» Issue 05/2011: Critical Thinking about Craft
The Red House in Bexleyheath, Kent. One of the homes of William Morris and Jane Morris, designed by Morris and Philip Webb. Photo borrowed from Wikimedia. Released into the public domain by: Velela.
The House as an Aesthetic Category
Text:Knut Astrup Bull
Published: 30 Nov 2011
On 16 November 2011, the Norwegian Association for Arts and Crafts and the Museum of Decorative Arts and Design in Oslo held the seminar ‘Home as a Historical and Contemporary Context for arts and Crafts’. Senior Curator Knut Astrup Bull’s lecture at the seminar investigates Kantian and materialist aesthetics in light of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement. The lecture is here published in full.
In the last few years my research has been concerned with materialistic aesthetics and its concept of the artwork in relation to the Arts and Crafts Movement and contemporary craft. I have examined the aesthetics of craft from various angles with a view towards understanding the concept of art that William Morris and his followers aimed to implement in the late 19th century debate about aesthetics and the purpose of art. 
Reading the texts of Morris and Walter Crane, especially in the aftermath of Modernism, reveals an indisputable fact: the Arts and Crafts Movement never intended to merge craft with the aesthetics of what we call fine art. The movement was an early avant-garde that attempted to overrun the ideology of autonomy and introduce a new understanding of art based on aesthetics in the tradition of materialism. It was, in other words, a non-autonomous concept of art. For these thinkers, art was created in the realm of everyday life, by means of man`s ongoing transformation of nature into culture through non-alienated labour. A manifestation of non-alienated or aesthetic labour was architecture, a reflection of society as a whole. And that is why the focus on decorative art and the home plays such an important role in their writings about art and society. The Arts and Crafts Movement`s notion of the home can still be felt in contemporary craft. To understand why, I will give a thorough presentation of the meaning of the home in their aesthetics. This investigation is significant for interpreting the use of the home as a curatorial strategy today.
The home as a manifestation of society
In the aesthetics of the Arts and Crafts Movement, architecture, or the house if you like, is seen as analogues to civilization. These two concepts are closely connected and reflect each other. Both William Morris and Walter Crane read the state of society, its health, through the mainstream ideas of architecture and the British home that were prevalent in the closing years of the 19th century. The house is a mirrored image of the current civilization in the sense that it shows the state of labour, the arts and the relations between the different genres of art.
The quality of the house – for instance, the material used, the layout, the construction, how it relates to the surrounding landscape and ornamentation, interior fittings and domestic objects – are all factors that reveal the degree of freedom for individual self-expression in a society. From the Arts and Craft Movement`s point of view, the biggest threat to art, and therefore to civilization, is the division of labour. According to Morris, the division of labour is a consequence of two ideological factors: first and foremost, the system of production which Capitalism is based on, and secondly, the Kantian concept of art, which he sees as a result of the plutocracy that emerged in the wake of modernity. The new system of production is based on rationality in the making of goods for an open marked. Profit is the new industrialists’ aim, and the most efficient way of making a profit is to cut manufacturing costs through mechanized production lines and to have workers specialize in limited tasks. For the Arts and Crafts Movement, this means there is no room for the imagination, thus no room for self-expression. Individual freedom is lost and it follows that everything produced is produced under force. Under these conditions art is impossible. The only place for the full play of the imagination is outside the rationality of everyday life. As Morris sees it, this is why art under Capitalism must be autonomous: because there is no space for work which combines imagination and individual skill with an everyday rationality. This, he believes, is the consequences of Kant`s aesthetics, the division of art and everyday life.
As mentioned, Morris asserts that the division of art and everyday life is devastating to a civilization. Under these conditions true art cannot exist and society comes to the brink of moral degradation because man has lost control over cultural production. For the Arts and Crafts Movement, the production of art is a conscious work process, one where nature is converted into culture, and the degree of consciousness in a civilization manifests itself in architecture and the home. When labour is reunited with the imagination, all the arts will again be united in the making of the home, and then reconciliation, or freedom, will be achieved. The balance between work and art, nature and the individual, will then be re-established and the abyss that modernity has created between individual self-expression and the material world will be overcome. The house, therefore, becomes a conscious work of art. 
In this sense, the home is understood as a work of art that conveys meaning and the recognition of truth. Because it reveals knowledge of being, the house is constituted as an aesthetic category within the Arts and Crafts Movement. But in what way can the house reveal knowledge about existence, and how does the house function as an artwork conveying aesthetic meaning?
