Lewis Nicholson

Enacting Political Craft: The Aesthetic of Handwork

Split, carved, and chiselled from finely grained wood of Japanese magnolia trees, contemporary artist Yoshihiro Suda reveals hyper-real weeds and other small botanical specimens from beneath the mere perception of material. Meticulously crafted from banal wood, Suda brings to life a highly realistic representations of plants, a representation typically absent in a white walled gallery space. Intentionally installed in particular location of galleries, Suda’s plants call attention to detail and to beauty, imparting fascination as well as investigation. What might not be so obvious when speaking to Suda’s wor,k is that the artist’s use of craft holds something unexpected, yet simply overlooked within current understandings of visual culture.The following essay proposes that craft in the contemporary is political; it is rebellious, as it holds subversive qualities within its practice. By placing Suda’s work and practice within Thomas Markussen’s 2013 framework for design activism, detailed in his essay The Disruptive Aesthetics of Design Activism: Enacting Design Between Art and Politics, Adamson’s non-political classification is under contention. Markussen offers a method of unearthing political and subversive implications within aesthetics – adapted to craft work, the crafted object, even when located in the gallery, is a political object. Employing concepts such as the everyday object, perception, labour, and effort, Markussen’s framework and the aesthetic dimensions within it are adapted to provide an understanding of craft as political.The political within Markussen essay is of importance within this adaptation, as Markussen deals with such ideas of anti-capitalist, anti-establishment, and notions of consensus and descensus. In this way, Markussen’s framework works to define craft in a specific way, illustrating its political nature. Furthermore, Markussen puts forward the prerequisite of aesthetics for the demarcation of true design activism, giving this essay backing for the illustrative powers of craft aesthetics to determine craft as political. As such, a new theory is posited in this essay called the aesthetic of handwork which can be understood as the aesthetic experience of craft, demonstrates to the viewer ‘the work of the hands’, which creates affect within the workings and perceptions of the everyday, in turn possessing genuine political implications. Simply stated, the aesthetic of handwork is: in observing the made object the viewer sees the labour enacted by the artist or labourer, with this the viewer is able to perceive both the ‘material’ in connection to its original form and the ‘object’ in connection to its final figure. This is applied as a transference of material by the artists through the enactment of effort within the labour process that in its activity illustrates political implications in relation to the world around us.