When I read On Craftsmanship Towards A New Bauhaus (OpenLibrary link) by Christopher Frayling it didn't really connect with me. However, reading through my dog-eared notes here a few months after finishing it I find myself nodding along and reacting favourably to them.
The agility of small firms staffed with skilled workers mated with CNC tools chimes with some of the flexibility the workers of the Lucas Plan were advocating. And the calls for more focus on the Bauhaus' interfacing with industry/industrial methods and encouraging more production over manifestos is reassuring, given my—and the collective our—areas of exploration in DoES Liverpool.
Page 58
The central thesis helps to explain why we are so much better at setting up quangos and professional organisations, than we are at remedying the historical and contemporary mismatch between design and (what's left of) manufacturing industry.
Page 68
However, I believe that sensible arguments in support of the crafts in education and society - arguments for the benefit of educators, civil servants, grant-givers of all descriptions, sponsors, and society at large - are in danger of being confused with less sensible arguments, based as they are on a mixture of sentiment, bad history, and a misunderstanding of the lessons of the Arts and Crafts Movement. And it is of crucial importance to separate the two. There are hard-edged arguments, but it's not always easy to dismiss the popular connotations of the crafts. We have to live with them: the crafts as folksy, alternative, rural occupations associated with a homecoming vision of the future, and also with a nostalgia masquerading as history.
Page 80
It was not necessarily a matter of protecting skills, as Morris thought, but rather of protecting the measure of control the craftspeople exercised over their work - in their own time, ,to their own pace, perhaps with their own machinery.
Page 81
Here in 'the middle Italy', in small workshop-based activities, there are craft industries as diverse as shoes, ceramic tiles, textiles, and furniture. In these a huge variety of craft goods is produced through the cooperation of networks of small firms each employing around ten craftsmen. The thing that has made this possible is the development of numerically controlled machine tools or robots - but robots harnessed to the ever-changing needs of small batch or short-run production. These small interconnected firms have proved themselves relatively immune to economic crises of over-production at a time when large, inflexible, highly-automated, deskilled firms are going to the wall. By any definition this success is related to skilled craftsmanship; so it may not be a question in the near future of 'industry versus craft' but of 'craft with industry', of a product hand-built with just a little assistance from robots. Industries of a few people, creating local networks with new kinds of tools, maybe linking with larger networks...
Page 88
It was, as Gropius later added, a question of the crafts shedding their 'traditional nature' and becoming instead 'research work for industrial production, speculative experiments in laboratory-workshops where the preparatory work of evolving and perfecting new type-forms will be done'. This was the 'turn' which so impressed Herbert Read in Art and Industry. And yet almost every British book about the Bauhaus still prefers to interpret the manifesto as a plea for the skills of yesterday [...]
Page 131
Another [problem with the Bauhaus] was that nearly all the workshop Masters were artists rather than designers, so they were much stronger on writing manifestos about industry and producing wonderful visual aids, especially Paul Klee's, than on practical results.
Page 133
The Bauhaus did indeed produce some iconic objects. But the real research, on which industry depended, was of course happening elsewhere - in engineering, and materials science and chemicals and technology, and in the research and development sections of big businesses.
Page 134
In this world of flux, the staff and students of our new Bauhaus will by definition have a strong belief in the future, just as their forbears did in their manifestos and slogans. Not as any kind of feel-good factor, on in an uncontroversial or unchallenging way, but they will believe that doing something about it, and making a difference, is a worthwhile thing to attempt.
The Care Manifesto by The Care Collective (on OpenLibrary)
Page 5
In this manifesto we therefore use the term 'care' to capaciously embrace familial care, the hands-on care that workers carry out in care homes and hospitals and that teachers do in schools, and the everyday services provided by other essential workers. But it means as well the care of activists in constructing libraries of things, co-operative alternatives and solidarity economies, and the political policies that keep housing costs down, slash fossil fuel use and expand green spaces. Care is our individual and common ability to provide the political, social, material and emotional conditions that allow the vast majority of people and living creatures on this planet to thrive — along with the planet itself.
Page 42
[...] if the neoliberal defunding and undermining of care has led to paranoid and chauvinist caring imaginaries — looking after 'our own' — adequate resources, time and labour would make people feel secure enough to care for, about and with strangers as much as kin.
Page 43
Promiscuous care argues that caring for migrants and refugees should carry the same significance that our culture places on caring for our own, and urges us to care about the fate of those children forcibly separated from their families at the US border and placed in detention centres, as if they were kin. It recognises that we all have the capacity to care, not just mothers and not just women, and that all our lives are improved when we care and are cared for, and when we care together.
Page 46
As we showed in the previous chapter, such forms of support are often spontaneous and generated from down to up, but they also require structural support to be consistent and survive over time. Second, caring communities need public space: space that is co-owned by everyone, is held in common and is not commandeered by private interests.
Page 52
We need both community spaces and shared resources.
Page 57
To be clear, what 'caring communities' does not mean is using people's spare time to plug the caring gaps left wide open by neoliberalism. It means ending neoliberalism in order to expand people's capacities to care. To be truly democratic will involve forms of municipal care that put an end to corporate abuse, generate co-operatives and replace outsourcing with insourcing.
Page 76
As the feminist economist Nancy Folbre puts it, we should be thinking of 'invisible hearts', not 'invisible hands', when it comes to how care often is, and indeed should be, organised.
Medals are key to this. Medals are public money, goodwill, merch, the maintaining of the illusion that this success represents something other than simply itself. This is the basic contradiction in a national high-performance culture.
Gold medals have been stockpiled. But these golds are the work of those involved in winning them. Victory without context means nothing more broadly. The only societal value in a medal is where it expresses a physical culture, is the final evidence of a working system, of public access, fertilising the soil, encouraging participation, seeing what grows.
But “the important societal debates now revolve around how to adapt to, or brake, global warming,” the guidelines declared. “Our coverage should primarily be about how action is being taken, not if action is necessary.”