life and enjoyment of life.”8 Such an integral and personal relation between producer and product is the hallmark of much modern artistic production, and Marx compared the post-revolution worker to a composer whose activity is truly free. Once material needs are satisfied work becomes life’s primary desire; it is the action that develops human potential.9
Marx’s early notion of ideal work suggests that the modern self-expressive artist would be a strong example of unalienated labor, however. Margaret Rose has shown that Marx decried individualistic notions of artistic talent and genius as limiting. He also critiqued the narrow specialization of artists by medium, which he linked to the pernicious division of labor within society as a whole. In the future communist society, Marx believed, individuals would not be limited to narrow areas of specialization or excluded from the possibility of realizing the full range of their particular artistic talents.10 Marx was interested in successful contemporary artists like Horace Vernet who had large workshops with assistants, which demonstrated the virtues of cooperative labor. In rejecting the notion of “priest-like artists,” Rose claims, Marx “above all brought attention back from the art object to the process of its production and opened the way for the elimination of the theoretical division between art and technological labor,” which was enshrined in the tradition of German aesthetic theory dominated by Kant, Hegel, and Schiller.11
Marx’s views provide useful terms with which to evaluate modern and contemporary artists’ processes. The modern artist is commonly considered a self-motivated worker whose labor is self-affirming and spontaneous; the artist thus represents a successful alternative to the alienated workers employed under industrial capitalism described by Marx. This has been, and remains, a widely held view of the exceptional freedom and integration of the modern artist’s life and labor. Marx, however, recognized difficulties associated with this view that have become increasingly central to artists and theorists engaged in the critical examination of the artist’s labor. Most modern artists are associated with the production of a particular type of commodity in an individual style that is presumed to be the artist’s natural expression. Market forces as embodied by art dealers and galleries often pressure successful artists to continue to work in their established style in order to remain commercially viable. This, as Marx recognized, can be extremely limiting for the artist and results in an artistic labor process little different from that of the alienated factory worker. In recent decades many artists have successfully rejected the limiting notions of individual style to work in a broad spectrum of styles and media. Moreover, artists like Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons developed large workshops with many assistants to work under their direction in a manner comparable to the production processes of Horace Vernet. This raises even more complex issues regarding the nature of the artist’s work process, which will be discussed in chapter 9.
One aspect of Marx’s thinking has particular relevance for the traditional division and hierarchy of the arts based on the degree of conceptualization presumed appropriate to them: “Division of labor only becomes truly such from the moment when a division of material and mental labor appears. . . . From now on consciousness is in a position to emancipate itself from the work and to proceed to the formation of ‘pure’ theory, theology, philosophy, ethics, etc.”12 An elimination of the division between mental and material labor in the arts would implicitly eliminate hierarchical distinctions between the arts and between different practitioners within the arts. Thought and action would be inextricably bound up with one another, creating a holistic form of productive/creative activity.
Marx’s thinking indicates what becomes a central theme of modern artistic thought, the artificiality of separating the artist’s work into conceptual and practical arenas. This theme is by no means clearly dominant in discussions about the nature of the visual arts, but it is a major trend from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Indeed, it is intriguing to consider that many artists use conceptual strategies to engage in Marxist social/cultural critiques (e.g., Victor Burgin), thereby implicitly maintaining a sharp distinction between theory and practice in their actual work, although not in their conception of the work’s engaged social positioning (as praxis). In contrast, artists who are not explicitly politically engaged in their work and who reject attempts to theorize their activity from outside the actual creative process—that is, artists who are often criticized for their narrowly aesthetic concerns by their more politically engaged peers—are more closely engaged in fulfilling the holistic requirements Marx saw as the necessary condition for free productive labor.