In his book The Claim of Decorative Art from 1892, Walter Crane says: ‘Our own cathedrals, no less, will bear witness to the vitality in all the crafts of design at that period.’ The Arts and Crafts Movement`s paradigm of reconciliation was very much inspired by the Gothic Revival ideology. John Ruskin`s book The Stones of Venice from 1851 was a major source of inspiration for Morris and his followers. Here Ruskin brings forth man`s close relation to nature and the sense of unity that the gothic architecture reveals. He compares it with his own time, modernity, which by contrast dissolves unity between nature and man, and hence the unity of the arts. On his view, this is the reason for the poor state of art in Victorian society. His suggestion for how to restore art and society is to create the future in the spirit of the medieval concept of beauty and harmony. This is the avant-garde aim and ideology of the Arts and Crafts Movement.
To read architecture, or an artwork, as a ‘time document’ subordinates the Arts and Crafts Movement to the Hegelian phenomenology of aesthetics, that is, to see the artwork as a manifestation of a zeitgeist. But there is one significant difference. William Morris bases his aesthetics on Karl Marx`s alteration of Hegel`s philosophy. Instead of the phenomenology of the spirit, Marx introduces the phenomenology of labour. Through the organization of labour and production, a civilization reveals its level of consciousness. And in the phenomenology of the tradition of Materialism translated into decorative-art aesthetics, architecture stands out as the 
superior artwork because it is here the state of art or labour manifests itself in everyday life. This notion of the work of art directs us to an important essay in the tradition of materialistic aesthetics, The Origin of the Work of Art by Martin Heidegger. His aesthetic philosophy articulates the theoretical position of Morris because it links the house as an aesthetic category within the tradition of phenomenology derived from Marx. This connection creates an affinity between Heidegger and the philosophy of the Arts and Crafts Movement.
The house and the question of being
The essay The Origin of the Work of Art is a philosophical probing into what an artwork is as Heidegger understands it, and what signifies a work of art is its ability to raise the question of the being.
Heidegger`s point of departure is his criticism of the idealism in Kant`s philosophy. He does not accept the transcendental subjectivity, but instead relates knowledge and liberty to a collective recognition, just as do Marx and Morris. This implies that the work of art becomes a collective experience and not something in the mind of one autonomous individual. 
Another crucial aspect which follows is of course that the artwork does not transcend everyday life, as the autonomous artwork in the Kantian tradition. The original work of art is an object in the same sense as other things in everyday reality. But it is a thing with particular properties. At the same time as it is an integrated part of reality as a thing, it has the ability to raise the question of being. This is the power inherent in the work of art. Here Heidegger points to the temple as the superior work of art because it raises the basic question about being. He is not interested in the architecture and ornamentation as such, that is, its under-structure, which is just a shell. The temple as a work of art is activated when it assumes its function as a temple, a place for rituals and worship. Through the rituals played out in the temple, the existential questions about being are asked and the participants experience a collective revelation about social, cultural and natural phenomenon. The temple then, as a work of art, reveals knowledge about everyday life, and in the same process, also maintains everyday life. So in contrast to the ideology of autonomy, the artwork in the tradition of materialism is not cut off from everyday life but actually is de facto everyday reality. Through the continuous ritual activity which is performed in the temple, the reality becomes visible for the collective of individuals, and in the process, mankind is reconciled with nature. This activity also implies that the individual reflects on everyday reality and gains deeper insight into his own existence and the society he lives in within the realm of everyday life. The work of art – or the house when it assumes its being (Dassein) as a house – is literally a world view (Weltanschaun). In short, the being of the work of art is to maintain everyday reality through revealing the truth about the thing, man and society.
Heidegger`s account of the meaning of art is inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche`s notion of the importance of art because it represents the only way man can relate to life without denying reality. Nietzsche follows Marx in rejecting the aesthetics of idealism, and in his thesis on The birth of Tragedy from 1873, he has a similar understanding of the original work of art in his description of the pre-Socratian tragedy. Before the birth of philosophy, the tragedy was played out in real life. The people who performed the rituals where not acting as the gods; instead, the gods took possession of their minds and bodies and, through their mediums, set forth the meaning of existence and society. This is in contrast to post-Socratian tragedy, where actors played the part of the gods and the tragedy was no longer reality as lived, but only a depiction of everyday life.
The work of art then, in the tradition of materialism, does not present a new or an alternative idea of everyday life, but gives insight into a pre-existing world. The work of art is reality, and reality is the work of art. This claim brings us closer to how the house in the aesthetic of decorative art is transformed into a work of art through the Marxian concept of liberated or conscious labour.
