Jean Railla
Modern Crafting
>> Jean Railla is the author of the new domesticity manifesto Get Crafty: Hip Home Ec (Broadway Books). Obsessed with the craft of cooking, she is researching a book on underground food cultures.
Sex, art, and rock ’n’ roll was the motto of my early 20s. Free of any real responsibilities, I spent my youth at local rock shows or gyrating to Tropicalia records at living-room dance parties. When inspired, I would publish my handmade zine, or work on a video diary of my life in “the scene.” Somehow, this fluid, artful existence felt organic to a time and place: Los Angeles in the years before hip became mainstream, Kurt killed himself, and MTV programming went reality.
At that moment, being an artist was about the culture of DI Y — Do It Yourself. Its ethos, popularized by indie record labels like K Records, was simple: Don’t like corporate rock? Start your own band. Disgusted by TV? Create your own shows. Think magazines are stupid? Xerox your own.
modern crafting might just be in size; crafting is now a $30 billion industry that has completely transformed how we look at knitting, crocheting, and all things domestic. Modern crafting is, in a word, huge.
Given this crafting renaissance, it seems odd that the art world seems to be distancing itself from the modern crafting movement. For example, New York City’s Museum of Craft recently changed its name to the Museum of Arts and Design and launched the show “Radical Lace and Subversive Knitting,” which featured a bevy of international artists using “crafts” in their artwork. Actual crafters were conspicuously absent. Where were Jenny Hart’s portraits of rock legends like the White Stripes? What about Kathy Cano Murillo’s Mexican-inspired shadow box art? Or an installation from the Church of Craft?
Maybe the problem with crafter “artists” in the eyes of curators is that they not only create, they also instruct others how to do the same. With the boundaries between art and craft breaking down, is this what separates us?
more artists, to help In 1934, social theorist Walter Benjamin proposed a new role for the artist that would help lead the way
to a more progressive society: to create great works
of art that, by design, would inspire others to do the
same. Meaning that the ultimate goal of the artist is
to create more artists, to help others see themselves
consumers. as more than just consumers. In this light, both the DIY scene and the modern
crafting movement are on to something quite
While there are no retrospective museum shows revolutionary. No matter how delusional and
documenting this DIY scene, and most of the misdirected, my punk rock friends and I were
musicians, performers, painters, and writers have transcending our roles as American consumers,
disappeared from history, I see remnants of my and in doing so, we helped the movement spread.
old art-punk posse echoed throughout the modern When Murillo shows others how to create their
crafting scene. The emphasis on being an individual, own shrines on her website, she breaks down
on carving a different path through the worlds of art the boundary between artist and audience —
and commerce, the sense of community both online and inspires others.
and in cool craft fairs across the country, the culture At the end of the day, do I really give two crochet
of sharing, swapping, and working together in cre- hooks about whether a quilt belongs in a museum
ative endeavors, are common to both movements. or on a bed? No. What I, a proud crafter, really want
The real difference between the old DIY scene and to know is: how did you make it? ×
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