Work was often described as a blessing in the nineteenth century, a trope that Alasdair Clayre has suggested may reflect the extent to which mechanization created a formless existence for the new wealthy upper classes. Work offered social acceptance, identity, and routine, all of which served as a replacement for the rituals and ceremonies that once structured time for the ruling classes.13 Marx believed the centrality of work in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit was its greatest insight: “Hegel grasps the self-production of man as a process, as objectification and supersession of this alienation; . . . he thus grasps the nature of work and comprehends objective man.”14 Identity is created through human labor, the interaction of self with the material and social world; thus, the form of labor becomes a matter of extreme importance. It is this concern with the situation of labor and its practical and philosophical implications that lies at the root of what is arguably the most influential discourse addressing the importance of process in the creation of art, that formulated in the context of the Arts and Crafts movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
John Ruskin, the primary influence on the Arts and Crafts ideology, believed that labor was noble and the source of the greatest human happiness. Art and craftsmanship were in turn the most valuable forms of work because of their beneficial effects on the worker. Like Marx, Ruskin believed that the most beneficial labor must unite the mental and the physical, the manual and the intellectual. He denounced the
fatal error of despising manual labor when governed by intellect; for it is no less fatal an error to despise it when thus regulated by intellect, than to value it for its own sake. We are always in these days endeavoring to separate the two; we want one man to be always thinking, and another to be always working, and we call one a gentleman, and the other an operative; whereas the workman ought often to be thinking, and the thinker often to be working. . . . It is only by labor that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labor can be made happy. . . . It would be well if all of us were good handicraftsmen in some kind, and the dishonor of manual labor done away with altogether. . . . In each several profession, no master should be too proud to do its hardest work. The painter should grind his own colors; the architect work in the mason’s yard with his men.15
In The Stones of Venice Ruskin deplored the exaltation of mindless perfection in modern architectural ornament and compared modern tastes to those of the Renaissance and classical Greece, when artists and artisans were slaves and held to inhuman standards of perfection: “Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions” (161). In those cultures, according to Ruskin, artisans were mere hands, physical laborers who made no thoughtful contributions to the building as a whole.
Ruskin believed every manual laborer has intellectual and emotional potential that must be developed, even at the expense of perfection. Any workman can be trained to manual precision, “but if you ask him to think about any of those forms, to consider if he cannot find any better in his own head, he stops, his execution becomes hesitating; he thinks, and ten to one he thinks wrong; ten to one he makes a mistake in the first touch he gives to his work as a thinking being. But you have made a man of him for all that. He was only a machine before, an animated tool” (161). Ruskin advocated the embrace of the human imperfections he saw in Gothic craftsmanship, which for all its “fantastic ignorance” gave “signs of the life and liberty of every workman who struck the stone; a freedom of thought, and rank in the scale of being” (163). Furthermore, he believed that the social upheavals of his day happened not because of material deprivation, but rather because workers took no pleasure in their labor and hoped greater wealth would make them happy.16
Ruskin saw the division of labor in modern industrial manufacturing as a primary contributor to the debasement of contemporary workers, who are “divided into mere segments of men . . . so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin, or the head of a nail” (165). His solution was to demand only products that were the result of “healthy and ennobling labor,” and he formulated three rules to that end: abolish the manufacture of unnecessary objects that do not require invention; abolish unnecessary finish; and allow no imitation except as a record of noble work. As examples of these ideas he proposed the elimination of mindless glass bead making, which gives workers palsy, and the promotion of glass vessel making, which offers liberal opportunity for invention. Similarly, he advocated the mentally stimulating crafts of the goldsmith and enamel worker and condemned the unimaginative cutting of gemstones.
Ruskin insisted on the need for the artist’s intellectual engagement (invention) in order to rise above the mere employment of mechanical craft skills; this position is one of the pillars of the Western aesthetic tradition. What is remarkable about his ideas is the degree to which he extended this position to all crafts. Aesthetic notions are not in his view merely applicable to the evaluation of the work of fine artists but should be applied to all human-made products. Thus the viewer is adjured to become aware of the craft object as created not by human hands, but rather by a human mind: “Always look for invention first, and after that, for such execution as will help the invention, and as the inventor is capable of without painful effort, and no more. Above all, demand no refinement of execution where there is no thought, for that is slaves’ work, unredeemed. Rather choose rough work than smooth work, so only the practical purpose be answered, and never imagine that there is reason to be proud of something that may be accomplished by patience and sandpaper” (167).
Ruskin’s values are imbued with morality. Not only must intellectual and manual labor contribute in equal balance to the well-made product as indicated by the object’s final form, but the product must also demonstrate that no unnecessary labor has been added. Excessive finish is a meaningless superficiality, one that appeals to trivial desires for decorative appeal. His condemnation of glass bead making and gem cutting as mindless labor also indicates a condemnation of mere showy adornment. The beautiful object presented for the display of its fine color and texture is a material embodiment of vanity, where surface beauty is taken to be more satisfying than beauty created by intelligent craft. Human labor guided by intelligence is the true value, and it is Ruskin’s intention to define the terms by which it may be determined. In this he makes the unlikely assertion that finely finished work is always achieved at the expense of properly intellectual craft: “You cannot have the finish and the varied form too. If the workman is thinking about his edges, he cannot be thinking about his design; if of his design, he cannot think of his edges. Choose whether you will pay for the lovely form or the perfect finish, and choose at the same moment whether you will make the worker a man or a grindstone” (168).
