Page 77 - Constructing Craft

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developed between art and craft. But, in a concession to fair balance, it could be
argued that Collingwood, who rarely had difficulty expressing clear distinctions and
providing lucid and apt examples, found defining the difference between art and
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craft ‘both thorny and obscure’. The contrasting arguments of Collingwood and
Kavanagh demonstrated that the studio craft movement was fundamentally different

to earlier arts and crafts movements and that Collingwood’s attempts to define craft
acted more as a convenient device to exclude craft from the world of art rather than

as a functional means of distinguishing the new studio crafts from earlier craft forms

– or from art. Kavanagh was defending craft in its new form.

Trapped between two Worlds

In Collingwood’s model no distinction is made between the work of skilled labourers

or artisans and the later studio craftspeople whose work, while containing many of
the features of traditional craft, had clearly been designed to be ‘looked at’ rather

than used in some domestic sense ‒ work that had an aesthetic quality not based

on its functionality. Craft was located in a sort of no-man’s land. Philip Rawson, a
curator and lecturer at Durham University, highlighted this conundrum for the studio

potter in his book, Ceramics.

Functionalism assesses works of art by what each critic takes
to be their success in reflecting their function; but it cannot
explain the enormous number of variations in shape among
pots fulfilling very closely similar functions; nor can it explain the
imponderable appeal that one pot can exercise, rather than
another one very like it, through minute and functionally
meaningless variations of proportion or surface inflection. Pure
aestheticism, on the other hand, concentrates on the “beauty”
or “expression” of a pot without any regard for its function, and
is equally at a loss to explain the whole nature of humanity’s
pottery which is unequivocally utilitarian whilst also being
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expressive.

To deal with the special nature of the craft produced during the studio craft
movement a careful balance between function and aesthetics was needed. The

philosopher, Charles Fethe, who believed that craft was not ‘poor art’, suggested
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that ‘[t]o discover what makes art bad is not to learn what makes craft craft.’ He
instructed craftspeople not to abandon either function or aesthetics.

[T]he craftsman’s primary aim is to create objects which have
an assigned place in the world of common activities but which

Constructing Craft