Talking Shop: The Language of Craft in an Age of Consumption

Introduction

INTRODUCTION the yankee stonecutter In June of 1842, the American sculptor Horatio Greenough laid down his chisel in his Florence studio. Embarking for the United States to oversee the installation of his massive statue Washington in the rotunda of the Capitol, he also embarked on a new kind of labor: the writer’s. At the end of his yearlong visit to his home country, Greenough’s first two essays appeared alongside stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne and poems by John Greenleaf Whittier in The United States Magazine and Democratic Review. Expressing his dismay at the imitativeness of the built environment he saw in the United States, Greenough’s essays assert the relation of form to function and, tapping the Jacksonian mythos of practicality promoted by the United States Magazine, celebrate the structural integrity he associated with handicraft. What makes Greenough’s literary career my starting point in this book, which studies the adaptability of craft to textual media, is that Greenough’s writing on practical workmanship is saturated with language about language itself. Daring, as he describes it, ‘‘to utter a few words of discontent,’’ Greenough wonders whether a new aesthetic ‘‘language can be born’’ as an alternative to the ‘‘conflicting dialects and jargons’’ of derivative styles—particularly the Greek, Gothic, and Egyptian—that appear to have blocked the original development of American art and architecture.∞ The new language Greenough proposes constitutes not a lexicon of ornament but a willingness to engage in frank and vigorous communication, a habit Greenough identifies with the craftsman ’s discourse: in the studios of the Old World, he writes, apprentices did not sit ‘‘passively listening’’ but ‘‘discussed with their fellow students the merits of di√erent works, the advantages of rival methods.’’≤ In the nine years between the pieces in the United States Magazine and the publication (in the final year of Greenough’s life) of his collection The Travels, Experiences, and Observations of a Yankee Stonecutter, he went on to argue a series of points about labor and authenticity that he described as derived from the ‘‘traditional lore of handicraft.’’≥ These points of recovered ‘‘lore’’ became, in turn, core assertions of the formal crafts movements of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Aesthetics, Greenough claimed, should be properly related not to history or to certain visual qualities (a position he identified with Enlightenment taxonomies of beauty and sublimity) but to purpose, use, and ‘‘principles of construction’’ ≤ talking shop (137); understood in that way, the presumed gap between high art and the ‘‘socalled lower trades’’ closed.∂ Anticipating the emphasis of the Arts and Crafts Movement on vocational training, Greenough urged his country to establish ‘‘working Normal schools of structure and ornament’’ for ‘‘mechanics who need aesthetical guidance in their operations’’ (20–21). A craft-centered ethos of function would connect modern production to vernacular examples: the South Sea islander’s purposeful shaping of his ‘‘war club’’ mirrored, for instance, the nineteenth-century engineer’s fabrication of a ‘‘compact, e√ective, and beautiful ’’ machine by eliminating nonessential weight.∑ Yoking primitivist ideologies and emerging technologies, art and construction, form and purpose, Greenough ’s essays of the 1840s anticipate the strenuous e√orts of such figures as William Morris, Gustav Stickley, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and Frank Lloyd Wright to make craft and craft principles relevant to modern life. For Ralph Waldo Emerson, who read the Yankee Stonecutter volume in manuscript, Greenough ’s essays announced ‘‘in advance the leading thoughts of Mr. Ruskin’’ and contained ‘‘more useful truth than any thing in America.’’ ‘‘I should think,’’ Emerson went on in a letter to the sculptor, ‘‘the entire population well employed if they would suspend [all] other work for one day & read it.’’∏ Emerson’s suggestion of a national day o√ to read Greenough is of course figurative, a way of complimenting the author on the cogency of his revolutionary ideas about design and labor. But in imagining work suspended by a book about work, Emerson unwittingly addresses a profound anxiety about the relation of text and practice that courses through Greenough’s formulation of craft-centered design as, in particular, a vigorous discourse and a revivified lore. After his trip to the United States, Greenough found less time for sculpture; more travels, professorial and diplomatic appointments, and growing family responsibilities (his three children were born between 1845 and 1850) dramatically altered his schedule and directed some of his energies from the studio and the chisel to the desk and the page. The decrease in Greenough...