The extremity of Ruskin’s contention that form and finish are at odds in craft production indicates the limits of his understanding of craftsmanship. In his eagerness to exalt the intellect’s role in handcraft production he failed to account for the extent of the worker’s physical engagement with his materials. Instead, he looked for physical signs of intellectual engagement. What precisely in a finished work shows that the work is the product of a human mind and not mechanical labor? For Ruskin the primary signs of mental involvement in production were imperfections in the final product. Lack of finish indicated to him a mind absorbed by the most elevated aspect of making, which is invention, and impatient of the mindless tedium of perfect finish. The craft product has indeed taken a step up in the hierarchy of the arts to become an intellectual product. (This is in keeping with a seemingly opposed trend, the widespread institutionalization of technical training, in which drawing, the intellectual basis of the fine arts, became the basis of craft instruction.) For a thinker who exalted manual labor and believed that even hard labor should be shared by all, Ruskin was extremely quick to condemn unintellectual labor, even when it might contribute to the beauty of an object. The result is to see in surface beauty a tangible sign of social inequity and a brutalization of human labor.
Ruskin’s views on the relation between a craft product and the process of its production are often somewhat obscure. He insisted that the designer and fabricator of a craft object should be the same person because “one man’s thoughts can never be expressed by another, and the difference between the spirit of touch of the man who is inventing, and of the man who is obeying directions, is often all the difference between a great and a common work of art” (168–69). What specifically indicates this inventive “spirit of touch” is left undetermined, though it appears the answer may be signs of ineptitude. Ruskin stressed that no good work of art can be perfect and that to expect perfection is to misunderstand the ends of art: “No great man ever stops working till he has reached his point of failure; that is to say, his mind is always far in advance of his powers of execution . . . and according to his greatness he becomes so accustomed to the feeling of dissatisfaction with the best he can do” (170–71). Only Leonardo strove for perfection, and Ruskin claimed that the vanity of this effort can be seen in his inability to finish anything. The second reason for valuing artistic imperfection Ruskin enumerates is that it is “the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state of progress and change” (171).
It appears that Ruskin’s admiration for anonymous Gothic craftspeople was largely the result of what he perceived as the ineptitudes and inconsistencies of their products. These were for him signs of their free and intellectually creative labor, and he conceived the gifted creative artist, whether craftsman or fine artist, as often having a personality lacking “accurate and methodical habits” (173). For Ruskin, what is most significant is to delineate how the artist is distinct from the mindless manual worker; thus he stresses the organic qualities of the artist and the degree to which artistic labor and products are not rigidly mechanical, predictable, or governed by rules. In Ruskin’s view, the Gothic spirit was fundamentally creative, and Gothic artisans were “capable of perpetual novelty” rather than being bound by established principles and forms. Unrestricted capacity for invention, dedication to the realization of an idea in material form—even when the material or techniques are inadequate to its expression—freedom from rules and restrictions, these are all qualities attributed to the greatest fine artists during the Renaissance and after, particularly during the Romantic period. Thus, despite his stated disdain for the Renaissance, Ruskin’s views as expressed in his widely influential Stones of Venice are less a critique of Renaissance notions of the artist than an expansion of them to a broader spectrum of art makers accompanied by an amplification of the traits associated with inspiration.
William Morris adopted many of Ruskin’s ideas as articulated in Stones of Venice, which he declared “the truest and most eloquent” statement on the pleasure in work,17 and he dedicated himself to reinstating them in the modern world. His primary efforts were directed toward the revival of handcrafts, which he saw as the solution to the debasement of modern mechanized labor. The craftsman who takes joy in his labor forms the foundation of Morris’s vision of a society most suited to fulfilling the fundamental needs of humanity. He promoted a society of artists and those sensitive to the arts, and he believed that such a society had existed before the conception of the artist had come to be separated from that of the craftsman: “Time was when the mystery and wonder of handicrafts were well acknowledged by the world, when imagination and fancy mingled with all things made by man, and in those days all handicraftsmen were artists, as we should now call them. . . . The artist came out from the handicraftsmen and left them without hope of elevation, while he himself was left without the help of intelligent, industrious sympathy. Both have suffered; the artist no less than the workman.”18 In Morris’s view the intellectualization of the artist divorced him from the craftsman and left the craftsman to become a mere manual laborer. Furthermore, the modern artist has become alienated from all but the most educated level of society, and the aesthetic needs of the populace remain unfulfilled. The reunification of mind and physical labor in a revived craft industry, which created beautiful items for practical use, would be the means to heal modern society of its many ills.
