On Knowing the Unknown Craftsman

Abstract

This abstract is primarily about the framing of my presentation, which itself will be more directly reflective of my practice as a maker. This is more the groundwork on which it will be built, taking further the practical approach I developed in my presentation at the last Making Futures ‘Take a look at these Hands’.

For the last twenty years Soetsu Yanagi’s essay the ‘Buddhist Idea of Beauty’ has been both a constant inspiration and irritation for my work as a maker. It’s perhaps his most thorough treatment of ‘The Unknown Craftsman’, the closest he comes to giving us a theory of craft.

In the West, Yanagi’s championing of craft has been seen primarily in terms of Romanticism and the Primitive; where a Japanese context is acknowledged, it is as part of pre-WWII Japanese Nationalism.

This paper will argue that there is a far more sophisticated dialectic at work in this essay than has been generally recognised. It will explore this dialectic through the different (or not so different) voices of Buddhism and the workbench.

In his essay Yanagi compares the Way of the Artist and the Way of the Unknown Craftsman to Buddhist ideas of jiriki (reliance on Self Power), and tariki (reliance on Other Power). As he explicitly formulates the Unknown Craftsman as relying on the ‘Tradition’, then ‘Tradition’ itself is implicitly the ‘Other’ of the maker.

However, to understand the implications of this opposition, one has to take into account another Buddhist tool, the idea of annata, or 'not-self': that I, you and everyone and everything else have no fixed, permanent essence or self. Everything that I might invest in as a ‘self’ is ultimately ‘not I, not me, not mine.’ ‘Selfing’ can hence be better seen as an action than an entity, creating identities that are always provisional and contingent.

So, contrary to the way in which these ideas have usually been understood, one is never simply on the side of ‘The Artist’ or ‘The Unknown Craftsman’, these are alternative strategies (as are jiriki and tariki) that one employs to create a relation of Self and Other, and to make objects in the world.

To take Yanagi’s analogy absolutely seriously: in a world where concepts of Self and Other cannot ultimately be sustained, but interdepend, what is the relation of ‘the Artist’ to ‘the Unknown Craftsman’? (Or Craftswoman, as so many are and always have been...) What is the relation, as a maker, of my own intention to ‘Tradition’, to the discipline in which I work? And what has all this do do with ‘beauty’ as Yanagi approaches it?

In short, when I go to the bench: who carves? Who creates? And does it matter?

The presentation will contrast the different voices in a way still evolving: perhaps pre-recorded paragraphs and ‘live’ reflections on work at the bench, perhaps the soundtrack of the workshop itself. Definitely raw material and craft objects, definitely no Powerpoint...