For Marx, labour was alienated under Capitalism because there was no room for the workers’ imagination (Art) in the labour process. According to his understanding of production ethics, it was only the instrumental side of labour that was favoured in the quest for capital. The only place for conscious labour was within the institution of art. This disinterested labour Marx labelled false consciousness since it, in reality, was controlled by the rationalistic system of production which had forced and contained liberated labour into a state of autonomy. 
To understand why Marx sees non-aesthetic labour as an alienated and traumatic condition for man and society, one can again seek an understandable explanation in Heidegger`s essay. Heidegger, like Marx, was influenced by Greek philosophy in the tradition of Aristotle and adopted his concept of téchne, a term that describes labour in a particular way. For both Marx and Heidegger, art is something that is pre-existing in the world. For them, production is a question of how the process of making can evoke the work of art – a thing that can reveal knowledge about being. One must understand the artist`s way of making in order to come to the core of the work of art. The manufacturing of art differs from the manufacturing of mere things. Craft in itself does not create art. Instrumental manufacturing is aimed at producing things, while the artist aims to manufacture art. Hence, the artist must have extraordinary insight into his/her craft. The Greek concept of téchne, then, has nothing to do with the mere skill of making. The term denotes a certain way to have knowledge. In this sense, knowledge means to have seen in a broad sense; one has seen the present as it really is. So the artist’s way of making is to conjure the being from the world. Through téchne the artist has the skill to conjure forth truth in an object. As such, the work of art becomes a way of constituting and maintaining reality through what the work reveals. Thus the temple is an artwork that becomes a place for recognition. It becomes this not as an autonomous and transcendental artwork, but as a thing within the realm of everyday life. Another important aspect of the Arts and Crafts Movement`s notion of craft is that it is understood as a philosophical process, a field of recognition and reflection on the everyday life conditions that envelop the individual. Consequently, craft Is not a question of good craftsmanship, but an aesthetic approach for constituting reality.
The medieval inspiration
As we know, the Arts and Crafts Movement found inspiration in history, and was indeed an offspring of the Gothic Revival in Victorian England. But there is also, in this respect, an obvious affinity between the materialistic philosophies of Marx, Heidegger and Morris. Like the Arts and Crafts Movement, their philosophies sought back to a period before the modernization process set in during the high-Renaissance – before modernity and the division between art and everyday life were established. So in the materialistic tradition of aesthetics, the Gothic spirit and notion of beauty mark an apex in the arts both spiritually and visually, and the Renaissance stands out as giving birth to the idealism which led society and the arts in the direction of subjectivity and autonomy. The Arts and Crafts Movement is an attempt to revive the spirit of the late Middle Ages and to create a modern society in the spirit of the Gothic mind, yet not copying the mindset of the Middle Ages. The foremost advocate for the late medieval gesamtkunstwerk is Abbot Suger of St. Denis, and his idea of the work of art is strikingly meaningful to interpret in light of Heidegger`s The Origin of the Work of Art and the aesthetics of decorative art. 
Abbot Suger is a central figure in the history of architecture because his refurbishing of the church of St. Denis marks the beginning of Gothic style in architecture and sculpture. With this in mind, it is surprising to read his accounts of his administration and restoration of the abbey. In his notes, he is hardly concerned with the architecture or sculptures. For him it is the totality of the church as a house of God, with all its adornments and ritual objects, that conjures the divine truth from the world and sheds light on man`s existence and the order of the universe. The work of art is achieved through the unity of all the arts aiming for the same goal, thus bringing recognition and revelation to the pilgrims who encounter the divine beauty inherent in the church.
The peak of this form of aesthetics is perhaps the Baroque era and Louis XV’s palace of Versailles. The whole installation – its gardens, architecture, interior fittings and all the household goods – coalesce under one unified idea: to give the beholder an explanation of the king, the state and the order of natural phenomena and social structures – even to impress upon the beholder that it is all guided by God through the sovereign king. 
What Materialism and the Arts and Crafts Movement find in medieval thought on art is a sense of harmony between the imagination and skill involved in labour. This harmony stands in contrast to the separation of art and labour common to secular idealism and its form of modernity. To explain; the critique of Victorian design – especially the lack of coherence between objects and ornaments – goes deeper than a mere discussion of design issues. The Arts and Craft Movement saw the lack of unity as a manifestation of the separation between art and labour that Capitalism had forced on society. This resulted in the ornament’s ‘divorce’ from the object and its becoming a meaningless adornment with no aesthetic value. Yet in the same moment that labour and art were reconciled to each other, the ornament and the object would be reunited and gain aesthetic value. Thus reconciliation between man and nature could be achieved, and the individual could be liberated from the alienation of rationalization. 