Given his direct personal engagement with craftwork, it is not unreasonable to expect that Morris’s notions of the craftsperson’s working process would be more concrete than Ruskin’s vague and often impractical pronouncements, and to a degree this is the case. Morris, for example, does not equate the craftsperson’s artistry with the inconsistencies and roughness that Ruskin saw as indications of the artisan’s intellectual engagement with his material. Morris offered explicit advice to aspiring craftspeople:
Be careful to eschew all vagueness. It is better to be caught out going wrong when you have had a definite purpose, than to shuffle and slur so that people can’t blame you because they don’t know what you’re at. Hold fast to distinct form in art. . . . Always think your design out in your head before you begin to get it on paper. . . . You must see it before you can draw it, whether the design be of your own invention or Nature’s. Remember always, form before color, and outline, silhouette, before modeling. . . . Furthermore, those of you especially who are designing for goods, try to get the most out of your material, but always in such a way as honors it most.19
This advice is traditional in its stress on beauty, art’s origin in the mind, and form and drawing as the foundation of art. Less traditional is the adjuration to honor the material, which was the result of Morris’s deep concern to counteract the indifference to materials that was a widespread phenomenon in nineteenth-century machine-made decorative arts.
It is customary to contrast Arts and Crafts’ ideals with the practices and processes of industrial production—most notably the lack of proper attention to style and medium in machine-made furnishings and the separation of the designer from the practical labor of the factory worker—but it is also interesting to consider them in relation to the traditional practices of artists’ studios. Ruskin’s rejection of fine finish as an index of mindless labor stands in marked contrast to well-established studio practices. Studio assistants often performed many of the earlier stages in the creation of an artwork (the underpainting or initial carving of the block) according to the master artist’s designs and instructions. It was the later stages that showed the master’s hand, and even the final stage, that of polishing a marble sculpture, for example, was often accomplished under the master’s close direction at least, given the need to determine degrees of finish for different areas of the work. In elevating what he considered the lack of overrefinement of Gothic sculpture to the status of an index of the artist’s uncorrupted idea, Ruskin romanticized the medieval sculptor and ignored the reality of medieval (and later) studio production, in which divided labor played a significant role.
The relation of Morris’s views to traditional notions and practices is also interesting. Given that Morris’s primary intention was to establish (in his view, reestablish) a world in which labor was a joy to the laborer by placing artistry at the heart of the production process, it is not surprising that he emphasized the artistic nature of the laborer. In his celebrated biography E. P. Thompson claims that Morris sought out apprentices without special gifts and took it for granted that any intelligent boy had the makings of an artist and craftsman,20 but Morris’s writings indicate a different, more traditional attitude: “Inborn knowledge has shown [the path] to you; if it is otherwise with you than this, no system and no teachers will help you produce art of any kind, be it never so humble. Those of you who are real artists know well enough all the special advice I can give you, and in how few words it may be said—follow nature, study antiquity, make your own art and do not steal it, grudge no expense of trouble, patience or courage, in the striving to accomplish the hard thing you have set yourselves to do.”21 Inborn talent, the study of nature and antiquity, hard work, integrity—these are all definitions of the artist and his training derived from Renaissance texts. Thus Morris’s ideas are important not for their originality regarding the artist’s identity or labor, but for extending the notion of the artist into areas that had been largely ignored by art academies. In his efforts to elevate the craftsman’s status to that of the fine artist Morris’s ideas are perhaps somewhat more traditional than their widespread effects. By advocating the renewal of joy in the labor of craft production through the institution of greater creative freedom for the worker, which in turn would create more beautiful objects for daily use that would elevate the quality of life for society as a whole, Morris set the stage for a far more democratic understanding of creative production. If the laborer or craftsman could exercise his native creative talents through labor and thus achieve joy, why should this option not be available to all?
Alasdair Clayre has pointed out many fallacious presumptions in the theories and attitudes toward work espoused in the writings of Marx, Ruskin, and Morris. Most significantly, there is no indication of the supposed joy in labor of the craftsman that plays such a key role in Morris’s ideas. There are no records of the medieval craftsman’s feelings about his work,22 and it is not until the development of the special concept of the artist in the Renaissance that concern about mental attitudes toward artistic labor becomes apparent in surviving texts. Clayre posits that nineteenth-century theorists, middle-class writers, and intellectuals who derived pleasure from their own work projected similar expectations of pleasure on an industrial working class that had none. In 1898 Vida Scudder noted that “it was the middle-class intellectual—not the wage worker—who demanded ‘joy in labor.’”23 As intellectuals found pleasure and relaxation in certain forms of manual labor, notably occasional agricultural or craft work, they may have assumed that the manual laborer desired a corresponding mitigation of physical work by intellectual occupation. This notion has an interesting parallel in the (somewhat incongruous) stress on the intellectual labor of the craftsman by Ruskin and Morris. Morris’s emphasis on drawing and the preexistence of a mental concept for a work’s final form, for example, is clearly derived from academic instruction and theory. Thus, while Morris’s craft revival and its attendant insistence on truth to materials had an incalculable influence on the development of critical and theoretical attention to medium and technique as central concerns in modern art, his own basic aesthetic concepts were far from revolutionary.
