William Morris and the politics of artistic production

In 1889, William Morris delivered a lecture titled "The Arts and Crafts of Today," which addressed the degraded state of labour and commerce in industrial England by working through the question of art's purpose in everyday life. Not simply an indictment of late Victorian society, Morris's lecture functions as a manifesto, justifying his radical position to an audience of artists while laying out the philosophy of the Arts and Crafts movement. Like the manifestos of later design movements, such as The Bauhaus, Morris's lecture assumes a close relationship between what he calls the "applied arts" and the complex form of society at large. For both movements, the design manifesto is a polemical call to all creative labourers to recognize their collective capacity to overturn and transform the status quo; it is an attempt to articulate an alternative vision of society in which art does not simply mask reality but actually improves it.

Modernist aesthetics can be seen as a direct engagement with the question of technology and its increasing dominance within industrial capitalism. In this way, the lineage of early twentieth century movements like The Bauhaus can be traced back to Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement. If the design manifesto is itself the outgrowth of a modernist attitude toward art and life, it retains the same dialectical impulse that drove Morris to understand the applied arts as a sign of collective solidarity: it is at once critical of its immediate context and pragmatic about how to change it. As Morris's 1889 lecture demonstrates, the rise of the applied arts as a discipline directly follows from art's confrontation with capitalist modes of production and to social inequality.

In a landscape saturated with advertising and mass production, the applied arts provided Morris with tangible opportunities for intervention. His 1889 lecture recognizes this discipline as a site of labour that must be reconciled with degraded labour of the industrial factory. Art, according to Morris, has two related purposes. The first purpose has to do with use and consumption: art adds beauty to functional objects, it enables the enjoyment of everyday activities. Here, Morris suggests that in some forms of human labour (certain moments in agriculture, fishing, carpentry, etc.) beauty is already inherent in nature, or it would be if we recognized that this sort of work is necessary and dignified. Art's second purpose is to add pleasure to labour. Nature again figures into this definition because it models this relationship for us by making necessary activities like eating enjoyable.

For Morris, the vast separation between art and life was symptomatic of England's social and economic inequality. In his lecture, he points out that artists frequently fixate on a particular style or method and consequently lose sight of what that style might achieve. Such artwork finally expresses nothing more than the vanity of the artist: his self-satisfied ability to render a "clever" product, which simply mystifies and alienates his audience rather than working towards its edification. Within the conditions of capitalism, art cannot be commonly experienced: it becomes the lofty domain of aristocratic enjoyment; meanwhile, the factory work that sustains England's economy is stripped down to bare utility.

Removing art from utility does not make utility somehow more neutral; it rather works against the human spirit and against social progress. If we simply adhere to utility, suggests Morris, we have the choice between two dystopian futures. Either society will be organized in a way that allows for the exploitation of the many by the few (fascism), or, as a strict system of compulsory egalitarianism, not unlike the form of communism that would later envelop Eastern Europe. In either case everyday life is defined by the drudgery of work, which destroys creativity and instrumentalizes human energy.

In contrast, the true work of art for Morris must point to the unified bond of true society, where every individual endeavour is grounded, inspired, and made possible by collective interest. In this way, Morris's philosophy was grounded in the "constructivism" that would come to define the avant-garde in the early twentieth century: art is distinguished not by the finished product but by the social process that surrounds it and makes possible its creation (McGann 56). For Morris and, later, for The Bauhaus this impulse toward collective interest culminated in the work of architecture. In "The Bauhaus Manifesto" Walter Gropius suggests argues that arts and crafts must work together in unity in order to create complete objects, the most important of which is "the complete building." Like Gropius, Morris recognized architecture as a way to understand how art and life could influence one another. Even the fine arts, such as painting or sculpture, must be considered within the context of architecture and can aid in the construction of a unified space. The building, argues Morris, is "a unit of art": it is the pure expression of the lives of its builders and inhabitants. What bound these two groups together in previous societies was a common tradition. By Morris's time, that tradition had been superseded by the irrational demands of the market, all of which have led increased specialization and alienation for working classes. In this setup, ornamentation (what used to belong to the domain of art) is mass produced as an afterthought to utility, the ultimate purpose of which is to quicken commerce. The end of objects produced in this kind of context is profit, pure and simple. Beautiful work can therefore only be oppositional because it must, by definition, take into account the mutual conditions of production and consumption.

In his lecture Morris sees the buildings of industrial Britain standing in stark contrast to the cathedrals of the middle ages, not only because of their orientation towards commerce, but because such spaces reduce workers to blunt instruments. Because he is driven solely by commercial interest, Morris argues, the capitalist will either have machines do work of production or rely on "human machines": workers whose desire and creativity must be channeled into spare moments of leisure time. Under such conditions, the working classes are doomed to produce objects of mere utility. In other words, if ornamentation does make an appearance in factory products, it has no purpose beyond the self-interest of those who own the means of production.

Where other social critics of Victorian England, such as John Ruskin or Thomas Carlyle, valourized work as an inherently ennobling activity and risked having their arguments used to justify the further exploitation of the working classes, Morris was convinced that simple labour reform would not solve the problems of capitalism (Breton 43). Commerce, according to Morris, can only encourage exploitation and treat beauty as a superfluous ornament. When those engaged in the applied arts take seriously their conditions of production, they cannot but be aligned with rebellion. For Morris the free labours of applied artists are therefore the concrete appearance of utopian possibility; they carve out a space of critique and a space of hope. Such work, in other words, reminds us of what the industrial age has forgotten: that labour can be pleasurable, that social equality is attainable, and that both possibilities depend on one another.

Works Cited
 

Breton, Rob. "WorkPerfect: William Morris and the Gospel of Work." Utopian Studies 13.1 (2002): 43-56.