The critique directed against the decorative arts and the Arts and Craft Movement in the early 20th century attacked the core of the Movement’s reconciliation paradigm: the unification of the ornament and the object. In his essay Ornament and Crime from 1908, Adolf Loos criminalizes the Movement’s aesthetics and argues that the ornament belongs to the field of autonomous art. The artefact, he asserts, belongs to the realm of everyday life and, in a modernized culture, the artefact and the ornament are strictly separated. To join art and everyday life is to contaminate art and to degenerate the pot and thus society. The ideology of applied art therefore advocated a totally different gesamtkunstwerk.
There is coherence between the different elements of the home, but architecture is architecture, furniture is furniture and painting is painting. Through the course of several decades, the ideology of autonomy won sovereignty and defined art and decorative art. The home was no longer seen as a work of art; rather, it was seen as a question of design.
The interior and the museum
In the first decades of the 20th century, it was quite common for decorative art museums to present their collections in the context of home interiors. The above discussion and presentation of the work of art in the aesthetics of craft suggests that there might be a deeper meaning to the use of such rooms than to simply give an example of a period style. In 1907 Jens Thiis, the director of Nordenfjeldske Kunstindustrimuseum in Trondheim, commissioned an interior from the Arts and Crafts advocate in Belgium, Henry van de Velde. 
This commission should be seen in light of Thiis` ambition to implement the values of the Arts and Crafts Movement in the Norwegian artworld, and to transform a traditional applied art museum into an art museum based on the aesthetic of the Arts and Crafts Movement. The room was intended as a tool for presenting the new arts as a unified effort. The Interior 1908 exhibited decorative prints by Edward Munch, decorative windows by Tiffany and van de Velde, furniture and other object by van de Velde, fabric printed by Thorn-Prikker, and of course interior architecture by van de Velde. Thiis was perhaps aiming at presenting the home as a total work of art. One is tempted to read the room as a temple or chapel. Originally the room was mounted with the entrance in the west and with a sort of apsis pointing east, precisely as a church or a temple. The plans for the room included mounting Gustav Vigeland`s draft for the tomb of judge Jacob Lindboe. It would be positioned in apsis. Lindboe, a radical politician who fought for socialist and egalitarian principles, was also a front figure in the struggle for independence from Sweden. Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson called him ’The red hot judge from Trondheim’. One might say he was a political spokesman for the values inherent in the Arts and Crafts aesthetic. Like the Sesessionhaus in Vienna, the room can be interpreted as a manifestation of a new society and the order of art that the decorative arts aimed to achieve; hence the room is a work of art that proclaims radical changes through art, yet within the realm of everyday life. In this sense, the home becomes a distinct curatorial frame within the context of decorative art. When using a specific kind of room, or when alluding to it as a curatorial tool, one cannot escape the meaning inherent in its history. It will affect the reading of the work and the exhibition as a whole.
The home as a curatorial space
To escape the ‘white cube’, many contemporary craft artists are seeking back to the ’home’ as an exhibitionary setting. Curators and artists tend to convert the traditional gallery space, which was intended for fine art presentations, into a craft setting. The aim is perhaps to create a more fruitful presentation of the craft object and to relate it to a relevant context.
In retrospect, it becomes obvious that the aesthetics of fine art – and by this I mean the Kantian paradigm – have enjoyed hegemony and become the measure for what art is and how the object should be perceived. In the ’white cube’, the reading of an object is affected by the fine art tradition and thus interpreted as autonomous. This has severed the craft object from its own aesthetic tradition and the important reference to everyday life. Consequently, its non-autonomous position becomes blurred. In order to overcome the dominance of autonomy and direct the reading of the object in a non-autonomous way, the home is an appropriated space.
The home as a semi-autonomous space
The Danish artist Anders Ruhwald is a relevant case study for clarifying the relationship between the home and contemporary craft. Today the Arts and Crafts Movement`s perception of the home cannot simply be transferred to contemporary craft. It is most relevant as an aesthetic context. What differentiates the contemporary art scene from the historical context of the Art and Crafts avant-garde is of course history and the fact that artist now have the gallery space as their context and not the home of everyday life. Contemporary craft aesthetics must adjust to this situation and Ruhwald is an example of this transition. The gallery setting presents a challenge for Ruhwald, for he is particularly concerned with the craft object’s interaction with aesthetics, space and the beholder. His pieces are ambiguous – they are not quite sculptures and not quite functional object – thus they can be read as a bridge between the Arts and Crafts and contemporary craft aesthetics.