Despite Morris’s essentially conservative conception of the fundamental components of artistic production and the nature of the artist, the Arts and Crafts movement had a profound effect on the concept of the artist’s process and its significance. This effect worked in two important ways. The first is the emphasis on the process of artistic production, developed by Ruskin and Morris in response to what they perceived as the evils of industrial processes and their unsatisfactory products. What had once been considered a matter of little consequence beyond the artist’s or craftsman’s studio was elevated to a level of great importance. The value of an aesthetic object depended on the means of its production, and not merely on its final form. In the context of the Arts and Crafts movement this belief was more often a rhetorical posture than a means to develop a notably new understanding of art, as this comment by Lewis Day makes evident: “There is infinitely more to be learned from the study of ancient processes than from the worship of antique forms. . . . Our respect for the consummate art, the admirable tact, the masterly treatment of material, that we find in the best old work, can but increase with closer familiarity. . . . [It] is not only worthy of study, but capable of impregnating our work with no little of its own reality and manliness.”24 Given that artists since the Renaissance had made it a primary goal to rediscover and master the processes of ancient art, there is no real weight to Day’s implication that earlier artists had merely indulged in superficial “worship” of antique forms.25 Nevertheless, ameliorating the public’s ignorant evaluation of art was a major concern for those involved with the Arts and Crafts movement. Industrial production might fool the uninstructed public into admiration of its mindless products by superficial qualities such as elaborate forms or highly finished surfaces, but the knowledgeable viewer could evaluate a product more correctly and read the signs that indicated an artist’s engagement in a truly creative process. Increasingly, such signs became the hallmarks of meaningful art making.
The second effect of the Arts and Crafts movement was the expansion of art making to society at large as the means to full self-development and, as a corollary, a cure for anxieties and ill health.26 The process of making art thus became a general concern rather than one limited to a group of professionals. The audience for art was increasingly engaged with the production of art, not merely as an idea, but in terms of individual practice. This in turn might be said to increase the number of artistically knowledgeable viewers able to discern and appreciate the signs of a developed creative process evident in an artwork. Whether this was in fact the case is unclear; it is more certain that it helped to create a large number of amateur artists, craftspeople, and hobbyists who formed a sort of shadow art world that persists to this day.27
In addition to promoting artistic production throughout society as a means to achieve well-being, health, and happiness, the Arts and Crafts movement may be credited with promoting an expanded understanding of the meaning of art. Thus those who felt themselves unable to make art are still able to engage in meaningful artistic activity. In an 1897 essay titled “Of Art and Life” T. J. Cobden-Sanderson wrote, “It is as far as may be, to do each thing, however small, however great, it is to do each right thing well, in the spirit of an artist, in the spirit of the whole. Art . . . is primarily . . . doing a right thing well . . . and its immediate future is to apply this idea of itself to the whole of life.”28 Eight years later Cobden-Sanderson reiterated this position in an essay on the Arts and Crafts movement, in which he described art “as the supreme mode in which human activity of all kinds expresses itself at its highest and best.” He outlined several alternative ways to define the Arts and Crafts movement, including “insistence on the worth of man’s hand, a unique tool in danger of being lost . . . , or of emotional as distinguished from merely skilled or technical labor . . . [or as] a movement to bring all the activities of the human spirit under the influence of one idea . . . that life is creation, and should be creative in modes of art.”29
As these quotations indicate, art is no longer limited to specific objects but has become a term indicating a quality of activity that need not even be directed toward making a specific thing. In expanding art to encompass a specifically moral activity—the highest, the best, the right thing done well—Cobden-Sanderson defines making art as an attitude rather than a set of specialized physical actions directed toward the creation of an object. Furthermore, the hand may be the means for art making, but this is not because of its physical aptitude as a tool but because of its unique capacity to work with feeling. What matters is not so much what is produced but how it is produced.
