Crafts are my Culture

Edit: This is a post I wrote a couple of weeks ago and couldn't finish for some reason. Maybe it was just too soon to bring up cultural appropriation again, even in a new light. 

My Saturday Market season was launched a week late, and after so many decades, I know what to expect: completely surprising details in a fairly routine pattern. Much had changed over the winter, so there were missing craftspeople, and new ones, recognizable customers and ones from out of town, laughs and hugs and bad jokes and the constant drumbeat interspersed with refrains from the buskers on the corners and wherever they thought they had a space.

It looked like there might be big changes at the Courthouse Plaza as the sellers over there were finally hearing that there is a difference between commerce and free speech, but it looks like nothing will indeed change. Apparently those doing commerce were going to be required to pay for the appropriate permits and insurance requirements that Saturday Market has been paying for for almost five decades, but the prospect of litigation or violence reared up and the pressure went down. It's hard to be against free speech. No one wants to be in that position, certainly not Saturday Market or the City of Eugene.

It's odd to observe them and be taken back to my own early days when I was making anything I could think of that might sell, so that I could live from my own craft. I don't think I was looking for something for nothing but in those days you could sell at Saturday Market for $3.50 a day, so those zero days weren't quite so expensive. But using that structure to grow within was certainly beneficial for me and I don't see how resistance to it makes that much sense, even with our new fee structure and the process it takes to get a really great space. It does make it hard if you aren't handcrafting what you want to sell. We aren't a flea market.

Now that the discussion of cultural appropriation is deepening and people are looking more carefully at how words and images matter and what needs protecting, I'm bringing up the discussion of handcrafting again. (Not that I've dropped it.) If you've been listening to the larger culture you now know that everything from commercial beer to fast-food tacos to kayaking is being described as a craft or hand-crafted. If a person's hands were involved, that designation is being applied. It obscures what I consider the artisanal practices that have been carried from the most ancient times, of some person taking a raw material and making it into something useful and beautiful from the work of their own imagination and skillful application of simple hand tools and techniques.

This definition doesn't include stuffing a taco or patting a burger into a round shape. Those are cooking skills and that's not what handcrafting is. There can be artisanal foods, of course, but unless one person is putting their own creativity into it, those foods aren't qualified for this distinction. For instance, Dana mixes up his cake with his own recipe, takes it out of the oven at the right time and frosts it. I'm sure he makes it look easy and can make a lot of them but he still does it himself, with his hands and because he wants to. So that is a hand-crafted food. If he bought the cake and just frosted it, the significant contribution of his frosting would have to outweigh the commercial material of the cake. Food isn't the best example of this, but it makes the point that we draw some lines that divide the products we sell at Saturday Market from the products for sale everywhere else.

It's easier to see with a product like a wool hat, for instance. The artist selects the wool, creates the pattern of color and design, knits the hat, blocks it, finishes it, displays it and sells it. She stands there and can easily say "I made this," without a shred of ambiguity. Most of our crafts are like this, dishes made from raw clay, paintings made from a blank canvas, prints made from a silkscreen process with the artist holding the squeegee. Not that there aren't some gray areas.

T-shirts and other screenprinted items have always presented a dilemma because they are commonly commercially made items. Saturday Market has dealt with this by calling the t-shirt a blank canvas, and requiring that any commercially made items be simple and generic so that the artistic contribution has outweighed the item. You couldn't sell a white t-shirt without an image, but if you applied the image with a craft technique, you could. You could also dye it, but you couldn't send it out to someone else to be dyed, even in a color you chose, because the requirement is that you have your hands and heart involved right on the piece you are selling. The Maker and the Seller are the same person. It's a narrow definition and many people currently selling things under the mantle of hand-crafted are in zones that are even more gray than the t-shirt one. I do my own screenprinting, but some artists don't, and some send their art to a business that provides them with a digitally printed image made with a printing machine (a fancy copier/computer) that is a step removed from their watercolor painting or original image. This has been allowed, but it pushes over the line and those in the world of Standards and jurying have worked over these lines with questions that are hard to answer. Now that we have 3-D imaging, where does the line get drawn with reproductions? It's a constant discussion in meetings. It's very hard to dial things back.

At Saturday Market, because we sell every week and have meetings every month, a lot of the fine lines get redrawn and adjusted over time, but we can still have an artist who cuts a coin with a little saw selling next to one who cuts a similar image with a computer-controlled laser. It's not ideal, and the technologies keep coming. Invariably the use of technology provides the opportunity to have multiple images or objects made at a lower cost per piece, with less artist labor involved, and thus less of a hand-crafted component. I know over time I stopped being accepted into craft fairs with my screenprinted shirts. They began to require a handcrafted garment as well as a hand-done application technique. We've been slow to make this change at the Saturday Market, because we are also a business incubator and we like to give a person a chance to get started as an artist. If they need someone to print for them until they can get set up to be a screenprinter as well as an artist, we've allowed that, letting them know that we hope that they will work up to being their own screenprinter as well. Sometimes they do, but other times they go in the direction of getting their images reproduced in even less hand-crafted ways, such as the digital prints. We haven't really been able to satisfactorily address the use of technologies within the limits of our non-juried, open entry marketplace. We'll never run out of subjects to discuss. Sometimes things tighten up, and sometimes they loosen.

We considered requiring those people selling digitally reproduced paintings (called giclee prints) to stretch their own prints on the wooden frames, but it was viewed as harsh to ask painters to be woodworkers, even though everyone is not completely comfortable with products that you can just order, unbox and sell. Your artistic contribution stopped at the original painting. We recognized that you had to make a living, and selling the prints and cards of your images allowed you to have a reasonably priced product. But that border needs constant patrolling.

So to cut to the chase, I challenge OCF people to start thinking carefully about what is sold at our Fair/festival. I doubt many festival-goers even remember that we are a top-quality hand-crafted Art Fair. Erosion of this ethic has come from lots of directions and in lots of subtle ways. Many, many things are sold during the Fair and the weeks around it that are not by any definition hand-crafted. Does this matter? Do we care, as a community, that the hand-crafting artisans are becoming a sideline, a misunderstood and rolled-over part of our landscape? Many of us have done this our whole lives, and founded and nurtured the Market and the Fair to protect a place where we could thrive, out of the commercial mainstream. Do factory-made products threaten us? I say they do. Someone asked me yesterday where they could get one of those cool pleated-fabric sets of wings they saw at Fair. I had to say I am pretty sure those are a commercial product you can find online, not a product of a Fair crafter.I hope I'm wrong about that.

I hope I'm wrong that the craft world is being eroded. I think it does still matter to people that things are handmade by artists you can talk to. I think the success of our two events is testimony to that. But I also think that the culture we participate in is in danger of being rolled over by fast food commercials and co-opting. So just listen carefully when you hear the word craft, and do your part to keep it meaning something different. Craft beer should find a new name. I suppose it is a compliment, right?