Making and Unmaking a System

by Christina Zetterlund

A small stamp on a wooden stick. It reads “Godkänt. Nääs.” or “Pass. Nääs.”, as in pass and fail. This is a model crafted by a pupil somewhere who met the criteria of the #thesystem. S/he could now continue to the next level, the making of the next model in the intricate system created by Otto Salomon. A system not just for teaching craft but also to for forming subjects, or creating #modelcitizens in the evolving nation-state.

It was an insightful system whereby the pupil would, by applying the right tools, positions, and techniques, slowly progress, every model built on the knowledge of the previous one. With an increased difficulty the pupil would learn how to make more complex models that combined several techniques and different tools. Model by model he pupil would not just acquire making skills but also a trust in her/his own abilities to make, hereby forming a confidence, and a sense of self-reliance.

Influenced by the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Otto Salomon emphasised the importance of practical knowledge. Knowledge could not be achieved by just studying and repeating existing knowledge as found in books. Also following Rousseau, Salomon found in the making a practical knowledge that could correspond with “the natural curiosity” of the child. Being able to use your hands was, according to Salomon, an essential human quality. Without practical skills one would lack personal fulfillment.  

However, equally important is that the making in Salomon’s system was also a tool for something else, to form a model citizen. It was a system that would contribute to creating industrious, self-reliant citizens who would respect hard labour and would not challenge the class system. S/he would know and appreciate her/his place in society and thereby not challenge #thesystem. The aim of aesthetic appreciation was also about forming good morals as there was, at the time, an intimate link between aesthetics and morals. You had to be industrious and contribute to the system as defined by the nation-state.

As a starting point in making the exhibition we read and re-read Salomon’s manifesto. In our reading we did not just want to emphasise the complex character of the system but also address current craft practices. Today craft is ascribed a function as a radical tool for creating alternatives that will allow us to hack #thesystem, to go beyond the control of capitalist demand, and to reject being industrious subjects inside #thesystem. In large parts of the western world craft has increasingly become a small-scale saviour in the face of global warming were qualitative making is an antidote to over consumption. Here different forms of #returns are formulated to help us live in a greater harmony with nature and respect the limits of the earth and its resources; we go #backtotheland, to the handmade, locally produced, and natural. Potentially “we” can craft the future consumer.

However, as evident in the “Made in America week” announced as a part of the nationalist agenda of the Trump administration, there is a thin and tricky line in the understanding of “locally produced”. Craft can easily offer a different form of return, to go back to a form of neverland found in history as the “make America great again” slogan implicates, an “again” that is made into a political tool to create divisions and exclusions, that encourage nationalism, a form of #statecraft where craft has throughout the history of the nation-state smoothly formed itself alongside the norms of the nation-state and the crafting the authentic national subject, a lineage that connects making to a place, to a history that political tendencies argue that we, again, should access to restore a former glory.

Today there is a strong distrust in the #thesystem for which Salomon created his teaching methods. There is a growing mistrust in the institutions of the nation-state. Here again, craft offers an alternative, a slightly different form of #returns. It is an opting out of #thesystem, a self-reliance when you can trust no one except yourself. Your making is allowing you to form your life outside #thesystem, your making is without a state.

 

INTRODUCTION – A journey to Nääs

by Allison Smith

Welcome to the blog for Models for a System, a collaborative project by Allison Smith and Christina Zetterlund commissioned by the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. From this post forward, we will be speaking in first person, sharing our ideas, writings, and research as it unfolds across the upcoming year. Here you will also find interviews with special guests and occasional posts by curators, artists, and historians who will be joining us in conversation.

This is a project about craft, but also about survivalism. It is not about the survival of craft defined as something of the past, forever in a state of decline or disappearance, although that idea comes into play. Rather, it is about the use of craft, in the present, in times marked by crisis, by radically different groups on both the left and the right simultaneously. Craft is hot. And this project will raise some hot-button issues. Indeed, fire-starting is a “lost” skill that is now making a popular return, along with beer brewing, bee keeping and indigo dying. Beyond the ritualistic aspects of craft that engage actual fire or living matter, we are interested in a reading of craft practice that is, in itself, somewhat incendiary. We ask, what threats specifically does craft prepare us to face?