Here we might consider a new variation on the definition of art, distinct from its limitation to a specialized meaning in the early nineteenth century as discussed by Raymond Williams: “An art had formerly been any skill; but Art, now signified a particular group of skills, the ‘imaginative’ or ‘creative’ arts. Artist had meant a skilled person, as had artisan; but artist now referred to these selected skills alone. . . . Art came to stand for a special kind of truth, ‘imaginative truth,’ and artist for a special kind of person.”30 The conceptions of art and artist in Arts and Crafts discourse are clearly more universal. They revive the broader senses of earlier usage, encompassing arts (i.e., the crafts) not traditionally associated with imagination, but do so by elevating them to the level of the imaginative arts and stressing their intellectual and creative foundations. In addition, an expanded meaning of art could include any and all types of activity, provided they were undertaken in a properly moral and emotional spirit.
Writing in an exhibition catalogue in 1935, C. R. Ashbee, one of the major figures of the Arts and Crafts movement, declared the wide-ranging significance of the crafts: “They are an educational necessity; they are part of the community’s leisure, and do themselves grow out of leisure; they are, in short, a great human need, and in a mechanistic age they take their place among the humanities.”31 The crafts have now assumed a place within modern society and no longer serve as a means to its reinvention. They have become a form of amelioration, a necessary antidote to a mechanistic age, one that will help people to develop and maintain their humanity. Like the study of ancient Greece and Rome, Shakespeare, and Italian Renaissance art, the crafts are part of the humanities, the intellectual means to keep modern people in touch with the achievements of past cultures and individuals. These achievements, unlike those of the sciences, have no immediate practical use; their value is primarily moral.
Ashbee’s emphasis on education and leisure reflects the terms of the widespread success of the Arts and Crafts movement in middle-class culture. As Elaine Boris has discussed, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the constituency for artistic crafts grew enormously in the United States. The movement “offered handicraft as a means to train all the faculties, to develop mental, ethical, and physical virtues and bring wholesome, real pleasure to its practitioners. In this way, all work could become artistic.”32 It is evident that what concerned those involved with the movement was less the production of art objects than it was the engagement in their making and the formation of identity: “Crafts promoters emphasized craftsmanship as process: the worker, as much as the work, was the product. Arts and crafts would check the ugliness of daily life by turning artists into craftsmen and workers into artists.”33
The concern with forming attitudes and identity through training in craft production dovetailed with the growth of universal public education and the development of educational strategies and goals for society at large. While much art training in public education was directed toward developing skills necessary for work in industrial and mechanical trades, this practical goal was supplemented by educators who saw training in basic art practices as a means to develop more exalted aspects of human potential. One consequence of the influence of Arts and Crafts ideas on general art education in the United States was the combination of drawing and manual training in an effort to develop the “complete child” who would become both a competent worker and a knowledgeable consumer of decorative products. Art’s mission was “to give increased joy to living; by teaching men both how to take pleasure in producing, and how to find happiness in possessing artistic surroundings.”34 These are relatively modest goals in comparison to the exalted aspirations that were often associated with art education. As Boris notes, “Most educators looked to the ‘art spirit’ for its potential to liberate the individual, its ability to unlock creativity and encourage freedom.”35
The liberating capacities of artistic creativity were most often promoted in relation to women, particularly middle- and upper-class women with an excess of leisure time. One textile artist encouraged affluent women seeking an outlet for creative expression to learn to make decorative artworks because they “comfort souls . . . who pined for independence” and ease “the dulling effects of wasted leisure.”36 For women needing to earn a living, craft production was considered a more independent alternative to working in a factory; it was a means of earning income at home. Art schools for women promised to fill both the practical and emotional needs of these two groups. For those who became dedicated to craft production the rewards were not merely the products of their self-directed labor but the pleasures associated with work. According to Boris, “The craftsman was a person who controlled his or her own labor; work was the standard of value, the highest social activity; and the worker deserved the fruits of labor, including pleasure from the actual process of making.”37 April Masten has shown that artistic labor played a significant social role beyond the improvement of individual women’s lives and experiences in the mid-nineteenth century, when a “Unity of Art” ideology based on Ruskin’s ideas dominated the New York art world. In the years following the Civil War many women had successful careers as professional illustrators and designers, and they were seen as workers combating the degrading effects of industrialization and the attendant disruptions of society and traditional artisanal labor.38
