Theaster Gate's Dorchester Projects and The Craft Paradigm

Abstract

Since 2008, the artist Theaster Gates has developed a work called ‘Dorchester Projects’ located in the
South-side of Chicago, an area devastated by the property market collapse that accompanied the Great Crash.
The work comprises a growing number of spaces that memorialise the material fabric of lost communities, while
opening spaces to new forms of congregation. Gates finances this activity, in part, by selling art objects that are
‘readymades’ of urban detritus. Trained in urban planning, he nonetheless cites William Morris as an important
influence. Here, Gates’s practice will provide an opportunity to explore the influence of craft upon debates about
urban space.

The urbanism debate increasingly acknowledges the organic interdependence of community and city. From this
viewpoint, the ideal form of urban planning would act with the care and responsiveness of a skilled craftsperson
working with, and learning from, a living material. Richard Sennett, for example, writes of urban design as ‘a craft
in peril’ though he holds that understanding ‘material craftsmanship and social cooperation can generate new
ideas about how cities might become better made’. To speak of urban planning in this way disrupts a
conventional relationship between craft and design. Until recently, the rational conspectus of design was usually
privileged over the material engagement of craft. From a paradigm influenced by craft, the rationalism of design
appears detached, or potentially so. Craft, by contrast, represents a dialogic relationship to community, and
complexity.

In this paper, Dorchester projects will be framed as a recurrence of the ambition to reunite art, design and craft,
though one that is conditioned by the socio-economic problems of the present. Gates’s work implicitly seems to
ask how it might be possible to work with a material –community–that warps and splits under the pressure of
global economic crises. Although it is too soon to ask whether, or in what sense, Gates's intervention might be
judged a success, his work nonetheless identifies a compelling interdisciplinary response to a city in crisis.