Even though the gallery is the current space for craft, Ruhwald`s objects maintain, to a certain degree, their non-autonomous status. The Danish art historian Louise Mazanti has characterized this position as semi-autonomous. By virtue of the gallery space, the contemporary craft object is seen as fine art, removed from everyday life, but at the same time connected to everyday life, that is, to the aesthetics of materialism and the heritage from the Arts and Crafts Movement. Ruhwald underlines this position by alluding to the home in his exhibitions. By using the home as a curatorial strategy, the viewer is enjoined to deploy a materialistic rather than an idealistic mode of reception when reading the object. A quote from the book The Meaning of Things (1981) can illuminate this strategy further:
[…] one can argue that the home contains the most special objects: those that were selected by the person to attend to regularly or to have close at hand, that create permanence in the intimate life of a person, and therefore are most involved with making the identity of the person….. Thus the household objects constitute an ecology of signs that reflects as well as shapes the pattern of the owner’s self.
This quote explains some of the issues Ruhwald explores in his projects. He is suggesting an alternative mode of reception for his work; it is an alternative to the fine art tradition, and one which has an obvious connection to materialism. Marx accused idealism of offering liberty from everyday life – not liberty within everyday life. The individual was forced to experience art on a one-to-one basis in an autonomous sphere, in contrast to the aesthetics of materialism which, as we have seen, took into account the collective experience of everyday life. Art is thus something the individual interacts with on a sensory as well as mental level, and the conceptual and the material world merge together. The above quote emphasizes the powerful relationship between the home and the individual: what makes up a home is the sum of all the objects that constitute it. The objects of everyday life reflect the individual and the individual reflects the objects. Thus, the non-autonomous work of art constitutes and reflects reality. Ruhwald’s art suggests craft as an alternative aesthetic to the tradition of fine art, and it rests on the shoulders of the avant-garde of aesthetic materialism.
Contemporary craft and the actual home of everyday life are seemingly no longer related. The current state of craft relates to the gallery, but the home and the functional object are indeed important as aesthetic references. The friction between craft history, the contemporary object and the gallery space is fruitful. It makes craft an aesthetic field that can reflect everyday life with other means, just as the philosophical traditions of materialism and idealism discuss ‘the real’ from different perspectives. Without this friction, the field of aesthetics and art will become poorer – not least for lack of the home as an aesthetic category.
The Red House in Bexleyheath, Kent. One of the homes of William Morris and Jane Morris, designed by Morris and Philip Webb. Photo borrowed from Wikimedia. Released into the public domain by: Velela.
Black and white version of a portrait of William Morris taken by George Frederic Watts, 1870. Borrowed from Wikimedia.
Photograph of illustrator, designer and painter, Walter Crane (1845-1915). Detail of photo by Frederick Hollyer (1837-1933). Borrwoed from Wikimedia.
The Red House in Bexleyheath, Kent. One of the homes of William Morris and Jane Morris, designed by Morris and Philip Webb. Photo borrowed from Wikimedia. Released into the public domain by: Velela.
Exterior view of Standen.Designet by Philip Webb and located near East Grinstead, West Sussex, England. Photo borrowed from Wikimedia. Released into the public domain by: Boondoxatron.
Martin Heidegger (1889 – 1976), German philosopher. Photo borrowed from Wikimedia. Photographer unknown.
Interior of Standen, an arts and crafts family home designed by Philip Webb with interiors by William Morris. Photo borrowed from Wikimedia. Released into the public domain by: Boondoxatron.
The Pantheon temple in Rome, Italy. Photo borrowed from Wikimedia, taken by Martin Olsson.
Portrait of Karl Marx (1875). Photo borrowed from Wikimedia, taken by John Mayall.
The west exterior façade of the Abbey of Saint Denis, considered by historians to be the first building in the Gothic style.
Abbot Suger (1081 – 1151) of Saint-Denis on a medieval window. , French ecclesiastic, statesman and historian. Photo borrowed from Wikimedia.
Versailles Palace, Versailles, France. Photo borrowed from Wikimedia, taken by Eric Pouhier.
Adolf Loos (1870-1933), Borrowed from Wikimedia, taken by Otto Mayer in 1904.
Chair designed by Henry van de Velde 1895 for the dining room of the house “Bloemenwerf”. Manufactured by Societe van de Velde, Ixelles, Belgium. Exhibition in the Pinakothek der Moderne, München.
Anders Ruhwald: Uten tittel (Untitled), 2007. From the exhibition Graft at Gallery Format Oslo.
Anders Ruhwald: Interior #9, 2008. From the exhibition Graft at Gallery Format Oslo.