Despite the great interest of Arts and Crafts promoters in the creative process and the enormous influence the movement had in developing, revitalizing, and elevating traditional women’s crafts, Arts and Crafts theorists made no notable discursive distinction between the processes of traditionally male and female crafts. This is surprising given that they largely maintained conventional gender divisions in terms of craft practices, with women typically employed in needlework and china painting, while men dominated woodworking and ceramics. Women were considered best suited for decorative work, which required fine detail and small hands and could be done in the home. This definition of the types of artistic production considered suitable for women had been in place since at least the eighteenth century. In fact, Arts and Crafts leaders subscribed explicitly, and more often implicitly, to the widespread nineteenth-century belief that women were intellectually inferior to men, and thus more suited to imitative labor than to design. William Morris, to cite the most prominent example, designed carpets, tapestries, and embroidery patterns for female weavers and needleworkers to fabricate. Of course, such practices contravened Arts and Crafts ideals regarding artistic process and maintained what Ruskin had condemned as a corrupt industrial practice.39
Nevertheless, the Arts and Crafts movement unquestionably raised the artistic status of women’s traditional handcrafts, including needlework. The artistic aspects of this traditional and pervasive form of creative and practical occupation for women of all social ranks was often overlooked in the nineteenth century, in large part because of its historical association with women’s domestic and professional labor.40 The primary purveyor of art supplies in nineteenth-century London contrasted the laborious drudgery of needlework with the creative pleasures of the new crafts, such as decoupage and lacquer, whose supplies he was marketing.41 These new “artistic” crafts, barely distinguishable from consumerism and requiring little more effort than making tasteful choices of preprinted materials, were promoted as replacing traditional crafts that required excessive amounts of tedious labor. The Arts and Crafts movement’s stress on the pleasures and benefits of traditional craftwork stood in direct contrast to these easy and modern forms of women’s amateur art making intended to demonstrate the artist’s decorative skill and taste without undue effort. Thus, while full participation of women in all aspects of designing and making within the context of Arts and Crafts was often limited, the movement established an enormously influential discourse that elevated the value of women’s traditional domestic arts as well as full engagement in the creative process. In this it promoted the significant participation of women in both the traditional crafts and the fine arts in the twentieth century.
The belief that work itself is a positive good underlies Arts and Crafts ideology. Work offers pleasures and rewards that are both social and personal, but the type of work that is valued is not mere labor, but labor that is fully cognizant of and participating in a complete process. Modern industrial labor was castigated throughout the nineteenth century for its division into separate, endlessly repeated tasks for each worker, who was thus disengaged from the entire process of production. What Arts and Crafts ideologues enshrined was the embrace of the entire work process as a means to individual wholeness and full social participation, as well as a personal relation to the products of their labor. Knowing how something was made, in fact being able to make it, was intended to combat the alienation of modern individuals from the objects they used every day. This goal can be seen in a 1904 model mural for schools proposed in The Craftsman magazine that depicted the processes of furniture making, baking, and pottery production.42 The elevation of such subjects to the level of education and art indicates an attitude toward traditional labor that can be accounted for by its rarity in everyday experience. When the baking of a daily loaf is no longer a regular and necessary activity, it becomes possible to realize that the texture of dough being kneaded and the smell of yeast in rising bread are aesthetic experiences and that the making of bread may be a pleasure in itself.
T. J. Jackson Lears has discussed the enshrinement of process in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American culture as an attempt to compensate for the loss of ethical and religious frameworks for determining ultimate values. Self-expression and experience became ends in themselves, creating a culture primarily devoted to self-fulfillment and consumption. The craft revival was one aspect of a broad cultural attempt to rediscover authentic experience, an antimodern reaction against the lack of individual autonomy in modern capitalist society.43 Craft activities became part of a therapeutic effort to ameliorate the exhausting effects of modern life, which created intellectual and nervous complaints. Manual labor, particularly that involved in craft production, was idealized and believed to hold the solution for the ills of both factory workers and businessmen.44 As Lears points out, Gustav Stickley, the most well-known proponent of Arts and Crafts in the United States, promoted crafts as a means to rebalance abnormal lives.45 That rebalancing consisted broadly of a reengagement with physical acts, with basic, even primal or instinctual, feelings, all of which were held to be authentic experiences in contrast to the experiences of modern life.
While the Arts and Crafts movement had enormous influence on the rise in importance and general understanding of the artist’s process and its effects on both artists and artworks, somewhat ironically the new “mechanical” art of photography also made important contributions to general perceptions of the artistic process. Beginning in the Renaissance fine artists had claimed high status for their work based on its intellectual requirements. This was particularly true of drawing, which was considered to require significant conceptual understanding for the creation of accurate naturalistic representations. The invention of photography provided a mechanical means to make accurate images requiring no artistic training or ability and no conceptual effort. Not only did photography fail to fulfill the requirements of a fine art, it was even difficult to classify as a craft given that its basic forms of production could be learned and adequately mastered in a few lessons. Its processes were mechanical and chemical; they required knowledge and precision but not long-term practice and highly developed skills for professional mastery, as evidenced by the rapid training of professional photographers in the nineteenth century.