August Abrahamson’s smoking room at Nääs Castle

Fittingly, we begin our dialogue in a smoking room—the smoking room at Nääs Castle near Gothenberg, Sweden, where Otto Salomon developed his theory of educational handicraft, or slöjd. Salomon’s pedagogical approach was based on a system—a number of formative principles or aims:

1. To instill a taste for and an appreciation of work in general.

2. To create a respect for hard, honest, physical labour;

3. To develop independence and self-reliance.

4. To provide training in the habits of order, accuracy, cleanliness and neatness.

5. To train the eye to see accurately and to appreciate the sense of beauty in form.

6. To develop the sense of touch and to give general dexterity to the hands.

7. To inculcate the habits of attention, industry, perseverance and patience.

8. To promote the development of the body’s physical powers.

9. To acquire dexterity in the use of tools.

10. To execute precise work and to produce useful products.

A framed copy of Salomon’s system, penned in calligraphy and displayed at Nääs

You can read more about Salomon’s educational theories in the  Teacher’s Hand-book of Slöjd and other writings. We traveled to Nääs together over the summer of 2017 to see for ourselves where these ideas were formed physically, and to understand the context out of which they were forged.   

 

Brief Description of Models for a System

In That Case: Havruta in Contemporary Art

Allison Smith and Christina Zetterlund

July 20, 2017-July 3, 2018

Allison Smith and Christina Zetterlund present “Models for a System,” the seventh installation of In That Case at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco.  Smith first met Zetterlund during a 2015 residency in Stockholm and together they discovered a shared interest in the politics of handcraft and its role in both progressive and conservative social movements in which a “return” to past forms of making is often tied to populist notions of self-reliance and opting out of “the system”—be it mass production, artworld hierarchies, government intervention, elitism, globalism, or other forces that seem threatening to individuals. As educators who teach about and share a love of craft, their research led them to the writings of Otto Salomon (1849-1907), a Jewish Swedish educator whose work focused on the development of slöjd, or educational sloyd, a movement that promoted handcraft as a formative method of self development through the creation of useful, everyday objects termed “models.”

Otto Salomon

August Abrahamson

Salomon’s ancestors were some of the first Jewish individuals to be given legal immigration status in Sweden, and his uncle August Abrahamson, who had became a wealthy businessman in the wholesale trade, was one of the first Jewish people in Sweden to be granted special landowning rights as well. A diverse group of luminaries of variously gendered, religious, ethnic, and political backgrounds gathered at his estate at Nääs Castle, a 17th-century mansion near Gothenburg, Sweden. This is where Salomon first hatched his idea of a craft school for the children of local workers, which soon became a renowned teacher training program that in many ways sparked the development of trade schools and art schools in many parts of the world including the U.S. For their Havruta installation, Smith and Zetterlund took Salomon’s educational theories as a starting point, in order to engage viewers in discussions that address the role of craft, past and present, in formations of the nation-state. They ask, given the intensities of this political moment, what does the current upsurge in craft really mean?

“Models for a System” reflects on what Zetterlund in her research has called “material meaning making,” which considers craft as a critical platform for the investigation of systems of power, as well as Smith’s investigation of reenactment culture, in which nationalism is performed as a form of education as well as entertainment. Conducted over a series of emails, readings, Skype sessions, and in person visits in Stockholm, Nääs, and San Francisco, their exchanges have resulted in a display of objects, an active blog, and a pending publication. Using wallpaper reproduced from the Nääs Castle smoking room, and wood flooring akin to that in Salomon’s first classrooms, Smith and Zetterlund have used the case to frame a complicated discussion that is both ambiguous and double-edged. The objects were selected for their potentially multiple readings, suggesting the ways craft functions today within both fundamentalist survivalist groups as well as hipster DIY culture simultaneously. To underscore their arguments and/or further make their “case,” Smith and Zetterlund present a series of images: using picture frames that reference one of the models in Salomon’s system and also recall the hashtag symbol, each image relates to key ideas elaborated upon in the blog, from #statecraft to #prepper and more. Smith and Zetterlund’s year-long project unfolds over time and is punctuated by a series of public events. 

Allison Smith is an artist and academic who has exhibited her work nationally and internationally since 1995. She has produced solo exhibitions, installations, performances, and artist-led participatory projects for venues such as SFMOMA, Public Art Fund, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, The Arts Club of Chicago, and Signal Center for Contemporary Art, among many others. She was, until recently, Associate Professor and Chair of the Sculpture Program at California College of the Arts and is now Associate Professor of Art in the area of Sculpture, Installation and Site-Work at the Carnegie Mellon University School of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. More info can be found on Smith’s website. 

Christina Zetterlund is a socially engaged craft and design historian active as an educator, researcher, writer and curator. She is currently working as a Professor in Art with a specialization in Craft History and Theory at Konstfack in Stockholm, Sweden. Previously she was a curator at Röhsska, a museum of design and applied arts, as well as acted as a special advisor in design at the Swedish Ministry of Enterprise and Innovation. In 2013 she initiated the Craft in Sweden project (konsthantverkissverige.se) that so far has resulted in an anthology (2014), an exhibition (2016) and workshops (2014—).