Crafting Identity: The Development of Professional Fine Craft in Canada (review)

Sandra Alfoldy's Crafting Identity: The Development of Professional Fine Craft in Canada is a thoroughly worthwhile addition to the slowly growing oeuvre of Canadian design history; one which not only sets the fact straight on a critical time period for craft professionals, but also sets the standard for the handing of theory in a historical account.

The book provides comprehensive coverage of the ten years between the foundation of the World Crafts Council in 1964 and the opening of the exhibition In Praise of Hands of 1974, a period during which the basic myths and contradictions still governing contemporary craft today emerged for the first time. Working from primary archival materials, Alfoldy has established a scrupulous yet engaging chronology of events, bristling, as does all Canadian history, with the details of shifting personal allegiances, organizational turf wars, and the various forms of government intervention.

At the heart of the story lies the emergence of the idea of 'fine craft' as a personal art form, or as Alfody puts it, the projection of 'late Modernist ideologies onto international craft.' The problematic nature of the very word 'craft' is a central issue. Supporters and advocates of craft are shown at different times to be variously seeking to preserve traditional folk hand skills, to promote profitable low-tech cottage industries; to contribute to industrial design, to forge national self-identity, to support alternative life-styles, and to nurture creative self-expression. (No one seems ever to have spoken up in support of the apocryphal church basement craft sale.) In Canada, the tensions between folklore, industry, and art are further complicated by the distinctions between francophone, anglophone, and Native cultures, with the Quebec government in particular working in opposition to strong emerging American individualistic influences, and both English and French speakers uniting in their failure to consider Native art on an equal basis.

Alfoldy brings to this tale an intelligent and dispassionate eye, depicting her cast of characters not just as their idiosyncratic selves, but as representatives of larger narratives. She observes that the influences of Joan Chalmers in Canada and Aileen Webster Webb (Mrs Vanderbilt Webb) in the United States have been aided by their personal possession of what Pierre Bourdieu calls 'cultural, symbolic and economic capital' – meaning good social connections, educated taste, and money, ingredients for influence in any world. In her able hands, the specific historical details of this particular subject, place, and time become a case study revealing generalities behind the unfolding of all culture. Craft in those terms may be a perfect subject, as its uncertain definition and low cultural status leave it vulnerable to change – a weathercock of culture, as it were.

Modernist history of the recent past aims for an 'overarching metanarrative,' showing historical change as a process of satisfying 'progress' made towards an ideal perfection of style through a series of cumulative 'discoveries' by heroic individual geniuses. Operating in the postmodern era, Alfody is freed of the conflation of style and morality, able to see style as one among many issues. Alfody does not dismiss the ideal of progress, however, for she has no hesitation in identifying improvements since 1974 in Canadian craft. Today, a small but powerful community has achieved consensus on what it means to be a professional craftsperson – which is to say being skilled in technique, innovative in concept, and able to 'engage in the discourses of eclectic postmodern culture.' If a national craft museum does not yet exist, at least now craft is collected by the Canadian Museum of Civilization, while Alfody herself is an assistant professor at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, holding the only university position in Canada devoted to craft study.

Future debates on the meaning and intellectual status of craft will continue, of course, and we can confidently expect Alfody's book to play an important role in that future debate. Not only does she provide a definitive summary of the too-often rehashed craft/art...