Early debates on the potential artistic status of photography are highly instructive regarding the conception of the artistic process in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This is primarily because the arguments explicitly engaged distinctions between mechanical/technical and artistic processes. The latter were repeatedly defined in the context of photography as reflecting the artist’s thought and controlled by conscious choices, in comparison to the mindless visual records of the former. Lady Eastlake’s 1857 review serves as an early representative of this enduring conviction:
Correctness of drawing, truth of detail, and absence of convention, the best artistic characteristics of photography, are qualities of no uncommon kind, but the student who issues from the academy with these in his grasp stands, nevertheless, but on the threshold of art. The power of selection and rejection, the living application of that language which lies dead in his paint-box, the marriage of his own mind with the object before him, and the offspring, half stamped with his own features, half with those of Nature, which is born of the union—whatever appertains to the free-will of the intelligent being, as opposed to the obedience of the machine—this, and much more than this, constitutes the mystery called Art, in the elucidation of which photography can give valuable help, simply by showing what it is not.46
Later arguments for recognizing photography as an art form generally maintained Eastlake’s position regarding the nature of art as a product of the artist’s mind. Unlike Eastlake, however, they successfully contended that photography was an adequate artistic medium able to reflect the artist’s thought and not merely a mechanical device for making visual records.47
Photography’s challenge to the fine arts contributed to a narrowing and refinement of the definition of artistic and creative activity. The art of making representational images ultimately lost prestige as an elite art form requiring a high level of intellectual and scientific training. In fact, photography contributed to a greater awareness that the precise representational techniques associated with academic art were more mechanical than artistic; they were the result of precision craftsmanship rather than an intellectually engaged artistic process. Romantic attitudes also greatly contributed to changes in the fine arts and evaluations of artistic processes associated with mental engagement. Intellectual and emotional values that previously had been of lesser significance, such as inspiration, imagination, originality, and self-expression, became increasingly important and gradually achieved ascendancy over traditional forms of intellect associated with the fine arts, such as scientific knowledge and classical erudition. Romantic values were clearly distant from the mechanical images typical of early photography, but photographers were soon eager to prove that their medium was capable of producing art in accord with prevailing requirements for originality and imagination.
More important in terms of artistic process than the details of the struggle to have photography recognized as an art form, however, is the extent to which discussions of photography, both its techniques and the theoretical debates regarding its artistic nature, rendered discussions of artistic process common. As photography became a popular hobby, technical discussions of photographic methods and materials frequently appeared in the popular press. Debates on the artistic potential of photography were widely published in general interest magazines with a broad readership. This occurred most prominently in relation to world’s fairs and other international expositions where the location of photography in the industrial arts or fine arts sections was fodder for public debate. Such public discussions revitalized general understanding of art and fostered interest in its definition.
Amateur practitioners of photography may also have felt personally engaged and knowledgeable given their own experiences with creative working processes. Among photographers there was a full spectrum of positions ranging from those whose interests were primarily technical and scientific, to those whose methods were more in keeping with traditional craft mastery, and those who embraced an intuitive and personal approach. Often compared with writing, photography is remarkable among image-making media for its flexibility. Because its basic employment can be extremely simple and available to anyone, photography demonstrates far more obviously than drawing, painting, or printmaking that image making has no natural or necessary connection to art. Photography’s artistic qualities must be sought elsewhere, and among the sites considered to potentially reveal artistry was the artist’s process.
Those who wished to promote the artistic potential of photography often attempted to show in detailed terms how the medium was not obdurately mechanical; it could be made to reflect the desires and intentions of the photographer, who controls the final product. As simple as such a concept is, the notion that the photographer has creative control over the process was an effective way to convince people that artistic production was within their reach. Unlike drawing, which required manual facility and significant training to master, by the end of the nineteenth century photography had made image making a relatively simple affair, and anyone who wished could devote themselves to it as a form of art making. This complemented the general increase of amateur art-making activities and expanded the numbers of those personally involved in the processes of artistic creation. Thus, from the anti-industrial efforts of the Arts and Crafts movement to the popular embrace of photography as an artistic medium, by the late nineteenth century the general public had become increasingly aware of, and often directly engaged with, artistic processes. Art was no longer just synonymous with beautiful objects made for passive contemplation; it was also the result of a complex and labor-intensive activity, and consciousness of that activity became ever more important for understanding modern art.