Gropius, Walter. "The Bauhaus Manifesto." Maria Buszek, n.d. Web. 12 Feb. 2013.

McGann, Jerome. "'A Thing to Mind': The Materialist Aesthetic of William Morris." Huntington Library Quarterly 55.1 (Winter, 1992): 55-74.

Morris, William. "The Arts and Crafts of Today." Marxists Internet Archive, n.d. Web. 12 Feb. 2013.

making art that matters

The new issue of Via Media is now online. Contents of this issue focus on the relationship of art to theology and vice versa. My article attempts to link our culture's appetite for kitsch to a perversion of sacramental theology: a desire to transcend the "resistence in the material" about which the Victorian craftsman/writer William Morris speaks. Here is an excerpt:

Our culture has a large appetite for art that evades the risks of craftsmanship. We hunger for art that allows us the false comfort of a space beyond discernment, beyond a reality of competing interpretations. Such dreams manifest themselves as kitsch.(1) With kitsch, all answers are given in advance of any questions. As the Czech novelist Milan Kundera famously put it, kitsch is characterized by “an inability to admit that shit exists.”(2) It is that sentimental fiction in which art allows us to forget and do away with our bodies.

Theology holds a special interest in the material world. We believe it to be given and entered into by God. For this reason, Christians must recognize that our taste for kitsch runs parallel to a belief in the disposability of materials. If we believe that God creates out of nothing, then we must understand the idea of waste, of kitsch, as a human perversion of creation. Even the vast amount of religious kitsch we take for granted is a symptom of contemporary Christianity’s tendency towards Gnosticism.

Andres Serrano’s much-debated 1987 photograph, “Piss Christ” (the image of a plastic crucifix immersed in urine), provoked outrage from Christians of all stripes, not least because Serrano had been granted funding for his artwork by the American government. Nothing about this image of Christ on the cross appears wrong or upsetting. It is only when we hear the title that we become uncomfortable. That this piece of religious kitsch from a gift shop could provoke such hostile reactions means that, whether he knew it or not, Serrano was making a profound theological claim. We tend to turn religious symbols into kitsch. The problem with our reaction is not that we are offended; rather, our error is that we are not offended enough, and our offense is not directed at the right target. There is indeed something monstrous and fundamentally horrible about Christ’s death; something that conservatives evade and liberals idealize. In the crucifixion we begin to see that “this monster is of our own making,” for to look at ourselves in Christ’s suffering and live “is to confess that the power by which we have brought the world to such a sorry pass . . . is but the reflex of frailty.”(3) Serrano’s work rescues the scandal of Christ’s humanity from a culture that prefers to keep religion separate from the threat of everyday life.

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1 Thomas Kinkade, whose website boasts him to be “the most collected artist in America” is an easy target. Yet Kinkade’s work is a fine example of kitsch as sheer craft: the product of an artist who has transcended the “resistance in the material” and become a master of bucolic scenery: commodifiable images of cottages with glowing windows sterile gardens.

2 Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Trans. Michael Henry Heim (London: Faber & Faber, 1986), 236.

3 Terry Eagleton, “Tragedy and Revolution.” Theology and the Political: The New Debate. Eds. Creston Davis, John Milbank, and Slavoj Zizek (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 16.

music and medium

"You can't have art without resistance in the material."
William Morris

As a sort of sequel to my last post on "Textile and Text," I'd like to pick up some themes I discussed in relation to Mary Carruthers in order to explain my first impression of Caribou's new album, Swim, which arrives officially in mid-April. Dan Snaith (aka Caribou, formerly Manitoba) has said that he wanted to make a dance record full of “music that's liquid in the way it flows back and forth, the sounds slosh around in pitch, timbre, pan . . . Dance music that sounds like it's made out of water, rather than made out of metallic stuff like most dance music does." Swim does just that. In fact, what first struck me about the sound of this album is how much attention it draws to its medium. Swim is an appropriate title for an album that is unapologetically thick in the way it sounds. It's dance music that is explicitely processed, affected, distorted, mixed and arranged. In short, it is richly synthetic, mediated. Of course, all recorded albums do this; but few albums are this self-conscious about it.

The album cover features something very much like an LP that is vibrantly expressive and textured, in contrast to a voided background. In this sense, Swim essentially does with music (and I'm quite aware that electronic artists have been at this sort of thing for quite some time), what poetry does with language. As Jerome McGann writes, "The object of the poetical text is to thicken the medium as much as possible -- literally, to put the resources of the medium on full display, to exhibit the processes of self-reflection and self-generation which texts set in motion, which they are."

As Mary Carruthers rightly sees it, there is no such thing as knowledge (or meaning) outside of discourse. This idea is nothing new. Marshall McLuhan said it similarly when he famously pronounced that "the medium is the message" in the late 60s, and Derrida wasn't very far off when he wrote, "there is no outside the text." McGann, from whom I quoted in above paragraph, would likely agree, but he sets out to do something slightly different. In his book, The Textual Condition, Jerome McGann calls not only for an engagement with bibliographical data over and against “romantic hermeneutics,” but contends that “Literary works do not know themselves, and cannot be known, apart from their specific material modes of existence/resistance." Because texts are always manifestations of concrete historical moments (or, in McGann’s words, “localizations of human temporalities”), no reading of a text is ever the same: “. . . every text is unique and original to itself when we consider it not as an object but as an action. . . . [it] is always a new (and changed) originality each time it is textually engaged.” Although he works against literary theories that imagine an ideal message behind the literary text and render the physicality of reading as a fall from grace, it would be wrong to call McGann’s approach reductive. Rather, it is an attempt to recognize the social possibilities and the irreducible heterogeneity of literary interpretation.